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R. Mersharsheya told his sons: Better to sit on the dung heap of Matta Mahsya than in the palaces of Pumbedita.1

Life in Babylon

The seeds of the Talmud were sown long before it was dreamt of, in 586 bce. That was when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar invaded ancient Israel, destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and resettled its population in his kingdom. Amongst them was the prophet Jeremiah who advised the uprooted families to ‘Build houses and dwell in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit … and seek the peace of the city’.2

The forced exile didn’t last long. Less than fifty years later the Babylonian Empire had fallen, wiped out by Cyrus the Great, king of Persia. But although Cyrus issued a decree allowing Nebuchadnezzar’s captive nations to return home, not all the exiled Jews did. Babylon, one of the world’s leading cities, with international trade links, fabulous architecture and the latest technology offered a far more sophisticated lifestyle and much greater opportunity than the provincial backwater they now considered Jerusalem to be.

No longer exiles, the émigrés sank their roots deep into Babylonian soil. Any guilt they may have felt at being seduced from their divinely bestowed homeland to a foreign, heathen capital was cancelled out by their pride in living in the land where Abraham had been born. Babylon was not Egypt, Moses hadn’t told them they couldn’t live there.3

The Jews remained in Babylon for thousands of years, a handful still remain today. Empires came and went. Alexander the Great conquered it, establishing his capital in the famed city. He died there in 323 bce, after drinking a bowlful of suspect wine in the palace that Nebuchadnezzar had built nearly three centuries earlier.

Alexander’s death marked the beginning of Babylon’s decline. A succession of warlords and invaders fought over it, gradually emptying the city of its population. Its once-famed ziggurats fell into desolation and ruin, its hanging gardens throttled with weeds. Eventually Babylon became as much of a cultural byway as the land from which the ancestors of its Jews had first hailed. Today it is a ruin, close to Baghdad, in Iraq.

The mists of time have concealed ancient Babylon’s Jews from view. But a second wave of immigration took place from the Holy Land in 135 ce. The Roman occupiers had brought about the second destruction of the Temple sixty years earlier. Now they had savagely put down a revolt led by Shimon bar Kochba; an uprising which for three short years had kept the might of Rome at bay. When Bar Kochba’s forces could hold out no longer, Roman retribution was harsh and vicious. Judea, as the Romans called Israel, was in tatters. Those who had the resources to leave did. Many of them went to Babylon. It is from this time on that Babylon’s Jews became more visible on the historical stage.

In those days the ruling power in Babylon was the Parthian Empire. The Parthians, who hailed from Iran, to the East, had driven out the warlords who had squabbled over the territory after Alexander the Great’s death, nearly half a millennium earlier.

The exilarch

The Parthian Empire covered over a vast area, encompassing almost all of modern Syria, Iraq and Iran. Their approach to government was fairly hands off; they made no great demands of their subjects and delegated administrative power to semi-autonomous regions, run by local dynasties. One such dynasty was that of the exilarch, a hereditary Jewish leader who claimed descent from King David.

According to a letter written in the tenth century by a Jewish religious leader, Sherira Gaon, to a correspondent in the North African city of Kairouan, the first exilarch had been the biblical king, Jehoachin of Judah. He had been taken into exile in the first wave of captives whom Nebuchadnezzar had transported to Babylon, ten years before he destroyed the Temple.

Sherira’s letter is the source for much of our information about the early Babylonian community.4 Of course a letter written fifteen hundred years after the event, even one ascribed to a premier rabbinic authority, is not the same as evidence from a contemporary source. The earliest evidence we have of an exilarch comes from the fourth century ce,5 long after Jehoachin’s time. The problem is that, unlike the Jewish community in Israel during Talmudic times, the history of which is well attested in archaeology and Roman literature, the only major source of information about the Jewish Babylonian community in the same period is the Babylonian Talmud itself.6 As Seth Schwartz points out, nearly everything we know about the historical environment of the Talmud must be wrested from the Talmud itself; we only know what the Talmud tells us and we have very little other historical context to set it against.7 Sources such as Sherira’s letter do not constitute hard evidence; as Ivan Marcus writes, medieval chroniclers were not historians, the facts they chose to recount, and the way they presented them, were intended only to support their own theological or cultural view, not to provide an objective reality.8

Jehoachin may not have had the title Exilarch but he was an ex-king and would have been held in high regard by those who were exiled with him. In 1939 archaeologists found cuneiform tablets listing the rations of oil and barley given to captives in Babylon.9 Jehoachin, king of the Land of Judah is listed as one of the recipients. He almost certainly retained his personal authority and perhaps he had some degree of autonomous power over his former subjects. Whether this authority was handed down through his descendants is harder to know. The origins of the exilarchy are just as likely to lie in power struggles over the years between wealthy families who had grown rich in the silk trade.

