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.