This book offers a broad and readable survey of Christian reinterpretations of the Jewish stories about the Maccabean martyrs as transmitted in 2 and 4 Maccabees. It deals successively with the late antique Christian commemoration of the martyrs in homilies and treatises, the medieval reception in biblical commentaries and liturgical commemorations, Jewish and Christian traditions in the Rhineland from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and the ethics of commemorating martyrs and the problem of the appropriation of Jewish traditions by Christians. The author interprets the source texts about the martyrs as stories about heroes who died nobly for the Jewish Law. He analyses their reception through a postcolonial lens, which focuses on hybrid identities and allosemitism (defined as profoundly ambivalent attitudes towards Jews). He argues that the attempts to assert Christianity's antiquity and superiority over Judaism reflect a dynamic of negotiation and adaptation that results in hybrid identities. Jewish resistance to Christian culture, as demonstrated by the Ashkenazi Jewish responses to the crusade massacres in 1096 (discussed in chapter iii), reflects a similar dynamic in the mimicry of Christian practices and traditions. It is obvious that a survey of the reception of the Maccabean martyr stories in less than 200 pages can only be selective (see, for other aspects of this reception, several essays in G. Signori [ed.], Dying for the faith, killing for the faith: Old-Testament faith-warriors [1 and 2 Maccabees] in hstorical perspective, Leiden 2012). The author focuses much more on the mother and her seven sons than on the old scribe Eleazar, who is hardly or not mentioned after p. 60. The reception of the mother and her sons is much richer than that of Eleazar, and it would be interesting to know why this is the case. Readers may disagree with one or two points, for example that 2 Maccabees was ‘not used to determine church teaching’ (p. 81), although it functioned as proof text for the significance of prayers for the dead and the existence of purgatory as well the concept of the creatio ex nihilo, or that there was only a well-documented cult of the Maccabean martyrs in Cologne (p. 122). All in all, however, this is a most stimulating contribution, a fascinating elaboration on how the Maccabean stories were re-created in very different ways, depending on the purpose of the interpreters: resistance against unjust authorities, polemics against rival Christian groups, education, or highlighting Christian identities.