Irano-Talmudica is one of the older subfields of Jewish studies, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. It explores the junction of Iranian studies and the Babylonian Talmud. Practitioners typically excavate the Bavli for sediments of Sasanian Persian culture, be it on surface layers such as with Persian loans or calques, or in the subterranean levels in diverse areas such as midrash, law, or mythology. From the beginning it was recognized that Persia formed part of the imperial and cultural context of the Talmud, and that a better understanding of it would enhance our knowledge of much of Babylonian Jewish civilization.
There has been a recent growth of interest in this field, much to the credit of Yaakov Elman. Elman has also spearheaded a conceptual change in the field. He has asserted a privileged relationship between the Zoroastrian Middle Persian literary culture and the Babylonian Talmud that goes far deeper than has been widely believed by his predecessors and contemporaries, and advocates reading Middle Persian Zoroastrian religious literature in tandem with the Bavli. In this latest addition to a now-burgeoning field, Elman's student Shai Secunda seeks to demonstrate the plausibility and feasibility of the Irano-Talmudic project, as perceived by Elman and Secunda, and to provide this new position with a methodological framework.
After its introduction this book has five chapters. The first describes the sources; the second seeks to locate Jewish-Zoroastrian encounters in Sasanian Mesopotamia. The third and fourth focus on rabbinic and Zoroastrian discourses about “the Other.” The fifth explores methodology and theoretical strategies for reading the Bavli alongside Middle Persian literature. A few concluding pages complete the main body of this volume, which has its notes and acknowledgements at the end along with its bibliography and indices.
The success of the book's mission is not clear. Zoroastrian hermeneutical literature might seem, at times, to have a rabbinic “feel” about it, but the author struggles to resolve fundamental issues: there are challenges in dating and locating its production. Most of the Zoroastrian sources in which Secunda is interested have reached us through works redacted far from Babylonia, many centuries after the Sasanian era. His efforts to convince the reader that a substantial amount of this literature reflects “Sasanian realities”—not to mention rabbinic ones—accompany the volume to the end.
The earlier chapters attempt to construct a Zoroastrian scholarly culture that parallels Babylonian rabbinic culture, and to show reciprocal intellectual interaction between rabbis and magi. Since Secunda is in search of elite encounters, a discussion of incantation bowls—a popular, local, and contemporary literary genre, written by Babylonian Jews, which ostensibly attest to physical proximity between ethnic Persians and Jews at some level—hardly fall under his purview. The bowls have little to contribute toward elucidating the exchange of religious ideas between Jews and Zoroastrians, and as such pose a challenge to his thesis. He appeals to the evidence of “Zoroastrian texts written down in Iranian languages as early as the third century CE” (42). By this, however, he is referring to a Coptic Manichaean tradition of questionable credibility. His assumption of a “great translation movement” of Abbasid times that “can be traced back to Sasanian times” (42–3) actually refers to Syriac (and Armenian) translations of Greek, not to Middle Persian ones. He evokes the example of Paul the Persian, who apparently wrote about Greek philosophy in Middle Persian, but he was a sixth-century Christian. Secunda would like to see rabbis learning to recite the Avesta with the magi, but this is based on ambiguous statements such as “he who learns something from a magus is worthy of death” (43).
In the other direction, a story of the Babylonian Amora Samuel hearing a “Persian” pronounce the divine name is interpreted by Secunda as suggesting that Zoroastrians knew the tetragrammaton (74). This story, however, appears in the Yerushalmi and is told from the Yerushalmi's perspective. The Yerushalmi, like so many sources from the Roman Empire, is liable to describe anyone living in the Persian Empire as a Persian, so that this Persian is presumably a Jew.
It is my view that the talmudic source analysis in this volume, in seeking to connect talmudic and Middle Persian literature, is problematic. The value of the book as a whole will ultimately depend upon the degree to which its readings of talmudic sources are persuasive. The choice of less controversial talmudic interpretations might have made for a more compelling case for Secunda's proposed methodology.
As an example let us examine one of the book’s central topics—the bei ’abeidan. This term appears only in the Bavli and refers to a place where scrolls of questionable sanctity can be found. A sugya in B. Shabbat 116a–b, for example, speaks about whether one may save from fire holy writings in the possession of heretics or gentiles. There we find “Yosef bar Ḥavushma” asking R. Abahu whether books of the bei ’abeidan should be saved in such a case. The Talmud inquires, or has gentiles of authority ask, why leading rabbis don’t go to such a place, and we hear their lame excuses, or declarations that they do go there.
