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Is The Merchant of Venice Antisemitic? V7
The resolution of this controversy - a personal journey
By John Warszawski

Is The Merchant of Venice Antisemitic? Or the Effect of Censorship

The resolution of this controversy – a personal journey

It is strange that despite the prodigious amount of writings interpreting this most

controversial of the Shakespeare plays, all of it has missed the point.

Since the holocaust it has become de rigueur to portray Shylock sympathetically,

despite the play being fundamentally anti-Semitic. I reject this interpretation and argue that

the play is in fact unequivocally not antisemitic - the writer only gave Shylock the mythical

evil traits ascribed to Jews, in order to debunk them. It was the writer’s strategy for telling a

forbidden story about the tragedy of a Jew without alerting the censors.

Some of my favourite writers are antisemites

A decade ago when I read Anthony Julius’s book “T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and

Literary Form”, I was mortified by its assertion that the four most esteemed English writers,

the pillars of the literary canon, writers that I loved, all wrote antisemitic works featuring

antisemitic portraits of Jews: Chaucer’s blood libel in the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s

Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Dickens’ Fagin in Oliver Twist, and T.S. Eliot’s

Bleistein With A Cigar.

Yes I was mortified? But also angry. Fie on these Englishmen! These giants of literature that

composed the songs of our humanity; how is it possible that they did not know better? I had

no answer - dutifully, I inducted them into The Book Of Things Jews Must Know Even If They

Don’t Want To.

Now a decade on, I am to some extent placated: turns out I was wrong to include the

Merchant of Venice as one of this cohort. Perhaps along the way, we will find out why the

other three did not know better.

The long debate

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Is The Merchant of Venice Antisemitic? V7
The resolution of this controversy - a personal journey
By John Warszawski

The question, “Is The Merchant Of Venice Antisemitic?” has been debated, if not for

400 years, then at least since Edmund Kean’s unprecedented portrayal of Shylock in 1814 (I

come back to this). But on one thing all agree; the playwright portrays Shylock as an

exemplar of the archetypal tropes that define the historical Christian “idea of a Jew”. Shylock

is rich and obsessed with money, he is vengeful and bloodthirsty, he is corruptly legalistic,

cunning and inhuman. Every character in the play, except Shylock’s Jewish friend Tubal,

ascribes to this grotesque idea of a Jew, and likely, nearly everyone in Elizabethan England

did too.

Yes, there is something strange about this because in 1596 when the play was written,

there were no Jews in England. They had all, except for some conversos, been expelled three

hundred years before, in 1290 by Edward 1st. The conundrum is, how come, without ever

having met a Jew, it was generally accepted that Jews were agents of the devil? Sure, they

may have heard about the blood libel in church sermons and in morality plays, that Jews use

Christian blood for ritual purposes, or perhaps they had followed the trial of Dr Lopez (see

below). But all this only begs the question.

So how can I claim that The Merchant of Venice is not antisemitic? Even such

luminaries of Shakespearean hermeneutics as Harold Bloom have written: "One would have

to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognise that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The

Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly antisemitic work” and that he is pained to

think the play has done “real harm to the Jews for some four centuries now.”

Blind, deaf and dumb? And Real harm?

But first, let us set the scene.

It is 1596, the year The Merchant of Venice was completed, and just two years after

Queen Elizabeth’s Doctor, Roderigo Lopez a converted Portuguese Jew, was trialled and

executed – publically hung, drawn and quartered, for allegedly plotting to poison her. During
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Is The Merchant of Venice Antisemitic? V7
The resolution of this controversy - a personal journey
By John Warszawski

the doctor’s trial the whole country was up in arms. Mobs in the streets of London demanded

death to the Jew! and according to contemporary commentators, the spontaneous jubilation

that broke out at the gruesome spectacle of his death, then spread throughout England.

Significantly, the Merchant of Venice references this event in the trial scene of Act 4,

when Gratiano speaks of Shylock’s “wolfish soul” and of “the wolf who hanged for human

slaughter” – the Latin for wolf ‘lupus’ puns on the Doctor’s name ‘Lopez’.

