In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

By the Rivers of Babylon

Flower-beds and fountains might have seemed an incongruous setting for mass slaughter. Nevertheless, if the stories told of the execution of Mazdak and his followers were true, they had met with their fate in a peculiarly fitting venue for an assertion of royal power. In a land such as Mesopotamia—where sand was often borne on howling winds, and where only relentless toil kept the desert from smothering the fields—there was no more precious perk of majesty than a walled and well-tended park. The ancient kings of Persia had termed such a garden a paradaida—a “paradise.” When Khusrow dallied in arbours “fresh with the beauty of fruit trees, vines and green cypresses,”⁷³ or wandered past paddocks boasting “boundless numbers of ostriches, antelopes, wild asses, peacocks and pheasants,”⁷⁴ or rode with the lords and ladies of his court through his hunting grounds in pursuit of “lions and tigers of huge size,”⁷⁵ he was the heir to traditions more ancient than he knew.

Indeed, there were some among his subjects who claimed that the horticultural traditions of the region stretched all the way back to the beginning of time itself. Beyond the wall that encircled the blossom-scented air of the royal gardens, amid the immense agglomeration of settlements that sprawled for miles along the banks of the Tigris, there lived people who believed that once, shortly after the making of the heavens and the earth, all of Ctesiphon, and far beyond it, had been a paradise. “And the Lord God,” it was recorded in their scriptures, “planted a garden in Eden, in the east.”⁷⁶ Prior to that, under cover of a mist such as still often rose up from the Tigris, He had taken mud, and fashioned out of it, not bricks, not a city, but a man. The first man who had ever lived, in fact: “Adam,” which meant, in the language of the people who told the story, “Earth.”

The Jews, however, were not natives of Mesopotamia. Rather, they traced both their name and their origins back to a vanished kingdom—Judah—that had lain just inland from the Mediterranean Sea, some five hundred miles to the west. A fair distance, it might be thought—and all the more so because the directest route cut across burning and near-impassable sand. However, by taking a slightly longer course, along the arc of a well-watered crescent—northwards from Mesopotamia and then curving back south—it was possible to travel from the banks of the Tigris via a succession of cities, rather than across the open desert, and arrive in Judah within a matter of months. Eleven hundred years before the time of Khusrow, this had proved sufficient to doom the tiny kingdom’s independence. In 586 BC, a vast Mesopotamian army had descended upon its capital, a temple-topped city named Jerusalem, and put it to the torch. The wretched kingdom’s elite had been carted off into exile. Their god—who was believed by the Jews not only to have chosen them as the objects of his especial favour, but also to have been the creator of the entire universe—seemed to have abandoned them for good.

A thousand years on, however, and it was not the Jews who had vanished from Mesopotamia, but the very memory of the conquerors who had first hauled them there in chains. Preserved in the Jewish scriptures were the visions of a man named Daniel, said to have been one of the original exiles from Jerusalem. In a dream, he had seen a tempestuous sea, out of which had emerged “four great beasts.”⁷⁷ These monsters, according to an angel who interpreted the dream for the prophet, were four great kingdoms that were destined to inherit the earth, until, at the end of time, “the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, for ever and ever.”⁷⁸ That Daniel’s vision had been a true one, and that the course of history was indeed to be interpreted as a succession of mighty empires, each one consigning its predecessor to oblivion, was more manifest in Mesopotamia, perhaps, than anywhere else on earth: for the land was an entire graveyard of abandoned capitals. Its two great rivers, rather than flowing obediently within their banks, were like restless serpents, shaking their coils with such sporadic violence that entire cities were left high and dry, or else submerged and returned to mud. The Jews of Ctesiphon, when they wandered along the banks of the Tigris, could see the shells of abandoned buildings, partly dissolved by the turbid waters: remnants of Veh-Ardashir, the first capital raised by the House of Sasan and built according to a perfectly circular plan, but which, upon an abrupt and calamitous shifting of the river’s course, had been sliced in two. In turn, of course, beyond Veh-Ardashir, there loomed the sand-throttled ruins of Seleucia, its harbour choked by silt and reeds; and beyond them, some forty miles across the mud steppes, an even more battered monument to human vanity, a place that was now “nothing more than mounds and stones and decay” but once, long before, had been the greatest city in the world.⁷⁹ Abandoned by the Euphrates, emptied of its population and despoiled of its brickwork, the name of the ruin was barely to be heard now on people’s lips. The Jews, however, did speak it. They had not forgotten the vanished city, nor the glamour and the terror of its reputation. They still remembered Babylon.

