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.
In ancient times it was recognized that first books were meant precisely to be Jugendarbeit; they were expected to make convincing and well researched arguments about small-scale things. In the US, in our (taking the word “our” very broadly) field, the custom was to publish them in a European monograph series which did not abhor footnotes, extended and complex analyses of texts quoted in foreign languages, and detailed engagement with the history of the scholarship. This was perhaps a dim reflex of the German ancestry of the US PhD. But nowadays at least, US universities in the higher ranks are no longer content to let young scholars be young scholars, and expect mature and accessible engagement with large questions already in the first book. This system benefits very few people, since the expectation is not realistic, so first books are even now small-bore monographs, but with their traditional monographic poetics stripped away and replaced with the poetics of the grand, mature synthesis.
But full solar eclipses, blue moons, and other signs and wonders do happen, with passing rarity. Simcha Gross’s book is that most unlikely occurrence: a first book that actually makes a big revisionist argument, in a structurally elegant and above all largely convincing way. I will not provide a full summary here, but would like to note some things that stood out for me. First, on the meta level: it’s rather unusual for young American scholars to know quite so much. Rabbinists often get away with knowing some rabbinics; if they work on Palestinian rabbinic texts then they might read some modern synthesis treating the subject of their interest in the Roman world, in order to provide “context” (at least no longer called the “Hellenistic context”). And of course, the Irano-Talmudists have actually taken the trouble to learn middle Persian and read relevant Zoroastrian texts. But Simcha has actually acquired not just competence but real expertise in a whole range of material lying beyond the usual boundaries, in particular eastern Syriac literature. He is taking his mission of understanding the Jews as a religious minority subject to Persia very seriously, to the extent of having published texts and translations of Syriac martyrs’ lives.
Simcha stands out from the crowd also by actually thinking like a historian. That is, his big questions lie outside the text—they are not exegetical or redactional but social and political. This can result in a style of argumentation that raises the hackles of text people, but let hackles be raised in that case: the Liebermanian/Rosenthalian “historical philological” method after all yields not history but historicist hermeneutics. The Talmud is a text and not an archive and history begins outside it.
Let me note some sections that I found especially impressive. Simcha attacks head-on the assumptions that have always informed historiography on Jews in Sasanian Babylonia—among them that the Jews had substantial group-wide autonomy because the empire was organized in corporations, and the king devolved authority onto the leaders of the constituent groups. This means that exilarchs and rabbis had real authority, granted them by the kings. Particularly elegant is the treatment of the exilarchate, split between two chapters. The first chapter more or less summarizes and updates Geoffrey Herman’s work (A Prince without a Kingdom, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), and at the end of it I was left feeling as I did after reading Geoffrey’s book: the resh galuta seems to have been a god-like figure, in the Maimonidean sense of having had no positive attributes. All we could say was that he didn’t have formal jurisdiction over the Jews, did not have the right to collect taxes, had no formal role as intermediary between the Jews and the king, etc. But then, what the hell was he? Here Simcha responds that he fits the pattern of non-Iranian aristocrats, who lived in a condition somewhere between advanced mimicry of their Iranian counterparts, and integration into an imperial network of royalist aristocrats. It is my general impression that the Sasanians were somewhat less inclined than the Romans to conceal patron-like relationships behind constitutional language (though resh galuta seems to have been a generally recognized title), and did not necessarily have the ultra-bureaucratic tendencies that began to emerge in the Roman Empire in the course of the third century, so that bureaucracy eventually engulfed the curial and equestrian classes. The exilarch thus remained a local grandee with the trappings of quasi-Iranian aristocracy at a moment—the mid-fourth to the early fifth centuries—when the Palestinian patriarchate was undergoing a process of bureaucratic Gleichschaltung. It is however worth remembering that if we had not had the Codex Theodosianus we would not have had any solid information about the incorporation of the patriarch into the state apparatus: the Talmud and midrashim say nothing about it.
