Parthian and Sasanian Iran in History and Memory
When Alexander the Great conquered the Near East in the fourth century BCE, his enormous empire, which stretched from the Adriatic to the Indus, was centered in Babylon. We know very little about Babylonian Jewry from the time of Alexander’s conquest through the Seleucid period. Even during the period of the Parthians—a northeastern Iranian dynasty that came to power in the middle of the second century BCE—we have few sources at our disposal for reconstructing Babylonian Jewish history. What little we have suggests that Babylonian Jewry constituted an important diasporic community that, unsurprisingly, was vulnerable to changes in governmental policy and dwelled in some tension with its neighbors.
Only during the Sasanian period—named after the southwestern Iranian dynasty that defeated the Parthians in 224 CE—did Babylonian Jewry emerge as one of the most influential communities in Jewish history. The importance of Babylonian Jewry is due largely to the production of the Babylonian Talmud—which over the course of centuries became the primary repository of Jewish law and lore—and to the geonic academies where the talmudic tradition continued to grow and exert influence well beyond Babylonia.
Most of the Jews mentioned in the Talmud lived in some proximity to the imperial capital at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, which lay on the Tigris River about twenty-one miles (35 km) south of modern-day Baghdad. They probably spoke an Aramaic that corresponds to the Aramaic of the Talmud and interacted with speakers of other Aramaic dialects, Persian, and perhaps also Greek. And they came into contact with many other peoples, including Zoroastrians, Syriac Christians, Manichaeans, and Mandaeans. The rabbis describe contact with the Sasanian court and refer to tensions with Zoroastrian priests who were closely aligned with the Sasanian state. Some Zoroastrian sources also describe Jews with ambivalence and even animosity, and texts composed by Sasanian Christians reflect competition with their Jewish neighbors. Yet this pressure had little or no apparent effect on the regular functioning of Jewish communal life, which was “governed” by a Jewish figure known as the exilarch. Of course, some Jewish communities that lived beyond the center of Sasanian power, in places like Cappadocia and Armenia, were subjected to more violent encounters during wars with the Sasanians. And the pull and possibilities of leaving the empire to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple apparently remained a factor for some.
Although the provenance and reliability of sources is always an issue in premodern historiography, the issue is particularly acute in Sasanian historiography, since most surviving Middle Persian texts composed by the Zoroastrian elite appear in compilations dating to the ninth and even tenth centuries, hundreds of years later than the events they describe. While some have questioned the validity of using medieval compilations to write late antique history, a majority of scholars still consult compilations like the Dēnkard (compiled in the ninth and tenth centuries) when it can be reasonably assumed that the works preserve earlier traditions dating to the Sasanian period.
Read more about the Jewish experience in Parthian and Sasanian Iran: