“Shylock, Shakespeare, and the Jews: Anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice”
Panel discussion Wed 13th April, 7pm Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Barry Edelstein, director, The Public Theater,
Professor James Shapiro of Columbia University,
Rabbi Steven Weil
Moderator: Patrick Healy, New York Times drama critic.
Dear reader,
This was a subject that has fascinated me since I was a teenager even though I am very much a Shakespeare novice. So, denying myself a Rachmaninoff concerto at Carnegie Hall, I attended this panel discussion on Anti-Semitism at the Museum of Jewish Heritage at Battery Point.
Rather than spirited debate, all three experts and the moderator seemed to agree on most of the themes raised. More diverse parties might well have had heated discussion using lines drawn from the play. An all-Jewish expert panel left no gentile expert to take the can or “blame”, even play devil’s advocate. The Merchant of Venice was a play for the London middle classes and a case might be made that the more anti-Semitic it was, the more effective it might be to make its audience question its themes, whether from a Christian, Jewish or humanist perspective. But this aspect was left as either self-evident or else too difficult by the panel.
We were told that William Shakespeare would never receive the ‘righteous gentile of the year’ award (laughter!). However it was agreed by our speakers that Shakespeare should probably not be characterised as any more anti-Semitic than most his era. I once quizzed Australia’s great Shakespearean John Bell in an unguarded moment. He said that he felt that on balance the play was probably not anti-Semitic.
Literary historians cannot agree on just where the Bard came upon his quite detailed knowledge of Jews … not to mention Venice, Verona, Cyprus, etc. It is doubtful that he ever saw a Jewish community unless he ‘slipped across the channel’ to Antwerp, Amsterdam or other cities with visible Jewish communities. We were told that the 13th century expulsion of the Jews from England was not a simple date by which all Jews had to leave. Even before this things were being made more and more difficult for Jews using ruinous taxation, education limitations and living restrictions. Eventually most of the community had either emigrated or converted. Those who made their Jewish faith public would be formally deported as happened, we were told, to a well known civil engineer in the service of Queen Elizabeth I. We were told that despite his position, knowledge and connections he was forcibly exiled. Even prior to the expulsion of the Jews in the 13th century by Edward I, Magna Carta did not apply to them as they were considered direct subjects of the Crown.
Hence the only Jews Shakespeare could have known would have been ‘private’ or ‘at home’ Jews who like covert Catholics under Henry VIII, became pseudo-Christians outwardly to avoid punishment and/or deportation. I have read that Queen Elizabeth’s physician Rodrigo Lopez, an Iberian exile, may have been a model for Shylock. He was executed after accusations of an assassination plot. The very lack of a real Jewish community to observe in England at the time may well have heightened the scope for wild anti-Semitic stories such as the ‘blood libel’.
Shakespeare would have seen Marlowe’s play ‘The Jew of Malta’ written just a few years earlier c1590. Despite being very popular at the time, we were told that Barabas was little more than a cardboard cut-out persona compared to the complex character of Shylock. Readers who know the play or who have seen a summary as I did, may find this an unfair simplification. The experts agreed that Marlowe’s play had a substantial influence on the character of ‘Shylock’.
One panel member said that Shakespeare would certainly have been familiar with the New Testament story of replacing the covenant of circumcision with a comparable but symbolic “bris of the heart” during baptism (St Paul’s letter to the Romans was mentioned). The notion of a bloody cardiac ‘covenant’ for the ‘pound of flesh’ is almost too ‘clever’ to be true. Yet it just may have been the homicidal intention of Shylock on his gentile adversary as the Bard often had layers of meaning in his writings. We learned that in Yiddish, ‘flesh’ can also refer to ‘penis’. By Christian tradition St Paul tried to attract more converts by eliminating the need for circumcision in his ‘new’ religion. Paul was born ‘Saul’ and only changed names, like so many other binominal biblical characters … in his case on the ‘road to Damascus’.
My long time Jewish mentor once told me that Pauline intolerance was disguised as liberalism. She also said that Jesus would have kept kosher and followed Jewish practices. Paul dropped both the kosher dietary laws as well as circumcision in order to ‘market’ his new religion to other Jews as well as gentiles, simultaneously bad-mouthing establishment Jews as an exclusive clique. My friend described St Paul as an ‘extraordinary spin doctor’, like some modern day politicians. Whether Shylock considered teaching the Christians a lesson from these tales is a matter for interesting speculation.
The panel members then dealt with the origins of anti-Semitism using New Testament quotes such as Matthew 23. Some blamed the Jews for the death of Jesus while others blame the Romans (and Herod was only nominally Jewish according to some sources). A contrary deduction to my mind would be for Christians to laud, or at least respect those responsible since it was the death of Jesus which was by tradition supposed to ‘cleanse the sins of the world’.
Mention was made of the ‘outsider’, stranger or underdog being used in Shakespeare’s plays, usually as minor characters. However, top billing went to the moor in Otello and to Shylock who parallel each other to some extent. Each man was needed to perform difficult tasks at the time by established society, despite their outsider status. We were given a brief quote from Otello as he is dying, likening himself to a dog.
