Playing with Persecution: Parallel Jewish and Christian Memories of Late Antiquity in Early Islamic Iraq

Abstract

Over the course of Late Antiquity, due to the con­ tingencies of imperial support and the gravitational pull of migrations and social networks, some Jewish and Christian communal boundaries formed roughly along imperial limites. Under the Sasanians, Chris­ tians adopted the appellation “Church of the East,” an endonym reflecting their position relative to the Byzantine West; they saw their geographic horizons as fundamentally eastern.1 The Church of the East was regularly sponsored by the Sasanian king, whom its members depicted as a new Constantine and dubbed a new Cyrus.2 Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis, while undoubtedly deeply intertwined socially and intellectu­ ally, nevertheless developed distinct practices and cus­ toms. They imagined themselves as subjects of Roman and Sasanian imperial rule, respectively, whose kings, administrators, and realia they thematized in their re­ spective texts. These communities competed with one