Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation Miriam Ben Zeev Leonard V. Rutgers Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation Leuven: Peeters, 2009 Pp. 151. This fascinating and innovative work by Leonard Rutgers focuses on the role of the Jews in early Christian identity formation. In order to distinguish themselves from their historical background, Christians had to redefine the theological and socio-political position of the Jews. For this purpose, a series of myths was created, designed to dislodge the Jews theologically in such a way as also to affect their societal position. The first case study takes us to Antioch in the fourth century C.E. Here the local church authorities systematically appropriated the Jewish literary tradition about the Maccabees, then developed the liturgical means to turn these traditions into a cult—the veneration of the bones of the martyrs—and finally appropriated [End Page 332] the synagogue that was associated with their memory, turning it into a church that soon became the center of the cult. Scriptural exegesis was a double-edged sword that could be used both to induce violence and to validate its results ideologically once such violence had taken place, a truly ingenious way of having Jewish heroes further a Christian cause. The next case concerns Constantinople in the year 553. Justinian's Novella 146 heavily intervened in the internal affairs of the Jewish community. Jews were allowed (or rather advised) to read their holy Scriptures in the Greek translation of the Septuagint, to do away with the Mishnah, not to believe in certain doctrines, and stop adhering to a "literal interpretation" of the Hebrew Bible. Rutgers puts forward a new interpretation of this law, arguing that it was promulgated in order to eliminate the Jews' knowledge of Hebrew and consequently their access to the Hebrew Bible: otherwise it remained difficult for Christians to win the exegetical war they had been waging against Jewish contemporaries. With the Mishnah gone, Jewish commentators eliminated, Scriptures read in Greek, and severe penalties instituted, Christians would no longer fear that what went on in the synagogues was beyond their control. Rutgers highlights an additional important point. The Jews mentioned in Justinian's law are not real-life Jews, but rather "hermeneutic Jews" like those we find in the writings of the early Church: people whose life was characterized by means of inferences drawn from scriptural exegesis. Novella 146, therefore, is important in that it attests the extension of the notion of "hermeneutic Jews" from patristic to Roman legal literature, which in turn translated these views into actual policies. The third case study focuses on the background of the synagogue destructions advocated in legal material and carried on physically in different part of the empire in the fifth and sixth centuries. The starting point of this phenomenon is identified by Rutgers with a semantic shift occurring in the ways Christian theologians viewed "the synagogue." While in previous Jewish and non-Jewish sources the term synagogue meant a specific building and/or community, Christian writings, from the second century C.E. onwards, took it to mean, generally, the entire people of Israel. By this expansion, the term came to have a stereotypical and atemporal meaning, whose negative character is exemplified by Augustine's equation of the Jewish synagogue with the Latin congregatio, a gathering of cattle, as opposed to ecclesia, convocatio, a gathering of people—the church. The generalization of the term allowed church leaders to make an additional move: to infuse it with a whole repertoire of generic and often hermeneutically constructed prejudices against the Jews. These negative views show up in all parts of the Roman Empire in commentaries on books of the Hebrew Bible, in sermons, and in letters. The consequences for the Jews were lethal, transforming early Christian communities from passive listeners into active rabble-rousers. The abstracted negative notions of "the synagogue" collided with the ongoing reality of the actual buildings, and thinking was translated into practice. In addition to theologically displacing Judaism, Christians had also to physically replace the Jews. Social psychology confirms: when self-confidence is low, physical proximity in inter-group settings often leads to aggressive boundary maintenance. This...