Judaism has a long and rich set of traditions regarding burial, caring for the dead, and mourning. With the rise of modern medicine and public health in the eighteenth century, however, some of these traditions conflicted with new ideas of hygiene and public safety. In this class we will study how the Jewish tradition of burying the dead immediately after death became a flash point in emerging tensions between Jewish ritual and modern science. This debate would involve some of the greatest luminaries of the age including Moses Mendelssohn, Jacob Emden, and Yechezkel Landau (Noda Biyhudah). We will consider how this fight set the stage for the tensions that still pervade modern Judaism today.

Ranana Dine joined the CTU faculty in 2025 after finishing her PhD at the University of Chicago Divinity School in religious ethics. Prior to enrolling in the PhD at the University of Chicago, she studied religion and art at Williams College and completed two master’s degrees in Christian theology and medical humanities respectively at the University of Cambridge. She also has experience in clinical ethics from the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. Originally from the Washington DC area, Ranana attended local Jewish day schools and has studied Jewish texts and Hebrew language at the Drisha Institute, Hadar Institute, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her research interests include modern Jewish thought and ethics, Jewish feminist thought, bioethics, and religion and visual culture.