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The Comparative Study of “Scholasticism” in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2010

Adam H. Becker
Adam H. Becker*
Affiliation:
New York University, New York, New York
*
ahb3699@nyu.edu

Extract

Now is an appropriate time to reconsider the historiographical benefit that a comparative study of the East Syrian (“Nestorian”) schools and the Babylonian rabbinic academies may offer. This is attributable both to the recent, rapid increase in scholarship on Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire and late antiquity more broadly, and to the return by some scholars of rabbinic Judaism to the issues of a scholarly exchange of the late 1970s and early 1980s about the nature of rabbinic academic institutionalization. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, scholars of classics, Greek and Roman history, and late antiquity have significantly added to the bibliography on the transmission of knowledge—in lay person's terms, education—in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds. Schools continue to be an intense topic of conversation, and my own recent work on the School of Nisibis and the East Syrian schools in general suggests that the transformations and innovations of late antiquity also occurred in the Sasanian Empire, at a great distance from the centers of classical learning, such as Athens, Alexandria, and Antioch. The recently reexamined East Syrian sources may help push the conversation about rabbinic academic institutionalization forward. However, the significance of this issue is not simply attributable to its bearing on the social and institutional history of rabbinic institutions. Such inquiry may also reflect on how we understand the Babylonian Talmud and on the difficult redaction history of its constituent parts. Furthermore, I hope that the discussion offered herein will contribute to the ongoing analysis of the late antique creation and formalization of cultures of learning, which were transmitted, in turn, into the Eastern (i.e., Islamic and “Oriental” Christian and Jewish) and Western Middle Ages within their corresponding communities.

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Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , April 2010 , pp. 91 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2010

Now is an appropriate time to reconsider the historiographical benefit that a comparative study of the East Syrian (“Nestorian”) schools and the Babylonian rabbinic academies may offer.Footnote * This is attributable both to the recent, rapid increase in scholarship on Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire and late antiquity more broadly,Footnote 1 and to the return by some scholars of rabbinic Judaism to the issues of a scholarly exchange of the late 1970s and early 1980s about the nature of rabbinic academic institutionalization. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, scholars of classics, Greek and Roman history, and late antiquity have significantly added to the bibliography on the transmission of knowledge—in lay person's terms, education—in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds.Footnote 2 Schools continue to be an intense topic of conversation, and my own recent work on the School of Nisibis and the East Syrian schools in general suggests that the transformations and innovations of late antiquity also occurred in the Sasanian Empire, at a great distance from the centers of classical learning, such as Athens, Alexandria, and Antioch.Footnote 3 The recently reexamined East Syrian sources may help push the conversation about rabbinic academic institutionalization forward. However, the significance of this issue is not simply attributable to its bearing on the social and institutional history of rabbinic institutions. Such inquiry may also reflect on how we understand the Babylonian Talmud and on the difficult redaction history of its constituent parts. Furthermore, I hope that the discussion offered herein will contribute to the ongoing analysis of the late antique creation and formalization of cultures of learning, which were transmitted, in turn, into the Eastern (i.e., Islamic and “Oriental” Christian and Jewish) and Western Middle Ages within their corresponding communities.

The purpose of this article is to ask how we can better conceptualize the relationship between the respective histories of Jewish and Christian institutions of learning in late antique Mesopotamia, in order that they may shed light on each other. I will describe the East Syrian material and review the scholarship that employs the internal talmudic evidence to examine rabbinic institutionalization. I will also address some recent work on the Sasanian Persian cultural context of the Babylonian Talmud. My focus will be methodological, raising the question of how we should understand the relationship between these two cultures of learning, especially in light of recent scholarship on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. I do not pretend to make a new contribution to the discussion of the rabbinic sources through actual source analysis. I come to this material as a Syriacist, not a talmudist, but I hope that an outsider's speculation on an issue in the field of rabbinics may help spur future work among scholars engaged with the social history of the Babylonian Talmud. The recent interest in Syriac among nonspecialists is noteworthy, and the increasing use of Syriac sources by scholars of Islam and rabbinics, and, of course, Patristics and the history of late antiquity, will no doubt have a salutary effect on Syriac studies, just as it will contribute new sources for consideration to these various other fields.

The East Syrian schools

From 1886 to 1897, the Russian Jewish scholar Daniel Chwolson published numerous late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century grave inscriptions found in modern-day Kyrgyzstan.Footnote 4 More recently, these inscriptions have been employed to partially reconstruct the history of a community of “Nestorian” Christians who lived in Central Asia during the Mongol period.Footnote 5 Although these Christians spoke a Turkic language, they were Syriac literate: they read and wrote in Syriac, and their gravestones' inscriptions are written in a sometimes flawed Syriac.Footnote 6 Forty-two of these gravestones bear the title ’eskolāyā. Chwolson thought this term was used to refer to lawyers (cf. Gr. scholastikós);Footnote 7 however, this rendering is wrong.Footnote 8 To strike the right nuance in translating the word ’eskolāyā is difficult, but for lack of a better term, we might render it as “school student,” or even “scholastic” or “schoolman,” labels commonly used in English to refer to those associated with the medieval Latin schools of Western Europe (cf. Lat. scholaris). Like other school titles found in these inscriptions, the term was commonly used from the late fifth century on to designate both the students of East Syrian “schools” and those associated with the “schools” as instructors.Footnote 9

One of the numerous Greek words to creep into Syriac in late antiquity is the word scholé, or in Syriac, ’eskolē, the root of ’eskolāyā. Footnote 10 Initially, this word shows up most often in the various sources for the School of Nisibis, the most prominent of a number of East Syrian schools attested from the sixth century on.Footnote 11 By “East Syrian,” I mean Syriac-speaking “Nestorian” Christians and the ecclesiastical hierarchy they developed, particularly in the late fifth and early sixth centuries.Footnote 12 To be sure, these schools, despite sharing an obvious etymological link, have little in common with our own modern notion of the school. In fact, one part of my research has been to attempt to understand these “schools,” as they were called, in which one learned to read and write (as we do in our own schools) as part of a larger system of devotional practice aimed at forming elite Christian men—gender is not inconsequential here—who, in turn, would guide the Church of the East. This pedagogical system led to a social group of “schoolmen,” which became common enough in the church that it persisted, as the Kyrgyz gravestones attest, until much later in the Middle Ages.

The East Syrian practice of devotional study, the elevation of the man of learning to an authoritative position within the community, and the development of correlative social institutions correspond to a similar phenomenon in rabbinic culture, the effects of which are still easily apparent in Judaism today. This cultural development occurred among the East Syrians at the same time and place—the late antique and early Islamic period in Mesopotamia—as the formation of the rabbinic yeshivot (and, of course, the cultural processes that contributed to this development persisted in early Islamic times among Muslims, despite the rather late emergence of the madrasa). The Syriac sources attest to the spread of East Syrian schools throughout Mesopotamia beginning in the sixth century CE. We can roughly divide these East Syrian schools into three categories: independent schools, institutions that were not based in, or wholly dependent on, a local church or monastery and that provided both elementary literacy and higher learning; monastic schools, that is, centers of learning based within monasteries; and village schools, which can be divided into those that taught elementary lessons in reading and church service and those in which a higher form of learning could also be acquired.Footnote 13

The two most developed and well-attested schools in the sixth century were independent schools: the School of Seleucia, in the agglomeration of towns commonly referred to as Meḥoza in rabbinic sources, and the School of Nisibis. The former would not have been far from contemporary rabbinic institutions. It was founded in the Sasanian capital in the mid-sixth century, possibly by the Catholicos Mar Aba I (d. 552), who had studied at the School of Nisibis.Footnote 14 The latter was founded after the so-called School of the Persians in Edessa (modern Urfa in Turkey) was closed in 489 by the bishop of the city, Cyrus, under orders from Emperor Zeno (d. 491).Footnote 15 Numerous leading figures in the Church of the East in the sixth and seventh centuries passed through this school, and it seems also to have played a significant role in the importation of Western texts and ideas into the Sasanian Empire. Furthermore, before the School of Nisibis's fame spread, and for some time running parallel to the rise of such formally structured East Syrian schools, Christians also studied with individual teachers. However, one of the most significant developments within the school movement was that, as I have stated elsewhere, schools were no longer centered around charismatic teachers, but became actual places of learning.Footnote 16 In the same way, the Babylonian rabbinic yeshivot were transformed from study circles centered around learned masters to formal institutions that remained intact after the death of individual masters.