As well they might have done—for it was a king of Babylon who had burned their capital, enslaved their ancestors, and first embodied for the Jews that peculiar and terrifying intoxication which was the lust to rule all of mankind: “The nations drank of her wine; therefore the nations are mad.”⁸⁰ Conversely, in the ruin of such a city, there had been offered to the Jews a precious reassurance: that there existed no earthly empire so great or overweening that it might not one day be dashed to pieces by their divine protector. All the convulsive rhythms of history, which over time had served to offer now one nation, and now another, the sceptre of the world, bore witness to nothing, in the final reckoning, save the purposes of the One God of the Jews. That was why, in the heartlands of Mesopotamia, it was the Jews themselves who still maintained the sacred habits of their worship, while all the temples of Babylon had “become a heap of ruins, the haunt of jackals, a horror and a hissing, without inhabitant.”⁸¹

Only in a single city—one that lay right on the margins of the one-time Babylonian world, at the uppermost point of the Fertile Crescent’s arc, just beyond the frontier with Rome—did “the ancient faith”⁸² of Mesopotamia continue to flicker: for in Harran, they still worshipped the ancient gods. The landscape beyond its walls was filled with idols: strangely preserved, withered corpses, both animal and human, were wedged into fissures above mountain roads; eerie figures framed by peacock feathers and crescent moons stood guard over desert lakes. The mightiest idol of all, however, and the glory of Harran itself, was a colossal statue of the city’s patron, Sin—the “Lord of the Moon.” Annually, the god’s worshippers would hoist him on their shoulders, carry him from his temple, parade him all around town, and then return him in triumph to his sanctuary on a barge. The rituals of this festival—the akitu—were of a quite staggering antiquity, and had once been practised across Mesopotamia; nor did the priests of Sin, who conducted them with a grave and sombre sense of reverence, ever forget it.⁸³ Yet, in truth, the same obduracy with which the people of Harran clung to their ancient cult served only to emphasise their freakishness. In Mesopotamia, the balance of power had long since swung against any notion that the moon, the sun and the stars might conceivably be deities. The Harranian idols—demonic though they often seemed to nervous visitors—were the merest flotsam, left beached by a retreating tide. The Jews, whose prophets had long foretold the doom of all gods save their own, found a particular vindication in this: “By the purple and linen that rot upon them, you will know that they are not gods; and they will finally be consumed, and be a reproach in the land.”⁸⁴

Nevertheless, for all the mingled scorn and dread with which they cast their backward stare upon the primordial traditions of Mesopotamia, the Jews had never ceased to be fascinated by them. The land that had served the first man and woman as an earthly paradise had also provided humanity with the wellsprings of its learning—a precious legacy from an otherwise vanished world. Just as the Tigris had turned all the grandeur of Veh-Ardashir to mud, a great flood had submerged the whole earth and dissolved all traces of Eden. Had a man named Noah not been given forewarning of the calamity, and built a massive ark, then life itself would have been obliterated. However, not every trace of the world before the Flood had been lost: for Noah’s descendants, digging amid the mud of Mesopotamia, had stumbled across a buried cache of books.⁸⁵ These, when they were deciphered, had been found to contain the wisdom of the earliest generations of men—necromancers who had lived before the Flood. The consequence had been the reputation that had served to grace Mesopotamia ever since—not only among the Jews, but among peoples everywhere—as the land “where the true art of divination first made its appearance.”⁸⁶

Such stories reflected not only the faint aura of the sinister that had always clung to Babylonian learning, but also an ambition on the part of Jewish scholars to lay claim to its inheritance. For a thousand years and more, ever since the first deportation of the people of Judah, they had been in the habit of regarding Mesopotamia as a home away from home. Naturally, they had never entirely conquered their sense of homesickness: Jerusalem, the capital of their God-given homeland, would always represent for them the most sacred place on earth. Nevertheless, it had also long been their conviction that their ultimate origins lay not in the Holy Land but on the banks of the Euphrates. The proof of this could hardly have been a weightier one: for it was to be found in the very first book of the Tanakh, the great compendium of the holiest Jewish scriptures. There, after the stories of Adam, and of Noah, it was recorded how God, ten generations after the Flood, had spoken to a man named Abram: a native of a place called Ur. As to where precisely this mysterious city might have been, there was much dispute; but what all scholars could agree on was that it had stood somewhere in the Land of the Two Rivers.⁸⁷

