Javier Castaño is a specialist in the history of the Jews of the CSIC. His interest concerns the society, the economy and the religious culture of the Late-Medieval Hispanic Jews and the early Sephardic Diaspora. He studied at the Complutense University of Madrid and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been a researcher at the Harvard and Oxford universities and at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia, and has taught Jewish history at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.