BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

Prayer From Alexander to Constantine: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Mark

Kiley et al. London: Routledge, 1997. xx + 332 pp. $74.95 cloth; $22.95
paper.
This volume assembles the commentaries of forty-nine scholars on fifty-
four prayers or sets of prayers spanning the period 325 B.C.E.-325 C.E. The
selections represent Jewish, pagan, and Christian sources as diverse as Qum-
ran, Philo, an Orphic hymn, Catullus's Prayer to Diana, the Acts of Paul and
Thecla, and the Didache. A wide range of literary contexts is represented, not
limited to formal liturgical use. Each text is introduced in terms of its
manuscript attestation, literary and cultural setting, and theology. Fresh
translations of the prayers are followed by bibliographies for further reading.
A glossary is included.
Kiley contends that several features unify this diverse collection of texts. He
argues that prayers in all three traditions are characterized by petition,
intercession, thanksgiving, and adoration. Sacrifice is also a recurring theme,
linking all traditions with Hellenistic thought, in which sacrifice was a topic
for philosophical inquiry in antiquity. Kiley sees broad influence from Greek
rhetorical standards. Finally, the anthology is enlisted as a tool in the present
search for greater Jewish-Christian understanding, and the likelihood that
these two faiths had more in common with their pagan neighbors at prayer
than is typically recognized. Purely literary interest, too, is invited. For these
and other reasons, the collection will be useful to students of antiquity from
several disciplines.
William P. McDonald
Tennessee Wesleyan College

Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World. By Peter

Shäfer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. xii + 306 pp.
$35.00 cloth.
Few cultural ideas and social patterns from antiquity have as immediate
and dreadful a resonance in our own century as does anti-Semitism. Professor
Peter Schäfer, born in Germany shortly before the end of World War II,
currently director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Free University of
Berlin, acknowledges this forthrightly. His sensitivity to the complex context
of modern scholarship on the question of anti-Jewish hostility prompted him
to compose the current study in English ("We are [much] influenced in our
thinking by the language in which we write. Had I written in German, a
different book would surely have emerged" [vii]; cf. his articulate animadver-
sions on translating genos/ethnos as "race" [217 n. 37]). But once past the
introduction—a concise sketch of modern historiography on the question of
ancient Gentile-Jewish relations from Mommsen (1884) to Gager (1983) and
Feldman (1993)— Schäfer plunges us into a foreign world thick with legend-
ary myths of origin; with rumored forbidden offerings, animal and human;
with well-tended ethnic resentments and fantasies of huge destruction. We are
in the ancient Mediterranean, in pursuit of the origins of anti-Semitism.
Schäfer lays out his evidence in three blocks. Part 1, "Who are the Jews?"
(15-118), presents major themes retailed by gentile authors when commenting
556
BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 557

on Jews and Judaism: the Exodus (transmuted from the more familiar biblical
story of flight to freedom to a derogatory tale of leprosy and expulsion); the
Jewish God (unnerving, mysterious, aniconic); abstinence from pork (odd and
ancestral); Sabbath (mistaken for a fast day); circumcision (a gold mine
particularly for Latin satirists); and proselytism, the reception of gentile
converts. As the author reviews each of these topics, the dislikes and preju-
dices of certain ancient writers (Manetho, Apion, Juvenal, Tacitus) emerge
with startling clarity.
Part 2, "Two Key Historical Incidents" (121-60), analyzes oddly twin events
in Egypt, three centuries apart, whose salient features—political, social,
religious—closely resemble each other: the anti-Jewish outburst at Elephan-
tine ca. 410 B.C.E., and the well-known eruption of violence in Alexandria in
38 and 41 C.E. In both cases, the resident Jewish population identified itself,
and was resentfully associated by the natives, with a well-hated foreign
power: the Persians, who conquered Egypt in 525 B.C.E., and the Romans of
the early imperial period. In both cases, the gentile population worked
through co-opting the local representative of the distant imperial power (the
Persian Vidranga; the Roman Flaccus) in order to attack with impunity the
Jews in their midst. And in both cases, the situation stabilized only once
greater external authority intervened. Schäfer's writing in this section is
excellent, a vigorous combination of narrative and analysis. And the material
he relates serves him in making an important point, namely, that for the
ancient world one cannot reasonably or usefully distinguish between political
(understand "secular") and religious motivations: the two are intertwined,
inseparable, indeed most often indistinguishable.
Part 3, "Centers of Conflict" (163-96), surveys the three geographical
matrices of major traditions of anti-Semitism: Egypt, Syria-Palestine, and
Rome. This section reprises the themes of Part 1 now refracted through the
powerful analysis of Part 2. Here Schäfer builds clearly and strongly to his
thesis. Egyptian anti-Jewish sentiment was based upon deep ethnic resent-
ments, caused in part by clashes in the religions of the respective groups. Later
Hellenistic "ethnography" picked up and developed the originally Egyptian
charges of impiety, xenophobia, and misanthropy—boosted, perhaps, by the
Jewish-Greek tensions of the Maccabean revolt, which comes too late, how-
ever, to serve as the origin of such sentiments (against Bickerman, Hengel, and
Habicht, esp. 178-79). Hellenism's own grandiose sense of itself served as a
kind of step-up transformer to the very particular hatreds transferred from
Egypt: if things Greek represented the very best in universal human culture,
then perceived Jewish rejection of that culture revealed a supposed Jewish
animosity to humanity itself—a conviction that also shapes hostile character-
izations of early Christians as driven by an odium generis humani.
Finally, the contribution of Roman attitudes cut two ways. On the one hand,
Jew-haters such as Cicero, Juvenal, and Tacitus would characterize Judaism as
the quintessential barbara swpersïiïio, intrinsically inimical to Roman "religio,
the latter being the essence of the political, cultural, and religious ideals of
ancient Rome" (181). But, on the other, Judaism obviously exerted a powerful
appeal. "Proselytism is a subject only in Roman, not in Greek literature"
(193)—enough Romans were attracted to conversion, if Schäfer's reconstruc-
tion of Domitian's motives for prosecuting the fiscus iudaicus is correct, that
forcing them onto the tax roll might have significantly increased government
revenues (183, cf. 106-118). Conversion to Judaism alone (as opposed to
558 CHURCH HISTORY

