Shylock The History Of A Character

The of a

by

On the myths
bj

of THE

OF

Shylock is more than a stage-character.
For centuries he has stood for the Jew,
conjuring up images of greed, deceit,
and hatred. Yet these questions remain :
was Shakespeare's single Jewish charac-
ter a viliification of the Jewish people
and, if so, a deliberate smear; should
the play be viewed in relation to the
Elizabethan literary traditions rather
than those of our time; and, finally,
and possibly most important, should it
be performed today?

To answer these questions, one must
not only analyze the play from a lite-
rary viewpoint, but also examine the
medieval legends and myths about
the Jews which entered into the plot
of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
More than half of Sinsheimer's book
is devoted to such a study. Paradoxical-
ly, this account can lead to many con-
clusions, but, in the opinion of Sin-
sheimer, Shakespeare rejected the bla-
tant Jew-baiting of Ms predecessors
and contemporaries and, for the first
time in English literature, created a
Jewish character who resisted his tor-
mentors, though with the wrong weap-
ons.

See inside of jacket for other books
published by Benjamin Blom, Inc.

-22.55 U7

Slnsheimer
Sjylock

622,53
Sinsh.elm.er
Shy lock

65-^024;

$5.00

65-^0214-5

SH YLOGK

SHYLOCK

The History of a Character

by
HERMANN SINSHEIMER

BENJAMIN BLOM, INC.

NEWNF YORK

5 Copyright 1947, by Hermann Sinsheimer.
Reprinted 1963, by arrangement with the author.

Published by Benjamin Blom, Inc., New York 52.
L. C. Catalog Card No.: 63-23188

Printed m U.S/t by

OFFSET PRINTEES, INC.
NEW YORK 3 S N. Y.

TO

THE JEWISH MARTYRS OF

THE WORLD CONFLAGRATION

"Thou Shalt Not Kill"

I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Miss
Christobel Fowler for her invaluable help with the
English version of this book.

CONTENTS

Page

Foreword, By JOHN MIDDLETON HURRY 9

Two Prefaces ij

First Chapter: Shakespeare's World

1. Shakespeare and Elizabeth 21

2. People and Stage 22

3. Shakespeare In Space and Time 25

Second Chapter: The World of the Jews

1 . The Jews in the Middle Ages 27

2. The Jews in Medieval England 36

3. The Jews in the Sixteenth Century, or 43
The Spanish-Portuguese Expulsion

Third Chapter: History ', Myth and Fiction

i . Gerontus, the Good Jew of Turkey 48

,/2. Barrabas 3 the Wicked Jew of Malta 51

3. Joseph^ the Duke of Naxos 54

4. Joseph, the Jew of Cyprus and Venice 58

5. The Case of Roderigo Lopez 62

6. Zachary and Zadoch, the Jews of Rome 68

Fourth Chapter: The Pound of Flesh

1 . The History of a Fable 7 1

2. The Fable in the Sixteenth Century 75

3. The Meaning of the Fable 80

5

Page

Fifth Chapter:

1 . Shakespeare and the Jew 83

2. The Name 87

3. The Drama 88

4. Shylock versus Antonio 92

5. The Character 101

6. The Other Shylock 106

Sixth Chapter: Shylock' *s Medieval Elements^ or
Reality versus Mythology

1. Judas and Ahasver 5 the Prototypes 1 14

2. Of Usury ng

3. Of Hatred and Retaliation 124

4. Of Blood-guilt 1 3 !

5. Shakespeare between Myth and History 134

I 4I

ILLUSTRATIONS
At end of book

Devils and Jews: The First (and probably the Only) Medieval
English Caricature of Jews representing a Usurer, a Coin-
clipper and a Woman Usurer attended by Devils (drawn
on the Rotulus Jud^rum^ 1233).

Medieval Disputation between Christian and Jewish Theologians
(published at Augsburg, 1531).

Alleged Ritual Murder of the Boy Simon at Trent, 1475 (wood-
cut by Wohlgemuth, Nuremberg XVI, C).

Simon of Trent as a Saint.

Medieval Burning of Jews (Deggendorf 5 Bavaria, 1337).

A Noble Turkish Jew (like the Duke of Naxos).

The Philosopher Joseph Del Medico, an Eminent Sephardish
Jew of Italy (XVI. C).

Menasseh Ben Israel, Sephardish Writer and Printer In Amster-
dam, who Negotiated with Cromwell about the Readmission
of the Jews into England.

"Juda seeks Refuge at the Altar of Christendom" (frontispiece
of Philologus Hebrao-Mixtus, by Johann Leusden, Utrecht

1657).

Gustave Dore: Simon, the Cobbler, cursed and condemned by

Jesus to wander eternally.
Gustave Dore: The Wandering Jew.
Four Shylocks of the Modern German Stage: Albert Bassermann,

Rudolf Schlldkraut, Paul Wegener, Werner Krauss.
Kean as Shylock. Reproduced, by permission of Columbia

University Press, from Odell's Annals of the New Tork Stage,

Vol. II.

Irving as Shylock.
Portla-Shylock Scene, etched by Edward Tinden from a drawing

by John Absolon.
Sir John Gilbert: Shylock after the Trial.

FOREWORD
By JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY

INSHYLOCKSHAKESPEARE created the only post-Biblical
Jewish figure which has impressed itself on the imagination of the
world and become a universal symbol of Jewry. Lessing's Nathan,
Dickens 5 Fagin to choose two extremes are memorable, but
they never achieved or came near to achieving the archetypal
status of Shylock. For in Shylock are combined^ in a mighty
imaginative creation, the passionate determination to revenge
the secular wrongs of Jewry with a scorching and irrefutable
indictment of the Christianity which inflicted them. He
in the play more as a Shakespearian hero than a Shakespearian
villain. Compare him with lago, and what has been caEed lago's
"motiveless malignity." The malignity of Shylock is more than
motived; it is justified. The suffering and injustice of a thousand
years of spiritual outlawry seek through him their just Tcvenge:
were it not that revenge is stamped as unjust by the eternal law
that is written in the human heart.

Thus it is that Shyiock, though certainly not a Shakespearian
viEain, is not a Shakespearian hero, after all. He is defeated, not
as a hero is, by blind circumstances 5 or a momentary folly which
puts him within the toils of the evil will, but by a higher Justice
than his own. That is less manifest in the proceedings of the
Venetian law-court, where the letter of the law is used (or forced)
in order to annihilate him, than it is apparent in the atmosphere
of lyrical and romantic love in which the last act of the play is
bathed. The moonlight of Belmont is a light that never was on
land or sea. It is a light of the spirit, the circumambiency of a new
world. And the music to which the lovers listen is like that music
to which when Anton Tchehov listened, he knew a condition
"where everything was forgiven, and it would be strange not to
forgive.' 5

In the light that surrounds that condition, Shylock shrinks
away like a ghost of a stained and evil past* He cannot enter it
because he has not felt that fii it would be strange not to forgive.**

We do notj we cannot dispute the sentence which has condemned
him to the limbo of forgotten thlngs 5 wrapped In the grave-clothes
of a warped humanity. But we can and do have our doubts
whether all the Inhabitants of Beimont deserve to be In the new
world. About one of them, however, there Is no doubt at all: the
mistress of the castle the lady Portia. She Is the incarnation of
love. This love of hers is equally human and divine. It Is no
disembodied spirit of universal charity, but a red blood running
In her warm veins. It Is a spontaneous and Impulsive motion, a
Iking generosity of body and soul. By the alchemy of poetic
genius the grace Is poured out upon her lover and his retainers;
but It is by something of a poetic trick. At the best 3 Bassanio and
Ms followers are the careless aristocrats^ or the hangers-on of
aristocracy^ whom Shakespeare knew so weH 3 and I think to Ms
cost. Even Antonio Is hardly better than the best In that kind.
Indeed, it would be a fine point In ethics to determine whether
his treatment of Shylock, or Shylock's treatment of him, was the
more Inhuman. But all of them 5 from Antonio to the S.S. man
Gratiano 5 are brought within the charmed circle which radiates
from Portia's royally generous being.

This new world, which Shakespeare half-imagined, from which
he banished Shylock, and Into which by a doubtful title he
admitted so many undeservers, has never and perhaps never will
be realised. To the end of Ms life, and more emphatically at the
end than at the time when he wrote The Merchant of Venice,
Shakespeare seems to have associated his vision of It with his
vision of woman In love. It was a world to which, in the process
of Ms "life of sensation rather than thoughts" he felt that an
unspoiled woman belonged by sovereignty of Nature and her
natural love. As he grew older and perhaps more certain that
such woman was not in Ms destiny the figure^ though not the
essence of the Woman changed. The essence of Portia is the same
as the essence of Imogen, Miranda, Perdlta and Marina; but
there Is no mistaking the Impression that these are younger than
she younger, not In years, but with the youthfulness of a new
generation*

Portia has no ancestry: she might almost have arisen^ like
Aphrodite herself, from the foam of the sea. She is the eternal
Lady of Beimont; without father or mother, rich, not by inher-
itance, reaMy, but in her own timeless right as the innocent Eve.

10

But her successors of the symbolic names Miranda, Perdita and
Marina have an earthly ancestry; they are born, or their birth
Is recounted,, in the play. They are manifestly a new generation,

born to suffering and exile. They are separated from the old
world by revolution, banishment or tempest: a cataclysm out of
which they emerge like the naked new-born babe of Bethlehem
striding the beast. They appear after an interruption of the
natural order of things such that it disrupts the family,
them from the anchor and the fetters of instinctive blood-
affection, and leaves them to triumph by the sheer innocence of
love. And Imogen, the one who falls slightly outside this pattern,
is the one whose name, spelt as it is in the Folio 5 Innogen, directly
witnesses to her nature and Shakespeare's intention in creating
her.

The innocence of the loving woman., apparently so different
from the quality of the woman to whom Shakespeare of the
Sonnets was enslaved, seems to have become for him the promise
and the symbol of the new world. That it is always a woman
never a man speaks volumes for Shakespeare's own nature, and
throws a clear light backward on the meaning of The of

Venice. This meaning may have played little part in Shakespeare's
deliberate intention. It could only have been partly conscious^
and it may have been wholly unconscious. But the whole pattern
of Shakespeare's work> and in particular the unique design of
the final plays goes to reinforce the immediate impression that it
is no accident that the spiritual conflict in The Merchant is between
Shylock and Portia: between the man of the old world and the
woman of the new or 3 rather., between the old world, which is
man's, and the new, which is woman's. The sign of the new
world, the element from which its newness and its beauty and Its
tenderness are derived^ is the new Woman. She, I need hardly
say, has little relation to the phenomenon that went by that
name at the end of the nineteenth century the "emancipated"
woman whom (I suppose) Bernard Shaw deliberately pitted
against the women of Shakespeare's final period in the figure
with the equally symbolic name of Candida, Candida is a
specimen of a bad kind; but, compared with her Shakespearian
rivals, she just is not a woman.

In Portia the new Eve confronts the old Adam. She triumphs
with ease: she was bora to triumph. That is well, and om-
it

imagination Is at rest. But in respect to the main spiritual issue of the
play, she is the goddess from the machine. For the main spiritual
issue is the conflict between Jewry and Christendom. Had these
been left to fight it out in mental warfare weight for weight,
idea against idea Christendom would not have won, and did
not deserve to win. Shylock has more passion in his body and
more destiny in his soul than Antonio and Bassanio and all their
entourage of Renaissance scallywags. Shylock is an Imaginative
power ? whose elements^ as Dr. Sinsheimer shows, were gathered
together In the myth-making unconscious of the Middle Ages;
but who Is given his human shape by the noblest Imagination of
Humanism. Shakespeare could not help himself. The terrible
caricature of the Jew created by medieval Christianity, which
came thereby under the operation of the law formulated by
William Blake "we become what we behold 55 was turned by
Shakespeare into a fierce Accuser of the Christianity which,
by conceiving him, had forced him into existence, and made him
the scapegoat of Its own Inhumanity.

At this level It Is Shylock who prevails, for centuries of injustice
clamour to be heard through him. If retribution be justice,
Shylock's cause is just: and though his Instinctive passion for
revenge Is Indiscriminate in that It claims for victim a man who
done no worse and no better than despise and Insult the
Jew, we cannot condemn him. This is not an affair of Individuals:
It Is the curse of a civilisation which has betrayed its own truth.
And perhaps It Is not fanciful to discern In the life-weariness of
Antonio at the opening of the play and Ms indifference at the
trial an evidence of his (or rather Shakespeare's) awareness of
Ms own mere Instrumentality.

It Is not until Shylock has deliberately refused Portia's great
appeal for mercy that the issue turns against him:

POR. Then the Jew be merciful.

SHY. On I? Tell me that.

POR. The of mercy is not strained . . .

There Is no compulsion to mercy: It would not be mercy If It were.
It Is the spontaneous imitation In the human soul of the love of
God: man's reverence for the Image and likeness of God discern-
ible In the human being who Is within Ms power. .When Shylock

12

has rejected this appeal,, he is doomed, not by the court of Venice,
but by the finer conscience of humanity. And the mercy whose
claim he has denied becomes his only refuge.

In Portia mercy appears as the twin of the natural affection of
love. Though she argues as a lawyer and speaks as an angel,
mercy is in her the instinctive motion of a loving woman, as
indeed it is in all Shakespeare's heroines. It is by casting mercy
from her heart that woman in Shakespeare outside the

bounds of nature and becomes a fiend pure fiend like Regan
and Goneril, against whose devilishness the sanity of Lear breaks
in pieces; or half-hearted fiend like Lady Macbeth, whose sanity
is broken in pieces by her own self-violation. This conception of
woman as the spontaneous fountain of love and mercy in the
world, and therefore the natural vehicle of the regeneration of
mankind, seems to me peculiar to Shakespeare. It has 3 of course^
a deep affinity to Dante's imagination of Beatrice; but Shake-
speare's vision is incarnate in a whole family of creatures of
and blood, from Portia and Juliet and Rosalind and Benedick's
Beatrice to the final galaxy. True, as Shakespeare grows older,
they grow younger. We feel that he is no longer imagining a love
for himself, but a hope for mankind. He sees not a wife, but a
daughter in his vision. But that only makes the quest more
human, more lovely and more significant. "That will hardly be
In our time,* 5 Svidrigailov said to Shatov in The Possessed. "It will
not be in my time, 5 ' Shakespeare seems to say, "but it will be,
it must be, it shall be."

Ever since I began to read Shakespeare with any awareness,
I have felt that this vision of the regeneration of the world by
Woman was the reflection of the deepest motion of his soul. I
find something akin to it In the concluding words of Hawthome ? s
The Scarlet Letter.

fis She [Hester Prynne] assured them, too, of her firm belief that
at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe
for It, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in
order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on
a surer ground of mutual happiness. . . . The angel and apostle
of the coming revelation must be a woman, Indeed^ but lofty, pure
and beautiful and wise; moreover, not through dusky grief but the
ethereal medium of joy : and showing how sacred love should make
us happy, through the truest test of a life successful to that end. 5 *

13

Hawthorne speaks with the primness of a birthright Puritan
who Is still sweating his creed or the extravagances of It out
of his spiritual system. But the expectation Is substantially the
same as Shakespeare's. It is, however, only the abstract Idea 5 or
notional silhouette^ of Shakespeare's woman. It lacks her concrete
richness. Hester Prynne is the ghost of a Shakespeare lover.

The Shakespeare woman, created In the swirling matrix of
Reformation and Renaissance, the collapse of an old order and
the travail of a new,, comes trailing clouds of great glory. She has
been the woman In the old Catholic godhead: but now, like the
Botticelli Venus, she descends from the sky, and ascends from
the sea, in one single epiphany. She marks, and embodies, a new
conjuncture of earth and Heaven, the reconciliation of flesh and
Spirit In a new creation. The pagan Great Mother of Mediterra-
nean civilisation and the Virgin of medieval Christendom,
embrace one another and are one, in a complementary incarna-
tion. What William Blake called the Divine Humanity Is fulfilled,
in a moment of imagination, which, as he also said, Is the Human
Existence itself.

This woman Is really the protagonist with which Shakespeare
confronts the Jew not deliberately perhaps, but by the command
of liis own poetic and prophetic destiny, Shylock cannot stand
against her, but neither could the Christianity which had
fashioned and condemned him. Both alike are ghosts: discords to
be forgotten when the world is attuned to listen to the eternal
music.

Sit, Jessica. Look the floor oftmmen

Is of gold:

There* $ not the orb which behold 3 st

But in his like an sings t

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim.

Such is in souls.

But this of decay

Doth us HZ, we it.

But we hear the echo, if we have ears to hear; and love, human
and divine at once, is the medium by which it reaches us.

Tim of Venice is, if you will, a fairy tale. Were the

justice of its fantasy complete, Shylock himself would be trans-
formed. He would be the custodian, and not merely Ms daughter
14

the chatelaine, of Beimont, when the mistress was away. That -was
too much to expect of the popular dramatist of a country which
had expelled the Jews for three hundred years and was not to
admit them again till Cromwell's time. In any case, the lack was
trivial compared to what Shakespeare actually did. He gave to
the figure of the Jew dignity.

How Shakespeare compounded him,, what and cruel

elements in the medieval spectre of the Jew he rejected, how
much he retained, and by what arts he humanised this residue,
the reader of Dr. Slnshelmer's fascinating book will learn. It Is
an Illuminating chapter in the spiritual history of the race which
has just emerged from the most terrible of all the fearful persecu-
tions it has endured; and is even now condemned , until the
policies of Christian nations become human, to wander

Like a strange soul upon the Stygian
Staying for waftage.

THELNETHAM.
August 6th y 1945.

TWO PREFACES
L Preface written in Na^i (Abridged)

SHAKESPEARE CREATED THE greatest Jewish character
since the Bible. Necessarily, he has thus recorded Judaism that

Is to say, he has made and written Jewish history.

This book is intended as a tribute to him for this by interpreting
Shylock from the Jewish point of view.

In doing so, Shylock has to be treated^ not only as a fictitious
character, but also as a figure in Jewish history. His atmosphere
is that of the sixteenth century, but, by virtue of Shakespeare's
genius, he moves within the perennial destiny of the Jewish
people from Biblical times down to the present day.

While I was at work, 1 was often asked if 1 was writing a topical
book. This was my reply;

I am not aware that Danish courtiers are still regarded as
loquacious Polonluses or Moors as jealous and murderous
Othellos, The Jews, however, are still looked upon as Shylocks,
or, rather, Shylock still stands for the Jews- Therefore the book Is
topical.

I have purposely refrained from paving the book with
and references, as It would have been easy for me to do 3 In order
not to trouble the reader, whom I have primarily in mind, who
is not Interested In research. The scholar is sure to collect the
references from the bibliography at the end of the book s
incomplete though It is.

BERLIN.
March, 1937.

LONDON.

43*

17

//. Preface written in England

I have purposely placed the dates of my two Prefaces as close
to each other as possible. Thereby hangs a bit of history (or at
least a tale) about the book and the author.

This book was to be published In Hitler's Germany. It had, not
without trembling, been submitted to the Nazi Department
authorised, or rather presuming, to censor Jewish manuscripts
before publication by Jewish publishers for Jewish readers only,
and, surprisingly enough, had passed. Perhaps the Nazi official
concerned did not read It at all (Nazis generally not being eager
to read books or manuscripts). There followed an appeal for
subscriptions which was successful, and the manuscript went, or
rather wandered,, to a printing-house In Czechoslovakia.

Meanwhile months had gone by. I had already been out of
Germany some time when, in the November of 19383 the Nazis
decided that It was high time to cleanse their new Germany of
Jewish life, If not yet of the unfortunate Jews themselves. You may
remember or you may not those terrible November pogroms.
By the time all the synagogues had been burnt down, many
Jewish shops, offices and flats pillaged and destroyed, a number
of Jews slain and thousands of them dragged into concentration
camps, the season for the publication of Jewish books was gone
for good.

And so to skip some years full of illness and trouble I came
to write this second Preface in London. At this point I cannot
refrain from saying a few words about the way I trod before I
wrote this book on Shylock.

For thirty years I was a literary and dramailc critic, and for
a few years, as a young man, I practised as a solicitor. As to
Jewish history, I frankly confess that, before 1933, my knowledge
was very limited. But ever since then I have studied It as fervently
as I have, throughout my life, studied German and European
history. Inevitably the figure of Shylock, the lawsuit and the
historical background of both claimed my Interest.

Apart from these bookish antecedents, it is well to remember
where and when and In what circumstances the book was written:
in the Germany of the years 19367, when the spiritual and
material Isolation of the Jews was becoming more and more
Intense, by a Jew who, having been bom and brought up as a

18

German and a Jew (not as a Jew and a German), was no longer

nor could he be with any propriety- a German at heart.

I may mention, further, that my home country Is In south-west
Germany, In the Rhine Valley, where my ancestors, so far as I
can tell, have lived since time immemorial. In that part of
Germany Jews were settled as early as In the first century B.C.,
when the Roman legions arrived. Ever since Jewish settlements
have been there down to Hitler's time, never uprooted, though
sometimes murderously decimated. At any rate, when the first
Jews settled In the southern Rhine Valley not a single ancestor of
the "Aryan 55 Inhabitants of to-day was already there, for they
certainly did not come before the Migration of Nations.

I have no desire to emphasise the particular "German-ness"
of the Rhineland Jews or of any others In Germany. I would only
say that the nucleus of the German Jews was bound to be and
before Hitler, was, in fact regarded as a native element. And 1
was one of them a "pure" German and a "pure" Jew. But what
Is this "pure-ness"? Everything depends on what, over and above
this futile fiction, you as an individual really are, what you are
thinking and accomplishing together with, and on behalf of, your
neighbours and contemporaries.

Now I found myself surrounded by Hitlerism and Teutonic
extravagance, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the Jewish
debacle, accompanied by unrestrained calumnies and injuries.
Every day brought new troubles. For two years from early 1 934,
I had to fight for the release from prison of an elder brother, who
had been absurdly accused of treason by the Nazis. In this 1 was
successful. During these years, friends were dying In concentration
camps, families were being torn apart or starved, and 1 could not
but contemplate that flood of homeless Jews wandering over the
world and looking, more often than not In vain, for a new home
and a new livelihood. With them, and against them, appeared
Judas, Ahasver (as the Wandering Jew Is called in Germany) and
Shylock, all the ghosts that seem to be as immortal as the Jews
themselves.

So I left Germany In spirit. I no longer looked on the enemy,
but on the victims. Outwardly I continued to live In the German
air and in the atmosphere of Nazism, but the whole of my inward
life was absorbed by Judaism and, more particularly, Zionism.
Was it escapism? I think not. I believe It was a final homecoming.

19

No longer a Rhineland or a German Jew, I had become but one
of those European Jews now again victimised as so often before.

In such a mood I approached Shakespeare and his play, The
Merchant of Venice. If, in spite of what I have just asserted, my
conception of poet and play seems to my English readers to be
thoroughly German, no doubt they will accept it with a smile as
part of the tragi-comedy of a Jewish refugee from Germany.

H. S.

20

FIRST CHAPTER

SHAKESPEARE'S WORLD
Shakespeare and

FORSAKING AT LAST the waning medievalism of the first
two Tudor reigns, the England of the later century

soared rapidly, almost breathlessly 5 into the atmosphere of the
Reformation and the Renaissance. And the awakened of

a people demanded and itself produced the genius of an
individual William Shakespeare. His plays reflect a at a

turning-point in their history and at a peak of develop-

ment the England of Elizabeth.

At this very time, when thought and deed and outward form
were predominantly male 5 there sat upon the throne the personi-
fication of female receptivity and caprice. The virgin Queen
received with open arms the powers of light and darkness^ of
present, past and future, and out of them she compounded
political power!

She had staggered to the height of queenship out of the
darkness of semi-banishment. And her path was to zigzag between
petty intrigue and the standards of royalty* between Catholicism,
and Protestantism, Constitutionalism and Despotism, between
fiery loves and mean dislikes. She was herself an image of
past and times to come, a mixture of impulsiveness and deter-
mination, of savage pettiness and disciplined greatness^ of chaotic^
unlovely weakness and creative power.

This womanly-unwomanly creature was queen for forty-five
years. These years less than two human generations saw the
transition of her kingdom from its island to its world period^ the
rejuvenation of her people through their release from medieval
self-torture. The centuries that have passed and those that were to
come seemed to meet and jostle each other in her reign, halfway
through the second thousand years of our era.

It is tempting to think that this was possible only under female
rule, which lets itself be fertilised from all directions, yields to all

21

powers and drinks of every sap. If Elizabeth had been a shade
weaker and more womanly, she might have become, with a
husband at her side, a second Cleopatra and have suffered the
same fate. If she had been a shade more manly and stiff-necked,
she might have earned that misnomer given to her by some
Puritan, the "Jezebel of the North," Instead, she welded the
lusts of an amorous woman and of a bloodhound into one
triumphal lust to rule and be ruled. Virgin or not 5 the very soul
of receptivity, she let the throne become part of her, and of this
union was born a new kingdom and a new epoch.

At a distance of four centuries, Elizabeth Tudor and William
Shakespeare look like sister and brother. He too had a unique
receptivity, so unbounded indeed that nothing of consequence
and significance about him as an individual now matters. He too
assembled a thousand years around his throne. He is, as it were,
a woman-man, just as his sister Elizabeth is a man-woman. The
wind carried the seed to him from all the woods and meadows of
mankind and mysteriously he brought forth the shapes and
colours of a new world. The second thousand years of our era
find fulfilment in poetry that foresees and holds within itself a
development reaching back to the myth of Troy and forward to
the myth of Prospero's as yet unrealised island.

To us, William's work is embedded in Elizabeth's rule and
William's poetry is redolent of Elizabeth's work. He is the Eliza-
bethan poetj . . . she is the Shakespearian Queen. Shakespeare
the Spear-shaker! Or, as his embittered contemporary, Greene,
ironically called him. Shake-scene!

He shakes the scene and time vibrates for a thousand years
around. Abysses open and new lands emerge 5 the stuff of a new
world.

and

The Elizabethan stage is young what is not young at that
time? Bible plays, morality plays, psychological plays this path
seeming to lead onwards, opens out on to the level plain from
which one can see and build as high as heaven itself. This is the
site of the Elizabethan stage.

Such masonry could only be accomplished amongst and in the
presence of a people that felt Itself great. The stage in the centre
of a nation is a magic space which draws the magicians. Great

22

people, great stage, great poets these are not three

phenomena, but one In Its three dimensions.

The English day lives In the spectators, the players and the
plays. 1 A visit to the theatre Is part of dally life, SIBCC the per-
formance begins after midday meal. It serves to enliven the day
and to chronicle the time- living history of glorious or Inglorious
centuries become relevant for to-day, of familiar or scarcely-
Imagined iands made near and present*

The noble, the rich 5 the powerful are there as well as the
professionals and the "gallants/ 5 the snobs the self-appointed
guardians over style, taste and fashion. There are well-to-do
citizens as well, who can now afford such luxury cloth-mer-
chantSj tanners and butchers with their wives, with
"no ladles" alike. People smoke 3 banter 3 chatter flirt with
each other.

But the people who bring hot life into the house are the
groundlings In the pit. Here there are no seats. Here, for a penny
entrance fee 3 there swarm the "plebs," the row-loving rag-and-
bobtail s the stuffing, boozing s belching mob of London. "Caviar
to the general" they enjoy or reject it vigorously.

Daylight,, alertness^ awaJkeness and wildness are in the Eliza-
bethan theatre. The people s all the people 3 are present,
their sovereign rights over the stage. To such people who
it both in body and In spirit, the theatre must offer solid
strong tobacco. For the people are brim-full of themselves. They
reach the shoulders of their Elizabeth,, that romantic and at the
same time realistic despot, and peep over them into the traffic of
the world, of politics, of business, of Intrigues^ of adventure. They
hold their heads up and keep their eyes open. Occasionally
or other of them has Ms head cut off or Ms eyes put out. And
too Is drama, which the people applaud with howls of joy or hoot
and shudder at.

They have learnt what drama is: Drama is Life! Conscious of
this, they sit or stand, nobles and plebeians, citizens

1 In the following lines I have purposely not followed up the varied develop-
ments of the Elizabethan stage such as the Inn-yards Players, Public and
Private Theatres, Court PIays 9 University or Inns of Court Performances, and,
above all, the Children Companies about all of which every detail is com-
piled in Sir E. K. Chambers* unique work, The Elizflbethaat Stage, I have con-
centrated on the public theatres, where the bulk of the playgoers as well as
playwrights were making their appearances.

23

adventurers, industrious and lazy, before the scaffolding of the
stage and know as vividly as the Greeks of Pericles 3 Athens knew
that the stage Is the mirror of their world. The high destiny of
the theatre has always been dependent on \vhether the people
are capable of weeping and laughing from a full heart, of crying
out with the cry of the stage and of keeping silent with its
still more horrifying silence. In the rough and rude public of
Shakespeare's time there was much of this readiness and urge.

They wanted to see bloodshed and excesses, violated justice,
triumphant injustice and their opposite^ home country and
foreign land, earth, Heaven and Hell. For of such is their own
outer and Inner life. It was no easy task for the Elizabethan stage
to fulfil the demands both of the courtier and the man In the
street. But both and all the others between as well had a claim
on it

It was not the London citizen who set the tone for the theatre
and Its playwrights. He was only a super. The people who counted
were the genteel and the very ungenteei those who to-day
stood nearest Elizabeth's throne and to-morrow would sit In the
Tower and the next day perhaps would lay their heads on the
block ? or those others who made bragging speeches In the taverns
and the streets and led a dangerous life, the witty, expansive and
sometimes repulsive street orators and shouters and rioters, both
humanly and socially of the lowest class* With these types, the
dramatistj and, indeed^ each one of Ms stage characters, had as
it were to compete or at least to keep pace.

For those who could not read, the stage was newspaper and
novel. They looked to it for adventure and horror, heroic deed
and treachery, the light and shade of life, knowledge of the world,
of history and of mankind. The educated sought and found in it
the reflection and sublimation of what they already knew and
were. What a contrast between the upper and lower sections of an
audience! But It was these very contrasts that created the tension
within the Elizabethan theatre.

Elizabethan England desired nay, demanded to be trans-
lated into drama. It offered to the Inspired poet an endless variety
of themes. They could be picked up on the streets or in written or
oral reports and tradition, familiar to the educated and often
already clumsily presented to the uneducated by none other than
Shakespeare's predecessors.
24

The themes for great poetry and great drama are never new;
they have already travelled a long way, the way of enrichment
and elaboration. This is true of Homer and the Greek tragedians,,
of the Bible and the Vedas, as of Paradise Lost and of Faust. The
old the historical and the mythical is the communicable in
the highest poetic sense, and also in the primitive sense that, to
a certain extent, it is already the common possession of the
recipient and the giver.

So with Shakespeare! He is not an inventor. He is the poet. He
lends to old stories and plays the nobility of the new. The noble
new was Shakespearian, Elizabethan, humanistic one might
almost add, unmedieval, because it attained the rank of literature
through conflict and disputation with the medieval.

None of Shakespeare's plays illustrates this better than The
Merchant of Venice. In none are there two characters who prove it
more clearly, both jointly and in opposition to each other, than
Shylock and Portia.

Shakespeare in Space and Time

Long flights this eagle of the European stage made in search of
food. Back into antiquity, on into history, out into mythology, to
the Continent, above all to Italy, the cradle of humanity, where
antiquity, history and mythology lay bound together. Thus
Shakespeare writes Roman and Greek dramas, dramas from
English history, dramas of fantasy and bourgeois-unbourgeois
dramas set, not in England, but in Italian cities.

