Dovid Katz

Dovid Katz (Yiddish: הירשע־דוד כ״ץ, also דוד קאַץ, הירשע־דוד קאַץ—Hirshe-Dovid Kats) (born 9 May 1956) is an American-born, Vilnius-based Yiddish scholar, author and educator, and cultural historian of Lithuanian Jewry. In recent years, he has been active as a human rights activist, and has been best known for combatting the so-called "Double Genocide" revision of Holocaust history. He is editor of the website DefendingHistory.com. He is known to spend part of each year at his home in North Wales. His websites include a list of his books, of some articles by topic, a record of recent work, and a more comprehensive bibliography.

Born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn into the Lithuanian-Jewish or Litvak family of the award-winning Yiddish and English poet Menke Katz, Dovid Katz attended the Brooklyn day schools Hebrew Institute of Boro Park, East Midwood Jewish Day School, and then, Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, where he led a student protest calling for the inclusion of Yiddish in American Hebrew day school curricula, and founded and edited the Yiddish-English student journal "Aleichem Sholem" (1972-1974). He majored in linguistics at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1978, having studied concurrently at New York's Herzliah Yiddish Teachers' Seminary. He relocated to London in 1978 to work on a doctorate (completed in 1982) on the origins of the Semitic component in the Yiddish language at the University of London, where he won the John Marshall Medal in Comparative Philology (1980).

In his early linguistic work, he began to argue for "continual transmission" of the Semitic component in Yiddish from ancient Hebrew through to Aramaic through to Yiddish, challenging the standard "text theory" that postulated entrance principally via religious texts later on. He proposed novel reconstructions for parts of the proto-Yiddish vowel system, modifications in the classification of Yiddish dialects, and joined the school of Yiddish scholars that argues for a more easterly (Danube basin) origin of Yiddish over the western (Rhineland) hypothesis, bringing to the table Semitic component evidence; it was in that connection that he came across a thirteenth-century Hebrew and Aramaic prayerbook manuscript in the Bodleian that exhibited the vowel system he had earlier, in his thesis, reconstructed as underlying that of the Semitic component in Yiddish.

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