>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. [ Silence ] >> As most of you already know, our division is made up of three sections, the African section, the Hebraic section, the Near East section, and we are responsible for collections and materials from 78 different countries from the Near East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, as well as from the entire continent of Africa, North and Sub-Sahara. And we're very active in acquiring and developing collections, briefing visitors coming from all those countries and, organizing programs, symposia, and workshops. We also invite scholars and experts, as we are today, who have researched and done work in our areas of responsibility to share with us their insights, their findings, so that all of us attending and participating in the programs leave enriched with new information and a better understanding of the cultures and societies whose publications we collect. We also organize exhibits. Two years ago we celebrated 100 years of Hebraica here [inaudible] with an exhibit entitled "Words Like Sapphires: 100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress." And this year we have a current exhibit, which I suggest you go and see, it's on the same floor on the other side and it's entitled "A Thousand Years of the Persian Book," which are both directly relevant to today's program, which brings together two sections of this division, the Hebraic section and the Near East section. Our speaker today is Dr. Shai Secunda, the Martin Buber Research Fellow at The Hebrew University, who will be speaking about the Iranian Talmud. So you see the connection between the two. And now our very own Sharon Horowitz, Senior Reference Librarian in the Hebraic Section, will introduce the speaker and the program. Thank you. >> Sharon Horowitz: Thank you. Thank you, [inaudible]. Good afternoon. On behalf of the Hebraic Section and the Near East Section, let me add my welcome to you all to the African and Middle Eastern Meeting Room. My name is Sharon Horowitz. I'm a reference librarian in the Hebraic Section. The Hebraic Section marks its beginnings in 1912 with the receipt of 10,000 Hebrew books and pamphlets whose purchase was made possible by a gift from New York philanthropist Jacob Schiff. From those humble beginnings, our collections have grown to around 250,000 items in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judaeo, Persian, and other Hebraic script languages and our holdings also include and important collection of [inaudible] books. The section's holdings are particularly strong in the area of bible, rabbinic, liturgy, Hebrew language and literature, responsa and Jewish history. Two of our missions in this division are to publicize our collections and to bring people into the library. One way we do this is by holding lectures and having programs such as the one we are hosting here today. Today's speaker is Dr. Shai Secunda. Dr. Secunda is a student of rabbinic literature, Iranian studies, and comparative religion and is a fellow at the Martin Buber Society at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he lectures in comparative religion and rabbinic literature. He received his PhD from the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University in New York. His most recent book, " The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context" argues that the foundational document in Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud, is best appreciated when read firmly within its original Iranian context. Dr. Secunda is a founder and co-editor of the Talmud Blog, a collective web log that follows academic and popular discussions and trends about rabbinic literature. In a recently published interview, Dr. Secunda was asked, what was the biggest thing that has happened in his field in the past 30 years. And he answered, and I quote, "Digitization, it has changed everything." Many of us would've given the same response. One item of business before we begin today's lecture, this event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcasting. There will be a formal question and answer period after the lecture at which the audience is encouraged to ask questions and to offer comments. Please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event. By participating in the question and answer period, you are consenting to the Library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks. And now, please join me in welcoming Dr. Secunda. [ Applause ] >> Shai Secunda: Thank you so much for that very nice introduction and thank you everyone for coming, particularly family members from near and far. I wanted to begin with words of thanks to Ms. Horowitz and [inaudible] for the opportunity to give this lecture and also for a wonderful tour of the exhibit. If you haven't seen the exhibit about the Persian book, "A Thousand Years of the Persian Book," you should see it now. I also must mention something personal about why I'm excited to be here. My wife will be here soon and she'll appreciate hearing this, but the first date that I went on with my wife 13 years ago was at the Library of Congress and apparently it works. So if you're looking for great date ideas, you can come to the Library. Okay, let me begin my lecture. So I wanted to begin talking about this Iranian Talmud, which is a misnomer, if you know anything about the Talmud, by analyzing a very well known phrase that we often use to think about Jews and that is Jews are the people of the book. This is a common refrain. It has modern applications. Every year in the state of Israel there is a massive book sale that used to take place for a week, it used to be called book week but it became book month, and the phrases, this is the week of the book for the people of the book. So this is an appellation that is connected to the Jewish people, the people of the book. But the history of the term is very interesting. It originally was not a Jewish designation. It was not something that the Jews thought of themselves to describe who they were but, in fact, it came from the outside. It came from Islam and from an attempt to categorize different types of people and different