Yosef Kaplan is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History, incumbent of the Bernard Cherrick Chair at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous studies on the history of Spanish Jewry, the conversos and the western Sephardi Diaspora. He has been visiting professor at Yale, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Universidad Ibero-Americana, Mexico and the Ècole de Hautes Ètudes, Paris, as well as a Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University (1986/87) and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (1991). Since 1992 he has been Chairman of the Historical Society of Israel.