The Alarming Lunch: Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Colonialism in Sasanian Iran

Samuel Thrope

The story of Rabbah Bar Bar Hannah's encounter with a fish masquerading as an island is one of a series of fantastic tales on pages 73a-73b of tractate Bava Batra of the Babylonian Talmud. This story, like many of the others in the series, can be fruitfully read as a site of cultural contact between Babylonian rabbinic Judaism and the dominant Sasanian Zoroastrian culture. The rabbinic story shares a number of features with the pivotal moment of the Zoroastrian legend of Keresaspa, retold both in the Avesta and later Pahlavi traditions. Applying Homi Bhabha's theories of colonial hybridity to this instance of cultural contact reveals the complexity in the rabbinic story's inversions and subversions of the Zoroastrian legend. From this theoretical perspective, we can read this retelling as a site both of incorporation of one of the colonizers' central narratives and, through mimicry, of the colonized Jews' resistance to that domination.

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