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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts by Susanna Drake Andrew S. Jacobs Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts Susanna Drake Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. 176. ISBN 978–0-8122–4520–2 Susanna Drake’s elegant first book, based on her Duke University dissertation, poses serious questions. “How did the figure of the ‘carnal Jew’ come to function as a topos of early Christian literature?” she asks at the outset, asking as well about the chronology of this topos (“when did it first appear?”), its function (“how did the stereotype … serve Christian leaders as they forged boundaries?”), and its larger contexts (“ancient understandings of gender and sexuality”). The chapters that follow outline a troubling discursive genealogy whose material traces have long outlived their late ancient context. In her introduction Drake stakes out a broad terrain. She evokes themes of “Bible,” “asceticism,” “heresies,” and “empire” (2), any one of which could be the subject of a rich monograph. Drake also makes clear her theoretical perspectives: the ways in which language, inflected by power, can produce and reproduce multiple possibilities of subjecthood (assujetissement is Foucault’s term, processed here through Judith Butler’s feminist philosophy and Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial criticism). Throughout, Drake remains attentive to the intersecting discourses of gender, power, and body. Drake begins with the apostle Paul, who “like many Jewish polemicists before him, conceived of porneia and idolatry as the paradigmatic sin of Gentiles” (19). According to Drake, Jewish carnality first acquires its sinister shadows in two second-century texts: the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. Helplessly mired in their own sinful bodies, Jews misread their sacred Scriptures in a bodily manner: they insist on the literal interpretations of food laws, festivals, and circumcision. This textual/sexual “tautology” structures future slanders against Jews: “Jewish misunderstanding of scripture is rooted in Jewish lust; simultaneously, Jewish lust is rooted in and authorized by Jewish (mis)understanding of scripture” (33). A [End Page 187] vast repertoire of negative sexual rhetoric is available to these early authors, drawn from Roman moral discourse as well as the Jewish prophets. What was nascent in Barnabas and Justin comes to full flower in the writings of Origen. Drake touches on several texts of Origen, but the basic message is consistent: “In his rhetorical production of Jewish literalism and his argument for Christian interpretive superiority, Origen formulated a certain ‘discourse of sexuality’ that characterized Jews as more fleshly and sexually depraved than their Christian counterparts” (40). Origen’s most lasting (and perhaps insidious) contribution to this “discourse of sexuality” is the “importation” of Paul’s flesh/spirit dichotomy into anti-Jewish discourse. What had been for Paul language that distinguished the “old man” from the “new man” now articulates the moral and exegetical boundary between Jews and Christians. Drake is clear that Origen is “misreading” and “misrepresenting” Paul (40, 44, 49), such that Origen’s innovative reading of the apostle actually becomes an unfortunate turning point in the history of Christian anti-Jewish discourse. Origen’s twisted Paul becomes the originator and authorizer of an ascetic and allegorical Christian way of being (as Drake notes, for Origen reading Paul, “allēgoria is askēsis” [52]), shaped in opposition to the profligate and literal-ist Jews. That Jews are not only textually and sexually corrupted, but are corrupters as well, emerges in Christian interpretations of the Susanna story from the Greek book of Daniel. Hippolytus allegorizes the innocent Jewish heroine into “the Church” who remains faithful to her husband (Christ) even in the face of trial (martyrdom). Hippolytus transforms the Jewish “elders” who threaten Susanna into those who persecute Christians—notably, both Jews and Gentiles. For Origen, the story once more reinforces the textual and sexual barriers between Jews and Christians: the “elders” who lusted after Susanna are no different than the Jews who, in Origen’s day, remain “duplicitous and corruptive” with respect to the Bible (69). The effect of these interpretations is not just to create a moral boundary between Jew and Christian, but to elicit the social danger of that boundary: “the relationship...