There was not room enough for him in the island of Britain. He
had to roam far and wide in order to keep his genius supplied
with raw material. Like Drake and Raleigh, he discovered and
held as booty the material which set his imagination on fire. By
so doing, he gained space and time for the British nation. The
fact that, except for The Merry Wives of Windsor^ he did not set
any contemporary plays on English soil finds its ultimate ex-
planation in the mission of a national poet to enrich from outside
sources, from every corner of space and time, a nation that is just
struggling into her proper, uninsular shape. Between the lines
and between the characters one may read the legend: Our island
is too small; our kingdom is the world! Shakespeare was, in the
realm of poetry, one of the founders of English "Imperialism."

25

The plays are Elizabethan English conquests, extensions of
territory, expansions of privileges and power, additions of
wealth to a nation that Is experiencing a whole world in itself
before It lays hands upon it. The plays, In so far as they do not
deal with the history of the island, follow precisely the course
of the ships, chiefly that which leads to the Mediterranean and
more particularly to the coast of Italy, the land of the classics,, old
and new.

Thus, for the poet, Venice, the Republic holding sway over
the sea, rises from the waves in a sense England's predecessor,
and her model. In Venice, whether he ever saw it or not, Shake-
speare felt at home. He seems to know the town almost as well
as he knows London. He catches the political and commercial
atmosphere, the streets, canals and squares, the houses and
palaces and people, and makes poetry and drama out of them.

He conquered Venice twice over: in The Merchant of Venice and
in Othello, the Moor of Venice.

In both those steps nay, leaps from the Venetian scene a
monstrum unicum, a human being different from the others, the Jew
and the Moor. Both are creatures who have no corresponding
types in the Elizabethan England. Both are Orientals, both are
Semites. The mystery of a foreign race of men, the mystery of the
unusual and extraordinary, broods over them both. Both elicit a
peculiar expectation and excitement.

It can hardly be accidental that the woman who perishes at
the hand of Othello, and through whom he himself perishes, and
the other woman who judges and ruins Shylock both
Desdemona and Portia are described by Shakespeare as blonde.
It gives added emphasis to the contrast with the two dark-skinned
and dark-haired men, the two Mediterranean types, the "middle-
men" between Europe on the one hand and Asia and Africa on
the other. With their creation and, if one may so express it, their
importation into England, Shakespeare touches on the ethno-
graphical and political problems of the Mediterranean as part of
the adjustment between Europe and the Orient.

In the year 1453 that is, about a hundred years before
Elizabeth ascended the throne the Turks conquered Con-
stantinople, and in the intervening time they had pressed forward
as far as Vienna. Othello has his origin in the Turkish North
African Empire; so has the Prince of Morocco_, the suitor for

26

Portia's hand. In Othello the struggle of Venice and Turkey for
the possession of Cyprus plays a part. In Shakespeare's time this
struggle had been decided in Turkey's favour incidentally, as
we shall see later on,, through the advice and assistance of a Jew.

In The Merchant and in Othello between the writing of the
two plays there is an interval of about ten years Shakespeare
has incorporated a piece of political geography significant for his
own time and country. He seized upon world political change
and the world political transformation of that geography. In
Othello it is of secondary importance, for the general of the
Venetian Republic is involved in a personal destiny and goes to
an unpolitical end. On the other hand, Shylock, the Jew, appears
in the public law-courts of Venice and challenges the justice and
power of the Republic. Thus he raises in public a question which
belongs to the cultural and political situation.

With this is bound up the European situation and destiny of
the Jews, the situation and destiny of a landless and, as it were,
timeless people. In Shylock Shakespeare puts before the English
people a picture of the Jewish people.

How he came to it and what he made of it is the content of
this book.

SECOND CHAPTER

THE WORLD OF THE JEWS

The Jews in the Middle Ages

AFTER THE DESTRUCTION of the Jewish State by the
Romans, again and again Jewish communities, representing the
stage in social development higher than the family, established
themselves with astonishing success in the remotest centres and
corners of the ancient and medieval world. They were held
together by the strongest imaginable force: God, faith and
tradition combined. These communities were congregations in a
quasi-ecclesiastical sense. They were as close-packed and as
circumscribed as such communities always are.

Their fate did not depend so much on the communal spirit
of their members as on the degree to which they were able to
isolate themselves from the great political events of the day.

27

Where they did not succeed in doing this permanently and
where could this have been possible? they fell victims to some
external cause, it might be after years or decades or even
centuries. The more the inner life of these communities flourished
in other words, the fitter for historical survival they proved to
be the more liable they were to attack from without. The
richer they became, materially and spiritually, thereby fulfilling
themselves as communities, the more they provoked the outside
world, the world of history, to disturb and to destroy them.

This is attributable to the fact that they were on a different
spiritual basis from the ruling society and that the difference
between the material bases of the two grew ever sharper as the
Middle Ages advanced. There could be no common social con-
sciousness, no historical solidarity. The Jewish configiunities
remained inevitably foreign bodies within the anatomy of
medieval Europe. They were, as it were, counter-historical
phenomena.

Not that there was any lack of willingness on the part of the
Jews, in different places and at different times, to accommodate
themselves to the established lawful external authorities. Nor
were the representatives of Christianity generally unwilling to
find a place for the Jewish communities within the accepted
order, even though they were not considered an integral part of
it. This mutual will-to-accept has left traces, both legal and
economic, throughout the whole history of the Middle Ages. But
it lay in the nature of Christian society, no less than in that of the
Jewish communities, that there was no lasting historical result.

The Middle Ages is the period of the Christianisation of Europe.
Its human, social and political structure was the instrument by
which this Christianisation was achieved. And the greater the
difficulty in overcoming the forces of heathenism, the more
uncompromising were the methods adopted. In particular, no
clear distinction could be made between the heathens and the
adherents of a faith other than Christianity, especially since the
very elements of the faith of the latter happened to be the same
as those of the Christian Church. The Ecclesia militans et triumphans,
which created the spirit of the Middle Ages and was its supreme
incarnation, was bound to regard the Jews as potential religious
seducers.

The Church had no difficulty in fitting the Jews into her

28

picture of the world, once the necessarily anti-Jewish apolo-
getic of the Church Fathers had been established. For her they
were suffering witnesses to the post-Jewish truths, scattered
about the world as a demonstrative punishment for their lack of
the true Faith and their crime against the Christian Saviour, but
not excluded from the final act of Grace at the Day of Judgment.
In the meantime, indeed, they were of the Devil, but even he
must have his followers in order that the victorious power of the
Trinity might be manifest. In a purely theological sense, there-
fore, a place had been prepared for the Jews of the Middle Ages.
They were included, theoretically and dogmatically, in the
triumphal procession of the Church.

But the Jewish question, the question of the place of the Jews
in the material world, could not be solved by theory and dogma
alone. They had not only a theological, but also what might
be called a teleological peculiarity. They had a country and a
capital, a future and a vocation to which they clung the more
tenaciously the further away from realisation these seemed to
be. They had Erez Isroel, their land, and Jerusholajim, their
capital, the hope of the Messiah, and a mission of salvation to the
peoples of the world through their Messiah. In other words, they
had, theoretically, everything necessary to a nation: a historical
and metaphysical goal. It was precisely the idea which the
thinkers and dreamers of the Middle Ages had seen in a vision:
one Lord, one people, one faith. It was, and not at all in a nut-
shell, Augustine's Civitas Dei. This distinctively medieval ideology
was present, without any vitiating influences of consequence, in
the imaginative environment of the Jews, and had enabled them,
in spite of their political impotence, to appear and to feel as a
nation. One thing they lacked: the land and the power of
a nation!

Jewish history, in the Middle Ages and later on, is a collection
of stories. The one fact of historical significance common to all
of them is that of the dispersal of the Jews. In it their national
epic culminates, thus becoming a political and human
tragedy.

What happened to the Jewish communities as a whole was
visible only in its effects on the life of the individual. Hence the
figure of the Jew at a time when the tendency was to universalise.
The fate of one Jew differed continuously from that of another.

29

The one in Spain became a knight and a minister of State, a
representative of civilisation and culture. At the same time, the
Jew in France or in Germany, with wife and child, bag and
baggage, phylactery and Talmud, followed secret paths through
the darkness of the night. This difference of circumstances did
not depend in the least on the ability or the attitude of the
individuals or their communities. It may be that the wandering
Jew loved and understood his country, though it made him
footsore and bent his back, more deeply than the upstart
swaggering in silk and velvet and laden with dignities and riches.
Fortune or misfortune derived from politics or economics; the
victim or the beneficiary was the single Jew.

Thus the European diaspora gave birth to the individualism
of the Jew. Outwardly medieval Europe shattered the phe-
nomenon of Judaism and ground it to powder. The result was to
create a limitless and incalculable variety of relationships amongst
the Jews themselves as well as with the native populations. Hence
the assumption: what an individual Jew that is, what the Jew
does is done by Judaism as a whole. In other words, medieval
Christianity pieced together a picture of the Jewish people which
was in no sense accurate.

The Jews were a negligible minority. To be a minority
throughout centuries and even millenniums that is truly a
Satanic doom. The Jews have drunk of this cup to the dregs in
their historical and post-historical existence. As a small State,
they were wedged for a thousand years between the waxing and
waning Great Powers of Asia. As a small nation, they were faced
with the world power of Rome. And so they were blown about
like sand among the European peoples, but they were not "as
the sand upon the seashore for numbers." Numerically and
politically, they were the very personification of a minority.

But now, in the Middle Ages, they were the most mysterious
of minorities, for they were everywhere! Whether as settlers or
wanderers, they were visible all over the Continent. Banished
or imprisoned or slaughtered, they could not be persuaded to
disappear. With or without legal rights, tolerated or ostracised,
they continued to trade and to pray. Still more: if one Jew was
found in Winchester or in Frankfort, whatever his standing might
be it could almost be assumed that he had connections with
fellow believers in Avignon, Toledo or even Damascus. So that
30

the Jew seemed to be in both places. A nation? A ghostlike
minority!

If one takes the trouble to realise the manner of thinking, the
emotional and religious life of the medieval man, nothing seems
less astonishing than his assumption that the Jews must have a
god other than his Christian God. That other god must, of course,
be the Devil. Popular feeling thus coincided with the doctrine of
the Church.

At this point the myth-creating power of the medieval man
steps in. Ecclesiastical and secular, Christian and heathen
influences worked together to make of the medieval existence of
the Jew something legendary and uncanny. Thus emerged the
medieval "Myth of the Jew." Mythology is not subject to the law
of cause and effect. It springs from subterranean or cloudy
sources, from the irrational, and leaps into full creative activity.
The conditions of its growth are not vegetative but atmospheric.
Wishes and dreams, fear and lust, mated with experiences
however fragmentary and questionable, are the progenitors of
the myth. It is a reflection of the air and atmosphere in which the
tormented and gasping breath of a humanity struggling for
release has collected. The myth is, at one and the same time,
below and above the level of history. The people of the Middle
Ages created, in the course of their fight for the Church, a number
of the most magnificent myths. They adorned the Christian
Trinity lavishly and surrounded it with a veritable court of saints
and saintly attributes. That is the superhuman achievement of
medieval Europe, its festal contribution to the beauty of the
world. But it would not have been capable of this upward urge
and thrust if it had not been under the necessity of escaping from
the torment and terror of everyday life.

This life of the medieval man, dominated by the stern doctrines
and dogmas of the Church, was, notwithstanding the elevations
and even exultations of the festival dates, melancholy, hard,
rough, raw. He had to tread the path already trodden by the Jew
of more than a thousand years before, from the gods and ghosts
to one God. It is a path which leads through errors and confusion,
to backslidings and onrushes. It is not of the earth, but of the
chasms and storm winds of eternity. The hard striving after good
needs the complementary response of evil. And as the good, so
the evil demands its personification. The black magician and the

3 1

witch, the heathen, the Saracen and the Jew had to supply
it.

The Jew was a stranger and clung to a strange faith. He was a
wanderer without the honour which accrues from agriculture
and craftsmanship, without the reliability lent by a settled
residence, without the grace which only the Church could
dispense.

The dance of faith, of fanaticism and superstition, began to
whirl about him and buried him in a desolation of conceptions
not derived from a sober and just observation, distorted his
appearance into a picture necessary to the medieval man, into
a wish-fulfilment, the fulfilment of a curse.

It is idle to enquire whether the Jews of the Middle Ages gave
psychological cause for their mythological transformation into
the Satanic and what that cause might be. Those who know
themselves to be damned irrevocably cannot be expected to be
angels. The medieval Jew was as bad and as good as medieval
Europe itself. This is the contrast to be emphasised: with his Old
Testament to him literally the "last will" of his nationhood
with his Talmud and his rich rabbinical literature, the Jew did
not participate at all in the spiritual life of the Middle Ages. Thus
he became a victim, a creature of circumstance and of the
distortion of medieval mythology. The contrast might be ex-
pressed thus: the Jew had a bad conscience toward medieval
Europe because he took no part in it and shouldered no
responsibility. Medieval Europe had a bad conscience towards
the Jew because it misunderstood him wilfully. Hence the
estrangement between medieval Christianity and Judaism.

Until well into the eleventh century, there was little or no
persecution of the Jews in medieval Europe. By that time it had
become clear that they rejected the benefits of the Church and
therewith the spiritual communion of the Middle Ages. On the
other hand, they were "useful members of society" that is to
say,Tagents for the international exchange of goods, especially
between East and West. Their connections with their fellow
believers in every country of the known world could hardly have
been replaced or dispensed withj

fjhe Crusades wrought a catastrophic change in this situation"?)
Up to this time, the history of the Jews knew nothing of accusl-
tions of ritual murder or profanation of the Host, and very little

32

of the Jewish usurer. The discrimination against the Jews found
its expression rather in the ecclesiastical law than In their secular
treatment. The representatives of politics and economics were
aware and made use of their commercial ways and means and
recognised their economical "extraterritoriality/' which was
opposite from, and at the same time complementary to, the
economic life of the European nations confined within their
frontiers.

But now, when the Holy Sepulchre had to be rescued from the
hands of the infidel, men found themselves suddenly face to face
with the amazing fact that the "murderers" of Christ had settled
industrious and rich! in the very heart of Christendom. This
was the signal for a concerted attack on the lives and property
of the Jews. Hence the horrible massacres, especially near the
Rhine, on the Crusaders' route to the East. It was the beginning
of a warfare which lasted hundreds of years and of an unexampled
martyrdom of the Jews. European Jewry was seized with restless-
ness and mortal fear. Not only their life and property, but also
their faith and honour were constantly threatened. Once startled^
the Jews were prevented by the feudal economy and the guild
organisation from settling anywhere and following any of the
basic occupations. Moreover,jthe Crusades created contacts with
the Orient and made the agency of the Jews, hitherto so impor-
tant, of negligible value. They became second-hand dealers 3
moneylenders and pawnbrokers." They became pedlars in a small
way and creditors on a big scale despised in the first capacity
and hated in the seconcL/ "

Jew-baiting became a medieval institution, like pilgrimage,
and a habit, like tournaments. But still worse was the protection
granted them by the. sovereigns as their conscript bankers. They
were forced into the part of the exploited exploiters and drew
upon themselves the contempt and hatred of the Christian
subjects. In pre-capitalistic times they were, apart, incidentally,,
from the Church, the only conspicuous capitalists, not only
because they were forced to be such by their masters, the im-
pecunious princes and emperors, but also because the uncertainty
of their own position led them to invest in securities that could
most easily be carried away in the event of persecution namely,
money and jewels. A Jewish capitalism officially imposed or at
least officially protected was grafted on an already decaying

33

system of barter. Contempt and hatred, hatred and contempt
were the consequences.

Between the First and Third Crusades that is, between the
eleventh and thirteenth centuries those myths arose which
branded the Jews as enemies of God, of Christianity and of
mankind in general: the legends of ritual murder, of the
desecration of the Host and of the Wandering Jew, who was
alleged to have injured the Saviour. No sovereign, no country
and no city was now at a loss for an excuse to get rid of the Jews,
whether it was as creditors or competitors or infidels that they
were found uncomfortable. The myths grossly distorted the facts.
The Jew himself became a mythical figure transferred from
medieval reality into an underworld, where the faithful might do
with him whatever they pleased.

Round about 1250 there were in all European lands, from
Sicily to England, from Spain to Russia, Jewish settlements,
Jewish congregations, Jewish streets. There was the Ghetto, even
though it was only christened thus two centuries later, in Venice.
The Ghetto became the very underworld of the medieval town.
What might be happening behind the walls of the houses which
hung crooked over the narrow streets? Outsiders did not know
and were, therefore, willing to believe every fantastic piece of
gossip and invention. Someone or other had once stepped over
some threshold of the Jewish town or street, and behind the shaky
and shabby facade had seen walls hung with carpets and
ornaments, great seven-branched candlesticks, heavy chests,
gigantic folios, inscribed with mysterious characters. Thus arose
the legends of enormous riches, of magic and necromancy, of
the dark customs and nefarious plans of the Jews. The Ghetto,
originally designed as a refuge and felt to be a home, became the
visible sign of the economic and spiritual tension between
Christians and Jews. It immortalised the strangeness of the Jews
and set up between them and their temporary compatriots, not
merely a distance in space, but a whole world of spirit the world
of mystery, fable and myth. At the same time there were added
to the Jewish garb, which not only proclaimed the wearers as
Jews, but branded them as such the yellow ring and the pointed
hat.

How European Jewry survived the exorcism of those ultra-
medieval centuries is a mystery. To attempt to explain it is all but

34

hopeless. It is, indeed, inexplicable and deeply moving that the
Jews did not shake the dust of dark Europe from their feet, inured
to wandering though they were. A European paralysis arising
from the truly medieval capacity for suffering and sacrifice must
have had them in its grip. Yet in remaining they could, if they
wished, become as comfortable as the others: they could be
baptised. How few took this opportunity, in spite of allurements
and compulsion of many kinds! Why? Why? The Christians of
the Middle Ages could make nothing of it except by interpreting
it as devilish obsession.

It was easy for them, when, in the fourteenth century, Europe
was visited by the plague, to assume that it was caused by the
Jews poisoning the springs and wells in order to de-Christianise
the whole continent. The Spanish Jews, as the richest, most
accomplished and most influential members of European Jewry,
were said to have conceived the devilish plan and distributed the
poison by messengers all over Europe. The crazy minds of the
people, haunted by the fear of the plague, were not lacking in
particularities: Toledo, at that time the centre of Spanish Jewry
as well as of Oriental magic, was the place of the poison-mixers,
who had made their material from the flesh of basilisks, from
spiders, frogs and lizards or even from the hearts of Christians
and from dough intended for the Host.

Through this gigantic fable originating in the gloomy under-
world of medieval Europe, the Jews again came to be regarded as
the arch-enemies of Christianised humanity. The fable contains
everything that the dark, mentally and spiritually confused
epoch could bring to bear on a minority without rights and
means of defence. This monstrous lie absorbs all lesser lies and
transforms them into a sentence imposed by the highest and
most unapproachable authority namely, the mythological
and ingrained in the consciousness of the populace and the
peoples.

The macabre mood of the plague period, inflamed by the
flagellants, and its after-effects contributed decisively to the
stabilisation of the general inclination of the peoples to lay
anything unexplained and unexplicable in their multifarious
tribulations at the door of the Jews. The latter are thereby given
a significance out of all proportion to their numbers and capacity.
When Jews are concerned, numbers and importance do not

35

count at all. Indeed the fewer their numbers., the greater the evil
likely to be attributed to them.

The Middle Ages did their work on the Jews thoroughly.
Among the magnificent myths they created, none is so powerful
as the sombre myth of the Jew, which distorted every element of
reality.

Myth-like was appearance of the Jews in Europe. They came as
the defenders of a religion and faith which was peculiar to them
and strange to the other Europeans and for which they had sacri-
ficed their existence as a nation, their homeland and single lives
beyond reckoning. Through being scattered about the earth and
through their outward homelessness, contrasted with their con-
ception of a spiritual home in their Scriptures, the Jews themselves
lent colour to the myth. If they had gone under in the Middle Ages
that is, if they had allowed themselves to be absorbed into the
Christian Church their posthumous reputation would have
been that of a nation of heroes. But since they survived as heretics,
there arose, in place of that reputation, a prejudice hammered
down into the European myth about them. That prejudice has
remained more real than all the new realities since created by the
Jews.

The Jews in Medieval England

The English of medieval times were no more friendly towards
the Jews than their contemporaries on the Continent, Indeed, the
path of the Jews in England seems to have been a peculiarly
thorny one, from the point when it emerges into the light of
history, in the reign of William the Conqueror, up to their
expulsion, two hundred years later. During that time, it is true,
the history of the English and Scottish peoples themselves was
full of violence, upheaval and oppression. And wherever there
was war and violence, the number of Jewish victims was sure to
be disproportionately high.

The behaviour of the English kings and other rulers towards
the Jews differed not at all from that of the Continental princes.
They accorded them rights and privileges, which in due course
were taken away from them together with the fruits of their
labours and, often enough, with freedom and life itself. English

36

history, like Continental, is familiar with letters of protection for
the Jews, with Jewish taxes and a Jewish poll. Though they can
hardly have numbered more than 20,000 at any given time,
there was nevertheless a special department of the royal treasury,
the Exchequer of the Jews, to deal with the taxes levied upon
them. The regular income from this source was always
considerable.

Nor is English history lacking in sudden anti-Jewish riots and
systematic persecution of the Jews. The massacre at the Corona-
tion of Richard Coeur-de-Lion on September 3rd, 1189, is a
famous instance, though it should be added that the King had
those guilty of it hanged, so far as they could be traced.

What is peculiar to English history is that the Jews were
driven out and banished from the country in the year 1290 and
that they were debarred from entering it until the second half
of the seventeenth century. This measure, unparalleled for
duration throughout the Middle Ages, calls for special
explanation.

During the period preceding their expulsion, the English Jews
suffered greater hardship than ever before. On more than one
occasion they themselves asked for permission to leave the island,
Edward I had extorted a crushing poll-tax from them and had
forbidden them to settle as newcomers in any town or district of
his kingdom. His mother Eleanor had driven them out of her
town, Cambridge, and also stirred up the hatred of the English
merchants against their Jewish competitors.

The conversion of a Dominican monk, Robert de Redingge,
to Judaism whipped up the rage of his brethren, who were
(though without success) particularly eager to convert the Jews
to Christianity. A little later it was discovered that an unusual
number of counterfeit coins were circulating a not infrequent
occurence in the Middle Ages. Thereupon all Jews, including
women and children, were thrown into prison. The inquiry
revealed many Christian coiners as well. But 263 Jews suffered
the death penalty, they alone having been found guilty. The
King was wise enough to examine the accounts of the proceedings
against the forgers and just enough to forbid any further accusa-
tions against the Jews on charges of forgery. This happened at the
close of the seventies of the thirteenth century. But at the same
time, the Jews of Northampton were accused of murdering a

37

Christian child. A number of Jews had their bodies torn apart by
horses and hanged.

Rumours arose that the Gross or the Mother of God or the
Church itself had been profaned by the Jews. Again the King
condemned the "guilty" to death. In this tense situation,
the Dominicans and the Franciscans vied with each other in
seeking to make the maximum number of converts by the
eloquence of their preaching amongst the Jews. Doubtless they
were moved by religious zeal, but they aimed also at provoking
their sceptical and unwilling hearers to utterances which were,
or could be construed, as blasphemy. Ruin or conversion there
was no other choice. Edward founded, as his predecessor Henry
III had done, a "House of Converts," in which baptised Jews
could find shelter. In more ways than one, indeed, he showed his
desire to shield the Jewish tax-payers from the worst. In this it is
said he was influenced by his wife, who had a Jewish doctor and
favourite, Hagin (Chaim) Deulaches.

But the fanaticism and the popular influence of the Domini-
cans was beyond control. They addressed themselves to the Pope,
accusing the Jews, not only of luring Christians away from
the services of the Church and obliging them to bow the knee
before their own Scrolls of the Law, but even of attempting to
persuade them to adopt Jewish customs and ways of life. The
Pope reacted, as anticipated, with an encyclical. In the year 1287,
a Church Assembly in Exeter revived the canonical injunctions
against the Jews. Once again the King had all the Jews arrested
this time without any pretence that a crime had been
committed. When a sufficiently large ransom had been received
they were released. Its collection probably exhausted the
resources of the Jews. They were ripe for banishment.

Their number is believed to have been about 16,000. Some of
them fell victims to the rapacity of sailors; the bulk of them were
scattered throughout the world. Hardly a trace of their English
origin is found in subsequent Jewish history. There is something
shadowy, something unreal, something ghostly about their
memory. They were swallowed up by the rest of medieval Jewry,
of whose fate theirs was the exaggerated reflection.

During their residence in England, the Jews had been exploited
by the kings to a degree almost unknown in any other country,
even in the Middle Ages, and had thereby been forced (and
38

entitled) to exploit the kings' subjects. Mercilessly treated,
themselves, they showed no mercy to others. Usury had both
them and their victims in its grip.

The inhabitants of the British Isles had been used to invaders
from the very ^beginning of their history. Clearly these historical
experiences still influenced their subconscious mind, giving rise
to an instinctive mistrust of foreign immigrants, together with a
desire for separateness and a defensive attitude towards the
assimilation of foreigners into the national community. This was
doubtless reflected also in the behaviour of the English people
towards the Jewish minority, protected by the kings for financial
and therefore unpopular reasons.

Thirteenth-century England was concerned to put her finances
on to an increasingly constitutional basis. The Jews, being
entirely dependent on the will of the king, were elements of
financial disorder. Their expulsion was, therefore, bound up with
a political issue.

Additional momentum was provided by the Church. The
ecclesiastical hierarchy appeared in very militant guise in
medieval England. Necessarily so, for otherwise it could not
have realised its spiritual and material ambitions in face of the
instability and variability and the urge towards religious freedom
which existed both among the nobility and the common people.
(It is no accident that the first reformer of the Faith was a native
of this island.) In this respect, also, the Jews were disturbing
elements and marked for victimisation. For, however unwillingly,
they stood for heresy.

No wonder that anti-Jewish myths in England fell on good
ground and appealed to the terrorised imagination of the people.
It 'was in England that the first accusation of ritual murder was
formulated against the Jews. In the year 1 144, they were said to
have crucified a boy called William in Norwich. Many miracles
are reported to have taken place at his grave.}'

This happened in one of the most miserable and turbid periods
of English history. It was the reign of King Stephen the Usurper
a time of general war and of the "Battle of the Standard. 33
Battles raged between castle and castle, between townsmen and
nobles, between English and Scotch. Even the Churchmen
joined in the general warfare. The King had hired "Brabanzons,"
mercenaries from Flanders, who had mercy neither on friend nor

39

roe. reasants ana townsmen believed that the end of the world
might come at any moment. ; Grown-ups and children vanished
no one knew whither. Their Fate had, therefore, to be guessed.
It was easy to assume that the Jews were the murderers. Were
they not unbelievers, outside the scope of Grace and creatures
of the Devil? So may, so must the first legend of ritual murder
have arisen. It was followed by others In quick succession., (In the
same century they cropped up in Gloucester, St. Edmundsbury
and Winchester.) It passed over to France and from there spread
over the whole continent. The horrible legend became a part of
the Faith. Faith has nothing to do with credibility.

About a century later, a figure arose in England that afterwards
became a symbol of Judaism: "The Wandering Jew, 35 known
later as the "Eternal Jew," or Ahasver, in Germany. Roger of
Wendover, a monk of the Abbey of St. Albans, reports in his
Flores Historiarum (1235) that an archbishop of Armenia had
visited the Abbey and told a story about one Gartaphilus, gate-
keeper to Pontius Pilate, who had been condemned to eternal
life by the curse of the Saviour he had ill-treated, and who now,
having turned Christian, lived as a recluse in Armenia. Soon the
same figure appeared in French and Belgian chronicles as well
as in an Italian poem of the same century. The outstanding
chronicler of the thirteenth century, Matthew Paris, Roger of
Wendover's pupil and successor at St. Albans, adopted the story.
From that point on it wandered through history.

The historicity of the clerical reporter from the Orient cannot
be proved. Incidentally he is reported to have entertained his
pious hosts with a story of remains of the Ark still visible on the
top of a mountain in his diocese. It is probable, therefore, that
the figure of the "Wandering Jew" is also indigenous to England.
It appeared during the reign of Henry III (121672), whose
terrible methods of treatment first caused the English Jews to
ask for permission to leave the country. At that time they were
within the realm startled and terrorised, scared and in fear of
their lives constantly driven hither and thither, "Wandering
Jews" indeed. These tortures, together with the possibility of
redemption by becoming Christians, emerge in that story. In its
wanderings throughout Europe, the vista of redemption
disappeared.

In the myths of all peoples are reminiscences of individuals,

40

groups and tribes which have grafted themselves as newcomers on
to the community at large or split themselves off from it and
migrated. Similarly, the enforced migration of the Jews from
England had left its mark on the English people. The banished
lived on in the popular imagination, haunting it. Myths were
all that remained myths of men who were "different/ 3 of
strangers in the land and these myths took root and flourished,
precisely because there was no longer any reality by which they
could be tested. Jewish destiny and Jewish nature had been
transmuted into saga. Popular behaviour has never been
governed by the maxim, De mortuis nil nisi bene. Rather it has
followed the more realistic if fallacious principle: The outsider is
always wrong.

In English medieval literature, the picture of the banished
Jews is crude and uncompromising. The story told by the Prioress
in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is the classic literary expression of
the ritual murder legend.

"In a great city" in Asia, the seven-year-old son of a widow
used to sing the Alma Redemptoris Mater when passing through
the Jews' quarter on his way to and from school. (It was the
pious child's favourite song, though he understood little of the
Latin text.) The Jews, prompted by Satan, took it as an insult to
their faith, murdered the boy and threw his body on to a dung-
heap. The mother searched for the boy in the Jews' quarter in
vain. But the dead boy lifted up his voice and sang his favourite
hymn. Thus his corpse was discovered and the Jews were put in
chains. The little martyr, who continued to sing uninterruptedly,
was brought to the neighbouring abbey for burial. Meanwhile,
the guilty Jews were hanged, drawn and quartered. The Abbot
asked the boy, who was still singing, how he could do so after
his throat had been cut. The boy answered that the Mother of
God had laid a grain of corn on his tongue when he lay between
life and death and so he must go on singing in praise of her until
the grain should be removed from his tongue. The abbot removed
it and with his monks buried the holy child in a marble tomb.

There is no doubt that the tale is inspired by a genuine and
profound piety. The murder of the boy is not ascribed to the
demands of Jewish ritual, but to Jewish hatred of Christianity.
The Jews stand for everything directed against Christian faith
and piety. The tale is essentially a song of praise to the Mother of

41

God and the Church, rather than a song of hatred of the Jews. It
is a typical legend written by a great poet in gracious mood and
bathed in heavenly light. All the more horrible appear the deed
and the attitude of the Jews. The medieval hatred of them based
on ecclesiastical doctrines, and no less naive than medieval piety,
thus finds magnificent expression. The picture is complete and
has documentary value for the history of the Jews in England.
The particularly unhistorical element is the transfer of the story
to the East, where the charge of ritual murder against the Jews
was unknown in the Middle Ages. It serves only to deepen the
legendary character of the story. But at the same time its effect
was to recall and to stress, in the fourteenth century, the English-
man's grievances against the banished Jews. It should not be
overlooked in this connection that the chronicler of St. Albans
also gives his report of the Wandering Jew an Eastern origin.
Chaucer, on the other hand, brings the story back from its
legendary Oriental setting by mentioning at the end the case
of the boy, Hugh of Lincoln, the most famous ritual murder
legend of the thirteenth-century England, which was actually
the source of his tale. According to tradition, the corpse of thzft
eight-year-old boy, afterwards called "Little Hugh of Lincoln,"
was found covered with filth on the dung-heap of a Jew. The boy
was the son of a widow called Beatrice.

A Scottish ballad, "The Jew's Daughter," concerned with the
murder of a Christian boy by a Jewish girl, is easily recognised
as being in accord with Chaucer's tale. But in this wild poem
the horror of the murder takes first place. The cry of the dead
boy from the well, into which the murderess has thrown him, is
secondary. The Jewess is a pure monster. She is heathenish, not
Jewish; one might almost say, a witch.

