Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Shylock and Fagin



















Mastiff said...

While there is a distinction between racial anti-semitism and religious anti-semitism, most Jews treat the general term "anti-semitism" as a misnomer and don't get hung up on the racial angle. It is used to encompass any situation in which Jews are hated for being, or having been, Jewish.

I consider the term a bit of a cop-out. It sounds too erudite and is imprecise, as it does not inherently exclude other "semites" such as Arabs. I much prefer "Jew-hatred," it's far clearer.

But back to Shakespeare…

I agree that Shylock is not the typical portrait of the hated Jew. The play's main jeopardy is only introduced when Shylock decides to forego his money in favor of vengeance, not an action that one would expect from the Jewish caricature of the time.

But that caricature still informs Shylock's character. His stubbornness, his grotesque use of the law, his contempt for the Christians around him — while each of these make sense on their own, they also tie in well with traditional Christian polemics against Judaism.

Whether Shakespeare himself was a Jew-hater or simply used a convenient trope in his writing, you should remember that Jews had been banished from England entirely between the years 1290 and 1655, when Cromwell let us back in. The Jews was thus a conveniently absent bogeyman.

Alan K.Farrar said...

"Jews had been banished from England entirely between the years 1290 and 1655, when Cromwell let us back in"

Not actually true in the sense there were no Jews in England (although officially banned)- as with so much official history, it doesn't tell the whole story: There is a considerable body of evidence that there were Jews in England - Queen Elizabeth actually had a Portugese Jewish Doctor at one point, and a number of musicians in Shakespeare's London were Jewish.
There was also a thrieving Black community.
One reason I think Shakespeare doesn't fall into the trap of racial stereotypes is the variety of people he had contact with in London - including Jews.

Ian Thal said...

Given the most recent controversy over the perceived antisemitism of Shylock's portrayal, I have just finished reading MoV in an edition edited by M. Lindsay Kaplan. She includes lots of comtemporary materials that would have been available in Shakespeare's time that would be evidence as to English attitudes not just of Jews, but of Italians, and Moors-- so it also has relevence for discussing Othello.

Ian Thal said...


As to the term "antisemitism"-- it is a term of recent coinage, dating only to the 19th century as a self-description by the new "anti-Semites" who wanted to make it clear that their Jew-hatred was not theologically based but rooted in their [pseudo]scientific concepts of race, that is, it is a response to the secularization of the Enlightenment era and the liberation of the Jews from their previously segregated existence.

It was never meant to refer to Arabs and other non-Jewish speakers of Semitic languages, indeed Western antisemitism as an ideological movement has often sought out allies in the Arab world.