Abram had not remained in the land of his birth, though. Out of the blue, shortly after his seventy-fifth birthday, he had received a revelation from God. “Go from your country and your kindred, and your father’s house, to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”⁸⁸ A tempting offer, to be sure—and one that had seen Abram duly commit to emigration. His reward had quickly followed. No sooner had Abram arrived in a land named Canaan than he had found himself being graced with a further divine revelation: an assurance that his descendants would inherit Canaan as “an everlasting possession.”⁸⁹ Hence the new sobriquet that the Almighty bestowed on him: “Your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.”⁹⁰ And so, sure enough, it had come to pass: for Abraham had indeed ended up fathering many peoples, with the most prominent of all being the Jews. A glorious pedigree, to be sure. Much had derived from it. Abraham it was, after all, who had handed down to the Jews their sense of themselves as God’s Chosen People. But he had also bequeathed them something more: the title deeds to what had once been Canaan, and now ranked as their Promised Land.

A gift that, coming from the Almighty, could only be for keeps. Here, to the half a million or so Jews settled between the Two Rivers, was a flattering assurance. As they toiled in the fields that bordered the great canals north of Ctesiphon, or squatted cross-legged beside their market stalls, or drove their pack-animals laden with merchandise through the winding and narrow streets of the sprawling capital itself, they could know that they, unlike the teeming millions who lived alongside them in Mesopotamia, were a nation set apart: for they had a homeland granted them of God. This did not mean, by and large, that they actually wished to go and live in their Promised Land. Granted, any Jew who happened to dream of barley would, so their sages had pronounced, be expected to move there straight away^e—but most much preferred the idea of emigration to the reality. In truth, for many centuries now, there had been nothing to prevent the Jews from ending their exile, save only their own partiality to life in a land as fertile, cosmopolitan and prosperous as Mesopotamia. Certainly, the forced captivity imposed on them by their Babylonian masters had not endured for long. A bare four decades or so after the sack of Jerusalem, it had been the turn of Babylon herself to fall. Her captor, in 539 BC, had been none other than Cyrus of Persia, that trail-blazing exponent of global monarchy. The Jews, unsurprisingly, had hailed his achievement in rapturous terms: for not only had Cyrus humbled the hated strumpet-city of Babylon, but he had also granted them permission to return to Jerusalem, and rebuild their annihilated Temple. Yet though many had gratefully taken the Persian king up on his offer, just as many had not. Instead, they and their heirs had remained where they were, and put down such roots in the rich, thick soil of Mesopotamia that not all the savagery and swirl of great power politics, gusting across the landscape of the Near East for a millennium and more, had served to uproot them. Instead, it was upon the descendants of the Jews who had returned to the Holy Land that devastation, over the course of the centuries, had been repeatedly visited: so much so that by the early third century AD, when Ardashir and his Persians had first come clattering into Ctesiphon, it was not Jerusalem and its environs that provided the Jews with their surest heartland, but the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.

This was a development that verged, in the circumstances, on the miraculous. Immigrants to Mesopotamia were rarely in the habit of preserving the memory of their origins for more than a couple of generations, at best. The region had long experience of serving as a melting-pot: for the rich fertility of its soil was not the only source of its prodigious wealth. Lying as it did midway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, between the steppes of Central Asia and the deserts of Arabia, it was incomparably well positioned to serve as the world’s clearing-house. “All that exists in it is brought there,” boasted its Persian masters, “and is for our enjoyment, be it food, or drugs, or perfumes.”⁹¹ The consequence of this could be sampled with a simple stroll through Ctesiphon. Whether in the overflowing bazaars, or in the few streets large enough to cater to carts and livestock, or in the narrow alleyways through which only pedestrians could gingerly pick their way, there was not a language spoken under the sun but it could be heard somewhere in the monstrous city. Yellow-skinned men with slanted eyes, white-skinned men with straw-coloured hair, black-skinned men with flat noses: their peculiar jabberings served to season the fetid air. Yet all, over time, would prove so much mulch; for just as the streets were repeatedly being cleared of their ruts, and houses abandoned to spreading cess-pools, and whole neighbourhoods demolished to make way for new developments, so was the human fabric of Ctesiphon forever being recycled. Memories, like mud-bricks, rarely stood solid there for long. Only the Jews, it seemed, like some timeless landmark fashioned out of granite, stood proof against the process.