The mental picture which, from the fourteenth century on,
in England had perforce to replace the sight of the Jews in actual
life was mythological. Gradually they were stripped of the last
shred of reality. A few names of streets, places or districts, a few
other words, were the only remaining evidence of the historical
existence of the Jews, of their having once been there. The rest
was popular or poetical fantasy which made ghosts and ghouls
of men.

It is true that many a Jewish figure from the Old Testament
afterwards strode over the stage of the miracle plays. But in the

42

view of the medieval and post-medieval audiences, the " Children
of Israel" had nothing in common with "the Jews." Only one
figure from the New Testament was designed to mirror them:
Judas! Israel stood for the pious tradition; Jewry, with Judas at
its head, for the impious and devilish one.

Thus it remained until the time of Elizabeth and Shakespeare.
In the course of the sixteenth century the historical aspect of
European Jewry had altered even for England. Not so much as a
result of the changed view of the world caused by the Reformation
and Humanism as because of the new catastrophe which had
befallen the Jews; through their expulsion from Spain and
Portugal.

The picture of the Jew and the myths about him take on new
colours.

The Jews in the Sixteenth Century, or
The Spanish and Portuguese Expulsion

In the Middle Ages the Jews of Spain and Portugal lived under
very different conditions from those of the Jews in England.
Indeed, these two groups represented the opposite extremes of
Jewish life. The Iberian Jews lived as organic parts of their
respective States. They were ardent patriots, pillars of the Throne,
civil servants, diplomats, financiers of war and peace, quite apart
from their habitually being merchants, artisans, scholars and
scientists, poets and artists. The Jewish settlements in Spain were
amongst the earliest, those in England amongst the latest in the
Western world. For Jewish development the island of the north-
west was a channel, the peninsula of the south-west a reservoir.

In 1492, two centuries after their expulsion from England, the
Jews were banished from the United Kingdoms of Aragon and
Castile by Queen Isabella and King Fernando. In so doing, they
dealt a deadly blow at a section of their people who were impor-
tant both numerically and intrinsically, and also came of much
more ancient Spanish stock than most of the Christian in-
habitants.

Under such conditions, the attempt to "de-hebraise" Spain
was bound to fail. The country remained riddled with "crypto-
Jews," who were "secretly Judaising," to use the technical term.
This was the result, not only of the expulsion, which anyone could
escape, as 200 years before in England, by accepting baptism, but

43

also of several earlier persecutions, especially those of the years
1391, 1412 and 1435. By the year 1492, the Marranos, as the
secret Jews were called, had already permeated a considerable
portion of the Spanish nobility and aristocracy. (Even the Queen
Isabella had a Jewish great-grandmother, the Portuguese Beatrix
of Pareira, wife of a Duke of Braganza.) It took nothing less than
the Inquisition, raging over three centuries with torture and stake,
to root out the Marranos.

By the close of the sixteenth century that is to say, in the time
of Shakespeare great numbers had followed in the footsteps of
their co-religionists expelled in 1492 and had found refuge in
Africa and Asia, in the Mediterranean islands, in the New World
discovered at the very time of their expulsion and not without
Jewish assistance Columbus himself may possibly have been
the descendant of Genoese Marranos in Europe, especially in
Italy, Turkey and, towards the end of the century, in the Nether-
lands. They differed both inwardly and outwardly from the rest
of the European Jews.

When the expulsion from Spain and, four years later, from
Portugal took place, only a small number of Jews were lured or
forced into baptism. The departure of the rest was marked by
much heroism and martyrdom. This was bound to increase the
inborn Spanish pride of those who reached some goal and
achieved a new existence. At the beginning of the modern era,
they transformed European Jewry. The Jews who left the penin-
sula were steeped in the traditions of the higher middle,
professional and aristocratic classes. Their dispersal throughout
Europe and the other continents was bound to leave its mark on
the contemporary world at large, and to change the physiognomy
and extend the sphere of European Jews.

This is not the place in which to recount the multifarious
reasons for their expulsion. Undeniably, they had been a con-
structive and productive element in the economic, political and
intellectual life of Spain and Portugal. It was no accident that
the decree of expulsion was signed by the two Spanish monarchs
at the newly-captured castle of Alhambra above Granada, the
last citadel of Islam on Spanish soil. For it was at this moment
that the problem of getting rid of the Jews became urgent as part
of the development of the Spanish kingdoms towards national
and religious uniformity. The remaining Marranos had to be
44

separated from their former co-religionists to be saved for the
Spanish and Christian communities. With this aim, the In-
quisition became active.

The bodies of both Jewish and Christian heretics were burnt
at the stake. The troubles of the Church had begun. They meant
suffering for the Jews, who thus appeared on the Christian
horizon as martyrs and claimed attention in a new way. A new
Jewish creature emerged from the medieval mythical chrysalis.
The Reformation might have altered the fate of the European
Jews. But it did not.

Wherever the Marranos, the Spanish secret Jews, fled from
the Inquisition during the century, they were received as
Spaniards. They brought with them the Spanish or Portuguese
language, dress and customs. Faced with these immigrants, the
other peoples were bound to ask not only: "Are these Jews not
Spaniards?" but also: "Are these Spaniards not Jews?" For by .
no means everywhere were they allowed to practise their Jewish
faith. Thus the newcomers were not seldom compelled to continue
to live as secret Jews, as, for instance, in England. Even outside
Spain their lot was hard. A twilight of doubt and secrecy
enveloped them the everlasting tragi-comedy of the unwilling
emigrant.

The fugitives from Spain and Portugal found themselves
confronted with a particularly strained political situation. Europe
was then involved in a fight for the re-establishment of its balance
of power. The nation-states which have characterised it to the
present time were then emerging. The North Sea and the
Mediterranean were the boundaries and the battlefields of this
development. The tension came from east and west. The Western
world had entered a new phase of political geography.

In the north, England became a European Great Power
through her victory over Spain. England's former sworn enemy,
France, profited by the great rivalry between Spain and England,
which were opponents not only as the representatives of the two
hostile Christian confessions but also as rival sea Powers.

Queen Elizabeth and King Philip II of Spain stood for
principles increasingly incompatible, both in the spiritual and
religious as well as in the political and economic field. After the
destruction of the Spanish Armada, warfare continued in the
guise of intrigues and plots. While Elizabeth's daring buccaneers

45

haunted the shores of Spain and Its Empire, Philip's spies and
the fanatical adherents of the Church continued to land on the
shores of England for their own "popish" and particularly
Spanish purposes. Anything smelling of Spain was suspect and
odious in Elizabethan England.

For the Jews expelled or secretly fleeing from Spain nothing
would have been more natural than to settle in that island where
the commerce of the world had begun gradually to concentrate.
But as Jews they were not allowed ashore. It is true that in the
first half of the sixteenth century a certain number of Marranos
had established themselves in several towns, such as London and
Bristol, and had even formed secret religious communities.
Throughout the English ports they had also set up a sort of
secret service to protect the immigrants or transmigrants from
the ubiquitous spies of the Inquisition. But all this only served to
emphasise the extra-legal position of the Jews in England. As
Spaniards they were suspected of being Philip's spies, as
Catholics unwelcome, as commercial competitors disliked and
as Jews excluded. An English-Jewish rapprochement was,
therefore, out of the question. On the contrary, the particular
circumstances of the time were bound to re-awaken the prejudices
against the Jews and the popular dislike of them.

Quite a different part was played by the Jews in the com-
plications and developments in the Mediterranean. South-east
Europe was in danger of being absorbed by Mohammedanism,
and it was here that its fate was being decided. In Northern
Europe the Catholic Church stood over against the Reformation;
in the Mediterranean the Cross stood over against the Crescent.
In the north-west people watched the progress of the "Infidel"
with Christian grief indeed, but were themselves more than
fully occupied with the Papist and Spanish danger.

Apart from Spain, the Republic of Venice was the most
formidable adversary of the Mohammedan Turks. Her position
was seriously threatened by Turkish imperialism and she was
gradually losing ground. The Vatican made great efforts to
mobilise the Catholic Powers against the advancing enemy of
Christianity, who from time to time was bold enough to raid the
shores of Italy. The Popes attempted in vain to revive the ideology
of the Crusades. The Turks succeeded in penetrating into Europe
and in seriously damaging the prestige of European Christendom.

Here, even more than in the struggle between England and
Spain, the Jews found themselves between two fires. A great
number of them lived in Venice and other Italian ports, a still
greater number in the Turkish Empire. In Italy they had to
live in Ghettoes and permanently to fear the Inquisition. But in
Turkey they were recognised as citizens. They were allowed to
worship freely, to found flourishing communities and even to
become officials and dignitaries of the State. Naturally enough,
the Turkish Jews maintained close contact, in commercial,
religious and family matters, with their co-religionists on the east
coast of Italy, especially with those in Venice, Ancara and Pesaro.
Their sympathies were, of course, on the side of Turkey, where
they were humanely and wisely treated. It was thus inevitable
that they should be suspected in Italy of being traitors. And it
must be admitted that this suspicion was not unfounded. For how
could the Jews feel any sense of loyalty towards those Powers at
whose hands they had, over and over again, suffered slights and
persecution? Could they have remained faithful to Spain? Or to
those other Powers that had established on the Mediterranean
islands regimes of religious intolerance?

Once again the mistrust of the Christians weighed heavily on
Jewish life and made the land and sea of south-east Europe hot
for them. They were victims of the political situation. Whatever
they planned or accomplished was rightly or wrongly interpreted
to their disadvantage. New myths, outgrowing and transfiguring
truth, sprang up and flourished.

Imagine the tragic situation of the European Jews in the
sixteenth century: they were caught between Cross and Crescent,
between Catholicism and Reformation, between Venice and
Turkey; finally, between Europe and Asia. Fugitives from Spain
and the Inquisition, they were repelled by the adversary of both
England. In Germany and France, they reeled between
toleration and persecution. In some of the Italian states the
commissions of the Inquisition met to kindle the auto-da-fe; others
adopted an enlightened attitude towards them. The Netherlands
as a whole were not yet free. From Spain, where the medieval
spirit persisted, from England, where anti-medievalism, had
triumphed from both countries they were excluded. It seems
like a grim joke of history at the expense of a people doomed to
be homeless, or some wildly exaggerated and sensational play.

47

The Jews were suspended between two epochs. So indeed was
the whole of Europe. But wherever the Jews lived in this restless
continent they were in a foreign country.

Their quality as foreigners is mirrored in the English drama of
that time. They appear like phantoms of the night, adventurers
from the Mediterranean un-English, un-Christian 5 un-human
ghosts of the English stage as of European politics.

Here is the path that brings us straight to Shylock!

THIRD CHAPTER

HISTORY, MYTH AND FICTION
Gerontus, the Good Jew of Turkey

IN THE YEAR 1584 the first performance of the morality
play, The Three Ladies of London., took place in London, produced
by the Earl of Leicester's Company. The author, William Wilson,
was one of its members as an actor and playright.

The three ladies mentioned in the title are not women of flesh
and blood. Their names are Lucre, Love and Conscience. There
are other such ladies and gentlemen in the play: Dissimulation,
Simony, Usury, Fraud, Simplicity, Hospitality, and characters
like Sir Nicolas Nemo or Mr. Artifex.

Lucre is the mistress of London. She masters and corrupts all
men and all things. She even marries Love to Dissimulation and
burdens Conscience with shame and disgrace. And where
should her grandmother live? In Venice! The very city from
which so abominable a character as Usury also comes. The
servants of the Lady Lucre come "from Italy, Barbary, Turkey,
from Jewry"

Among the more or less allegorical scenes there are a number
of realistic ones. In one of these the London merchant Mercadore
from Venice again and the Jew Gerontus, make their first
entry. They meet in Turkey, whither Mercadore has come from
London on business. The Jew appears to be settled in Turkey,
though the name Gerontus, a Latinisation of the name Gernot,
points to Germany.

Mercadore Is In the service of Lady Lucre. She has sent him to
the Orient to buy luxuries of every kind, though their import
into England has been forbidden by Act of Parliament. And so
he meets his business friend, Gerontus.

Several years before Gerontus has lent Mercadore 2,000 ducats
for three months and, after this time had expired, another 1,000.
When the total sum fell due, Mercadore had left Turkey.

On their meeting again, Gerontus reproaches his debtor and
observes:

Surely if we that be Jews should deal so one with another >
We should not be trusted again of our own brother.
But many of your Christians make no conscience to falsify your faith and
break your day.

Nevertheless, he gives Mercadore several more days 5 grace.
This is very naive on the part of the Jew, especially as Merca-
dore has already told him that he intends buying all kinds of
luxuries and trifles for the noble ladies of London, for which he
obviously has money in hand. It goes without saying that he
again breaks faith.

At last the Jew loses patience, and on their next meeting he
threatens the other with court proceedings. Thereupon
Mercadore openly admits that he has no intention of paying the
debt and that he means to become a Mohammedan, because as
such he would be released from all former obligations. As he
makes his exit, he insults the Jew ("Be hang'd, sitten, scold,
drunken Jew") and tells the audience that his mistress had bidden
him cheat the Jew of the money for love of her.

The scene in which both are seen in court is the exact opposite
of the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice. The latter under
another title and by another author than Shakespeare had
already made its appearance on the English stage and will be
discussed in a later chapter. All the more remarkable is the scene
now to be described.

"The Judge of Turkey" and both the parties make their
entrance, Mercadore already dressed as a Turk. Gerontus puts Ms
case. The Judge informs him that, according to Turkish law, the
man who abjures his religion, his country and his king in favour
of Mohammed is released from all his debts. Mercadore reiterates

49

his desire to become a Turk. That being so, says the Judge, there
is no need to waste words. He asks Mercadore to put his hand on
a book, apparently the Koran, and to repeat the words:

"I Mercadore, do utterly renounce before all the world my
duty to my prince, my honour to my parents and my good will
to my country. Furthermore, I protest and swear to be true to
this country during life, and thereupon I forsake my Christian
faith . . ."

Here Gerontus interrupts him:

Signor Mercadore^ consider what you do".

Pay me the principal , as for the rest I forgive it you.

But Mercadore refuses the offer: "No point da interest, no
point da principle." (The author makes him speak a comical
Italianised English.)

Now Gerontus goes on: "Then pay me the one half if you will
not pay me all" but Mercadore refuses these offers as firmly as
Shylock does the offers of Antonio's friends. He is determined,
as he assures us, to become a Turk, professing himself tired of
Christendom. At this the Jew remits the whole debt, lest, as he
says, he might be held guilty of the other's perjury. Mercadore
accepts the remission and thanks Gerontus heartily. To the Judge
he says:

. . . not for all da good in da world
Me forsake a may Christ.

He has cheated the Jew and made a mock of the Judge. The
latter answers him thus:

One may judge and speak truth> as appears by this:

Jews seek to excell in Christianity and Christians in Jewishness.

The Jew, when thanked again by Mercadore, replies that he
does not regret what he has done and would not wish to have acted
like Mercadore. He goes on to advise the other in future to repay
his debts punctually and so to preserve his good name! Merca-
dore, at last left alone on the stage, triumphs: his mistress will

smile when she hears how he has cheated the "filthy Jew. 35
Yes, the Jew remains "filthy," even if he has just proved
himself to be of an unnatural, angel-like purity. And, strictly in
accordance with medieval tradition, he is something else as well :
the victim! The cheated and derided victim like Shylock.

This scene, though vitiated by a coarse pedagogic and satiric
tendency 5 seems to demonstrate the fact that it was possible to
present a Jew to Elizabethan audiences as an ideal character
and as the exponent of morality and religious faithfulness. But
the inference is not so much that the reputation of the Jews was
high as that of the Christian merchants was extremely low.
Moreover, the villain is not English but Venetian.

Barrabas, the Wicked Jew of Malta

We do not need to move away from the Mediterranean or to
lose sight of Turkey, in order to trace the story of the most
abominable Jewish rogue that ever appeared on the stage:
Barrabas, the hero of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy. The Jew
of Malta. Produced in London for the first time in 1591, it became
one of the most successful plays of those years. The part of the
Jew was played by Edward Alleyn, who was extremely popular
in it.

Named after the malefactor of the gospels, Barrabas is himself
a murderer and robber, a traitor and rebel. The author leaves
no doubt as to his country or origin, since he puts Spanish words
and phrases into his mouth. Under the Spanish-German
Emperor, Charles V, he had been a "war engineer." Even then
he had, as he confesses, no other purpose but to kill Christians.
He had also been a physician in Italy, and boasts that he had
brought prosperity to the grave-diggers and funeral orators.
Poison was the weapon used by him to despatch both healthy and
sick into the other world.

When the play opens, he is a great and immeasurably rich
merchant on the island of Malta. But he is "at home" everywhere.
His ships sail every sea and anchor at every port, his merchandise
is everywhere displayed, his money produces interest in all
countries of the world. In Florence, Venice, Antwerp, London,
Sevilla, Frankfurt, Luebeck, Moscow he has debtors, bank

5*

deposits and stores of jewels. Is he not Indeed, like Antonio in
The Merchant of Venice, a "royal merchant"?

In choosing Malta for the Jew's domicile, Marlowe does
violence to history. Down to the second half of the sixteenth
century, the island belonged to the Spanish sphere of influence
and was, therefore, closed to the Jews. Some suggestion of this
has passed into the play, for it begins with the persecution of the
Jews.

Malta is governed by the Knights of St. John, who are tributa-
ries to Turkey. Selim Galymath, the Sultan's son, has just
entered the port in order to collect the tribute. The Governor
summons the Jews to the Senate and informs them that they must
yield up half their fortunes and bpcome Christians. The Jews
comply with the exception of Barrabas. He forfeits all his
goods and chattels, and his house is converted into a convent.
Barrabas begins to take his revenge. In order to save his treasures
hidden in the house, he forces his own daughter to become a nun.
Like Shylock, he has no other relative except his only child,
Abigail. Like Jessica, she is in love with a Christian, but is also
courted by the Governor's son. Barrabas stirs up the rival suitors
against each other and so delivers them to death. All who cross
his path become his victims; nuns, friars, knights, a courtesan,
and even his own daughter.

Treason follows close on the heels of murder. Barrabas delivers
up the Christian island to the Turkish fleet, which, owing to the
Knights^ refusal to pay the tribute due, is besieging the port. For
his service as a traitor, he is rewarded by the post of Governor.
Nevertheless, he now strives to betray and annihilate the Turks
as well. He conspires with the ex-Governor to blow up the
Turkish forces. Prince Selim and his attendants are to be thrown
into a pit filled with liquid fire. The Governor, however, satisfied
with the annihilation of the Turkish forces, reveals the Jew's
design to the Prince and Barrabas himself is finally thrown into
the fiery abyss.

Besides Barrabas, Marlowe has created two other personifica-
tions of anarchy and of the medieval or post-medieval spirit,
Faust and Tamerlaine. Faust is the incarnation of mental and
physical insatiability, Tamerlaine the barbarian chieftain with
the Asiatic mask who tramples on a whole world. Similarly,
Barrabas is the incorporation of greed for money, blood and

52

power. Larding his conversation with Latin phrases, he has
something of the European super-versatility of Faust and of the
Oriental super-rigidity of Tamerlaine. He combines all that Is
medieval in the former with all that is exotic in the latter. He
says that he is born to rule and that he is not unworthy of being
a king. Every crime he commits is another step towards the
fuller existence he covets, a means of darkening the world around
him, to his own delight. He is scarcely conscious of his own
motives, and lives up to Macchiavellian doctrines as understood,
or misunderstood, by Marlowe. To make this doubly clear,
Marlowe introduces the ghost of that Italian prototype to speak
the Prologue.

From the outset Barrabas wears his heart on his sleeve. Like
all Marlowe's heroes, he is completely candid about himself.
And so he is about the Jews in general that is to say, he treats
this subject in the contemporary style. The current legendary
conception of the Jew justifies the crimes of Barrabas as a
matter of course. The figure that rages through tfoe play is a
product of the medieval myth and legend which had survived
in a country without Jews, as England had then been for 300
years.

Mythical features and stage effects take the place of psychology
and knowledge. The criminal nature of the Jewish hero is
magnified to such an extent that it becomes allegory: a Jew
(the Jew) opens the hell in his breast; a soul, itself swollen with
poison, poisons the world, a human being turns devil, and the
Devil himself, who in medieval demonology and even theology,
commands the services of the Jews, takes on the shape of this
single Jew. v -

The social status of Barrabas is the exact opposite of that of
Shylock. The latter is a Ghetto Jew who obeys the laws of Venice
and depends on them. The other is the super-Jew, the super-
human and sub-human Jew, who acknowledges neither law nor
justice. In English history he has no prototype. But it is scarcely
possible that Marlowe should have entirely invented his monster*
Barrabas.

He places him in Malta, the island between Africa, Asia and
Europe, important both commercially and politically, a rampart,
gate and bridge between Orient and Occident. Here is the focus
of those interests and clashes already explained. This is inter-

53

national soil, as it were, a kind of no-man's land between the
powers of the East and the West.

Tamerlaine and Faust are historical characters, the former
taken from actual history, the latter from popular tradition.
This suggests that one should look for the prototype of Barrabas
that is, for an outstanding Jewish personality who played an
important part in the fight between Islam and Christendom for
predominance in the Mediterranean.

Such a Jew did in fact exist.

Joseph, the Duke of Naxos

Josef Mendez-Nassi, or, by his Portuguese name, Joao Miquez,
came from one of the richest and most respected Jewish families
once expelled from Spain and fugitives in Portugal, where they
were compelled to embrace Christianity. His father must have
died very early in the sixteenth century. His uncle, Francisco
Mendez, was the senior principal of the important firm of
Mendez in Lisbon, which, from 1512 onwards, had a branch in
Antwerp, managed by Francisco's brother, Diogo. After Fran-
cisco's early death, his widow, Grazia Mendez, moved to Antwerp
and took with her the whole family, including Josef. On their way
from Lisbon to Antwerp, they stayed for several months in
England, where the firm had business connections and a number
of agents.

Diogo Mendez, who rendered financial services to the English
Government and on whose behalf Henry VIII intervened in
1532, when he had to face a charge of "secret Judaising," died
about 1547. The young Joao Miquez now became Grazia's
partner in the management of the firm. He was a handsome and
versatile young man, with an exuberant spirit of enterprise. The
Regent of the Netherlands, Maria, widow of a King of Hungary
and sister of the Emperor Charles V, favoured Grazia and her
nephew and protected them from the Inquisition, which was not
to be trifled with, even in the Netherlands. But, Maria, to whom
Erasmus and Luther dedicated books, had a humanistic and
tolerant outlook.

Charles, permanently short of money, squeezed the rich
Marranos of Antwerp. After the death of Diogo, he accused him

54

of having "secretly Judaised, 33 and this was made a pretext for
seeking to confiscate his fortune. But Queen Maria, who had a
strong influence over her brother, took the side of the heirs. They
had to compromise by lending a large sum to the Emperor
without interest for two years.

In the course of these and similar negotiations and quarrels,
Joao, though only in his twenties, may well have proved and
trained his gift for diplomacy. When, as soon as possible, he and
the whole family emigrated to Venice, he left behind him a legend
stories and rumours of his cleverness and successes.

For the Mendez family the attraction of Venice was not only
its great commercial importance, but also their hope of being
allowed, on Italian soil, openly to return to Judaism. Once
arrived in Venice, Joao rushed into a very intoxication of
enterprise. He also succeeded in making contact with the Sultan
Suleiman II and securing his intervention on behalf of Grazia
Mendez, who had been imprisoned in Venice on suspicion of
intending to move her fortune and family to Turkey, the mortal
enemy of the Republic. Meanwhile, he was continuously occupied
in spreading his business connections throughout the countries
of the south. Travelling and planning indefatigably he extended
the business of the firm to the import and export of merchandise.
He founded a banking branch in Lyons and made a loan of
150,000 gold ducats to the French King Francis I, the opponent
of Charles V.

Owing to the benevolence of the Sultan, the path to the East
was open to him. But the interests of the house of Mendez had
become so multifarious that the emigration had to be postponed.
Grazia, released from prison, moved to Ferrara, where another
branch of the firm grew up. Thanks to the tolerance of the Duke
Ercole II, the family could here openly confess their Jewish faith.
Grazia started a tremendous work of charity on behalf of the
suffering Jews in all countries of the world and became at the
same time the patroness of a circle of Jewish scholars, poets and
printers. Joao adopted the name Josef Mendez, and married his
cousin, the only daughter of Grazia. More and more Marranos
gathered about him, and he asked the Signoria of Venice to grant
him one of the Mediterranean islands for a Jewish settlement. But
the Signoria refused.

In the year 1547 the family emigrated at last to Constantinople.

55

Again the Sultan had, by a special envoy, demanded that no
obstacles should be put in the way of this move. In Constanti-
nople, Josef Mendez was received with open arms. At that time
the Turkish metropolis had the most flourishing Jewish
community in the world. It was said to number from 30,000 to
40,000. In Pera on the Golden Horn the family bought a princely
palace, Belveder, and set up something of a Jewish centre and
court. They founded Jewish colleges, called in scholars and
rabbis, and kept open house for Jewish people, rich and poor. A
German traveller who visited Constantinople at that time
reports that eighty persons regularly sat down at the dinner table
of Belveder.

Josef now plunged into Turkish politics and soon became
friendly with the Crown Prince Selim, who appointed him his
official adviser, while the Sultan made him a member of
the Crown Council. His knowledge of European affairs and
languages and his diplomatic talents quickly made him an
outstanding figure in Turkish foreign affairs. European ambassa-
dors strove for his favour and European dignitaries and princes
approached him with flattering letters and presents. Thus his
name and reputation became known throughout the diplomatic
circles of Europe.

The Sultan bestowed on him the Palestinian town of Tiberias,
with seven of the surrounding villages, to be used for the
settlement of Jewish immigrants. It was this that started the
rumours of Josef's intention to make himself King of the Jews. But
he preferred to exercise his influence in the sphere of European
politics. For instance, he challenged the Pope, who in Ancara had
sent to the stake Jewish fugitives from Spain. He boycotted the
Papal port of Ancara by directing his ships to the port of Pesaro
instead. A tremendous stir was created by the action which he
took against the King of France, who had failed to repay the
loan already mentioned. The Sultan allowed him to seize French
ships and merchandise in Alexandria and other Turkish ports
and so to recover his money.

Selim's accession to the throne made Josef omnipotent at the
Turkish Court. On the coronation day, he was promoted to the
rank of Duke of Naxos and the Cyclades. Soon he found an
opportunity of dealing a heavy blow against the Republic of
Venice. In 1570 he advised his master to conquer the island of

56

Cyprus, then ruled by Venice. The enterprise was successful.
His enemies asserted that he hoped to be made King of Cyprus
and that before the conquest he had had a royal banner designed.

In the diplomatic records of that time the name of the princely
Jew occurs again and again, for the European ambassadors at
the Sublime Port got into the habit of making Mm responsible
for their failures. They connected his name with all the anti-
Christian measures of Turkish policy. The contemporary
Venetian writers in particular excelled in making him the
scapegoat for the many shortcomings of Venetian policy in the
East. In the ports and offices of the East and the West people
told each other the strangest tales of the wealth, the enterprises,
plans and plots of the great Jew. His fortune must, in fact, have
been fantastic. For the house of Mendez had assumed the
leading position in the commerce of the Levant. Its ships sailed
every sea, its merchandise was in every market, and its capital
here, there and everywhere.

The conquest of Cyprus marked the zenith of Josef's career*
His friend Selim died in 1574. His son and successor, Murad,
deprived the Jew of all personal influence, while allowing him
his dignities. Five years later, Josef died, sick and taciturn. He
left a widow without children. The greater part of Ms fortune
was confiscated on false pretexts. This inglorious end of the great
man revived all the old rumours about him and gave rise to the
myth of the Duke of Naxos.

To come back to Marlowe, the poet introduces Prince Selim
as "son of the Grand Seigneor," in whom it is not difficult to
recognise Sultan Suleiman. Malta was beleaguered by the Turks
in 1565, a year before Selim's accession to the throne. These and
other hints leave little doubt that Josef Mendez-Nassi was
Marlowe's model for Barrabas. Marlowe himself took part in the
English military expedition to the Netherlands and may there
have come across rumours about that young merchant, the
courtier and favourite of Queen Maria whose firm had important
connections with English finance. Moreover, the house of Mendez
had also subsidised the Flemish rebels. Apart from this, Josef's
name and career must often have been discussed in business as
well as in diplomatic circles. Finally, the Duke of Naxos, whose
co-religionist and friend, another Jewish dignitary at the Turkish
court, the Duke of Mytilene, was a diplomatic intermediary

57

between the Sultan and Queen Elizabeth, was himself bound to
be a figure of particular interest to the English public as one of
the fiercest and most efficient enemies of Spain.

His distortion into a monster in the drama demonstrates
impressively that the fact of his Jewishness gave rise to exaggera-
tion and falsification of all other facts.

Josef) the Jew of Cyprus and Venice

"Josef, Duke of Naxos, died in 1579. In the same year, a book
hostile to the theatre. School of Abuse, by the Puritan writer,
Stephen Gosson, was published in London. In it a play, The Jew, is
mentioned. Gosson says of it that it pictures "the greed of worldly
suitors and the bloody mind of usurers." This might be taken
to refer to The Merchant of Venice, especially when it comes from
the pen of a moralising Puritan. Since the play is entitled The
Jew, it undoubtedly contained the character of a Jewish usurer.
Since Shakespeare has also connected the story of several suitors
with the story of a usurer, there can be little doubt that The Jew
served him in some respect as a model. In English literary history
there is only one trace of a similar play: Josef, the Jew of Venice, by
Thomas Dekker, reported to have been produced between the
years 1592 and 1594 by the Admiral's Company, whose hack-
writer Dekker was. He was born about 1567, so that he can not
have been the author of the play mentioned by Gosson, though
it is possible, and even probable, for reasons to be explained
later, that he rearranged it.

It is well-known that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
companies of English players, the Englische Komoedianten, as they
are called in German literary history, travelled the Continent,
playing especially at the many courts and in the free towns of
Central Europe. Their performances were in Dutch or German.
Old bills still extant give some record of their Continental
repertoire. They produced moralities and contemporary plays
translated, rearranged and often enough distorted.

Among other manuscripts one has been preserved, Componiert
von Christoph Bluemel, studiosus Silesius (composed by Christopher
Bluemel, a Silesian student) of which there are copies In the
libraries of Vienna and Karlsruhe. It bears the title, Komoedia

58

genanndt Der Jud von Venezien (Comedy called, The Jew of
Venetia). On bills it is also called Komoedia genandt Dass wohl
Gesprochene Uhrteil Eines Weiblichen Studenten oder Der Jud von
Venedig. (This title, quite irregularly spelt, meaning: Comedy
called the Well-spoken Sentence of a Female Student or The Jew
of Venice.) Performances of this play can be traced in a con-
siderable number of German towns and courts. Sometimes it is
called Von einem Koenig von Cypern und einem Herzog von Venedig
(Concerning a King of Cyprus and a Duke of Venice), sometimes
Komoedie von Josepho Juden von Venedig (Comedy of Josef Jew of
Venice) or Teutsche Komoedie der Jud von Venedig (German comedy,
The Jew of Venice).

The dramatis personae of the existing German manuscript are
King of Cyprus; Prince of Cyprus; Duke of Venice; Jew Barra-
bas, afterwards Josef; Florello, Counsel of Venice; Ancileta,
his daughter; Griraaldi and Gentinelli, lovers of Ancileta
Pickelhering (Jack Pudding), the servant of the Prince;
Franciscina, the maidservant of Ancileta.

The play opens on the island of Cyprus. The Prince proposes
to his father that the Jews should be expelled, their money
confiscated and their claims against Christians nullified. A Jew
called Barrabas attempts to avert this calamity. He addresses the
King as "Sir Adonai" that is, with the expression in Hebrew
prayers reserved for God. Barrabas appeals also to Pickelhering
to intervene, but he proposes instead to have the Jews hanged.