Jehoachin was a descendant of King David, whose monarchy it was believed would one day be re-established. The exilarchs also claimed David descent. This gave them quasi-royal status. They enjoyed all the trappings of power and wealth, including an armed force that allowed them to enforce their will. The exilarch was answerable to the emperor and was responsible for the good governance and administration of the communities under his control. His powers, which varied depending on who was running the Empire at any particular time, would have included the right to appoint judges, impose capital punishment and collect taxes. He could also appoint an agoranomos, an overseer who took responsibility for the smooth functioning of the markets, including regulating weights and measures and controlling prices. There are accounts in the Talmud of measures to prevent overcharging or deceptive practices by traders.10

The distance from Israel to Babylon is a little over five hundred miles. Even in those days it was a relatively easy journey. There had always been contacts between the Jewish communities in the two countries, dating back to Temple times when the courts in Israel despatched messengers to announce the sighting of a new moon and the festival calendar for the coming months.11 From at least the first century bce young scholars would travel from Babylon to study in the Land of Israel; indeed according to legend it was from Babylon that Hillel, the first Nasi, had originally hailed. Seeking to establish a new life for himself as a scholar in Israel but too poor to enrol in the study house, the newly arrived Hillel had climbed onto the roof and listened to the lectures through the skylight, shivering in a snowstorm until the outline of his freezing body cast a shadow inside, and he was brought down to thaw out.12

The founding of the academy in Nehardea

Sherira Gaon’s letter also tells us that the exiled king Jehoachin founded the first school for religious study in Babylon, in the town of Nehardea, the largest of the Jewish settlements. According to Sherira, Jehoachin and the prophets who had been exiled with him had built the academy using clay and stone that they had brought from the Jerusalem Temple. Again we have to take this with a pinch of salt; it’s not likely that a throng of captives in the sixth century bce were able to transport building materials with them. The first we hear of Nehardea is when the Mishnah mentions Rabbi Akiva travelling there to announce the onset of a leap year. This would have been around the end of the first century ce and it’s the earliest record of any academy in Babylon.

Akiva was a seasoned traveller but it couldn’t have been an easy trip for him. When he arrived in Nehardea he was approached by a certain Nehemia of Bet Deli who complained that he had been unable to travel in the opposite direction because the country was ‘swarming with troops’.13 Akiva had clearly considered that showing his support for the academy in Nehardea was worth the hazards of the journey.

Early in the third century ce an intense, young, lanky scholar arrived from the Land of Israel. Like Hillel he had been born in Babylon, had gone to Israel to study and had made a name for himself. Now he was returning home. His name was Abba; his friends gave him the nickname Abba Arikha, or tall Abba, but everyone knew him as Rav. Rav was a title, an honorific which acknowledged his intellectual prowess and depth of learning. It corresponded to the title Rabbi, used in Israel.14 Just as Judah the Nasi was known simply as Rabbi, Rav was considered to be so distinguished that no name was necessary; all he needed was the title.

When Rav arrived in Nehardea he found a flourishing academy.15 He worked there as an interpreter and was appointed market commissioner by the exilarch, but he soon outgrew the job. Leaving Nehardea he founded a new academy further down the Euphrates, at Sura. From that time on the Nehardean and Suran academies would compete with each other for prestige.

The head of the Nehardean academy, Shmuel, was esteemed as highly as Rav and they frequently differed on matters of law. Their disagreements sharpened the acuity of debate between the two academies. Prior to Rav’s arrival the Babylonian students had considered their educational level inferior to that of their counterparts in Israel. Now the intellectual rivalry between Nehardea and Sura boosted their self esteem, and not just in matters of learning. Rav himself pointed out to his students the difference between Babylon and the other major Jewish diaspora centres: ‘Babylon is healthy; Mesene is dead; Media is sick, and Elam is dying’.16

Babylon’s flourishing reputation probably contributed to the new wave of immigrants who arrived from Israel early in the third century. They left their homeland due to the ongoing economic and political difficulties of life under Roman occupation, hoping to make a fresh start elsewhere. A message sent around this time from Israel to the Jewish authorities in Babylon asked them to ‘take care of the sons of the poor, for the Torah proceeds from them’.17 Since the Torah was regarded as emanating from Zion, another name for Jerusalem, the sons of the poor must have been immigrants who were on their way to Babylon to carve out a new life for themselves.18

In the year 226 the Parthian Empire fell, brought to its knees by dynastic struggles. The coup de grâce was delivered by the Sassenid warlord Ardeshir who defeated the last Parthian king, Artabanus. Babylon now became part of the Sassenid Empire.

