Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians: Religious Dynamics in a Sasanian Context ed. by Geoffrey Herman (review)

This collection of eight essays developed out of a 2010 workshop at Ruhr Universität in Bochum. It adds to a growing list of important publications about Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians in late antique Persia. The contributors’ main foci are Jewish-Zoroastrian and Christian-Zoroastrian interfaces. Other recent studies, including the conference proceedings—Die Inkulturation des Christentums im Sasanidenreich (2007) and The Talmud in Its Iranian Context (2010), as well as Shai Secunda’s The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Sasanian Context (2014), and Richard Payne’s A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and the Making of the Iranian Empire (2016), adopt a similar approach. All five seek to understand Jewish and Christian communities, and the texts that they produced, from within their Sasanian contexts. And all further strive to remove the religious communities of late antique Persia from silos by bringing together the often disparate spheres in which the scholarship about them circulates, thus setting a new standard for Sasanian studies.

The first paper, “Political Theology and Religious Diversity in the Sasanian Empire,” by Adam Becker, sets the stage for the subsequent chapters. In reviewing grand histories such as Touraj Daryaee’s Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009), Becker points to a persistent problem in Sasanian studies, namely the frequent employment of “anachronistic, modern notions borrowed from liberal political philosophy” (7) in discussing the religious communities of late antique Persia. Relying on critiques by Talal Asad and, more recently, Brent Nongbri, Becker argues that terms such as “church-state relations,” “tolerance,” and even religious “minorities” necessarily invoke post-Enlightenment, secularized categories of “religion” and “politics.” Presuming a divide between “religion” and “politics,” or even that these categories can be dis-embedded from late antique sources, clouds our understanding of Sasanian history. Instead, Becker proposes using “political theology” as a means of getting at “the inevitable mutual imbrications of the domains of the religious and the political and the diversity of ways that these domains are constituted” (17).

In “Another ‘Split’ Diaspora? How Knowledgeable (or Ignorant) were Babylonian Jews about Roman Palestine and its Jews?” Isaiah Gafni reexamines the recent thesis of Arye Edrei and Doron Mendels, who proposed that while rabbinic thought moved east from Palestine to Babylonia, a language barrier may explain why the Palestinian rabbinic tradition did not filter west to Greek- and Latin-speaking Jews). Gafni argues that the western diaspora remained well within the orbit of Palestinian influence, and that if there was a “split diaspora,” it was rather the divide between Palestine and Babylon. Not language barriers but different cultural and social “atmospheres” between Palestine and Babylon drove the divide. Gafni singles out the characteristic “assertiveness” of Babylonian Jews who branded themselves the new Zion, “with all the intellectual qualities and Torah-tradition that was once assumed to be the sole property of Palestinian rabbis” (45–46).

Peter Bruns, who has published several important articles on the Syriac Acts of the Persian Martyrs, turns his attention to “Antizoroastrische Polemik in den Syro-Persischen Märtyrerakten.” Focusing on a sixth-century text known as the Martyrdom of Pethion, Adurhormizd, and Anahid, Bruns demonstrates how the anonymous author, although most certainly a Christian, possessed an impressive knowledge of Zoroastrianism. Indeed, the Martyrdom of Pethion is deeply marked by the Sasanian and Zoroastrian contexts in which it was written. Narrating the conversion of hundreds of soldiers, dozens of magi, and several high-ranking Sasanian officials, the Martyrdom of Pethion employs sophisticated Middle Persian terminology to critique Zurvanist theology and discuss, among other things, the opposition between “the material world” and “paradise.”

In his essay, “The Last Years of Yazdgird I and the Christians,” Geoffrey Herman, the volume’s editor, questions whether the fifth-century persecution of the Sasanian king Yazdgird, an alleged response to the zealous Christians who destroyed Zoroastrian fire temples, actually took place. Yazdgird was a fascinating, if polarizing, figure. Zoroastrian sources...