David S. Katz – författare

This book traces the Jewish thread throughout English life between the Tudors and the beginnings of mass immigration in the mid-nineteenth century. The writing of English history has been very largely framed without taking note of the Jewish presence at all - here, for the first time, the Jews are shown as an integral part of English religious and social history.David Katz explores completely new subjects in depth, such as the Jewish advocates of Henry VIII's divorce, and the Jewish conspirators of Elizabethan England, without neglecting themes such as the role of Jewish finance and the emergence of Anglo-Jewish institutions. This extensively researched and accessible history of the Jews in England over almost four centuries will be essential reading for those interested in English and Jewish history.

This wide-ranging book is an intellectual history of how informed readers read their Bibles over the past four hundred years, from the first translations in the sixteenth century to the emergence of fundamentalism in the twentieth century. David Katz re-creates the response of readers from different eras by examining the “horizon of expectations” that provided the lens through which they read.During the Renaissance, says Katz, learned men rushed to apply the tools of textual analysis to the Testaments, fully confident that God’s Word would open up and reveal shades of further truth. Other developments that altered readers’ experiences included the politics of the English Civil War, Newtonian and Darwinian scientific theory, the rise of the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, and geology, and the development of the novel and a concept of authorial copyright. Katz discusses all of these and more, concluding with the growth of fundamentalism in America, which brought biblical interpretation back to the Lutheran certainty of a demonstrable authority.

This book is about the principal writings that shaped the perception of Turkey for informed readers in English, from Edward Gibbon’s positing of imperial Decline and Fall to the proclamation of the Turkish Republic (1923), illustrating how Turkey has always been a part of the modern British and European experience.

This book is a study of the practical application of a religious idea: the belief in the continuing validity of the Old Testament, especially the Ten Commandments, which ordained the observance of the Sabbath on the seventh day, Saturday.The author traces the growth and development of the most radical of English Sabbath observers, those who revered the Jewish Sabbath in a Christian context. But this is not only a pre-history of the Seventh-Day Adventists.It is also the story of the remarkable persistence of a revolutionary religious belief powerful and convincing enough to survive the Restoration and continue into modern times.The Saturday-Sabbath gradually became institutionalized in a nonconformist sect in which the ideological foundation was sufficient to unite men who on political grounds should have been the most bitter of enemies, including Fifth Monarchists, millenarians, neutrals, and Royalists alike. That those men and their followers could amicably join forces after the Restoration is testimony to the power of religious ideas which might overshadow the political affiliations of the civil war.