8 - Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tradition

Summary

JEWS AND PERSIANS

Jews and Persians had coexisted in Mesopotamia, mostly peaceably, for some 750 years before the Sasanian dynasty took over from the Arcasids in 224 C.E. They would continue to do so for more than another four centuries, including the entire amoraic period (220-500 C.E.). As the late third-century R. Huna put it, the Babylonian “exiles” were at ease in Babylonia, as the other exiles - those in the Roman world - were not (B. Menahot 110a). The Persian emperor wanted it that way. Jews were a significant minority in a vital province; Mesopotamia was both the breadbasket of the empire and the province most vulnerable to Roman invasion; unlike Christians, who might become a fifth column once Christianity became a tolerated religion in 313 C.E., the Jews would support the regime if they were left alone.

At the same time, the official religion of the Persian Empire, Zoroastrianism, was comfortable and even familiar to the Jews, with its theological doctrines of creation by the benevolent and omniscient Ohrmazd, the fight against evil, reward and punishment, heaven and hell, judgment, creation, the coming of three pivotal “messianic” figures, the ultimate defeat of evil, the resurrection of the dead, and the renewal of creation. This was true of its ethical system as well, with its emphasis on right thought, speech, and action, and its ritual system, with its stress on the avoidance of idolatry, its hatred of sorcery, “wasting of seed,” and contact with menstruant women and dead bodies.