But how? Inimitable though their attachment to the distant homeland promised them by God certainly was, it would hardly have been sufficient in itself to prevent them from being digested into the maw of Mesopotamia. Fortunately, however, long previously, when issuing His grant of Canaan to Abraham, the Almighty had foreseen the risk. “This is my covenant which you shall keep, between me and you and your descendants after you: every male among you shall be circumcised.”⁹² Nor had He been content to leave things there. To a subsequent generation, so it was recorded in the Tanakh, He had issued yet further markers of the exceptional status that was theirs as the children of Abraham: never, so He had thundered, were they to eat pork, or any other meat that had not first been drained of its blood, nor were they to fashion “any likeness of anything,”⁹³ nor were they, on any account, to break a whole battery of other commandments, interdictions and prescriptions, which they were never to change or add to one jot. This awesome body of law was called the Torah—“Instruction”—and it gave the Jews, uniquely among the many peoples deported to Babylon, a sense that law derived ultimately, not from any mortal king, or sage, but from God alone. It was this, more than anything else, that had enabled them, throughout the long centuries of their sojourn in Mesopotamia, to preserve their identity as a nation apart. Unlike other, less privileged peoples, they had been brought by God to fathom the essence of what it meant to be human: that it lay not in any aspiration to empire, or liberty, or fame, but rather, and very simply, in being subject to a law.

Which was doubtless, for the Jews of Iranshahr, just as well. The House of Sasan, after all, did not look kindly upon sedition. That most Persian kings were prepared to tolerate the prickly exclusiveness of their Jewish subjects reflected their understanding that it posed their authority, not a threat, but the opposite. The bizarre distinctiveness of the Jews, in a city as teeming and inchoate as Ctesiphon, had come to the imperial bureaucracy almost as a relief: for it rendered them easier to regulate and fleece. All that was required to ensure that these peculiar aliens did not get ideas above their station, and paid their taxes obediently, was the appointment of one of their own as a tame puppet—an “exilarch.” This, ever since the reign of Shapur I, had been the settled policy of the Sasanian monarchy; and it was a measure of just how smoothly it had operated that the attitude of certain kings to the Jews had even, on occasion, stretched to a lukewarm favouritism. One Shahanshah had gone so far as to marry the daughter of an exilarch, and sit her by his side as his queen. Unsurprisingly, then, the Jews tended to regard their Sasanian masters as a cut above other pagans. Even the Persians’ notorious reluctance “to urinate in public”⁹⁴—regarded by everyone else as a laughable foible—met with glowing approval from Jewish moralists. Such a people richly merited obedience. “For they do protect us, after all.”⁹⁵

Yet this compact, like so much else in Iranshahr, had started to crumble during the reign of Peroz. Not every Persian was inclined to mimic the haughty tolerance of royalty. The Zoroastrian priesthood had long viewed the Jews’ obdurate refusal to acknowledge the manifest truths of Ohrmazd as a standing provocation. As what else did it brand them, so the mowbeds demanded to know, if not the spawn of Dahag, that brain-eating, serpent-shouldered fiend? “For it was Dahag who began the composition of the Jewish scriptures, and Dahag who was the teacher of Abraham, the high-priest of the Jews.”⁹⁶ No wonder, then, as the Zoroastrian Church increasingly sought to muscle its way free of royal control, that it should also have looked to purge Iranshahr of such an offensively demonic minority. Already, in the reign of Peroz’s father, the mowbeds had begun to lobby for the policy as a sure-fire way of regaining those portions of their ancient empire that had been lost for good to Alexander: “For only convert to one religion all the nations and races in your empire,” they had advised the Shahanshah, “and the land of the Greeks will also obediently submit to your rule.”⁹⁷ It was Peroz, however, eager to clutch at any straw, who had shown himself most receptive to the argument.⁹⁸ In 467, he had duly sanctioned the execution of leading members of the Jewish elite, including the exilarch. The following year, he had banned the teaching of their scriptures and the practising of their law. In 470, he had abolished the post of exilarch altogether.⁹⁹ The reversal of long-term royal policy could hardly have been any more brutal. For the first time in their millennium-long history, the Jews of Mesopotamia had suffered active persecution. Worse: they had faced abolition as a distinctive people.

