Content area
Full Text
Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians: Religious Dynamics in a Sasanian Context Geoffrey Herman, Ed. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 314. ISBN 978-1-4632-0250-7.
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...