Javier
Castaño González
Redes sociales
I am a medievalist historian and my research interests encompass the interdisciplinary fields of Jewish history and socio-religious studies. I earned my PhD in History (University Complutense of Madrid, 1994) and hold a degree in Hebrew Philology (1996).
My publications and research projects have addressed various aspects of the social and religious life of Jews in medieval Sepharad and its early modern diaspora. I am particularly interested in the study of power strategies and social networks, as well as the foundations of economic activities. Starting from the conviction that the family is the core of Jewish medieval society, I have focused on issues of inheritance transmission and dowry devolution, and their impact on both individual and social levels. More recently, I have directed my studies toward the analysis of social mobility. I have paid special attention to the concept of trauma and the objective mechanisms of religious conversion, understood as a social process. Additionally, I have dealt with the textuality of material culture and its interpretation.
A fundamental part of my recent research has been oriented towards the study and edition of legal and administrative texts in Hebrew script (Ginze Sepharad project), and the preparation of a documentary corpus accompanied by historical, diplomatic and palaeographic analysis.
I have undertaken pre- and post-doctoral research stays at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (as a Golda Meir fellow, 1991-93) and Harvard (1995-97), respectively. Before joining the CSIC in 2002, I held teaching positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1993-95) and the Complutense University of Madrid (1997-2002). I have been a researcher at the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies in Philadelphia (2010-11) and at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2015). I have taught 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 journal Sefarad (2006-2015), and currently, I am the president of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS).
Some recent publications:
“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