Jewish Ideas Daily May 7, 2012 Our Zoroastrian Moment By _Shai Secunda_ (http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/authors/detail/shai-secunda)
The great contemporary scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith once remarked
that the omnipresent substructure of human thought lies in the human
capacity to make comparisons. In ancient Sumer, scribes crafted intricate
similes. In classical Greece philosophers discussed and employed the critical
tools of analogy and metaphor. And following the European Enlightenment,
university professors made their contribution by inventing the field we know
today as "comparative religion." From the field's earliest days,
Zoroastrianism—the ancient dualistic religion of Iran, whose adherents
worshiped
Ahura Mazda ("Lord Wisdom") and his heavenly hosts and battled the evil Angra
Mainyu ("Foul Spirit") and his demonic minions—has played a central role in
the way the modern academy has studied the religions of the world.
The existence of Zoroastrianism was known in the West for centuries. The
religious figure Zoroaster and the Persian religion appeared in classical
Greek sources; Zoroastrianism, in the persons of the magi, even made a cameo
appearance in the New Testament. But, as of the beginning of the
Enlightenment, neither Zoroastrianism's sacred texts nor the practices and
beliefs
of Zoroastrians actually living in Iran and the Indian subcontinent were
known to Western tradition. Thus, Zoroastrianism was surrounded by an aura
of mystery. It was seen as a quintessential "natural" religion, evidence
that a spontaneous religious apprehension of the world was common to all human
beings. Its delicious concoction of the known and the unknown sparked the
imaginations of European scholars—including the 18th-century orientalist
Thomas Hyde, whose efforts brought increased numbers of Zoroastrian texts to
the West—and of 19th-century philosophers and poets from Nietzsche to
Wordsworth.
Religious scholars like Hyde were moved by the pressing need they felt to
locate Zoroastrianism within the salvation history of Christianity. Soon,
however, Christian apologetics gave way to a more detached critique as
intellectual heavyweights like Voltaire joined the discussion. Indeed,
Voltaire pointed to the autonomy of Zoroastrianism and its distance from the
Christian tradition as evidence that the church did not have a monopoly on
divine truth. In this way, the existence of Zoroastrianism functioned as an
important piece of the dialogue of secularization, the process that led to the
modern critical study of comparative religions.
Jews had their own "Zoroastrian moment" during the Jewish Enlightenment, or
Haskalah, of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There were solid
academic reasons for the "enlightened" Jewish scholars known as maskilim to
familiarize themselves with the research on Persian language, culture, and
religion that was then emerging from the great European universities. One
reason was the importance of the so-called "Persian Period," a critical
epoch in Jewish history. Following the conquest of the Near East by the
Persian ruler Cyrus in the 6th century B.C.E., Jews living in the land of
Israel
and in exile in Mesopotamia came under a Persian dominion that lasted for
centuries. Except for a brief interlude following the conquests by
Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C.E., Babylonian Jews were subjects
of
successive Iranian dynasties that together made up more than a millennium.
A number of important books of the Bible were written during this period.
They reflect the Persian context, which appears most explicitly in the
strange and rich tapestry that is the Scroll of Esther. Moreover, the central
work in the Jewish canon, the Babylonian Talmud, was produced in a
location close to the ruling Iranian dynasty's winter capital of Ctesiphon; it
contains many Persian "loanwords" and numerous references to Iranian kings,
Zoroastrian religious leaders, and aspects of cultural and religious life in
Iranian-ruled Mesopotamia.
In addition, major Jewish beliefs that seem to have developed largely in
post-biblical times, such as those concerning the afterlife, angelology, and
the Messiah, bear striking resemblances to ancient ideas found in
Zoroastrianism.
All these connections encouraged Jewish scholars to learn Persian, read
Zoroastrian texts, and engage in a sustained comparative endeavor. Their
project engaged some of the most prominent figures of the era. The Hungarian
maskil Alexander Kohut, who (among his other accomplishments) edited and
vastly expanded the classic 11th-century talmudic dictionary, the Arukh, and
filled it with Persian etymologies, was fascinated by the world of
Zoroastrian angelology and demonology and charted many correspondences between
the
Persian system and its Jewish counterpart.
But some of the most interesting Jewish writing on Zoroastrianism occurred
on the fault line between Jewish apologists and anti-Orthodox crusaders.
The Austrian talmudist Isaac Hirsch Weiss was drawn to parallels between
Zoroastrianism and the Talmud; he listed a number of critical areas in which,
he argued, the rabbis had adopted Persian practices. Just as interesting,
in other places Weiss claimed to have found signs of resistance—instances
in which rabbis established practices specifically as a means of precluding
certain "Persianisms" in practice and interpretation. Perhaps the most
radical and colorful character involved in the exploration of Zoroastrianism
was a sharp-tongued Galician maskil named Joshua Heschel Schorr. Like
Voltaire, Schorr wanted to reform his religion radically by subjecting it to
the
rules of logic and a rationalistic approach. Unlike the early modern
Christians who treated Zoroastrianism, however, Schorr did not see in the
ancient Iranian tradition an admirable "natural" religion or otherwise
sagacious
philosophical system. In Schorr's orientalism, the Zoroastrian "Bible,"
or Avesta, was filled with strange and preposterous superstitions. Any
parallel he found between the Avesta and the Bible or Talmud was a sign of
corruption in the latter and a reason for excision and reform.
