East LA: Margin and Center in Late Antiquity Studies and the New Irano-Talmudica

The contemporary growth of interest in the study of Late Antiquity corrects a long-standing approach to a period that was formerly seen as one of decline and darkness. Recent years have seen a push to extend the chronological limits of the period later, to include the rise of Islam, and the geographical borders eastward, to include Byzantium’s ever-present “other” – the Sasanian Empire. Scholars in the field are increasingly concerned with thinking about how to incorporate “Eastern Late Antiquity” into a story that was formerly primarily about the West.
Questions of margin and center relating to religious matters are particularly relevant. For example, how should late antiquitists interested mainly in the history of Christianity conceive of the role of the Jews in the period, with their large diaspora and two centers of rabbinic culture, one in Palestine and the other in Babylonia? Indeed, even geographically speaking, matters of margin and center are fruitfully complicated when it comes to late antique Jews.
The Jewish community that essentially gave birth to normative Judaism as we have known it since the Middle Ages via the Babylonian Talmud flourished in Mesopotamia, the bureaucratic center of the Sasanian Empire, beyond the borders of Byzantium. Recently, the study of the Babylonian Talmud has been revolutionized by an effort to contextualize it within the complex religious space of Sasanian Mesopotamia. For example, long neglected Zoroastrian scholastic texts are now being pored over by Talmudists who see within these documents traces of a broad, legalistic religious discourse that flourished in the Sasanian Empire. Syriac literature has also become a new frontier for scholars of the Babylonian Talmud. At the same time, it has been acknowledged that the Babylonian Jewish community was neither sui generis, nor cut-off from its sister community to the West in Roman-Byzantine Palestine. There was a constant flow of foot-traffic between the two rabbinic centers.
The Sasanian Babylonian Jewish community thus provides a perfect pretext for asking some pressing questions that specialists in Eastern Late Antiquity need to confront regarding margin and center, Orient and Occident. This paper will deal with the significance of the term “Late Antiquity” for understanding Babylonian Jewry and its place within the religious terrain of the Sasanian Empire and its ongoing dialogue with Roman-Byzantine Palestine.