To take advantage of the public mood for Jewish blood, in fact the very next day,

Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew Of Malta went into rehearsal. It was wildly popular,

especially the part when the Jew gets boiled alive in a cauldron of boiling oil.

This was the mood and context in which The Merchant of Venice was written. For us

to understand the play four hundred years later, we must have in mind that it was illegal for

Jews to live in England, and unthinkable for an English playwright to create an overtly

sympathetic portrayal of a Jew.

“Art made tongue-tied by authority” – Shakespeare Sonnet 66

In 1559 Queen Elizabeth proclaimed that no play should be performed that dealt

with “religion or ...governance...", in effect making blasphemy and political commentary a

crime. Writers such as John Stubs had his right hand cut off for comment on the queens

proposed marriage and William Pryne, a Puritan, had his ears removed. Thomas Nashe,

Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Kyd, George and John Marston and John Haywood were

imprisoned for political allusions or libels in their dramatic or prose works. Marlowe was

questioned for seditious and atheistic ideas, released on bail then mysteriously killed ten days

later. His friend and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd was tortured in prison – his forced

confession may have lead to Marlowes demise. Many other writers were summoned for

questioning and often had changes to their manuscripts imposed.

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Is The Merchant of Venice Antisemitic? V7
The resolution of this controversy - a personal journey
By John Warszawski

In 1599 “The Bishops Ban” included a list of books to be burned, and a total ban on

the writing of unauthorised English historical works and satirical works. The entire works of

Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey were banned for ever. Their outrageously witty and

merciless satires delighted many, but offended some – most famously each other. It’s not

surprising that under such conditions of fear and suppression, all plays (except George Peel’s)

performed in the playhouses before 1594, were written either anonymously or hidden behind

a front man or a pseudonym. Many now believe William Shakespeare was a pseudonym.

What is pertinent to this essay, is how these dangerous conditions affected the way

writers wrote and consequently how we must interpret their work. Annabel Patterson, in her

ground breaking book “Censorship and Interpretation”, published in 1984, was perhaps the

first modern scholar to take account of the wider effects of censorship on early modern

literature – opening the door to re-interpreting works of this period. In the 2nd chapter, “The

Hermeneutics of Censorship”, she writes: “The continuous and repressive watchfulness of

authority led writers” to adopt “oblique strategies of communication”, “carefully planned

ambiguity”, “strategies of indirection”, “to say one thing, but mean another. By using

allusions, suggestions and hinting through trivial facts, a playwright might be able to

communicate with the wiser sort in an audience and yet avoid confrontation with authorities”.

Using Shakespeare’s “King Lear” as a case in point, she argues that the allusions in

King Lear to the failings and foibles of the current monarch King James 1, would have been

grounds for a charge of sedition. But with the use of “carefully planned ambiguity” and other

“strategies of indirection”, the writer was able to moderate the censors reaction to a list of

compulsory text changes. Whatever their suspicions, the censors had to weigh the

consequences of too much censorship. Prosecuting the writer, especially such a popular one,

may in fact raise public awareness of the kings failings. Too many prosecutions would

overload the system and could inflame public resentments and encourage more covert
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The resolution of this controversy - a personal journey
By John Warszawski

communications. Ultimately, it is counterproductive in troubled and rebellious times, to add

fuel to the perception that the social contract between the ruling class and the people is

breaking down.

This left the writer some leeway – writers adapted the way they wrote, they managed

the risks, they self-censored and refined their ‘strategies of indirection’.

Still it was a dangerous game, as the mood and the ‘unwritten rules’ of censorship

could suddenly be changed by such events as the Doctor Lopez trial, the Essex rebellion or

the ascension to the throne by James 1.

This analysis of the effect of censorship on literature in 16th and 17th century England

is informed by the extensive and surprisingly sophisticated discourses on the subject by the

writers themselves, including Ben Jonson, John Donne and John Milton.

Bad boy Ben, arguably the most outspoken of the playwrights, had more run-ins with

authority than any of them. He wrote incisively in his poetry and plays about censorship and

bemoans the writer’s lot in the posthumous publication of his book, ‘Under-wood’, a

collection of his early poetry:

Epigram 44: (He) ... “cries out, my verses libels are!

