BA Czech and Yiddish
About this course
Czech and Yiddish is one of the most unusual language combinations available at any British university, and that unusualness is itself part of what makes it significant. Czech is the official language of the Czech Republic, a Central European nation whose literary and cultural history is disproportionately rich for its size, encompassing writers of international stature, a capital city that has been one of the great centres of European intellectual and artistic life, and a twentieth century history of occupation, resistance, dissent, and transformation that has produced some of the most important political and literary writing of the modern era. Yiddish connects you to a radically different tradition: a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet, the primary vernacular of Ashkenazi Jewish communities across Central and Eastern Europe for centuries before the Holocaust, and a language that survived that catastrophe to persist as a living tongue and an extraordinary literary heritage. The geography of these two languages overlaps significantly. The Czech lands were home to substantial Jewish communities whose daily life was conducted in Yiddish and German, and the history of Prague and Bohemia is in part the history of Czech, German, and Yiddish cultures in intimate and complicated proximity. Studying both languages at University College London, which has exceptional strength in both Slavic studies and Yiddish through its Hebrew and Jewish Studies department, means you will engage with these overlapping cultural worlds from an unusually well-placed academic home. You will develop advanced proficiency in both languages, study literature, history, and culture from both traditions, and engage with questions of memory, identity, migration, and cultural survival that these languages carry with particular intensity. Graduates move into careers in academia, translation, cultural institutions, Jewish organisations, publishing, diplomacy, and education, with a particularly rare and distinctive linguistic profile.
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