The rabbinic academies

David Goodblatt puts forward such a model of institutionalization for the rabbinic academies—from study circle to school—in Rabbinic Instruction in Sasanian Babylonia, in which he suggests that rabbinic academies did not exist in Babylonia in amoraic times, but rather only came into being later.Footnote 17 Goodblatt argues that yeshivah and its Babylonian Jewish Aramaic equivalent, metivta, do not mean “school” or “yeshivah” in the Babylonian sources. Rather, the word tends to be used to refer to a “learning session” or a “session of study,” and not to the place where study occurs, which is commonly rendered by the words bē rav, “at the house of” or “with the master.” Though it is not mentioned by Goodblatt, his argument is aided by the regular use of the Syriac mawtbha, the equivalent of metivta, for just this: a period of study.Footnote 18 Goodblatt is responding to the standard scholarly position, derived from an uncritical reading of later geonic sources, that the academies of the Islamic period existed as essentially the same institutions in the Sasanian period, even as early as the third century CE, when Rav and Samuel supposedly founded their academies in Nehardea and Pumbedita, respectively. While formal academies did not exist, Goodblatt suggests that the disciple circles and other informal congeries organized around learning did develop. For example, he argues that a specific group with certain halakhic interests can be identified in Nehardea in the early fourth century.Footnote 19

In more recent scholarship on Palestine, scholars have examined similar social practices and institutions, eschewing formal “schools” for social networks and local traditions.Footnote 20 As is well known, Goodblatt and Yeshayahu Gafni engaged in a back-and-forth debate over the issue of academic institutionalization in the pages of Zion and Tarbiz (1978–82). Gafni argues, pace Goodblatt, that the words yeshivah and metivta are, in fact, used in the Babylonian Talmud at times to refer to formal institutions of learning.Footnote 21 Gafni continued to address the topic, engaging with Goodblatt's criticisms but coming to conclusions less radical vis-à-vis the historiographical tradition, and included the issue in his later synthetic work of 1990.Footnote 22

Furthermore, this question of institutionalization has been closely tied to that of the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud: scholars often work with the assumption that the two correspond in some way.Footnote 23 While the common assumption has been that the Talmud was produced in some form of yeshivah setting, Daphna Ephrat and Yaakov Elman argue that the institution may have come about after the formation of this literature, perhaps even because of it.Footnote 24 Goodblatt has recently produced a summary of the issue, going back to what he argues was the origin of this problem in the geonic sources themselves.Footnote 25

One factor that has become the center of this conversation in recent scholarship is the role of the stammaim, those rabbis who redacted amoraic traditions within the stratum we call the stam ha-talmud, that is, the unattributed or anonymous material that makes up the majority of the Babylonian Talmud. The stam as a distinct stratum, with its own interests, arguments, and tendencies, has received scholarly attention since the 1970s. However, until recently, the halakhic (legal) argumentation of the stam was the focus of study, not its aggadic (narrative) or cultural tendencies.Footnote 26 The most recent piece that Goodblatt cites in his review is an article written in 2001 by Jeffrey Rubenstein, who tries to resolve the difference between Goodblatt and Gafni by laying evidence within the framework provided by scholars such as David Weiss Halivni and Shamma Friedman on the stammaitic stratum of the Talmud.Footnote 27 Rubenstein argues that those places where Gafni finds contradictions in Goodblatt's argument—that is, where yeshivah or metivta means “academy”—are stammaitic. In this regard, there is a correlation between textual, pedagogical, and institutional developments. The silencing of the Amoraim, the macro-formation of the Babylonian Talmud, the institutionalization of the transmission of knowledge, and the development of schools had all begun by the end of the fifth century (or perhaps the mid-sixth century).Footnote 28 Rubenstein summarizes the issue:

Indeed, the development of rabbinic academies may have been a critical factor in the shift from amoraic to stammaitic times, that is, in the decision no longer to preserve attributions, as the introduction of new forms of social organization often entails significant cultural shifts.Footnote 29

Fully integrating the theory of the stammaitic redaction—or rather, creation—of the Babylonian Talmud into the historiography hence promises to subvert and transform what we know about ancient and early medieval Judaism.Footnote 30 Furthermore, because we find the absence of attributions as well as the creation of false ones in later Palestinian sources, we might ask the following in general: what is the relationship between anonymity and institutionalization?Footnote 31

Comparison to the East Syrian sources may shed light on these issues. Furthermore, such a comparison need not be limited to fully developed independent institutions, whenever they finally did come into being. The elementary levels of study practiced at all three types of East Syrian schools, especially the village school, are not unlike the kind of study we might imagine at a beit midrash, the center of elementary Jewish learning, whereas some of the institutions that the East Syrian sources describe as “schools” seem to be informal circles around learned men, comparable to the rabbinic study circle. Moreover, as I will address later, the two religious cultures are comparable on multiple levels with regard not only to their practice of learning, but also to their conception of it.

The question of Jewish–Christian relations

Before continuing, I need to make explicit the larger framework within which I understand the relationship between these two school cultures, and between Judaism and Christianity in general, in late antique Mesopotamia. Recent scholarship has increasingly questioned the assumption that Judaism and Christianity were shaped by a definitive “parting of the ways,” after which these two religions followed wholly separate trajectories.Footnote 32 According to this traditional model, Judaism and Christianity institutionalized their differences after the Bar Kokhba revolt (135 CE) and became distinct and autonomous religions. From that point on, the two “religions” existed as relatively isolated entities and developed separately, only interacting through polemical conflict and mutual misperception, with the exception of limited instances of unidirectional influence of one religion on the other.Footnote 33 In challenging this “parting of the ways” model with regard to a comparative history of institutions of learning, I do not claim that there were no Jews and no Christians and that there was only a hodge-podge of in-between groups. Such hybrid groups did exist, and they continue to defy our (and ancient religious elites') categories, but there were also thoroughly non-Jewish Christians and thoroughly non-Christian Jews. I am not interested in non-“Orthodox” Jews and Christians who blur the boundaries. Rather, in looking at the schools and academies, we are examining learned elites, those who enjoyed some dominance in their communities and who saw themselves and were able eventually to get others to see themselves as representative of the norms of the Jewish and Christian communities, respectively.