religious groups that they encountered. In fact, it didn't only refer to the Jews but it also referred to the Christians and it was a way of saying that anyone who is connected to scripture, who has relationship with scripture, has this special designation of a people of the book. Although this was what we call an [inaudible] designation, that means a designation from the outside, it became a native term that the Jews were proud of to call themselves the people of the book. But in that process, it underwent two very interesting changes that I want to talk about today in order for us to appreciate what exactly the Iranian Talmud is. The first change is more obvious and that is the question of which book is being referred to when we say that the Jews are the people of the book. Now in the original designation, it referred to scripture, the bible, maybe the Torah, or maybe all sections of the bible, but, in fact, if you look historically at what the Jews focused on primarily, what defined their religious life, their theology, their imagination, their culture, and which book merited the most you could say intellectual energy throughout the generations, that book is not the bible, surprisingly but is, in fact, the Talmud or as it's normally known the Babylonian Talmud. So that's the first change so to speak that the term underwent from scripture, which, of course, is the foundation of everything for the Jews but it went, it then referred to the Talmud, which actually does define Jewish life and belief in living. The more interesting and perhaps difficult for us to understand transformation has to do with the word "book." When we think about a book, we normally think, we have many examples here, of something that you have a bunch of pages that are bound in a codec's form, that's the normal form of the book, usually written by one author, maybe a few co-editors, and something that's a distinguishable object, a very good object that allows information to be transmitted. The Talmud, though, really isn't a book like that. Now of course the Library has many editions, classic editions and others of the Babylonian Talmud and you can point to a shelf or series of shelves on which this book is held, but it's still not a normal sort of book and that is for a number of reasons. The first reason is that the Talmud, although it is now a physical book, was originally oral, right. It's a representative of what the Jews refer to as Oral Torah, right, the Torah that was handed down orally throughout the generations. And not only does it encapsulate this oral tradition but, in fact, when it was first composed, when it was first edited and redacted, it was done so orally. This is very difficult for us to understand as people of the type, as Marshall McLuhan liked to refer to us, homo typographus, because when we think about knowledge and how we access knowledge, we assume that there needs to be words on the page, that there needs to be a book that we can hold in front of us on a desk but, in fact, an essential element of Jewish culture is this oral aspect and the Talmud was composed orally from traditions that were oral traditions. So, in fact, we have two transformations that occurred with that phrase, "the people of the book." First of all, the book has changed in a sense from scripture to the Talmud and second, we have a shift in terms of the book. Now I will get back to that idea but I want you to think about what this might mean when we talk about an oral literature that is a collection of different sources that are put together, that are fused together and eventually written down in book form. I want to begin now with another question. I won't ask-- I'll ask it rhetorically because it's a Talmudic question that will bring us into the aspect of geography that's going to be so important here. Now again I refer to the Talmud or the Babylonian Talmud and the reason is that there are two Talmuds in fact. The most dominance kind of important Talmud for Jewish religion, culture, et cetera, is the Babylonian Talmud but this is distinguished from another Talmud that's traditionally referred to as the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Jewish Talmud but this was a misnomer because it was not put together in Jerusalem but further north in Israel and that is what's referred to in English as the Palestinian Talmud, the Talmud that was composed in the land of Israel, in the Byzantine Period. So that is an important Talmud but not as important as the traditional Talmud that we are familiar with, the Babylonian Talmud, or in Hebrew the Talmud Bavli. Remember this term as we look at the following source. The Talmud asks an interesting question that's very open ended and can be interpreted in different ways. The question is what is Babylonia, right? What is bavel in the Hebrew and this is a question that seems to refer to not the geographical place because Babylonia of course is more or less within the borders of modern-day Iraq in between the two great rivers, The Tigris and Euphrates, but it's a question about the learning that was produced in Babylonia, a question about the learning that ultimately became the Babylonian Talmud. The answer is by word of a word play, which is very illuminating. [Inaudible] Rabbi Yohanan said this, "It is mixed with Scripture, Mishna and Talmud." Babylonian learning is a mixture of three elements: Scripture, the bible, which I referred to above, the original meaning of the people of the book, Mishna, which I translate here as around a 200 CE compendium of rabbinic law, the kind of basic textbook on which Jewish law, from which Jewish law derives and that book was written and composed I should say orally in the land of Israel, at the beginning of the 3rd century, and Talmud, this learning that was kind of placed on top of the Mishna and, in fact, is a commentary on the Mishna. So this rabbi, Rabbi Yohanan who actually was not from Babylonia, he was from Palestine and there might even be a little bit of a dig at Babylonian learning, refers to Babylonian learning as mixed up and the etymology is very interesting. Many of you probably know the etymology, the biblical etymology of the word