In the 20th century, Jewish scholars continued to work on Zoroastrianism
from a comparative perspective—but no longer with the same sense of
theological urgency. Along with their Christian colleagues, Jewish academics
came
to operate within a more "objective" context, which had moved on to other
battles and had a concern with Zoroastrianism that was ostensibly free of
direct theological concerns. Nevertheless, now as then, there is no escaping
the broader implications of research, even when it is conducted in the
ivory tower of academic religious studies. Every comparison contains the
seeds
of judgment; every comparative act has the potential to become an
explosive affair.
Shai Secunda is a Mandel fellow at the Scholion Center for
Interdisciplinary Jewish Research, and a lecturer in the Talmud department at
Hebrew
University.
======================================
November 2, 2010
The Persian Talmud
By _Yehudah Mirsky_
(http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/authors/detail/yehudah-mirsky)
Iran makes for an awful lot of news these days, and—the green shoots of
democratic dissidence excepted—virtually none of it is good. But then there
is the past: a recent conference in Jerusalem brought together scholars
from Europe, Israel, and the United States, as well as some Iranian
expatriates, who have been intensively researching the buried treasures of the
field
known as "Irano-Judaica." The gathering, together with the publication of a
volume titled _The Talmud in its Iranian Context_
(http://www.mohr.de/en/jewish-studies/subject-areas/all-books/buch/the-talmud-in-its-iranian-context
.html) , underscores one of the most exciting developments in Jewish
scholarship: the effort to put the "Babylonia" back into the Babylonian
Talmud.
Babylonian Jews had lived for six centuries under the Persian Parthian
empire when, in 224 C.E., the land fell to another Persian dynasty, the
Sassanians, who ruled until the Muslim conquest in the mid-7th century. In
addition to the official religion of Zoroastrianism, Sassanian Babylonia was
home
to Christians, Jews, and a range of syncretistic sects, all standing at
the geographic and cultural crossroads of Greco-Roman culture from the west,
Hindu and Buddhist influences from the east.
Despite its dualism, which put it at odds with monotheism, Zoroastrianism's
moralism and eschewal of sorcery were in some ways more congenial to Jews
than Greco-Roman paganism; also, both Jews and Zoroastrians vigorously
engaged in the study and interpretation of ancient texts (respectively, the
Torah and the Avesta). At least until the mid-5th century, moreover, when the
atmosphere turned chilly, establishment Zoroastrianism was relatively
tolerant of Jews and Judaism. It was in this period that the discussions
recorded in the Babylonian Talmud took place, although the editing proceeded
for
several centuries thereafter.
Modern historical studies of the Babylonian Talmud—the Bavli, to use its
Hebrew name—have understandably focused on the Hellenistic and, later,
Christian milieus that were so influential in the formation of Western Jewry.
For
decades now, academic Talmudists have also devoted much energy to
understanding the composition and editing of the talmudic text itself. By
contrast,
and with exceptions, the Iranian element has been relatively slighted. In
the 1960s, Jacob Neusner began to frame some of his research in terms that
encompassed the study of Sassanian Babylonia; in 1982, the late E.S.
Rosenthal urged the mastery of Middle Persian, the Sassanian lingua franca, as
a
gateway to Talmud study; Isaiah Gafni made deft use of Persian sources in
his researches into talmudic history. But today's efflorescence, capped by
the conference in Jerusalem, is above all the fruit of unflagging efforts by
Yaakov Elman of New York's Yeshiva University.
Knowledge of Middle Persian language, history, and culture is obviously
helpful for understanding such things in the Bavli as place names, folk
proverbs, and the practicalities of agricultural and commercial life. More
significantly, such study sheds light on the social and political structures of
talmudic times, the cultural processes at work among Jews and non-Jews
alike, and even the Talmud's distinctive theological views and literary
methods.
Situating the Bavli in its Sassanian context hardly effaces the
differences between Judaic and Persian culture; rather, it helps clarify
points of
similarity and difference and how each group understood and, within a
multicultural environment, observed its own boundaries.
Thus, as the scholar Maria Macuch points out in The Talmud in its Iranian
Context, although the Bavli does not use explicitly religious terminology
taken from Zoroastrian scriptures, it does avail itself of technical legal
terms and of the daily vernacular of the law courts—with which, it seems, the
rabbis were familiar. (After all, it was the 3rd-century Babylonian sage
Samuel who decisively declared in the Talmud that dina d'malkhuta dina, the
kingdom's law is the law.) Another clarifying point is registered by
Richard Kalmin. Why were the rabbis of the Bavli so much harsher on the issue
of
professional dream interpretation than their counterparts in the Yerushalmi
or "Jerusalem" Talmud? Answer: they wanted to keep their own and their
people's distance from the Persian Magi.
If Persian history can be a significant resource for study of the Talmud,
the Talmud can be a significant resource in turn for Persian history.
Gafni's student Geoffrey Herman comments: "As a product of integrated
Sassanian
subjects, . . . the Babylonian Talmud has few parallels among Sassanian
sources. Indeed, it has the potential to convey to us some of the flavor of
life in the Sassanian Empire that few other sources offer."
Shai Secunda, a rising star in the field of "Irano-Judaica," has noted the
relative paucity of contemporary work on Iranian Jewry during the many
centuries after the coming of Islam. This brings us back with a jolt to the
realities, and the dangers, of today. Excavating the distant past will hardly
solve those dangers. But by immeasurably enriching our knowledge of how
Jews and Persians once lived and thought, it can help us understand how they
built identities that still have the power to shape our world—if not today
then, we may hope, tomorrow.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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