Shai Secunda, “This, but also That: Historical, Methodological and Theoretical Reflections on Talmudo-Iranica,” Jewish Quarterly Review 106:2 (Spring 2016): 233-241

This chapter is devoted to the Sasanian context of the Babylonian Talmud. While the Talmud is, first and foremost, a rabbinic work, a link in an unbroken chain of rabbinic tradition, it cannot be properly comprehended in isolation from the broader cultural fabric of the late ancient world in which it was produced. Unlike the vast majority of the early rabbinic corpus, which was produced in Roman Palestine, the Bavli is uniquely situated at the crossroads of East and West, and, as such, it embodies and reflects both Greco-Roman and Sasanian impact. While the Greco-Roman context of rabbinic literature is explored in adjacent chapters, this one turns to the ambient Sasanian or Syro-Mesopotamian culture in the context of which the Bavli took shape. The chapter discusses the broader significance of talmudic discussions of Persians, Persian culture, Sasanian royalty, its bureaucracy, and its priesthood; the Talmud’s use of Iranian loanwords; talmudic engagement with Sasanian law, its institutions, and technical terminology; the Zoroastrian context of talmudic ritual taxonomies and classifications; the Iranian context of talmudic narratives and myths; the affinity between the Babylonian rabbinic academy and its distinctive scholastic culture and the East Syrian Christian school movement; the connections between talmudic devotional and religious expressions and the corpus of the Persian Martyr Acts; the exegetical affinity between the Talmud and Syriac authors such as Aphrahat and Ephrem; talmudic law and the Syriac legal tradition; the Talmud’s engagement with gnostic, and especially Manichaean and Mandean, thought; and, finally, the ties connecting talmudic lore with late cuneiform traditions relating to astronomy, astrology, mathematics, omens, medicine, and magic.

2017

In this book, Daniel Boyarin offers a wide-ranging introduction to the many fields of study to which the Talmud can contribute, from linguistics to gender studies to the relations between formative Judaism and Christianity and the literary genres of the Talmud in the Hellenistic context.

AJS Review, 2023

In the study of Jews in late antiquity, scholarship of the past half century has increasingly recognized the significance of the anonymous editors of the Babylonian Talmud. Whereas earlier scholars argued that the Babylonian Talmud was redacted and completed by the last generation or so of the Amoraim, scholars now accept that substantial sections of the anonymous editorial layer(s) postdate the final named Amoraim. However, basic historical questions about these editors and their activities remain unanswered. This paper will offer several case studies that argue that certain anonymous sections in the Talmud refer to known historical events that transpired in the Sasanian Empire in the sixth century, and reveal how the editors were acquainted with, affected by, and participated in broader contemporaneous historical trends.

2018

This dissertation offers a comparative study between a number of Talmudic and Middle Persian narratives. The present work seeks first and foremost to examine Talmudic narratives in their Iranian context, and secondly to examine the Talmudic background of Iranian narratives where applicable. The first and second chapters will offer an analysis of the alteration of historical and Biblical figures in the Bavli (the Babylonian Talmud) based on the influence of Iranian mythical and historical figures, while the third chapter will provide an account of how Iranists can learn from Talmudic Studies. Here we suggest that a Talmudic narrative may have encouraged Zoroastrian priests to compose an extensive work of religious literature, namely the Ardā-Virāz Nāmag, an idea which will be further explored in the appendix. The relationship between Iranian and Jewish materials in the Talmudic era is merely a piece of a larger puzzle, a piece that a number of scholars—such as Elman, Secunda, Mokhtar...

RBL, 2021

RBL, 2022

The Babylonian Talmud is a notoriously complex text. This holistic, and in many ways, totalizing text compiled over the course of late antiquity, in multiple languages, with both named and anonymous contributors, has a steep barrier to entry, even before we take into account its religious and cultural significance, both in our own time, and over the course of the last fifteen hundred years. David Kraemer's A History of the Talmud is a very readable introduction to how some Jewish studies scholars make sense of this complex late antique text.

AJS Review 39.1, 2015

Irano-Talmudica is one of the older sub-fields of Jewish studies dating back to the mid-19th 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 a better understanding of it would enhance our knowledge of much of Babylonian Jewish civilization.