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.
The first Talmudic text quoted in Simcha’s book, Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity, is the following line, which appears as part of a longer Talmudic statement:
Rabbah said: I will tell you something that not even King Shapur said!
And who is he [i.e. who is King Shapur]? Shmuel.
In his discussion, Simcha points out that despite its brevity, this line can be divided into two layers—one, attributed to the third generation amora, Rabbah, draws a contrast between his own pronouncement and that of the Sasanian King, Shapur, and another, later unattributed addition counters that in fact, it is not King Shapur who is invoked rather the first generation amora, Shmuel. In my book, Iranian Talmud, published over ten years ago, I suggested that what is reflected here is shifting rabbinic perceptions of the Sasanians and their perceived proximity to rabbinic discourse, so that earlier Babylonian rabbis imagined the Sasanians as something like fellow rabbinic jurists, while later Babylonian rabbis no longer saw the Sasanians this way.
And yet, here are three, much smarter sentences from Simcha’s discussion:
“To make such a boast, Rabbah presupposed that King Shapur can serve as a benchmark for legal and interpretive creativity, such that claiming to be cleverer than him, however hyperbolically, is praiseworthy. Ideas about the king as a wise legal authority were indeed promoted by the Sasanian Empire itself, a claim Rabbah appears to have embraced and internalized. However we understand the relationship of the anonymous interpolation to Rabbah’s statement, the Sasanian Empire, its leading figures, and even its projections, penetrated the narrowly focused discursive universe of the rabbis.”
Simcha suggests that the idea of King Shapur as a wise legal authority was not solely a rabbinic invention, but interacts with imperial propaganda, and that interaction is an unfolding process. More broadly, what Simcha has done here is to push us forward on two of our main preoccupations as Talmudists: a) Higher Criticism and b) reading the Bavli in its Sasanian context.
As for the first, while we may think that the deployment of diachronic tools separating amoraic statements from unattributed, editorial additions is tantamount to doing history, Simcha assumes that such work is preliminary, and on its own, historiographically insufficient. Second, while those of us devoted to situating the Talmud in its Iranian context highlight the places where the Talmud refers to that context and match it with what we know from non-Talmudic sources, Simcha reminds us that there is never a static, Sasanian context which the rabbis were influenced by, rejected, or accommodated themselves to, rather a set of imperial projections producing a cultural field that rabbinic subjects then navigated. In this way, the penultimate chapter of Simcha’s book dismantles what we thought we knew about the supposedly warm relations the rabbis had with the Sasanian Kings and their icy interactions with Zoroastrian clergy. 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.
Apart from crafting these sorts of dynamic models, the other standout quality of Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity is its voracious appetite for non-Talmudic sources. In considering how the Sasanian sovereigns crafted the above-mentioned imperial image (which the rabbis responded to), Simcha refers to courtly texts, royal coinage, silver bowls, and more. He also extensively consults Syriac literature in his attempt to understand how other minorities neighboring Babylonian Jewry—in this case, Syriac Christians—navigated Sasanian society. But he also looks at Arabic and Persian historiography, Sasanian inscriptions in Middle Persian, Zoroastrian Middle Persian literature, and more. I point this out not only to praise Simcha’s great curiosity and even greater work ethic, but also to appreciate how the renewed effort to read the Talmud and Babylonian Jewry contextually has come a long way in a relatively short amount of time. After all, it was barely one scholarly generation ago when our assertion that Talmudists must immerse themselves in sources stemming from the Bavli’s Sasanian context was met with counter-assertions, for example that the better-known Greek sources (or “Hellenism,” more broadly) remains the “more important” context for Talmudists. Even those committed to doing “Irano-Talmudica” have, unfortunately, engaged in a similar sort of crossfire, pitting, say, the Zoroastrian sources against the Syriac Christian ones (or vice versa) as being the more important source for Talmudists. Despite his considerable work as a Syriacist, Simcha has never seen this work as a zero-sum game.
Relatedly, it’s worth noting that the term “smoking gun”—particularly in the sense of a piece of evidence that proves (another word hardly used in the book) the significance of Babylonian Jewry’s Sasanian context—is, to my knowledge, not invoked a single time in Simcha’s book. In fact, Simcha problematizes the word “influence”—a term with its own history of abuse in the contextual study of Babylonian Jewry and its Talmud. Moreover, the book doesn’t set up a relationship between Babylonian Jews and the Sasanian Empire on a contextual axis, rather conceives of webs of actors, observing how these actors (such as rabbinic elites, exilarch-style elites, etc) operate with other actors, including Sasanian royals. Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity does not apologize about not working in that outdated mode. It, correctly, ignores it altogether.
Aside from the immense value of this book for the study of Jewish history (this is the first monograph on Babylonian Jewish history in decades), its dynamic mode of approaching Babylonian Jewry in the space of the Sasanian Empire has also been critical for someone like me —less a historian of Babylonian Judaism, and more, a student of the text of the Babylonian Talmud. Again, previously, the way most Talmudists like me operated was with the older paradigm, looking for “smoking guns,” “proof” of influence, in specific texts and textual developments. One of the things that Simcha’s work has helped me do is to think bigger, more dynamically, about my work, so that I am not only examining particular sugyot, but asking questions about the composition of the Talmud on the whole, and the factors in which such a text would develop. My current ongoing project, in which I am studying the encyclopedic anthology that is the Babylonian Talmud, is very much indebted to Simcha’s distinct form of historicizing, his encouragement to peel back the ideological layers of our texts, and his insistence that we use every piece of evidence available for appreciating Babylonian Jewry, and its texts.
Anyone who has had the experience of spending time in scholarly archives knows that not long ago, the publication of a book signified a real event, a record of which is preserved in archive. People not only read the new books, but quickly and seriously responded to it both publicly and in private correspondence. There is no doubt that the publication of Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity is a real event in the field, one which I know will spark serious dialogue, and will leave a last impression in the archive, and in the future work that we produce.
Shai Secunda, Bard College