The panel members were discussing the context of anti-Semitism in past eras, pointing out that it was ubiquitous and just ‘normal’ until very recent times in most western countries. To demonstrate this point, Rabbi Weil read out a brief quote and asked the panel and audience to guess its author. “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. When they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment”. With a silent and startled audience we were informed that it was written by Harry Truman when he was President. This also caused some consternation amongst the audience. The quote was from a private diary found years after the President’s death and published in the Washington Post in 2003. A Google search shows that Rabbi actually read out an edited version. The full version, while also outrageous (see below*) has some more caveats and details so readers may judge for themselves if it is any less offensive than the above excerpt. Importantly, while it refers to Jews, it generalises to other minority groups, or ‘under-dogs’ who may have become ‘masters’ themselves and subsequently forgotten their past. While it would be less than acceptable today, it was a shame Rabbi did not analyse the President’s meaning in relation to post war events, rather than using his words as a 'shock-horror' tactic to underline a point, and one well known to everyone in the room I suspect.
Indeed, we were also reminded that it was some of Truman’s actions, against the advice of his State Department, that probably allowed the State of Israel to come into being. [A cynic might say that the Anti-Semite in him might have hoped that the creation of Israel would cause all the Jews to migrate there and solve the perceived “Jewish problem”.] On a more positive note, Truman had a life-long Jewish friend and business partner for whom he apparently had the greatest devotion and affection. The rather shocking quotation was used by the Rabbi to show that ‘as a society we have moved along’ from the days when just about everybody was openly anti-Semitic.
In a number of other instances in his other plays Shakespeare uses the term ‘Jew’ as a derogatory generic in what might be throw-away lines by the characters involved: ‘You think me a Jew?’ Just as the President’s anti-Semitic quote was dismissed without analysis as an ugly historical exhibit, I was disappointed that the panel also overlooked Shakespeare’s own written words. I had hoped for some examples from the play of anti-Semitism and some balancing sentiments … but it was not to be. There is other racism in the play although nothing to rival the anti-Semitism (eg. Portia on Morocco and other suitors). I was also disappointed that we did not get some wisdom on how it was that of the hundreds of human situations one could write about, this time Shakespeare chose aspects of Jewish life in Venice, then a place of the most ‘international’ status, perhaps like New York or Shanghai today.
Our speakers touched on dozens of different productions of ‘Merchant’. Apart from all the varied adaptations in English they included a version in Yiddish in New York, in Hebrew in Israel and in Italian in Italy. Of great interest was the use of Shakespeare by the Nazi regime in the 1930 in German. There were many productions of Merchant in both Germany and Austria in the 1930s and during the war. Mostly these were substantially edited to keep consistent with the prevailing pure Aryan dogma. The (inter)marriage of Jessica and Lorenzo was often omitted … and on occasions Jessica was cast as an adopted Aryan child. The Germans apparently even called him “our” Shakespeare (Aryan, Christian, etc), a principle which, taken to its extreme, could have shortened the war considerably. We were told about a widely screened propaganda film version of the play, also carefully edited, made under the watchful eyes of Josef Goebbels. One speaker expressed some views about the educational and historical value of such films - ‘however shocking they may be by their nature’. Some of the worst examples have apparently been lost to posterity.
Another odd description from one of our panellists who happened to see a production in Italy in Italian when the play simply stopped after a commotion-filled courtroom scene. One of the characters, a well-known Italian comedy actor, came down to the front of the stage and made some hilarious comments about the ‘comedy’ that was to ensue.
There were various American versions of the play from the 1960s up to one recent production in Central Park followed up at The Public Theater with Al Pacino. The famous Hollywood actor reputedly said: “My parents are from Sicily, therefore I am a Jew” (more laughter). Daniel Sullivan also directed one classic production which was mentioned. Barry Edelstein make a note of the fact that Mr Sullivan is not Jewish which ‘must have enabled him to read the lines from an unbiased perspective although as a humanist he must also have cringed like any Jew at every negative sentiment in the play’.
It was “let slip” that one such production may be reprised in Los Angeles later this year This information may be been an intentional commercial ‘Wiki-Shy-leak’! Moderator Mr Healy said that his education was Jesuit but he wondered about how a Jew felt about the play and its author on first hearing the words from its characters. While ‘startled’ and ‘upset’ initially were some emotions given, it was not said that probably the main view of Jews would be that Shakespeare was just like everybody else. It was vexing to have the panel agreeing on just about everything with few if any point of discord, despite the huge gaps in our knowledge about the era, playwright and his chosen subject.
We were told that apart from a handsome portrayal of Shylock, the unique addition for Pacino was when holding the knife to extract the ‘pound of flesh’ from Antonio’s chest he apparently displayed absolute terror (rather than anger). The reason, we were told, was that in that the stabbing Antonio would likely have then led to the death of Shylock himself as well. If his own actions caused his own death, and since suicide is contrary to Jewish law, this would also condemn him forever, along with his quarry. It seems that for most people the turning point in the play is the near-murder of Antonio (the Merchant) when the play returns to being an involving comedy.
Almost as interesting as the panel discussion was my solitary walk northwards after the talk, passing Thames Street and Liberty Street towards the World Trade Center site. The coastal blocks from Battery Park contain dozens of new buildings on reclaimed land near the mighty Hudson River. By mid-evening the tallest were shrouded in cloud which made the tranquil early Spring night eerie indeed. Across the water the New Jersey coastline could clearly be seen including a huge bright red fluorescent clock face showing the current time. At Ground Zero, despite two new buildings are going up rapidly in opposite corners, there remains an enormous chasm amidst the dense surrounding development. The so-called (but now to be re-named) “Freedom Tower” has reached 62 floors, about half its final height. Another building on the south-east side looks to be up to about twenty floors. I understand that there are some monumental areas with pools of water as well as some open space and visitors’ center with a dedication to those who lost their lives as a result of the attacks. Another unique day for a traveller in the Big Apple.
Comments by Andrew Byrne ..
* Full quote from Harry Truman’s private diaries: "The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."
