In this work, a revision of a dissertation written under the guidance of Elizabeth Clark at Duke, Susanna Drake considers the interplay of categories of race, sex, and gender in the construction of Jews and Judaism by some Greek church fathers from the first through the fifth centuries. Tracing the development of the image of the “carnal Jew,” she makes use of the works of theorists of colonialism and gender, including Homi Bhabha, Robert J. C. Young, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, highlighting Foucault's claim that sexuality represents a “dense transfer point for relations of power” (8).

Paul, by dichotomizing spirit and flesh, and by associating porneia with Gentiles, inadvertently provided the categories that proved useful to later Christian writers who theorized Jewish difference. Although Paul never associates carnality with Israel, Drake shows how others retained the antithesis and turned it against Jews (99–100). The author of the Epistle of Barnabas, fifty years later, theorizes difference by fusing exegesis and sexuality, arguing, for example, that the forbidden animals in dietary laws are really symbols of illicit sexual practices. Justin, in Dialogue with Trypho, claims Jews' wrong-headed literalist understanding of scripture springs from their lust, as they misread Jacob's multiple wives, or David's affair with Bathsheba.

Drake examines five texts to show how Origen, despite his regard for Jewish scriptural experts he consulted (whom he calls Hebraioi), used Pauline dichotomies of spirit and flesh to differentiate Christians from contemporary Jews (whom he calls Judaioi). Jewish carnality and literalism in understanding of Scripture are intertwined in Origen's theory of Jewish alterity, providing a contrast to Christian chastity in practice and spiritual understanding in biblical interpretation. Circumcision provides a graphic case, where Jews foolishly “mutilate the flesh” because they interpret the text literally. Using Philo's allegorical interpretation, Origen promotes the Christian “spiritual” circumcision, expressed as bodily self-control or asceticism.

The third century writers Hippolytus and Origen took the already fraught and sexualized story of Susanna and the Elders and turned it to their own uses, with the chaste matron standing in for the church, which was under attack from lascivious Jewish elders. Gender became more complex by the third century, Drake observes, as an ideal of masculine self-control absorbed aspects of an ideal of feminine passivity. The image of the church as the chaste virgin beset by hyper-masculine Jews corresponded to the idea of pure spiritual exegesis sullied by Jewish literalism. John Chrysostom's Sermons Against the Jews provides the most extreme examples of anti-Jewish stereotypes; Jews as dogs or animals fit for slaughter, Jewish men as malakoi, soft and sexually depraved, their women as prostitutes, and the synagogues as brothels. Reversing Paul's image of the olive tree in Romans 11, Chrysostom argues for permanent Jewish exclusion from grace.

Drake is not content to examine rhetoric for its own sake, but asks the crucial question of the relationship between rhetoric and violence. Chrysostom's preaching of Jews as pollutants in the community and worthy objects of violence, for example, provided justification for anti-Jewish legislation of the late fourth century. Establishing causal relationships is tricky, and she attempts to steer a course between Wayne Meeks and Robert Wilken (Jews and Christians in Antioch, Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978), for example, who sought to reconstruct Jewish-Christian relations in fourth century Antioch, and Isabella Sandwell (Identity and Religious Interaction in Late Fourth-Century Antioch, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) who considers Chrysostom's rhetoric as part of a construction of Christian identity. Drake describes her plan to explore “how his rhetoric functions in the construction of reality” affecting identities, differences, communities, and boundaries (79).

This approach occupies a rather subtle space between “facts on the ground” and “facts on the page,” between reconstructing historical contexts and identifying theological constructs. Since the work of Miriam S. Taylor (Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity, Leiden: Brill, 1995) and others, the field has become rightly reticent about reconstructing social history from tendentious patristic texts. Yet some details tantalize the historian, say, when Drake suggests that Origen reacts to a “hybrid Judaeo-Christianism” (3) in Caesarea, or reminds us that Chrysostom lived near Jews and pagans and that his constituents visited synagogues. The author of The Epistle to Barnabas knows of people who assert some form of inclusivism, saying “the covenant both theirs and ours.” Drake is brave enough to assert a relationship between rhetoric and reality. She does not speculate about specifics-causality, possible Gentile attraction to Judaism, the relative success or failure of this rhetoric with the immediate hearers.

Two points could be clarified. Paul's ideas of Gentile association with porneia were attributed to his Jewishness, Drake several times asserting Paul's similarity to “many Jewish polemicists before him” (19, 20, 24). While this association typifies later rabbinic thought, it would be helpful to provide examples that pre-date Paul. Also somewhat puzzling was the discussion of Origen that employs Andrew Jacobs' notion of Jewish “remains” (56–57). Drake says that Judaism is only partially suppressed and resists the boundedness that Origen tries to impose. To the extent that the Jewish origins of Christian thinking can never be completely discarded because of the shared scripture, this would seem to be true for all the texts she examines. How is Origen's work different from the other texts? She argues that absolute distancing from Judaism is ultimately unsuccessful because Origen still relies on the Jew Philo, and Chrysostom must keep repeating his slanders. But for whom were they unsuccessful? Did instability in their arguments weaken their effect on life and relations in the cities of the empire?

Drake has presented us with a carefully-drawn map through these early Christian writers, showing how the language of difference mutates to absorb caricatures based on gender, sexuality, race, and religion. Quite remarkably, these same tropes applied to practices of text interpretation. She argues that the ultimate effect of the increasingly grotesque caricatures played out in the imperial legislation of the time, and probably in spontaneous violence. Subtle, careful, and suggestive, this book will help us all think more clearly about the relationship of rhetoric and history.