Babylonia, right, or babel, we even use this word in English today and the bible tells us that in ancient times the Tower of Babel, right, in that region received its name when the languages were mixed up, when there was a mixing up of tongues that occurred from whence the word babel. Rabbi Yohanan is saying that even Babylonian learning in his day, in the 3rd century of the Common Era, what ultimately would become the Babylonian Talmud was also mixed it. It was a mixture of different elements. There is the biblical elements, right, the base, the source of sort of everything. There is Mishna and classical rabbinic learning from the land of Israel, and then there's the interpretive tradition that's built on top of this. Bavel, the word for Babylonia, is linked to the word balal, mixed, the mixture that it contains. This is an interesting idea and it actually even has legal force in Jewish law. I'll give you a funny example. For those of you who know Jewish history and especially Jewish intellectual history, you might know, as I mentioned earlier, that the yeshiva curriculum does include much focus on the bible. It doesn't include great focus on medieval Jewish poetry. There is single-minded focus on studying the Talmud and this was actually true even in medieval France. A group of Jewish scholars known as the theosophists were bothered by a seeming contradiction between this fact of the yeshiva curriculum that people were focused on Talmud study and another requirement that Jewish learning should be divided in a similar way to what we find here. We are told in Jewish tradition that learning must be divided between three pillars, right: Scripture, Mishna, and Talmud. And, in fact, people are just studying Talmud. How could this be? The theosophists answered by citing this tradition and justified the yeshiva curriculum and they said that when one study's Talmud, because it is this mixture of different parts, because it contains already within itself Mishna, Scripture, and the learning that was built on top of it, one can simply learn the Talmud and receive a comprehensive Jewish education. And this idea was still operative in Eastern Europe in the 19th century and really even today in [inaudible], in America, and Israel. Now I want to refer to another, focus on another aspect of this statement and that is the issue of geography. As much as the topic of this little snippet is the Babylonian learning tradition that became the Talmud, it's clear that there is a connection to geography. They don't simply call this-- The question isn't simply what is Talmud, and this is based on a verse they use as the word Babylonia, but, in fact, the linkage between the learning, the Babylonia learning and Babylonia is quite clear. They refer to Babylonia, Babylonian learning, I'm sorry, as Babylonia. So there was a conception that the learning that was produced in Babylonia could not have been produced anywhere else. It could not have been produced in a vacuum but it was intimately connected to Babylonia, to this place. Now what is Babylonia? Let's ask that question as moderns. So as I said a few minutes ago, it's a geographic designation. It's within the boundaries of Mesopotamia, the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. But let's dig a little deeper and when we think about that question, when we ask what is Babylonia. What is Babylonia when the Talmud was produced? The Talmud was produced over a period of centuries from the 3rd century of the Common Era until the 6th or perhaps even the beginning of the 7th century of the Common Era. During this period, there wasn't an Iraqi government but in a sense there was an Iranian government, an Iranian regimen that ruled over the area and this was the Sasanian Dynasty. The Sasanians were the last great Iranian Dynasty to rule over the Near East, Central Asia, Iranian lands from almost exactly the same period during which the Talmud was produced, from the 3rd century of the Common Era until the 7th century of the Common Era, when the Islamic conquest took place. So we have a very important centralized regimen, the Sasanian regimen, which as much as it was an Iranian dynasty, was actually centralized in the sense in this very region in modern-day Iraq, in Babylonia. And, in fact, the Sasanians saw this region not as a separate place that they had conquered, because they did conquer many lands, but, in fact, they referred to this region which they called [inaudible] or really Assyria as an Iranian land, right. This is not a foreign location that they conquered but this is sort of the heart of the empire even though it wasn't traditionally a place where Iranian languages were spoken. So we have the Talmud and Babylonian learning being produced in really the center of the Sasanian Empire and in a place where rabbis, Babylonian Jews came into constant contact with Sasanians, with royal Iranian figures, with bureaucrats, and also with regular Persian speakers. And that created a fascinating mixture, right, this idea of balal mixture that I want to talk about today and I want to see the ways in which this affected the production of the Talmud itself. The first type of encounter that I want to talk about briefly is a religious encounter, an encounter between Jews and Babylonia and Zoroastrians. Zoroastrians were adherents to an ancient Iranian religion. According to the scholarly tradition in which I was trained, this is a religion that can be traced back to the second millennium BCE based on linguistic analysis of their scripture, which is known as the Avesta. So you have a fascinating phenomenon in which two ancient religions, Jews and Zoroastrians are encountering each other and as much as they encounter seems to have a certain gravitas and heaviness, some of our sources are actually quite humorous, when describing these sorts of encounters and I want to read one of them with you right now. A certain magus said to Amemar, a magus is a priest as many of you know, the three magi in the New Testament of the Zoroastrian religion, so he said to Amemar which is the name of a Babylonia rabbi, "From your waist upwards is of Ohrmazd." So the upper half of your body is the territory we might