The problem I wish to address is how we can transcend reliance on the notion of simple “influence,” on the one hand, where one autonomous and distinct entity affects another, and a vague idea such as Zeitgeist or “Spirit of the Age,” on the other, as tools for explaining the similarities that existed between the two social groups. A similar issue is raised in Peter Schäfer's Mirror of His Beauty (2002), in which he suggests that the strong focus on the shekhinah as a feminine being and the meaningfulness of this gender attribution in Jewish mysticism may be understood within the context of the high Mariology of southern France in the twelfth century.Footnote 34 Schäfer rejects the kind of diachronic history found in, for example, the classic work on mysticism of Gershom Scholem, for a synchronic analysis that examines religious communities as ultimately porous. The relationship between East Syrian schools and rabbinic academies raises the same question. Regarding the schools, we might ask, how do we understand religious diversity and interaction and the shared religious discourses that existed among different religious communities living side by side in the same empire? How do we do this without relying on the problematic notion of “influence” or the equally problematic notion of “Zeitgeist”? To put the two points on the spectrum in stark contrast, I would say that, on the one hand, I do not think it is a coincidence that the Jewish and Christian communities had parallel institutions of learning. Jews and Christians in Mesopotamia spoke essentially the same language,Footnote 35 were subjects of the same state, and shared a common imaginary world, which included notions of magic, mysticism, eschatology, revelation, and the need for inquiry into the meaning of that revelation. Furthermore, as Christine Hayes suggests, there was probably greater economic interaction between rabbinic Jews and non-Jews in Babylonia than in Palestine.Footnote 36

On the other hand, I doubt we should imagine in our historiographical reconstruction that, for example, a Jew walked by a Christian school one day and said to himself, “I have a great idea. Let's build schools instead of having these study circles of ours.” We are addressing a historiographical problem of multicausality. Because we can trace the independent development of Jewish and Christian forms of learning in Mesopotamia, such an inquiry entails a synchronic analysis of diachronically distinct entities. But if each entity has its own separate trajectory, do we then assume that these trajectories have no relation to one another? Can each trajectory not be drawn in certain directions by the other, perhaps like a cathode ray drawn by a magnet? Points of interaction of both religious and nonreligious nature between these communities may have existed, but we need to reconceptualize our model of understanding this interaction, if “interaction” is even the right term. I might add that with regard to the question at hand, such study will unfortunately continue for the foreseeable future only with texts, as the kind of archeological work that needs to be done has been delayed by the bloody political situation in Iraq.Footnote 37

The kind of analysis produced by Steven Wasserstrom in his Between Muslim and Jew (1995) goes one step beyond this dichotomy of Zeitgeist and “influence.”Footnote 38 In this study, “symbiosis,” a metaphor taken from the biological sciences, allows us to imagine two distinct entities mutually interacting over time, responding to each other, critiquing, and sharing. However, Wasserstrom's book addresses the early Islamic period, a time when such interactions between Muslims and Jews are well attested. It is much easier to demonstrate intercommunal interaction within the new oikoumene created by the Arab conquest. For example, Sidney Griffith's recent book addresses the world of Kalām, Islamic speculative philosophy and theology, shared by Muslims, Christians, and Jews.Footnote 39 In contrast, the study of religious communities in the Sasanian Empire and of the interrelationship between them is far less developed, in part because of the obscurity of the evidence compared to that for the later Middle Ages both in Latin Christendom and in the Muslim Middle East.Footnote 40

Parallels and fundamental differences

One type of comparative, intercultural research that has begun is the study of the relationship between rabbinic and Middle Persian–Zoroastrian culture, most notably in numerous articles published in Irano-Judaica (Jerusalem, 1982–), the work of Shaul Shaked, and, more recently, several pieces by Yaakov Elman in which acculturation, accommodation, and resistance in the rabbinic relationship to Persian culture are examined.Footnote 41 A recent contribution to this journal by Shai Secunda synthesizes such a historical contextual approach with a focus on internal talmudic hermeneutics.Footnote 42 An article by Geoffrey Herman lays out some of the issues for Irano-talmudic inquiry;Footnote 43 he examines “Jewish-Zoroastrian syncretistic tendencies” in rabbinic literature:Footnote 44

[T]he insular quality of this religious literature would naturally tend to avoid explicit references. It would, indeed, not be surprising to find various religious and other influences or borrowings dressed up, reformulated, or otherwise judaized.Footnote 45

Herman characterizes Elman's work as “the identification of legal processes and principles, common to both Sasanian and Talmudic corpora.”Footnote 46 In this article, Herman then examines two instances of the assimilation of Persian elements into the Aggadah of the Babylonian Talmud. He looks at the account of how King Ahasuerus served as a stable master for his predecessor Belshazzar and how this tale employs the Middle Persian Kārnāmag (Book of the Deeds) of Ardashir, son of Bābag, and examines the Middle Persian influence on the figure of Alexander the Great in the Talmud. Notably, these are both places where parallel dependencies exist for Christian sources: in his book on the legend of Mar Qardagh, Joel Walker shows the Syriac Christian dependence on sources such as the Kārnāmag,Footnote 47 while numerous Syriac Christian sources on Alexander still require further study.Footnote 48 Even more apt to the topic of schools, some time ago, Daniel Sperber provided a close reading of b. Bava Qama 117a–b, demonstrating the Persian context for the famous story of Rav Kahana's flight from Babylonia to R. Yoḥanan's yeshivah in Palestine, where Rav Kahana soon dies, but is then raised from the dead to engage in further discussion.Footnote 49

The East Syrian sources are verbally, thematically, and historically comparable to the rabbinic ones in a variety of ways. Even without systematic study, a number of parallels are immediately apparent.Footnote 50 For example, some rabbinic academic terms have Syriac equivalents (rav, metivta,Footnote 51siyyuma,Footnote 52qam b-resh Footnote 53). Even if Gafni is inaccurate in suggesting that the Greek kélla (the source of the Syriac kellayta or “monastic cell”) is also the source for the rabbinic kalla (the term used for the period of several days when scholars convened to study a specific tractate—a practice formalized in the geonic period),Footnote 54 we perhaps are able nevertheless to find a parallel between the semester system of the respective academies. Indeed, the School of Nisibis had a summer and a winter semester, as did later rabbinic academies.Footnote 55 The pair of scholars, or zug (from Gr., zugós), has its Syriac equivalent in the use of the same word for the relationship between East Syrian holy men and saints.Footnote 56 Chains of transmission, ultimately deriving from classical sources, are common to both cultures.Footnote 57 The shekhinah commonly appears in East Syrian speculation about the divine presence as a distinct entity (Syr. shekhinta).Footnote 58 The rabbinic pirka, or public lecture, may find its equivalent in the performance of the East Syrian ‘elltha, an extant etiological genre of public address apparently also presented to a wide audience.Footnote 59 The rabbinic “service of the heart” has its equivalent, “prayer of the heart,” in Ephrem the Syrian's fourth-century writings, and became common in East Syrian spiritual literature.Footnote 60 Both cultures discerned angelic opposition to humans’ special status within creation, though this status was attributable to Israel's reception of the Torah for one, and the human being's identity as the image of God for the other.Footnote 61

We could expand from terminological and thematic parallels to consider broader social structures. For example, a comparison of the exilarchate and the East Syrian office of Catholicos has only recently been taken seriously.Footnote 62 However, my interest is in another issue, one that is more difficult to address because of its nebulous character. Apart from some exceptions—some more striking than others—I am not considering content in my comparison of Jewish and Christian schools. In any case, even to engage in this type of comparison, we would need to find a common ground, a realm of overlap, lest parallelomania set in.Footnote 63

A simple comparison of the content and method of study at the schools points to striking differences. In contrast to the rabbinic academies, there was no legal dimension to East Syrian study. The East Syrian schools taught basic literacy as well as the East Syrian exegetical tradition, which derived heavily from Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428), the Greek church father held as authoritative in the Church of the East. Moreover, from the literature produced by “schoolmen,” we can observe an acquaintance with Greek Patristic literature translated into Syriac, as well as translations of Greek philosophical texts, particularly Aristotle's logical works and a portion of the neoplatonic commentary tradition on them. The East Syrians studied their own liturgical tradition and developed an etiological genre, the “cause” (‘elltha), which examined important events on the sacred calendar. Apart from church canons, the East Syrians composed almost no legal texts and did not seem to have been interested in law, nor is there evidence that they were well acquainted with contemporary Jewish law.Footnote 64 Similarly, as we know, the rabbis did not produce texts in any of the multiple genres in which the East Syrians composed, nor is there significant evidence that they were aware of East Syrian learned literature, such as East Syrian monastic and theological literature or texts employing Greek philosophical logic.

