It is often said that the most gratifying experience for an author is seeing others engage deeply and productively with their work, and that sentiment certainly holds true for me. But in this case, it is more than just a platitude—it is at the heart of what I hoped this book would achieve. From the outset, my goal was to challenge a set of historical assumptions—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—that have profoundly shaped the ways we study Babylonian Jews, the rabbis, the Talmud they produced Babylonian Talmud, and the Sasanian Empire in which they lived. These presuppositions constructed a segregated world, of a social environment in which Jews were isolated from their neighbors, of a textual corpus that was entirely inward looking, and of an empire so distant that Jews thought little about it, or it about Jews. My goal was to paint a markedly different portrait, one that was intensely vibrant, interactive, and dynamic, where Jews were deeply embedded in and shaped by their local and imperial contexts, and the Talmud animated precisely by the concerns that raised. To now see a group of scholars, whose work I deeply admire, take up the task of exploring where these alternative historical foundations might lead us is a dream come true. I am profoundly grateful for their contributions and for expanding this conversation.

To conclude this panel, I will briefly elaborate on the immediate historical intervention I aimed to make with the book before expanding upon its implications for the historiography of Jewish Studies, the study of the Sasanian Empire, and approaches to late antique empires more broadly.

The book is an unabashedly revisionist one, in which I attempt to combine responsible deconstruction with reasonable construction about a particularly significant period of both Jewish and Iranian history. The book centers on the fascinating but still woefully understudied Sasanian empire. The empire rose to power in 224 CE and quickly came to control territory spanning from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, growing to its largest extent in the seventh century when it encompassed much of Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt. Its reign lasted for over four hundred years, and throughout that period it was, among other things, Rome’s chief imperial rival.

The Sasanian empire controlled Babylonia, roughly modern central Iraq, which by the outset of its reign was home to a sizeable Jewish population – Josephus (Ant. 11.133) describes them as “countless myriads whose number cannot be ascertained” – for nearly a millennium. While there is a frustrating dearth of evidence for Jewish life prior to the Sasanians, the advent of Sasanian rule coincides almost perfectly with the emergence in Babylonia of a peculiar subgroup of Jews, known as the rabbis. By the end of Sasanian rule, the rabbinic movement expanded in size and organizational complexity, ultimately producing the Babylonian Talmud, a sprawling anthology addressing many aspects of Babylonian Jewish life and thought. This chronological confluence is the launching point for the question animating my book: how did life under Sasanian rule affect and inform both Jewish life in general, and the rabbinic movement in particular?

An answer to these questions largely depends on determining how the Sasanians solved the chief problem confronting every empire: diversity. To put it simply: how does one govern an incredibly varied array of subjects? To what degree do you embrace, make space for, or tolerate heterogeneity, and to what degree do you coerce or encourage homogeneity? Do you empower and incorporate local officials, allow for local forms of governance, or seek to centralize and monopolize power in the state? And what tools does the empire use to achieve these goals: does it chiefly communicate through force, through the threat or application of violence, or through persuasion, by making their subjects feel positively disposed towards it, and even, ideally, encouraging them to assume and internalize aspects of imperial ideology?

In the case of the Sasanians, the answer to these fundamental questions has remained static for over a century: the Sasanians managed diversity by neatly-packaging heterogeneity. There are three basic components to this scholarly paradigm concerning Sasanian rule. First, the Sasanians allegedly separated their subjects on the basis of religion, and granted them a large degree of autonomy, designating an official intermediary for each religious community. Second, each community had a centralized social hierarchy enforced by the empire, with its own judicial branch, thereby governing its own affairs. Third, as a result of this system of social organization, religious groups lacked any real impetus or incentive to mix with each other, or to acculturate to any particular set of norms or habits; in other words, religious groups were compelled to remain insular and isolated. These three assumptions were then applied to and simultaneously confirmed by Babylonian Jewish society. The Jewish intermediary was supposedly a figure known as the Exilarch, the judicial branch was occupied by the rabbis and as a result rabbinic law was broadly normative for all Jews, and Jewish society was siloed from its neighbors and its surroundings more generally. Scholars therefore anticipated few signs of Persian acculturation among Jews, except for those elites, like the Exilarch, who were required to participate in the culture of the court as a byproduct of their positions in the social hierarchy. Residing in a social vacuum, Jews, like other groups, allegedly had little impetus to contemplate an imperial presence or devise political strategies for how best to navigate it.