say of Ohrmazd. Ohrmazd was the good God because Zoroastrianism was and is a dualistic religion that divides the world and spirits of the world into good and evil categories. So this magus said to Amemar: "From the waist and upwards is of Ohrmazd. From your waist downwards is of Ahreman. This is the region related to the evil spirit, Ahreman. So this was sort of the claim that the Zoroastrian priest presented to Ahreman, to Amemar, I'm sorry. Amemar, the rabbi, said to the magus, "If so, how does Ahreman let Ohrmazd pass urine through his land." He has a very interesting crypt here. He says you can't really look at the body as two separate parts as if the upper part functions on its own and is the territory of the good spirit and the lower part is another piece and functions according to its own rules of the evil spirit but, in fact, the body cooperates, the two halves of the body cooperate all the time. One drinks water and later one urinates and this shows that there is a collaboration between the two halves. It's a humorous source but it actually gives us a certain insight into the kinds of theological debates that Jews might have with Zoroastrians. Jews, of course, are monotheists and they assert time and again that there is one God that created and is responsible for the world. There might be things that seem to be evil in the world and, nevertheless, we attribute those things also to the one and only God. Well Zoroastrians would claim no and there's a certain theological force to their argument. If you see evil things happening in the world, don't blame that on the good god, blame that on an evil force that has rein in the world. So this is a humorous source that gives us an insight into one type of encounter between Jews and Zoroastrians, the adherents to the ancient Iranian faith. I want to look at another source briefly because it gives us two sides of one coin. The rabbis as much as they knew about these interceptions and these meetings between Jews and Zoroastrians, they were nervous at times that one community, the Zoroastrian community, should not influence the Jewish community and should not affect the Jewish community too deeply. So we have here a source that is rhetorically quite harsh in which a rabbi, an important rabbi named Rav says, "He who learns something from a magus is worthy of death." So on the one hand this sources gives a sense of the concern the rabbis had and the desire the rabbis had to erect offence between Jews and Zoroastrians, between rabbis and magi. But on the other hand it gives us a sense of what actually was going on. You only need to make a statement like this if, in fact, there were encounters between the two groups, where, in fact, Jews were learning things from magi. To take a modern example, one would assume that you would not find a similar statement in Williamsburg Brooklyn against Hasidim studying with the local priests. And this is probably because the Hasidim in Williamsburg are not studying with the local priests, so there's no need to even make such a statement. This statement gives us both things. It gives us a sense that the rabbis wanted to erect boundaries between Jews and Zoroastrians but also that these boundaries were being transgressed by Jews who wanted to study things from Zoroastrians. So the religious encounter is one type of encounter that it's worth thinking about and we'll get back to some of those sources in just a minute to kind of broaden them. But another kind of encounter that's worth looking at are royal encounters. The royal encounters are very interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is geography. As I said before, Babylonia was really in the economic bread basket and heart of the Sasanian Iranian Empire and the rabbis would have seen various examples and reflections of that Sasanian Iranian power. In the exhibit, "A Thousand Years of the Persian Book" exhibit that I just got to tour, there is a wonderful image of the Taq-i Kisra, which is a remnant of ruin of a great Sasanian palace. There is no doubt that the rabbis would have seen this palace because it was located right in the heart of where they lived. And they would've seen perhaps even the Persian kings themselves. What's more interesting is sort of the way they imagined a certain closeness between some of the Persian kings and not only that, they imagined that some of the Persian kings were very similar to the rabbis and might even share similar interests. In this sort little source, which is about a technical issue in law, we see an amazing thing. Efraim, a disciple of Reish Laqish, said of the name Reish Laqish, the law agrees with Rabbi Shimon, a very specific law in rabbinic property law. They set it in front of King Shapur this law. He said let us bring praise using the Middle Persian word Efraim to Rabbi Shimon. Let us bring praise to Rabbi Shimon because he is given a just and good ruling. To tell a story about the Sasanian king, a great king, this would probably be King Shapur I in the 3rd century of the Common Era means that the rabbis, we might even say identified or saw certain closeness between the Sasanian king and the activities, the traditional Babylonian learning activities that they were doing. This idea of the Sasanian king being involved in some way in Jewish learning is so incredible and almost so hard to believe that later sources question whether this could have even been the case. And by the way, I intentionally crossed out the word rabbis, there wasn't a mistake in my slide, to give you the sense that this would be something that would happen normally with a rabbi praising a ruling and here it's a Sasanian king. Well in the next slide we get the other side of that story, where a rabbi says something and refers to King Shapur but a later source says that can't really be King Shapur but it must be a nickname for a rabbi. Rava said-- Rava lived actually in the area of [inaudible], which was right part of I'd says the metroplex of the capital [inaudible]. He said, "I am saying something that King Shapur did not say." So he's giving a certain rhetorical force to his argument, which doesn't need to concern us here. And then an anonymous voice