Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts . By Susanna Drake. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 173 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts . By Susanna Drake . Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2013. 173 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn this work, a revision of a dissertation written under the guidance of Elizabeth Clark at Duke, Susanna Drake considers the interplay of categories of race, sex, and gender in the construction of Jews and Judaism by some Greek church fathers from the first through the fifth centuries. Tracing the development of the image of the "carnal Jew," she makes use of the works of theorists of colonialism and gender, including Homi Bhabha, Robert J. C. Young, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, highlighting Foucault's claim that sexuality represents a "dense transfer point for relations of power" (8).Paul, by dichotomizing spirit and flesh, and by associating porneia with Gentiles, inadvertently provided the categories that proved useful to later Christian writers who theorized Jewish difference. Although Paul never associates carnality with Israel, Drake shows how others retained the antithesis and turned it against Jews (99-100). The author of the Epistle of Barnabas , fifty years later, theorizes difference by fusing exegesis and sexuality, arguing, for example, that the forbidden animals in dietary laws are really symbols of illicit sexual practices. Justin, in Dialogue with Trypho , claims Jews' wrong-headed literalist understanding of scripture springs from their lust, as they misread Jacob's multiple wives, or David's affair with Bathsheba.Drake examines five texts to show how Origen, despite his regard for Jewish scriptural experts he consulted (whom he calls Hebraioi ), used Pauline dichotomies of spirit and flesh to differentiate Christians from contemporary Jews (whom he calls Judaioi ). Jewish carnality and literalism in understanding of Scripture are intertwined in Origen's theory of Jewish alterity, providing a contrast to Christian chastity in practice and spiritual understanding in biblical interpretation. Circumcision provides a graphic case, where Jews foolishly "mutilate the flesh" because they interpret the text literally. Using Philo's allegorical interpretation, Origen promotes the Christian "spiritual" circumcision, expressed as bodily self-control or asceticism.The third century writers Hippolytus and Origen took the already fraught and sexualized story of Susanna and the Elders and turned it to their own uses, with the chaste matron standing in for the church, which was under attack from lascivious Jewish elders. Gender became more complex by the third century, Drake observes, as an ideal of masculine self-control absorbed aspects of an ideal of feminine passivity. The image of the church as the chaste virgin beset by hyper-masculine Jews corresponded to the idea of pure spiritual exegesis sullied by Jewish literalism. John Chrysostom's Sermons Against the Jews provides the most extreme examples of anti-Jewish stereotypes; Jews as dogs or animals fit for slaughter, Jewish men as malakoi , soft and sexually depraved, their women as prostitutes, and the synagogues as brothels. Reversing Paul's image of the olive tree in Romans 11, Chrysostom argues for permanent Jewish exclusion from grace.Drake is not content to examine rhetoric for its own sake, but asks the crucial question of the relationship between rhetoric and violence. Chrysostom's preaching of Jews as pollutants in the community and worthy objects of violence, for example, provided justification for anti-Jewish legislation of the late fourth century. …