Furthermore, scholars have emphasized the “pervasive orality,” as Yaakov Elman expresses it, of amoraic and even post-amoraic culture.Footnote 65 Elman even argues for the oral composition of the Babylonian Talmud in the sixth century. This is in stark contrast to the East Syrians, who had caught the Christian writing bug, a symptom of which is a predilection for textuality. The similarities between these two school cultures are reflected not in what was studied, but rather in the very idea of study and its multiple effects on, for example, social organization, ethics, and the idea of the self.Footnote 66

The scholastic habit as structuring principle

Considering these fundamental differences in content, how were these cultures of learning similar, even once the rabbis had formal academies, whenever that was? The two communities were strikingly similar in structure. By “structure,” I mean syntactical relations, both objective and imagined, within which the scholastic social type of each community fit. This structure was pedagogical: both communities were guided by a pedagogical paradigm, or what I have referred to elsewhere as the “pedagogical model.”Footnote 67 In a volume dedicated to the question of the benefit of “scholasticism” as a cross-cultural category of analysis, José Cabezón lays out what he sees as the characteristics of scholasticism, including hermeneutics, epistemological accessibility, and systematicity.Footnote 68 In the same volume, Michael D. Swartz demonstrates the applicability of the label scholastic to rabbinic Judaism.Footnote 69 Elsewhere, I have argued that several of these characteristics, as well as the embodied, imaginative, and historiographical aspects of the “scholar” and the scholastic life—also emphasized by Swartz—may be applied to the East Syrians.Footnote 70

With regard to a comparative scholasticism, Martin Jaffee's characterization of rabbinic pedagogical culture can be applied, without any changes, to the culture of learning found in the Church of the East:

The disciple-community is a setting for the transmission of transformative knowledge in which emulation of the imparter of knowledge is both a primary goal of knowledge and proof of its possession.Footnote 71

Although the existence of such “disciple-communities” was not uncommon in the early church, the East Syrians maintained the most quantitatively and qualitatively developed version of this ideology and practice of learning.Footnote 72 Although parallels between the East Syrians and the rabbis have been noted in the past, and the East Syrian material has been introduced into the discussion of the rabbinic academies, scholars have relied too heavily on obsolete secondary literature and not engaged with the Syriac texts themselves.

For example, in the third volume of his History of the Jews of Babylonia, Jacob Neusner presents a formal comparison of the supposed amoraic yeshivot to “Nestorian” schools and monasteries.Footnote 73 Neusner's comparison is apt because, apart from addressing details such as a common use of military terminology, he also focuses on structural similarities between the two. Neusner provides a composite, structural perspective on the rabbinic academies:

What is most striking about the schools is the conception that in them lived holy men, who more accurately than anyone else conformed to the image of God conveyed by divine revelation through the Torah of Moses “our rabbi.”Footnote 74

Remove the emphasis on Torah—obviously, for the rabbis, the defining characteristic of the religious life—and again we have a statement that could be made about the East Syrians. The emphasis on the school as a factory for the holy, a place where the raw human being was worked to bring out his essential nature provided by the creator, can be found in both these cultures of learning.

One fundamental problem that arises when we return to Neusner's discussion forty years later is that although his comparison is correct, he applies it to the wrong period. Neusner's work derives from a time before the critical turn that began with Goodblatt's work, and he addresses supposed academies in the amoraic period under Shapur I (241–72) and Shapur II (309–79). Furthermore, he relies on the outdated work of Arthur Vööbus for details about East Syrian monasticism and the history of the East Syrian schools.Footnote 75 In fact, both Vööbus's work and Neusner's (I am not singling out Neusner here) suffer from the same flaw: they employ sources that project much later institutions onto an earlier period.Footnote 76 Other scholars, such as Isaiah Gafni, have further raised the issue of comparison to the Syriac material and improved on Neusner's work, but unfortunately this further work has depended on what is now obsolete secondary literature.Footnote 77

Recent developments in both rabbinics and the study of the Church of the East have created the possibility of new approaches. For example, in his The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (2003), Jeffrey Rubenstein, whose recent work on the stam was mentioned earlier, briefly addresses the origins and structure of the School of Nisibis as demonstrating how the fifth- or sixth-century origins of the rabbinic academies “coheres with the broader cultural climate.”Footnote 78 After describing the main contours of the life of learning at the School of Nisibis and several “structural parallels” between it and that of the rabbinic academies, Rubenstein states,

This kind of scholastic lifestyle and piety describes that of the rabbis in general and in particular the Stammaim, who dedicated themselves to the systematization, interpretation, and analysis of earlier traditions.Footnote 79

In contrast to Neusner and Gafni, who compare the East Syrian “schoolmen” to the Amoraim, Rubenstein suggests that they are closer to the stammaim, both institutionally and in intellectual method.

Furthermore, the East Syrian engagement with Greek texts and ideas serves for Daniel Boyarin as evidence confirming the “Hellenism” of the Babylonian rabbis.Footnote 80 Boyarin rejects a simplistic model of “influence” for one of “shared and overlapping cultures imbricated on each other and partly simply just the same culture in different variants.”Footnote 81 In the Babylonian Talmud, we find “dialectic without telos”;Footnote 82 furthermore, “the act of study was made an end in itself.”Footnote 83 These developments were simultaneous with a growing apóphasis (negative theology) among the East Syrians as well as with a similar shift toward study as devotion. These parallels serve to demonstrate rabbinic Hellenism, especially because the East Syrians relied heavily on Greek monastic and philosophical thought to move such developments forward.Footnote 84

Future work needs to build on the suggestions of Neusner, Gafni, Rubenstein, and Boyarin. Jews and Christians in Mesopotamia developed similar institutions aimed at inculcating a specific pedagogical religious identity in young males who traveled to them. This similar notion of the student who would later become the teacher corresponds to the shared pedagogical metaphors the two cultures of learning employed in talking about God and the projection of this pedagogical imagery onto an imagined biblical past. These schools provided a particular scholarly habitus (including deportment, implicit values, and identity) and advocated ritualized study as an obligation with as much religious valence as prayer.Footnote 85 Furthermore, the East Syrian and rabbinic material may be compared as scholastic systems engaged in certain kinds of reason and argumentation: Aristotelian for one, halakhic for the other. The recognized indeterminacy of the Babylonian Talmud finds its correlative in the apophatic theology of the upper echelons of East Syrian study, that is, the Evagrian spirituality of the monastery.Footnote 86 Competition was an important element in both of these cultures of learning, and a system of honors and punishments that functioned to prevent deviance, such as we find among the rabbis, is also identifiable in the East Syrian school sources.Footnote 87 We find the eroticization of learning in both religious traditions, the object of desire being the Torah in one and Jesus the Bridegroom in the other. Such an eroticization inversely corresponds to the generally ascetic attitude taken to study, and often to life.Footnote 88 Characteristics such as these may also be labeled as shared content, but, structurally speaking, this eroticization represents part of the affect that kept the system going.