The rabbinic scholars in Babylon were keenly aware of the change in regime. Not only did the Sassenids introduce a far more centralized form of government than their predecessors, limiting the independence of the exilarch, but two developments in particular upset the smooth course of their lives. First, the new dynasty entered into a prolonged conflict with the Roman Empire, sparking a series of battles that lasted for more than a century. Major devastation ensued, including the destruction of the city of Nehardea and the slaughter of twelve thousand Jews in Cappadocia, in what is now central Turkey.

The other disruptive factor was the rise of the Zoroastrian religion, which the Sassanians encouraged as a means of consolidating power across their new, vast empire. Relations between the Zoroastrian Magi and the many diverse ethnic communities in the Sassanian Empire would fluctuate between peaceable and intolerable over the coming centuries. Fire, earth and water have a special sanctity in the Zoroastrian religion and their priests, or haberim, were zealous in proscribing their use for secular purposes. The Talmud recounts stories of fire-priests forbidding the lighting of fires or seizing candles from Jewish homes, even if these were only being used for domestic purposes. There were even tales of corpses exhumed from their graves since dead bodies were deemed to violate the sanctity of the ground.19

Nevertheless, as Isaiah Gafni points out,20 these troublesome incidents in no way compared to the wholesale persecutions taking place in Roman Palestine. With the exception of the frenzied Kirdid, a third-century Zoroastrian priest who was over-zealous in imposing his faith’s strictures on the minority populations, relations between the Sassanians and their non-Zoroastrian subjects, seem to have been relatively benign. Indeed the Talmud recounts amicable contacts between leading Jewish rabbis and the Sassanian rulers, particularly between Shmuel and King Shapur I,21 and although these accounts may be exaggerated they do suggest a general atmosphere of political and religious tolerance. Things would change with the ascent of King Yazdegerd II in the middle of the fifth century.

Land and rivers

The Jewish settlements in Babylon were located in an area bordered by the Rivers Euphrates and Tigris, the mythical site of the Garden of Eden. Genesis identifies one of the four rivers in that utopian land as the Euphrates and an ancient Bible tradition renders another as Tigris.22 The area forms part of the Fertile Crescent, which stretches north from the Persian Gulf, through Iraq to the southern border of Turkey, then turns to follow the Mediterranean coast across Syria, Lebanon and Israel to the Nile Delta and Valley.

The two Babylonian rivers were connected by a network of tributaries and canals. Water flowed in abundance. A statement by Rav in the Talmud suggests that the land was so well irrigated that even when the rains failed its harvests were secure.23

The rivers played an important part in daily life. Dotted with towns along their length, the watercourses functioned as modern highways, transporting people and goods. Inundations could be sudden and unpredictable, rivers might change their course, swallowing up agricultural land,24 there are even instances of barren fields becoming fertile through the sudden deposit of alluvial soils.25 The Talmud discusses questions such as water disputes and the ownership of items washed up by floods.

Most people lived modest lives but owning a small amount of land, typically one or two fields, seems to have been quite common. When a couple married, the husband was obliged to make provision for his wife in the event of his death. The Talmud discusses how a widow is to collect her money in a case when her husband has made out his will in favour of his children from a previous marriage. The solution is for her to distrain upon the children’s landed property, but not upon their chattels. This could only work if most people owned land; the solution would have been pointless if they didn’t.

The ownership of the little land they had was not absolute. One of the two principal taxes that the Sassanian rulers levied on their subjects was the taska, a form of ground rent. When they paid the taska people effectively had the right of ownership of their land. If they did not pay they would be evicted.

Owning land doesn’t seem to have been a big deal in most people’s eyes. It appears to have been a completely natural state of affairs. We can see this in context if we compare the Talmud with the Roman law code, Justinian’s Digest or its Sassanian equivalent, the Book of a Thousand Judgements. Only two of the Talmud’s five hundred and thirty chapters deal with questions of land inheritance. The other works each devote more than a third of their content to the same subject.26

Most people who lived off the land were smallholders or tenant farmers, mainly growing dates, grains and rice, or rearing sheep and goats. But even though they lived in the idealized land which gave rise to the myth of the Garden of Eden we shouldn’t picture a pastoral scene in which everyone tilled their own fields, with crops growing in abundance. Poverty seems to have been rife; ‘Ten measures of poverty descended into the world, nine of them were taken by Babylon’.27