Then the Prince asks his father for leave to visit Venice. The
King agrees on condition that the Prince should travel as a
simple nobleman, until he, the King, had proposed to the
Venetian Republic an alliance against the Turks. Pickelhering
is to accompany the Prince as his servant.

Barrabas, disguised as a soldier, returns to the Prince,
pretending to have lost an eye in the last war and wearing a
large plaster on it to make himself unrecognisable. He offers to
serve the Prince on his journey and, having been accepted by
him, swears to take his revenge: "You will suffer death at my
hands."

In the second act, in Venice, Grimaldi and Gentinelli, two
noble friends, lighthearted and charming, like Antonio's friends
in the Merchant, propose to the rich and beautiful Ancileta. She
is in love with neither, finding the same virtues in both of them,

59

so that she is unable to make any choice. The situation of Ancileta
is substantially the same as that of Portia; Shakespeare has shifted
the emphasis from the inability to choose to the restriction of
freedom to do so.

Meanwhile,, the Prince has arrived in Venice with the two
servants. Barrabas disappears immediately. Ancileta and
Franciscina meet the Prince and Pickelhering by chance; both
couples fall in love with each other at first sight.

In the third act Ancileta succeeds by a trick in seeing the
foreign nobleman. She simulates illness and sends for him as a
doctor. Barrabas again appears, with the stage direction, "The
Jew in his glory. 35 In a soliloquy, he informs the audience that,
thanks to his brethren in Venice and to his own industry, he is
quite well off again and richer than ever before. "Whatever are
you thinking of, you foolish Christians, 55 he continues,
"attempting to annihilate the Jews? Do you imagine that if you
expel us from one country we perish in the others? Ach, this is a
mistake of yours. Often enough it is then that our good luck
begins to bloom and to flourish; we are like a dry oxhide, which,
trodden down on the one side, rises on the other. 55 At the same
time he divulges that he has changed his name from Barrabas to
Josef. Pickelhering calls on him in order to borrow clothes for
his master's disguise as a doctor.

In the fourth act love scenes develop between the supposedly
sick Ancileta and the supposedly French doctor, as well as
between the two servants. In the meantime, the Prince has
gambled away all his money and tries to borrow 2,000 ducats
from the Jew Josef, of course! The same bond is made between
them as between Antonio and Shylock..

Josef is in triumphant mood. Now he is certain of his revenge.
He knows there is no possiblity of a ship arriving from Cyprus in
time to provide the Prince with money before payment of the
debt is due. And, he says, even if he is not able to cut a pound
of flesh from the body of his hated debtor, he will "at least
inflict on him one cut with a poisoned knife such that there will
be no need of another. 53

The play concludes as in the Merchant. Ancileta, of course,
plays Portia 5 s part as wise and upright judge. The Duke of Venice
causes the Jew to be thrashed and thrown out from the court
after denying his claim to the repayment of the loan. There

60

follows the disentanglement of the love affairs. Finally, the
Prince's steward brings money and the news that an embassy of
the King of Cyprus has arrived to sign an alliance with Venice
against the Turks. Now the Prince reveals his Identity and the
two betrothals are announced.

In this arrangement of the play by the German student,
Bluemel, probably only the skeleton of the original has been
preserved. There is no doubt, however, that this play must have
been written before Marlowe's and Shakespeare's. For the
character of Josef contains, if only in a crude fashion, the elements
of both the Jew of Malta and Shylock. It clearly represents an
earlier stage and the psychological nucleus of both of them. A few
passages in the dialogue among others the comparison of the
young lawyer to Daniel have been adopted by Shakespeare.

The life story of the Duke of Naxos shines through the character
of BluemeFs Jew. The figure is grossly underdrawn, just as it is
grossly overdrawn by Marlowe. It Is at any rate clear from this
early play, what confusion there must have been in the legends
about the famous Jewish statesman. Several facts stand out the
more clearly: he was at some time in Venice, there he changed
his name to Josef, and he was in some way connected with
Cyprus.

We are now approaching the figure of the Jew as drawn by
Shakespeare. He had before him Barrabas-Josef and Marlowe's
Barrabas, the first being already mixed up with the story of the
pound of flesh and with love affairs and marriages. Shakespeare
followed the outlines of this story and appears not to have had any
interest in the political backgrounds of either story. He has chosen
for his plot the Jew as a private Individual. Thanks to his unerring
realism, he sees the Jew small and oppressed and his Christian
adversary proud and powerful, if also as a private person only.

We have now examined the immediate literary sources for
the character of Shylock* It is doubtful whether they would
of themselves have stimulated Shakespeare to write the play. But
contemporary history provided him with a figure which, even
if it cannot be marked down as the model for Shylock, may have
served as the final impetus for his creation.

This was the physician-in-ordinary to Queen Elizabeth,
Roderigo or Roger Lopez.

61

The Case of Roderigo Lopez

In the year 1580 there was no heir to the throne of Portugal,
though there were a number of pretenders. Two of them had to
be taken seriously: King Philip II, whose dynasty was linked by
recurring marriages with the Portuguese throne, and a cleric,
Don Antonio, Prior of Crato, son of a Portuguese prince and an
aristocratic Jewess. Antonio's claim would certainly have been
recognised as legitimate had there not been doubts about the
legitimacy of the marriage of his parents. The sympathies of the
Portuguese people were bound to be with him, because all of them
hated the Spanish pretender. But Philip sent his Duke of Alba
with an army against Portugal. Antonio, though already duly
crowned and enthusiastically hailed by his people, was defeated
and forced to flee. Philip became the despotic ruler of
Portugal.

Antonio fled first to Paris, where he even succeeded in getting
a French fleet mobilised on his behalf. For a time his partisans
were able to set up a sort of pirate kingdom on Portuguese
islands. But so badly did he mismanage his affairs in Paris that
he was obliged to leave the city. In the year of the defeat of the
Spanish Armada, 1588, he came to London, where every enemy
of Philip was sure of a welcome.

Elizabeth, intending to use him as a pawn in her post-war
manoeuvres against Philip, had him received with the honours
due to a sovereign and surrounded with a miniature court
of his own. He became a popular figure in the Metropolis.
This adventurous King had as his interpreter and adviser, Dr.
Roger Lopez.

There are great gaps in our knowledge of the antecedents and
early life of Lopez. When Antonio arrived in England, Lopez was
already over sixty, possibly nearing seventy. He may have been
born in England. As early as 1515, the Ambassador of the Spanish
King Fernando, husband of Isabella, had presented to Henry
VIII the Magister Hernando Lopez, a famous doctor. In the
year 1550 there is a record of another Dr. Lopez, who was known
to be of Jewish stock. He had been accused of "immoral
behaviour." After his condemnation, Court influences intervened
on his behalf with the Lord Mayor of London.

There is no evidence as to whether Roger was a relative or

62

even a descendant of these two Lopez this name having been
common among Spanish or Portuguese Jews, He had, we know,
studied at Italian universities and probably begun to practise his
profession in Italy (like Marlowe's hero). It is not known when he
came, or returned, to London. In the year 1569 he was a member
of the College of Physicians and appointed to give lectures on
anatomy. In 1575 his name appears on the register of the most
important physicians of London. At that time he was a doctor
at St. Bartholomew's and physician-in-ordinary to Walsingham,
the Secretary of State. His wife, Sarah, was a daughter of the rich
Marrano Dunstan Anes, who was banker to Don Antonio. He
had two daughters and a son, the latter educated at Winchester.
A brother of Roderigo, Luis Lopez, was probably an agent, of the
firm of Mendez. He himself was a member of the established
Church of England. One wonders whether, as a Marrano, he
remained inwardly faithful to the Jewish creed.

The man to whom Lopez owed his last and most brilliant
success did much to create popular dislike and distrust of him.
It was the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's intiinate favourite and,
at one time, Mary Stuart's suitor. He figured in many scanda-
lous stories and more than one crime was attributed to him by
public opinion. In a pamphlet published in 1584, Leicester^
Commonwealth, Roderigo is mentioned as "Lopez, the Jew," and
described as being particularly skilled in poisons (which again
reminds us of Barrabas).

Apparently, Lopez was not only physician to Leicester, but
also his confidant.

In 1586 he had an astonishing stroke of luck: he became
physician-in-ordinary to the Queen. This distinction he owed
not only to Leicester's protection, but also to recommendations
from Walsingham and Burleigh. Both of them had been quick to
recognise either the value of his political gifts or his political
connections abroad. At their suggestion, he had opened a
correspondence with Marranos in Spain, Portugal and the
Netherlands, in order to obtain information about the political
and military designs of the enemy.

His appointment as interpreter and adviser to Don Antonio^
"the King/' is said to have been at the behest of the Queen
herself. In fact he seemed peculiarly suited to this position. He
had mastered five languages, knew the Continent and had

63

excellent connections there. Moreover, as a descendant of the
expelled or compulsorily baptised Iberian Jews, he was likely to
share the common hatred of the country which had ill-used his
ancestors.

Antonio and his presence in England played a big part in the
plans and dreams of the Earl of Essex and his friends. They
deliberately kept alive the public interest in the person of the
legitimate sovereign of Portugal and saw to it that his public
appearances were duly acclaimed. Neither did they forget to
honour his companion,, Lopez. In defiance of Burleigh's policy
of reticence and "appeasement/' they sedulously accumulated
fuel for a general explosion against Spain. Don Antonio was no
more than a puppet to be used in political shows of all kinds.
The Queen's favourite, Essex, who, together with his brilliant
friends, had the streets and the public opinion of London under
their control, had a weakness for such shows. One of them was
to cost him his head.

In these circumstances, Lopez had every reason for being
content with his position and mission. Apparently his role as a
go-between pleased him greatly. It can hardly have been other
than attractive and alluring for this aged foreigner and Jew to
be in with court and diplomatic circles. He could furnish the
insatiably curious Queen with reports of the young would-be
hero, Essex, his thoughts, words and plans. At the same time he
could supply the latter with news of the Queen: how her eyes had
gleamed or when she had screwed up her lips or knitted her brows
or uttered one of her coarse oaths. It was a position that brought
its own reward.

As early as 1589, he helped to persuade Elizabeth to equip an
expedition against Lisbon on behalf of Don Antonio. But, in
spite of the heroic or pseudo-heroic deeds of Essex, the expedition
failed. With the consent of the Queen, Burleigh and Essex, Lopez
meanwhile kept up his correspondence with the Continent and
remained the factotum of the King-without-a-throne, thereby
serving all sides.

Around Antonio there gathered refugees of all sorts, whose
true political tendencies became more obscure the longer their
emigration lasted. On the other hand, particularly in the years
after 1590, King Philip increased his efforts, through the agency
of his paid creatures or of devoted fanatics, to get rid, not only of

the troublesome Antonio, but also, and above all, of the odious
Queen herself. Between these out-and-out villains or fanatics and
those men of doubtful character round Antonio connections
began to spring up, in which the industrious letter-writer, Lopez,
became entangled.

As we know, King Philip slept little, prayed much and worked
even more. He concerned himself with political details, such as
the espionage and plots in England. At any rate, it is certain that
he entered Into a correspondence with Lopez and that between
them there were negotiations about the price for the poisoning
of Elizabeth. Lopez demanded 50,000 gold ducats, or 18,000, a
tremendous sum at that time; Philip was prepared to pay it, but
Lopez wanted payment in advance, which Philip refused.

In order to assure him of his special favour, the Spanish king
sent a valuable ring to the English Court doctor. What did Lopez
do with it? He offered it to the Queen without concealing its
origin. She did not accept it. Thereupon he hinted at what the
Spaniard had in mind. She forbade him to speak of such dis-
agreeable matters. Now, as before, he enjoyed her unlimited
confidence.

Meanwhile, Antonio could not help recognising that his fight
for the Portuguese throne was hopeless, and that he was being
pushed more and more into the background. He could not
reconcile himself to this. Rightly or wrongly, he came to believe
that his adviser, Lopez, was to blame, and made him feel It. In
1593 they broke with each other for good. In his anger at the
Ingratitude of Antonio, Lopez is said to have exclaimed that the
King's next illness would prove fatal. Assuming these words to
have been uttered in fact, they would suggest only the rashness
of senility. A dangerous spy and conspirator does not easily let
such a threat escape him.

Essex still set his hopes on the person of Antonio. A year
earlier, in 1592, he had persuaded Lopez to write to his Spanish
agents in order to get proof of Spanish preparations for war.
Lopez talked about this to the Queen, who in turn talked about
it to Essex. The latter grew furious with Lopez.

Now the Essex clique started a public campaign against him.
Wherever these young gentlemen met him they scoffed and
scolded. Contemptuously they called him "the Jew" and indulged
in scornful allusions to his past life. Suddenly there was one very

65

conspicuous Jew in London, singled out by enmity and suspicion.
He was to pay dearly for It.

Essex succeeded in Intercepting two suspicious letters from
friends of Lopez,, Estava Ferrera di Gama and Luis Tinoco, both
in the circle of refugees round Antonio, Imprisoned, they believed
that they had been betrayed by Lopez and not without assist-
ance from the rack admitted that they had been in his service.
Essex triumphed and reported to the Queen. She ridiculed him,
but permitted a surprise search of Lopez 3 house. It was without
result. Essex and his friends were enraged and spread the rumour:
"Like a Jew, he had burnt all a little before."

Essex contrived that the two prisoners should be still more
communicative. It was now revealed that Lopez was apparently
not in the habit of informing his employers about all his letters
to Spain or about all his negotiations with persons on the Con-
tinent, more particularly with the King of Spain. This was too
much even for the Queen, and he was thrown into the Tower.
Here he collapsed altogether. To escape the rack, he even
confessed to his supposed Intention of poisoning the Queen. In
late January, 1594.3 he was imprisoned. A month later his trial
began.

The triumphant Essex succeeded in being appointed president
of the special court of fifteen judges set up to try Lopez. With
Coke, the Attorney-General, as prosecutor, he was accused of
high treason In the form of a plot against the life of the Queen. He
repeated his confession in court, whereupon he was condemned
to death and his fortune confiscated.

The prosecutor expressly emphasised that the defendant was
a Jew. In a report he Is described thus: "That perpired and
murdering traitor and Jewish doctor is worse than Judas himself. "
The judge spoke of him as "that vile Jew. 53

The execution at Tyburn did not take place until early June.
For the Queen forbade the Governor of the Tower to deliver the
prisoner to the executioner. But at last she yielded to his being
taken to the gallows. The horrible proceedings were not lacking
in dramatic moments. Lopez attempted to speak to the mob, but
was howled down by them. When the executioner threw the
rope round his neck, he cried out that he had loved the Queen
even more than Jesus Christ. The mob laconically retorted: "He
is a Jew! He is a Jew! 55

66

Elizabeth seems to have been far from convinced of the guilt
of her physician. She returned the confiscated fortune to Ms
heirs and even endowed them with a beneficial lease. Incident-
ally, it is strange that Lopez had often been in financial straits
in spite of his high income as a doctor and of an import monopoly
bestowed on him by the Queen.

Whether and to what extent Lopez was guilty is not our
concern here. If he was really a traitor in the service of Philip, he
was equally a traitor to the cause of his fellow Jews. For Philip
and Spain were their sworn enemies.

The essentially Jewish element in his tragedy is that, being the
Jew of London in the public eye, he was bound, once under
suspicion, to focus on himself all the prejudices against the Jews.

The London public found Lopez guilty. Essex and his comrades
saw to it that his case was kept to the fore, because Essex had
ostensibly played the part of saviour of the Queen and thus of
the country. They did everything possible to keep alive the
interest in the Spanish-Jewish conspiracy. Indeed, so zealous
were they in their endeavours that one cannot but suspect that
the judgment had provoked criticism. No less than five official
reports of the proceedings were published, one of them by Coke
and another by Francis Bacon. Whether c 'inspired' * or not,
pamphlets, ballads and caricatures appeared.

In this way the case of the Jewish physician, traitor and
poisoner remained a cause celebre in the streets and inns of London
during the summer of 1594. It seems likely that there was a wave
of hatred against Jews and Spaniards in a city where very few
of either lived, and then not openly. How could the stage ignore
such a situation? Was not Marlowe's Jew also a Spaniard, a
doctor, poisoner and conspirator? The play was, in fact, revived
at that time, and a number of performances were given. The
older play, The Jew, was also unearthed and rearranged by
Thomas Dekker. One can easily imagine how many topical
allusions were introduced into the dialogue by the actors, a
practice in which, according to Hamlet's complaint, Elizabethan
players excelled. This was no mere caviare for the people, but
strong meat.

And The Merchant of Venice? What is more natural than to
assume that Shakespeare seized the opportunity of presenting
his company with a peculiarly suitable play? And was he not

closely associated with people round Essex through his friend
or patron, the Earl of Southampton? But, to be cautious, let us
say only that Shakespeare was bound to be confronted by the
complexity of Jewishness in the conspicuous fate of that Jew Lopez.

At any rate, it is idle to hunt for traces of the case of Lopez in
the Merchant. It is, however, worth noting that Shakespeare calls
his "royal merchant," Antonio, the adversary of Shylock, after
the royal adversary of Lopez. No such name occurs in the literary
models for his play.

The very nature of Shakespeare as a dramatist and poet is
revealed by his being able to rise far above the tendencies of the
day and to create a timeless, imaginative portrait of the Jew. He
was far from being a lampoonist, whether his play was for the
first time produced as that " Venetian comedy," mentioned in
the year 1594 by Henslowe, the theatre-owner, or no earlier than
1596, as the leading Shakespeare scholar of to-day. Sir E. K.
Chambers, suggests.

But a book by a genuine lampoonist of that time is indubitably
haunted by the case of Lopez.

and ^adoch^ the Jews of Rome

In the year 1594, a book, The Unfortunate Traveller or the Life of
Jacke Wilton, was published in London. Its well-known author,
Thomas Nashe, dedicated it, as Shakespeare had dedicated his
Venus and Adonis and his Lucrece, to the Earl of Southampton; thus
it has, outwardly at least, a link with the Essex circle. It is per-
missible, therefore, to assume that the part of it which has to do
with Jews was inspired by the Lopez affair, if not directly
"ordered" by Essex and his friends.

Nashe's was a quick brain, pen and tongue. He was involved
in nearly all the literary and religious quarrels of his time. This
crisp and witty writer, renowned also as a playwright, had some-
thing of the modern journalist and bears a striking resemblance
to one of the fathers of modern journalism, Heinrich Heine. At
any rate, he was one of the most gifted prose writers of his day,
rich in fantasy, overflowing with ideas and intoxicated with life.
Born in 1567, he died before he was thirty-three consumed
early by his exultant lust for life and letters.

68

The hero of his Unfortunate Traveller is a villainous and charming
page, Jacke Wilton. Nashe makes him tell the reader how he
travelled over the continent to Italy in the suite of Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey (i5i7(?)-47), the English hero and poet, whom
Henry VIII had executed on a frivolous charge of treason.
Having finally landed in Rome, Jacke has the most astounding
adventures in company with his sweetheart, Diamante. Both fall
into the hands of the Jew Zadoch, who, according to Roman law,
could have had them hanged because he had caught them as
intruders in his house. But "covetous as all Jews are" he preferred
the other legal alternative of keeping them as his bond-slaves. He
sells Jacke to his co-religionist Zachary, the Pope's physician,
for anatomic research. While being taken to the house of Zachary,
Jacke is seen by Juliana, the Marquis of Mantua's wife and one
of the Pope's concubines. Struck by his youth and beauty, she
falls in love with him and tries to get him free.

In his narrative, Jacke now dilates upon his sufferings through
the cruelty and avarice of the Jewish doctor. Juliana attempts
to beg or buy him from the Jew. But "Zachary Jewishly and
churlishly denies both her suites and says, if there were no more
Christians on the earth, he would thrust his incision knife into
his throat-bowl immediately. " This stirs Juliana to revenge.

Within a few days the Pope falls ill and Zachary prescribes
a potion which Juliana handles before it is given to the Pope.
With it she mixes a strong poison, "so that when his Grand-
sublimity-taster came to relish it, he sank down stark dead on
the pavement." She assures the Pope that the poison has been
supplied by Zachary. "The Pope without further sifting into the
matter, would have had Zachary and all the Jews in Rome put
to death, but she hung about his knees, and with crocodile tears
desired him the sentence might be lenified and they be all but
banished at the most. For Doctor Zachary quoth she, your ten-
times ungrateful physician, since notwithstanding his treacherous
intent, he has much art and many sovereign simples, oils,
gargarisms and sirups in his closet and house that may stand
your Mightiness in stead, I begg all his goods only for your
Beatitude's preservation and good. This request at first was
sealed with a kiss, and the Pope's edict without delay proclaimed
throughout Rome, namely, that all foreskin clippers whether
male or female belonging to the Old Jewry, should depart and

69

avoid upon pain of hanging within twenty days after the date
thereof. Juliana . . . sent her servants to extent upon Zachary's
territories, his goods, Ms movables and his servants. " Thus Jacke
passes into the household and into the power of Juliana.

As to his sweetheart Diamante: Zachary "was a Jew and
entreated her like a Jew ... he stripped her and scourged her
from top to toe." But after the Pope's proclamation Zachary and
Zadoch decide to use her as a spy and intermediary between
them and Juliana. Before this is done, Zadoch, in an outburst of
hatred and revengefulness against the Christians, outdoes even
the horrible utterances of Marlowe's Barrabas.

Both Jews now persuade Diamante to allow herself to be
offered by them to Juliana as a bondswoman in order that they
may poison the mistress of the Pope. Diamante agrees but, of
course, betrays the plot to Juliana. Zachary before he can be
captured, flees, but Zadoch "was left behind for the hangman. 95
His execution is described with full details of all its detestably
cruel medieval features an outstanding contribution to sadistic
literature.

This atrocity story, familiar only to the literary expert, has
been recapitulated here chiefly in order to illustrate the kind of
thing that the people of Shakespeare's time were told about the
Jews as occasion arose. The Unfortunate Traveller follows the
prevailing Elizabethan fashion in travel and adventure stories.
Nashe introduces into the first part of his narrative a number of
historical personages, such as Thomas More, Erasmus of
Rotterdam, Melanchthon and others. In this way he may have
succeeded in suggesting to his readers that the Pope in his story
had actually lived and that the two Jews and their criminal
projects were facts of history.

The truth is, of course, that the whole episode is without any
historical foundation. Moreover, the resemblance to the case of
Lopez is so obvious that one is tempted to regard the story not
only as "inspired," but also, because of its fantastic exaggerations,
as satirical in intention. Papal physician, royal physician, both
occupied with anatomy the allusion could hardly be more
obvious. The preoccupation with poison, used daily for all kinds
of sinister purposes, emphasised more in the original story than
in our summary, also points to Lopez. Finally, Zachary,, like
Lopez, is denounced for his greed for money. All the other
70

medieval myths about the Jew are added: murder of Christian
children, poisoning of wells and springs, blasphemy against the
Christian faith, satanic hatred of Christianity.

Nashe knew neither the Jews apart from Lopez and perhaps
a few Marranos nor Rome, for in all probability he never went
abroad. The more difficult is it to resist the suggestion that his
abominable descriptions were aimed at London and Lopez. He
made " the Jew" a kind of bogy, so that the people should more
easily swallow the stories that they kept hearing about the Jewish
doctor of their own day. Though, as we said before, the possibility
of Nashe being critical and ironical about the prevailing attitude
towards Lopez is not to be excluded.

Be that as it may, this literary episode suggests the atmosphere
in which Shakespeare created the character of Shylock and so
contributes to Its interpretation.

FOURTH CHAPTER

THE POUND OF FLESH
The History of a Fable

WHAT WOULD SHYLOCK BE without the fable of the
pound of flesh? It is his mental luggage which determines his own
weight. It makes him the representative of a principle of life, or
rather of a principle hostile to life.

The underlying theme of the fable first appeared in pious
Oriental legends. As a religious document, it emphasises the
sacrifice of their own flesh by pious men. Such versions are to be
found in Hindu mythology as well as in the Jewish Talmud.
Their subject is human sacrifice on behalf of animals.

In the Hindu poem, Mahabharata, the Gods, Indra and Agni,
assume the shapes of birds in order to put the King Usinara to
the test. Agni, as a dove, seeks refuge on his breast from a hawk,
impersonated by Indra. The hawk insists that the dove be yielded
up to him as his natural prey. In the end, the hawk contents
himself with the King's giving the weight of the dove from his
own flesh. For this the latter is elevated to heaven.

In the Talmud there is a legend about Moses coining down

7*

from Sinai and seeing an eagle carrying a lamb in its beak. In a
rage, Moses upraids the eagle for being about to kill a fellow
animal, just when he, Moses, had received the commandment
of God; Thou shalt not kill! The eagle drops its prey, but comes
down to Moses, asking him to feed its young himself. At this the
holy man bares his breast and offers his own flesh to the bird of
prey.

These two legends, the Indian written down about 300 B.C.
and the Talmudic in one of the following centuries, suggest
themselves as the nuclei of the fable. Later on, probably In
Byzantine literature, it was transmuted from the religious into
the secular. The pious sacrifice was replaced by the bond, the
bird of prey by the cruel creditor.

As early as the twelfth-century the fable emerges in French
literature namely, as one of a number of stories, fitted together
into a common framework, called Dolopathos or De Rege et Septem
Sapientibus (The King and the Seven Sages), by a monk, Johannes
de Alta Silva. In this version the debtor is a knight and the
creditor his former bondsman, a Christian, who wants to avenge
himself on his former master for having been mutilated by him
in a fit of anger. The King himself is the judge, advised by a
horseman who pronounces the same verdict as in the Merchant
and is, in fact, the knight's wife in disguise.

By the early thirteenth century the fable has found its way into
the Gesta Romanorum> the most widely circulated book of fables
and anecdotes of the Middle Ages. It is, to quote from the
Introduction to The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum,
by Sidney I. H. Herrtage (London, 1879), "a collection of
ficticious narratives in Latin, compiled from Oriental apologues,
monkish legends, classical stories, tales of chroniclers, popular
traditions and other sources which it would now be difficult to
discover." (Incidentally, the story of the Three Baskets is also
to be found in the Gesta.}

During the Middle Ages they were translated into a number of
languages and at the same time modified and adapted. In
England there was a so-called Anglo-Latin version as well as an
English one. Since the fable, as it appeared in the Gesta, was
circulated, in varying forms, all over Europe, let us summarise
it in its first popular version.

At the court of the Roman Emperor Celestinus (this fictitious

72

name differs in the different versions) , a knight falls in love with
the Emperor's daughter. But her father will not let him have
her. The knightly lover is not discouraged, but begs the princess
to let him come to her at night. She consents but on condition
that he give her a thousand marks (or florins)! He does so and
retires to bed with her, only to fall asleep at once. The constant
lover spends another thousand for another night, but again sleep
comes between him and his beloved. To meet the cost of a third
night, he has to borrow. In a big city to which he goes, a merchant
lends him the amount he needs under the familiar conditions.
In the same city the knight tells the "master Virgile, the philo-
sophere," of his experience with the Emperor's daughter and of
his bond with the merchant. The philosopher reveals the secret
of the princess: between the sheets and the coverlet of her bed
is hidden a magic letter which causes her bedfellow to fall into
a deep sleep. He advises the knight secretly to remove the letter.
Now the lover succeeds in achieving what he had longed for and
"after he lovid her so muehe, he drew so muche to hir companie,
that he for-gate the marchaunt: and the day of payment was
passid. . . ."

In the court the knight, having obtained money from the
princess, offers the merchant twice the amount of the loan and
more. The latter refuses the money saying: "that spoke we not
of: I wolle have Right as thou dudist bynde thee to me." The
princess, as in Dolopathos, appears in court as a foreign knight
and pronounces judgment as follows: ". . . the knighte bonde
him never by letter, but that the merchant shoulde have power
to kitte his fleshe fro the boons, but there was no covenaunt made
of sheding of blode: there of was nothing y-spoke. 3 '

In this way the knight is excused from any payment. The
princess discloses that she was the foreign knight and marries her
lover,,

The Jew, missing in Dolopathos and the Gesta, makes his first
appearance in a medieval English version. It is in the Cursor
Mundiy a poem of the closing thirteenth century, consisting
chiefly of a long-winded re-telling of Bible, Apostles' and saints'
stories and boasting well over 30,000 lines, that the fable,
complete with bond and Jewish creditor cheated out of his
inhuman claim, is introduced into European literature. It is
noteworthy that the story is outwardly connected with the

73

' 'Invention of the Holy Rood" near Jerusalem by Helena, the
mother of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great,
and on the other hand, that Cursor Mundi was written about the
time of the expulsion of the Jews from England when another
Helena (Eleanor) was the zealously religious mother of King
Edward I.

The second medieval appearance of the Jew in the fable
happens to take place in another period of Jew-baiting
namely, in the second half of the fourteenth century, when
they were accused of having been the "poisoners of the wells"
after the European plague which, for years to come, was
followed by the most horrible persecutions, with all the medieval
trappings revived. Then, in 1378, it was the Florentine novelist,
Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, who re-told the fable in his collection,
II Pecorone (The Dunce), and inserted the bloodthirsty Jew into
it, which he took in all probability from the Gesta, as the unknown
author of the Cursor Mundi may also have done. Moreover,
since the Jews were in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
the conspicuous if not the only moneylenders, a Jewish creditor
suggested himself in both cases.

Incidentally, when the Merchant was performed for the first time
only a few stories out of the Pecorone had been translated. The
fable of the pound of flesh was not among them. Since Shake-
speare took from it the name of the castle of Belmont, we must
assume that he either read the Italian original, or used some
other source unknown to us.

During the next century, in 1443, a so-called Meistergesang
(Master-song), "Kaiser Karl's Recht" (The Emperor Charles's
Law) was published at Bamberg, Franconia. It contains the
following episodes. A rich merchant leaves a great fortune to his
son. The son wastes his heritage. He borrows a thousand florins
from a Jew and goes abroad. If he should fail to pay the sum due
by a given day, the Jew has the right to cut a pound of flesh from
his body. He returns punctually as a wealthy man, but cannot
pay his debt in time because the Jew is not at home. Nevertheless,
the latter demands the fulfilment of the bond. Both appeal to the
Emperor. On their way to the court, the debtor falls asleep on
horseback and his horse tramples a child to death. The child's
father, also intending to appeal to the Emperor for damages,
follows the others. The debtor, again overcome by sleep, falls

74

from the window of his inn and kills an old knight who had been
sitting on a bench below.

This "master-song" of Bamberg, though without literary value,
is particularly important in the history of the fable, because It
pieces together several legal cases to illustrate the law of re-
taliation. The judgment of the Emperor Charles probably
Charlemagne goes against the Jew for the same reasons as in
all other versions of the fable. To the father of the dead child he
says, "Lay him [that is, the defendant] to your wife that he beget
another child by her." The plaintiff very understandably
replies: "No, I will do without the child." In the case of the dead
knight, the Emperor decides that the defendant should himself
sit down on the bench and the knight's son should fall on him
from the window. Thus the defendant leaves the court under no
obligation either to pay his debt to the Jew or damages to the
others.

In all probability the author of this farcical version was a
lawyer with a sense of humour.

The Fable in the Sixteenth Century

For the "modernists" of the sixteenth century, the fable of the
pound of flesh was archaic and obsolete. It had become merely
a document in the history of progress and could be used for
pedagogic purposes.

There is strange evidence of this in the biography of Pope
Sixtus V. (Vita di Sixto Quinto), published in Venice in 1587. Its
author, Gregorio Leti, is untrustworthy as a historian. His
fashionable aim was to suit his writings to fashionable taste of
the times and to surround his hero with as many anecdotes as
possible.