The East Syrians and the rabbis projected their scholastic practice into heaven and the biblical past.Footnote 89 Numerous examples attest to a scholasticizing of history: later Babylonian sources understand Roman imperial “persecution” of Jews specifically as an attempt to restrict access to Torah (i.e., as an obstruction of study), whereas the East Syrian Cause of the Foundation of the Schools provides a history of learning from the time of God's creation of the world to the time of the text's composition in the late sixth century CE by recasting patriarchal, Israelite, “pagan,” and Christian history as a long series of schools.Footnote 90 Furthermore, East Syrian and rabbinic sources both self-consciously attempted to reconcile their relationship to a tradition deriving from the distant West. Just as Jewish learning and traditions, after a period of back-and-forth exchange between Palestine and Babylonia, arrived in Mesopotamia from the littoral of the Mediterranean basin, so was there a continual influx of “Western” texts and ideas into the Mesopotamian Christian milieu.Footnote 91 The rabbis and the East Syrians felt the need to renegotiate imaginatively this long-distance transmission of learning.Footnote 92 This led to the development of what we can perhaps call a scholastic historiographical paradigm in both communities. However, in contrast to the Babylonian Talmud and later geonic responsa, only rarely did East Syrian texts move westward (e.g., Cassiodorus mentions the School of Nisibis in the beginning of his Institutes).Footnote 93

The conversion of the protagonist in the History of Mar Aba, the East Syrian Catholicos who died in 552, serves as a prime example of the pedagogical understanding of Christianity common to many East Syrian sources.Footnote 94 Before his conversion to Christianity, we are told, Aba met up with an East Syrian “schoolman” (’eskolāyā) whose deportment and humble dress impressed him. According to the text, Aba was unable to tell whether this man was a Jew or a Christian.Footnote 95 Aba's conversion is described in pedagogical terms, and soon after he became a Christian, according to the History, he entered the School of Nisibis. As I have suggested elsewhere, this text takes for granted that a Zoroastrian could have trouble discerning the difference between Jews and Christians.Footnote 96 It is important to note that a Christian and Christianity are understood in pedagogical terms in this text, and that it is in these same terms that the confusion for a Jew (and Judaism) occurs. It is the pedagogical paradigm shared by Jews and Christians in this Mesopotamian context that allows for Mar Aba's confusion.

In comparing the East Syrian and rabbinic academies, we should bear in mind the shared timeline. Although there is much disagreement in the secondary literature, it seems that the earliest Babylonian Jewish academies developed between 450 and 650, precisely the same time as the spread of East Syrian schools throughout Sasanian Mesopotamia. What do we make of this? Do we simply say that schools and scholastic ideology were a shared discourse between Jews and Christians at this time? It is clear from looking at the history of the School of Nisibis that one contributing factor to its development as a formal institution at the turn of the sixth century was the model that the monastery offered for such a social organization. Perhaps, then, the East Syrian schools spread more quickly and widely because of this institutional predecessor. Furthermore, endowments of monasteries and schools were not uncommon within the Church of the East, an aspect that raises comparable economic questions for looking at the slower, but eventual, rise of rabbinic academies.Footnote 97 Separate factors such as these need to be delineated, but at the same time, our analysis requires that we address the problem of identical phenomena in a shared spatial and ideological realm. To simply describe the situation as a “shared discourse” risks providing an overly theoretical and anemic explanation.

The problem I am addressing may be exemplified in the pedagogical version of Jesus imagined by both communities. It has been commonly noticed that Jesus as he appears in the Talmud and in later Jewish tradition (e.g., in the Toledot Yeshu) is depicted as a student, and a bad one at that, who sometimes engaged in illicit magical practices.Footnote 98 Modern scholars seem to understand this as reflecting the rabbinic tendency to put things in scholastic terms, in the same way that biblical patriarchs are understood in the Talmud to be members of a yeshivah. Now that we are aware of how thoroughly pedagogically inclined, practically through actual institutions as well as metaphorically, the Church of the East was, it seems that the yeshivah bokher Jesus is not simply a rabbinic distortion. Rather, it is an inversion of the East Syrians' Jesus, a teacher who founded a new school for humanity and taught through both his words and his death.Footnote 99 The pedagogical paradigm shared by the two groups created a link bridging the chasm caused by their own ideological and practical self-differentiation. This is comparable to the dialogic relation between Judaism and Christianity posited by Israel Yuval, who argues that the two traditions employ mutually constitutive, reciprocal images—as when, for example, medieval Christian accusations of ritual murder, the so-called blood libel, may be read next to the Jewish martyrological response to attacks on Jews during the First Crusade.Footnote 100

The common world of enchantment

Another perspective is offered by the incantation bowls from late antique and early Islamic Mesopotamia. Two related aspects of the economy and circulation of the bowls that point to a religious space shared by Jews, Christians, and others are, first, that they served as objects of exchange between members of different communities, and, second, that the form of ritual expertise required to produce them fit into a larger intercreedal system in which the learned scribe had power over health, wealth, and the other mundane matters that make up many of the concerns of what we call “religion.” As Michael Morony states, “The incantation texts themselves provide social information for a population about which there is virtually no other source of knowledge.”Footnote 101

Judging from the scripts and the names of the clients, it seems that the marketplace for the bowls was wider than the creedal boundaries set up by the religious elites of each community. Jews seem to have been the most common producers of bowls, but they also produced them for people with particularly un-Jewish names.Footnote 102 Formulae are shared from one religio-communal dialect to the next, with rabbinic figures appearing in Syriac and Jesus being invoked in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.Footnote 103 Assessing the incantation bowls, Shaul Shaked writes, “One can speak of a broad common denominator in the field of popular religious beliefs, around which members of different communities could be united, and which made it possible for them to turn to magic specialists outside their own community.”Footnote 104

This real economy of ritual objects would have been correlative to an ideology of the power of the learned male. Learning was authoritative, and the language of learning was employed in a number of places where we would not expect it, functioning to expand its discursive range into areas not usually labeled as belonging to the realm of learning. For example, the standard Syriac word for conversion to Christianity, ’ettalmad (the passive of the denominative verb meaning, literally, “to be made a student”), and the Mandaean word for a lower-level priest, tarmida, are both cognate with, and derive from, the Hebrew talmid. The scribe as religious figure already had a long history in Mesopotamia, and the Babylonian god of scribes, Nebo (Nabu), remained popular even in late antiquity.Footnote 105 Furthermore, outsiders to this culture of sacral literacy were drawn in from the periphery. For example, Arabs in Petra and Palmyra inherited Aramaic literacy and, with it, the worship of Nebo.Footnote 106 This elevation of the man of esoteric learning to a place of symbolic and religious power within Sasanian culture may also be understood as structurally parallel to the existence of such scribal authority within the bureaucracy of the Sasanian Empire.Footnote 107 The content of learning was specific to different communities (except for shared scriptures), but the ideology of learning was common to them all. This ideology of learning was concomitant with the institutionalization of the transmission of knowledge among these different religious communities, even if orality, for example, was the dominant mode of transmitting knowledge among Zoroastrians and rabbis. On a level other than that of communal elites, we can see the power of learning playing out in the incantation bowls.

