While studies of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi worlds have traditionally followed parallel paths, Yiddish Barcelona seeks to build bridges between the two, thanks to its location in one of the historic centers of Sephardic culture. 

This program thus highlights a little-known aspect of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage: the influence of imagery surrounding the Sephardic world, particularly the Inquisition and the expulsion of Jews from Castile and Aragon, on Yiddish literature and folklore, serving as metaphors for the persecutions endured by Jews in Central and Eastern Europe over the centuries. 

The creation of a Yiddish program in Barcelona also aims to highlight specific historical connections between Ashkenazi Jewish communities and the former center of Sefarad in the 20th century. On the one hand, thousands of Jews from around the world volunteered to fight on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. The commitment to the Republican and anti-fascist cause, both by Jewish combatants and by sympathizers geographically distant from the conflict, left numerous traces in Yiddish prose and poetry that deserve special attention. On the other hand, the journeys of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism who headed toward Spain during World War II, including thousands of Polish Jews rendered stateless by the Vichy regime and later persecuted by Franco’s regime, have also left a mark that remains largely unexplored in Yiddish testimonial literature. The establishment of a Yiddish program in Barcelona makes it possible to highlight all these historical experiences precisely because of its proximity to the sites of memory of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s persecutions.

In addition, Yiddish Barcelona aims to fill a significant gap in the current landscape of intensive Yiddish programs through its focus on the uses and developments of this language in Spanish-speaking contexts. While Latin American Yiddish culture typically occupies a marginal or nonexistent space in European Yiddish education, our program seeks to highlight the importance of peripheral Yiddish diasporas and to promote their study and appreciation. 

Finally, the launch of this Yiddish program in Spain and specifically in Catalonia aims to build bridges between the historical experiences of three languages and their communities of speakers: on the one hand, between Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish as languages profoundly marked by the murder of the majority of their speakers during the Shoah; on the other hand, between Yiddish and Catalan as languages that underwent comparable processes of linguistic activism,  standardization, and cultural revival in the early 20th century.