Swiftly and surely, however, “the wicked Peroz”¹⁰⁰ had been struck down. He and all his army had been obliterated. The agonies of Iranshahr, so the Jews could reflect with a grim complacency, had served as the verdict of an outraged heaven. Others too, of course, had arrived at much the same conclusion; and among them had been Kavad. The clinging to a discredited policy, just because the dropping of it might offend the mowbeds, was hardly the new Shahanshah’s style; and so it was, it appears, that the ban on the teaching of the Jewish law had been quietly dropped.¹⁰¹ Many Jews, eager to show their gratitude, duly rallied to his cause. In time, they came to play such a prominent role in his armies that Kavad himself, if obliged to fight on a Jewish holy day, had been known to request his adversaries for a temporary truce. Everything, it seemed, was back to normal. The balance that the Jews of Mesopotamia had always sought to strike, between obedience to their overlords and a yearning to be left alone, appeared restored to its customary equilibrium.

Except that the trauma of persecution could not so easily be forgotten. To ban Jews anywhere from studying their scriptures and their laws was, of course, to deliver them a crippling blow; and yet to ban the Jews of Mesopotamia was an act of peculiar vindictiveness. To a supreme degree, they were still, as they had ever been, a “People of the Book.” Scholarship possessed the aura for them of something incomparably glorious: for in Mesopotamia, attentiveness to the word of God, such as came naturally to any Jew, had fused with a robust pride in the region’s glamorous reputation for ancient wisdom, and which could be traced back to the giants who had flourished before the Flood. Tellingly, the Jewish sages who lived in the land of Abraham’s birth had always taken it for granted that the favours granted to their ancestor had been his due, not simply as a man of God, but as a polymath “superior to all others in wisdom.”¹⁰² No surprise, then, that by the time that Ardashir took control of Ctesiphon, Mesopotamia should have come to boast what ranked, by the admiring assent of the Jewish people everywhere, as the two leading centres of scholarship in the world. Sura and Pumpedita lay some hundred miles apart, but were in every other way the mirror image of one another. Both stood on the western bank of the Euphrates, both were largely populated by Jews, and both gloried in the possession of a yeshiva, or “school,” with ambitions to change the world.

It was the self-appointed mission of these two institutions, a bold and extraordinary one, to replicate on earth the very pattern of the heavens: for to understand the Torah properly, so the sages who taught in them believed, was to fathom the deepest and most hidden purposes of God. Naturally, the laws that had been given to their ancestors could never be altered; but what if there were more to them than met the untutored eye? Such was the question to which the sages of Sura and Pumpedita gave an answer quite staggering in its implications. In addition to the written Torah, so they taught, there had also been revealed a secret Torah, never recorded, but passed down instead through the ages by word of mouth, from prophet to prophet, from rabbi to rabbi, and which they in turn, in their schools beside the Euphrates, had inherited and entrusted to memory. This was the same Torah that God Himself, before embarking on the Creation, had made sure to peruse, that the angels studied ceaselessly, and that a mortal, if sufficiently learned, might use to sway demons, to change the weather, or to communicate with the dead. No wonder, then, that any sage who could legitimately lay claim to such an awesome body of wisdom should be hailed by his students as Rabbi—“Master.” No wonder, either, that the sages of Mesopotamia, in the wake of the shock that Peroz had given them, should have realised just how precarious a thing a yeshiva might be, and how very easy to close down. Was it really a safe bet, some of them began to ask, to entrust a treasure as incomparably precious as the unwritten Torah solely to the memories of rabbis?