This triad of semi-autonomy, centralization, and insularity remains dominant in both the study of the Sasanians and of Babylonian Jews. Indeed, the two created a feedback loop, or less charitably, a death spiral, where scholars of the Sasanian Empire adduced Jews as proof of the empire’s tendency to provide religious groups with autonomy, and Sasanian feudalism shaped interpretations of the Talmud and of Jewish history to corroborate the existence of autonomy among Babylonian Jews.

My book advances a radically different account of Jewish life under Sasanian rule, and by extension, of Sasanian rule itself. I argue that Jews were firmly integrated into the empire’s administrative structures and directly subject to them. Jewish society was highly dynamic and in constant flux, where status was determined not by guaranteed positions in a formal centralized hierarchy but by success in competition for recognition on a crowded playing field of social actors. Likewise, the rabbis did not serve as the official judges of the community, but like their Christian neighbors, offered one means of arbitration that competed with – even while borrowing from – Persian imperial courts, creating overlapping means of legal resolution that are consistent with what is typically called “forum shopping.” Jews, including the rabbis, were not siloed, but entrenched in a broader religious, social, cultural, and political world, which they variously redefined, internalized, contested, mimicked, and negotiated. The result is a new approach to how we understand the rabbis but also their stories and discussions, which are often the very sites in which Jews articulated attitudes and strategies towards their broader religious, political, and cultural surroundings. Babylonian Jews their traditions, teachings, and identities within the particular conditions generated by Sasanian rule.

Methodologically, my account diverges from previous ones not only due to individual interpretive decisions, but as a result of a suite of alternative approaches that guided me throughout. Some of these are specific to the study of ancient Judaism and rabbinics and developments these fields have undergone over the last several decades. After centuries of positivist and credulous approaches to the Talmud, scholars now exhibit a heightened sensitivity to this vital text’s layered and highly tendentious character, concerns that largely arose after the publication of the foundational works on Babylonian Jewish history. Similarly, consistent with trends especially in early Islamic studies, I exhibit more skepticism towards medieval texts – whether rabbinic, Persian, or Arabic – which often construct a late antiquity that is conducive to their contemporary aims, and which anachronistically retroject their own social, cultural, and institutional settings onto the past in a bid to assert unbroken continuity.

But perhaps the most central methodological innovation of the book emerged in an attempt to solve a kind of humanistic three-body problem, an attempt to chart the unstable gravitational field created by three poorly understood forces: Babylonian Jews, the Sasanian Empire, and its other subjects. Unlike studies where the imperial framework is a fixed mass exerting a predictable pull on its Jewish inhabitants, here, our state of understanding is such that each body moves in ways that are currently unknown, and where changes to one unpredictably affect our account of the others.

To address this problem, I eschewed previous assumptions and the disciplinary boundaries that siloed subject groups from each other and foreclosed any sustained comparison between them. Instead, my working assumption throughout was that Jews were simply one of several groups subjected to similar imperial pressures and conditions. Their analogous positions therefore invite comparison between their texts and experiences. Fortunately, living cheek-by-jowl with Babylonian Jews were Syriac Christians, who left a voluminous body of literature about life under Sasanian rule. Triangulating between Jews and Christians, on the one hand, and these communities and the Sasanian Empire on the other, allows us to reconstruct the common circumstances and challenges subject groups faced, while also attending to how each group responded to these shared conditions in their own unique ways. Together, these methodological approaches produce a new account of Babylonian Jewish and by extension Sasanian history, though one necessarily circumscribed by the quality and nature of our sources

What I did not engage too fully in the book was a basic question: what made the thesis of Babylonian Jewish autonomy – already found in Heinrich Graetz’s mid-19th century Jewish history and repeated regularly ever since – so appealing and enduring in both Jewish Studies and Sasanian history?

For Sasanian studies and ancient history more generally, the appeal of this narrative lay in seemingly irrepressible ideas about unchanging Persian feudalism, oriental despotism, and the Persians as precursors of the Ottoman millet system.

All of these ultimately boil down to a eurocentrism that treated the Persians as a (lesser) foil to the Romans. So, if the Romans had a centralized government and judicial system, and boasted the capacity to create a framework of citizenship with shared rights, the Persians instead must have been decentralized and disorganized, and chose to delegate authority whenever possible. The fact that the Sasanians became a kind of mythical dynasty in Iranian memory through the popularity of epic works like the Shahnameh or Book of Kings placed the emphasis of our sources and scholarly interest alike on the royal court, creating the impression that the Sasanians had little interest outside of it.

This focus on palace intrigue naturally produced ideas like the existence of intermediaries on behalf of religious communities, such as the Exilarch, the Catholicos, or the Mobedan Mobed, who operated within the royal court. Classicists, informed perhaps by Aeschylus’ the Persians or the biblical book of Esther, were only too ready to reproduce this court-centered account, framing the story of Sasanian rule as a cyclical and never-resolved tension between the royal household on the one hand, and certain aristocratic families and Zoroastrian priests, on the other.

