I joined the department of Comparative Religion in 2025. I am a scholar of early Christianity and rabbinic literature, focusing on late ancient perceptions of religious law, embodiment, and rituals. I am interested in socio-normative stratification, that is, the way legal discourse and practice shape different social identities, and in the interaction of bodies and laws.  Additionally, I have examined the discourses on the Law and on the body in early Christian and rabbinic literature, beginning with the New Testament and with Paul’s critic of both body and Law, and continuing with fourth and fifth Syriac and eastern Christian monastic authors.

Hannelies Koloska joined the Department of Comparative Religion in 2021. Her research and teaching focuses on the Qur’an in its late antique context, and on its interpretation, Islamic material cultures and religious practices. Her first book, “Revelation, Aesthetics and Qur’anic Exegesis. Two Studies of Surah 18 (al-Kahf)” (published in German) explores the rhetorical composition and theological focus of a Qur’anic text and sketches out its immediate impact on its initial audience. It also takes account of later Muslim interpretation and offers a unique exploration of divergent hermeneutics and their interrelations and incompatibilities. She also published the first German translation of a widely-adopted medieval Arabic book about Muslim women and their right and duties, Aḥkām al-nisāʾ by Ibn al-Jawzī, including considerable annotations. Her current projects include a monograph on concepts of vision and visuality in the Qur’an and Early Islamic exegesis and research on the relation between different media such as texts and images and the transgression of boundaries between them.

Naphtali Meshel joined the Department of Bible and the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2016. His research focuses on the Hebrew Bible in its ancient Near Eastern contexts, and on its early interpreters. Within the broader study of religion, he has a particular interest in Sanskrit literature. His first book, “The Grammar of Sacrifice”, examines the ancient intuition that sacrificial rituals, like languages, are governed by “grammars.” His research interests include ancient models for the “science of ritual”; systems of pollution and purification; and mechanisms of double entendre in Wisdom Literature. He previously taught at the Moscow State University for the Humanities and at Princeton University.

Teaches and researches the three “Abrahamic” religions, with an emphasis on Christianity and Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Focuses on the relation between theology and society, and questions of interpretation, gender and body. In addition to chairing the department, he also directs the Center for the Study of Christianity.

Ronit Ricci's research explores the literary cultures of Muslims in South and Southeast Asia including in Java, Indonesia, the Malay World (parts of Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore),and Sri Lanka. She studies Javanese and Malay manuscripts, translation traditions in Asia, and the history of Islam and its relationship to earlier religions in the region. Ronit teaches Bahasa Indonesia at the beginning and advanced levels, and courses on Islam in Southeast Asia, the history and culture of Indonesia, translation traditions in South and Southeast Asia, and methodologies in the study of religion. In her teaching she strives to challenge the pervading perception that links Islam almost exclusively to the Middle East by exposing students to the diverse Islamic cultures in the regions that stretch from India to the Philippines. Research fields: Islam in Southeast Asia, Islamic literature in Javanese and Malay, Translation Studies, Indonesian Studies, history and literature of the Sri Lankan Malays, exile in colonial Asia.

As a historian of late antique Eastern Christianity I inquire into and interpret the delicate balance of continuity and transformation that defines a historical Christian self-identity. I seek to discern the dynamics of change, continuity, and rupture in religious behavior and thought within Christian and non-Christian traditions alike; to reveal their effects on institutional and personal religion in late antique Eastern Christianity; and to seize the particularity of the period, grasping its peculiar identity through the lens of three major religious and social phenomena: pilgrimage, monasticism, and prayer. She published on the debate on Christian literature in late antiquity, monasticism in Gaza, Syriac hagiography, Syriac ascetic culture, personal experience of God in Byzantine literature, theories of prayer in late antiquity, and the Greek patristic legacy in East Syriac Christianity in the 5-8 centuries.  

Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University, since 2009 I have been privileged to teach at the Hebrew University. My latest two studies, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (2017), and When Christians Were Jews (2018), place the Jesus-movement’s Jewish messianic message within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean culture, politics, and power.

My research and publications have two focuses. First, Jewish contexts of nascent Christianity. Here, I continue an already traditional direction of investigating patterns of Jewish thought from late Second Temple period as possible background for the beliefs of Jesus' followers. I am also interested, however, in a complementing track, namely, mapping early Christian traditions as potentially bearing witness to broader Jewish tendencies – tendencies, which otherwise are attested only in later rabbinic sources. Second, I study the strategies of early Aramaic-speaking (Syriac) Christianity, employed it its search for self-definition vis-à-vis, on the one hand, the dominant Greek Christianity and, on the other hand, Babylonian Jewry, to which it is close geographically and with which it shares the same language of religious discourse. In my research, I also enjoy the collaboration, and joined publications with colleagues outside the Department of Comparative Religion – both from the Hebrew U. and from other Israeli universities.

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Prof. (emeritus) Michael Stone on early Jewish and Christian exegesis of the book of Daniel and from its completion (1986) the Dept. of Comparative Religion has been my academic home at the Hebrew University. My teaching touches on different aspects of the history of Christianity with an emphasis on the period of the early Church.

In addition to extended periods of chairing the Department, it has been my privilege to serve as the academic director of the Division of Graduate Studies of the Rothberg School fro Overseas Students, the Center for the Study of Christianity, and “Amirim”, the Hebrew University undergraduate honors program

My fields of research include Philo of Alexandria and Jewish Hellenism, Origen and early Christian rationalism, and the relations between philosophy and religion in Late Antiquity. My new book examines the nature of the teacher-student relationship in the school of Origen in Caesarea as part of a larger ancient literary and educational pattern.