Not, of course, that they were the only sages to have fretted over such a question. It was a very similar anxiety, ironically enough, that had prompted the mowbeds to put the sayings of Zoroaster for the first time into writing. Now, a couple of decades or so after the death of Peroz, and the rabbis of Mesopotamia were braced for an even more gruelling project of scholarship.¹⁰³ To transcribe those revelations of God that had hitherto only existed inside their heads was certainly no simple matter. Over the course of many years, the great scholars of Sura and Pumpedita had sought to demonstrate to the Jewish people that the demands of the Torah, both written and spoken, could be applied to even the most mundane aspects of day-to-day life: that geese, for instance, should not be permitted to copulate, and that it was wrong to laugh at the overweight, and that migraines could best be cured by pouring the blood of a dead rooster over the scalp. These, and a whole multitude of teachings like them, were not, so the rabbis claimed, additions to the unchanging law of God, but rather clarifications of it; and as such were themselves a part of the Torah. They too, accordingly, would all have to be recorded. Not so much as a single ruling, not a single detail, could be omitted. So it was that the written record of the rabbis’ learning, their talmud, was brought to testify to an apparently puzzling truth. The Torah, which the rabbis attributed to God Himself, and which they claimed had first been revealed to the Jewish people way back in the mists of time, was composed in part of their very own commentaries upon it. Not only their commentaries either. Even the size of their respective penises was held by the sages to merit detailed mention. This, to anyone untutored in the stern disciplines of rabbinical learning, might have appeared a nonsense; and yet the mysteries of God’s law, it went without saying, were hardly such as could be framed by mere mortal logic. Any new insight into the Torah, provided only that it derived from a rabbi with the requisite qualifications, ranked as a revelation direct from the Almighty—no more and no less so than the written Torah itself.

The task that the rabbis of Mesopotamia had set themselves, of transcribing their talmud, would take entire lifetimes to complete. Such a project could hardly be hurried, after all. The sages who trod the dusty streets of Sura and Pumpedita had their gaze fixed unblinkingly upon the dimension of the eternal. The focus of their researches was the entirety of creation, nothing less. They alone, by virtue of their prodigious feats of study, had fathomed the precise configuration of the will of God—and as a consequence, so it seemed to the rabbis, of the past and the future as well. Certainly, it never crossed their minds that there might have been a time when men such as themselves had not existed. The prophets of the Tanakh, the angels, even God Himself—all were recast in their own image, as rabbis. Likewise, in their heroic struggle to identify and define every conceivable application of the Torah, the scholars of Mesopotamia had no doubt that they were shaping the order that was to come. Fortress-like though the isolation of their yeshivas certainly was, yet the rabbis were all too painfully conscious of the horrors in the crumbling world beyond. Their aim, in devoting their lives to study, was not to escape such evils, but rather to purge them upon the coming of a golden age: for God had given to the Jewish people the assurance of a new and blessed era, when “all ruined cities will be rebuilt,” when “the cow and the bear shall feed together,” and when “death will cease in the world.”¹⁰⁴ Only once Jews everywhere had been brought to a proper understanding of the Torah, however, would this blessed moment arrive. “If you are worthy, I will hasten it; if you are not worthy, then it will be left to arrive in its own good time.”¹⁰⁵ Such, the rabbis explained, was the bargain that the Almighty had struck with His people. The future of the world lay in their hands.

Yet like the mowbeds and the Mazdakites, whose yearning for an age when justice and mercy would prevail had seen them snatching after the reins of earthly power, the rabbis were not so unworldly as to disdain the making of a similar grab. Time was clearly dragging. God Himself, as every Jew well knew, had promised his Chosen People a saviour. “The Anointed One,” he would be called—the Mashiach, or “Messiah.” With such a king at the head of the Jewish people, the world’s promised redemption from suffering would have dawned—and who was to say that the convulsions of the present age did not herald its imminence? “When you see the great powers contending one with another,” so it was written, “then look for the foot of the Messiah.”¹⁰⁶ As yet, however, with not so much as a toenail in evidence, there was a desperate need for the Jewish people to be graced with an alternative leadership: one that could serve to instruct them in the obedience demanded of them by God, and thereby to speed the Messiah’s arrival.

