Books by Jacob Katz

Eminent social historian Jacob Katz examines the rise and transformation of Jewish communal leadership in Central Europe. It is a story of fragmentation and polarization that sheds light on the tensions within the 19th-century Jewish community in Central Europe as it struggled to respond to the promises and perils of modernization.

A new edition of Katz's study of European Jewish society at end of the Middle Ages. It taps into a rich source, the "responsa" literature of the Rabbinic establishment of the time, a time when self-governing communities of Jews dealt with their own civil and religious issues.