234 A History of Judaism
Babylonian community in the last centuries of the Second Temple,
although there were close contacts with Judaea through pilgrimage to
Jerusalem. Herod made use of Babylonians to garrison part of Batanaea
on the pilgrimage route, and he appointed a Babylonian to the position
of High Priest at the beginning of his rule. Unlike their fellow Jews in
Adiabene, further north in Mesopotamia, the Babylonians do not seem
to have participated in the war to defend the Temple in Jerusalem,
although they may have been caught up in the diaspora revolt of 115 to
117, which broke out as the emperor Trajan extended Roman military
power perilously close during his campaigns to the east. Left in peace by
the Parthian state, they were also generally tolerated by the Sasanians
after the mid- 220s, despite the prominence of Zoroastrian magi within
the regime and despite occasional attempts by the state to extirpate non-
Zoroastrian religions, as recorded in an inscription from the late third
century set up on the Ka’ ba- yi Zardusht by the High Priest Kartir:
And in kingdom after kingdom, and place after place throughout the
whole empire, the services of Ohrmazd and the gods became superior ...
And Jews and Buddhist Sramans and Brahmins ... and Nasoreans and
Christians and Maktak and Zandiks in the empire became smitten.^6
As Kartir’s inscription indicated, Jews were not the only religious
minority within the state. The political leader of the Jewish community,
styled resh galuta (‘exilarch’) in the rabbinic texts, was entrusted by the
state with considerable authority from the third century down into the
Islamic period. He had the right to appoint judges in both civil and
criminal cases when Jews were involved; in return, the Jews recognized
the authority of the Sasanian state in a fashion quite different from their
opposition to the ‘wicked kingdom’ of Rome. Jews seemed to have fared
much better under the Sasanians than their Christian neighbours, whose
religious affiliation suggested too much sympathy with the Roman
enemy. Nonetheless, there is evidence of a drastic deterioration in the
condition of the Jews in the sixth century, and persecutions were suffi-
cient for the Jews of Babylonia to embrace with enthusiasm the Islamic
conquest of the seventh century.
Under the Arab caliphate, and a revival of the secular authority of the
Jewish exilarch under Islamic rule, the Jews of what was now known as
Iraq flourished, despite occasional discrimination against Jews along
with other dhimmis. Inevitably affected by the vagaries of the political
fortunes of different Islamic dynasties, so that to Benjamin of Tudela the
Baghdad community in the twelfth century seemed to be in decline, they