For at least four centuries, the intellectual center of rabbinic Judaism was located in the Sasanian empire, a pre-Islamic Persian kingdom that included Mesopotamia, home to a vast Jewish population and its flourishing yeshivas. Yet despite the fact that these Jews produced the Babylonian Talmud, several other works, and numerous inscriptions, surprisingly little is known to scholars about how they related to the state that ruled over them. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein reviews a new work by Simcha Gross that attempts to shed light on the subject:

Previously, scholars viewed the Babylonian Jewish community as largely independent, autonomous, and tolerated in the empire. The ruling Sasanians and the local political institutions were seen as remote, operating in the background but not really influencing Jews, who lived at some degree of social and political remove from their neighbors and overlords. Gross rejects this in favor of “a more immanent and integrationist model of Sasanian rule, which Jews could not avoid, and within and against which they positioned and defined themselves.”

The older model of a remote and largely tolerant empire emerged in part due to the relatively few references to the Sasanian court in the Talmud and the fact that when talmudic sources portray the Persian kings, they paint favorable, sympathetic pictures of them.

Likewise, the absence of many reports about persecution, violence, and martyrdom suggested to earlier scholars that Babylonian Jewry was not oppressed. When friction did occur, it was assumed that this was the work of fanatical Zoroastrian priests rather than the fault of the Sasanian kings. Gross is skeptical of this irenic picture, and for good reason.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.