In 1967, on graduating from Waterloo high school, he won a National Merit Scholarship, and emigrated to Israel, where he enrolled at Hebrew University. He graduated in 1971 with a B.A. degree 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 Sanskrit, 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 the department 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). He actively supports the Clay Sanskrit Library, for which he is preparing, with Yigal Bronner, a forthcoming volume.

Shulman is a peace activist, and member of the joint Israeli-Palestininian 'Life-in-Common' or Ta'ayush grass-roots movement for non-violence.

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 a leader of international campaigns to defend the Palestinians under threat of eviction from such villages as Susya in the South Hebron Hills, and especially from Silwan, where they are at risk of being dispossessed of their houses and property by the Elad, and by archaeologists who wish to raze the area and establish Jewish settlement and an archaeological zone on what they believe to be the underlying 'City of David'.

Dark Hope

In 2007, he published a book-length account, entitled Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, 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, Israeli philosopher 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 'pure, rarefied, unadulterated, unreasoning, uncontainable human evil'. He does not excuse Arabs in the book, but focuses on his own side's culpability, writing: 'I feel responsible for the atrocities committed in my name, by the Israeli half of the story. Let the Palestinians take responsibility for those committed in their name'. Writing of efforts by the IDF and members of hard-core settlements at Susya, Ma'on, Carmel and elsewhere who, having settled on Palestinian land in the hills south of Hebron, endeavour to evict the local people in the many khirbehs of a region where several thousand pacific Palestinian herders and farmers dwell in rock caves and live a 'unique life' of biblical colour, Shulman comments, according to Margalit, that:-

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.

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, Telugu, 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 Telugu 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 Ka??p?r??dayamu, Columbia University Press.
• 2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao), A Lover’s Guide to Warangal. 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.
• 2006 (Translation, with Velcheru Narayana Rao)The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India,(by Pi?ga?i S?rana) SUNY Press, Albany.
• 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.
• 2008 Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Diary, 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 Velcheru 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.