in the Talmud says, "And who is he? Shmuel," meaning he must be referring to a rabbi because this is a rabbinic debate and, therefore, King Shapur must have been a nickname for Shmuel, who in other stories does indeed appear conversing with King Shapur I. Now the Talmud contains these different oral traditions, so we have another version of this, which is common in oral cultures. Others say that it was Rav Pappa who said, "I am saying something which King Shapur did not say," meaning this story was not told about Rava but about his student Rav Pappa and once again there is an anonymous voice who says, "That could not have actually been King Shapur and who is he? Rava," because Rava, just like Shmuel, appears in a number of stories conversing and talking with the King Shapur but it's now Shapur II, a powerful king in the 4th century, and also even with his mother, which the Talmud refers to as Ifra Hormiz. Her name has not been preserved anywhere else outside of the Talmud. So we see in this source that as much as there's a certain closeness and even rabbis refer to King Shapur in their rabbinic debates, other voices aren't so sure if such a thing is even possible, how could this even be. I want to now take you on a rather entertaining tour about similar pattern in which we get an insight into the way the rabbis thought about the Persians and it also gives us a sense of the mixture of sources that we have in the Talmud. I call this a pattern of love and dislike and I have many examples in my book but I'll give you two of the most entertaining I think. In this source we have two rabbis talking. One lived in the land of Israel in the 2nd century and he was an important rabbi and the other lived in the Sasanian Empire in Babylonia in the 4th century. The teaching is as follows. It has been taught Rabban Gamliel said, "For three things do I like the Persians." So he's praising the Persians for their modesty. "They are modest in their eating habits, in the bathroom and regarding sex." Now the rabbis actually use a more euphemistic term for sex, [inaudible] another matter, but that is indeed what they are referring to. Then we have a citation of a verse from the Book of Isaiah. "It is written I have summoned my consecrated ones." The Hebrew term is important, mequdashai. Isaiah, both the first half and the second half, often refers to the Persians. In this part, in fact, he is relating a prophecy in which the Persians play a very important role. This was true for many communities in the Near East including and especially the Jews and you can see a similar aspect also in the [inaudible] which there is an example of and exhibit as well. This is because the Persians, when they first came to the world stage in the 6th century, before the Common Era, they were empowered to defeat those who had defeated other nations. The Jews had been defeated and exiled by the Babylonians and now the Persians were coming to power and they were going to defeat the Babylonians. So, therefore, Isaiah in this prophecy refers to the Persians as the consecrated ones of God because they have a very important role in destroying the Babylonian enemy. Look at how the source ends though. Rav Yosef taught: These are the Persians who are designated for purgatory. Quite a different attitude towards the Persian, very negative, in fact, and there's a very interesting nuanced play that's taking place here that I want to just highlight. Rabban Gamliel who lived in the land of Israel, which at that point was under Roman domain, and, in fact, the Romans had destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 of the Common Era, he look towards the Persians, and there are other sources similar to this, with a certain expectation, if only the Persians would come and defeat their longtime enemies, at this point it's the Parthians, I should say, defeat their longtime enemies, the Romans, and maybe Jewish sovereignty will be restored, the Jews will be able to be in the temple, and we have a lot of positive statements about Persians, some of these including this one even ring of a certain ancient Orientalism. What I mean by that is there's a Greek tradition about talking about the Persians and about various empires of the East and on the one hand sometimes negative ways but in other times a certain romanticism and we have that romanticism here. He refers to their modesty and he seems to be basing it or riffing on the verse in Isaiah, where the word in "my consecrated ones mequdashai with the root qudash, which might read to rabbinic ears as holy ones. In other words, Rabban Gamliel says, I like the Persians. They might do something very important for us politically if they defeat the Romans, but more than that, they have a certain holiness which the verse in Isaiah he believed referred to. They are modest in various aspects. Rav Yosef said you're misreading the verse. It's not referring to any sort of holiness of the Persians but, in fact, is referring to designation which is sort of on the base level what that word actually means. They are designated for something but Rav Yosef, who was an intimate observer of the Persians and lived in close proximity to them, did not have a positive thing to say about them and he claimed that they were designated for nothing less than purgatory. Another fascinating source in which we find a similar attitude of the rabbis of the Talmud is about Cyrus. Cyrus was the first emperor of the Achaemenid Empire, which was the first great Persian Empire, and Isaiah, right, this is in the second half of Isaiah, really from chapters 40 to 48, extolled Cyrus and sees Cyrus, as I referred to before, as having this very important role of beating the Babylonians and not only that allowing the Jews to return and rebuild the temple. In one verse, Isaiah even refers to Cyrus as his God's messiah. Rav Nahman b. Rav Hisda expounded: What is it that is written "Thus said the Lord to Cyrus, His anointed one, right, using the word meshiho, his mashiach from where we get the English word messiah. The Talmud is not able to accept this statement that Cyrus is somehow a messiah. What, is Cyrus His messiah? Rather, the Holy One Blessed is He said to his