The Iranian West and the Aniranian communities

Simcha Gross argues for taking the Sasanians up some notches.

Not to defend how the Orientalists treated the Sasanians - until Mary Boyce, I agree scholarship has been biased and Whig. I can however excuse, why my forebears so treated them. If we made the Sasanians exotic, we learnt it from the best - from Ferdowsi, in his Arthurian Shahnameh. And to the extent we treated the Bavli Jewry as an Ottoman millet, we learnt that from our own Western Jews in the university.

Also the bare fact remains that, if Sasanian ideology was at least equal to pagan Roman (and Hellenistic) ideology; against Christian Rome, it failed, and against Islam it died.

I can pick nits here and there. If we bemoan the lack of witness to the Parthian-/Hellenistic-era Iraq, that's where we bring Josephus. Also "Iranian west" isn't... really an improvement over "Roman east". The Sasanians themselves saw Iraq and maybe Khuzestan as "Aniran", as not-Iran but rightfully subject to Iran. "Iranian west" as an ideologic term would apply narrowly to Armenia whose Hayots' people they worked hard to Iranise. And Pourshariati, even moderated through Daryaee, teaches that the Sasanians as "feudal" were less French or English, than Holy Roman. When the shah meddled with the local dynasts they did not do so lightly.

This last, by the way, goes some way to bolster that Iraqi Jews were, in fact, as autonomous as they could get away with, and they got away with much. They certainly were more autonomous than the Christians, even in Iraq, who raised even more martyr literature than they will under Islam. Christianity seemed tailor-made for Aramaeans under empire; Iran could never make us Iranian.