Career
He established the history curriculum used in Israel"s High Schools. In the year 1945 Jacob Katz presented to a conference of historians his article “Marriage and Sexual Relations at the close of the Middle Ages” which was published that year in the periodical "Zion." Katz, who lived at that time in Tel Aviv and worked as a lecturer in a College of Education, had already been credited with a few articles in the fields of education, psychology and pedagogy, and their publication had given him a good reputation in the field However, this reputation alone did not make him happy—he even suspected that it might distance him from the thing that he craved most of all, to get back to engagement in history research.
lieutenant was Ben-Zion Dinur who encouraged Katz not to give up on his research even in the absence of an academic post.
Indeed, despite the difficulty of setting aside time for research, Katz succeeded in completing the article mentioned. With hindsight it is possible to claim, that the article on “Marriage and Sexual Relations” in Zion paved the way for the integration of Katz into the Hebrew University.
At the approach of the academic year 1949-1950, the University invited Katz to serve as an external teacher, offering him 25% of a full-time post. He became a specialist in Jewish-gentile relations, the Jewish enlightenment, or Haskalah, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.