Disciplinary boundaries precluded scholars of Iranian history or ancient historians from accessing the works of subject groups like Jews and Christians, and given that Jews and Christians were assumed to be organized by religious community and siloed from each other, they were mainly relegated to the purview of religious studies and philology, with their own penchant for dehistoricized approaches. The supposedly autonomous nature of these religious communities in the Sasanian Empire reinforced a world religions paradigm, where different so-called religious traditions naturally gravitated towards isolation in order to avoid becoming adulterated through mixture with other groups.

But this model of Sasanian rule especially resonated with scholars of Jewish studies, where the idea of Jewish autonomy was paradoxically put in the service of several clashing ideological camps. They all agreed about at least one thing: that autonomy was a prerequisite for Jewish flourishing. Thus, in his effort to problematize what he famously called “lachrymose” histories, Salo Baron, of this storied institution, in his trailblazing 1928 essay “Ghetto and Emancipation,” celebrated pre-emancipation Jewish communities for their “total internal autonomy.”

He contrasted this beneficial autonomy with the place of Jews in the modern nation state, which imposes taxes, education requirements, standards of justice and more that ultimately forcibly integrated Jews into the state. To Baron, autonomy afforded Jews conducive conditions for their flourishing, despite external pressures, giving the pre-modern world, for all of its brutality, a certain leg up on modern Jewish life.

The importance of autonomy persisted in different ideological corners, with the Babylonian Jews and the Talmud often serving as Jewish autonomy’s chief avatars. Zionist historiography saw sovereignty as a prerequisite for Jewish flourishing, only fully realized with the establishment of a Jewish state. But to some, Talmudic Babylonia, a high watermark of Jewish cultural efflorescence, served as a kind of precursor to a Jewish autonomous state. These same scholars therefore denigrated aspects of the Talmud as diasporic, superstitious and religiously benighted, proof that outside of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, “adulterated” forms of Judaism were inevitable. By contrast, in his alternative to the developing Zionist movement, Simon Dubnow defended diasporism as a viable path for Jewish flourishing, albeit so long as Jews had an “autonomous community,” what he called a “miniature state,” a necessary bulwark against assimilation. Unsurprisingly, in his influential 1931 encyclopedia entry on diaspora, Dubnow pointed to late antique Babylonia as an embodiment of this ideal diasporic configuration. Thus, whether statist or anti-statist, a premium was placed on Jewish autonomy.

These parallel yet opposing positions persisted in other forms; the literary critic George Steiner imagined the Talmud and Jewish bibliophilia as a non-geographic autonomous state that served to unite Jews across time and space as they waited for a physical homeland. At the same time, Daniel Boyarin could treat the Talmud as a “traveling homeland,” a model for an autonomous trans-geographic Jewish culture independent of a state, a space he calls “Jewland.”

A veritable industry now exists investigating Jewish autonomy in various periods, though the accuracy of these accounts, and their ideological underpinnings, are now thankfully being scrutinized.

Yet throughout, different ideological streams continue to see Babylonian Jews as the epitome of a certain ideal of Jewish autonomy.

It is no wonder, then, that in the case of Jewish Babylonia the narrative of communal autonomy has endured and remained stubbornly resistant to change. But its salience there also had to do with concerns particular to the study of late antique Judaism. As is by now well established, a teleology governed the study of ancient Judaism from its earliest days, whereby the medieval dominance of the rabbis was assumed to obtain already from the first centuries of the common era in both Palestine and Babylonia. This assumption spared scholars the difficult labor of explaining when and how the rabbis grew to prominence. As evidence began to mount challenging the assumed supreme position of the rabbis in Palestine, key revisionist figures like E. R. Goodenough and Jacob Neusner made two interrelated moves, the first well known but the second less so.

They first argued that Palestinian rabbis were not, in fact, dominant for much of late antiquity. But they simultaneously maintained that the situation in Babylonia was fundamentally different, where Babylonian rabbis had achieved an early and uncontested dominance. The reason? You guessed it, autonomy.

Jews in Babylonia, under Persian feudalism, were simply structured differently, such that the Babylonian rabbis did not need to achieve dominance, but were granted it by imperial fiat. The spread of Babylonian rabbinism and the Talmud by the early medieval period was considered the culmination of centuries of entrenched rabbinic dominance in Babylonia now exported across the world through migrations and networks newly established under early Islam.

