178 | CHAPTER 6
knowledge.^68 In all this Boyarin sees a symptom of the impasse experienced
in Greek Christianity too, as regards the possibility (still accepted by the ear-
lier Palestinian Talmud) of adjudicating between different versions of the
truth, and attaining unity of mind. Once that Nicaean aspiration was aban-
doned—to look on the bright side—the community was less likely to split
over doctrine, and might allow pluralism of practice as well.^69
Despite these similarities of spiritual and intellectual experience, there
was a fundamental mistrust between Jews and Christians, which usually pre-
vented productive conversations between their scholarly representatives.
They belonged to the same First Millennium exegetical culture; yet their par-
allel and chronologically close rereadings of the Jewish Bible, respectively
through the Mishnah’s law and ritual and the New Testament’s proclamation
of faith,^70 set them at odds. The coming of Islam introduced another perspec-
tive. Already in the later suras of the Qurʾān there is marked hostility to both
Jews and Christians; but there is also throughout the text recognition that
the new revelation follows and reinforces the older ones, while correcting
corruptions introduced by their exegetes. Not only is the Qurʾān full of allu-
sions to Torah and Gospel, but the role of monks and rabbis is acknowl-
edged, albeit at times critically: “They have taken their rabbis and monks as
lords apart from God.”^71 One senses, though, that the Jews were more of a
presence to Muhammad. The Qurʾān, like the Torah but not the Christian
Bible, is full of law; and in its pronouncements the hand of the rabbis may on
occasion be discerned.^72
The establishment of the Caliphate united most of the world’s Jews under
one government more tolerant than East Rome had become by the seventh
century. It offered the rabbis a chance to impose the moral hegemony of their
new Talmudic orthodoxy from Central Asia to the setting sun—not implau-
sibly, given the need to present a single front to the new ruler, his faith, and
his tax collectors. To the Pumbedita and Sūraʾ academies (yeshivot), which
moved to Baghdad in the course of the later ninth and tenth centuries, Jews
68 The best rabbi was the one who could devise most arguments for a manifestly absurd position:
R. Kalmin, “The formation and character of the Babylonian Talmud,” in Katz (ed.), Cambridge history of
Judaism 4 [6:51] 872; and cf. D. Kraemer, Reading the rabbis (New york 1996) 60–70.
69 D. Boyarin, Border lines: The partition of Judaeo- Christianity (Philadelphia 2004) 151–201; id.,
in Goldhill (ed.), End of dialogue [6:67] 226–39; id. [6:61], in Fonrobert and Jaffee (eds), Talmud and
rabbinic literature [6:58] 341, 349, 358. Cf. Kraemer, Reading the rabbis [6:68] 71–85 (pluralism of prac-
tice); C. Batsch, “Le(s) corpus rabbinique(s): Questions de clôture,” Cahiers Glotz 21 (2010) 359–70
(anarchic formation of rabbinic literature); A. Becker, “The comparative study of “scholasticism” in late
antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians,” AJS review 34 (2010) 91–113.
70 G. G. Stroumsa (tr. S. Emanuel), The end of sacrifice (Chicago 2009) 47–48.
71 Qurʾān 5.82; 9.31 (whence the quotation, tr. A. Jones), 34.
72 Cf. R. Leicht, “The Qurʾanic commandment of writing down loan agreements (Q 2:282)—Per-
spectives of a comparison with rabbinical law,” in A. Neuwirth and others (eds), The Qurʾān in context
(Leiden 2010) 593–614.