Hostage Negotiations Won’t Succeed without Military Pressure
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May 1, 2024
The Talmud Seems to Paint an Idyllic Picture of Life in Babylonia. But Is It Accurate?
Questioning the rabbis’ Sasanian paradise.
For at least four centuries, the intellectual center of rabbinic Judaism was located in the Sasanian empire, a pre-Islamic Persian kingdom that included Mesopotamia, home to a vast Jewish population and its flourishing yeshivas. Yet despite the fact that these Jews produced the Babylonian Talmud, several other works, and numerous inscriptions, surprisingly little is known to scholars about how they related to the state that ruled over them. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein reviews a new work by Simcha Gross that attempts to shed light on the subject:
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The Talmud Seems to Paint an Idyllic Picture of Life in Babylonia. But Is It Accurate?
Questioning the rabbis’ Sasanian paradise.