RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESBy the sixth century, Jewish peasants in the Sawad were the tenants
of non-Jewish landlords (dal;aqzn) and may have been adversely af-
fected by changes in crops. The absence of flax from late Sasanian and
early Islamic schedules of agricultural taxes in the Sawad indicates
that it was no longer a very important crop. The increase in tax rates
by the Muslims after the conquest affected the Jewish Aramaean peas-
ants and laborers directly and may have helped to provoke a Messianic
rising by Jewish weavers, carpet makers, and linen bleachers at Falluja
in the 640s.^50
The change in the condition of Jewish peasants in the Sawad of
Kufa was eventually recognized in the late eighth century. According
to the Talmud, creditors could only claim the landed property of the
deceased parents of orphans. But in 787 the leaders of the community
decided to allow debts to be paid out of the movable property of
orphans because most of the people in the districts around Sura and
Pumbaditha had no fields, although those in other places still did.^51
This seems to suggest that in this part of Iraq there was a rural pop-
ulation that did not own the land on which it worked. It also indicates
that elsewhere Jewish peasants owned their land. Although Jews did
not abandon agricultural occupations in the early Islamic period, Ja~i~,
in a typical stereotype, says that they tended to be dyers, tanners,
barbers, butchers, and tinkers. 52
THE FORMATION OF THE RABBINIC COMMUNITY
Rabbinic Judaism took shape among this population in the Sasanian
period. It was strongest in the region of concentrated settlement in
central Iraq where its development reflected the social context of the
local population. The religious scholars who produced the Talmud
were engaged in organizing communal institutions and in spreading
and enforcing a distinctive way of life based on the observance of their
own system of religious law. The observance of ritual purity, weekly
congregational worship, and the calendar of fasts and festivals served
to reinforce a personal identity and to enhance group feeling. The
communal ideal is reflected in the tradition that a scholar ought only
to reside in a city where there are "five persons to execute what the
court decides; a treasury of charity (which is collected by two and
so Guidi, Chronica Minora I, I, 33; Il, 27-28.
SI J. Mann, "Responsa," pp. 310-11.
52 Pellat, fa!?i?-, p. 87.