Likewise, autonomy, and its offshoot insularity, conveniently explained why the rabbis and the Talmud’s rhetoric was so internalist, so self-referential, frankly, so Jewish. There was no real need to search for comparanda or larger contexts, because the text did not readily invite such comparison. Rabbinic stories, especially in the Babylonian Talmud, were said to exhibit “closure” or were meant to convey timeless lessons rather than addressing immediate contemporary concerns. Entrenched assumptions about rabbinic insularity disincentivized scholars of Jews to gain facility with other groups, texts, and languages, only further reinforcing the feeling that these texts somehow uniquely stood outside of time and place.

In challenging the narrative of autonomy, I was therefore also arguing that the Babylonian rabbis in fact had to attain dominance in a world where it was not guaranteed, that rabbinic sayings and stories could and did have larger political and contemporary aims, and that any study of a group or its literature is predicated on historical models about which we must be conscious, and whose accuracy we must ensure. I was likewise probing the engrained habit in the study of the Babylonian rabbis, rabbinic literature, and ancient Judaism to assume our subjects and their texts were autonomous and therefore isolated and siloed. This has bred a kind of parochialism that I think the field has never fully shed, which is further entrenched in how we conduct our research, define our disciplines, and train our students. If the Babylonian rabbis served as one of the embodiment of an idealized ancient Jewish autonomy, that ship has now sailed. Models that treat Babylonian Jews or rabbis in isolation are no longer viable.

But my primary goal throughout was to investigate anew the question of the imperial conditions of Babylonian Jewish life and their many implications. Looking back, however, I think that, even as I rejected autonomy as an accurate or useful paradigm, I too was in a way shaped by the long shadow it cast. As a result of this framework’s omnipresence, I ultimately adopted a pragmatically conservative approach in the book. The evidence that I marshalled is mainly explicit engagements with empire – statements and stories about kings and magi, officials and laws, courts and fire temples, persecution and martyrdom. I mostly limited my study to overt manifestations of empire, where its presence in the lives and minds of Babylonian Jews was simply incontrovertible. And, mainly as a concession to the lacunose nature of the surviving evidence, I opted for broad generalizations that push back again the older paradigm and point to broad alternative directions, but which undoubtedly do not do justice the complexity and more textured nature of Babylonian Jewish life.

Empire studies and common sense agree that the ability of imperial, political, and cultural conditions to shape worlds and worldviews go well beyond explicit engagements by subjects – subjects are often entirely unaware of the ways empires shape them. Fish may not notice the water around them, yet it sustains, conditions, and delineates the possibilities available to them.

Looking forward then, I hope that my book serves as license not for rank speculation, but rigorous historical work that can assume the presence and pressure exerted by the Sasanian empire on different facets and aspects of Babylonian Jewish life and thought, without having to prove that empire was indeed a fact of Babylonian Jewish life. The various contributors to this forum have offered several rich examples of the promising results such an approach might yield. The imperial background could illuminate not only individual legal opinions or stories in the Talmud, but social and intellectual trends among Babylonian Jews and indeed also found among other groups living under Sasanian rule. Our possibilities are endless, but might include new culturally- and contextually-sensitive studies of rabbinic humor by Christine Hayes, or histories of emotions by Sarah Wolf, or more illuminating and rigorous work about rabbis and charity by Alyssa Gray, or studies of the very project of rabbinic textualization by Shai Secunda, or a comparative history of Sasanian approaches to Jews and Manichaeans by Jae Han, and so much more. Indeed, this kind of an integrated approach, can be used to illuminate texts, but also real Jews within and outside of Babylonia, to explore how Jewish individuals and different Jewish collectives formed, were shaped by, and navigated the various contexts in which they lived. Such an approach may help us to explain, among other things, how the rabbis grew in scale and influence over the course of this period, not as a result of imperial sponsorship, but due to their participation in larger developments occurring in late antique Iraq and across the Sasanian Empire.

Finally, for the study of late ancient empires, 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. It was only by contrast with a (fictive) Rome that Iranian rule could be characterized as detached and feudalistic, lacking the interest – let alone ability – of affecting the political positions of their subjects, or of engaging in acts of persuasion. This bias extends to the terminology scholars continue to use to describe conflicts between the two empires, where the Romans tend to “control” and “govern” while the Persians “raid,” “conquer” and “occupy.” Romans seize hearts and minds, Persians fleetingly subjugate territory. We call it the Roman Near East, not the Iranian West. There are many troubling knock-on effects that follow from this basic dichotomy. I tried to show throughout the book that, for all their differences, both of these empires responded to the same problem of diverse subjects. While their particular ideologies and strategies to resolve this tension no doubt differed, they were structurally far more alike than we have previously allowed.

Simcha Gross is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.