Announcement of the International Course “Readings in Indian and Jewish Ritual Texts: The Science of Ritual” - July 5-10,2026
The Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia is glad to announce the International Course "Readings in Indian and Jewish Ritual Texts: The Science of Ritual" which will take place in Summer semester.
The course 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 offered by Dr. Naphtali Meshel (Bible and Comparative Religion The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Dr. Anand Mishra (South Asia Institute - Heidelberg University) and Dr. Liane Feldman (Department if Religion & Progrm in Judaic Studies - Princeton University)
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-in progress to the group at the end of the seminar in Heidelberg, pairing up across disciplines and across institutions.