And threatens the star chamber and the bar.”

Epigram 68: “Playwright convicted of public wrongs to men,

Takes private beatings and begins again...”

“Shylock is my name”

In the case of The Merchant of Venice, the stakes were even higher than usual. It was

unthinkable to portray a Jew as a hero, defending himself and his people against the

persecution and hypocrisy of Christians. Drawing parallels with the recent Doctor Roderigo

case would have further compounded the crime inviting accusations of sympathy with the

plot to murder the queen. No playwright had gone this far, and the likely consequence would
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Is The Merchant of Venice Antisemitic? V7
The resolution of this controversy - a personal journey
By John Warszawski

have been nothing short of the elimination of the writer and the Shakespeare canon from the

world.

To avoid this outcome the writer made good use of every one of the above

mentioned strategies of obliqueness, ambiguity and indirection, and where needed, invented

new ones. For example, The Merchant of Venice is set in a foreign city, not London. The Jew

is portrayed as a villain and matches the prevailing image of a Jew and is therefore

uncontroversial. And by ostensibly making the play a comedy at the Jew’s expense, it renders

his accusations laughable. Above all it was necessary that the Jew loses in the end and the

Christians win – as Marco Roth puts it in his essay on ‘Shylockism’ in Tablet Magazine,

“Without Jewish guilt there can be no Christian innocence”.

Each of these accommodations would help allay the censors fear of controversy. To appease

the censors it was essential to avoid confronting the biases of the audience – as Annabel

Patterson has detailed, the censors would take less interest if there was no adverse public

response or objections from authorities or important people.

To achieve its grand deception, The Merchant of Venice makes use of allegory and

parody in novel ways. The play has two variously intermixed narratives: Overtly it is a

Venetian comedy about a buffoonish evil Jew who wants his pound of flesh from the good

Christian merchant Antonio. However there is a counter-narrative hidden within the comedy,

in fact a tragedy of a man, a Jew named Shylock. It is the genius of this play that it was

written in such a manner, that those disposed not see a Jew as a human being, would not see

the actual man or his tragedy – he is almost never referred to by name, but as “The Jew” as if

a Jew is some other kind of creature. It was the writer’s gambol, a theatrical sleight of hand,

to use the mythology of the evil Jew, the widely accepted image of a Jew, while

simultaneously revealing to those in the audience not blinded by their bias, the actual man
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Is The Merchant of Venice Antisemitic? V7
The resolution of this controversy - a personal journey
By John Warszawski

behind the myth; the man who answers his accusers, “Shylock is my name.”

“Which is the merchant and which is the Jew?”

Portia, disguised as a Professor of Law, asks at the beginning of the trial scene, “Which is the
merchant and which is the Jew?”. It is in effect a coded message, a stage direction that the
actor playing the Jew should be dressed like a normal person – and not as a grotesque
buffoon in red spiky wig or as a demon with horns and a tail, as were the theatrical
conventions of the time. This alone was a radical departure and a paradigm shift that would
alert the “wiser sort”, the unblinded within the audience, to look out for other paradigm shifts.

“The quality of mercy”

Early in the trial scene, Portia disguised as a law professor, delivers her famous

speech on “The quality of mercy”, a speech of such dazzling eloquence that it is still quoted

by trial lawyers today, no doubt to inject a touch of Shakespearean flair into their

performance. Everyone is impressed except Shylock who mocks this so called Christian

mercy, and their ownership of “slaves...(who are treated) like your asses...dogs and mules”.

He rejects their appeals to show mercy to Antonio and insists on his legally agreed-to pound

of Antonio’s flesh, the bond for failing to repay a loan of 3000 ducats by the due date.

Throughout the play much is made of the Jew’s lack of love and mercy as the defining

difference between Jews and Christians. Ultimately the play will dismantle this as delusion.

It would not have escaped the notice of an astute Elizabethan theatre patron, that the

horror image of a blood-spurting pound of living flesh being cut from Antonio’s chest, was

evocative of the recent public disembowelling and dismembering of the Jew Roderigo Lopez,

the Queen’s doctor – but with the roles reversed.