real messiah, who is apparently at some kind of occultation, "I lodge a complaint with you concerning Cyrus. I said, "He shall build my house and my exiles he will send forth," yet he said, "Who is there among you of all his people, his God be with him, let him to up to Jerusalem." The rabbis, who are very creative readers, decide that the only way to salvage this verse in Isaiah is to punctuate it differently. God is not referring to Cyrus as His messiah, right, it's almost like the semicolon in English, which can just work magic on language. You need to read as follows: Thus said the Lord to his appointed one, it works better I the Hebrew, regarding Cyrus who has been a great disappointment and has not actually lived up to the important historical task that was given him. So we have a certain pattern here and this, there are other examples that are similar to this in which rabbis from the land of Israel or a source from the land of Israel, like the Book of Isaiah, has very positive things to say about the Persians, about Persian rulers, about even Persian culture and modesty, and then time and again there are Babylonian voices, rabbis who lived in the empire, who weren't able to suffer a praise of the Persians and had to respond that in some way they are negative, they're not as good as you think they are, this sort of thing. So first of all this is an interesting phenomenon, right, that we might say that absence makes the heart grow fonder but proximity breeds contempt. And because they saw the regular goings on of the regimen, of the government, they had complaints like people who live in places all over the world do. In fact, if we were to compare the situation of the Jews in a Sasanian Empire in terms of persecution and religious freedom and the Jews under the Romans and even the Byzantines, the Jews in the Sasanian Empire faired far better. In fact, there's very little evidence of any persecution and part of the flourishing of the Jewish community there might even be connected to the tolerance of the Persians, but, nevertheless, we have this phenomenon in which sources, right, remember the Talmud is made up of different kinds of sources, which came from the land of Israel, which are absorbed into a new textural edifice, right, and this is how this sort of oral book works, are then responded to and reworked or not allowed to sit alone as they come into the fabric that becomes the Talmud. My last text I want to return to that funny little story about Amemar and the magus, to say something also about sources, but also something about really what's going on when we think about the Talmud. Now I didn't give away at the beginning of the lecture the reason why I refer to an Iranian Talmud, right. I told you that the Talmud is traditionally referred to as the Babylonian Talmud and this is connected to the geography. The reason why I have invented this term Iranian Talmud is because I think it gives a certain sense of the significance of the location of the geography and the cultural geography, we might say, in which the Talmud was produced. Now certainly Babylonia, the fact that it was made in Babylonia was significant but what might be even more significant was the Sasanian Empire, was Iranian rule, was the sense that the Talmud was written while Jews and rabbis were encountering Persians and maybe Sasanian officials, Zoroastrian priests, and, therefore, the Iranian Talmud, this Iranian aspect although it's not captured in a traditional term of the Talmud is very significant. In this last text, this is not a Talmudic text. It comes from a Middle Persian text that records a dispute that took place in the 9th century of the Common Era after the Sasanians were gone and after the Zoroastrians were now a minority in Islamic area. In fact, Abbasid is the name of the Caliphate at this time and there was a very famous caliph named Al-Mamum, who lived in the 9th century and apparently held disputations before him. This disputation describes an encounter between a Zoroastrian whose name is Adur Farnbag [phonetic] and a Zoroastrian convert to Islam named Abalish, so the text because it's written from a Zoroastrian perspective refers to him as Abalish the Accursed and in a way it's sort of the mirror image of the story we read about Amemar and the magus. It has to do a belt. The Zoroastrians have two sacred garments that they wear. They wear a sudra, which is a special kind of shirt, and kustig, which is a special belt. And the last question in this debate concerns the kustig. The seventh question was this: Why do you tie the kustig. This is the convert to Islam asking the Zoroastrian priest. "For, if there is merit in tying the kustig, then asses, camels, and horses, who night and day have a belt tied seven times tightly around their bellies, will go to heaven before you." So he uses a little humor in questioning the religious significance of such a banal instrument as the belt. The Mowbed, the priest, said, "I will make it clear, we say as we believe in two origins that this is made visible on our bodies. Ohrmazd's share is the light and paradise. In the same way, all that is in the upper half of the body, such as hearing and smell, the place of wisdom, the soul, the mind, thought, intelligence, perception, inborn wisdom, and that acquired through hearing, is the place of the gods and the Amahraspands, which are these positive deities that are under Ohrmazd's rule. The lower half is like a place of stench and pollution, the bladder and excrement. Notice that sex is not negative in the Zoroastrian conception but it's simply a place of waste. And the stench is like the liar and place of Ahreman and the demons. The kustig makes a boundary on the body, that's what the belt does, which is why it is called kustig, for by it, it is shown that the body clearly has two sides or provinces, this is a Middle Persian word, kust, in the same way and part in the bathroom humor but it's part of the text here, if you referring to Abalish and those of his [inaudible] meaning Muslims, squat somewhere from the urine it is shown, I'll explain what this means in a second. So this kustig is, in fact, a dividing wall. This is a fascinating