Rabbis, Sorcerers, and Priests

On the terminology designating the Zoroastrians of Iran and their language

“…Bausani (1991) argues that Iranian probably exchanged the Arabic k for a Persian g . Mokhtarian (2015: 96–7) finds “this proposition historically reasonable, since the tenth century ce , when Gabr appears, was a time when Arabic was already flourishing as a religious, administrative and literary language and began to penetrate into New Persian lexicography”. However, there is little support for Bausani's assumption of a substitution of Arabic k- with Persian g- because, as convincingly argued by Asatrian, the word kāfir has been widely used in parallel with Gabr from a very early period of Modern Persian, and the Iranians never struggled to pronounce the word kāfir (Asatrian 2002: 31).…”

“…That mistranslation, which was influenced by the linguistic confusion surrounding the incorrect etymological connection between Semitic ḤBR and New Persian gabr , represents a larger interpretive problem in modern scholarship on the Talmud in its Persian setting. The mistranslation “Gueber” (or “Parsees”) misconstrues the rabbis’ original meaning into a derogatory modern appellation—an error that distances us from the original subtleties of the rabbis’ usage of the carefully chosen metonym in a late antique context.(Mokhtarian 2015: 97)…”