But just as Antonio bares his chest ready for Shylocks knife and all seems lost, our

hero(ine) saves the day. The judicially robed Portia, parsing like a Talmud scholar, objects:

“You can take the flesh but not a drop of Christian blood (a clear reference to the blood libel)

or be hung for murder”.

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The resolution of this controversy - a personal journey
By John Warszawski

Thwarted by this legal technicality, Shylock offers to settle for the loan repayment

after all. But Portia is not done yet; “Tarry, Jew”. She has done her homework and has

discovered a law that “An alien who seeks to directly or indirectly cause the death of a

Christian citizen is punishable by death”. Not just a pretty face; but tough and smart, and all

are duly delighted with this delightful young ‘man’.

The Duke of Venice who is the judge, is moved to pronounce that in the spirit of

mercy, and in contrast to the Jew’s vengefulness, he will spare his life. But only on condition

that the Jew complies with the three proposals put by Antonio:

The Jew must will all he is possessed of at his death to the eloped couple, the

Christian Lorenzo and his daughter Jessica. Next, he must give fifty percent of his wealth to

Antonio who will invest it on Lorenzo’s behalf and transfer it to him on the Jew’s death.

And lastly, the Jew must convert to Christianity.

Mercy or Revenge?

So have the Duke, Portia and Antonio been merciful as they repeatedly claim?

Consider the effect of the courts sentence on Shylock:

On Shylocks death, all his wealth will be transferred to his daughter’s husband, financially

binding her into this Christian marriage for as long as Shylock lives.

Shylock’s reputation as an honest businessman is ruined and Antonio will finally have the

Venetian loan market to himself.

And lastly, he must convert to the very religion that has “scorned my nation”.

Mercy? Or mercy most cruel?

Clearly it is not Shylock but his accusers who get revenge; having cut from Shylock’s heart

all that he holds most dear.

Okay, maybe they do not practice the mercy they preach. Maybe they are more
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hypocritical than merciful. But this Jew was after all, going to cut out a pound of flesh from

next to Antonio’s heart. So did Shylock get what he deserved?

“Still have I born it with a patient shrug”

In the courtroom Shylock insisted on his legal right to get his bond as per the written

loan contract, and that he was not obliged to give any reason other than it is his legal right.

But some weeks before the trial, on the street and on the Rialto, he gave reasons more

profound and more compelling, than spoken by any other in the play:

“Shylock: Signor Antonio, many a time and oft

In the Rialto you have rated me

About my moneys and my usances:

Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,

For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe....

(You) foot me as you spurn a stranger cur...

You spit on me on Wednesday last...

You call'd me dog; and for these courtesies

I'll lend you thus much moneys?

Antonio: I am as like to call thee so again

To spit on thee again .....”

But now before the court, Antonio is suddenly humble and respectful, a paragon of Christian

virtue. Why didn’t Shylock expose this hypocrisy? Did he think it wouldn’t help him? and

that the legal document, the words written and signed in the loan contract, would be more

effective?

“What’s his reason? I am a Jew”

In the street, Solario meets Shylock.

Solario: I’m sure if he forfeits, you wouldn’t take his flesh: what’s that good for?”
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Shylock: ... it will feed my revenge.

He hath disgraced me and hindered me half a million,

laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation,

thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies –

And what’s his reason? I am a Jew...

If you prick us, do we not bleed?...

If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?

Why, revenge! ...

This speech like much of the play is intentionally ambiguous and lends itself to two entirely

contrary interpretations: as an indictment of his persecutors or alternatively as an evil

bloodthirsty and inhuman blasphemy. What the audience will hear will depend on the actor’s

interpretation and on their own attitudes.

Again Shylock does not repeat a word of this in the courtroom. Again, did he assume

that raising the issue of his Jewishness in court would be counter-productive?

The pivotal line: “...and what’s his reason? I am a Jew” , is a specifically Jewish question. It

is a question that answers itself and implies that it is not a reason at all. Rather it is an

accusation that Antonio’s Jew hatred is a delusional avoidance of his own guilt and self-

hatred. At the same time Shylock’s words express a grief that is profoundly personal yet takes

in the sweep of history. It is the pivotal point in what is Shylock’s and the play’s most

powerful evocation, because it goes directly to the heart of the tragedy - the hatred towards

Jews, towards himself and to his people, and the hypocrisy that sustains it.

