Leonard V. Rutgers tells us in his introduction to these essays (the first two of which have been previously published) that, in order to properly contextualize his archaeological work conducted in the Roman catacombs, he found he had to do some textual spadework on late ancient Jewish–Christian relations. Rutgers begins by nodding to the newly recognized robust life of Jews in the late ancient world (“traditionally seen as an isolated and inward looking group” [4]), a salutary recognition for which Rutgers can take no small credit. Robustness, however, does not equal tranquility; Jews may have thrived, but they did so in an intractably violent Roman society: Rutgers takes exception to studies that promote a notion of “peaceful interaction.” When Christians talked violently about Jews, however, were they recording their real experiences of Jews or merely noting imaginative constructions? Both, Rutgers answers: We must take account of “hermeneutical” and “real” Jews emerging from the same textual remains.
“Hermeneutical Jew” signals that Rutgers views Christians' Jews from a psychological functional perspective: “The notion of the hermeneutic Jew may well have arisen not so much in response to real-life Jewish communities, but for the specific purpose of delineating early Christianity's own in-group identity” (128). Once conjured, however, these hermeneutical Jews bore material fruit—Empowered in the post-Constantine era to actively remold their physical landscapes, Christians projected their negative ideas about Jews onto real Jewish people and buildings: “By the late fourth century it was not ‘the letter that killeth’ … it was the Christians' own belligerent rhetoric that did” (124).
The first essay, “The Importance of Scripture in the Conflict between Jews and Christians: The Example of Antioch's Maccabean Martyrs,” uses a textual question—In what ways did Christians read Jews through the lens of the Hebrew Bible?—to answer a material conundrum, that is, did Christians in fourth-century Antioch really appropriate an existing Jewish shrine containing the venerated remains of the Maccabean martyrs? After a whirlwind tour of early Christian sources from Cyprian through Synesius of Cyrene, Rutgers suggests that the embrace of the pre-Christian Maccabean martyrs as Christian heroes followed the same logic as the Christian embrace of the Hebrew scriptures: It allowed Christians, in their unpalatable newness, to create a viable link to traditions that were “old and respectable” (32).
By contrast, Jews were indifferent to the Maccabees. Rutgers further rejects the suggestion that Jews—against all evidence and known burial customs—would have built a synagogue over human remains, and that such a martyrial synagogue was subsequently “taken over” by Christians. Instead, he suggests that as Christians grew enamored of relic-veneration and the Maccabees, it made sense that they would produce bones (serendipitously discovered, like most relic “inventions”) and a shrine in Antioch to house them. These pre-Christian martyrs' bones would serve a double purpose: to contribute to a growing form of material piety and to give Antiochene Christians a more appropriate venue for their fascination with Jewish bodies than the local synagogues (as John Chrysostom so memorably complained).
Rutgers's second essay, “Justinian's Novella 146 between Jews and Christians,” reinterprets Justinian's legal proscription of Hebrew language and Mishnah (deuterosis) in 553 CE. Notable as the first intervention of Christian imperial authority into Jewish religious practices, the novella is usually interpreted either as witness to an internal debate between Greek- and Hebrew-speaking Jews (and a “renaissance” of Hebrew language among Jews) or as an attempt to coerce Jewish conversion. Rutgers, instead, understands the law as being about Christian anxieties. Justinian realized that “as long as the Jews had their own Hebrew Bible, Christians could never hope to win the exegetical war they had been waging with Jewish contemporaries ever since Christianity had begun to adopt Jewish scriptural traditions” (59). By enforcing the universal use of a Greek Bible, Justinian could finalize Christian triumph over Jews.
The final, longest essay is “The Synagogue as Foe in Early Christian Literature.” In contrast to Chapter 2, here Rutgers makes clear the links between his polarities of “real” and “hermeneutical” Jews. He begins by noting that the fourth century witnessed the rise of Jewish synagogue building as well as the first Christian attempts to demolish said synagogues. On the Jewish side, he posits that Jews—perhaps (as Seth Schwartz has suggested) in reaction to the sudden prominence of Christianity—began “making their own identity more manifest” (82) through monumental buildings (synagogues) and texts (the rabbinic writings). The Christian side is more complicated. Rutgers traces a “semantic shift” by which Christians came, first, to associate Jews with their physical building, the synagogue, thereby stripping it of its geographic particularity (i.e., we no longer hear of “the synagogue of [city X]”). By the fourth century, Jews were routinely called “the synagogue,” a term of generalized opprobrium that stands in stark contrast to “the church” (ecclesia). Once so generalized and abstracted, “synagogue” became a semantic vessel to be filled at will with all manner of rhetorical infamy. Rutgers draws on a wide range of mostly Latin-speaking authors to conclude: “The ‘synagogue’ ceased to be an actual place or a living institution. Instead it was abstracted into something else, namely the very essence of evil” (104).
Rutgers then moves us from hermeneutical to “real” Jews by suggesting that the outbreak of violence against synagogue buildings in the late fourth century represented the natural response of Christians who for years imbibed this hateful rhetoric: They were “program[med] neuro-linguistically” (107) such that, endowed now with imperial backing and confronted with monumental Jewish structures rising in their cities, “it was no longer a question of ‘if’ but rather of ‘when’ early Christian preaching on ‘the synagogue’ would lead to actual violence” (108).
In an extended epilogue, Rutgers explains how early Christian “hermeneutical Jews” became the lens through which Christians encountered “real Jews.” Pre-Constantine, he argues, minority Christians lived socially “separated” lives from Jews; in this splendid isolation, “hermeneutical Jews” emerged to articulate their communal identity (121–22). With the fourth century came legalization and the entry of a newly empowered Christianity into confrontation with actual Jews: The negatively concocted “hermeneutical Jew” now began to “determine the rhythm of actual Jewish–Christian relations” (124).
That Rutgers has synthesized work across more than a decade in such a clear and forceful argument is commendable. Nonetheless, I wonder at some of his assumptions about the social realities of Jews and Christians that undergird his arguments. Were all Christians truly anxious about their non-Hebrew Bible in the sixth century? Surely the work of Jerome—an outlier—almost 200 years prior is not dispositive (see p. 60), and the rise of Syriac biblicism in the sixth century must play some role here. Likewise, can we really imagine that—until the legalization of Christianity in the fourth century—Christians lived “isolated, separate” lives and only came into contact with “real” Jews after centuries of separation? Finally, the focus on negative discourse of Jews paints a somewhat flattened picture; what do we make of Christians speaking positively of Judaism (such as Augustine, as depicted now by Paula Fredriksen)? Like Rutgers, I do not think such testimonies bear witness to a pax religionum, but they might signal deep ambivalence about Jews and Judaism at the rhetorical and “real” levels of Christian life. Why privilege the surviving voice of Chrysostom railing against the synagogue and ignore the (touristic? colonizing? patronizing? fetishizing?) Christians frequenting the synagogue and drawing John's ire?
As a scholar of early Christianity, I am deeply grateful to and invigorated by these essays, as will be all students of late ancient religion. Perhaps one of the most salutary moments comes at the end of Chapter 3, when Rutgers warns modern scholars that the retention of seemingly “innocent” metaphors (e.g., calling Jews “the synagogue”) leaves us, and our scholarship, open to the toxic remains of the myths crafted in early Christian texts. These essays are a fine work of scholarship that will enter usefully into the ongoing scholarly conversation.
