The World of The Babylonian Talmud
When you open a page of the Babylonian Talmud, it is easy to forget that this text was written inside a very real world. Not an abstract world of ideas alone, but a living empire: with borders, taxes, a state religion, an economy, fears, neighbours, and power relations. The Babylonian Talmud was not created in a vacuum. It was written at the heart of the Sasanian Empire, one of the strongest and most organised empires of Late Antiquity, and that world is always present in the background, even when it is not explicitly mentioned. From the third century onward, the Jewish world was divided into two completely different political spaces. The Euphrates River became a sharp border between Rome in the west and Persia in the east. The Land of Israel was under Roman–Byzantine rule, while Babylonia was part of the Sasanian Empire. This was not a small cultural difference, but a deep political divide. Jews in Babylonia and Jews in the Land of Israel lived under different laws, different forms of...