Students of Jewish Studies receive comprehensive knowledge of the history, religion and culture of Jews and Judaism at Bachelor's level. This includes developments in the history of religion since antiquity, events and contexts in the history of Jews in Europe, North America and the Middle East/Israel from the early modern period to the present day, literature by Jewish authors and political and legal aspects of hostility towards Jews. Excursions to former European metropolises of Jewish life - such as Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam or Krakow - offer students the opportunity to engage intensively with a city and a topic on site. Hebrew and Yiddish as well as the hermeneutic-text-critical method are also an essential part of the course.

The subject area Jewish Studies in Basel has a clear cultural studies profile, in contrast to Jewish Studies elsewhere, which is more theologically, religiously dialogically or philologically oriented. The main part of teaching and research concentrates on modern and contemporary Judaism, although ancient and medieval times are also taken into account in introductory and overview courses, particularly with regard to the history of religion. Three thematic areas are distinguished:

• Languages: Teaching knowledge and tools for the languages Hebrew and Yiddish as well as their literary history.
   
• History: Study of Jewish lifeworlds, social positions and the political situation of Jews in connection with the cultural-scientific changes of modernity.
   
• Literature and religion: Examination of the continuity of Jewish references to transcendence and traditions, which can be seen in classical and modern Jewish texts and from which ethical considerations on contemporary issues can also be drawn.

It is crucial for the subject to develop a differentiated understanding of the concept of "Judaism" without losing sight of the claim of "Jewishness" as an entity that can be grasped from different perspectives. This requires a high level of methodological differentiation. It is an important task of Jewish Studies to convey this to students - and at least to some extent to a society concerned with Judaism in the media and society at large. Judaism should be made visible and analyzed as a form of attribution both in its traditional references and in the dynamic development processes that it undergoes in a wide variety of fields.

In the Bachelor's degree course, students acquire a broad knowledge of the subject. They learn to interpret written testimonies of Judaism using hermeneutic and text-critical methods, to recognize and locate reciprocal processes and conflicts between the Jewish minority and the entire ensemble of the social mainstream, to differentiate between secular, religious, national, cultural and other definitions of Judaism in the past and present and to understand the changes within the Jewish community through time and space and to analyze them in a theory-based manner.