Here is one of them:

One day news had reached Rome that Francis Drake had
conquered San Domingo and made off with much booty. So, at
any rate, said the merchant Paolo Maria Secchi to the Jewish
merchant, Simson Ceneda. The latter refused to believe It and,
in a passion, declared that he would wager a pound of his flesh
that the news was false. Secchi staked a thousand scudi against
him. In the presence of a Christian and a Jewish witness, the
bet was recorded by a notary.

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Secchi was right and demanded a pound of flesh to be cut by
him from the body of the Jew. Ceneda offered instead a thousand
scudi, but in vain. Then he appealed to the Governor of Rome,
who in turn referred the case to the Pope. Sixtus called both
parties into his presence, read their bond and declared that
Secchi must not cut a whit more or less than a pound; otherwise
he would himself be hanged. At the same time, he ordered both
of them to be imprisoned,, and even condemned them to death.
Finally, this great financier among the Popes contented himself
with fining each two thousand scudi for their frivolous bet.

The story is taken, of course, from the Pecorone and is intended
to glorify the strict, just and wise Pope. It is all the more
significant that the roles played by the Christian and the Jew
are reversed. There is something almost comic in the thought
that this version, originating in Venice, which was full of Jews, is
gentle to the Jew. Probably Leti realised that * less privileged
citizen such as a Jew could not have ventured to demand a pound
of flesh from the body of a Christian.

In the literature of the sixteenth-century Germany there is
another remarkable version of the fable. Jacob Rosefeldt called
Jacobus Francus or, according to his birthplace, Jacobus
Scherneckiensis is the author of a Latin comedy, Moschus
(Moses), in which the fable is introduced. The play, performed
for the first time in 1599 at Jena, has the following plot:

The merchant Mercator has two sons, Polyharpax and
Musophilus, one of whom is a greedy merchant, the other a
student. The first is betrothed to a lady called Lucrum, whose
name, like that of the father and brothers, reminds us of names in
the London play. The Three Ladies of London. In order to finance a
business journey, Polyharpax borrows from the Jew, Rabbi
Mosche ben Rabbi Jehuda, the sum of five talents for three
months. The penalty in case of negligence is the usual one. But,
far from the Jew's proposing it, the Christian debtor, for no
apparent reason, includes it in the terms of the loan, which he
dictates to a clerk. Afterwards Moschus expresses his pleasure at
having caught such a fat fish. There follow coarse interludes, in
which the Jew and his Jewish servant Barrabas (remember the
name again in English literature!) are mocked and thrashed.

In the second act Moschus dilates on Jewish doctrines and
vices for the benefit of Barrabas, especially on theories of the
76

Talmud and of the Messiah, from which it is clear that the author,
a theologian and Hebraist, was grossly prejudiced against the
Jews. (Rosefeldt, by the way, even wrote a number of poems in
Hebrew!) Barrabas attempts to convert a peasant to Judaism.
Polyharpax returns from his voyage laden with merchandise.

Third act. His father being hostile to scholarly studies, the
pious student Musophilus is compelled to leave his university for
home. Polyharpax goes to repay his loan, but Barrabas refuses to
take the money on the pretext that Moschus is not at home. Next
morning Moschus declares that he was at home and Barrabas
denies having said otherwise. The position of Polyharpax
is now the same as that of the debtor in the Bamberger master-
song. He is summoned before the judge. Musophilus, approaching
his native town, is attacked by robbers and stripped of everything.

In the fourth act the trial takes place. Moschus, having sworn
a Jewish oath that he has not hindered his debtor from paying
at the proper time, is declared legally entitled to the pound of
flesh. He makes Barrabas fetch a knife and a whetstone and then
undress the victim, while the latter's bride, Lucrum, implores
him to be merciful. At this point Musophilus, chained and
fettered, is brought to the court by peasants, who accuse him of
murder. Hearing of his brother's plight, he suggests the familiar
solution. Thereupon the judges reverse their sentence and refuse
Moschus even the sum of money due to him. Musophilus now
reports his own adventure: after being robbed, he had spent the
night in a chapel where foreigners had slaughtered a child and
drawn off its blood. Next morning, having been found next to
the child's corpse, he had been suspected by the peasants of being
the murderer. Now he recognises Moschus as one of the male-
factors. The latter is duly fettered and delivered up to tne prince
of the country for judgment.

In the last act everything turns out happily for the Christians
as in The Merchant.

Thus the fable of the pound of flesh has encountered the legend
of ritual murder in its most exaggerated form, because it is
committed in a church. Moreover, the play Is stuffed with
calumnies against the Jews. Written in Latin, Moschus was a
"scholarly" play and was performed by students at the wedding
of a lawyer and the daughter of a professor of the University oi
Jena.

77

There Is one more German version of the fable: a short
anecdote in the Epitome Historiarum by a certain Wolfgang
Buettner (1576).

The fable wanders about. In France it appears in a book
printed in Paris in 1581, Epitomes de Cent Histoires Tragiques,
extraites des actes des Romains et aufres, by Alexandre Sylvain
(Alexandre van der Bussche). As indicated in the title, the book
has the Gesta Romanorum as its source. Nevertheless, the fable is
connected with a Jew and the action is supposed to take place in
Turkey, where during the next two centuries two German writers
(Schudt and Zwinger) also locate the story, with the Sultan
Suleiman II as the "wise judge" pronouncing the usual sentence.
There Is, of course, as little truth in these two narratives as in the
anecdote by Leti, though they may back the suggestion that the
fable is originally rooted in Byzantine soil.

Sylvain's book was translated into English in 1 596 and entitled
The Orator because the stories were intended to be used as
oratorial exercises. Accordingly, the Jew and his debtor, a
merchant, plead their causes In court.

In this final pre-Shakespearean stage we find the Jew versed
in the technique of the great contemporary essayist, Montaigne,
whose dialectical method and liberal conception of life are
reflected in his arguments. (Incidentally, Montaigne was on his
mother's side a descendant of Marranos, a fact about which, com-
municative as he otherwise was, he preserved complete silence.)

In business, says the Jew, one cannot break faith without doing
great harm to the common weal. Therefore no one should
undertake to do what he is not able or not willing to carry out.
Otherwise fraud would prevail. He then enumerates things more
cruel than his claim to the pound of flesh, which are quite
commonly done. Among them he mentions slavery as being
Ignominious, whereby Sylvain hints at an argument used by
Shylock In court. Sylvain's Jew also refers to the persecution of
adherents of another faith and even of another sect.

One might ask, continues the Jew, why I should not prefer
this man's money to a pound of his flesh. I might answer that I
want it in order to cure a friend of an otherwise incurable disease
or to alarm the Christians, so that they are deterred from treating
the Jews worse than they have done hitherto, but I merely say:
by virtue of his own promise, he owes it to me.

In this way the Jew puts less emphasis on his claim as such
than on the principle involved. Accordingly, he is not concerned
with cutting the flesh himself, but demands that It shall be
delivered to him by the defendant. Neither the bond nor custom
nor the law compel me to cut and weigh the flesh myself, he says,
I will have nothing to do with all that. I demand only that I be
given that to which I am entitled.

The tendency of the fable is thus not without irony reversed.
But the Christian does not mince matters in insulting his Jewish
adversary and the whole of Jewry. He speaks of their inborn
hatred of all non-Jews who are foolish enough to permit such
Jewish villains to live among them. The plaintiff he denounces as
a tiger and a devil and as a worthy descendant of the people who
murdered the Saviour. He goes on to say that even the Jews' own
book, the Bible, is full of evidence against them; they have always
been rebels against God, their priests, their law-givers and rulers
and even against the patriarchs from whom they are descended.
He concludes by asking what else one can expect of the Jews of
his day than that they should disregard the law and all rules of
honest conduct, practise usury, commit robbery and imagine
themselves to have done a good deed by mortally injuring a
Gentile.

If we turn for a moment to the south-east corner of Europe, we
find a Serbian version of the fable. From the Jew Isakar, the
vagabond musician Omer borrows thirty bags of money in order
to be able to marry. He undertakes to return in seven years and
to repay the loan. If he fails, the Jew is entitled to cut half an
ounce of flesh from his tongue. The case is submitted to the judge
in the familiar way. Omer's wife, the beautiful Meira, succeeds in
gaining the judge's favour. Disguised as a man she is allowed by
him to pronounce judgment on the usual lines. The Jew is
required to pay thirty more bags, which Meira carries home in
triumph to her beloved husband (Louis Leger, Collection de Conies
and de Chansons Populaires, Vol. V, Paris, 1882).

Back in England we find the industrious ballad-writers seizing
upon the fable, though probably not until it had been popularised
on the stage.

One ballad is entitled "The Ballad of the Jew Gernutus or
The Jew of Venice a new Song showing the crueltie of Gernutus
a Jew, who lending to a Merchant a hundred crowns, would have

79

a pound of his flesh, because he could not pay him at the time
appointed. 9 ' Another ballad is called "The Northern Lord/ 5 in
which a knightly suitor, in order to buy his bride from her father,
borrows gold from a Jew on the familiar condition. With his
wife and child, he flees to Germany, but even there the Jew
summons him to court.

The first-mentioned ballad is of some interest because it uses
the name Gerontus, which we met before in The Three Ladies of
London in a slightly different form, and contains the following,
not necessarily reliable reference to Italian sources:

"In Venice towne not long ago

A cruele Jew did dwell
Which lived all on usury
As Italian writers tell"

The Meaning of the Fable

The fable in its religious garb belongs to Asia and to pre-
medieval times. It is impossible to trace its transition from the
religious to the secular.

Now the fable comes to illustrate the progress from the rigidity
of law, rigor juris, or from the strict letter of the law, jus
strictissimum, to fairness and humanity in the interpretation of
deeds and bonds, to equitas,

Medieval law was a development of Roman law, which in the
sixth century produced the magnificent Justinian code, the
different parts of which were closely co-ordinated in the twelfth
century as the Corpus Juris. In the fifth century B.C. there had
come into existence the law of the Roman Twelve Tables on the
threshold, as it were, of a millennium of development and
formulation of European law, culminating in the work of the
Emperor Justinian.

In the Twelve Tables Law the negligent debtor was
abandoned, "body and life" to the creditor. The axiom was:
Qui non habet in aere, luat in cute, which might be freely translated:
"Your money or your flesh." The creditor was entitled to cut
the negligent debtor in pieces (secare in paries}. The value of each
part of the body was meticulously calculated in terms of money.
80

For example, what is the worth of an eye, ear or leg, if the
creditor comes to demand them In place of the forfeited money.
But it was not considered to be a violation of the law if the
creditors cut out too much or too little (Si plus minusve secuerint,
sine fraude esto),

But even this is the result of progress in the development of
lawful handling of the debtor. For originally the creditor was
permitted to deal with the insolvent debtor as he willed. He
could force service from him or sell him into bondage or kill him
or, if there were several creditors, cut him in pieces.

The law of the Germanic tribes was naturally no more humane
than that of the Twelve Tables. According to the Salic (Franc-
onian) Law, the debtor was condemned to outlawry and
"peacelessness," which, by mutual agreement, might be changed
into bondage. But in the case of refusal to work, the legal claim
to mutilation and killing re-asserted itself. Amongst the Anglo-
Saxons insolvency led to menial bondage, manus et caput that is,
the work and life of the debtor was given in manus domini, into the
hands of the creditor. Between ancient and medieval times the
law developed a number of other forms of execution against
the debtor for example, the simple ban, devastation, exclusion
from trade, deprivation of ordinary burial, calumniation and
deprivation of clothing.

These examples suggest the atmosphere in which the fable
of the pound of flesh grew up. In the background there lurks
the principle oftalio, the principle of precise and strict retaliation
applied to the relations between creditor and debtor.

In practice, these cruel regulations were mitigated. As binding
law, they hardly survived ancient times. The Romans abolished
them even before the Christian period. But as part of the popular
conception of law, and partially even in the letter of law, however
modified, they have persisted down to the beginning of modern
times. Imprisonment for debt is an example.

The fact that, in the fable of the pound of flesh, a debtor
voluntarily and formally acknowledges the right of the creditor
to claim part of his body suggests that the origin of the fable falls
within a period when the right of the former to dispose of the
latter's body was no longer sanctioned by written law. The
spirit originally expressed in a law often survives that law's
abolition.

81

Thus "flesh-bonds" were common usage in European countries
until, at least, the fifteenth century that is to say, agreements
by which bodily safety was staked on the performance or omission
of certain conditions. They had the legal quality of penalties to
which both parties had agreed. But no case is known in which
such a penalty was seriously demanded or paid. Such stipulations
(cutting off the ears, the nose, etc.) seem to have served only to
underline the gravity and strictness of an agreement.

One point must not be forgotten. In the Middle Ages and even
much later the safety and integrity of the human body was not
an elementary right. Criminal law and practice recognised
mutilations, which, for instance, were everyday occurrences in
Elizabethan England. Many a person who had written something
obnoxious had to forfeit his right hand or many another who had
divulged something hostile to the State or Throne lost his tongue
or ears.

Possibly it was such punishments which lent "topical 35 interest
to the fable and kept it alive. Apart from this, the fable incor-
porates the spirit of antiquity and of the Middle Ages as opposed
to the spirit of "modem" times. In it yesterday and to-day look
at and mirror each other. An agreement, in itself right, becomes
wrong, and the abolition of an agreement, in itself wrong,
becomes right.

To sum up, the fable is genuinely medieval } but suggests the
overcoming of the medieval spirit by its obviously progressive
tendency. The problem of the moral validity of a commercial
'agreement is presented. The spirit of humanity knocks at the door,
and the fable becomes an instrument of evolution.

As the representative and would-be exploiter of the wrongness,
behold the Jew the medieval man with the medieval spirit, the
embodiment of a medieval myth in a fable: Shylock!

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FIFTH CHAPTER

SHYLOCK
Shakespeare and the Jew

IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY war and commerce dimin-
ished the distance between England and the Mediterranean and
so brought nearer to each other English sailors and merchants, on
the one hand, and the Jews, as a newly established but
conspicuous Mediterranean people, on the other. The Jews played
an important part in the Mediterranean ports and centres of
commerce. They had settled on the edges of three continents, as
their nation had done of old. Inevitably, the English sailors and
merchants had stories to tell of them when they came home as of
people with whom they had done business and experienced
adventures. The Jews were thus realised as inhabitants of a world
in which the English were greatly interested. They differed from
the ghostly medieval Jewish figures that were still alive at home,
as reality differs from myth.

It might be said that the England of the sixteenth century was
both empty of Jews and full of them, full, at least, of reports and
rumours about them. It was the moment for a new portrait of
the Jew as such to be painted by an Elizabethan writer. But
Shakespeare was not competent for this task. Essentially, he was
no innovator, but a collector and sifter. His imagination was
preoccupied with what had been and had developed in the past.
He hardly cared for what was in the making. Therefore, as
contemporary figures, the Jews lived outside the sphere inhabited
by Shakespeare the dramatist.

It has already been mentioned that he hardly touched the
"people," in the sense of the lower and middle classes. When
they do take the stage, he makes no secret of his low opinion of
them. He is interested in them only as accessories, as stage
"padding," as the subjects of paltry jokes and minor intrigues,
interludes in the affairs of the great.

How, then, should he be interested in the Jews, those peripheral
people, the very embodiment of foreignness? They were in the
extreme sense un-Shakespearian.

Shakespeare lived at a time when the English middle class had
already begun to prepare for the part it was to play in politics.

83

Yet there is no trace of this in his work, not a single bourgeois
character of significance unless it be conceded that the Jews of
that time were bourgeois figures. In that case, Shylock becomes
the one "commoner 33 among Shakespeare's great characters. In
him he has created a subject, one of the governed class, a private
individual asking for his right. Shylock is thus an alien in the
world of Shakespeare's creation. It is not essential that he should
be a Jew at all. He might just as well have been a Christian
commoner of the Republic of Venice, where the patricians were
the ruling class. Even as such he would be a provocative
character, whom the patricians and the officials and governor
of the Republic would be permitted to misuse at their pleasure.

Chronologically, Shylock belongs to the same group of
characters as Bottom the Weaver and Sir John Falstaff; the former
a representative of the lowest orders, the latter a representative
of what might be called the lowest gentry. Both are patronised by
the poet, who raises them momentarily into the sphere of masters
and princes. Both are of tough fibre and out of place in the milieu
to which they have been transported.

The same applies equally, if not more so, to Shylock. Like
Bottom and Falstaff, he is snatched from an obscure past
and transformed, in contrast with his social antecedents, but
with a compelling, theatrical purpose. Bottom straying into the
realm of masques and elves, Falstaff into the taverns and the
society of ruffiansthis is the dramatically intriguing element
in both characters. Similarly, Shylock is led into the circle of
the Venetian gallants and noblemen, and finally into the Court
of Venice and the presence of the Venetian Duke himself. Is this
the appointed path of a Jew? Indubitably it is not.

However little Judaism could participate in the spiritual
quarrels and developments of the sixteenth century, it had
importance as representing the tradition on which the Christian
faith is founded. It was indeed more than ever present in its own
firm and steady tradition, inseparably connected with the holy
language, when the Christian tradition was being reformed.
Moreover, Calvin, a much more vehement and consistent
theologian than Luther, had given a new prominence to the Old
Testament as the first revelation of God, so that his doctrine had
a Judaistic tone and tendency.

How his doctrines came to England is well-known: the fugitives
84

from the regime of the Catholic Queen Mary brought it with them
on their return. They became the adversaries of the established
Church, on which Elizabeth, indifferent about religion though
she was, insisted for political reasons. The Puritans, im-
pregnated with the Calvinistic spirit, considered this English
Church to be still too papistic and Catholicising, too much given
to power and splendour. In it they saw and hated despotism. To
counteract it, they infused into the English people a new
enthusiasm for the patriarchalism of the Old Testament. They
turned Judaists.

They looked upon the English nation as the new Chosen
People. Extremists regarded the English as the descendants of
the ten lost tribes of Israel. Clergy and laity built up an English-
Jewish myth. Fanatics even proposed to observe Saturday as the
Sabbath and to introduce the Mosaic laws.

One only needs to skim over speeches, sermons and pamphlets
of the century from Elizabeth to Cromwell to recognise how
deeply the phraseology of the Old Testament had permeated the
English style of talking and writing. A number of Jewish post-
Biblical books even found English translators. In the year 1558,
the historical work Sepher Josippon, falsely ascribed to Joseph ben
Gorion, which is the Hebrew name of the Jewish historian
Josephus, was translated by Peter Morwying with the sub-title,
"A compendious and most marvellous History of the latter tymes
of the Jewes commune wealth." It went through ten editions
between 1558 and 1615. In Shakespeare's time, the authentic
works of Josephus were also translated. In 1598 a book called
Canaan's Calamitie Jerusalem's Miserie or the doleful destruction of
faire Jerusalem by Titus was published. Though Thomas Deloney
signs as author, it is sometimes attributed to Thomas Dekker, the
playwright already mentioned. Incidentally, Thomas Nashe is
the author of a book, Christ's Teares over Jerusalem, for which he
used Sepher Josippon as a source. Nashe's work is, in fact, intended
to be a topical satire in Biblical guise. But here, too, Nashe was
turning to literary advantage a fashionable tendency of the
time.

In these and other ways, Jewish history underwent a kind of
"Renaissance" after, and in contrast with, the pagan one. Quota-
tions from the Old Testament seasoned the daily conversation
and the sermons or other public speeches of the Puritans, Instead

85

of Ovid and Seneca, Plutarch and Aristotle, the "Saints" of the
Renaissance, Abraham and Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah, got a
hearing.

This was at the time when Shakespeare himself was indulging
in Hellenic and Roman reminiscences, images and similes that
is, in neither Christian nor Jewish ideas. Doubtless he was well-
read in the Bible. But he is relatively sparing with Biblical
quotations and images. The Biblical argument about Jacob and
the sheep, which he puts into Shylock's mouth, is neither pious
nor convincing, perhaps on purpose, in order to demonstrate
that from, the Bible one can even prove that wrong is right.

Puritan hatred was especially provoked by the wordly pomp
of the Elizabethan time and also by the stage entertainments. The
stage was hated, insulted and avoided as a device of the Devil,
as a haunt of vice and sins, as a place of seduction and corruption.
The more the lower and higher classes were attracted by it the
more the Puritans rejected and assailed the playwrights and
actors. (Think of School of Abuse, by Gosson, who himself was a
playwright and actor before he became a Puritan preacher.)
They were regarded as the vanguard of the Apocalyptic horsemen
and as the exponents of pompous despotism, as a spiritual and
secular stumbling-block.

Voluntarily or involuntarily, Shakespeare came into contact
and into conflict with this Christianised and Anglicised variety
of the Jewish spirit. It was not only hostile to his own humanist
and hellenistic mind, but also to his very essence and existence as
a writer. It is well known that on several occasions he wreaked
vengeance on the moral and spiritual presumption and narrow-
mindedness of the Puritan adversaries of the stage; he does so in
The Merchant. Conscious of the foundations and background of
their zealous fight as he certainly was, he encountered in them
something of Judaism. It touched him nearly too nearly!
He was bound to hate Judaism in the form of Calvinistic
Christianity.

This is, for what it is worth, Shakespeare's "anti-Semitism."
Perhaps it may have inclined him to touch the problem of Jewish
life.

As we said before, it would have been the time and the
opportunity for creating a new Jewish character, that of the
sixteenth century. But Shakespeare, the Elizabethan genius,

86

dramatises what already existed in the consciousness of Ms
contemporary audiences: the medieval myth of the Jew.

Its personification is Shylock, the Jew from the Mediterranean
world.

The Name

At first sight, it is strange that the Jew of Venice was given an
English name. The more so since in the sixteenth century Biblical
names were particularly common in England. Apart from the
usual names, the Dictionary of National Biography contains for the
period 1560-80 the Biblical names Abdias, Amos, Ezechiel,
Gamaliel, Helkiah, Hezekiah, Nathaniel, etc. The opinion, often
expressed, that Shylock is an Anglicised Biblical name is therefore
not to be discarded.

In the play there are, apart from Shylock, three Jewish
characters: his daughter Jessica, his friend Tubal and, if only
mentioned in the dialogue, Chus. All these names occur in the
tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis, where, from Noah
onwards, a genealogy is given. It is worth while to examine it.

Noah has three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. A grandson of
Shem is called Shelach or Shalach, in Greek Salah. Shelach is
said to be the original form of Shylock.

Shelach is the ancestor of the three brothers, Abraham, Nahor
and Haran. Haran has two daughters, one of whom is called Jiska.
Jiska Italianised gives Jessica. Both Shelach and Jiska are thus
descendants of Shem "Semites." Chus is a son of Ham a
"Hamite." Tubal is the fifth son of Japheth a "Japhethite." It
is, of course, of no consequence at all whether this naming is
deliberate or a chance result. In any case, Shakespeare chose
ugly names for his three Jews and a charming one for his Jewess.

The striking fact remains that Shakespeare anglicised the name
of the Venetian Jew, while in all his Italian plays there is no
other outstanding character with an English name, apart from
such as Sir Toby Belch. Perhaps the two syllables Shy-lock
were intended to suggest the medieval English conception of the
nature of the Jews. Incidentally, the very similar-sounding word
"Shycock," taken from the popular cockfights, was, according to
the Oxford Dictionary, also used for a cautious and cowardly person^
specially one who keeps himself hidden from fear of officials.

It is, after all, probable that Shakespeare chose a name which

should single out its bearer from the other Venetians, but it also
seems possible that the English name should allude to the
numerous usurers of the Elizabethan time. Finally, it is not to be
excluded that the name might contain some allusion to Roderigo
Lopez, who had certainly lived up to the meaning of the word
"Shycock."

The Drama

With the tale of the pound of flesh as the centre of the law-suit,
Shakespeare has connected the tale of the three caskets as the
centre of the love affair. This story has also travelled a long road
which leads back at least as far as the Talmud. Its content is
rather trite. Surrounded by the tremendous wealth of Portia, it
is easy and cheap to be satisfied with lead. For the castle (and
Portia's dowry) abounds in gold and silver. This motive is
inappropriate in Shakespeare's world. But it is full of irony, and
thus mitigates the coarseness of the romance in the earlier
versions.

Not to mention the emperor's daughter in the Gesta Romanorum,
who not only sells her nights of love, but twice cheats the lover
out of the price paid by him, even in the Pecorone, the mistress of
the castle of Belmont is a rich and greedy widow waiting to
deprive her suitors of their goods and chattels. In the con-
temporary play. The Jew> there was no longer such barbarism.
The lady's greed had changed into playfulness. But even this
did not suffice to counterbalance the greedy and cruel Jew. It is
the Shakespearian touch at its best that has shaped the Lady
of Belmont into the highest expression of humanity and
womanliness, able finally to utter the magnificent message of
mercy against the mercilessness of the hunted Jewish creature
the modern gospel against the medieval.

The theme of the three caskets derives essentially from the
same motive that governs the character of Shylock. It is the
impulse to possess, which permeates the whole of the play.

There are four categories of "propertied" persons in it:

First of all Portia: in her castle of Belmont she owns all that
can be longed for. She is "absolutely" rich. Her properties are
secure: a splendid house, a splendid park, servants and music,
nature and culture, a standard of life saturated with wealth
88

accumulated and cultivated for generations. She can afford to
follow her ideals. Settled and rooted, this rich lady blossoms into
Inward and outward beauty.

Then Antonio: he is also rich and noble by inheritance. A
"royal merchant," he is used and eager to risk his fortune. He is
the "capitalist 35 of that time when big business had not yet been
drained of romance. There is something chivalrous and ad-
venturous in despatching ships to distant shores. The man who
risks so much cannot and must not stick to money. Even if he
stay at home himself, he is a "merchant-adventurer. 33 Hazardous
enterprise is the essence of his life. Antonio risks money in order
to earn money or shall we say to deserve money. But he despises
it.

Round him there swarm a number of young people who own
nothing, yet lack nothing. They live on the riches of others. It does
not matter whether by means of friendship or of love-making.
They are the "co-rich, 55 the lilies of the field, smart have-nots.
Being the beneficiaries of abundance, they abolish the difference
and contrast between poor and rich. (How many of them may
have lived round Essex and Southampton!)

Last, Shylock! He is so much bound to money that it is the
essence of his life. He has no landed properties, no ships at sea;
he only owns and wants cash, or jewels which are as good as
cash. To him money is an end in itself. To hoard it, to augment
it, to love it, to know that it is his that is his life. He works for
money; money works for him. He is no greater and no less than
the power of his money.

It is noble to live as heir in an inherited castle.

It is chivalrous to venture one's ships and goods among the
winds and pirates.

And smart it certainly is to own no money and yet live gaily
from day to day.

But it is ignoble, un-chivalrous and un-smart to give and to owe
one's life to nothing else but the preservation and increase of
money.

That is the fate of the Jew Shylock. He lives under the tyranny
of money. He is its slave.

The mastery of the others over money and property is
emphasised in every possible way. The three caskets symbolise
contempt for gold and silver. Lorenzo goes off with Shylock' s

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valuables but even this gross robbery is endowed with an air
of lightness and romanticism. Youth, sportiveness and love win
the day against the lifeless possessions of ShylocL Such property,
says Shakespeare between the lines, is not entitled to protection
and security. A roving idler is something poetical; a calculating
usurer is not. (As we know, the man Shakespeare from Stratford
thought and acted in a different way. He lent out money and
filed suits against negligent debtors. He succeeded in quickly
increasing his fortune and in becoming a well-to-do member of
the gentry. He was, paradoxically, nearer Shylock than the
Venetians of his play.)

The unexampled liberality displayed by Antonio and
ultimately by Portia may well have originated in a poet's dream
of being able to behave like them. Bassanio is an impoverished
spendthrift he is given money by Antonio. After losing his
ships, Antonio is himself, if only for a time, little more than an
impoverished spendthrift he is given help by Portia. And will
not Graziano, marrying her maid Nerissa, also become a parasite
of hers? Or Salanio and Salarino, who have so far sponged on
Antonio? At last Portia alone remains as the one who gives.

In her are concentrated every sentiment and attitude which
clash with Shylock's world. She "stars" in the action against
him a woman! In a woman Shakespeare symbolised a world
the signs and beacons of which irradiate the whole of his work.
Portia contains the myth of a new time or a new world which is
far above the reality. It may be called the myth of the new
aristocracy of man. Through the character of Portia the
conception of money and property in general acquires a new
significance, that of being rich both outwardly and inwardly., the
two states being interdependent. In her the relation between the
possessor and the thing possessed is a perfect equation. She is the
only person in the play to have freed herself from the tyranny of
material things; she becomes the leading and determining force
against Shylock.

For this very reason, she is entirely surrounded by love, the
most exclusive of the feelings, in which again only one character
in the play is prevented from participating Shylock, who is not
even granted a modicum of love from his own daughter. Portia
and Shylock represent two spheres and two principles in constant
opposition. It is neither by mere chance nor a dramatic trick

go

that Portia's spirit is called upon to judge Shylock. With her
sermon on mercy, she rises above the sphere, not only of Shylock^
but also of Antonio and the others into a spiritual world in which
her possessions, her love and even her deception of the court are
justified.

Portia is the vision of a human being, of a humanity not yet
in being and not to be expected ever to become reality. It is
essential truth dreamt by a poet true in its idea.

Inevitably Antonio takes second place. His feeble hands are
tainted with wrong. Even the hymn in praise of friendship of
which he seems to be the incarnation has faults. He loves
Bassanio because he is young, daring and gay. This is not
an emotion of a high order, and his sympathies with the other
youths have still less human value. A rich man does not become
valuable and virtuous because he likes to squander his money
nor because he indulges in noble melancholy which alienates him
from life. Not even by a sacrifice the gravity of which he estimates
at nothing.

The climax of the play in terms of human beings is: Shylock-
Antonio-Portia. The combat is between the highest and the
lowest extremes. Alternatively, this climax can be expressed as:
medieval time time of transition modern or future time.
Horror, compassion and glory in another climax are their
respective dues.

Or one may define the contrast* Ghetto versus Belmont. Between
them lies the city of Venice. She is implicitly glorified as a bright
centre of the world. From all directions the suitors come to Portia.
Their enumeration suggests an atlas of the nations. Even here
Portia becomes the central figure of an orbis pictus humoristically
foreshortened. Her residence or, as one is tempted to say, her
throne floats above the city. She is Venice in blossom. The scent
of her blooming gives the play its peculiar atmosphere which
reaches perfect fragrance in the last act.

In this world Shylock is an uncanny, foreign element; Shylock
is the Jew, inappropriate, out-of-date, un- Venetian, even unreal.
That he is swallowed up by the Venetian world is the Jewish
tragedy in the play. How Venice comes to triumph over
everything foreign not only the Jew, but also the suitors,
Morocco, Aragon and all the others from the height, nay, from
the sublimity of Belmont, is the comedy. Shakespeare recognised

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Instinctively that the Jewish tragedy is consummated within the
comedy of the world.

The characters of this comedy, from Portia downwards, he
idealised, while with the subject of the tragedy he did the reverse.
This is the double aspect of his drama and one of the mysteries
of its unfading beauty and undiminishing appeal, nourished by
two myths: the Portia-myth pointing to the future and the
Shylock-myth reaching back into the shadowy past.

Shylock versus Antonio

Many a Shakespeare scholar of the past was constrained to
conjecture that the dramatist had been a law expert. Ludwig
Tieck, who inspired the German Shakespeare translators
(amongst them his daughter Dorothea), even introduced him
as a young and dignified lawyer's clerk into one of his short
stories. But it is futile to try thus to embellish Shakespeare's
biography. For he shows signs of possessing medical and other
scientific knowledge as well. The spirit of his time, so greedy of
learning, is caught up, as in a magnifying mirror, by his unique
capacity for observing and digesting. A kind of polymathy is
common to him and many of his minor contemporaries. In this
sense he was an "expert" in law. Probably he never came to know
otherwrits than those of his own law-suits. However this may have
been, the case "Shylock versus Antonio 55 admits of and invites a
juridical examination. Let us set about it with sobriety and
objectivity, as if Shakespeare had been a lawyer and we had to
examine a legal record.

