RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESwine press jointly with a pagan at Nehardea.^57 The town of Mata
Mehasia near Sura, and a center of Rabbinic scholarship, had a mixed
Jewish and pagan population in the fifth century. By the middle of the
seventh century Mata Mehasia was entirely Jewish, although elsewhere
Jews were still selling wine to Christians in the 670s.^58
One of the best descriptions of intercommunal segregation at the
end of the Sasanian period occurs in the legend of 'Abd al-MasiQ..
The story is placed at Sinjar where, as a boy before his conversion to
Christianity, Ashir had been put in charge of his father's sheep grazing
outside the town. Every day at noon the Christian and Magian shep-
herd boys would gather at a certain cistern or well for the midday
meal, where they sat and ate in separate groups. Ashir was forced to
sit and eat alone because the Christian shepherd boys drove him away
and refused to let him eat with them.^59
COMMUNAL CONFLICT: JEWS AND MAGIANS
Built-in sources of conflict provided by mutually offensive rituals
and religiously sanctioned social customs served to increase the social
distance between communal groups. The existence of such differences
tended to be emphasized by religious leaders whose position depended
on the recognition of such differences by their followers. Magians
were offended by Jewish practices such as ritual bathing and ablutions
in warm water,60 burial,61 circumcision, the ritual slaughter of clean
animals, and by the way Jews normally considered snakes and other
creeping things to be ritually clean.^62 For Magians, Jews were a source
of impurity and corruption in the world.^63 Jews were apparently the
first to call Magians gabrs (A.}.64 Such conflicts did not occur between
57 Ibid., p. 125.
58 Chabot, Synodicon, pp. 225, 489; Neusner, History, pp. 21, 23.
59 Peeters, "'Abd al-Masih," pp. 295-96.
60 Rodkinson, Talmud, I, "Sabbath," 41; idem, n, "Sabbath," 352; idem, VII, "Moed
Katan," 39, "Succah," 33.
61 Ibid., XV, "Sanhedrin," 142-43.
62 Grayzel, History, p. 223; Neusner, History, p. 206. Newman (Agricultural Life,
p. 10) argues that none of these differences caused Jews inconvenience in the third
century.
63 De Menasce, Dinkart, pp. 176,206.
64 Rodkinson, Talmud, V, "Pesachim," 235. They called a fire-worshipper a Persian
geber (Heb.). Gabra was the usual Aramaic word for "man," but gabr became an
abusive term for Magians used by non-Magians. Gabragiin occurs in a Jewish refutation
of Mazdaeans from the early Islamic period; see D. N. Mackenzie, "An Early Jewish-
Persian Argument," BSOAS 31 (1968),250,260-61.