Why Tertullian Preferred Symbolic Jews to Real Ones

A brilliant master of Latin prose and legal reasoning, the Tunisian lawyer-turned-priest Tertullian (ca. 155–220) is considered one of the founders of Western Christianity. Tertullian wrote extensively about Jews and Judaism, in his Adversus Iudaeos (“Answer to the Jews”)—a foundational work of anti-Jewish polemic—and his five-volume Against Marcion, an attack on an influential thinker who wanted to separate Christianity entirely from the Hebrew Bible and Judaism. Considering the attention he paid to Judaism, and the likely presence of a Jewish community in his native Carthage, Stéphanie Binder tries to determine whether the church father had in mind actual, living Jews or Jews as a biblical-theological abstraction. Her conclusion says much about the way non-Jews over the centuries have turned Jews from people into symbols: