Abstract: The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the 3rd through 6th centuries CE, by rabbis living under Sasanian Persian rule in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. What kind of society did these rabbis inhabit? What effect did that society have on important rabbinic texts? This book offers a re-examination of rabbinic culture of late antique Babylonia. It shows how this culture was shaped in part by Persia on the one hand, and by Roman Palestine on the other. The mid 4th century CE in Jewish Babylonia was a period of particularly intense “Palestinianization,” at the same time that the Mesopotamian and east Persian Christian communities were undergoing a period of intense “Syrianization.” The book argues that these closely related processes were accelerated by 3rd-century Persian conquests deep into Roman territory, which resulted in the resettlement of thousands of Christian and Jewish inhabitants of the eastern Roman provinces in Persian Mesopotamia, eastern Syria, and western Persia, profoundly altering the cultural landscape for centuries to come. The book also offers new interpretations of several fascinating rabbinic texts of late antiquity. It also demonstrates how Babylonian rabbis interacted with the non-rabbinic Jewish world, often in the form of the incorporation of centuries-old non-rabbinic Jewish texts into the developing Talmud, rather than via the encounter with actual non-rabbinic Jews in the streets and marketplaces of Babylonia.

Keywords: Babylonian Talmud, Sasanian Persian rule, rabbinic culture, Persia