Samuel Thrope
Samuel Thrope is a writer, editor, and translator based in Jerusalem. Born and raised in Arlington, Massachusetts, Thrope earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at the Hebrew University.
He has written for Monocle Magazine, BBC News, Aeon, The Nation, the Daily Beast, Haaretz, Tablet, Times of Israel, Israel Story, and other publications. He is the Curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the National Library of Israel and a Research Fellow at The Ezri Center for Iran & Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Haifa. He previously worked as Managing Editor at Academic Language Experts, and as a Deputy Managing Editor at The Jerusalem Post.
His translation, with Domenico Agostini, of the Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. He has also translated Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s The Israeli Republic, published in 2017 by Restless Books. With Roberta Cassagrande-Kim and Raquel Ukeles, he edited the 2018 exhibition catalogue Romance and Reason: Islamic Transformations of the Classical Past.
Address: Israel
He has written for Monocle Magazine, BBC News, Aeon, The Nation, the Daily Beast, Haaretz, Tablet, Times of Israel, Israel Story, and other publications. He is the Curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the National Library of Israel and a Research Fellow at The Ezri Center for Iran & Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Haifa. He previously worked as Managing Editor at Academic Language Experts, and as a Deputy Managing Editor at The Jerusalem Post.
His translation, with Domenico Agostini, of the Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. He has also translated Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s The Israeli Republic, published in 2017 by Restless Books. With Roberta Cassagrande-Kim and Raquel Ukeles, he edited the 2018 exhibition catalogue Romance and Reason: Islamic Transformations of the Classical Past.
Address: Israel
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Books by Samuel Thrope
Articles by Samuel Thrope
Zoroastrianism in late antique Iran. Taking this connection as a starting point, the article considers the ŠGW’s critique of three angelic citations that are all closely paralleled by passages in the Babylonian Talmud.
After demonstrating that the ŠGW citations depict angels as weaker and more oppressed than the rabbinic parallels, the article sets these portrayals of weakened angels in the context of the widespread belief
among Jews in this period in Metatron, an angelic coequal to the divine. The article argues that the ŠGW’s depictions of downtrodden angels are not borrowed from rabbinic polemics, found in the Talmud, against this theology, but is an independent reaction to the same belief in Metatron’s co-regency, a belief that sources testify was still common in the early Islamic period. The ŠGW’s motivating theological imperative to portray
Judaism as radically monotheistic, and thus the binary opposite of Zoroastrianism, underlies the text’s descriptions of angelic suffering and degradation.
Papers by Samuel Thrope
Zoroastrianism in late antique Iran. Taking this connection as a starting point, the article considers the ŠGW’s critique of three angelic citations that are all closely paralleled by passages in the Babylonian Talmud.
After demonstrating that the ŠGW citations depict angels as weaker and more oppressed than the rabbinic parallels, the article sets these portrayals of weakened angels in the context of the widespread belief
among Jews in this period in Metatron, an angelic coequal to the divine. The article argues that the ŠGW’s depictions of downtrodden angels are not borrowed from rabbinic polemics, found in the Talmud, against this theology, but is an independent reaction to the same belief in Metatron’s co-regency, a belief that sources testify was still common in the early Islamic period. The ŠGW’s motivating theological imperative to portray
Judaism as radically monotheistic, and thus the binary opposite of Zoroastrianism, underlies the text’s descriptions of angelic suffering and degradation.