ANCIENT JEW REVIEW

“I hope the book further chips away at the deep-seated eurocentrism and Roman-triumphalism that continues to treat Iranian empires as backwards and primitive, employing different strategies of rule based on their lesser governing capabilities.”

“In the end what I think distinguishes Simcha’s account from others is the sense of the informality and improvisatory character of these arrangements, their non-institutionalization and their easy evadability. Thus, minority communities were not bound by any Personalitätsprinzip: they were not required to follow their own laws and did not even necessarily have any formal privilege to follow them, just accreted usage and custom.”

“Whatever the case, both Kartir and the Homilies converge on this one point, that is, that persecution now has an imperial scope. They agree that matters of religion are now imperial matters of concern, not just local. And it is perhaps this imperial vision of persecution that the early Sasanian experience with the Manichaeans bequeathed to later Sasanian Empire, especially following Constantine’s conversion and the later Christianization of the Roman Empire. “

“I want to respond to Gross’s call to read Bavli narratives differently – neither as pure literary creations nor as sources for historical fact, but as sites in which the rabbis are actively navigating their relationship with empire by incorporating and responding to imperial ideas and motifs.”

Actually, Simcha suggests, maybe all we have reflected in the Bavli is not a historical truth of kind kings versus mean magi but the effects of an imperial ideology which endeavored to get its Jewish subjects to think positively of the sovereigns and warily of the Zoroastrian clergy.

These two sets of patterns—rabbinic tensions with the non-rabbinic wealthy and their involvements with charity and the working poor—are arguably complementary. Not only should the rabbis prevail in the competition with the non-rabbinic wealthy for social capital because of their Torah study, interpretation, living, and teaching, they should prevail because they are benevolently mindful and even activist on behalf of their social inferiors (the working poor) and are willing and able to compel other Jews to be similarly mindful and also do charity in accordance with rabbinic visions of that cluster of practices.

The result is a radical revision of what we thought we knew about of Babylonian Jewish society, the place of the rabbis, and the nature of their textual tradition, as illuminated by comparison with other similarly-situated minority communities who were also navigating the realities of empire and being formed and transformed in the process. (I’ll return to this methodological point at the end.) But there’s more. The book also offers a radical revision of what we thought we knew about Sasanian rule.