David Dean Shulman

David Dean Shulman, born Jan 13,1949 in Waterloo, Iowa, is an Indologist and regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Indian languages. His research embraces many fields, including the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics,Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics and Carnatic music. He is also a published poet in Hebrew, a literary critic, cultural anthropologist and a peace activist. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and is now professor in the Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from temple myths, temple poems to essays that cover the wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India.

Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telegu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian and Arabic. He is married to Eileen Shulman (née Eileen Lendman) and has three sons, Eviatar, Micheal, and Edan.

Life and Work

In 1967, on graduating from Waterloohigh school, he won aNational Merit Scholarship, and hemigrated to Israel to enrol at Hebrew University where he graduated in 1971 in Islamic History, specializing in Arabic. His interest in Indian studies was inspired by a friend, the English economic historian Daniel Sperber, and later by the philologist, and expert in Semitic languages,Chaim Rabin

He gained his doctorate in Tamil and Sanksrit, with a dissertation on 'The Mythology of the Tamil Saiva Talapuranam', at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1972-1976) under John R.Marr, which involved field work in Tamil Nadu. He was appointed instructor, then lecturer in thedepartment of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at Hebrew University, and became a full professor in 1985. He was a MacArthur Fellow from 1987 to 1992. In 1988 he was elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He was Director of the Jerusalem Institute of Advanced Studies for six years (1992-1998)

Peace Activist

Shulman is a peace activist, and member of the joint Israeli-Palestininian 'Life-in-Common' or Ta'ayush grass-roots movement for non-violence. In 2007, her published a book-length account, entitled Dark Hope of his years working, and often clashing, with police and settlers to deliver food and medical supplies to Palestinian villages, while building peace in the West Bank. The distinguished Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua called it:-

'One of the most fascinating and moving accounts of Israeli-Palestinian attempts to help, indeed to save, human beings suffering under the burden of occupation and terror. Anyone who is pained and troubled by what is happening in the Holy Land should read this human document, which indeed offers a certain dark hope'.

Emily Bazelon, member of the Yale Law Faculty and senior editor at Slate Magazine cited it as one of the best books of 2007. In an extensive review of the book in the New York Review of Books, Israeliphilosopher Avishai Margalit, cites the following passage to illustrate Shulman's position:-

'Israel, like any other society, has violent, sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven, complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise. Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach, and Hebron, they have, in effect, unfettered freedom to terrorize the local Palestinian population: to attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill - all in the name of the alleged sanctity of the land and of the Jews' exclusive right to it.'

Shulman's book addresses here what he calls a ‘moral conundrum’: how Israel, ‘once a home to utopian idealists and humanists, should have engendered and given free rein to a murderous, also ultimately suicidal, messianism,’ and asks if the ‘humane heart of the Jewish tradition’ always contain the ‘seeds of self-righteous terror’ he observed among settlers. He finds within himself an intersection of hope, faith and empathy, and ‘the same dark forces that are active among the most predatory of the settlers’, and it is this which provides him with ‘a reason to act’ against what he regards as ìpure, rarefied, unadulterated, unreasoning, uncontainable human evil'.

'Nothing but malice drives this campaign to uproot the few thousand cave dwellers with their babies and lambs. They have hurt nobody. They were never a security threat. They led peaceful, if somewhat impoverished lives until the settlers came. Since then, there has been no peace. They are tormented, terrified, incredulous. As am I.'

Though he sees himself as a 'moral witness' to misdeeds of the 'intricate machine', Shulman shies from the limelight, admitting to an aversion to the idea of heroes, and gives interviews only reluctantly.

More recently he has been active as leader of an international campaign to defend the Palestinians of Silwan from being dispossessed of their houses and property by Elad, and archeologists who wish to raze the area and establish Jewish settlement and an archeological zone on what they believe to be the underlying 'City of David.

Bibliography of works

Bibliography Aside from numerous scholarly articles, Shulman is the author, co-author or editor of the following books.

• 1974 Hamiqdash vehamayim (poem), Neuman Press, Tel Aviv.
• 1980 Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition, Princeton University Press.
• 1985 The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry, Princeton University Press.
• 1986 Perakim Bashira Hahodit, (Lectures on Indian Poetry), Israeli Ministry of Defence, Tel Aviv.
• 1990 Songs of the Harsh Devotee: The Tevaram of Cuntaramurttinayanar, Dept. of South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
• 1993 The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion, University of Chicago Press.
• 1997 (with Don Handelman), God Inside Out. Siva’s Game of Dice, Oxford University Press, New York.
• 1997 (with Priya Hart), Sanskrit, Language of the Gods, (Hebrew) Magnes Press, Jerusalem
• 1998 (with Velcheru Nayayana Rao), A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Premodern South Indiaìì, University of California Press.
• 2001 The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telegu, and Sanskrit, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
• 2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyan), Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, Paris, Seuil, Permanent Black, Delhi.
• 2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao), Classical Telegu Poetry: An Anthology, University of California Press, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
• 2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao), The Sound of the Kiss, or the Story that Must be Told. Pingali Suranna’s Kaḷāpūrṇōdayamu, Columbia University Press.
• 2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao), A Lover’s Guide to Warrangal. The Kridabhiramamu of Vallabharaya, Permanent Black, New Delhi.
• 2004 (with Don Handelman), Siva in the Forest of Pines. An Essay on Sorcery and Self-Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 2004.
• (Translation, with Velcheru Narayana Rao)The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India,(by Piṅgaḷi Sūrana) SUNY Press, Albany 2006.

• 2005 With Velcheru Narayana Rao, God on the Hill: temple poems from Tirupati, Oxford University Press, New York
• 2007 Dark hope: working for peace in Israel and Palestine,University of Chicago Press,

He has edited and co-edited several books

• 1984 (with Shmuel Noam Eisenstadt, and Reuven Kahane), Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy and Dissent in India, Mouton, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam.
• 1987 (with Shaul Shaked and G.Stroumsa), Gilgul: Essays in Transformation, Revolution and Permanence in the History of Religions (Festschrift R.J.Zwi Werblowsky), E.J.Brill, Leiden.
• 1995 Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velchery Narayana Rao, Oxford University Press, Delhi
• 1996 (with Galit Hasan-Rokem, Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes, Oxford University Press.
• 1999 (with G.Stroumsa), Dream, Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming, Oxford University Press, New York.
• 2002. (with G.Stroumsa), Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions, Oxford University Press, New York