Javier
Castaño
Redes sociales
I am a medievalist, and my research interests lie in the interdisciplinary fields of Jewish history and socio‑religious studies. I earned my PhD in History from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1994 and completed a degree in Hebrew Philology in 1996.
My publications and research projects have examined various aspects of the social and religious life of Jews in medieval Sepharad and in their early modern diaspora. I have focused on Jewish power strategies and social networks, as well as on the foundations of their economic activity. Based on the conviction that the family constitutes the basic unit of Jewish society, I have studied issues related to inheritance transmission and dowry restitution, and their individual and collective implications. More recently, I have oriented my work toward the analysis of social mobility (SepharDyn project). The concept of trauma has proved particularly useful for understanding certain historical processes, and I have sought to define some of the objective mechanisms of religious conversion, understood as a social phenomenon. Additionally, I have explored the textuality of material culture and its interpretation.
A substantial part of my research is devoted to the study of legal and administrative texts written in Hebrew script (the Ginze Sepharad project), involving the preparation of an edited documentary corpus accompanied by historical, diplomatic, and palaeographic analysis.
I have held pre‑ and postdoctoral research appointments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Golda Meir Fellow, 1991–93) and at Harvard University (Committee of General Scholarships, 1995–97). Before joining the CSIC in 2002, I taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1993–95) and at the Complutense University of Madrid (1997–2002). I have been a research fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia (2010–2011) and at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2015). I have taught courses on Jewish history at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2009) and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2014). I served as editor‑in‑chief of Sefarad (2006–2015) and currently serve as President of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS).
Some recent publications:
“Anatomía de una comunidad de judíos en Castilla a mediados del siglo xv: el Padrón de Peñafiel de 1463,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 223 (2026), 43-99.
Jewish Inheritance. Dowries and Wills in Western Mediterranean Europe (14th-18th Centuries), Roma: Viella, 2025
“Shared Sensibilities. The Experience of the Jews in Fifteenth-Century Art,” in The Lost Mirror. Jews and Conversos in Medieval Spain, ed. J. Molina Figueras (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2023), 31-49.
“Deserving Poor and Rota Fortunae in Hispano-Jewish Society. A Preliminary Assessment,” in Ibero-Mediävistik. Grundlagen, Potentiale und Perspektiven eines internationalem Forschungsfeldes, ed. N. Jaspert (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2022), 475-495.
“Representing Hispano-Jewish and Sephardic Material Culture in Spain,” Jewish Culture and History, 22 (2021), 308-316.
“’Cleanse me from my Sin.’ The Social and Cultural Vicissitudes of a Converso Family in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” in Th. Dunkelgrün, P. Maciejko (eds.) Bastards and Believers: Jewish Converts and Conversion from the Bible to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 89-111 and 305-310.
“’Una obra reçia, bella y buena’: Los capítoles de la reforma de la sinagoga Mayor de Huesca y su aljama de judíos (1469),” Tamid. Revista Catalana Anual d’Estudis Hebraics, 15 (2020), 243-282.
“A European History. A proposito di «Gli ebrei nell'Italia medievale» di Giacomo Todeschini,” Quaderni Storici, 161 (2019), 234-237.
A complete list of my publications in https://csic.academia.edu/JavierCastaño
Further information on some completed projects in:
http://www.jmed.eu (Jewish Cultures across Mediterranean Europe project, CSIC-UCM)
https://yerusha.eu/network/spanish-national-research-council/ (Yerusha project, National Library of Israel)
Datos tomados de la base de datos ConCiencia