The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the third through sixth centuries CE, by rabbis living under Sasanian Persian rule in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. What kind of society did these rabbis inhabit? What effect did that society have on important rabbinic texts?
In this book Richard Kalmin offers a thorough reexamination of rabbinic culture of late antique Babylonia. He shows how this culture was shaped in part by Persia on the one hand, and by Roman Palestine on the other. The mid fourth century CE in Jewish Babylonia was a period of particularly intense...