The Babylonian Talmud, the most important document of world Judaism until the Enlightenment, was redacted in Babylonia, largely under the rule of the Persian Sasanian dynasty from the 4^th through the 8^th centuries C.E..  While the Talmud and other early rabbinic documents preserve a rather coherent narrative and legal record of what Jews felt about their pagan rulers in Palestine under Greek and Roman domination (333 BCE – 200 CE), there is little textual evidence showing how Babylonian Jews considered their Persian overlords.  Since the official religion of the Sasanian Empire was Zoroastrianism, a dualist religion believing in a supreme God, Ahura Mazda, it could not be considered idolatry like Greco-Roman paganism.

There is evidence in the Talmud and in Zoroastrian priestly documents that shows a polemic against Jewish and Christian religious practices that violated Zoroastrian extreme notions of purity and impurity.  However, there is no explicit anti-Zoroastrian polemic in Babylonian Jewish texts.  That Jews did, indeed, consider some elements of Zoroastrian belief and practice, especially their extreme notions of purity and impurity, to be absurd and/or problematic can be recovered from Talmudic narratives, if not in Talmudic law.

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