Carsten L. Wilke

As a faculty member of the CEU Department of Historical Studies, he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the religious history of Europe and the Mediterranean region, with particular emphasis on Jewish history and culture from the Middle Ages to the present. Since August 2025, he has served as Director of CEU’s Center for Religious Studies. He is also a member of the faculty of CEU programs and focus areas in Jewish Studies, Cultural Heritage Studies, Eastern Mediterranean Studies, and Early Modern History. In 2023–2024, he was Director of the Erasmus Mundus graduate program History in the Public Sphere.

His academic background combines training in Jewish Studies, obtained at the University of Cologne and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a diploma in Religious Studies from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Before joining CEU in 2009, he worked at research institutes in France, Germany, Mexico, and the United States.His research focuses on the trans-cultural aspects of European Jewish history, with particular attention to Jewish–Christian relations, the history of scholarship and book culture, Sephardic Jewry and early modern Iberian crypto-Judaism, and processes of modernization in the nineteenth century. His History of the Portuguese Jews has appeared in three French and two Portuguese editions (Histoire des juifs portugais, Paris: Chandeigne, 3rd ed. 2021). His most recent book publications include the monograph Farewell to Shulamith: Spatial and Social Diversity in the Song of Songs (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), as well as the collective volumes Modern Jewish Scholarship in Hungary (with Tamás Turán, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), Isaac Orobio: The Jewish Argument with Dogma and Doubt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), and Mayer Bretzfeld (1747–1823) – der letzte bayerische Landesrabbiner (with Daniela Eisenstein, Würzburg: Ergon, 2025). His recent article, “Expressing Emotion within pre-Emancipation German Jewry,” appeared in Jewish Culture and History 26.3 (2025), 343–356.

He is a member of the ÖAW Cluster of Excellence EurAsian Transformations with the research project Hebrew Inscriptions in South India. He is currently involved in several collective research projects, including Sephardic Manuscripts of the Early Modern Period: Literary Diaspora and Clandestine Polemics (with Harm den Boer, University of Basel), Jewish Cemetery Inscriptions in Europe (a database project with Marcin Wodziński, University of Wrocław), and The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Germany, 1860–1914 (with Michael Brocke, Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut, Essen). In 2022–2023, he was a research fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in the project New Christian and New Jewish Discourses of Identity between Polemics and Apologetics.