Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [107]
But our information sundial is in total eclipse at the “high noon” of Zoroastrianism, the Arsacid or Parthian Empire, which ruled after freeing Persia from the successors of Alexander around 250 BCE until the rise of the Sassanians in the mid-third-century CE.10 This largely unknown period is likely one of heavy influence of Persian and Greek culture on the land of Israel. Like the Jews, the Zoroastrians survived Alexander the Great’s Macedonian regime and Seleucid Greek rule from Antioch. The Jews additionally were ruled by the Ptolemies of Egypt, and the Zoroastrians by a shortlived Greco-Bactrian state. The Persian state, with Zoroastrianism resurgent, indeed eventually with Zoroastrianism as the official religion, was the major enemy of Imperial Rome. It was also a significant host country to Jewish culture. The Babylonian Talmud was written under the Parthian and Sassanian Empires in the third through seventh centuries. It was Persia that gave the Jews an attractive place to live after the Roman Empire became Christian and began enacting prejudicial laws against Jewish life, worship, and culture.
Because the Persians had a written Scripture, their Muslim conquerors considered them a “people of the Book” (’ahl al-qitab), just as Jews and Christians were, even though the Zoroastrians did not revere the Bible in any special way. So while they were called a “protected” (dhimmi) people like the Jews, they faced discrimination and heavy taxation as dhimmis under Islam, even as they were spared conversion to Islam. In this, they fared about as well as the Jews and Christians. Though Islamic tolerance might be judged imperfect by today’s more multicultural standards, it was considerably more pluralistic than Medieval European Christianity and, like the Jews and Christians, Zoroastrians were far more fortunate than the minorities of Europe.
Unlike those of Judaism and Christianity, however, many of the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism were lost in their original form. Even when glossed by commentaries during the Greek and Arab conquests, the texts are incomplete, full of contemporary interpretations, and therefore hard to reconstruct or date. After the Arab conquest, Zoroastrianism continued to be handed down amongst priests and laity from generation to generation, through the rule of the Mongols, the Turks, and Persian Islamic rulers. The Zoroastrians continue even today, in small and poor communities in Iran, where they are subject to local prejudice and periodically to overt persecution.
Generations ago, many Zoroastrians emigrated to the west coast of India. In India, Zoroastrians were called by the Gujurati and Hindi word for Persian: “Parsi.” They were also known as “fire-worshipers” because one of the major rites of the religion involves tending a sacred fire in the midst of a temple. The Parsis continue there today in small, sometimes affluent, endogamous, Indian-dialect communities in Gujarat, Bombay, the Deccan and in modern Pakistan.11 After the British Raj they also migrated to some large English-speaking cities-principally London, Toronto, Los Angeles, and metropolitan New York City-where there are well-established communities with prayer halls, if not fully-functioning fire temples. Their reduced numbers can be explained partly because of their minority and often persecuted status, partly because there is no way to convert to Zoroastrianism, and partly because progeny of intermarriage are considered non-Zoroastrian.
Dualism Versus Monotheism in Zoroastrianism and Other Western Religions
THE PRINCIPAL holy book of the Zoroastrians is the Avesta,