And how fortunate it was, how very fortunate, that just such a leadership should have been ready to hand. “Teaching and the mastery of a people,” so a celebrated rabbi had once piously averred, “have never coincided”¹⁰⁷—but that had not stopped his successors from hankering after both. Tensions between the rabbis and the exilarchate had been seething for years—and now, with the exilarch vanished from the scene, the sages of Sura and Pumpedita did not hesitate to step into the breach. Even as they continued to toil away at their transcription of the Talmud, so also, with a quite awesome display of self-assurance, were they working to impose its dictates upon the entire Jewish nation. From highest to lowest, from landowners to labourers, all were to be shaped and controlled by it. Yet the rabbis, in their determination to force through this revolution, could not, as the mowbeds had done, draw upon royal backing, nor, like the Mazdakites, resort to armed insurrection. Nor, if they were truly to seize the commanding heights of their society, could they confine themselves simply to administering the law courts, or liaising with imperial bureaucrats. The power that the rabbis felt called upon by God to wield was hardly to be justified in terms of bare expediency. Only the single path would ever lead them to the rule of the Jewish people. The rabbis had to offer themselves, not as functionaries, nor even as judges, but as living models of holiness.

“Whoever carries out the teachings of the sages is worthy to be named a saint.”¹⁰⁸ Once, even in a land as respectful of learning as Mesopotamia, such a maxim would have been dismissed by many Jews as merely an ivory tower fantasy. Increasingly, however, as the leaders of the yeshivas responded to the convulsions of the age with an outward show of defiance and an inner display of certitude, they were gathering ever more admirers to themselves. Lacking in swords, or silks, or mail-clad horses the rabbis might have been; but they had their own markers of power, nevertheless. There were the pregnant women, eager for their unborn sons to be imbued with a spirit of sanctity and scholarship, who haunted the limits of Sura and Pumpedita. There was the widespread conviction that even a blind rabbi, should he ever be mocked, had only to turn his gaze upon the wretch who had insulted him, and the offender would immediately be reduced to “a heap of bones.”¹⁰⁹ Above all, saturating every level of Jewish society in Mesopotamia, there was the gathering acceptance that the rabbis were justified in all their soaring claims: that the will of God could indeed only be known through the prism of their scholarship. The Torah, revealed to a grateful people in all its hitherto unsuspected complexity and detail, could now begin its proper task: that of moulding every last Jew into a rabbi.

A consummation devoutly to be wished: for then the Messiah would come, every grape would yield “thirty full measures of wine,”¹¹⁰ and every woman would “bear a child on a daily basis.”¹¹¹ In the meanwhile, however, prior to the dawning of this happy age, there was an additional reason, perhaps, why the rabbis of Mesopotamia could revel in the gathering pace of their winning of Jewish hearts and minds. At the beginning of time, so it was recorded in the Talmud, God had spoken to all the nations of the world, offering them each in turn the Torah; “but all had repudiated it and refused to receive it.”¹¹² Only the ancestors of the Jews had been willing to accept the precious gift; and by doing so, they had preserved humanity from annihilation, for had the Torah only been rejected, the entire purpose of Creation would have failed. The rabbis, then, by awakening their countrymen to a profounder understanding of what was required of them by the law of God, were also working to keep the world itself upon an even keel. The more Jewish that the Jews became, in short, the better for everyone.

But what if the opposite happened? What if the Chosen People, seduced by some treacherous and plausible idolatry, should stumble, and fall, and lose their identity altogether? For centuries before the founding of the schools of Sura and Pumpedita, the Jews of Mesopotamia had managed to stand proof against the temptations of all the false gods of Babylon, and demonstrated that it needed no rabbis for them to maintain their distinctiveness. Yet over time, a new and more dangerous temptation had arisen, a teasing and honey-voiced heresy that adorned itself with the beauties of the Tanakh itself, and wore them as a whore would her paint. Across the entire span of Mesopotamia, living in the self-same villages, towns and cities in which the Jews themselves lived, there were people whose beliefs served as the most noxious mockery of everything that the rabbis taught. There was no hidden Torah, these minim, or heretics, claimed, beyond that which the rabbis themselves had fabricated; nor was there any need to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, for the Messiah had already come. His name, according to the minim, was Jesus; a man who, half a millennium previously, had been nailed by the Romans to a cross, and then risen from the dead. The reality, it went without saying, was far different. The real Jesus, so the rabbis of Mesopotamia could reveal, was in fact “the son of a harlot”:¹¹³ a failed student who had been dismissed by his rabbi for assorted sexual misdemeanours, and had then, out of pique, fallen to worshipping a brick. Far from reigning in heaven, as the minim laughably claimed, the truth was that he had been consigned to hell, where he would spend the rest of eternity in a plunge-bath of boiling shit.¹¹⁴ God Himself, in His infinite wisdom, had foreseen the threat that Jesus would pose His Chosen People, and that was precisely why he had given them a hidden as well as written Torah: so that the minim would not be able to get their filthy hands on it, “and say that they were the Chosen People.”¹¹⁵

