Background
The family was descended from Spanish Jews from Castile who immigrated to the Holy Land after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. His father was born in Hebron. Moshe grew up in the Bukharim neighborhood, where he attended his father"s school.
Education
At the age of 13, he was accepted to the Bezalel Art School, directed by Boris Schatz, where he studied from 1921 to 1925. His teacher, Shmuel Ben-David, encouraged him to study art in Paris. Castel traveled to Paris in 1927, where he attended Academie Julian and Ecole du Louvre.
Career
He opened religious schools for Sephardi boys in the Nahalat Shiv"a and Bukharim quarters of Jerusalem. He sat in the Louvre copying the works of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Delacroix and Courbet, intrigued by their paint-layering techniques. lieutenant was here that he began to realize that "art is not symbolic, but rather material, the material is the main thing, the way the paint is placed, the way the layers are placed on the picture, this is the most essential thing." In May 1927, the World Union of Hebrew Youth in Paris sponsored his first exhibit.
Ze"ev Jabotinsky, who was in Paris at the time, wrote an introduction for the catalogue.
In 1940, Castel returned to Palestine and settled in Safed. In 1949, Castel married Bilhah (née Bauman), an actress.
In 1947, Castel helped to found the "New Horizons" (Ofakim Hadashim) group together with Yosef Zaritsky, Yehezkel Streichman, Marcel Janco and others In 1959, he purchased a studio in Montparnasse where he worked for several months a year.
His murals hang in the Knesset, Binyanei HaUma Convention Center, Rockefeller Center in New York, and the official residence of the President of Israel in Jerusalem.