Considerations on an aspect of Jewish culture under the Sasanians: the matter of Jewish Sigillography.

• Author: Lerner, Judith A.
• Position: Report

In this compact volume, Daniel M. Friedenberg has gathered a group of stamp seals to illuminate the culture of the Jews who lived under Sasanian rule (224-651 C.E.). This clearly is a work of love and will stand as a contribution to our knowledge of this minority group at a significant time in its history, when the rabbinical schools that flourished in Babylonia produced the collection of law cases and norms for the Jewish community, the Babylonian Talmud. The book also illustrates the challenge inherent in describing the culture of the Jews in this period living in a Zoroastrian-dominated society.

But the volume's title is somewhat a misnomer. We do not learn much about the "culture" of Sasanian Jewry other than a single aspect of its material culture--as indicated in the subtitle of the work--the stone intaglios that belonged to members of the community, which were used to authenticate and seal documents and objects and which also probably served some talismanic function. In fact, we have precious little in the way of material remains to illustrate the culture of the Jewish populace living in Sasanian lands. What we do have (or are able to recognize), as the author points out, are classes of objects--the so-called magic or incantation bowls and stone stamp seals--that are shared with other religious groups and which, in their style and iconographic details, are basically indistinguishable as to ethnicity.

Except for the lulav (sprouting branches or a palm frond) and ethrog (citron), unique symbols of Judaism that appear on a number of seals, glyptic imagery is shared by Jews with others. Otherwise, there is no "Jewish" iconography and no "Jewish" style, and we can only be sure that a seal is "Jewish" by the name of its owner, written in Hebrew. Seals engraved with the Sacrifice of Isaac or Daniel in the Lions' Den are not indicative of Jewish ownership, as these subjects were also popular among Christians (see further discussion below). Other motifs on seals bearing Jewish names--male portrait heads or various animals--are widespread within the Sasanian glyptic repertory and were used by members of other minority religious groups in the Sasanian Empire--Christians, Mandaeans, Mazdakites, Manichaeans--as well as, of course, by the dominant religious group, the Zoroastrians.

"Lexicon" is also somewhat of a misnomer or at least a puzzling term, as the author does not provide a rigorous discussion of the "vocabulary" of seal motifs as it pertains to the seals catalogued in the volume. By including "related seals," not only as comparanda but as part of his catalogue, he tends to blur the definition of what makes for a "Jewish" seal. In fact, as I have just noted and is acknowledged by the author, we cannot always be sure if a seal is actually "Jewish," that is, made for and used by a member of that community.

Following an introduction by the Biblical scholar Norman Golb ("Observations on the Jews of the Sasanian Empire"), Friedenberg begins with "A Brief Historical Review" (pp. 5-10) that plots the history of relations between the Jews and the Sasanian state, over a nearly five-century span in which Jews seem to have suffered persecution only intermittently. (1) In presenting this picture, Friedenberg relies on several of Jacob Neusner's well-known works as well as Geo Widengren's 1961 article, "The Status of the Jews in the Sassanian Empire," citing both it and an abridged version published in 2002. (2) This is the most recent date of any of the sources cited throughout the volume (and the only source he seems to have used that is more recent than 1998). A more nuanced view would have resulted if Friedenberg had considered the scholarship on Jewish-Iranian contacts in Talmudic times, an area that has expanded over the last twenty years, (3) as well as other works on Sasanian history, such as Josef Wiesehofer's Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996).

This historical review is followed by a brief chapter on the Jewish religious academies in Babylonia (pp. 11-12), which, Friedenberg notes, formed and taught the sacred texts and were "the center of Jewish life" for the period and "the top source for our knowledge of the Jews in the Sasanian empire" (p. 11). He lists the academies in the different Jewish settlements and gives their respective histories and their leaders' names. This provides an introduction to his fourth chapter, "Jewish Names on Sasanian Seals" (pp. 13-16) in which, following Shaul Shaked (to whom he dedicates this book), he attempts to match up some of the names on the seals with those of known rabbis and other leaders of the Babylonian Jewish community. (4) Many of the names include a patronymic (e.g., Mari bar Shmuel) but some do not, and for those instances Friedenberg opines that "the person was so well known in the contemporary community ... that the title [such as "Mar," also used as a name] might have been deemed sufficient."

