The primary theme of Daniel Boyarin's latest book is that “the defining feature of ‘diaspora’” is to “describe transnational bonds of co-responsibility” and “to distinguish that term from others—migration, exile, displacement—with which it is frequently conflated” (4). Boyarin's goal is “to work out the particulars and the implications of that powerful notion (that in some deep sense a book has been the portable homeland of the Jewish people) in greater historical and theoretical detail than anyone has attempted until now, to the best of my knowledge.” The book is, of course, the Babylonian Talmud of the subtitle. However, that Jewish history is more than a tale of exile and displacement (Salo Baron's classic phrase, “the lachrymose theory of Jewish history,” comes to mind) was a view that Baron's eighteen-volume history successfully dislodged; it was first suggested by Baron himself in a programmatic article in the Menorah journal's issue 14 in 1928. Yet, as noted, Boyarin's intent is rather to explore “some of the actual textual practices within and around the Talmud that make the topos more than a pretty metaphor; second, it queries … what difference that makes….” (5).

A succinct answer appears on p. 54:

This paragraph begins with the Babylonian Talmud and continues with both the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, despite the subtitle, which only mentions the first. Aside from the definition, this will hardly come as news to talmudists, and thus the question of the audience to which this book is addressed arises; that seems to be to anthropologists who study diasporas. (The need for this is embodied in one Robin Cohen, whose views serve as a foil for Boyarin.)

The book also has another goal: to place the Babylonian Talmud within the wider world of the Roman and Sasanian empires, but this too is not news to talmudists. In regard to this second objective, the author sounds a theme of “Babylonian Hellenism,” which he introduced in 2007, indeed, in the same volume in which I surveyed a few of the Iranian elements that make up the cultural world of the Babylonian rabbis (The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature).

The Babylonian Talmud runs to over 1.8 million words; the two chapters devoted to it in this book could hardly do it justice. Boyarin thus resorts to a representative illustration. He claims that the “locus classicus” for my own view of this topic is a story in which Greek words are also employed.  In addition, he connects a controversial doctrine of a fourth-century Arian Cappadocian writer, Eunomius, regarding the creation of a fixed number of souls at Creation, with a view found in four places in the Talmud. Eunomius does not mention a Jewish source, nor does a contemporary student of Eunomius, Richard Vaggione. But Boyarin writes, “I find it entirely plausible to imagine this doctrine (rather rare in the Talmud itself …) circulating between and among Babylonian Jews and Cappadocian Christians in the fourth century. (Lest the connected seem too far-fetched, the Talmud knows of many connections between its rabbinic heroes and Cappadocia….)” (79). And, after some further discussion, he concludes, “The remarkable thing is that we have compelling evidence of cultural and religious connection of a deep, specific and recognized sort between the Christian world of fifth-century Cappadocia and the Babylonian rabbinic world to the east and south and over the limes of the Roman Empire” (80).

Clearly, our notions of “compelling evidence” differ. But Boyarin has long proved himself to be an erudite, sophisticated, and sensitive reader of texts, and so this statement cannot be dismissed as the fulminations of a tyro. Moreover, Hellenism represents far more than an arcane point of Christian philology; why then does Boyarin insist on a Christian theological connection?

The point is sharpened when we look at the rather scholastic approach to religious law of the late Sasanian Pahlavi books, especially in light of Boyarin's quotation of Shaye Cohen's observation of the scholastic nature of Babylonian rabbinic society (“Patriarchs and Scholarchs,” PAAJR 48 [1981]: 57–83). Cohen argues from the existence of Babylonian rabbinical schools and their heads to a type of Babylonian Hellenization, which Boyarin extends by conceptualizing “Babylonian Jewish culture itself as a Hellenism, or more nuancedly, as a vibrant participant in Richard Kalmin's ‘rudiments of a partly shared elite culture [that] may have been emerging in Syria and Mesopotamia….’” (Boyarin, p. 77, citing Richard Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], p. 174). But here too the emphasis is on nonlegal matters.

In this connection let me quote a prescient observation made over 150 years ago in regard to Zoroastrian Pahlavi literature (translation is mine).

While Spiegel, in the early days of Old Iranian studies, attributed this to Semitic influence, it is becoming clear that, indeed, both Zoroastrian scholars and Babylonian rabbis shared a scholastic approach to religion, as I and my associates have demonstrated in great detail. Boyarin rightly praises Shai Secunda's The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)—a book published in a series that Boyarin himself helps edit. However, he suggests that “Greek and Syriac elements be included in Secunda’s ‘text-scape’” (84–85). I, and I am sure Secunda, would have no difficulty in doing so—if there was compelling evidence. But Boyarin has not adduced such evidence.

In truth, it would not be difficult to make such a case, since the Pahlavi books can be seen as the products of a scholastic mindset, as Spiegel noticed. And that mindset need not, and probably was not, generated by rabbinic influence, given the socioreligious factors in play. But the Sasanian Zoroastrian movement to a scholastic approach to religion probably does have a Hellenistic basis, as Mahnaz Moazami and I have tried to show in a pair of articles that will hopefully be published in the next year or two. By concentrating on Christian theological elements, the Western field of Talmud study misses the huge amount of Hellenism to be found in rabbinic and Zoroastrian texts alike.

The reason would seem to lie in the sociology of knowledge. The academy is a post-Christian institution, for the most part, but it is post-Christian, and Christianity's problems with Pharisees and talmudists are well documented, as is the decline of Old Iranian studies. And so, though two-thirds of the Babylonian Talmud's 1.8 million words must be ignored, and much of its aggadic material as well, most Western academic talmudists must make a place for themselves and their fields by selecting some acceptable aspect of the Talmud to study. Some have done narratology, some have done Jewish-Christian relations (but not Jewish-Zoroastrian ones!), some choose theology, but theology of a Christian cast. There is only one area in which concentration on halakhic studies is permitted and flourishes (at least for now) for some reason: Qumran, presumably because of its assumed association with the background of Christianity. The only other path for the would-be Jewish studies academic is to teach in a law school. It was no accident that academic halakhic studies flourished for a time in Boyarin's alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary. That regime, and that regimen, could not continue in the new world of academic Jewish studies.