polemical text. There's elements of humor but it also makes a very clear point. The Zoroastrians once again were dualists as opposed to Muslims or a staunch monotheist and the way that the Mowbed, the Zoroastrian priest, proves that there's a dualism at work is because there are, in fact, two different things that go on in the lower and upper parts of the body. The upper part of the body is a place of intellect, of sense, of all these positive aspects, and the lower part of the body, and this is emphasized two times as a place of waste, as we all know. In fact, it refers to urine in a similar though opposite way of the source, the Talmudic source, that we read earlier with Amemar and the magus. In fact, he might even be referring to Muslim practice where he says that, he refers to you, a plural you because Muslims also acknowledged that urine is an impure substance and it has to be dealt with properly. So we have a nice polemical text but we also in my closing words have something interesting that's going on as well. This text really strongly mirrors our Talmudic text. It's a text about dualism, some of the same elements come up but the cast of characters shifts between a rabbi and a Zoroastrian and a Muslim and a Zoroastrian. Now the location in which this passage in the Talmud appears is in a long discussion about dualism. Jews had dealt with all sorts of dualisms for a long time and in the land of Israel, one of the theological threats was a dualism referred to as two powers. There're many options and possibilities of what this dualism was and that doesn't concern us here but it was a type of dualism that the rabbis in the land of Israel encountered on a regular basis. This source, the Talmudic source, appears towards the end of that discussion and suddenly shifts to a dualism that the rabbis in Babylonia were familiar with and encountered and knew about and so in a sense it exemplifies in a very interesting way the ways in which the Talmud, this book, this text, is as mixture of sources. Earlier sources that dealt with dualism and a dualism that was native to the land of Israel, suddenly are sublimated, right, and brought into a longer discussion where the ultimate direction, the ultimate goal is a source like this. It's a source that describes the type of dualism that the rabbis encountered in Babylonia. And so it exemplifies what's really going on in Babylonian learning with which we started. What, what is happening with this mixture, this mixture of Scripture, this mixture of Mishna and Babylonia learning? Ultimately the Talmud and the Iranian Talmud is an attempt to take earlier sources, be it from the bible, be it rabbinic sources from the land of Israel, recite them, transmit them orally but make them relevant, make them deal with the challenges of the day, the challenges that are encountered in the local culture and the local experience and for this reason, although the Talmud is filled with sources that come from the land of Israel, that come from an earlier time and place, in fact, receives a certain Iranian veneer because these sources are constantly being brought into dialogue and discussion with the rich worlds of the Sasanian Iranian Empire. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] And of course if anyone has questions. >> What is this dualism? >> Shai Secunda: So this dualism meaning this dualism, the Zoroastrian dualism, it's a belief in two spirits that created the world. In fact, the good spirit created the regular world in this conception and the good spirit is referred to as Ohrmazd, which literally means Lord Wisdom, and the evil spirit attempts to destroy this good creation. The theology is much more complicated but he's placed certain enemies in this world. Mosquitoes, for example, are part of the force of the evil side, while the good spirit created good things like human beings, like cattle, like water, like fire, which is venerated in this religion. So basically it's an attempt to kind of divide the world into two halves though there's also a mixture in between which is an important idea that they need to deal with but it's basically good, evil, and a mixture of good and evil. Yes? [ Inaudible Audience Question ] Yes. [ Inaudible Audience Question ] Yeah, this is a great question. Let me just repeat it for those of you who might not have heard. The question is that the Talmud is written first of all composed in Aramaic and also in a region where the dominant language is Aramaic. As much as Persians living there were speaking Persian, there were all kinds of communities like Christian, like Mandean, like Jews, who spoke Aramaic. So the question is to what exit do we find Persian words in the Talmud. The answer is we're still counting them because we have better and better access to manuscripts all the time but the number is not gigantic, something in the vicinity of 350, 400. Now this is far less than the other rabbinic example from the land of Israel, where we have thousands of Greek words that entered into [inaudible] sources, into the Palestinian Talmud, which I referred to, but nevertheless, there's something we need to take into account. In this region, it's not simply the Talmud was written in Aramaic and people liked speaking Aramaic, but there are very ancient roots to Aramaic. So the point that Pahlavi, which is the script in which Middle Persian was written, contains many Aramaic looking words which were pronounced in Persian. These are referred to as ideograms usually. It's a dominant force and, therefore, although only about 350 lone words do appear in the Talmud, this is somewhat amazing given the kind of centrality of Aramaic. We do have evidence and I discuss this in the book that the rabbis were able to speak Persian. They even pun at times in Persian, which reflects a certain facility with the language to be able to make jokes in that language and, therefore, although Persians and Jews spoke normally different languages, they still were able to interact and some of those interactions appear in the form of lone words in Talmudic Aramaic. [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] Correct. [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] Yes, yeah, this