The bowls attest to a popular interest in writing that may be seen as directly parallel to that of the literate religious elites of the period and inversely related to the rejection of writing by some. The use of bills of divorce for banishing vexatious demons, the invocation of scriptural verses, and the insertion of Mishnah passages into the “in the name of” (be-shum) formulae, as well as the aping of textuality and scholarly practices within these ritual objects through fake writing, all demonstrate the existence of a belief in the power of written words among consumers of such objects.Footnote 108 The use of incantation bowls and the importance attributed to writing in this ritual technology are but two intercreedal phenomena—that is, religious discourses that transcended religious communal boundaries. The “magic” of the bowls serves as another paradigm shared by Jews and Christians (and others), while at the same time, the emphasis on writing and esoteric knowledge to which they attest suggests that this paradigm overlapped in certain areas with the pedagogical one. This helps explain why Jesus, the wayward student, is taken to be engaged in magic by the rabbis: this action is not simply a rationalizing attempt to explain his power, but also it renders him in an idiom, like the pedagogical one, that others can recognize. The transposability of the scholastic paradigm that we see here is also apparent in the “scholastic magic” studied by Swartz, who argues that “social circles outside of the academy took up rabbinic scholasticism and made it their own.”Footnote 109

Conclusion

More work needs to be done. This is both the conclusion and the main point of this article. In an oft-cited piece, “Jewish Traditions in Syriac Sources,” Sebastian Brock suggests that the fourth century saw the end of living Jewish traditions being employed by Syriac authors.Footnote 110 However, the connections that have been drawn for the fourth century with a number of Syriac texts may be attributable, at least in part, to a closer study of these texts (e.g., the writings of Aphrahat and Ephrem or the Martyrdom of Simeon bar Sabba‘ e). Further study of East Syrian sources would perhaps confirm this, but it seems that the divergence Brock finds remains true—with regard to content. On the rabbinic front, the discussion of the minim and minut as heresiological terms continues,Footnote 111 and there is recent work suggesting that we can find knowledge and intentional parodying of the Gospels specifically in the Babylonian Talmud.Footnote 112 However, as Richard Kalmin states, “the universe of experience of Babylonian rabbis, more so than of Palestinians, tended not to extend beyond the four walls of the study house.”Footnote 113 Much of Kalmin's recent book emphasizes the “internally focused character” of the rabbis.Footnote 114 In the rabbinic sources, again, no smoking gun of Jewish–Christian contact is going to be found.

As I have argued, we should be thinking about religious diversity and structural parallels rather than creating lists of shared terminology and exegesis or evidence of boundary-breaking Jews who were interested in Christianity, even if there were a few such people.Footnote 115 For example, we might further consider the usefulness of the rubric of scholasticism for thinking about rabbinic Judaism and the Christian schools of Mesopotamia. Furthermore, a broader, comparative study of similar cultures of learning may help us think about this material, as it could work in other fields, such as South Asia, where the sources are more extensive and diverse.Footnote 116 As with the Syriac sources, Armenian, Middle Persian, and other sources are yet to be plumbed to their depths.

Some will perhaps posit that despite numerous overlaps, rabbinic and East Syrian institutions of learning differ in essence. However, this would render certain practices and ideas, which the rabbis and East Syrians understood as central in their own communities (e.g., Torah and Jesus), to be the sole categories for interpreting the life of the schools. We must listen to our sources, but not be seduced by them so as to allow their internal, subjective self-understanding to serve as the only objective terms of analysis. This would result in a reification of rabbinic and East Syrian subjectivity, thus reiterating their perspective and reifying what is already a religious reification!Footnote 117

Furthermore, it is not enough to recognize the pluralism, if I may use that term, of the Sasanian Empire, as it remains necessary to reassess our notion of Sasanian or any other premodern cultural and religious pluralism, lest we anachronistically understand religious diversity in modern pluralistic terms (i.e., as diverse religious communities participating either in a transparent common ground of shared core values or in an independent secular space, in either case a society where, as Charles Taylor examines in his recent book, A Secular Age, belief is treated as an option).Footnote 118 It is now commonplace to point out that the category of religion, as it is used today, is a modern invention. Therefore, religious diversity as it is commonly understood, as well as the intercommunal dynamic within this diversity, needs to be reconfigured when we address religion before the modern political theological formation that has produced “religion.”Footnote 119

References

* This article is based on a paper given at the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies in 2005. I thank those who provided feedback at the time, as well as Jeffrey Rubenstein, Natalie Dohrmann, Ra‘anan Boustan, and especially Michael Pregill and Bridget Purcell. I also thank those in attendance when I presented a later version in the fall of 2007 at the Center for the Study of Early Christianity, Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures, Catholic University of America. The anonymous reader provided a number of helpful suggestions for which I am also grateful, and I thank Peter Schäfer for helping me with a missing reference.

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9. On the ’eskolāyā as social type, see Becker, Fear of God, 12, 19–20. On other school titles, see Klein, Das nestorianische Christentum an den Handelswegen durch Kyrgyzstan bis zum 14. Jh., 268–69.

10. The word sometimes appears as ’eskolā, which corresponds better to a singular Syriac noun. The long e (ē) ending is often marked in manuscripts by the seyame, which is the double dot placed above a Syriac word to mark it as plural, as such a long e (ē) is common to masculine plural nouns.

11. See the works cited in note 3 herein. For earlier works, see Labourt, Jérôme, Le Christianisme dans l'Empire Perse, sous la Dynastie Sassanide (224–632) (Paris: V. Lecoffre, 1904), 288–301Google Scholar; Vööbus, Arthur, History of the School of Nisibis, CSCO 266 (Louvain: Peeters, 1965)Google Scholar; and Macina, Robert, “L'homme à l’école de Dieu. D'Antioche à Nisibe: Profil herméneutique, théologique et kérugmatique du mouvement scoliaste nestorien,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 32 (1982): 87–124Google Scholar, 263–301; 33 (1983): 39–103.

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15. The sources are thin, and there is no chronological overlap. However, because Nisibis shows up in rabbinic sources, some have tried to draw connections to the Christian school there. Rabbi Yehudah ben Bathyra, a first-century rabbi (Tanna), is said to have been an agent in charge of the transfer of Temple funds from Jews in the region of Nisibis to Jerusalem. See, e.g., Neusner, Jacob, History of the Jews in Babylonia (Leiden: Brill, 1965–), 1:43–48Google Scholar.

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31. I thank the anonymous reviewer for pushing me on this question and regret that I am unable to address it in any detail. The various Christian catena traditions are directly related to this issue.

32. See note 1 herein.

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51. Sokoloff, Michael, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 720Google Scholar, provides two separate entries for metivta (1. site, academic session, members of an assembly, academy; 2. literary unit of traditional study, lesson). Precisely these two distinct but related meanings are attested in Syriac: mawtbha can mean study session or semester, but also it is commonly used for portions of the Psalter in the West Syrian tradition.

52. Ibid., 800.

53. Ibid., 1082.

54. Gafni, “Ḥibburim nestoryani'im k-maqor l-toledot yeshivot bavel,” 572; and Sokoloff, Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, 581.

55. See, e.g., Barḥadbešabba ‘Arbaya, Cause de la fondation des écoles, ed. Scher, A., Patrologia Orientalis 4 (1908): 393.4–394.7Google Scholar.

56. Bedjan, Paul, ed., Acta martyrum et sanctorum syriace, 7 vols. (Paris, 1890–97; repr., Hildesheim: O. Harrassowitz, 1968)Google Scholar, 2:564, line 13; and idem, ed., Histoire de Mar-Jabalaha et trois autres Patriarches, d'un prêtre et deux laïques nestoriens (Paris/Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz, 1895), 411.2.

57. The classic piece on this topic for the rabbinic sources is Elias Bi[c]kerman[n], “La Chaîne de la Tradition Pharisienne,” Revue Biblique 59 (1952): 44–54. See comments in Becker, Fear of God, 107–110.

58. See, e.g., Barḥadbešabba ‘Arbaya, Cause de la fondation des écoles, 337.1.

59. On the pirka, see, e.g., Sokoloff, Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, 906–907; and Rubenstein, “Social and Institutional Settings of Rabbinic Literature,” 67–69. For a more detailed discussion, especially on the question of the pirka creating a link to the broader Jewish community, see Gafni, Isaiah, “‘Al derashot be-ẓibbur ba-vavel ha-talumidit: Ha-pirka” [On Sermons in Public in Talmudic Babylonia: The Pirka], in Keneset ‘Ezra: sifrut ve-ḥayim be-vet ha-keneset, asupat ma'amarim mugeshet le-‘Ezra Flaisher, ed. Eliẓur, Shulamit et al. (Jerusalem: Yad Yiẓḥak Ben-Ẓvi, 1994), 121–29Google Scholar. On the ‘elltha (cause) genre, see Becker, Fear of God, 101–106.

60. Brock, Sebastian P., “The Prayer of the Heart in Syriac Tradition,” Sobornost/Eastern Churches Review 4:2 (1982): 131–42Google Scholar, repr., Forms of Devotion: Conversion, Worship, Spirituality, and Asceticism, ed. Everett Ferguson (New York: Garland, 1999), 133–44.

61. Although this idea goes back to an earlier period, it was developed by both traditions. See Schäfer, Peter, Rivalität zwischen Engeln und Menschen: Untersuchungen zur rabbinischen Engelvorstellung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for East Syrian sources, see, e.g., Narsai, Homélies sur la Création, ed. and trans. Ph. Gignoux, PO 34:3, 4 (1968), I.230ff; and Barḥadbešabba ‘Arbaya, Cause de la fondation des écoles, 350.8ff.

62. Geoffrey Herman, “Rashut ha-golah be-Vavel bi-tekufat ha-Talmud” [The Babylonian Exilarchate in the Sasanian Period] (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 2005). See recent comments in Seth Schwartz, “The Political Geography of Rabbinic Texts,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, 90–93.

63. See, e.g., comments in Smith, J. Z., Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (London: University of London, 1990), 114Google Scholar. By “parallelomania,” I refer to the term made famous by Samuel Sandmel in “Parallelomania,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 1–13.

64. However, the East Syrians did have a rather positive notion of “divine law.” See, e.g., comments in Becker, Adam H., “The Dynamic Reception of Theodore of Mopsuestia in the Sixth Century: Greek, Syriac, and Latin,” in Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism, ed. Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 41Google Scholar. Some knowledge of Jewish practice appears in certain sources. See, e.g., the reference to Jews’ emphasis on Levirate marriage in Mar Aba's encyclical, Chabot, J.-B., Synodicon Orientale ou recueil des Synodes Nestoriens publié, traduit et annoté, Notices et extraits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, Tome 37 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale 1902)Google Scholar, 83.2.

65. Elman, Yaakov, “Orality and the Babylonian Talmud,” Oral Tradition 14, no. 1 (1999): 53Google Scholar. For the development of the ideology of orality, standard reading is now Jaffee, Martin S., Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 BCE–400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66. Most recently on the “self,” see, e.g., Brakke, David, Satlow, Michael L., and Weitzman, Steven, eds. Religion and the Self in Antiquity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; with regard to the issues addressed here, see especially Edward Watts, “The Student Self in Late Antiquity,” 234–52.

67. Becker, Fear of God, 22–40.

68. Cabezón, José Ignacio, ed., Scholasticism: Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 4–6: These are, in full: (1) “a strong sense of tradition” and a polemical defense of it; (2) “a concern with language” and a belief in its “communicative ability” as well as in the utility of “conceptual thought and categories”; (3) “proliferativity,” a “textual and analytical inclusivity” “that leave[s] no questions unanswered”; (4) the sense that the tradition is complete and that each of its parts is necessary; (5) “the epistemological accessibility of the world”; (6) “systematicity,” the order of the world is reproduced in the “order of exposition”; (7) rationalism as “integral to the religious path,” reason and experience are reconciled; and (8) “self-reflexivity: the tendency to objectify and to critically analyze first-order practices,” (e.g., hermeneutics in exegesis).

69. Michael D. Swartz, “Scholasticism as a Comparative Category and the Study of Judaism,” in Scholasticism, 91–114.

70. Becker, Fear of God, 12–17.

71. Jaffee, Martin S., “A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word: On Discipleship, Transformative Knowledge, and the Living Texts of Oral Torah,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 3 (1997): 531CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the relationship between orality and such discipleship communities, see Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, 126–52.

72. On the early church, see Rousseau, Philip, The Early Christian Centuries (London: Longman Pearson, 2002), 124–52Google Scholar.

73. Neusner, History of the Jews in Babylonia, 3:195–200.

74. Ibid., 4:283.

75. Vööbus, Arthur, History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient, 2 vols. (Louvain: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1958–60)Google Scholar; and idem, History of the School of Nisibis.

76. See the discussion of the modern historiographical problems surrounding the so-called School of the Persians in Becker, Fear of God, 41–43.

77. In a brief piece published after his exchange with Goodblatt, Gafni provides a comparison between the School of Nisibis and the rabbinic academies. The purpose of this article is, in part, to use the high level of institutionalization of the school as a comparandum to confirm the possibility of the development of academies in the amoraic period. The parallels and similarities he notes are significant, and some of them deserve further study. Gafni addresses the possible contact points between the Jewish and the Christian communities, but he is careful to qualify his argument: the similarities may just be structural and do not necessarily point to actual contacts between the two communities (Gafni, “Ḥibburim nestoryani'im k-maqor l-toledot yeshivot bavel”).

78. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, 35.

79. Ibid., 37.

80. “The Church of the East (and other Syriac-speaking Christians) provide then a pendant on which to hang—by analogy—the plausibility of claims for Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia as much, or more, than a vehicle for transmission. The extent to which the post-amoraic rabbinic community in Babylonia seems to have been open to the scholasticism of the Nisibene foundation renders the notion of a hermetically sealed, exclusively inner-directed community less and less convincing” (Daniel Boyarin, “Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, 350). However, this seems to be an intellectualist notion of Hellenism, in contrast to what we find, e.g., in Bowersock, Glen W., Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81. Ibid., 349.

82. Ibid., 347.

83. Ibid., 349.

84. Cf. Becker, Fear of God, 16–17. Unfortunately, I did not have time to incorporate into this article Boyarin's new book, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), which suggests that the rabbis had access, even if through oral transmission, to Greek authors such as Plato and Lucian via the Christian community. This is highly implausible.

85. See, e.g., Becker, Fear of God, 204–209 (“Conclusion: Study as Ritual in the Church of the East”).

86. Kraemer, David C., The Mind of the Talmud: An Intellectual History of the Bavli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Becker, Fear of God, 16–17, 194–97; and Boyarin, “Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia,” 346–47.

87. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, 54–79. See the description in the Cause of the Foundation of the Schools of the rewards and punishments of good and bad Angels, Barḥadbešabba ‘Arbaya, Cause de la fondation des écoles, 350.6–352.4; cf. Becker, Fear of God, 99.

88. Boyarin, Daniel, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), 134–66Google Scholar; Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, 102–122; and Satlow, Michael L., “‘And on the Earth You Shall Sleep’: Talmud Torah and Rabbinic Asceticism,” Journal of Religion 83 (2003): 204–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar, although he focuses on the Palestinian context.

89. Becker, Adam H., “Bringing the Heavenly Academy Down to Earth: Approaches to the Imagery of Divine Pedagogy in the East-Syrian Tradition,” in Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, ed. Boustan, Ra‘anan and Reed, Annette Yoshiko (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 174–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 185–90.

90. Kalmin, Richard, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Cause, see Becker, Fear of God, 98–112.

91. Some magical motifs seem to have moved from Palestine to Babylonia. See Naveh, J. and Shaked, S., Magic Spells and Formulae: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 21–22Google Scholar.

92. Both the East Syrian schools and the rabbinic academies of the geonic period reinvented their institutional pasts (see Becker, Fear of God, 57–61; and Goodblatt, “The History of the Babylonian Academies,” 823–24). For example, the Yavneh tradition may be compared to the attempt we find in the sources from the School of Nisibis to negotiate the historical tradition around the School of the Persians at Edessa. See, e.g., Boyarin, “Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia,” 341–42.

93. On the reception of the School of Nisibis in the West, see Becker, “The Dynamic Reception of Theodore of Mopsuestia in the Sixth Century,” 29–47.

94. Bedjan, Histoire de Mar-Jabalaha et trois autres Patriarches, 210–23. On this pedagogical understanding of Christianity, see Becker, Fear of God, 22–40; and Becker, “Bringing the Heavenly Academy,” 179–82. Earlier, see also Macina, “L'homme à l'école de Dieu.” On Mar Aba's place within the church, see, most recently, Hutter, Manfred, “Mār Abā and the Impact of Zoroastrianism on Christianity in the 6th Century,” in Religious Themes and Texts of Pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia, ed. Cereti, Carlo G., Maggi, Mauro, and Provasi, Elio (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2003), 167–73Google Scholar.

95. For another reading of this passage, see Boyarin, Daniel, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 199), 22–23Google Scholar.

96. Becker, “Bringing the Heavenly Academy,” 190.

97. Becker, Fear of God, 77–81; Cynthia J. Villagomez, “The Fields, Flocks, and Finances of Monks: Economic Life at Nestorian Monasteries, 500–800” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998).

98. Schäfer, Peter, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. For the Babylonian insertion of Jesus into an account that has several prior versions, both Christian and Jewish, see Gero, Stephen, “The Stern Master and His Wayward Disciple: A ‘Jesus’ Story in the Talmud and in Christian Hagiography,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 25 (1994): 287–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99. See, e.g., Barḥadbešabba ‘Arbaya, Cause de la fondation des écoles, 367.11.

100. Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, 135–204.

101. Morony, Michael G., “Magic and Society in Late Sasanian Iraq,” in Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, ed. Noegel, Scott B., Walker, Joel Thomas, and Wheeler, Brannon M. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003), 100Google Scholar.

102. The popularity of “Jewish” magic continued in the Islamic period; cf. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, 187–205.

103. Joshua bar Peraḥya appears in a number of bowls in Babylonian Jewish Aramaic, but he also appears in a Syriac bowl; see Segal, J. B., Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls in the British Museum (London: British Museum Press, 2000), 149Google Scholar. For Jesus in Jewish bowls, see Levene, Dan, A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity (London: Kegan Paul, 2003), 137Google Scholar (note the East Syrian spelling of the name Jesus in this Jewish text). See also Levene, , “‘ … And by the Name of Jesus…’ an Unpublished Magic Bowl in Jewish Aramaic,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1999): 283–308Google Scholar; and Shaked, Shaul, “Jesus in the Magic Bowls: Apropos Dan Levene's ‘ … And by the Name of Jesus … ’,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1999): 308–19Google Scholar. However, the bowls share demons more than beneficial beings (Morony, “Magic and Society in Late Sasanian Iraq,” 95). See also Juusola, Hannu, “Who Wrote the Syriac Incantation Bowls?” Studia Orientalia 85 (1999): 75–92Google Scholar.

104. Shaked, Shaul, “Popular Religion in Sassanian Babylonian,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 21 (1997): 106Google Scholar. See also Shaked, , Dualism in Transformation: Varieties of Religion in Sasanian Iran (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1994)Google Scholar, 80ff.

105. Kaizer, Ted, The Religious Life of Palmyra (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002), 89–99Google Scholar; Drijvers, H. J. W., Cults and Beliefs at Edessa (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 40–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See comments in Becker, Fear of God, 30–31.

106. Again, see Kaizer, Religious Life, 40–75. Also, see the evidence for Nabu in Hillers, Delbert R. and Cussini, Eleonora, Palmyrene Aramaic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

107. Tafazzoli, Ahmad, Sasanian Society (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000), 18–37Google Scholar.

108. For bills of divorce, see, e.g., Levene, Corpus of Magic Bowls, 18–21. For the invocation of scriptural verses, ibid., 13 (though often these are verses employed in liturgy). For the use of Mishnah, see Schøyen Collection 1929/6 and 2053/170, discussed in Shaked, Shaul, “Form and Purpose in Aramaic Spells: Some Jewish Themes [The Poetics of Magic Texts],” in Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic in Antiquity, ed. Shaked, Shaul (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 3–6Google Scholar. See the fake bowls in Segal, Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls, plates 138–59.

109. Swartz, Michael D., “Scholasticism and the Study of Judaism,” 104. See his book, Scholastic Magic: Ritual and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

110. Brock, Sebastian P., “Jewish Traditions in Syriac Sources,” Journal of Jewish Studies 30 (1979): 231CrossRefGoogle Scholar, repr., Studies in Syriac Christianity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1992), chap. 4.

111. See, e.g., several essays in Iricinschi, Eduard and Zellentin, Holger, eds., Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008)Google Scholar.

112. Holger M. Zellentin, Rabbinic Parodies: Imitation and Subversion in Talmud and Midrash (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), chap 3; and Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud.

113. Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine, 19.

114. Ibid., 10.

115. See, e.g., Ibid., 104.

116. Again, see the essays in José Ignacio Cabezón, Scholasticism. Formal comparative analysis, though it may seem passé these days, may shed light on this material. For an example of a book working in this traditional history of religions mode, see Buck, Christopher, Paradise and Paradigm: Key Symbols in Persian Christianity and the Bahā’ī Faith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

117. See comments on the “rhetoric of insularity” among the religious communities of the Sasanian Empire in de Jong, Albert F., “Zoroastrian Religious Polemics and Their Contexts: Interconfessional Relations in the Sasanian Empire,” in Religious Polemics in Context, ed. Hettema, T. L. and Van der Kooij, A. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2004), 58–59Google Scholar.

118. Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

119. For an examination of this issue as it appears in East Syrian sources from the Sasanian Empire, see Becker, Adam H., “Martyrdom, Religious Difference, and ‘Fear’ as a Category of Piety in the Sasanian Empire: The Case of the Martyrdoms of Gregory and of Yazdpaneh,” Journal of Late Antiquity 2, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 300–336CrossRefGoogle Scholar.