The Law of the Kingdom Is the Law

Jews enjoyed relative autonomy in the Sasanian Empire. Jewish courts were a viable option for legal proceedings, and rabbinic courts competed for litigants in the empire’s legally pluralistic environment. Certain cases may have been judged in Jewish courts outside of rabbinic jurisdiction. The Babylonian Talmud continued the rabbinic bias against non-Jewish courts and also recorded a number of specific pejorative references to Persian and Zoroastrian law under the authority of the magi, Zoroastrian priests.

The talmudic claim that the law of the kingdom should be the law for Jews is credited, by an exilarch, to Samuel. In this case, the “law of the kingdom” was the law of the Sasanian Empire, by which Jews were to abide. The rabbinic exhortation to follow the rules of the reigning government or state—which appears several times in the Talmud—continues to influence Jewish life to this day.