This is part of a 2024 Association for Jewish Studies panel celebrating the publication of Gross, Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge Press, 2024). Read the full forum here.
Simcha Gross’s excellent new book contributes to the study of rabbinic literature not only by proposing an excitingly revisionist model of empire in Sassanian Persia, but also by offering a new take on some of the more granular methodological issues in the study of rabbinic texts. I was particularly interested in Gross’s take on a perennial question: “How can rabbinic narratives talk history?”[1]
I want to put Gross’s model in conversation with a much-discussed rabbinic narrative, the story of the plot against Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel on Bavli Horayot 13b. I choose this story because it has to do with subjects of Gross’s work—hierarchies, Persian motifs, and the role of the Exilarch—as well as my own work, since it is a source for our understanding of shame as a key affect for the late rabbinic period. I will propose an alternate read of this story in light of Gross’s model of empire, and then offer some insights from the history of emotions that can speak to how we can read rabbinic narratives as a source of history, and as a record of rabbinic self-fashioning as imperial subjects.
This much-discussed story is about intrigue between three figures who are given the titles of “Nasi” or “Patriarch,” “Av Beit Din” and “Chacham.” After the Nasi votes that the assembly should rise only for him and not the other two, the Av Beit Din and the Chacham conspire to shame him by testing him on his knowledge of uqtzin, a tractate dealing with a specific set of purity laws. Another rabbi comes to his aid by alerting him to the possibility that this tractate will be broached in the study session, inspiring him to study it at the last minute and escape public shame. In response to having almost been shamed, the Nasi throws the Chacham and the Av Beit Din out of the study hall. The Nasi eventually lets them back in but does not cite their statements. Finally, the Av Beit Din attempts to appease the Nasi and is rebuffed.
This story has already received plenty of scholarly attention. David Goodblatt conclusively demonstrated that despite its Palestinian protagonists, this story is Babylonian in both form and content.[2] Jeffrey Rubenstein discussed its late Babylonian scholastic motifs of hierarchy and shame.[3] And Mira Balberg and Moulie Vidas, as well as Yishai Kiel, have discussed the particular significance of uqtzin in the Babylonian academy.[4] Due to the Babylonian setting, it was already suggested by Goodblatt as well as by Rubenstein that the “Nasi” is not really the Patriarch here but actually represents the Exilarch. Rubenstein notes that there has been some scholarly dispute about whether or not the Exilarch actually “meddled in the affairs of the academy,” but he says, this story doesn’t prove things either way.
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. And indeed, this story provides an excellent example of Gross’s model of moving past the accommodation vs. resistance binary, as it demonstrates different Jewish figures adopting and responding to Sassanian norms as they jockey for authority. This becomes clear when reviewing the highlights of this text: Our story starts with an argument over who stands for whom. And visible demonstrations of hierarchy within elite circles, such as seating arrangements or standing vs. sitting, is a broader Sassanian cultural practice, not just a rabbinic one. Next, the attempt to humiliate Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel hinges on revealing his weakness in the study of uqtzin, which, as Yishai Kiel has argued, likely became a popular topic in the late Babylonian academies due to the cultural currency of similar topics in the broader Sassanian intellectual environment, as demonstrated in contemporaneous Zoroastrian literature. Chains of transmission, used to punish the Av Beit Din and the Chacham by not citing their opinion by name, are an important feature in Syriac Christian scholastic settings as well. And finally, the Nasi refers to the Av Beit Din’s lineage, itself a major Sassanian cultural concern, with the metonym of a kamra, a Persian word for a belt used to signify status in the Sassanian Empire. Clearly, then, not just the Exilarch stand-in character but everybody in this story is jostling for power by reference to broader cultural signifiers of status and intellectual prowess.
And what about the significance of shame in this text? Rubenstein has argued that shame becomes a central feature of Bavli narratives because of the scholastic context: “The conditions that rendered the potential for shame so acute were primarily found in Babylonia during Stammaitic times: the assessment of dialectical argumentation as the acme of academic ability and the institutionalized academy where numerous sages were present.”[5] Yet I want to suggest that, as per one of the arguments Gross makes, that the sages here are concerned not just with the pursuit of study but with their own status within the imperial context. If the Exilarch and other rabbinic figures were indeed competing with each other for authority, shame can be understood as a form of punishment and social control that functions much like Gross argues excommunication might, albeit to a lesser degree.
Historians of emotion and affect theorists alike have argued that emotions are, so to speak, not just personal, they are political. And likewise, emotions in rabbinic literature function as political responses to both internal and external concerns. The study of the politics of rabbinic emotions in an imperial context already has been treated by Erez DeGolan, who draws on Sara Ahmed and others to examine the politics of joy and sadness for rabbis under the Roman empire.[6] But there is further work to do in exploring the politics of emotions in the context of the Sassanian empire as well. As Gross’s book helps us see, stories like this one are not just about internal rabbinic maneuverings, or even about a clear-cut struggle between imperial vs. rabbinic culture. And shame serves as the stakes not just for Torah dialectics, but for who gets to prevail within an unstable imperial landscape of influence and expertise.
Sarah Wolf is Assistant Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
[1] This phrase is the title of a chapter by Adiel Schremer: “How Can Rabbinic Narratives Talk History?” in Social History of the Jews in Antiquity: studies in dialogue with Albert Baumgarten, eds. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal and Jonathan Ben-Dov (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), though I think it originates elsewhere.
[2] David Goodblatt, “Al sippur haqesher neged Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel hasheni,” Zion 49, no. 4 (1984): 349–74.
[3] Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), especially 16–53 ; Jeffrey Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 180ff.
[4] Mira Balberg and Moulie Vidas, “Impure Scholasticism: The Study of Purity Laws and Rabbinic Self-Criticism in the Babylonian Talmud,” Prooftexts 32:3 (2012), 312-356; Yishai Kiel, “In the Margins of the Rabbinic Curriculum:
Mastering ʿUqṣin in the Light of Zoroastrian Intellectual Culture,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 46 (2015), 251-281.
[5] Rubenstein, Culture, 78.
[6] Erez DeGolan, “Rejoicing, Mourning, and Empire: Emotions and History in Ancient Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 91:4 (December 2023), 836–853.