In the penultimate chapter, though, this picture is complicated on epistemic grounds, because it now has to be admitted that there is much about the role of non-Iranian aristocrats that is unknown. Simcha notes some recent scholarship that argues that they became iranized to the extent that their Iranian status was recognized by the state, but rejects this. It seems more likely that the king at least for some purposes kept the Iranian and non-Iranian parts of his state separate and had different relations with each. Simcha suggests that he ruled “An-Eran” through, first of all, a largely Iranian bureaucracy, but also with the help of local aristocrats. I would note that we seem to be creeping back in the direction of the old picture of the feudal empire in which non-Iranian groups have the power of the king mediated through local grandees. 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.
Another significant achievement of the book is the thorough and illuminating comparison of Jewish and Christian experiences under Sasanian rule. The sophistication of the analysis here goes beyond anything I have ever seen, with some old ideas—like regarding the Christian Katholikos as parallel to the exilarch—thoroughly debunked: Simcha does something much better than parallelomania: comparison. This means understanding the specifics of the political background and ongoing role of the Katholikos in great detail, thereby historicizing the role of the Katholikos in a way that makes the old practice of using what we know about this figure to reconstruct what we don’t know about the exilarch moot. Simcha’s general view here is irreproachable: the numerical dominance of Christians in western borderland regions, for which there is no Jewish parallel, and their political sensitivity as suspected or potential allies of Rome, meant that the kings had to think about them, and develop policies about them, in a way that they did not for the Jews. The Christians might be alternately persecuted and privileged, while the Jews were left mainly to deal with the arbitrary treatment of local officials and magi, except in periods, if any existed, of general government pressure on non-Iranians. The surprising tolerance of some rabbis of Jewish support for fire temples is an aspect of the Jews’ small-bore and localized negotiation with such occasional challenges. I am tempted to compare it with evidence, especially from the second century, for participation by Jews in Asia Minor in the imperial cult but would note that the pressures were very different. True, all politics is local, but in second-century Asia local politics was overshadowed by imperial philhellenism, which was less a cultural than a political choice, involving pouring millions and millions of denarii into the treasuries of the Greek cities of Asia—a particular feature of the reign of Hadrian, significantly enough—in a way that could not fail to affect Jews and the growing numbers of Christians living in those cities. So the political meanings of the two acts were quite different, though overlapping.
I could say much more but just close with a few questions. Isaiah Gafni argued that the local community was less important in Babylonia than in Palestine, and there is certainly evidence in the Talmudim that points in this direction. It must be admitted that the great bulk of the evidence for Palestine and points west comes from archaeology, which barely exists for Jewish Mesopotamia. Arguably, the importance of the local Jewish community in the Roman Empire mirrors and mimics the political and economic centrality of the city. I personally do not know what role cities played for the Sasanians but certainly they were not the basic building blocks of the empire as for the Romans. So if Gafni was right, how was Jewish life organized—in the absence of a strong ideology of the local religious community, based on a strong ideology of the civitas/polis? Or was there in fact no difference? Or, perhaps most likely, not enough relevant information? Another question: Simcha writes in his conclusion that the paucity of evidence often prevents granular accounts of historical development but has the advantage of enabling the production structuralist phenomenologies. To which my response is yeah, yeah. Things are always simple when you don’t know anything about them, including whether the surviving scraps are typical or exceptional. But I wondered about one thing in particular that maybe is not so poorly attested. A lot of what we know about relations between the Sasanians and the Christians comes from the fifth century, but the Sasanians ruled for at least a century when the Roman Empire was not Christian, and another series of decades when it was slowly and haltingly christianizing. Is there nothing at all to say about this?
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, Simcha Gross has written one of the most important books in ancient Judaism, Jewish history, and, to step out on a limb, Sasanian history, that I have read in a very long time: no standard first-book Jugendarbeit, but a precociously mature synthesis of great power and significance.
Seth Schwartz is Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization at Columbia University.