Still, despite the poverty it was possible to advance economically. Not everyone farmed a smallholding. The Talmud frequently introduces us to tanners, weavers, tailors, cobblers, blood letters and even camel drivers, although the latter seem to have been less prominent than in Israel; the camel which, in the gospels, cannot pass through the eye of a needle, is an elephant in the Babylonian Talmud’s proverbs.28

Not everyone was poor. Large estates were owned by families who had been settled in the area for generations, long before the tide of immigrants began to swell. The family of the exilarch owned tremendous estates, much of which they rented out to tenants. The trading city of Mahoza, situated on a caravan route on the Tigris, in the centre of the area of settlement, was fabled for its good living 29 and its wealth; it was rumoured that whilst in the whole city of Nehardea only twenty four women possessed a golden coronet, eighteen such owners could be found in a single alley in Mahoza.30

Unlike their colleagues in Israel, who often eked out a living as workmen or artisans, many of the scholars in Babylon were of independent means, typically owning larger than average land holdings. Not having to worry too much about earning a living gave them the freedom to study, but it could also lead to divisions with working people. The rabbinic elite was only a small segment of the overall population.31 Richard Kalmin argues that the Babylonian scholars, at least in the early part of the Talmudic period, were much more detached from the general population than their counterparts in Israel, who were integrated into the general community.32 He puts this down to differences between Persian and Roman society, but wealth would have played a part as well. Kalmin suggests that Babylonian scholars were internally focused, avoiding contact and marriage with non-rabbinic Jews, and reluctant to admit them into the scholarly environment. He likens them to monks who ‘managed to be both dissociated from and part of the world, detached from society in certain contexts and capable of exercising a leadership role in others’.33

But at least the rabbis seem to have been aware of their aloofness. In a discussion about why so few scholars produced children who became learned men we find four different but equally revealing opinions. Rav Yosef said it was so that the scholarly classes could not claim to have a hereditary right to the Torah. Rav Shisha said it was so that scholars would not have an arrogant attitude towards the community. Mar Zutra said it was because they acted high-handedly against ordinary folk, whilst Rav Ashi said it was because they called people asses.34

Standoffish they may have been but the Babylonian rabbis didn’t live in a cultural vacuum. They didn’t just study religion and law. Ancient Babylon was renowned for its mathematical and astronomical knowledge and its complex systems of magic and demonology. The Talmud is replete with passages on these subjects, from calculations of the size of the earth and the thickness of the sky 35 to legends about demons 36 and medicinal cures.37 Although mention of mythical creatures can be found in many branches of ancient Jewish literature, the Babylonian Talmud, under the influence of the local culture, takes a particular interest in them.38

We also find formulae for spells and incantations in the Talmud, the wording of which is often similar to the inscriptions found on ‘magic bowls’, a uniquely Babylonian practice in which earthenware vessels inscribed with enchantments were placed in the earth to guard against demons. The similarity of language suggests that Jews were involved in the production of these bowls, perhaps for their own use, or because the local Persian population considered the Jews as particularly skilled in getting rid of demons.39

Zoroastrian superstitions also account for a passage in the Talmud which urges the burying of cut fingernails, or at very least burning them and not simply throwing them away. This must be avoided ‘lest a pregnant woman steps over them and miscarries’.40

But spells and magic, astronomy and mathematics were probably light relief for the Babylonian rabbis. They were known as the ‘condiments of wisdom’,41 tasty appetisers but a bit of a luxury. The real hard work, the essential curriculum in the Babylonian academies, was the detailed analysis of the minutiae of the law. Everything else was simply icing on the cake.

Notes

1 Horayot 12a.

2 Jeremiah 29.5–7.

3 Deuteronomy 17.16, 28.68.

4 Lewin, 1921. Gafni, 1986 argues for the existence of some sort of chronological record that was available to Sherira but it seems clear that much of the historical narrative in the Letter is derived from Talmudic anecdotes and independent, unverifiable traditions.

5 J. Ketubot. 12.3, 35a.

6 Gafni, 2006.

7 Schwartz, 2007. Yaakov Ellman makes a similar point – ‘our data is restricted to the Bavli (=Babylonian Talmud) … and we are thus at the mercy of the redactors of that compilation and the rabbinic classes they represent’, Ellman, 2007b, p. 190.

8 Marcus, 1982.

9 Mélanges syriens offerts à monsieur René Dussaud: secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Ernst F. Weidner, Geuthner, Paris, 1939, II.

10 See, for example, Bava Metzia 60a–b, 61b.

11 M. Rosh Hashanah 2.1–4.