seems to be the case. Yes? I'll call on my aunt and then-- [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] So this is an interesting question. For one the specific question, I'll just repeat it for those who can't hear. Is the direction of potential influence only from Zoroastrianism to Judaism or may be, I'm sorry, from Judaism to Zoroastrianism, or did maybe perhaps rabbis and Jews teach or offer things to Zoroastrians? First of all we need to think about to what extent can minority cultures affect majority cultures. At first blush we would think not very much, what it means to be a minority is that you don't have great influence. But if you think about even examples of the United States of America, let's talk about music, I mean the influence of music that developed in the African-American community has been dominant although, you know, you're dealing with a minority culture. So, therefore, it certainly is possible to elements of Judaism influenced Zoroastrianism. That said, there is not a lot of evidence. They aren't that many sources that refer specifically to Judaism as a source of ideas. Most of the times that Judaism comes up is as a theological opponent. Basically, Judaism represents before the Islamic conquest, monotheism, the monotheistic faith and, therefore, they're constantly a [inaudible] partner with Zoroastrian dualists. Yes. [ Inaudible Audience Question ] Yes. Thank you for that question. I wasn't able to refer to that in this talk but that, in fact, to me is one of the most interesting things that, in fact, there does seem to be a certain structural or maybe we'll even call it scholastic similarity between the Talmud and a certain type of Persian literature of that time known as the Zend. The Zend, just like the Talmud, was a kind of mixture of sources in the sense that it's a translation and commentary on the Avesta. The Avesta was, you know, the ancient Zoroastrian scriptures as it were, and within that Zend, which was composed more or less in the Sasanian period, you find the types of debates that strike someone who studies Talmud most of the day is very familiar. There are conceptual debates, dialectical, a dialectical style, some of the even topics are similar, topics relating to purity, the impurity of corpses, how to imagine the movement of impurity in three-dimensional space, and even the type of combativeness that you get in scholastic cultures is there as well, so yes, that's definitely an element that's significant here. Yes. [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] So I mean whenever you translate words into English, something is lost. And in terms of purgatory, the original, which many of the Jews here might know, and even beyond because it's entered English, is Gehinnom, Gehinnam, or Gehenna, which I think would appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. That is a type of hell-- [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] Yes. Thank you. So that's what they were referring to there. In terms of the word Iran, Iran is a fascinating-- [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] Yes, it's a convenient translation but you're right, I should be-- [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] So it could be I was speaking that day too much to my Italian friend who's a Dante scholar but I'll in the future, future slides I'll correct that. [Inaudible] Yes, yes. No. You're correct. [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] So I want to say something about the term Iran. The term Iran never appears in the Talmud. When they refer to anyone who speaks in Iranian language, they always refer to Persians even when it's clearly not referring to Persians but Parthians. For example, when that rabbi, Rabbi Rabban Gamliel is praising the Persians, he's really praising the Persians that he knew in power, probably the Parthians. And yet the term Iran is very significant. The way I use it and I take pains to describe this at the beginning of the book because it's a political, you know, minefield is and we even see this use in [inaudible] inscriptions is that Iran is a much broader term geographically and linguistically than Persia. Iran refers to ultimately Iranian lands, which stretch from Central Asia, Mesopotamia of course, the Persian Gulf, et cetera, et cetera, and also refers to many languages that are Iranian languages, which is an Indo-European or specifically an Indo-Iranian language. This includes Persians, what Americans refer to as Farsi, incorrectly I should add, and it refers to Sogdian and Parthian and all kinds of languages that are part of this family. I use the term Iran because I wanted to capture this larger, this larger meaning, which would include for example Mesopotamia and would refer to different languages. I won't go into the politics here but if you study Iranian history, especially during the 20th century, and nationalism, so the term Iran and Persia are very significant, have different colorings, but I sort of wanted to avoid that as much as possible, at least in the context of this book. Do we have time for more questions? [ Inaudible Audience Question ] No, not at all. I think I would use the co-opted or even bastardize the term. The term Arian [phonetic] is a linguistic, originally is a linguistic category. The Achaemenids and Sasanians referred to themselves and the region as Aryan, which basically Aryan. I don't know that much about the Nazi history but they basically, the Nazis took this term, which is really just a technical term for a linguistic and cultural group of civilizations and they used it to as a term or a racist term to refer to a master race, that the true master race was the Aryan race. Now of course German is an Aryanian language, one of the examples that we heard during the tour was the word for daughter for example [inaudible]. You can even see this in English as well that gh in daughter at one point was pronounced in English. So German is an Indo-Aryanian language and it's connected, I'm sorry, to the civilization but the Nazis sort of abused this term and used it racially. Thank you very much. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.