In Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs, Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski seeks to trace the reception of the tradition of the Maccabean martyrs in Christian literature from late antiquity through the medieval period. The book joins a number of other recent studies of Jewish and Christian martyrdom that focus on the ways martyr stories construct identities. Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs is a revision of the author's dissertation, completed at Boston College; it consists of a short introduction followed by four chapters and a conclusion.

The introduction sets Joslyn-Siemiatkoski's chronological and geographical perimeters: “This book is about the Christian memories of the Maccabean martyrs from the early to late medieval Christian periods, ranging geographically from the eastern Mediterranean to northwestern Europe” (1). It also introduces the theoretical lenses through which the author reads his sources: memory theory and post-colonialism, especially the category of “hybridity.” Hybridity is typically used by this author to denote a process of Christian domination of Judaism: “I see hybridity as an instrument that can be deployed as an object of either resistance or control depending on context” (192n164).

Chapter 1 is a brief chapter that begins with a summary of 2 Maccabees 7 and then a discussion of early Jewish reformulations of that narrative, especially 4 Maccabees but also The Assumption of Moses and Josephus's Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. The last pages of the chapter turn to consider the reception of the Maccabean martyrs in early Christianity, focusing exclusively on Cyprian's Letter to Fortunatus.

Chapter 2 considers late ancient bishops' (primarily Gregory of Nazianzus, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and Augustine) appropriations of the Maccabees. This chapter is structured around three narrative motifs: the use of the Maccabean martyrs as, first, “a narrative of resistance against unjust imperial authority” (30); second, “a marker of difference between . . . Catholic Christian communities and rival groups” (for example, Jews, Donatists, Manichees; 30); and third, as “models for ideal Christian virtues and behavior” (31).

Chapter 3, on the medieval West, is also organized around three Christian concerns regarding the use of the Maccabean martyrs: first, by Rabanus Maurus and Rupert of Deutz “to alternately support and critique the imperial aspirations of Christian rulers” (81); second, by Anselm of Laon, John Beleth, and Bernard of Clairvaux to alter “late antique explanations for the presence of the Maccabean martyrs on the Christian calendar of saints” (81); and third, by Peter Comestor to signal “a historical continuity between Israel and the church while reinscribing these Jewish martyrs as Christians” (82).

The approach of chapter 4—on the eleventh- to sixteenth-century Rhineland—is different from the preceding chapters by being overtly comparative. Here Joslyn-Siemiatkoski juxtaposes Jewish (Ashkenazi) remembrances of the Maccabees with the Christian cult of the Maccabean martyrs in Cologne. The author asserts that while these communities did not seem aware of each other's specific traditions, “medieval Ashkenazi Jews were aware and had internalized Christian concepts and cultural practices” (122). Post-colonialism and its concept of hybridity (as used by Joslyn-Siemiatkoski) is most clearly at play in this chapter as the author moves to the conclusion that “the reality of Christian colonization and manipulation of Jewish life and culture informed the culturally determined production of localized memories of the Maccabean martyrs” (123).

In the conclusion, Joslyn-Siemiatkoski links late ancient and medieval Christian supersessionist theologies to anti-Semitic violence, in particular the Holocaust: “Certainly the events of the Holocaust laid bare the barbarism lying beneath the supersessionist moorings of European Christian civilization” (168). He turns, then, to ask, “How then can the past of others be remembered ethically?” (169). The author ends with a call for ethically informed history: “Writing about supersessionism from a postcolonial perspective enables others to see the pernicious possibility of this ideology even in contemporary contexts, so that it can be avoided in the present and the future” (174).

Joslyn-Siemiatkoski has written a book that is daring in scope. The chronological sweep covered in fewer than two hundred pages is daunting, and the author is to be commended for bringing to the academic community a work of such breadth. He reminds us that large questions should be asked. The scope of the book, however, also brings with it pitfalls. It is not possible, for instance, to treat any one text, author, time period, or geographical provenance with the nuance and detail one might desire. The section on John Chrysostom, for instance, in chapter 2, is well written and contextualizes Chrysostom's thought persuasively. In chapter 1, however, it is unfortunate that Joslyn-Siemiatkoski devotes only a little over two pages to the earliest period of Christian utilization of the Maccabean tradition—the first three centuries. This omission is problematic for at least two reasons. First, in a work that seeks to understand why and how Christians appropriated the Maccabean martyrs, this period would seem to be essential. Indeed, in chapter 2, the author states that “Late antique Christian bishops transformed earlier Christian memories of the Maccabean martyrs” (29), but he does not provide his reader with an examination of these earlier Christian memories themselves. Hebrews 11:35, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, and Origen's An Exhortation to Martyrdom are mentioned in passing but not discussed. Cyprian's Letter to Fortunatus receives only a brief discussion even though Cyprian's work was deeply influential for later Christian authors (for example, Rabanus). Second, the omission of the earliest period leads the author to the conclusion that Christianity narrated a history of “original purity” that obscured its “hybrid nature” (162). More work in the early centuries of Jewish-Christian relations—before the so-called “parting of the ways”—would nuance the starkness of this conclusion. Since the texts of the first three centuries were, after all, important in later Christian history, it would have been advantageous to examine carefully their use of the Maccabean tradition and how they informed later authors' views.