adherence to any of the other cults of antiquity, until Christianity) meant

betrayal of one's own patria nomima and literally joining another people in the
worship of its god, the God of Israel: it was in this sense seen as maiestas, high
treason. This double emotional response of dislike and (because of Judaism's
attractions) fear is what particularly marks Roman anti-Jewish traditions, for
which reason Schäfer proposes the term that entitles the work: Judeophobia.
Schäfer's final chapter, "Anti-Semitism" (197-211) draws together his argu-
ments through a comparison with Gavin Langmuir's taxonomy of types and
degrees of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Langmuir, a medievalist, while
acknowledging earlier anti-Judaism, sees the origins of fully developed
anti-Semitism only in the mid-twelfth century. Schäfer's evidence and argu-
ments belie this position, and in his counterargument he presses further to
analyze various historians' explanations for anti-Semitism. He dismisses the
position that the Jews' insistence on keeping their own ancestral customs and
laws, their voluntary and renown separateness, was itself the fundamental
reason for gentile hatred. "It is true that the allegation of Jewish 'separateness'
and 'strangeness' does have a fundamentum in re, but to argue that it is the
reason for pagan anti-Semitism is to confuse cause with pretext, to hold the
Jews themselves responsible for what others do to them. . . . To what degree
the Jews were separate is not important.... The only crucial question is what
the Graeco-Roman and Greek authors made out of it. They turned Jewish
separateness into a monstrous conspiracy against humankind and the values
shared by all civilized human beings, and it is therefore their attitude which
determines anti-Semitism."
In its clarity of presentation, in its broad consideration both of ancient
evidence and modern historiography, Schäfer's book marks an important
contribution to the study of the origins and history of anti-Semitism. All
students of antiquity—classicists, intellectual and social historians, religion-
ists—stand to benefit from his work. I would hope that particularly my
colleagues in Pauline studies acquaint themselves with Schäfer's arguments.
Perhaps then they will be able to hear in their own reconstruction of the
reasons for Paul's persecution of the ekklesiai and his own later "persecution"
by synagogue communities—both rountinely "explained" by an appeal to
supposed Jewish hostility toward Gentiles also claiming "membership in the
people of God"—the echoing strains of these ancient Graeco-Roman charges
of Jewish unsociability, misanthropy, and hatred of strangers. Plus ça change...
Paula Fredriksen
Boston University

Early Church Fathers: Book Collection on CD-ROM. Oak Harbor, Wash.:

Logos Research Systems, 1997. $279.95.
A single CD comprises the complete text of three nineteenth-century series
known to scholars everywhere: Ante-Nicene Fathers; Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers, first series; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series. These thirty-
eight volumes, originally published in Edinburgh and rarely out of print since
their first appearance over a hundred years ago, contain English translations
of substantial portions of the works of the major Greek and Latin church
fathers. Some of those volumes, by their ingenuity and learning, remain useful
tools today for very serious scholars (I think of the volume of Augustine's
anti-Pelagian writings, or the volume of the creeds and acts of the seven
Ecumenical councils), but on the whole they are aged and venerable at best.
 ^ s
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