One Historian, Two Histories: Jacob Katz and the Formation of a National Israeli Identity

In the early 1940s, an obscure young scholar named Jacob Katz sat in his one-bedroom apartment on Gordon Street in Tel Aviv and toiled over a book that would help shape the historical thinking of generations to come. To write this book, Katz—who would eventually become a prominent Jewish historian—examined thousands of historical sources and read numerous secondary works. The resulting volume, probably the best-selling book that the prolific Katz ever wrote, was not Tradition and Crisis, which gained him his academic fame. What Katz labored over for no fewer than five years was in fact a series of elementary school textbooks, Israel and the Nations. ¹

Katz's involvement in Israeli educational history, of which not many people are aware, did not consist solely of writing textbooks. As Katz himself testified, he had a well-articulated "scholarly-pedagogic conception" of educational history. ² From his early days as educator and principal of the Talpiot Teacher Training College in Tel Aviv and until his tenure as rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Katz published papers on history-teaching and participated in committees that formulated the history curricula taught at Israeli schools. At times he was snubbed for these educational activities, such as when literary critic Barukh Kurzweil remarked that "Katz did a nice job when he limited himself to writing history textbooks for schools." ³ Despite Katz's professed ambivalence toward his initial career as teacher-educator, he continued to play an important role in formulating the policies of Israeli educational history for decades after leaving his last education- related position.

This article will explore the historiographical and educational rationale behind Katz's "scholarly-pedagogic conception" of educational history. Katz, who adhered strictly—as he understood it—to academic historiographical conventions and disassociated himself from any ideological school of historiography, attempted nevertheless to influence the historical consciousness of Israeli teenagers through his textbooks. Why, according to Katz, should young people be taught history? What is the relation between Katz's views on educational history and his views on academic history? Finally, how do Katz's views on educational history compare with other dominant Israeli perspectives over the past 50 years? When I use the phrases "academic history" and "educational history," I am not discussing the history of academic or educational institutions or ideas. Rather, I use these terms to mean the form in which history is represented in educational and academic texts or settings. Clearly, these two concepts share commonalities in their representation of history; as we will soon see, they also possess significantly different attributes and aims in their historical representation. ⁴

Both scholarly and educational history have played important roles in the formation of modern nation-states. Recent scholarship has mostly highlighted the role of academic historians in the proliferation of national ideas and in the construction of national master narratives. As recent studies have shown, historians also played a significant role in formulating the national master narrative of Zionism. These Zionist historians, many of whom were associated with the Hebrew University's "Jerusalem School" of history, constructed the Jewish past to support the fledgling Jewish national movement. In their historiographical works, these historians shifted in various ways the Jewish past from religious terms toward national ones. This "reinvented" Jewish history matched the new national context and served Zionism in its nation- building process. ⁵

Much of the recent scholarship assumes that historians influenced the nation's collective memory through their historical writings. Yet, as the case of Katz will teach us, there may be a discrepancy between a historian's conception of academic history and his or her conception of educational history. At times historians function as scholars, but in other instances they may act as educators. The historical narratives they present in the two arenas may serve different aims and thus may possess different attributes. ⁶ [End...