But this explanation is too Babylon-centric: Friedenberg does not acknowledge the broad distribution of Jews throughout the Sasanian Empire. Although the most substantial Jewish settlements seem to have been in Babylonia, Jewish communities also existed in Armenia, in the provinces of Adiabene (modern-day Kurdish Iraq and northwestern Iran), Atropatene (Azerbaijan), Media (western Iran), Parthia (northeastern Iran), and in Isfahan in central Iran. In fact, as will be mentioned later, seals that could be attributed to Jewish ownership have been found at the reaches of and even beyond the Sasanian sphere, although none, to my knowledge, with a Hebrew inscription.

This leads to the question of who the seal owners actually were, if they cannot be associated with specific Babylonian community leaders. Friedenberg acknowledges the difficulty in "identifying just who the men owning these seals were though it is apparent that, as seal owners, they stood high in the hierarchy of Jewish Sasanian society" (p. 16). This is not necessarily so. Because seals serve in place of signatures, merchants need them to enter into contracts and to ship and receive merchandise. Although merchants seldom appear in Sasanian sources, they undoubtedly played an important role in Sasanian society as their activities were vital to the economic well-being of the Sasanian state. (5) While firm evidence is lacking, it is entirely likely that Jewish merchants, living in a network of communities across Western and Central Asia, were active in both local and long-distance trade; (6) Jewish names similar to those found on the seals occur on two fragmentary pottery vessels excavated at Parthian Merv in present-day Turkmenistan. (7)

Friedenberg suggests that the combination of lulav and ethrog on seals points to ownership by a religious figure, such as an official of the Jewish community like the exilarch, rather than a merchant. This may be true for those inscribed seals with these two motifs (his nos. 1-6 and 8-11), but these ritual objects--among the central symbols of Judaism and, along with the menorah (candelabrum), shofar (ram's horn), and mahta (incense shovel) symbols of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem--appear not only in official or communal religious art, that is, on coins and on the mosaic floors of synagogues, but on such personal objects as pottery lamps, metal amulets, and sarcophagi. (8) The lulav and ethrog occur on an uninscribed seal (no. 7) and so Friedenberg's supposition that these symbols "were the official designation of such [religious] figures" must be set aside. (9)

Similarly questionable is his interpretation of the outspread wings that support a portrait bust, as on no. 29, the seal of Ityonah Yoniya (or He'udia), as indicating "a person with high standing concerning official relations to the nobility or monarch" (p. 16). This would imply that the seal owner, clearly a Jew, held some position in the governmental administration, but we have no evidence of Jews holding government positions, other than perhaps serving as tax-collectors. (10) In fact, outspread wings as the support for a profile male bust is a characteristic and not uncommon device in Sasanian glyptics. (11) Double wings appear on seals of officials and priests but also on those of people without apparent official position, judging by the accompanying inscriptions, although many of these seals--certainly those of common people--are uninscribed; wings may even support an animal's head, such as a ram's or a stag's.

Chapter four, "The Nature and Function of Sasanian Seals" (pp. 17-21), is a general discussion of Sasanian glyptics, mainly the different motifs that were engraved on seal stones but also the physical characteristics of the seals themselves. For this, Friedenberg relies on the excellent catalogues of A. D. H. Bivar (British Museum) and Christopher Brunner (Metropolitan Museum of Art), as well as the writings of the doyen of Iranists, Richard N. Frye; he also cites Joseph M. Upton (for whom see our n. 11) but while J. M. Unvala and Phyllis Ackerman were important scholars in their time, their writing on Sasanian seals has been superseded by the extensive work of Rika Gyselen and Philippe Gignoux. Friedenberg utilizes several of the latter's catalogues but, apparently, only to provide a bibliography for the seals in his catalogue, and this, in my opinion, is not enough.

This fourth chapter, the longest of the book other than the actual catalogue of the seals (chapter 6), reveals a naivete that seems to come from not having looked at enough Sasanian seals nor having read much about them. In addition to the catalogues of seal collections that contain some of the seals included here, in his own catalogue of Jewish seals Friedenberg mentions the glyptic remains (both seals and clay sealings) found at Qasr-i Abu Nasr in southern Iran (again, see n. 11) but ignores other excavated sealings, notably those from Takht-i Suleiman in northwestern Iran--a site that has...