Carsten L. Wilke

As faculty member of the CEU Department of Historical Studies, I teach graduate and undergraduate classes on the religious history of Europe and the Mediterranean region, and in particular on Jewish history and culture from the Middle Ages to the present. I belong to the faculty of the of the Center for Religious Studies, which I have directed from 2016 to 2020, as well as to the faculty of the CEU programs and focus areas in Jewish Studies, in Cultural Heritage Studies, in Eastern Mediterranean Studies, and in Early Modern Studies. In 2023-2024, I have been the director of the Erasmus Mundus graduate program History in the Public Sphere.

During the Academic Year 2024-2025, I will be on a sabbatical leave.

My academic background combines a training in Jewish Studies, obtained at the University of Cologne and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a diploma in Religious Studies from the École Pratique des Hautes Études of Paris. Before coming to CEU in 2009, I worked at research institutes in France, Germany, Mexico, and the USA.

In my research, I am interested in the transcultural aspects of European Jewish history, with focus areas in Jewish-Christian relations, the history of scholarship and book culture, Sephardic Jewry and early modern Iberian crypto-Judaism, and the modernization processes of the nineteenth century. My History of the Portuguese Jews has appeared in three French and two Portuguese editions (Histoire des juifs portugais, Paris: Chandeigne, 3rd ed. 2021). My latest book publications are the monograph Farewell to Shulamith: Spatial and Social Diversity in the Song of Songs (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), and the collective volumes Modern Jewish Scholarship in Hungary (with Tamás Turán, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016) and Isaac Orobio: The Jewish Argument with Dogma and Doubt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). You can find here my recent article "Decimal Diaspora: Ten Exiles and a Medieval Construction of Jewish History," published in Hamsa: Journal of Judaic and Islamic Studies 8 (2022).

A am a member in the ÖAW Cluster of Excellence EurAsian Transformations. Other collective research projects in which I am presently involved include Sephardic Manuscripts of the Early Modern Period: Literary Diaspora and Clandestine Polemics (with Harm den Boer, University of Basel, Switzerland), Jewish Cemetery Inscriptions in Europe (database project, with Marcin Wodziński, University of Wrocław, Poland), andThe Alliance Israélite Universelle in Germany, 1860-1914 (with Michael Brocke, Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut, Essen, Germany). In 2022-2023, I 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.

Of the classes I have taught at CEU, the following are offered on a rotating basis:

• Scripture and Authority in Book Religions (mandatory for the Advanced Certificate in Religious Studies)
• Problems and Paradigms in Jewish Studies (mandatory for the Jewish Studies Specialization)
• Divine Love in Religious History
• Non-Western Historiography
• Advanced German Source Reading in Historiography
• Judaism and Christianity
• Jewish Cultural Heritage
• Medieval Jewish Civilization
• Jewish Traditions (co-taught with Michael Laurence Miller)
• Schisms and Divisions in Jewish History
• Social History of European Jewry
• Zionism: From Diaspora Movement to State-Building
• Jews and Muslims
• Jewish Memory from the Exodus to the Holocaust

Moreover, I have taught classes on

• Historiography: Themes in Its History and Approaches to Its Theory (co-taught with Daniel Ziemann)
• Religious and Cultural Transfers across the Eastern Mediterranean (co-taught with Nadia Al-Bagdadi)
• Post-Secularism and its Precedents: Religious Counterdiscourses to Modernity (co-taught with Aziz Al-Azmeh)
• Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (co-taught with Matthias Riedl)
• Paths to Jewish Emancipation
• Transnationalism and the Jews of the Nineteenth Century
• Yiddish and the Jewish Uses of German
• Medieval Hebrew Text Seminar: Advanced Source Reading
• Sephardic Jewry
• Israel: Nation-Building and Society
• Jewish Thought in the Twentieth Century

My teaching program on CEU's Budapest campus has included a regular walking tour "Commemorative Landscapes of the Fifth Budapest District" and an introductory field seminar "Excursions into Jewish History and Culture," taught off-campus on various Hungarian and Austrian sites related to ancient, medieval, modern and present-day Jewish life. 

CEU doctoral supervision:

• The Paravur Dialogues: A Debate between Four Religions in an Early Modern Malayalam Manuscript / Emy Joy (Department of Medieval Studies, co-supervision with István Perczel, 2020-present)
  
• Fighting for a Future: Postwar Migration Policy and the Displaced of the British Zone (1945-1950) / Imogen Bayley (Department of History, 2014-2020)
• The Beast between Us: The Construction of Identity and Alterity through Animal Symbolism in Late Antique Jewish and Christian Tradition / Andor Kelenhegyi (Department of Medieval Studies, 2012-2017)

CEU supervision of prize-winning MA theses:

• Crowning Hebrew Beauty: Gender, Race, and (Trans)Nation in the Interwar Pageants of Warsaw, Tel Aviv, and Beyond / Hana Abramson (Department of History, Hanak Prize 2022)
  
• From Postcolonial to Global Trajectories: Nigerian Novels and the Literary-Generational Historical Model / Oluwafunmilayo Miriam Akinpelu (Department of History, Hanak Prize 2021)
  
• Remembering Enlightenment: Bodh Gaya in the Cultural Memory of Thailand / Eszter Jakab (Cultural Heritage Studies Program, Advanced Certificate in Religious Studies Best Thesis Award 2020)
• Polite Carnival: Purim Festivities Within the Sephardi Community of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam / Zsolt Györegy (Department of History, Hanak Prize 2018)
• Yom Ṭov Lipmann's Stairway to Heaven: Cosmology and Kabbalah in Late Medieval Jewish Custom / Liat Sivek (Department of Medieval Studies, Tanasa Award 2015)

Visiting Professorships