In Memory of Ralph Jaeckel (1932–2024)

Published: November 19, 2024

It is with great sadness that the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures reports the death of Senior Lecturer Emeritus Dr. Ralph Jaeckel on October 21, 2024.

Dr. Jaeckel was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), on November 4, 1932. His parents, university graduates, left Europe before the start of World War II. Sadly, Ralph’s father died during the voyage; Ralph and his sister were his brought to the United States by their mother, where, with help from a Quaker organization, they settled in York, Pennsylvania, where Ralph went to William Penn Senior High School. Ralph’s mother eventually moved to New York, where she became a professor at Staten Island Community College, teaching German and French.

Ralph attended Haverford College, graduating in 1955 with a major in Russian, and continued studying Russian at the Middlebury College summer school. After completing the course, he went to Washington D.C., where he worked as an English language editor for translations from Russian and other Slavic languages.

While living in Washington, Ralph made the acquaintance of a group of English teachers from Turkey who had come to study the latest teaching methods at Georgetown University; Ralph helped them with their English and set about learning the Turkish language. With their encouragement of these friends, he went to Istanbul in 1957 and taught English, first at the American Dersanesi and eventually at Robert College (now Boğaziçi University) in the small community of Bebek, outside Istanbul, where he was hired by Dr. Sheldon Wise to teach in the school’s English Language Division, using a method of teaching English that had been developed by Dr. Wise.

He continued to teach at Robert College until 1965, when at the urging of Dr. Wise, he returned to the United States to begin graduate study. Dr. Andreas Tietze of UCLA, who was then at his summer home in Turkey, was so impressed by Ralph’s knowledge of Turkish and his extensive collection of notes on the language that he in effect recruited Ralph for UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Culture. Ralph studied under Professors Andreas Tietze, Janos Eckmann, and Stanford Shaw, taking courses in Turkish literature, Ottoman, and the related Turkic languages of Çagatay, Başkir, Kirgiz, and Uzbek.

Before Ralph had gone far in his graduate study, however, Tietze returned to Vienna and Eckmann died. Andras Bodrogligeti was hired to replace the latter and Ralph completed his doctorate under him with a dissertation entitled, “Dukaginzade Taşlıcalı Yahya Bey’s King and Beggar. A Sixteenth Century Ottoman Allegorical-Mystical Love Poem (Mesnevi).” The dissertation was finally submitted in 1980.

Ralph held numerous positions during his years of employment in UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, beginning with his appointment as Research Assistant in 1972 and ending as Senior Lecturer. He retired from teaching in 1993 as Senior Lecturer Emeritus.

Ralph’s contribution to the field of Turkish Studies was largely pedagogical. His books included:

  • Turkish Grammar Step-by-Step. Vols. I and II (1997).
  • Teach Yourself to Read Turkish: Decipher the Turkish Linguistic Code. Vocabulary and Grammar Explained in Context (5th edition, revised 2019).
  • A Dictionary of Turkish Verbs: In Context and by Theme (with Gülnur Tanrıöğen, Georgetown University Press, 2006).
  • Faruk Geç’s “A Letter from Germany.” An Interactive Module for Self-Study and Classroom Use. Adapted for students of Turkish (with Mehmet Süreyya Er [2010]).

He was working on a dictionary of Turkish adverbs at the time of his death.

Ralph was a widely admired and well-liked teacher. Many of his students went on to university positions. They included Ronelle Alexander (UC Berkeley, Slavic); Carel Bertram (SF State, Art History); Howard Eissenstat (St. Lawrence University, History); Martha Mundy (London School of Economics Anthropology); Steve Reinert (Rutgers, Byzantine History); and Holly Shissler (Chicago, Middle Eastern Studies).

Ralph was one of the first adopters of a desktop computer in his department. Even before such computers had become routine equipment, Ralph acquired a Kaypro, a pre-DOS machine that operated on the CP/M system. Later, he worked assiduously to create software to be used in teaching.

He was longtime member of the Turkish Studies Association (now the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association) and of AATT (the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages). In 2005, he received the Mentoring Award of the Middle East Studies Association in recognition of his contribution as “an outstanding mentor who, through his selfless and passionate teaching and his delight in working with different minds and creating instructional materials nuanced to suit them, has encouraged the careers of generations of students and colleagues.”

Besides his teaching, Ralph devoted considerable time over the years to photography. In his last years he established an ongoing relationship with the company Film Rescue International, which digitized the extensive collection of black-and-white images that he had created during his days in Turkey. The Department hopes to organize an exhibit of some of these historic images soon.

Ralph died in Los Angeles on October 21, 2024, two weeks short of his 92nd birthday.