The Science of Ritual: Readings in Indian and Jewish Ritual Texts

We will examine two corpora from a philological and comparative perspective: Sanskrit texts enjoining and analysing the ancient Vedic ritual (sacrificial) injunctions and Biblical/early Jewish texts on ritual sacrifice and purity.

Those specializing in one of these fields are welcome to join an experimental research endeavor within an emerging field of comparative studies, aimed at identifying and further developing a new yet ancient “fundamental science of ritual.”

Our objectives are to examine ritual writings as a site of ancient scientific thinking and a source for the modern theorization of a science of ritual. Furthermore, the course aims to explore how evidence for ancient technical sciences (e.g., geometry, mathematics, grammar) is concentrated within these ritual writings.

The course will be held as a blockseminar from 05.07.2026 to 10.07.2026. Graduate Students (MA, PhD), with reading competence in either Sanskrit or Hebrew/Aramaic are invited to contact the course instructors for more information. Preparatory readings and zoom meetings will introduce the theoretical framework in advance of the seminar. Participants are expected to present their pertinent work-inprogress to the group at the end of the seminar in Heidelberg, pairing up across disciplines and across institutions.

This international course jointly organized by the Program in Judaic Studies (Princeton University), the Department of Comparative Religion (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia (Classical Indology) at Heidelberg University.