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

by Tom Holland

  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 awaye—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-ter
m 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.