First let us look at the parties.

If we knew the full name of the defendant Antonio, he would
undoubtedly turn out to be the descendant of an old patrician
family of the commercial metropolis of Venice. A little while
before he was still a rich and powerful merchant, a shipowner
and adventurer like many another in the city of Venice. Her decline
from her former height of the Queen of the Sea Is mirrored in the
person of the defendant: apparently he is more fond of spending
money than of earning it. Commercial capacity has already
degenerated into effeminacy. He needs diversion and encourage-
ment in his private life. Therefore he incurs great expenses on

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behalf of his numerous young friends, who by their charm, and
gaiety try hard to entertain him. Apart from them, he has no one
near him, neither wife nor children nor friends of his own age and
standing.

One of the young men is his pronounced favourite, Bassanio, a
former student and soldier. His own fortune he has squandered
and he has more than once laid claim to Antonio's liberality. Now
he wants to stabilise his finances once for all by a rich marriage.
At the castle of Belmont near the town lives a rich lady whom he
once visited in the suite of the Marquis of Montferrat. To her he
wishes to propose. Therefore he has asked his friend and patron,
the defendant, for a loan of 3,000 ducats. It will be profitable
even for the lender, Bassanio proclaims, because after he has
married the rich bride he will repay the previous loans. But
Antonio is just now hard up himself and has exhausted his usual
credit. Nevertheless, he does not hesitate for a moment to help
his dear friend and to call upon the services of the usurer and
jewel-dealer, Shylock.

This Jew is the plaintiff.

He is settled in Venice where there is a considerable community
of his co-religionists. In 1534, they formed a "Corporation/ 3
whose duty it was to control the internal relations of the Jews and
to represent them in the Republic. About the middle of the
century, the professors of the Mosaic faith were said to have
numbered about 1,000. Since then their number may have
considerably increased. For the religious prejudices of the
Republic against the Jews have had to yield to commercial
considerations. The Jews are now tolerated for their useful trade
connections, but, for the protection of Christian competitors,
they are confined to the trades of second-hand dealers, money-
lenders and money-changers, pawnbrokers and jewellers, agents
and commission men.

The Venetian Jews had suffered various persecutions. During
the general Jew-baiting of the fourteenth century, they were
expelled from the city, and settled in Mestre, near by. Later on,
after paying a tax, single Jews were allowed to enter the city
until, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, two islands near
the former foundries were assigned to them as a "Ghetto. 35
Shylock, however, is living in the city.

In the middle of the century, the Signoria of Venice proposed to

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expel the Jews. But the Christian merchants opposed this because
they could not do without their collaboration. They even declared
that many of themselves would be compelled to leave the town
with the Jews.

However secular and utilitarian Venice might have been,
religious tensions were never lacking. Even there the Inquisition
hunted those Jews who had been baptised in Spain and Portugal
and had now returned to their original faith. In the autumn of
1553^ ft succeeded in arranging an auto-da-fe in St. Mark's Square,
in which no Jews indeed, but heaps of Jewish literature were
burned.

In order to form an opinion of the law-suit, it is important to
emphasise the different social positions of the parties. A new
citizen and half-citizen with restricted privileges faces a patrician
and member of the ruling class. That is to say, a half-free subject
files his suit against a gentleman whose liberty is boundless. In
order to dispense justice in such a case, the court must be of
unusual impartiality.

About the plaintiff something else is known. He is a widower
and living with his only daughter. Recently she has left him and
followed a young good-for-nothing, belonging to the circle round
the defendant. Also the plaintiff 's only servant has abandoned
Mm. He grieves passionately at the loss of his daughter and of
the valuables which she and her lover have taken with them. She
has in the meantime allowed herself to be baptised and has
married the Christian. The father himself passes for a pious Jew.

He is well-known in Venice as a moneylender. Sometimes he
does business with his co-religionist Tubal, whose means he claims
to have made use of in the case on hand. Tubal and another Jew,
Chus, are Shylock's "countrymen." Hence it follows that the
three of them have immigrated to Venice. From where, we
wonder.

Between the parties there has been open enmity long before
the law-suit the particular cause being the defendant's hatred
of moneylending for interest, the practice called "usury. 5 * At
this one must indeed be astonished. It indicates a peculiar
backwardness in a Venetian merchant who himself sells his
merchandise at a profit which certainly covers the interest on his
capital and more. On this point Antonio is blatantly inconsistent
and snobbish. To him Shylock is the "usurer/* even if he does

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not demand Interest at an excessive rate. He has constantly
Insulted and injured him.

The more careless of him to put himself into the other's hands
by the bond laid before the court. This bond has now to be
examined.

Its formal validity is not to be doubted. It is authenticated by
a notary. That it is based on a mutual agreement is not contested
by the defendant. Confident in his resources, he signed the bond.
But now with all his ships lost he is to be deemed a bankrupt.
Having let the day of payment go past, he cannot escape the
consequences. Indeed., he does not want to.

Evidently the bond was agreed upon by two men excited and
out of harmony with each other. This may be gathered from the
fact ,that the bond does not coincide with their verbal
arrangement. Shylock says to Antonio:

"Go with me to a notary ', seal me there
Tour single bond; and in a merry sporty
If you repay me not on such a day,
In such a place., such sum or sums as are
Expressed in the condition^ let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh y to be cut off and taken
In what part of your body pleaseth me"

Antonio replies:

"Content V faith: I will seal to such a bond"

But in the court Portia reads the bond thus:

"And lawfully the Jew can claim
A pound of fleshy to be by him cut off
Nearest the merchanfs heart"

How did this much stronger version come in? Admittedly the
right of cutting nearest the heart is implicit in the oral version.
But perhaps Antonio would have been taken aback if Shylock
had at once mentioned the heart, the centre of life. Antonio must
have signed the bond very carelessly, regarding it entirely as
a farce.

On the other hand Shylock's phrases, "in a merry sport" and

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"this merry bond," seem to have escaped his attention. The
question is whether he could have turned them to his advantage
as well as the discrepancy between the oral and the written
agreement. Shylock must be assumed to have made his choice
"nearest the heart/ 5 between the conversation with Antonio and
their meeting at the notary's. Had the famous lawyer Bellario
appeared in person at the trial, these points would certainly
have been taken up by him. It is doubtful, however, whether
that would have been any help to the defendant. For Shylock's
insistence on his bond is not without justification. It is probably
valid as a document which establishes an obligation and a title
disassociated from the cause of the obligation as well as from the
unwritten intentions of the parties. The formaHstic nature of
Roman law favoured such bonds.
When, however, Portia expressly states:

"For the intent and purpose of the law
Has full relation to the penalty,
Which here appear eth due upon the bond"

then we are tempted either to doubt Shakespeare's knowledge
of law or to antedate the action. We have already mentioned
that such "flesh-bonds" still occurred occasionally, but they were
based on a free (and not quite serious) agreement not on the
text of a law.

Finally, it is puzzling that Antonio trustfully accepts the offer
of a Jew whom he despises and insults, to make the loan without
interest. He ought to have considered as a merchant in what way
Shylock would be interested in the bond. Without doubt it is a
psychological flaw, in the play as a whole and the law-suit, that
he completely forgets how sorely he has provoked his bond-
partner and that he, the proud gentleman, was ready to accept
favours from a man whose personality, trade and tribe he so
thoroughly scorns. (It is difficult not to suppose that Shakespeare
meant to be ironical.)

Now to the proceedings of the court!

The judges are the Duke and the Senate of Venice. This is
in so far striking, because they are the governors but not the
judges of the Republic. The judicial duties were in sixteenth-
century Venice assigned to the so-called Quarantia al Civil Nuova.

Maybe this suit belonged to a number of special cases, in which
the Senate has reserved the right of decision, for itself and the
Duke. It is possible that, owing to Antonio's social position and
Shylock's membership of the Giuderia> as well as his unusual
demand, the case is considered a political and State affair. That
the Duke is aware of the difficulty of the case is proved by the
fact that he summons the famous lawyer, Dr. Bellario, from
Padua.

In Shakespeare's time, the University of Padua enjoyed
international fame. At the close of the century it was attended by
students from no less than twenty-three countries. From England,
for instance, the Earl of Rutland, the friend of Essex and
Southampton, came to join the Paduan students. (Incidentally,
the University roll of that time contains the names of two
Scandinavian undergraduates, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern,
immortalised by Shakespeare.)

A legal expert of international repute, Ottoello Discalzio
(1536-1607), was lecturing in Padua at the time. He served the
Republic of Venice in his legal capacity and was made a Knight
of San Marco. If one keeps this in mind, one can understand that
even his deputy has authority enough to pass judgment ex
cathedra.

Now to the verdict. The sentence is passed. Firstly: the plaintiff
is to be allowed to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the
defendant; secondly: he must not cut an ounce less or more than
a pound; thirdly: he must not shed a drop of blood.

Not an ounce more there is hardly anything to say against
this, though it does not conform, as mentioned before, with the
original regulations. But not an ounce less? Never and nowhere
was there a law prohibiting the creditor from taking less than
his due according to the verdict. Perhaps the bloodthirsty
Shylock would have only scratched the skin of his old adversary
Antonio or taken from his body no more than an atom of flesh,
"in a merry sport." How should a judge compel him to cut the
whole pound?

The third point, however, makes the first and second one
illusory. It is, of course, legally incorrect. For the admission of an
action necessarily includes the admission of its natural and
inevitable consequences.

It is here that the juridical examination of the suit breaks down.

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Shakespeare may have looked away from the fable, or, rather,
through it, to his England, where literal interpretation and
formalism in legal affairs were in their heyday . . . "The courts
had not the courage and the right to interpret bonds otherwise
than literally; moreover, the will of contract expressed in such
a bond had to be absolutely acknowledged. The consideration
of free points-of-view unwritten and derived from the very
nature and supreme purpose of law, such as bona fides, morality.,
or prohibition of chicanery, was completely excluded. 53 (Th.
Niemayer, Der Rechtsspruch gegen Shylock.)

Moreover, Shakespeare puts into his law-suit, so carefully
constructed, a worm that gnaws it asunder. Can a pound of
flesh be found next to the heart of a male? The heart itself must
not be touched. Only if Antonio were unhealthily fat would he
have sufficient stuff on his ribs. Otherwise Shylock's knife would
meet with the bare, all but fleshless bones.

Shakespeare cannot be supposed to have been ignorant on or
careless about this point. At his time, anatomy was a relatively
new science. Its initiator, Vesalius, published his epoch-making
book, De humani corporis fabrica, in the year 1543. Five years later
appeared an English book popularising anatomical knowledge,
A profitable treatice of the Anatomic of man's body, by Thomas Vicary.
With a different title, it went through many editions up to the
seventeenth century. This is proof enough that anatomy and the
structure of the human body were of general interest, quite apart
from the fact that people need no anatomical instruction about
flesh "nearest the heart." Shakespeare and his audiences must
have been aware of the impossibility of cutting a pound of flesh
next to the heart of a man. But this fact does escape the "wise
judge."

Such sudden leaps out of reality fit the style of the Elizabethan
stage, which was based on illusion. The truth of the action rested
on the fantasy both of dramatist and theatregoer, on a kind of
tacit agreement not to let the rules and facts of reality interfere
with the conduct of the play. Probably they knew that the Jew
was going to cut a pound of flesh where none can be cut. But
they were agreed that the formalistic law-suit was to be parodied,
and at the same time the cruelty of a Jew, non-English as he was,
exposed and castigated. For these purposes, the impossible
passed for possible.

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By his bond being so far removed from reality, Shylock as well
as the whole proceedings are deprived of reality. Shylock be-
comes the impersonation of a myth of cruelty. This is the true
Shakespearian meaning of the law-suit and of the verdict.
Though formally the plaintiff the Jew is in the deepest sense the
defendant.

This is corroborated by the behaviour of the court after the
verdict has been given. Every conceivable injury is done to the
Jew by the Duke, the young law expert, and the friends of
Antonio, His claim is refused, his fortune confiscated and he is
forced to adopt another faith. Venetian justice fails flagrantly.

That Shakespeare makes Shylock agree to be baptised is the
worst offence of all. One wonders if he knew anything of the
Marranos who suffered themselves to be baptised, but remained
secret believers in their old faith. Or did he know that in the
Middle Ages thousands of Jews preferred death, or, as in England,
expulsion to baptism? Nothing of this part of Jewish history is
even hinted at. Shylock's "tribe 35 remains in the darkness of
medievalism. Thus it comes to pass that Shylock is promoted to
be the representative of that mysterious, medieval "tribe 35 whose
outlawry still continued in the consciousness of Shakespeare's day.

Rudolf von Ihering, one of the greatest German scholars of
the last century in historical and psychological law research,
says in his famous Fight for Right: "When he [Shylock], persecuted
by bitter scorn, cracked, broken, totters out with trembling
knees, who can help feeling that in his case the law of Venice has
been deflected, and that it is not the Jew Shylock who drawls
away, but the typical figure of the medieval Jew, that pariah of
society, who cried out in vain for justice? The intense tragedy of
his fate rests, not on the denial of his right, but on his, a medieval
Jew's, faith in his right . . . until at last like a thunderclap the
catastrophe bursts down on him, dragging him out of his delusion
and teaching him that he is nothing else but the outlawed Jew
of the Middle Ages, who is given his right only to be cheated out
of it."

Another outstanding German scholar in the history of law,
Joseph Kohler, in his book, Shakespeare vor dem Forum der Jurisprudent
(Shakespeare in the Light of Jurisprudence), challenges Ihering's
opinion. He urges the historical importance of the case of Shylock.
To him the verdict is "the victory of the purified consciousness of

99

justice over the dark night which weighed on the former state of
right; it is a victory hiding behind mock reasons and assuming the
mask of wrong motives; but it is a victory, a great and mighty
victory: a victory, not in a single law-suit, but in the history of
law as a whole; it is the sun of progress that illumines the court,
and the empire of Sarastro triumphs over the forces of
darkness. 3 '

Kohler, who was throughout his industrious life also a Shake-
speare scholar, does not recognise that the warping of what is
just and logical can never serve as a means of development and
progress in law. Therefore, astute lawyer though he was, he shuts
his eyes to the many violations of law in the proceedings, not the
least of which is the appearance in court of Portia, whom he so
praises. Not only is she not the person she pretends to be, which
means that she deceives the court and the parties, but she is also,
as the wife of Bassanio, related to a man who is interested in the
outcome of the suit. And indeed, Bassanio, though he has become
rich by marriage, is not required to repay the 3,000 ducats. If the
terms of the bond offend morals and should have been nullified
for that reason, Portia's part offends the most fundamental
principles of justice. From the legal point of view, it is she who
makes a mockery of the tribunal and trifles with right and law.

By defending Shakespeare and praising him over-enthusiastic-
ally, Kohler underestimates his sense of justice. Shakespeare
propounded a parody of a law-suit and thereby exposed to
ridicule the unevenness of the courts in general and the inequality
of the individual before the law and the courts. For this purpose,
the Jew was clearly the most appropriate figure. Let us keep
silence about the potential parallels between the proceedings
against Shylock and those against Lopez, in which the political
prosecutor, Essex, also became the judge.

We do not wish our legal comments on the proceedings to be
taken as a contribution to the interpretation of Shakespeare's
glorious play; but merely as arguments concerning the human
role he has allocated to the Jew. In this respect The Merchant is an
outstanding document of Jewish history.

The great German-Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, once attended
a performance of the play in London and overheard an excited
English lady say after the fourth act (at that time the last one,
because the fifth used to be cut out) : "This poor man is wronged."

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We think she was right. But let us now examine what kind of
human being Shakespeare's Jew was.

The Character

The Jew was a foreigner in sixteenth-century England and in
its literature. His infrequency in English life corresponds with his
infrequency in literature and on the stage. Apart from the cases
already mentioned, he appears as a minor character in several
plays. Sometimes Italy, as in the anonymous play, Macchiavellus^
handed down in Latin, sometimes Turkey, as in Robert Greene's
Selimus, were the scenes of his appearance. Selimus was written
either at the same time as The Merchant or soon after; Macchiavellus
several years later. At the beginning of the seventeenth century,
some more Jewish characters are found in English plays, but they
are either cut after the pattern of Shylock or they remain quite
colourless. They are adventurous, indecent or repulsive beings
without becoming live, contemporary portraits. It is not worth
while to compare them with Shylock.

The unique achievement of the Shakespearian character is
that memories and conceptions from past centuries find expression
in and are lit up by a starkly realistic figure. In a romantic
play Shylock alone remains untouched by the romanticism of
love, of Venice, of the gay life. He is just the foreigner, he is just
the Jew. To make him this, Shakespeare worked with a degree of
precision which seems only possible in a genius of his rank. In
scene after scene, one can trace his hammer strokes on the statue.

His very manner of introducing Shylock into the play is
monumental: "Three thousand ducats; well" two sibilants
hissing two figures like leitmotivs. Then: "For three months;
well" ; and: "Antonio shall become bound; well." And finally
summarising: "Three thousand ducats, for three months, and
Antonio bound." With these rags of sentences, Shylock is only
an echo of Bassanio, a mechanism making notes a business
machine.

At the first possible moment, he criticises the quality of the
guarantor: "His means are in supposition . . . ships are but
boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, land-
thieves and water-thieves . . . and there is the peril of waters,

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winds and rocks." Thus he himself underlines the difference
between his unromantic commercial routine and the business of
a merchant-adventurer. How offensive this de-romanticising of
navigation must have been to English people, just then ex-
periencing the first thrill of their mastery of the seas! There is no
need for comment: the Christian merchant risks every thing, the
Jew nothing at all!

The refusal to dine -with Bassanio and his friends makes the
gulf still deeper and, as it were, more intimate: ". . . I will buy
with you, sell with you, and so following, but I will not eat with
you, drink \vith you, nor pray with you." In this way any
association between the Jew and the Christians other than
commercial is repudiated.

Since ancient times, the Jewish regulations about food have
been a principal cause of distrust and contempt. The very
plausible argument was: The man who refuses to eat with me
cannot be my friend. The early Christian world drew hostile
conclusions from this point. Church dignitaries forbade Christians
to eat at Jewish tables. The first documentary reference to Jews
in England deals v/ith such a prohibition issued by Archbishop
Egbright of York in the year 740. Moreover, pork being a symbol
of satisfaction and even of luxury for the people of Northern Europe,
the Jewish aversion to it contributed particularly to the mutual
estrangement. Shylock words it strikingly enough: "Yes, to smell
pork; to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite
conjured the devil into."

With such swift realism the Jew is revealed before Antonio
enters. As soon as he does, the word is at once uttered: "I hate
him, for he is a Christian." To Shylock's being foreign, different
and odd there are now added his enmity and hatred a climax.

This first scene eliminates the Jew from Christian that is,
human society as though he belonged to another planet. He is
brought back to London from his real exile, but only to be sent
into a new symbolic one.

What follows is almost entirely comment or consequence or
climax or exaggeration. Exaggeration, above all, is what Jessica
inflicts on her father, and how he reacts to it. The mutual lack of
love is certainly the most un-Jewish feature of their characters.
If Shakespeare had known intimately only one Jewish family, he
could not have been unaware of the intensity of the emotional

1 02

bond between Jewish parents and children, especially when,
as In this case, the mother is dead. Incidentally, an important
piece of evidence not to be overlooked, proving the ignorance of
English writers of this time about the Jews, is that all the Jewish
characters in English literature mentioned are without wives or
families or family life. It is also evidence that Jews were looked
upon as restless ghosts rather than human beings with a settled
way of life.

Exaggeration is exemplified best of all by the emphasis of the
word "revenge. 35 Shylock announces it as his programme and
expresses it in several variations. "I will plague him. I will torture
him ... I will have the heart of him. 33 Having spoken thus, he
addresses his friend: "Go on, Tubal, and meet me at our syna-
gogue; go, good Tubal; at our synagogue, Tubal. 53 By the repeated
mention of the synagogue at this point, the Jewish community
and faith are drawn into association with Shylock's evil intentions.
Carried away by his vindictiveness and by his thirst for the blood
of a Christian, Shylock directs his thoughts to the Jewish temple.
What is he going to do there? To pray, of course, with Tubal, his
partner. To whom? To the Jewish God, of course, to the "God of
Vengeance. 33 And what will they pray for? For His assistance in
the work of revenge, of course. Thus Judaism, if only
perfunctorily, is implicated in Shylock 3 s abominable business
just as later on Judaism will stand beside Shylock in the court.

It is there that he rises to the highest he is capable of. The
successive stages are clear enough.

First: Shylock, the usurer, foregoing interest for the sake of his
hope of revenge, of triumph over levity and haughtiness, thus
making himself the master of that master of money, Antonio he,
the slave of money.

Second: refusing not only the payment of the loan, but even
the multiple of it thus rejecting the greatest business chance of
his life beyond his dreams the opportunity of fantastic profits as
a usurer. He would get his triumph even if he only punished
Antonio, the opponent of usury, by exacting gigantic interest
from him. But he does not want it. For

Third: he wants Antonio's blood and life. He wants to turn the
law of the Christians against this single Christian. This was, both
from the Christian and Jewish points of view at that time ... a
venture little short of revolutionary.

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But is Shylock elated? With his knife drawn, at least in theory,
he stands in the court ready to do his bloody work on the enemy
supposedly snared by the bond. He does not listen to admonitions
and objections. He is terribly changed. He is no longer a usurer;
he is nothing else but hatred, revenge, thirst for blood. The petty
calculator has become a fierce animal, a cruel beast. Does an
animal care for money, profit or mercy? It cares only for blood.
Out of the darkness of sub-human life steps the demoniac, the
unchained cruelty beyond thought and reason. Shylock is no
longer permitted to be a usurer; destiny itself practises usury on
the hatred and revengefulness that have accumulated within
him. Since yesterday or the day before? Since Antonio insulted or
spat at Shylock or since Lorenzo carried away his daughter and
his jewels? No from time immemorial!

Let us for a moment look back, or rather down, on Barrabas,
Marlowe's Jew. His heart and mouth overflow with horrible
crimes which he has done or is about to do. He is intended to be
a criminal of the deepest dye. But how ineffective is the
cataloguing of all his crimes compared with the psychological
sublimation of Shylock's situation! There we see an extensive
massacre, here "only" the staking of a pound of flesh; there a
habitual criminal, here a man who is not known to have
committed any crime before. But his blood-curdling demand and
his longing to execute it, within the law and on behalf of law,
develop into the very essence of the inhuman, of the wolfish, of
the devilish. Thus the myth of the Jew, rising from the depths of
time, becomes a character and a personality. The medieval myth
receives a name, a face, a shape: Shylock!

But his choice was wrong. The edge of the law turns against
himself. He has trespassed beyond the boundaries of his existence
and is lost. This is the justice of the poet, very different from that
of the law.

"After the loss of his daughter, his fortune and his faith, nothing
of the Jew is left. He no longer exists. He can, and even must,
become a Christian." A strange punishment for a Jew hard for
him who has been so thoroughly a Jew. But is it not stranger and
harder for Christendom to receive a Shylock into its bosom? Here
again the play has a touch of parody, Shylock is bad, says the
poet with a shrug of his shoulders, only so long as he is a Jew. As
a Christian, he participates in the mercy proclaimed by Portia.

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He will no longer be a usurer, no longer hate and be revengeful.
For the Jew is always bad, the Christian always good. Mythical
is the Judaism from which Shylock has emerged,, mythical, too,
the Christianity into which he is discharged. Reality has nothing
to do with either of them.

Reality comes to its own in the person and fate of Jessica. Is
she not the daughter of this father, of this faith and of these people?
But she shows no signs of it. She might be a sister of Nerissa or an
acquaintance of Portia. There is no purgatory between her and
the heaven of Christianity. All defects of her youth and sex are
glossed over, like those of the young Venetian idlers and gallants,
Is it not as if Shakespeare, with a quick gesture, flings open the
gate of the Ghetto and lo! the barriers between Christians and
Jews are dissolved into nothingness? All the gentleness of the
poet is turned towards the Jewish daughter, all his severity against
the Jewish father.

Round Shylock there is nothing but a bare human desert,
while Antonio is surrounded by friendship and love. A more
complete image of "outsiderdom" and loneliness is unimaginable.
Shylock has no one of his kind beside him. The only other Jew,
Tubal, is almost colourless. (One little spot of colour he has: a
touch of malicious joy at Shylock's misfortune over the jewels
stolen by his daughter and her lover.) Shylock is alone. So is
Marlowe's Jew. But he is equipped with so many antecedents, so
much biography and comment given by himself, that he becomes
.a definite individual limited to a definite time, place and society.
With special satisfaction, he talks about his tribe, his people, his
faith. Shylock, on the contrary, only talks in passing of his faith
and oaly once mentions his wife. He has no private life. He is, as
it were, naked or rather wrapped in the mystery of his kind a
Jew and nothing else at all.

There are several hints in the play that Shakespeare was aware
of a considerable Jewish community existing in Venice. The more
striking is it that he does not extract from it a few smaller and
different Shylocks. His fantasy would have made up for his lack
of experience as with Shylock himself. Instead, he emphasises
with every means at his disposal the uniqueness of this one Jew.
It is the same in the Venice of Othello, where he introduces only
the one Moor.

Alone, then, Shylock faces the court. There is no realism in

105

this. No Tubal, no Chus is with, him, and no one else from the
Ghetto appears, though a co-religionist has summoned to court
the noble Antonio and with such a challenging demand. Antonio
is surrounded by a swarm of glib friends. Did Shakespeare
purposely refrain from burdening the Jewish community with
such an abominable affair? Yet has he not weighted the scales
unfairly against the Jew? In the dramatic sense, certainly not.
Through this very aloneness and singleness, Shylock becomes a
symbol carved in stone, a mixture of dark elements, a myth
incarnate in a man.

The Other Shylock

About the nature of Shylock, the other persons in the play
seem to be completely agreed. Not one of them has a good word
for the Jew, not even his daughter. There is no breath of under-
standing, no sign of the slightest desire to explain his behaviour
by his fate or by the injuries committed against him by Antonio.
The feelings of the Christians are separated from the particular
circumstances of the Jew as by a wall. He is, according to Lancelot
and Salanio, the devil. Salanio calls Tubal another devil and
"a third cannot be matched until the devil himself turns Jew."
Jew and devil inseparable conceptions, the vox populi from
medieval times.

Apart from this, the qualities attributed to Shylock are ex-
clusively of the worst kind. There is a unanimity of contempt and
rejection. All the more significant is it that two characters of the
play do not pronounce a word against the Jew, however often
they have the opportunity of doing so: the Duke and Portia.
Neither of them defends the Jew, but neither do they insult or
damn him. In Portia's case Shakespeare is concerned to raise her
character above prejudices. When the Prince of Morocco begs
of her:

"Mislike me not for my complexion^
The shadowed livery of the burnish* d sun . . ."

she answers:

u

Tour self) renowned prince, then stood as fair
As any comer I have looked on yet
For my affection"

1 06

Thus, If only out of courtesy, she declares herself ready to marry
a Moor the predecessor of Desdemona. Tolerance rules at the
castle of Belmont.

But in Venice and in Christian society, Shylock is bound to be
on the defensive, continuously under the necessity of saving his
skin. How does he accomplish it?

To grasp the full meaning of the character, we must again
remind ourselves that Shylock was expected to be a comic
character, that, as a man from below and from outside, he was
not entitled to become a tragic hero. Yet it is precisely at this
point that Shakespeare elevated him miraculously.

He bears the fate and features of his tribe with dignity. He does
not complain and whine, he does not give himself up to the petty
and the paltry. A money-Jew? He refuses the sums offered to him
lavishly. Currish, as he is called? He does not show himself
cringing and cowardly, but fierce and challenging. He raises the
eternally sacred question: the question of Law. In court no single
word or gesture of submissiveness escapes him. He challenges the
Republic of Venice herself as the protector of Law:

"If you deny it, let the danger light
Upon your charter and your city's freedom"

Is a Jew permitted to speak thus? He is by Shakespeare. He
is allowed to enter the sphere where equal rights for all prevail
and to claim them for himself. Here, if disguised (for a play is a
play), is a first act of emancipation: the promotion of a creature
to the rank of citizen.

One must consider into what a mesh of ridiculousness and
vulgarity Shakespeare might have hunted his Shylock as he did
Falstaff and Bottom. He could have made him dance and crawl,
lament and pray, whine and weep. It would have been better
(or worse) than caviar for his audiences. But Shylock loses his
dignity only once: when he learns that his daughter has left and
robbed him. It is significant that Shakespeare refrained from
bringing this scene on to the stage. He has it reported by Salanio
and Salarino. And, no less significantly, Shylock complains of
the loss of his daughter and valuables only in the company of his
friend Tubal. He does not parade his pain before the Venetians.

To them he addresses arguments not merely on his own

107

behalf, but on behalf of his people. They are based on rights and
claims which need no bond.

They start with a sentence which, by its simplicity, touches the
high- water mark of pathos: "For sufferance is the badge of all our
tribe."

A little later he goes to the heart of the matter:

" 'Shylock, we would have money 1 : you say so;
Tou, that did void jour rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: money is your suit
What should I say to you? Should I not say,
* 'Has a dog money? Is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?* Or
Shall I bend low., and in a bondman's key
With bated breath and whispering humbleness
Say this:

'Fair Sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
Tou spurn' d me such a day; another time
You called me dog; and for these courtesies
I will lend you thus much money* "

This is no longer pathos or complaint like the sentence about
sufferance; it is a rebellious rebuff for Antonio. It is the voice of
a creature that knows himself to be not low, but humiliated, a
proud creature. Doubtless there are other money-lenders in
Venice, any one of whom Antonio could approach. But Shylock
is no longer concerned with business, but with the defence of his
human rights an extraordinary usurer indeed. Here Shake-
speare gives him his first and legitimate triumph over his
adversary. It is won by the most biting wit and sarcasm. By its
popular logic, it must certainly have swung the play-goers over
to the side of the Jew. Shakespeare backs the "lower" against the
"higher." He almost ridicules the latter a rare occurrence with
Shakespeare.

The next time that Shylock's attitude is challenged by Salanio
and Salarino in the third act he scarcely mentions his dispute
with Antonio but raises the question of the Jewish fate in general.
He remembers the injuries and losses inflicted on him by Antonio
and continues:

1 08

". . , and what is his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,
passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, heated by the same means, warmed
and cooled by the winter and summer as a Christian is? If you
prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?"

With these words Shakespeare makes a Venetian usurer
proclaim something like the equality and the equal rights of man
not bombastically or sententiously or piously, but realistically
so that it can be understood by every < 'groundling" in the pit.
The usurer turns teacher and preacher understood by the people.
A Jew speaks English common sense. Shakespeare is identifying
himself with his character no other explanation is possible.

The first question had been: am I a man or an animal? Now
there is another one: are we Jews not men like the Christians?
And Shylock continues:

"If we are like you in the rest we will resemble you in that"
[i.e. in revenge], "If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his
humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should
his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The
villany you teach me, I will execute; and it shall go hard but
I will better the instructions."

Shylock proclaims: hatred for hatred, revenge for revenge. It
is, though wrong, a proud confession from man to man. Between
the lines he says: there is a war on between you and us and it is
you who have started it. At this point he is a true product of his
time, a Renaissance figure.

Only such a Shylock can, in court, use that horrible metaphor:

"What) if my house be troubled with a rat,
And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats
To have it barfd?"

And only such a Shylock can say proudly: ". . .by my soul I

swear there is no power in the tongue of man to alter me."

Finally he draws on the rights of man for another argument:

109

"Tou have among you many a purchased slave >
Which like your asses, and your dogs and mules
You use in abject and in slavish parts ,
Because you bought them; shall I say toyou^
Let them be free ^ marry them to your heirs?
Why sweat they under burthens? Let their beds
Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates
Be seasoned with such viands? You will answer:
'The slaves are ours* ; so do I answer you:
The pound of flesh which I demand of him
Is dearly bought; 'tis mine and I will have it"

Rebelling against the handling of the slaves like animals, he
assails one of the most important economic institutions in the
Christian medieval world still persisting in the sixteenth century.
He has discovered his peers by virtue of a common destiny and
makes use of the greater and more widespread injustice and
mercilessness of the Christian world to defend the lawfulness of
his bond. By a dialectical route he arrives at a humanistic
programme.

