Violent Words, Violent Ways : Brent Shaw on Catholics, Donatists, and Jews in Late Roman North Africa

Brent Shaw’s panoramic investigation of fourth-century North African sectarian hatred explores the meaning(s) of catholic/dissident violence, its social modalities and effects, its rhetorical “repertoires of hatred.”¹ As his study makes clear, the number and the ferocity of actual incidents of dissident/catholic “hard” violence were small in comparison to the repetitive vehemence of all the trash talk (mediated primarily through sermons) that nourished the conflict with the food of tradition. Why did all these people—and, especially, the bishops on both sides—act as they did? What Shaw observes about a local instance of traditional intra-civic violence, Mauretanian Caesarea’s caterva, can be equally well applied to this intra-generational fostering of the dissident/catholic grudge match, and thus suggest part of the answer: “The custom was so deeply ingrained because it defined the people who participated in it” (19).

Identity, violence and evocations of violence, toxic verbal repertoires, the careful cultivation of resentment: with these ideas delineating his analytic context, Shaw turns, in his sixth chapter, to the Jews. “Ravens Feeding on Death” is an important contribution to the study of Jewish-Christian relations in Roman antiquity, as well as to the study of Christian theological and rhetorical traditions contra Iudaeos. Shaw begins by attending to social fact—who were these North African Jews, where were they, and how many—in the process proffering a critical bibliographical essay on the pertinent secondary literature, rightly highlighting Karen Stern’s Devotion and Death (Leiden: 2008). “The problem,” as he notes, “is that these communities have not left much evidence of their existence” (260 n.1, surveying what there is on 261–65). Perforce, reconstruction relies upon literary evidence. And invariably with the Christian literary evidence, we run smack into the problem of historical Jews vs. rhetorical “Jews,” that is, “Jews” as a theological category deployed within intra-Christian polemics.

Traditions contra Iudaeos, as Shaw notes, seem to have developed in two phases. The rhetoric itself takes shape in the tractates and treatises of the second and third centuries. Relying on Williams, Adversus Iudaeos (Cambridge, UK: 1935) and Scheckenberg, Adversus-Judaeos-Texte (Frankfurt: 1982), Shaw characterizes this phase as mobilized primarily by the problem of gentile Judaizing (268 n.27). Siding with Efroymson,² I disagree: diverse and conflicting gentile Christian interpretations of Hellenistic Jewish texts—the LXX, Paul’s letters, assorted gospels, etc.—accompanied by the anxieties of identity-formation vis-à-vis other gentile Christians, generated the most virulent anti-Jewish rhetoric.³

Accordingly, then, this rhetoric undergoes its second great phase of hyperdevelopment in the period following Constantine’s conversion and the “triumph of the Church,” when the roiled state of fourth-century orthodoxy offered new opportunities for the intra-Christian exchange of anti-Jewish insults. Its medium was more often the sermon than the tractate; it basic technique simple, though its variations numberless, imaginative, and lush. The point of blackening “the Jews” was to argue that one’s Christian opponent was exactly as bad, indeed even worse.

Here Shaw’s careful interrogation of the primary evidence—sermons from both warring sides—yields rich results. “Jews,” he notes, are repeatedly linked by Augustine to “pagans and heretics,” all three serving in a “fixed geometry of hatred” (279) as premier enemies of the [true] church, thus enemies of God. Jews are frequently cross-identified with Donatists, who also “rage madly” against the church’s unity. Like Judas, Jews embody violent hatred and murderous betrayal, themes especially dear to the heart of dissident preachers, who lambasted catholic traditores with these same tropes. (“If ‘the Donatists’ were the Catholics’ surrogate Jews, then the Catholics easily fit the same role in reverse,” 306; for the Donatists as new Judases, 303.) Killers of Christ, vicious and mocking; ravenous roaring lions, vipers, asps, scorpions; ravens feeding on death (Shaw provides a virtual bestiary of anti-Jewish insults); leagued with Satan, spurred by insane fury—the anti-Jewish vituperation, much of it culled from Augustine’s sermons, goes on and on. Its target of choice, however, as Shaw repeatedly notes...