The political, social, and economic history of Babylonian Jewry, 224–638 CE

INTRODUCTION The fall of the Parthian monarchy (224 CE) and the succession of the Sasanian dynasty mark a major turning point in the political and religious history of Iran. Jewish historical reckoning designates precisely that same time as the dawn of the talmudic era in rabbinic Babylonia, an age that was destined to produce undoubtedly the second most important literary corpus in Jewish tradition: the Babylonian Talmud. Whether or not these two developments merely dovetail in time or are actually linked in a cause-and-effect relationship is open to debate, but one fact is certain: ignorance of the earlier history of Babylonian Jewry is a direct result of the paucity of Jewish literary evidence produced in Babylonia prior to the third century ce, and, were it not for the Babylonian Talmud, this ignorance would extend for hundreds of years until the Muslim conquests and the subsequent appearance of geonic literature. Non-Jewish sources on the Jews of Babylonia, whether under the Parthians or the Sasanians, are minimal, and material evidence from that community hardly approaches the mass of archaeological remains that have contributed so much to the knowledge of Palestinian Jews and Judaism in the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. The importance of those remains (most significantly from ancient synagogues and a few burial sites) lies not only in the unique nature of the information they supply but also in their function as a control for, or as a means of evaluating, the information provided by Palestinian rabbinic sources.