Reading the Bavli with Monks and Zoroastrians

The Babylonian Talmud is clearly the pinnacle of classical rabbinic literature, perhaps one of the great literary treasures of the Jewish and maybe even the Western tradition. Yet for many reasons, academic study of the Babylonian rabbis who created this magnum opus has lagged behind the study of their counterparts in the land of Israel. The main reason for this lacuna is that scholars generally believed that Palestinian rabbis operated in a sphere of Greco-Roman influence, whereas their Babylonian counterparts were in Persia where Hellenistic influence was less significant, Greek and Latin were not spoken, and Christianity did not dominate. When the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, the die was cast and centuries later the academic study of the history of Greece and Rome drew far more attention than the study of Persia. Naturally, European (and subsequently American) scholars wished to elucidate the history of their primary religion, Christianity, and their cultural ancestors, Greece and Rome. Greek and Latin were continuously taught in schools and universities and the classics were read in their original languages. When academics turned their attention to rabbinic literature, they focused on the texts most relevant to Christianity and Greco-Roman culture, those produced in Palestine, the main milieu in which Christianity was fostered as well. There were other reasons compounding the difficulties in studying the history of Babylonian Jewry and the level of contact that Babylonian rabbis had with surrounding cultures, such as the lack of material remains from ancient Babylonia, but this seems in my mind to have been the primary one.