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Shai Secunda . The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2014. 272 pp.
Book Reviews: Judaism in Late Antiquity and Rabbinics
Irano-Talmudica is one of the older subfields of Jewish studies, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. It explores the junction of Iranian studies and the Babylonian Talmud. Practitioners typically excavate the Bavli for sediments of Sasanian Persian culture, be it on surface layers such as with Persian loans or calques, or in the subterranean levels in diverse areas such as midrash, law, or mythology. From the beginning it was recognized that Persia formed part of the imperial and cultural context of the Talmud, and that a better understanding of it would enhance our knowledge of much of Babylonian Jewish civilization.
There has been a recent growth of interest in this field, much to the credit of Yaakov Elman. Elman has also spearheaded a conceptual change in the field. He has asserted a privileged relationship between the Zoroastrian Middle Persian literary culture and the Babylonian Talmud that goes far deeper than has been widely believed by his predecessors and contemporaries, and advocates reading Middle Persian Zoroastrian religious literature in tandem with the Bavli. In this latest addition to a now-burgeoning field, Elman's student Shai Secunda seeks to demonstrate the plausibility and feasibility of the Irano-Talmudic project, as perceived by Elman and Secunda, and to provide this new position with a methodological framework.
After its introduction this book has five chapters. The first describes the sources; the second seeks to locate Jewish-Zoroastrian encounters in Sasanian Mesopotamia. The third and fourth focus on rabbinic and Zoroastrian discourses about "the Other." The fifth explores methodology and theoretical strategies for reading the Bavli alongside Middle Persian literature. A few concluding pages complete the main body of this volume, which has its notes and acknowledgements at the end along with its bibliography and indices.
The success of the book's mission is not clear. Zoroastrian hermeneutical literature might seem, at times, to have a rabbinic "feel" about it, but the author struggles to resolve fundamental issues: there are challenges in dating and locating its production. Most of the Zoroastrian sources in which Secunda...