Iran makes for an awful lot of news these days, and—the green shoots of democratic dissidence excepted—virtually none of it is good. But then there is the past: a recent conference in Jerusalem brought together scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States, as well as some Iranian expatriates, who have been intensively researching the buried treasures of the field known as "Irano-Judaica." The gathering, together with the publication of a volume titled The Talmud in its Iranian Context, underscores one of the most exciting developments in Jewish scholarship: the effort to put the "Babylonia" back into the Babylonian Talmud.
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