Yet it remained terrifyingly the case that never, not in all their long history, had the Jewish people faced a more insidious and oppressive danger than that posed them by the worshippers of Jesus. Insidious, because the heresy was sufficiently similar to their own faith to exert a secret and terrible fascination on many of them, including even some rabbis; and oppressive because there was nowhere, it seemed, not in the whole world, that it had failed to reach. Far and wide across Mesopotamia, and Persia, and eastwards even of Iranshahr, the contagion had spread; but most alarming of all was its progress in the West. There, as even the Jewish subjects of the Shahanshah might be brought to admit, lay what was “the most important kingdom in the world: the kingdom of the Romans.”¹¹⁶ This kingdom it was, for half a millennium and more now, which had exercised the mastery of Jerusalem and the Promised Land; and many had been the sufferings, in all that time, that it had inflicted upon the Jewish people. Now, however, five hundred years after the birth of Jesus, the Jews had a fresh reason to dread the power and the might of Rome. The Caesars, who had once, like the kings of Babylon, raised temples to a whole infinitude of demons, had since set to closing them down—but only to replace them with a cult that was, if anything, even worse. To what had the Roman people chosen to devote themselves, if not to the most menacing false idol of all? Christos, they called him—which meant, in Greek, “Messiah.”

Yes—in the palace of Caesar, it was now none other than Jesus who was worshipped. The Jews were no longer alone in believing themselves a people chosen of a single god. The Romans too, those lords of a dominion even richer and more intimidating than that of the Persians, had recently come to enshrine as the pulsing heartbeat of their empire a conviction that Jesus did indeed reign in heaven. The roots of this assurance, however, were of a very great antiquity: older than the written Talmud, older even than Jesus himself. That the Romans had been converted to a belief in Christ was true enough; but true as well was the fact that belief in Christ, across much of the world, had taken on a colouring that was more than a little Roman.

One empire, one god: an entire millennium’s worth of history had served to make them seem a natural fit.

^a A spider’s web of misinformation that it has taken generations of scholars to untangle. For a long while, it was widely assumed that Zoroaster had lived when the Sasanian priesthood claimed that he had lived: “258 years before Alexander,” or, according to our own dating system, in the early sixth century BC. Only recently has close analysis of the sacred texts served to push their likeliest date of origin very much further back, to some point between the tenth and seventeenth centuries BC. Also discounted has been the supposed Median origin of the Prophet: none of the sacred texts so much as mentions western Iran. As to whether the traditions told of Zoroaster are genuine, it is impossible at such an incalculable distance to say. “Such a choice is neither legitimate nor illegitimate: it is a mere wager” (Kellens, p. 3).

^b The degree to which the Sasanians were aware of Cyrus and his successors is hotly debated by historians. The likelihood is that consciousness of them faded over time, for reasons largely to do with the rewriting of Iranian history in the fifth century AD. “The Place of a Hundred Pillars” does seem to be an echo of one of the original names applied to Persepolis.

^c The stories told about Jamshid—or Yima, as he was originally known—bear testimony to centuries, and possibly millennia, of elaboration. Long before the time of Zoroaster, he was being commemorated by Iranians and Indians alike as the first man. In this primal myth, he was installed as the king of the underworld following his death.

^d This is the name by which Persepolis is known in Iran to this day.

^e Such, at any rate, was the testimony of Rabbi Zera, whose own dream of barley prompted his immediate emigration. Another anecdote described how an overly drunken celebration ended up with his throat being cut by a fellow rabbi. “The next day, this rabbi prayed on Rabbi Zera’s behalf, and brought him back to life. Next year, he said to Rabbi Zera, ‘Will you honour me, and come and feast with me again?’ But Rabbi Zera replied, ‘A miracle cannot be guaranteed.’ ”