Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts by Susanna Drake (review)

Slandering the Jew traces the production of a stereotype: the sexually degenerate Jew. In this revised dissertation, Drake analyzes representations of Jews as sexually perverse, effeminate, and dangerously sexually aggressive as a “topos” that featured in Christian writings from the first to the fifth centuries (2). A lucid and sophisticated study, this work builds on recent discussions of how early Christian discourses of alterity and deployments of sexual slander contributed to Christian self-definition. Drake follows other late antique historians (notably Daniel Boyarin and Virginia Burrus) in applying post-colonial theories—in this case hybridity and stereotype—to explore Christian representations of Jews as an assertion and repetition of difference precisely where “border-lines” were least secure. Drake argues that sexual slander, with its imagery of “permeability, penetration, and adulteration” (54), enabled Christians to figure Jews as Other, thereby shoring up Christian subjectivity. Perhaps her most important contribution is establishing how this discursive production intensified when Christian claims to Jewish scriptures coupled with their assertions of ascetic identity.

Chapter One begins with Paul, who contributes indirectly to the stereotype that she outlines. It is not the sexual predilections of Jews, but of Gentiles, that he uses to enjoin sexual purity on his Christ-believing audience. Informed by New Paul scholars like Stanley Stowers and Caroline Johnson Hodge, Drake reads Paul as utilizing Jewish stereotypes about licentious nations, in combination with Greek and Roman moral discourse, to construct his virtuous community. Later Christian writers, she argues, reworked Paul’s rhetoric of sexual in combination with his dichotomy between flesh and spirit to support their supersessionist claims to Jewish scripture (83). Drake completes the chapter with a survey of second-century materials to demonstrate that, while attested (e.g., the Dialogue with Trypho), sexual slander was neither inspired by Paul nor a regular feature of anti-Jewish polemic in this period.

Origen of Alexandria—the subject of Chapter Two—did utilize Paul’s rhetoric, however, to advance the image of a sexually deviant and hermeneutically challenged Jew. The “Jew” provided a foil by which the church father authenticated both the allegorical reading practices of early Christians and their ascetic identity. Helpfully, Drake does not attempt to reconcile Origen’s characterization of Jewish interpretation with his congenial interactions with Jewish scholars themselves, as others have done. Guided by post-colonial approaches, she argues that the “Jew” in Origen’s texts occupies an ambivalent place, at once “desired and disavowed” (8; 57). For Origen, the “Jew” indicated the constant presence of the literal (and with it the carnal) that threatened to undermine the ascetic Christian exegete.

Chapter Three treats early Christian interpretations of the book of Susanna as it appears in the Greek version by Theodotion. Drake maps a hermeneutical trajectory of early Christian readings that begins with Hippolytus’s Commentary on Daniel, includes visual representations of the narrative from the Catacombs, and focuses primarily on Origen’s Letter to Africanus. In these readings the lascivious elders commonly stand in for the Jews, and Susanna, the chaste maiden, for the Christians. Drake argues that early Christians seized upon gendered implications of this story to establish Jewish-Christian difference. For Origen, the narrative offered another opportunity to fuse chaste sexuality with allegorical interpretation, and perverse sexuality with literal reading.

This study closes with an analysis of John Chrysostom’s eight homilies Adversus Iudaeos, with their imagery of Jews as pseudo-men and prostitutes, and of Judaizers (those who attend synagogues and observe Jewish festivities) as predators who easily beguile Christian women. Relying on Homi Bhabha’s conception of stereotype, Drake argues that Chrysostom’s construction of the licentious Jew and Judaizers represents an “anxious” repetition of difference (97), revealing (and perhaps also supporting) the instability of Jewish and Christian identities and communal borders in late antique Antioch.

Drake’s conclusion asks us to consider Christian violence enacted on Jews in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries as a “material effect” of...