It is an outburst against inhumanity and injustice which one
cannot but suppose to be the poet's own opinion. And the
conclusion is that Shakespeare must have realised that something
was wrong with the treatment of the Jews. And within, and even
in spite of, his dramatic plot, he took sides unequivocally with
the oppressed and injured again a unique feature in the work
of this poet of rulers and noblemen.

Yet, quite realistically, the other side remains untouched by
and unresponsive to Shylock's appeals on his own and the Jews'
behalf. The first time, when Shylock addresses Antonio on the
difference between man and the animals, the latter turns a deaf
ear to his argument and threatens "to spit on thee again, to spurn
thee too. 53 Prejudice gives no answer to reason!

The second time, when Salanio and Salarino are addressed,
neither of these young men, otherwise so loquacious, gives any
reply to the Jew. When he has finished, Shakespeare has them
called off the stage, and the dialogue stops.

Even in court the attack against slavery remains uncontra-
dicted and uncensured. The Duke passes on to another subject,
and so turns Shylock's argument into a soliloquy.

no

When we consider Shakespeare's superb craftsmanship In
dialogue, this is striking enough. Does it mean that the author
wants to let Shylock go uncontradicted because the argument*
are his own? Or Is it done to emphasise that the apologetic has
been pronounced In vain? Or may It not conceivably point to
the fact that those passages were not spoken at all on the Eliza-
bethan stage and are, therefore, only loosely inserted in the
dialogue?

This last question, intricate In Its causes and consequences,
lies outside the scope of this book, but it leads to another one:
what was there in the character of Shylock that pleased or
irritated the Elizabethan audiences such as they actually were?
That he was "wolfish, bloody, rapacious and hungry/* that he
was the incarnation of the Devil, that his daughter and valuables
were carried off, that by legal tricks he was cheated out of his
bond? No doubt the case of Lopez, whether hinted at by Shake-
speare or not, added to the effect, for many a groundling of the
pit, now staring and bawling at this ghostly Jew on the stage,
might have been present at Tyburn when the Jewish doctor was
cruelly executed. Many a one in the audience might have shouted
with the others: "He Is a Jew. He is a Jew," The smell of blood
and bestiality clung to the Jew on the stage as well. But Shylock
was not going to be hanged (as Lopez had been) but turned
into a Christian. That indicates a tiny step forward for the
onlookers on both occasions.

In the magnificent play as we have It to-day, the character of
Shylock is subject to a tension stretching over time and space.
For what Shakespeare has achieved is to put into a "modern"
play a medieval figure on the one hand, and on the other to put
into his mouth pronouncements and arguments of a future and
more progressive time and spirit. It is this very ambiguity,
contrasted, incidentally, with the striking anachronism of a
Venetian merchant hating moneylending for interest, that makes
the character most attractive. To-day one would be tempted to
call this subtle "trick" Shavian if it were not something more
namely, Shakespearian. Shylock perplexes by his medieval
origin and his progressive purpose a master stroke at a time
when past and future are jostling each other.

Shylock's expulsion from the court and from the rest of the
play is dramatically legitimate. The mischief-maker does not

in

fit In with the world of the last act. But traces of him still persist.
In the magic moonlight at Belmont, love shines through music
And poetry. Heaven hovers over three pairs of lovers. Jessica,
in the meantime de-Judaised, and Lorenzo, completely
romanticised, lead this pageant of highest harmony by a dialogue
as bright and rhythmical as a song:

" The moon shines bright: in such a night as this
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise: in such a night . . ."

But the memory of the banished creature returns:

". . . in such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew
And with an unthrift lover did run from Venice
As far as Belmont"

Shylock has lost his name and is no longer the father of
Lorenzo's wife. In the meantime he has become distinctly poor,
having been robbed, first, by Lorenzo himself and then by the
court. Notwithstanding, he remains the rich Jew, though Lorenzo
has become his unworthy heir. "The moon shines bright 59 and
dissolves the contradiction into a gentle mood.

Once more, before the arrival of Portia, a shadow falls from
Shylock into the light of this happy night. When music sounds
as if the Moon herself were melody, Jessica sighs: "I am never
merry when I hear sweet music." Does it not sound like an echo
of her origin and of a difference of mind of which, until now, she
has given no sign at all? No doubt the shadow of her father rises
between her and the music and it cannot be anyone else but he
that Lorenzo means and bans when he utters those immortal
lines about "the man that has no music in himself." This passage
is Shylock's "obituary. 55 It is immaterial whether Shakespeare
intended to allude to him or not. The psychological situation
itself brings forth the memory of the Jew as a figure of the dark
night, of un-romanticism, of the un-musical silence. Only the
bright, the gay, the young, the lovers have music in themselves
as figures of the world of Venice to which Shylock has never
belonged.

112

Thus, by means of tunes and hints,, the most dramatic and only
tragic character of the play is escorted into oblivion. Now he no
longer exists. "In such a night as this/ 5 Shylock, the Jew 3 is too
nocturnal. The moonlight blots him out one might add: with
music.

Only his legacy remains, as if he were truly dead. While the
night fades away it is bequeathed:

" There do I give to you and Jessica
From the rich Jew a special deed of gift>
After his death> of all he is possessed of."

A few more words and the play ends. Shylock his name and
nature, his claims and arguments, his faith and fortune is
"liquidated" and disposed of. The world into which he has
carried his demands and proclaimed his human right is again
purged of him. The romanticism of life, which he had dared to
disturb, is re-established.

Venice and Belmont, the spirit of the sixteenth century and of
youth, music and poetry, love and light-heartedness are the
surviving victors. The times are no longer out of joint. They have
deprived the Jew of his name and being.

Never before or since has the Jewish fate been portrayed so
clearly and convincingly. Shylock bears it away with him into
the centuries to come into our own day!

SIXTH CHAPTER

SHYLOCK'S MEDIEVAL ELEMENTS, OR
REALITY VERSUS MYTH

O BSERVATIONOFAND speculation about life and daily ex-
perience are not the begetters of the character of Shylock. It
is as it were embedded in two "tales" taken from literature
already current the tale of the pound of flesh and that of the
three caskets. There was no room for what is called realism. An
appeal, or rather a command, was made to the dramatist and

"3

poet to create a subtle fairy-tale character to fit the spirit of those
two tales.

The third tale, or, rather, a conglomeration of tales, that was
at hand in Elizabethan times, and especially after the case of
Dr. Roger Lopez, was what we have to call the medieval "Myth
of the Jew. 35 It was much more real (more realistic even) than
any possible experience of contemporary and local Jews which
Shakespeare could have dramatised. It was from this myth
that he snatched his Shylock. And it was a masterstroke of
"Surrealism" that made him painfully true to that myth so
true indeed that, without the creation of Shylock, the medieval
prejudices against Jewry would probably to-day be less alive
than, alas! they are. Which, of course, is no criticism of Shake-
speare, but rather a tribute to the vitality of the character he
triumphantly created.

In these times, when medieval barbarism is abominably
renewed, and even surpassed, we have good reason to investigate
and probe the contents of that underlying myth. There will,
moreover, be opportunities for seeing the character of Shylock
in a more intimate light and for showing with what mastery
Shakespeare played on the medieval conceptions of his
audience.

Judas and Ahasver, the Prototypes

In the Talmud are recorded hundreds of legends about the
holy and unholy figures of the Torah (the Old Testament)
products of oral tradition which ran parallel with the written lore
and followed it. The Agadah (to use the collective term for the
legendary elements in the Talmud) has caught the Jewish people
in a transport of poetic passion: in it their wisdom and their pious
fantasy are vividly expressed. All that the Scriptures contain of
holiness or unholiness reappears in these legends with heightened
effect.

In the Dark Ages and in medieval times much the same
happened to the Gospel figures as they emerged from the depths
of the Christianised mind or descended from the height of
ecclesiastical glorification. As in the Jewish antecedent and model,
the sacred stories of Christian tradition awoke to new life and

114

took on new aspects. In the resulting legends, whatever was
adored or loathed was raised to new brightness and saintliness or
thrust dow& into new darkness and gloom.

It was this last that happened to the betrayer of Jesus, his
disciple Judas. He became a favourite subject of popular myth.
The Gospels had left abundant space for them. They tell us
nothing either of his origin or of how Jesus came to choose him
or, apart from the thirty pieces of silver, of the motives of Ms
treachery. He is, in fact, an unconvincing figure, totally un-
satisfying to the hungry imagination of the populace.

Legend made up for this. Judas was endowed with all the evils
of this world and the next. He was expelled the word
"banished" is too dignified into the Devil's sphere, and often
enough identified with the Devil. Dante's vision of Judas in Hell
is the consummation of the medieval legends about him. He
inhabits the lowest circle of Hell, and three-faced Lucifer grips
him fast in a fire-red mouth.

All nations have their Judas legends. Their sources extend
from Loki, the traitor among the Germanic gods, to (Edipus,
the damned of the Greek world. Currents from Christian, Jewish
and pagan sources meet in an image inflated by popular hatred
and scorn. Judas had become the criminal par excellence.

His very name suggests the Jews. Consequently, the legends
about him were turned against them. Judas, the disciple of Jesus,
became Judas, the Jew! He stood for Judaism. In pictures and
on the stage of the Miracle plays he had red hair and a red beard.
In the processions following the pious plays, he was carried on a
cart that was used for criminals; sometimes a Judas effigy was
hanged on the gallows or drowned or burnt. But always it was
the representative of Judaism to whom these things were done.
This was specially evident on the stage, for the plays exploited
the bargain of the thirty pieces of silver in all kinds of topical ways
for example, they made Judas assay each of the thirty coins,
as the medieval moneylenders were in the habit of doing, thus
identifying him visibly with the contemporary Jews.

In English dramatic literature there are a number of Judas
characters. One play about Judas, written in the early sixteenth
century, is printed as an appendix to the famous Towneley
Mysteries (edition of the Surtee Society, London, 1836). It will
be remembered that Lopez, at his trial, was compared with Judas;

115

a reference to Mm as "that vile traitor 55 occurs in the title of an
English Judas poem. Similarly, the legends about Judas show
through the character of Shylock. Whether he betrays his
Christian adversary or not, the Jew is the Judas. For his perfor-
mance red hair and a red beard were customary from the time
of Richard Burbadge, the first Shylock actor, until, in 1814,
Kean created a new tradition. The myth of Judas was nourishing,
and still nourishes, the character of Shylock.

It is the same with the Wandering Jew. This figure of English
origin, as we have shown, was also re-discovered in the sixteenth
century. This time in Germany. Now he was called Ahasver
probably a Spanish name wrongly associated with that of the
Biblical King Ahasuerus. He was said to have been seen
and heard in a church at Hamburg. Every time the name of
Jesus was uttered he sighed. He claimed to be the cobbler who
had prevented Jesus, on his way to Golgatha, from resting in
front of his workshop and had been condemned to eternal
restlessness. At the beginning of the seventeenth century he was
the subject of a popular German pamphlet.

It was not by chance that the Wandering Jew appeared at the
great German trading port and emporium of Hamburg, where
ships often landed Marrano fugitives from Spain as reminders of
the Jewish destiny. But the circumstances of the Jews in the
countries of Northern Europe, during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, were in themselves enough to suggest a legendary
Jewish wanderer. For at that time there were many expulsions of
the Jews. They gave rebirth to the myth. Like Ahasver, the Jews
were sighing and groaning wanderers.

In Italy and Spain the figure of the wandering Jew, more
Christianised than the Nordic Ahasver, emerged in similar
circumstances as early as the fourteenth century, during the
persecutions which followed the Great Plague. Sometimes it was
confused with Christian saints and ecclesiastical legends. In Italy
it was already known in Dante's time under the name of Giovanni
Buttadeo.

In England, the country without Jews, the medieval figure had
survived. In the imagination of the English, it was a kind of
native ghost composed of everything dark and strange in the
Jewish fate and character. The figure was present wherever the
Jews were thought or spoken of and was bound to influence any

116

attempt to create a Jew or anything Jewish. Inevitably it affected
Shakespeare's portrait of Shylock.

One may call Shylock the brother or successor of the
Wandering Jew. In the latter a Biblical myth became part of
the medieval consciousness: in the former the medieval image
passed over into a modern conception. They belong to each other
because they are the only two Jewish characters of significance
in European literature. The curse which drove the one to eternal
wandering had, in fact, driven the other into the Ghetto. They
are burdened with a sense of "foreignness" and, therefore,
eternally suspect. The world which had produced them and now
looked at them knew nothing of nuances. Anything that is not
white must be black. Shylock and the Wandering Jew are black.
Not even a great poet can alter that.

Neither the cobbler already mentioned nor a doorkeeper also
alleged to have done Jesus an injury have any foundation in the
Gospels. They are products of pious fantasy centred in the story
of the Passion. The legend gives no hint as to whether the
doorkeeper Cartaphilus was a Roman or a Jew. Historical
probability would make him a Roman.

That he was assumed to be a Jew has a reason, and it leads us
to the very source and origin of the figure. For the Wandering
Jew has a genuinely Jewish ancestor: the prophet Elijah himself!
In Jewish legends it is he who is always wandering, always coming
back, appearing in every conceivable situation and in every
Conceivable place. In this guise he has even entered the Gospels.
In the first chapter of John the priests and Levites ask the Baptist:
"What then? Art thou Elias?" And he says: "I am not." Or in
Matt. xvii. 10-12: "And His disciples asked Him saying, Why
then say the scribes that Elias must first come. And Jesus answered
and said unto them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all
things, But I say unto you, That Elias is come already . . . J> And
so in other passages of the Gospels. In fact, the biography of
Jesus resembles that of Elijah in several important aspects.

In the Old Testament little is said about Elijah's origin beyond
that he is "Elijah the Tishbite." But the Agadah seized upon him
and made up for his lack of biography just as the Christian legends
of medieval times did in the case of Judas. In it Elijah returns to
earth and passes judgment on the pure and the impure. He sits
among the master rabbis and their disciples, he punishes

117

hypocrites, rewards the just and the poor and counsels those who
have lost their way. Usually he Is an old wise man. But at times
the youthful and adventurous assert themselves through him. Now
he is an Arab, now a Roman State official, now a simple pilgrim
or a daring knight. Miracle after miracle is connected with his
name and mission. He becomes the mediator between heaven
and earth. He knows all the secrets of the world beyond. Elia-nabI
that Is, Elijah the Prophet wanders through the times and
places of this world as a witness of the other.

The Kabbala the collection of books of Jewish mysticism
claims him as Its author and raises him to a place among the
angels. It calls him the "Angel of the Covenant." Hence the
Jewish belief that he is present at each circumcision, the receiving
into the Covenant of a Jewish boy. A chair is reserved for him on
such occasions, just as a glass of wine is poured out for him on the
night of Passover. In short, Elijah became the Jewish Messiah,
still to come, or at least his forerunner.

From Jewish mythology Elijah entered the Arabian legends.
In them he is called Khidr, the eternally green and fresh. He
lives in Paradise, feeding on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
and drinking from the Eternal Spring. He has wandered over the
desert, preceding the Jews and acting as their guide. As Alchidr,
he serves in the army of Alexander the Great, finds the Spring of
Life and from It drinks immortality.

The Christian legend took the character of the Eternal
Wanderer and Witness of God from the Agadah and enriched it
with new features. It even mentions Elijah's parents and grand-
parents, attributes eternal life to him and says that he will
appear at the last day and be crucified. Because Elijah had
delivered his "Sermon on the Mount" on Mount Carmel, the
Carmelite monks looked upon him as the founder and the patron
of their order. They hung pictures of him in their chapels and
told of miracles done by him or by the pictures. In this way they
were reviving a cult of the early Christians, who had also built
churches in his honour and called them by his name.

The order of the Carmelites was founded in the middle of the
twelfth century. The revival of the Elijah cult dates from that
time. A century later the figure of the Wandering Jew appeared
in Europe. There can be little doubt that these facts are
interdependent.

118

The transformation of the Jewish conception of a holy wanderer
with Messianic features into a Jewish figure burdened with the
curse of the Christian Messiah is a characteristic fact of medieval
mythology. Bright becomes dark, blessing turns into curse, mercy
degenerates into outlawry and from a heavenly and angelic
figure is created a nightmare. This perverse development of the
Elijah myth is dictated by the sight of the Jews wandering over
the earth without peace or blessing. But no pity or compassion
accrues to them from this experience. On the contrary, their
ancient curse as the persecutors and even the murderers of the
Messiah is revived. What a paradox! The Jewish predecessor of
the Christian Messiah is distorted by mythology into the man who
was cursed by him.

The English version of the Wandering Jew gives the legend a
merciful ending. He is converted to Christianity and takes the
name of Joseph, the father of Jesus. He "shuffles off 55 Judaism,
and with it the ban and the curse. When we remember that
Shylock was "condemned" to become a Christian,, the medieval
and symbolic nature of this conversion becomes evident. The
"unfortunate" Jew turns into a "fortunate 53 Christian. Since the
medieval and post-medieval Jews did not accept the way of
escape, the force of mythical judgment turned against them. A
murderous "boycott" thrust them out of the world of law and
order. This is the symbolically true meaning of Shylock's ex-
pulsion from Shakespeare's play.

He is son and brother of the legendary Wandering Jew. And
each is a "medievalised 55 Jewish character.

Of Usury

The colossal figures of the Wandering Jew and of Judas
overshadow the man Shylock, but he takes his contemporary
shape from his profession. The medieval and post-medieval Jew
is the usurer.

It has always been a matter for controversy whether the Jews
were made usurers by their medieval environment and by
compulsion from outside, or whether usury was their "natural* 3
profession and has ever since been a Jewish vice. Up to the
beginning of the twelfth century the Jews of the European

1 19

continent did not practise moneylendlng or pawnbroking
exclusively. Until then they had been merchants, artisans and,
especially in the Mediterranean countries, peasants as well. They
were bound to become a nation of merchants, because they
entered the Dark Ages as the representatives of the commercial
tradition of ancient times, which would otherwise have been lost
during the period of the Migration of Nations. As such they
filled a gap in feudal Europe, inhabited as it was by peasants and
knights permanently settled or mobile only for feuds and wars.

{The Crusades mark the moment from which the Jews turned
more and more to the moneylending business, j for the reasons
already mentioned. The Wandering Jew became identified with
the moneylender, the more so since the most movable merchan-
dise, money, almost presupposed a vagrant owner at a time when
it was very rare and the system of payment in kind still survived.
The Children of Israel were undoubtedly once shepherds and
peasants; otherwise the agrarian legislation of the Pentateuch
could not have come into existence. But it is no less sure that the
Jews became townspeople, first during their exile in Babylon and
later through their emigrations from their mother-country, too
narrow and too threatened as it was, and finally by their
dispersion. The course of history from the time of Alexander the
Great made them colonists in the many newly-founded cities of
the Hellenistic world. In the records of the travels of St. Paul, they
appear as traders and artisans in the Eastern towns. Outside
Palestine they were no longer country people. Thus they entered
Europe and the Dark Ages as inhabitants of the towns and in the
appropriate callings, the more so since the Christian-Roman laws
had made the holding of landed property either difficult or even
impossible for them.

The step from trading in merchandise to trading in money was
forced upon them by the restrictions of medieval times. The Jew,
wronged and outlawed, stretched out his hands for the only
power within his reach, the power of money. 'Peasants who settle
near a coast turn sailors through the fascination and the opportu-
nities of the sea. In the same way, the Jews, uprooted from other
trades by the flood of religious prejudices, turned moneylenders.
Just as the coast-dwelling peasants perforce develop their gifts
for navigation, so did the Jews develop theirs for the handling of
money. Had the Middle Ages forced them into agriculture and

120

manual labour, they would certainly have become peasants
again,, as their ancestors had been for a millennium.

The more the Jews practised usury the more were they them-
selves taxed or robbed. And the more this happened, the worse
became the usury they practised. Anyone who shrinks from
regarding the Christians of the Middle Ages as habitual
persecutors of unprotected people should hesitate to denounce the
Jews of those times as born usurers. They were kept prisoners in
this repulsive trade as in a cage. A golden cage, maybe, but
destined to be smashed again and again together with the
prisoners!

The whole bitterness of this fate becomes evident if one recalls
its religious foundation. Canon law forbade in general the taking
of interest by Christians. Pope Leo the Great (444-61) prohibited
moneylending for interest to members of the clergy and
condemned it when practised by laymen. The profit from it was
deemed to be ignominious. In his De Civitate Dei (xx. 4) Augustine
argues against it: money exists for buying it does not deteriorate
by being used and time is common property for which no
individual has the right to make a charge.

Under the Emperor Charlemagne the prohibition was already
binding on laymen. At a Synod at Aachen in the year 789 it was
expressly enjoined with reference to the decree of Pope Leo.
From then onwards it never ceased to trouble ecclesiastical and
secular authorities for one reason in particular: it has never
been generally obeyed by Christians as a whole.

The prohibition by the Church is based on the sentence in the
Vulgate (Luke vL 35) : "Mutuum date, nihil inde sperantes" (". . .
and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again 5 *). Apart from.
the Parable of the Talents and the Pounds in Matthew and Luke,
which ambiguously alludes to the theme, there is nothing more
to be found in the Gospels about it.

The ethics of the prohibition rest finally on the Old Testament:

Exod. xxii. 25-7: "If thou lend to any of my people that is poor
by thee, thou shalt not be to him as a usurer neither shalt thou
lay upon him usury. If thou at all take thy neighbour's raiment
to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by that the sun goeth
down: For that is his covering only, it is his raiment for his skin;
wherein shall he sleep?"

Lev. xxv. 35-6: "And if thy brother be waxen poor, and

121

fallen in decay thou shall relieve him; yea, though he be a
stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee. Take thou
no usury of him, or increase."

Finally, Deut. xxiii. 20: "Unto a stranger thou mayest lend
upon usury; but not unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon
usury,"

From this last passage it was concluded that the Jews were
generally allowed, if not advised or even compelled, to practise
usury upon non-Jews. But the very simple explanation is that the
Israelites were allowed to take interest from the foreign traders
in their home country, just as the latter took profit from them. It
was a self-evident, protective regulation for a small nation of
peasants and artisans in their dealings with foreigners.

The Halacha, which denotes the legal and other regulations
of the Talmud, declares the taking of interest to be punishable,
and states that the man who takes any commits a fivefold crime,
since Moses had prohibited it in five passages (Babba Me^ia^ 62,
70, 75). The man who had taken interest was not allowed to
take an oath (Sanhedrin, 3, 3). He was stigmatised as a heretic
and as godless. The Talmud also forbids the creditor to live
without payment at his debtor's house or to use the service of the
debtor's servants (Babba Mezia, 63, 64). Referring to Ezek. xviii.
13, usurers are put on a par with murderers. The sages of the
Talmud expressly advise lending even to heathens without
interest, and Babba Mezia, 70, even interprets the Mosaic law in
the sense that it is permissible only to pay interest to heathens,
not to take any from them.

The fundamental law of the Israelites thus leaves no doubt
that the prohibition of interest in general is part of Jewish
doctrine. How, then, should usury be a "natural" Jewish vice?
But men or groups or nations compelled to leave their native
soil and to migrate in distressing circumstances cannot help but
adopt new habits and new vices in their changed surroundings,
if they are not to perish. When, in the first centuries after Christ,
the pressure on the Jews in the Roman Empire increased, they
began the moneylending business. For the dispersed, despised
and persecuted it was probably the only way of holding their
ground against the rising power of the Christians. In the patristic
literature there occur protests against Jewish usury, if polemically
exaggerated for example, by Hieronyme in his letter to the

122

priest Nepotianus (Chapter 10), or in the sermons of John
Chrysostom, Archbishop of Byzantium (344-407). These are
the first traces of the tragedy of a homeless nation, against which
the dominant secular and spiritual powers have started a pitiless
campaign.

Jewish concentration on moneylending was not an assault on
the world, but an instrument of defence against restriction and
persecution. If the Jews were determined to survive and to make
their religion survive and this was their determination they
could not avoid the conclusion that they must use the power of
money. The post-Talmudic rabbinic literature had no other
alternative but to accommodate itself to the new circumstances
of the Jews. It could no longer oppose moneylending for interest,
just as, a millennium later, the Christian Church was compelled
to abandon the prohibition of it. In both cases economic necessity
overrode religious doctrine.

But there was never any understanding for the Jewish money-
lender on the Christian side. His role continued to be seen and
interpreted in the ancient and medieval ways. Judas and his
thirty pieces of silver remained the symbol of Jewish nature; the
faithfulness of the other eleven disciples did not count. What the
one had done was condemned as Jewish, what the eleven had
done was praised as Christian, just as the many Christian usurers
of all times were ignored. Around this arbitrary conception grew
the medieval myth of the Jew. Usury was the Jewish vice, born
with the Jews and spread by them. Shylock is the incarnation of
this conception.

"Many have made witty invectives against usury. They say
that it is a pity the Devil should have God's part, which is the
tithe, that the usurer is the greatest Sabbath-breaker, because
his plough goeth every Sunday." Thus begins Francis Bacon's
essay, On Usury, first published in 1625. The reference to the tithe
is probably related to the fact that, for the first time in the reign
of Henry VIII, the rate of interest had been fixed at 10 per cent.
Bacon defends the taking of interest and proposes two legal rates,
a general one of 5 per cent, and a higher one imposed
on merchants by licensed persons, for which a tax should be
introduced. At the time of Bacon and Shakespeare, the con-

123

demnation of interest was already out of date. Calvin himself had
declared in favour of it. In the reign of Edward VI, a new
prohibition was issued. But, owing to its flagrant contradiction
of the necessities of the English economy, it was completely
disregarded.

Probably no other century of European history was so
permeated with usury as the sixteenth. The German-Spanish
Emperor Charles V was almost certainly one of the greatest
borrowers of money and payers of interest of all times. But in
this respect, that progressive century was not at all at variance
with medieval times: it was rather their climax. In the Middle
Ages a variety of means were found to elude the prohibition
both by laymen and ecclesiastics. Greed and usury were rampant
throughout Europe. And England, the country without Jews,
was no better than the Continent.

In the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays there are plenty of
characters of usurers. They were stock figures. In Shakespeare
Shylock is the only one. And even he does not practise usury on
the stage. Shakespeare seems not to have been interested in
satirising this vice. In choosing a Venetian Jew as his only usurer,
he even spares the representatives of English usury, numerous
though they were. For him usury presented itself as the funda-
mental means of characterising the Jew in all his medievalism
and Jewishness. The Jew is not only the English, but also the
European scapegoat sent into the wilderness.

But much worse reputations than that of usury pursue him.

Of Hatred and Retaliation

Let us suppose for a moment that Shylock is not a Jew! Let
him be another Venetian merchant like Antonio, who wants to
revenge himself upon a commercial rival and personal enemy
and is determined to drink his vengeance to the dregs.
/ Without being a Jew, such a Shylock would still be un-
Christian. He would be a Renaissance hero, a condottiere type,
given to following up his intentions without restraint a
triumphant executor of his own economic and personal
superiority. He would have models in the popular figures of the
Renaissance. The super-man of that time and fashion would

124

survive in him. Shuddering, one would admire the horrible
greatness of his law-suit and of his behaviour in court, undiverted
by morals and sentiment. His London contemporaries would
have applauded him enthusiastically and would, to say the least
of it, have been more impressed with his superabundance of
vitality than with Antonio's excessive weakness.

The mood or fashion which takes a lively pleasure in the
unbroken, if cruel, man has its unmistakable share in the
character of Shylock. The triumph of the individual released
from ecclesiastical shackles is one of the spiritual antecedents of
the Shylock tragedy. But since the hero of this triumph is deluded
about his position in world and time, it leads to tragi-comicai
consequences. This is the best joke of all in a character calculated
to arouse both laughter and horror. The rebellion of a Jew? The
opening of the eyes by a human, or scarcely human, being who
was expected to keep them closed or at least cast down? There
has to be a flaming passion in such a creature to make up for its
defective Renaissance elements. Shakespeare chose hatred and
revenge, embedded in Judaism.

From the beginning, Christianity has claimed to be the
religion of love. Preaching the love of both neighbour and enemy,
the Evangelists declare it a step forward in relation to the earlier
doctrine. This comes out most clearly in the Sermon on the
Mount (Matt. v. 43, 44) : "Ye have heard that it has been said,
Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say
unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good
to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use
you and persecute you." In the Old Testament, however, there
is no trace of a command to hate one's enemies, but a number
of passages from which the opposite must be inferred.

The fundamental sentence, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself," is pronounced in Lev. xix. 18. Deut. xxiii. 7 goes farther:
"Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother; thou
shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his
land." Edomites and Egyptians were regarded as the arch-
enemies of Israel.

Apart from the Sermon on the Mount, the Gospels themselves
stress that the Scriptures contain as the supreme law the
commandment to love God and, co-ordinated with it, the com-
mandment to love one's fellow men. So Mark xiL 29 jf.i "And

125

Jesus answered him. The first of all the commandments Is, Hear,
O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart . . . this is the first command-
ment. And the second is like, namely this: Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself. There is no other commandment greater
than these."

By a number of concrete commandments, the Mosaic law
elaborates that concerning the love of one's fellow-men. In
Exod. xxiii. 4-5: "If thou meet thy enemy's ox or his ass going
astray thou shalt surely bring it back to him again. If thou see
the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden, and
wouldst forbear to help him, thou shalt surely help with him."
Nothing could prove the altruistic spirit of Mosaic law more
movingly than its extension to the animals of the enemy.

There are, of course, dozens of proofs of the altruistic tendency
of Judaism in the post-Mosaic Scriptures. We need not quote
them; most of them are well-known and even proverbial. One
only needs to read the Psalms or, for example. Chapter XXXI
of Job, apart from the prophetic books, to recognise that love of
one's fellow-men was inherent in Jewish doctrine, and that it
did not leave much room for hatred of the enemy.

This spirit is illustrated particularly in regard to the treatment
of foreigners. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him;
for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exod. xxii. 21).
Leviticus, moreover, commands: "But the stranger that dwelleth
with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou
shalt love him as thyself" (xix. 34). Further, Deut. xxiv. 27:
"Thou shalt not pervert the judgement of the stranger, nor
of the fatherless; nor take a widow's raiment to pledge." The
association of the stranger with the orphan and widow can
only be intended to emphasise a particular need for help and
forbearance.

This tendency is developed further in Kings viii. 41 ff. Solomon,
at the dedication of the Temple, prays: "Moreover, concerning
a stranger that is not of the people of Israel, but cometh out of a
far country for thy name's sake . . . when he shall come and pray
towards this house; Hear thou in Heaven thy dwelling place and
do according to all that the stranger calleth to thee for . . ." Here,
in all probability, is the first official prayer for the foreigner in the
history of the ancient world. The development in Jewish doctrine

126

which, beginning with love of one's neighbour and justice to the
foreigner, finds its first climax in that prayer of Solomon, is
continued in the utterances of the prophets, especially of Isaiah,
and culminates finally in the unique Utopian conception of
universal love and of the brotherhood of man from which the
early Christian ideal is drawn.

Moreover, as has been proved by the most outstanding
Hebraists, the word rea, which, in the sentence from Leviticus, is
the word translated "neighbour," means simply "the other"
without regard to his origin or religion, with the secondary
meaning of servant or even foreigner eventually accruing.