The origin of the term bei ’abeidan has hitherto defied a completely convincing explanation. We have Shaul Shaked’s hypothesis of a Persian etymology—“a reflection of *(a)beydān, a development of … baγdān ‘temple, name of a deity’” (Shaked, “A Persian House of Study, a King’s Secretary: Irano-Aramaic Notes,” AOASH 48 [1995]: 175). It, too, is not without its problems, but even if correct, its significance remains unclear. Furthermore, Shaked is thinking about “popular religion” and the demon bagdana/abugdana attested in magic bowls rather than the “official Zoroastrianism” in which Secunda is interested.
Secunda accepts Shaked’s proposal, but his bei ’abeidan shares little with Shaked’s. For the latter, it is “not likely to have been a Zoroastrian establishment” but a place where “rabbinic Jews could meet with other Jews” (Shaked, 173–4); for Secunda, it has become a pagan temple where Jews and Zoroastrians (and others?) conduct intellectual dialogue. Elman, in fact, had already described the bei ’abeidan as a “Zoroastrian temple annex,” presumably following the medieval commentary of Rabbenu Ḥananel, and Secunda also cites the medieval Talmud commentators with approval (58). Religious debate, however, is not alluded to in any of the talmudic sources that refer to the bei ’abeidan, nor are Zoroastrians.
Secunda's closer analysis of these sources can be confusing. Mar, the son of Rav Yosef, according to the better Talmud manuscripts, appears as Rav Yosef in MS Munich 95. Secunda initially adopts these better manuscript readings, but then explores a “tantalizing possibility” that Yosef b. Ḥavushma at the beginning of this talmudic passage is the very same Rav Yosef—following the late and unreliable MS Munich—who appears at the end, and suggests that the patronymic “ḥavu-shma” might mean “they hid his name” (179 n. 136). It would have to be “ḥavu-shmeh” but actually the redactors of the Talmud did not hide his name—he is explicitly referred to as Yosef! Likewise, his suggestion to read אדלא אבידנא בחישנא to mean “since I did not (go to) the bei abeidan he seeks me” (57) is insupportable.
Secunda sees a relationship between such interreligious dialogue as might have occurred in the bei ’abeidan, on the one hand, and that which is suggested in a passage in the medieval Middle Persian Dēnkard that speaks of the Sasanian kings, Ardashir I, Shapur I, and Shapur II restoring fragments of scattered wisdom from around the world to the Zoroastrian Tradition and perfecting this Tradition through antiheretical disputation, on the other. The Zoroastrian passage does not explicitly mention Jews, but employs a Persian word for disputation (pahikārišn), a form of which appears in the Bavli (Ta‘anit 24b). Here King Shapur II is warned by his wife to have no quarrel (פיקאר—paykār) with the Jews. Secunda believes this to be a “fascinating micro-link,” an intertextual reading of the Talmud in Iran. It is said to be “evidence of the penetration of a Middle Persian text into the poesis of Talmudic storytellers” and these diverse sources contribute to what Secunda will describe in the fifth chapter as a “textscape.”
But how is one to bridge a gap between the tenth-century Dēnkard account and the fourth-century Bavli source? Secunda suggests the following: The Dēnkard passage reflects the sixth-century reality of King Xusrō I. This king publicized a “kind of royal edict” (128) after his suppression of the Mazdakite rebellion. The sixth-century redactors of the Bavli were moved by this edict to revise this fourth-century talmudic source and introduce the Persian word paykār, which might not have been there earlier. Each one of these steps, however, is speculative, and I was not convinced that we have here a parallel at all: just a fairly common Persian word that happens to appear in two unrelated sources. Furthermore, this Dēnkard passage has only Shapur I gathering teachings from beyond the Zoroastrian faith, and Xusrō I is not associated with disputation. The thrust of this passage is probably, rather, an internal Zoroastrian one. Secunda requires that the term hamāg kišwarīgān (fellow countrymen), in reference to Shapur II, be understood to include non-Zoroastrians (and, implicitly, Jews), but this would seem unlikely.
Secunda's bold hypothesis ostensibly offers an exciting new avenue of research into Babylonian talmudic culture. However, the evidence that Secunda musters is not sufficient to support his theory, and he is often required to force on his sources interpretations that are not philologically grounded, brushing over the methodological problems involved. For a study such as this to find a place in future research of Babylonian Jewry, it must not only propose an audacious new paradigm, it must also demonstrate its validity.
