This clearly written and admirably succinct study seeks to show how, in a context of blurred and fluid lines of demarcation between Jews and Christians, Christian writers from the second century onwards, intent upon clearly distinguishing themselves from Jews, sought negatively to sexualise the latter by accusing them of carnality, fleshliness, bestiality and licentiousness. Such claims, it is argued, helped, inter alia, to inform Christian assertions about Jewish carnal or literal readings of Scripture, and often served to emphasise an ever-increasing sense of the Christians as spiritual and ascetical, or at least to encourage them to adopt such a state. Such rhetoric, in which Jews or indeed Judaizers could literally be portrayed as attempting to seduce their often feminised Christian neighbour in an act of sexual violence, came to justify Christian acts of violence against the Jewish community from the fourth century onwards.

Drake's thesis, which is heavily influenced by theories associated with Foucault, Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, amongst others, begins by examining the role of negative sexual stereotyping in pagan and Jewish sources, in part to show the context out of which the Christian polemic, which is her subject, arose. A multitude of Jewish texts, for instance, portray Gentiles as sexually perverse, often linking such perversity to idolatry. Paul, who was a Jew, however we understand that term, repeats such stereotypes about Gentiles, but, according to Drake, aside from a passage in Romans (Romans ii.22), never polemicises against Jews in such a way, and this in spite of his close association of the word ‘flesh’ and law. For Drake it is only subsequent ‘illegitimate’ interpreters of Paul’ who will make him a key figure in a subtle sexualisation of Jewish hermeneutical practice and Jews themselves.

The initial rogues in this tale, however, made no obvious use of Paul. Barnabas and Justin are the first to argue that Jewish inclination to porneia affected the way in which they understood the texts, namely the Tanak, over which Christians and Jews squabbled. A lustful, fleshly disposition inevitably influences hermeneutical assumptions, whose literalism can be seen as carnal. The voluminous Origen developed further the view of the Jew as carnal and licentious, and it was he more than anyone else who made Paul a helpmeet in this process. So the Apostle's dualities (flesh/spirit; spirit/letter etc.) come to be associated with Judaism and Christianity respectively, which was never the intention of Paul, and contribute significantly to the way in which Origen develops the idea of the Jew as a wrong-headed interpreter, carnal unlike his spiritual and Christian counterpart. A chapter then follows on the representation of Susanna in the story of Susanna and the elders, found only in Greek versions of the book of Daniel, and the way in which the story contributes to an image of the chaste, feminised Christian (Susanna) and the sexually aggressive lascivious Jew (the elders), though, interestingly, Drake shows how such an interpretation, in its various manifestations (Hippolytus and Origen) is not universally witnessed in Christian writings on this story, which, as time went on, tended to concentrate much more on the virtues of Susanna, as an ideal type of Christian, than on the sins of the elders. In the penultimate chapter Drake discusses Chrysostom's more intensive and rebarbative use of sexual imagery in his notorious sermons against Judaizing Christians, where Jews are explicitly accused of prostitution, effeminacy and sexual practices of various kinds. In such polemic, Drake argues, Chrysostom is seeking ‘to fix the ideality of the other’, but in such a way that he hints at the fluidity of Christian identity. In a final chapter Drake seeks to demonstrate the relationship between this language and acts of violence against the Jews. ‘The rhetoric of anti-Jewish stereotypes shaped and produced the reality of Jewish disenfranchisement’, and contributed to an atmosphere in which acts of violence were justified, a point Drake seeks to justify by analysing Ambrose's plea to the emperor in the wake of the destruction of the Callinicum synagogue and Theodosius’ demand that Christians pay for the rebuilding of the structure.

This is a solid piece of work, well researched and intelligently argued. It emerges to some extent out of recent debates about Jewish-Christian relations, in which Christian denunciation of Jews is seen as an attempt to create separation and a clear identity where such a thing, it is asserted, did not exist (and in the process show up the dependence, to some extent, upon the other). It examines a particular manifestation of that process, pointing to the complex relationship between assertions of sexual perversity and more subtle arguments about interpretative strategy. There arise here interesting arguments about primacy, that is, whether assertions of sexual abjectness precede those of hermeneutical foolishness, or whether the process is in fact the other way around, or whether, indeed, either of these alternatives is right. A more important question, however, relates to the role of this form of polemic. To what extent is it dominant in Christian representations of Jews? Or simply one of a heap of negative representations? And is its role in presenting the Jew, and indeed fixing his or her identity, central or peripheral? Drake is only able to show that a figure as rebarbative as Chrysostom uses such imagery in two of his eight homilies, and I would aver that in adversus Iudaeos literature more generally, not the subject of Drake's thesis, it plays less of a role. Finally, and a point which arose in conversation with my colleague, Simon Gathercole, Drake makes little of the fact that Christians made use of such sexual polemic in talking about those sometimes called Gnostics and other internal ecclesiastical enemies. What was the relationship between such language when used about the latter and when used about Jews? In the former was there, for instance, a slippage between language about actual sexual practices and other activities such as interpretation, right belief and related matters, as Drake claims to be the case in the use of sexual language about non-Christian Jews? And to what extent did such language, used of so-called heretics, contribute to the creation of a positive ideal of Christian behaviour?

Such questions, however, simply point to what the author would no doubt accept is the necessarily limited character of her thought-provoking book, and it may be the case that in the future she seeks to address these, and other, wider questions (something at which she hints at the end of her work).