It is, of course, a different matter that the doctrine of the Jews 5
who, in their own country, were not only surrounded by but also
interspersed with pagans, abhorred paganism and its representa-
tives, and that they felt and practised enmity against the first
Christians as Jewish heretics. The Jews of the early centuries felt
themselves called upon to fight for the unity of their faith, and
hatred between the two parties was inevitable. Its traces are plain.,
both in Christian patristic literature as well as in the Talmud. In
the Middle Ages, the Talmud particularly was alleged and is
still alleged to be full of the most horrible calumnies against the
Christian faith, its Founder and adherents. Being rather a series
of gigantic mines of writing than a book, the Talmud came into
existence during the centuries before and after the time of Jesus.
Small wonder therefore that it contains many apologetic and
polemical passages. Yet it could hardly have harmed
Christendom as such or the Christian Church, for at that time
the first was not yet in existence and the second just about to take
shape. As to the personality of Jesus, it is not even certain that
the Talmud refers to him at all. If it is arguable that some violent
passage or other applies to Him, one must bear in mind that for
the zealous Jews who were the authors, He could not be anything
else but the founder of a heretical sect.

Yet it was thus that the legend of the inherent and implacable
hatred of the Jews against the Christians came into existence.
This Jewish hatred, as an almost supra-personal element, is used
by Shakespeare, both expressly and by appealing to the pre-
judices of his audience, to explain the hatred of this one Jew,
Shylock, against this one Christian, Antonio. He combines it
psychologically with the motive of revenge and juridically with

127

the principle of retaliation. The supposition is primitive in tjhe
extreme: hatred repays with evil and love with good. The con-
clusion suggests itself: retaliation belongs to the Jewish character,
and the greediness for it, as well as the delight in it, are Jewish
qualities.

Thus in the background of Shylock's behaviour appears that
terrible phantom called the "God of Vengeance/ 5 which has
played a leading part in the misrepresentation of Jewish doctrine
and character. Shylock might even be taken as the human
embodiment of that phantom.

There is no need of weighty arguments to destroy this bogy.
One quotation may be sufficient: Exod. xxxiv. 6-7: "The Lord,
the Lord God, merciful and gracious, and abundant in goodness
and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and
transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty;
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon
the children's children unto the third and fourth generation. 33
The antithesis is obvious: mercy for thousands and punishment
to the fourth generation!

There is only a step from the "God of Vengeance" to the
principle of retaliation. This was developed in the regulations
of the different tribes and nations and is most clearly formulated
In the Roman Twelve Tables. In primitive civilisation, it must
even be regarded as a step forward, a way of overcoming the
barbarous custom of tribal and blood revenge.

Medieval Christendom was in the habit of ascribing the
principle of retaliation to the Old Testament. The formulation
"An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" (Exod. xxL 23-4;
Lev. xxiv. 20; Dent. xix. 21) is so vivid that it forced itself on the
world as the foundation of that principle.

In reality, strict retaliation was unknown to Jewish law. The
proof is supplied by the most authoritative scholars. Referring
the reader to the bibliography at the end of this book, we may
confine ourselves to the statement: both the context in which the
principle emerges in the Mosaic Scriptures and the meaning of
the Hebrew word tachat (ajin tachat ajin an eye for an eye), which
implies the conception of a thing of equal value, that is of equiva-
lent compensation, make it clear that Jewish law knew nothing
of literal retaliation in contrast to that older document, the
Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (2200 B.C.) Only for murder

TOR

does the Israelitic law command precise retaliation, the death
penalty.

The Talmud likewise decries retaliation. Simon ben Jochai 5
a great teacher of the second century, for instance, argues against
it: "How could the principle 'an eye for an eye' be maintained
if a blind man has blinded or a lame man has lamed another?"
Another passage runs thus: "A man who violates his fellow man
owes five things to him: compensation, payment for his pain 3
expenses for cure, indemnication for loss of time, and damages' 3
(Babba Kamma, VIII, I). Even the retaliation involved in the
death penalty was seldom applied by Jewish jurisdiction.

In short, Jewish doctrine in law and ethics, both Biblical and
medieval, was opposed to the cruel principle of precise retaliation.
Post-Biblical doctrine may be illustrated by a few more quota-
tions.

There is a Talmudic legend that God created the world
according to the principles of justice and mercy for evil would
triumph if the divine mercy and charity alone prevailed, but
neither could the world exist if it were ruled exclusively by
strict law. It might have been written for the case of Shylock and
served as a model for Portia's sermon on mercy.

Further, in the Talmud is recorded the opinion, at one time
expressed, that Jerusalem had been destroyed because her judges
had passed sentences based merely on strict law and had neglected
the principles of equity. In the section, Gittin, of the Mishnah, the
original part of the Talmud, the great sages Hillel and Gamaliel
(shortly before or about the time of Jesus) make the law
dependent on "the welfare of the world," and a number of regu-
lations of the same section are to serve "to advance peace among
men."

Gemarah Bezza, 23 b the Gemarah is the interpretation of the
Mishnah says: "Who does not show mercy to the creatures lie
does not belong to the descendants of Abraham. 35 Or Gemarah
Jebamoth, yga, calls charity and love the virtues by which the
descendants of the patriarchs are to be recognised. In Babba
Kammci) 930;, we find a moving parable: man should always be
among the persecuted and not among the persecutors; for there
is no bird for which snares are more often laid than the turtle
dove or the young pigeon, but Scripture declares them worthy
of being sacrificed on the Lord's altar.

129

To complete the picture of Jewish ethics., a few more quotations
are selected because they accurately reflect the spirit both of the
Jewish Scriptures and of the authors from whose writing they are
taken: the spirit of Judaism and of the Jews.

Philo, the Alexandrian philosopher of the first century, says
(De specialibus legibus, II) : "There are, so they say, two principal
injunctions among the numerous special doctrines and laws in
relation to God: veneration and piety, in relation to man: love
of one's neighbour and justice. 35

Josephus, the Jewish historian of the same time, says in his
pamphlet, Contra Apionem (II, 16), something fundamental to
the particular nature of Jewish ethics: "That a legislation so
entirely different from others became common property may be
explained by the fact that it did not make piety part of virtue, but
recognised all other virtues, as justice, steadfastness, prudence,
harmony of the citizens among one another, as an emanation of
piety and interpreted them accordingly. For with us all deeds,
occupations and words, have a bearing on piety towards God,
Moses having left nothing of them un-tested and un-regulated."

In the Book of the Pious, the outstanding work of rabbinic piety
and wisdom in medieval Germany, there is the sentence:
"Whatever is commanded by the lore of Israel has the single
purpose of maintaining love and peace among men."

Judah Halevi, the greatest poet in the golden medieval age of
Spanish Jewry, says In his Kusary (II, 56) : "One bears witness
to the divinity of the commandments by pure feelings the mani-
festation of which consists in actions such as are inherently
difficult for men."

And, finally, to bring back this short selection to ancient
times, we may conclude it by a sentence from one of the
Palestinian apocryphal books, "The Testament of the Twelve
Patriarchs": "The just and humble man is afraid of doing
wrong because he is accused not by any other but by his own
heart."

This is not, and does not pretend to be, more than an "anti-
Shylockian" illustration of true Judaism before and during
medieval times that is to say, the true period of Shylock's
spiritual origin. It is to show that post-Biblical Judaism is in the
sharpest possible contrast to the content of Shylock's law-suit and
to his sayings and actions, and that therefore he is nothing else
130

but the product of the medieval myth ot the Jew. i<rom tne
Jewish ethical standpoint, he is no Jew at all.

A Talmudic court would not only have disallowed his Iaw-suit 3
but would also have punished him. As, indeed, the Venetian
(and Shakespearian) Court does! But it condemns him on unjust
and illegal principles.

Of Blood-guilt

Greed, hatred, revengefulness and the curse of eternal
wandering even these extremes are not enough for the mythical
conception of the Jew. The most abominable crime is still lacking.
Murder in itself is not enough. It must be either the attempt at
general murder, as at the time of the Great Plague, or the most
horrible kind of murder namely, that of children, and they
must be murdered for ritual purposes. The Jewish faith must be
involved.

Barrabas, the Jew of Malta, is guilty of innumerable murders
of innocent Christians. On one occasion, when his name Is
mentioned in the play, someone asks: "What? Has he crucified a
child?" Zachary and Zadoch, the Jews of Rome, do not spare
Christian children or innocent girls or the sick In their murderous
plans. Thus the medieval spirit, influencing English literature of
Shakespeare's time, surrounds the Jewish phantom with an
atmosphere of murder.

Shakespeare being Shakespeare ! mitigated this "bloodi-
ness." But at the same time, being Shakespeare, he deepened the
mystery. The Jew Shylock is a sort of citizen of the highly
civilised city of Venice, a settled man, a man of credit and of
bonds, no longer a libertine and adventurer like the Jew of
Malta or the Jew of Cyprus or the Jews of Rome. Yet even he
makes use of a bond to satisfy his thirst for Christian blood and
his greed for Christian flesh. Bond and law become instruments
of his Jewish cruelty and Jewish lust for murder. It is an inrush
of sheer medievalism.

The Middle Ages flowed with blood both in a literal and
allegoric sense; it was sacrificed by the heroes and the saints and
was, therefore, the symbol of the two strongest impulses by which
the Christian-chivalric period was influenced. It was the supreme

131

sacrifice offered in war and peace, for saintly and profane
purposes. The warrior and the martyr were the triumphant
figures of a spiritually unsettled world.

The Jews were excluded from the heroes and the martyrs.
(Their martyrdom from the Christian persecutions, alleged to
be punishment, did not count.) They could not offer themselves
for military service and were generally forbidden to bear arms.
They were defenceless and their very defencelessness evoked the
deep mistrust of medieval people. Not being open fighters, they
were suspected of being secret murderers. Murdered as they so
often were, there must be blood-guilt upon them such was
medieval logic.

Moreover, the thesis of medieval (and later) times ran: the
Jews are the arch-murderers, for they murdered the Christian
Saviour. Against this popular last judgment, there was no appeal
and no counter-evidence. This law-suit was decided. And on the
permanently accused and condemned, judgment could be
executed over and over again. Their guilt was likewise
perpetuated. The Jews persistently murdered the Saviour with
every child that disappeared or mysteriously died when Jews
were at hand. Association with so high and holy a model made
every such child a martyr. Thus the ritual murder legend was
genuinely pious.

Its historical roots go back to ancient times. In the second
century B.C., the Syrian King Antiochus Epiphanes, entering the
Temple by force in order to plunder it, claimed to have found
there a Greek adolescent prepared for sacrifice. The Jews were
accused of fattening a pagan, year after year, in order to slaughter
him at the Passover feast like a sacrificial lamb and to use his
blood for ritual purposes. This fable, specially invented to excuse
the sacrilege of Antiochus, was only one of many current about
the mysterious Jewish rites. It was credulously swallowed by the
Hellenistic world, which could not understand the spirit of the
Jewish rites. Like all other legends, that of the fattened Greek
was an expression of the bitter enmity between Judaism and
Hellenism. As Josephus reports, the Greek was said to serve, not
only as a sacrifice, but also as a sacrificial meal.

The same accusation was brought against the first Christians.
Since they kept their meetings secret, partly to accord with the
traditions of the Ancient Mysteries and partly to escape dis-

132

tixrbances and persecutions, a veritable garland of legends grew
up around their rites. One even charged them with anthro-
pophagy. It was said that the novice to be initiated into the
community was presented with the corpse of a child covered with
grains or flour. The child was murdered, it was said, as a means
of consecrating the new member, and the blood was drunk by
the community.

These and similar legends have their roots in barbarous rites.
They were unearthed and used against the Jews and the early
Christians, because their religious conceptions were incom-
prehensible to the pagans and, therefore, denounced as the
products of abominable superstitions and as a relapse into
barbarism. This motive played a part also in the medieval
accusations against the Jews.

It is possible that a Jewish custom was misinterpreted. To
celebrate the salvation of the Babylonian Jews, as recorded in the
Book of Esther, the Jews observed, and still observe, the feast
of Purina. It is the gayest of the Jewish holidays, a kind of carniva! 3
with masquerades, plays and similar festivities. The effigy of
Haman, a stuffed puppet (like that of Judas in the Christian
processions after the miracle plays), used to be hanged on a
gallows. As Purim fell just before Easter, hostile and mistrustful
eyes were tempted to make a cross out of the gallows and an
infant out of the hanged Haman. What was a play and fun was
distorted and suspected to be the imitation of a real crucifixion.
To this was added the fable that the Jews used the blood of
innocent Christian children to make their Easter bread. Closely
connected with this was the further legend that the Jews stole
and pricked holy wafers in order to use the blood of Christ that
flowed out of them for their own rites.

Jewish religion knows nothing of all these horrible things.
Because the Israelites witnessed blood cults in their pagan
surroundings, the more radically did they condemn and exclude
them from their own rites. Lev. xix. 26 (and similarly Gen. ix. 4)
says: "Ye shall not eat anything with the blood." Or Lev. xix. 16:
". . . neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour."
There are further regulations to the effect that the touching of
the dead defiles (Num. xix. 16). Even the woman bleeding
naturally is deemed to be impure, and the person who touches
her becomes himself impure (Deut. xx. 18). Finally, it was the

Israelites who established the commandment: "Thou shalt not
kill!"

If any Jewish community or individual had practised any
blood cult, of which there is neither proof nor suspicion, they
would thereby have cut themselves off from Judaism, as Shylock
does, by longing for the flesh and blood of his adversary in spite
of his bond*

Shakespeare between Myth and History

In the Middle Ages, the heretic was deemed to be in league
with the Devil and thus the cause of many uncanny and in-
explicable happenings. The Jew as the arch-heretic was given
and surrendered unconditionally to the powers of darkness.

It would be wrong to underestimate the puzzling problems
presented by the mere existence of the Jews, apart from their
economic role, to the intelligence and imagination of the medieval
man. On the whole the latter was neither capable of, nor inclined
to, exact thinking. For the man in the street the Jew was the
intruder, the thief and mortal enemy a crescendo plausible
enough to the irrational mind. The ancient equation of foreigner
and foe, or even fiend, was re-established. The religious difference
was translated into human enmity not without assistance from
the Church. The psychological premises for ordinary living
together were thus destroyed and the soil prepared for the growth
of demoniac attributions. This discrimination against the Jews
was a moral outlawry which ,time and again took the grosser form
of bodily expulsion or of murderous persecutions.

Jewish usury was a reality, even though increasingly imposed
on the Jews by causes beyond their control. This is the starting
point of the myth of the Jew. On this real foundation, the pyramid
of un-reality was destined to rise until it touched the clouds of
perverse fiction.

It has already been said that realistic observation did not come
naturally to medieval people. All the more were their minds
governed by tendencies to symbolism. The intensity and devotion
of their feelings in the presence of emperor or king, towards
war or plague, at a wedding or procession, towards a knight or a
preacher or even the law court or the market day is, in spite of
the works of art and literature still extant, hardly imaginable in

our times. The single phenomenon, whether it chanced to be a
man, an action or a situation, was at one and the same time
grossly material and the germ of a vision or a ghost, subject to
blessing or curse, evoking unmeasured astonishment or terror,
joy or melancholy. In other words, medieval people experienced
the physical metaphysically, which, applied to the man in the
street, means that he exaggerated everything to a degree no
longer conceivable.

To such a mentality, what a monster the Jew must have
seemed! The nearer he was the less was he the neighbour, the
more he became the "other 55 and an ambiguous creature the
vehicle of much more and of much worse than was suggested by
his countenance and behaviour, to be relegated, therefore, to a
dark background and in the last resort driven underground. The
medieval man was faced with an impossible task when called
upon to incorporate the Jew into his consciousness and
community. He achieved only a terrifying confusion and dis-
tortion of men and things witches, dragons, unicorns and the
Jews!

The political position, or lack of position, of the Jews made
confusion worse confounded. The medieval development of the
nations proceeded from the Roman World Empire, inherited by
the Christian emperors, to the territorial States, from an ideo-
logical breadth to a concrete narrowness. What a contrast to
this development was that of the Jewries! They belonged to all
States or to none. On the Continent they were made smi earner ae
regis bondmen to the Emperor by a deed of Frederic II in
1236. The same happened in England and in other countries.
From this time they frequently became the subject of quarrels
and negotiations between the emperors or kings and the princes,
barons, bishops or town councils. They did not necessarily belong
to those with and under whom they dwelt. On the contrary, they
frequently possessed a kind of extra-territoriality. They were sold 3
given as presents or leased for exploitation.

All this tended to make the Jew one of the enigmatic monsters
by which the medieval man saw himself surrounded. In this sense
Shylock is the classical representative of the medieval conception
of the Jew. He is the outsider par excellence enveloped in all the
mysteries of the human creature who conies from outside and
abroad. He enters the play s and especially the court, as though

135

he and his like had not lived in the European world for centuries,
but had just arrived, yesterday or the day before.

It now becomes even clearer why Shakespeare did not furnish
him with the detailed equipment of Jewishness, either from
Biblical Judaism or from his Venetian life. As always, his realism
is fastidious and visionary. He was conscious of the myth of the
medieval Jew, on which he could rely as part of the consciousness
of his audiences, and aware of the times and peoples which had
fashioned and seasoned "the Jew. 53 As is right and proper for
a mythical figure, Shylock is unique and without peers. Shake-
speare's realism embraced that of his audiences and is conditioned
by it. The mythical transformation of the Jew through the
medieval centuries and three centuries without any first-hand
experience, gave the Elizabethans their picture of Jewishness, or
what was left of it: a speaking image, a walking, talking and acting
phantom, a legendary creature, thinly existent or even void of
reality. To such a figure, the poet could attribute the improbable
and impossible, even the cutting of a pound of flesh from a live
body in a court of justice. Mythology made up for all realistic
improbabilities.

Taking advantage of the dark complexities, the poet here,
indeed, poet at his sublimest elevates and transforms the
theatrical scene into something almost apocalyptic. It is inscribed:
the Jew in court. Or even: the Jew on the Day of Judgement.
Accordingly, Shakespeare furnishes him with fundamental
arguments against his damnation.

The old fable yielded the material and the cause. But Shake-
speare did the rest and in so doing he leaves the old fable far
behind. No Jewish "problem" is expressly touched. But in some
way or other Shylock's arguments, reflecting the fate of the
medieval and post-medieval Jew, make up for this. He becomes
the spokesman of the bondsmen of medieval Christianity.

Precisely in Venice and in the year 1568, though hardly known
to Shakespeare, a treatise was published, De Jud&is and aliis
infiddibus., by the lawyer Marquardis de Susanis. Proceeding
from the assumption of the innate immorality of the Jews, the
author examines the question whether being a Jew is or is not an
offence in itself (he answers the question in the affirmative!) and
goes on to develop a theory about them as half-citizens and non-
citizens. On this treatise a number of other disquisitions on the

136

legal position of the Jews are based. In England, the leading
lawyer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean time. Chief Justice Coke,
held the same opinion as the Italian writer: the Jews being
enemies, there could be "no peace between them, as with the
Devil, whose subjects they are, and the Christians." A passage in
Francis Bacon's New Atlantis takes a similar line. Thus it may be
said that Shakespeare brings a declared outlaw into the law
courts. And he uses him as a challenge to both "Mercy" and
"Justice." The tension is a magnificent one. Necessarily and
logically, Shylock, the denouncer of slavery 3 comes to be a rebel
and, according to Shakespeare's conception of State and society,
in the wrong. Contrariwise, the law of State and society are right
and bound to triumph.

The Duke and Portia again and again affirm that they are
proceeding strictly according to law. But the conduct and con-
clusion of the trial is a kind of parody. The axiom, Surnmum jus
summa injuria> the application of which is avoided by the annul-
ment of the bond, hits Shylock with full force. It smashes the
representative of Jewry with the hammer weight of legality.
Shakespeare's vision of the Jewish situation makes trial and
judgment true in the highest sense. Never before or after was
a law-suit conceived which, though farcical, is nevertheless
realistic and true.

At the height of the Middle Ages there was a trial, likewise for
and against Jews, of international dimension and importance. It
is not impossible that Shakespeare knew of it. By describing it s
at any rate, we place alongside the imaginary Shylock law-suit
a parallel from history which does not lag behind fiction.

The central figure is that majestic personality and friend of
wisdom, the Emperor Frederick II. In the summer of 1235^
Frederick (residing in Sicily and hardly a German or European
prince, but rather an Oriental potentate) had the German Diet
summoned to the Rhenish town of Mayence. At that time the
Jews of the Bishopric of Fulda had been accused of ritual murder
and, together with their co-religionists in neighbouring towns,
cruelly persecuted. Both parties, the persecuted and the per-
secutors, approached the Emperor, in order to lay their cause
before him. The Christians even brought with them the corpses
of two infants ostensibly murdered by the Jews. The Emperor
summoned a council of experts to examine the question of Jewish

137

blood ritual. Princes, knights, scholars and clerics considered the
case, but failed to come to any definite conclusion. Thereupon a
decree was issued by the Emperor, from which we quote the
following:

"... These, different as they were, uttered different opinions,,
and as they proved incapable of finding such a satisfactory
solution of the case as could have been right. We have from the
secret depth of Our wisdom decided that the offence of the Jews
could not be proceeded against more simply than by the assistance
of such people who had been Jews and converted to the Christian
faith and who, therefore, as adversaries would not keep silence
about what they might know against the Jews and against the
Mosaic Scriptures of the Old Testament. . . . For the sake of
satisfaction of uneducated people as well as of justice, We have,
... in agreement with the princes, celebrities and noblemen as
well as with the abbots and priests, dispatched a special report
to all princes of the Occident by which We have called upon as
many as possible from their empires of those who were recently
baptised and are experts in Jewish law. 35

These European proceedings were, in fact, set going. King
Henry III of England (incidentally, the brother of Frederick's
third wife) the same who by his taxes, confiscations and fines
had made the English Jews ripe for expulsion by his son, Edward I
dispatched two prominent converts, assuring the Emperor
that he was particularly interested in the case. Thus an inter-
national court of justice assembled, if selected on a very
questionable basis. The finding of its inquiries and consultations
was that the Jewish Scriptures forbid every form of blood sacrifice
and that the Talmud even imposes penalties for the sacrifice of
animals. Accordingly, the Emperor pronounced a ban on ritual
murder accusations throughout the Empire.

From this one would assume that the Jews had come into their
own. But on the Jews of Fulda like Shylock, prosecutors and
prosecuted Frederick imposed a heavy fine because they had
been the cause of "disturbances." And in the century that
followed these proceedings, ritual murder accusations grew and
multiplied!

This is the outstanding model of medieval justice towards the
Jews and of medieval sentences against them. Other less
impressive examples may have been better known to Shakespeare;

138

above all, the numerous English ritual murder proceedings, il
not the recent prosecution of Lopez. Of all this something lives
on in the Shylock trial.

It was virtually impossible for Shakespeare not to write a
satire. His "Shylockiad" became just this: the most ingenious
satire on justice and courts of law in the literature of the world.
Shylock thinks that he has the law in his hands. He has indeed
but it is only the Jews' law.

139

EPILOGUE
(Written in England)

T

J

EW'S LAW !' J The phrase leads me back to the present, or,
rather, to the immediate past, for it reminds me of the years in
Germany when time and again there was issued a new Judengesetz
(anti-Jewish law). It was legislation of a kind unique in the
modern world and was always preceded by the most fantastic
accusations and calumnies. In those laws, depriving the Jews of
one human and civil right after another, crass medievalism was
resurrected. Or had it not rather survived with its dark, mythical
conception of the Jew? I fear that it had and not only in
Germany, though it was there that it threw off its modern disguise
and was seen in all its barbarism.

It was only to be expected that the promulgators of such laws
would make full use of the medieval myth for their abominable
purpose, and therefore also of the character of Shylock. Shake-
speare was degraded by those barbarians into being their witness.
They mutilated his glorious play the "good" Lorenzo must not
marry the "terrible" Jewess, Jessica, because it would be
Rassenschande and cut it in such a way that Shylock's human
arguments were glossed over. He became the personification of
every possible devilishness, and changed from Shakespeare's
complex conception of the Jew into that simplified and distorted
creature that Hitler and his associates would have him to be.

In face of this "fashionable 35 Shylock, I dared not write the
stage history of the character, in spite of my affection for the
subject, I feared, and could not disregard, the Nazi censorship.
Now would be the time to fill this gap. But I am not competent
to write the English stage history of Shylock before and after
the great Kean, a pioneer interpreter of the Shakespearian Jew.
This task I must leave to English writers.

But perhaps I may be permitted to touch on the German stage
history, which I myself have experienced and to recall in
particular three Shylocks out of the many I came to know
during the last thirty years.

One was Albert Bassermann, the greatest German actor of our
time, and now, at little less than eighty years, a refugee In
America, the heroic figure of the German stage. Being a full-

blooded " Aryan/ 5 the Jew Shylock did not belong to his
outstanding parts,, the number of which was indeed legion. Yet
he turned to advantage his inability to strike the peculiarly
Jewish note in his interpretation. He repeated in himself, so to
say, the process that may have taken place in Shakespeare,,
likewise unversed in Jewish ways of thinking and speaking.
Bassermann emphasised Shylock 3 s superiority and ready wit in
arguing with his adversaries and the court and thus made him
the intellectual superior of all others on the stage. The deeper and
more tragic did his downfall and relapse into utter helplessness
seem to be, Bassermann presented a moving case of a rare human
being frustrated by prejudice and injustice and presented it
perfectly.

Another was Rudolf Schildkraut, whose son Joseph is the well-
known American film actor. A full-blooded actor and a conscious
Jew, he entered into the feelings of a hunted, tormented and
therefore unbalanced being, through whom generations of Jews
voiced their shrill protest against their persecutors of all times.
At the same time, Schildkraut imbued the character with an
unspeakable melancholy, which was elemental compared with
the ennui of Antonio. Injustice was round him like a shroud. It
is no mere chance that this great actor created the most moving
King Lear I have ever seen. For he was peculiarly fitted to portray
human creatures driven mad by inhumanity and oppression, and
to give them the spitefulness and simplicity of an ill-treated child.

Unmistakable madness marked the Shylock of the third
German actor I have in mind, Werner Krauss. He was, even in
the trial scene, clad almost entirely in rags, thus accentuating the
social and every other difference between him and the rest. He
seemed to tumble rather than walk, on old and weary feet. He
was possessed and obsessed by the wrongs done to him and his
like, a petulant underling who wished to argue with all and
sundry on one theme only: his wrongs as a Jew, Even when
he was silent, he seemed to argue on this theme. Krauss ceased
to be an actor playing the part of a Jew and took on the perplex-
ing appearance of a medieval player in the part of a ghost.
^ In fact, Shylock should not be played as a Venetian Jew of the
sixteenth or any other later century, because as such he is totally
lacking in probability, but as a "time-dishonoured" character in
whom the idea of a whole people abominably wronged has
142

displaced everything else. The steady popularity of The Merchant
of Venice is undoubtedly due, above all, to the playgoers'
satisfaction in seeing an oppressed man turning the tables at last
on his oppressors. For that is what Shylock essentially does more
than any other figure in world literature. That he has to atone
for this does not detract from the success of his mission to bully
the bullies for a while.

Strangely enough, it is in German literature that Shylock's
exact opposite appears. It was in the eighteenth century, on the
threshold of Jewish emancipation that G. E. Lessing (who was
the first enthusiastic admirer and interpreter of Shakespeare in
Germany) wrote his Nathan der Weise. He uses the same "trick"
as Shakespeare, but the other way round. Against a medieval
background Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades he sets a
Jew who is far in advance of his contemporaries, Nathan is a
wealthy Oriental merchant, a man full of wisdom, humanity
and tolerance in short, as un-medieval a character as it is
possible to conceive. It was Lessing's purpose, by portraying Ms
friend, the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, to preach
religious and racial tolerance. Lessing, that venerable thinker
and writer, excellent as a critic, a teacher of the Germans and a
standard-bearer for liberty, cannot be compared with Shake-
speare as a dramatist. His play is edifying rather than convincing^
a noble sermon rather than a drama. It lacks that myth-
preserving and myth-creating power that abounds in Shake-
speare's work. It is only fair to add that in Germany the character
of Nathan has continuously attracted almost as many great
actors (among others both Bassermann and Schildkraut) and
captivated almost as many audiences as Shylock. The Germans
have always been fond of idealistic sermons on the stage.

But however many "Nathans" Jewish history has produced,
the Jews are judged as "Shylocks." So one might continue;
however many Jewish preachers of peace have arisen at all times
since the prophets, the Jews were, and still are, decried as war-
mongers. On the other hand, however much heroism the Jews
have displayed in their national history against the Syrians and
the Romans and, later on, in defence of their countries of
adoption, and though their martyrs exceed in number those of
any other nation, they are more often than not denounced as
cowards. However many scholars, scientists, poets, artists and

143

patrons of art and literature as well as poor people there were,
and are, among them, they are mostly thought of as profiteers.
Finally, wherever there was, or is, a "Plague," be it social,
political or moral, there is almost always a noisy minority of
gentiles who accuse them of being the "poisoners of the wells."

But emphatically the anti-Semites must not be allowed to call
Shakespeare as a witness for their side. Once again: his Shylock
is a furious rebel against the medieval and post-medieval en-
slavement and calumniation of the Jews, a tragic character who
perishes because he fights a just fight with unjust means.

This is not the place to write of Jewish problems, troubles and
faults. Many others in our day have addressed themselves to that
task. Let me be content to affirm that the "myth of the Jew," no
more founded on fact to-day than it ever was, still survives and
continues to contribute to the distortion of reality. Imagination
is still to-day more potent than fact. Shakespeare's unmatched
achievement was to weave the one into the other one of the
secrets of Shylock's immortality.

In conclusion, I would say to my Jewish readers: let us
acknowledge Shylock "the Unwise" as the witness of our past
enslavement as well as Nathan the Wise as a witness of our
liberation. And let us praise Shakespeare as the genius who has
given to the European myth of the Jew, as to many another myth
and mystery of our earth, "a local habitation and a name."

144

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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1890.^

Aronstein, Ph. Der soziologische Character des Englischen Renaissance-
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Bodenstedt, FT. Shakespeares eitgenossen undihre Werke. 1860.
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Cardozo, J. L. The Contemporary Jew in the Elizabethan Drama. 1925.
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in der neuen %eit. 1 908.
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Beschuldigungen der Juden. 1901.
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Jahrhunderts. 1905.

Friedlaender, G. Shakespeare and the Jew. 1921.
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1916.

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Grimm, J. Deutsche Rechtsaltertuemer. 1828.

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Venedig im Jahre 1550. 1900.

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146

Schoeffler, H. Anfaenge des Puntamsmus. 1932.

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Sombart, W. Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben. 1911.

Weber, M. Aufsaetze zur Religionssoziologie. 1920.

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Beleuchtung. 1912.

Wolf, L. Essays in Jewish History, 1934.
Wright, L. B. Middle-class Culture in Elizabethan England. 1935.

The standard works, both of Jewish history and of Shakespeare
literature, which have been used are not specified.

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A PICTORIAL GROSS SECTION OF THE JEWISH
DRAMA IN MEDIEVAL AND MODERN

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Medieval Disputation between Christian and Jewish
Theologians (published at Augsburg, 1531)

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Simon of Trent as a Saint

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A Noble Turkish Jew (like the Duke of Naxos)

The Philosopher Joseph Del Medico, an Eminent Sephardish
Jew of Italy (XVI. C.)

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Menasseh Ben Israel, Sephardish Writer and Printer in
Amsterdam, who Negotiated with Cromwell about the Re-
admission of the Jews into England

"Juda seeks Refuge at the Altar of Christendom" (frontispiece
of Philologus Htbrao-Mixtus by Johann Leusden, Utrecht, 1657)

Gustave Dore: Simon, the Cobbler, cursed and condemned by
Jesus to wander eternally

Gustave Dore: The Wandering Jew

Albert Bassermann

Rudolf Schildkraut

Paul Wegener Werner Krauss

Four Shylocks of the Modern German Stage

Kean as Shylock

Reproduced, by kind permission of Columbia University Press
from Odell's Annals of the New York Stage, Vol. II. '

Irving as Shylock

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