It is critical to the meaning of the play that we hear this utterly plain spoken prose, as

it spells out the idiosyncratic nature of this particular hatred – it is not a metaphor about

racism in general as many modern scholars and theatre directors, perhaps with good

intentions, prefer to believe. But at this haunted time, post October 7th 2023, I can’t avoid
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questioning why this particular line is so rarely quoted - is it too raw, embarrassing, or just

too Jewish? While the following lines of this speech such as, “if you prick us do we not

bleed”, are among the most quoted lines in literature - lines which when taken out of context

become slogans of a more morally acceptable humanism and allow us (Jews and non Jews)

to void the disconcerting issue of Christian guilt and hypocrisy.

With the recent upsurge in antisemitism in the USA and Europe and even in China, is

it once again uncomfortable (for Jews and non Jews) to insist so specifically and so

unpoetically on behalf of Jews? Is this a time like so many times before, when being a Jew

has become contentious?

“Blame the Jews” has been a most useful strategy

In David Nirenberg’s seminal history “Anti-Judaism, The Western Tradition”, he

documents the development of the idea or image of a “Jew” from early Christian times and

how this idea has been adapted for different circumstances right up to the present. This

historically cumulatively constructed idea of a Jew has flourished even in countries that had

no Jews, an idea that has proven extraordinarily useful for shifting blame - and with

devastating effect. We all bear witness in daily headlines and twitter feeds that still now,

there is no more effective way of blinding ourselves to our own failings than to blame the

Jews - an idea that like a virus, mutates anew and insinuates itself, even in our most free

democracies.

It is this archetypal idea of a Jew, and not a generalised victim of racism, that is on

trial in the Merchant of Venice. But allegorically, it is the visceral man in all his specificity

that is revealed and gives the play its power and universality.

“I wish she were dead at my feet”

Shylock curses his daughter for the money and jewellery she stole, and for eloping

and converting to Christianity; “I wish she were dead at my feet”. It was the brutality of these
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words that had left me gasping and convinced that Harold Bloom and Anthony Julius must

be right; the play is irredeemably antisemitic.

But revisiting this scene a few years later, and now conscious of the conditions of

censorship that the writer was under, I discover that this most brutal line, in fact contains the

most powerful allegory in the play - it reveals the depth of Shylock’s tragedy. He who had all

his life “borne it with a patient shrug, for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe”, could no

longer shrug it off. After Jessica’s elopement and conversion to Christianity, and after

learning of the plot by Antonio and his cohorts to bring this about, Shylock is finally

broken. It breaks him:

“O my daughter”
“Solanio: I never heard a passion so confused,

So strange, outrageous, and so variable,

As the dog Jew did utter in the streets.

“My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter,

Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats! ...”

Solario: Why, all the boys in Venice follow him, crying,

“His stones, his daughter, and his ducats!”

Yes, through the eyes of Solanio and Solario, the “dog Jew” is laughable. But beneath this

parody, this cruel comedy, lies his buried heart:

“Shylock: (To Tubal, his Jewish friend)

I never felt the curse on my ancient nation so hard before...

what is this that I now feel upon my shoulders?...

“...no sighs but of my breathing; no tears but of my shedding.”

This poetry of a soul rending sense of loss is easily missed as it is deliberately concealed

amongst his expressions of bitterness over the financial losses Jessica has caused him.
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Decoding the author’s necessary deceptions, we read Shylocks words of bitterness and

brutality towards his daughter as in fact being a measure of his love – his “tears” are for his

daughter, not for the money. And the murderous rage that seems directed at her, is in fact

directed at those who had plotted to steal her from him.

I don’t want to stretch the comparison, but I could not help recalling how Tevye (in

the original Yiddish novel that ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is based on) had sat shiva (the Jewish

ritual of mourning for the dead) after his daughter eloped with a Christian. Unable to live

with their unbearable loss, both fathers imagine their daughter dead.

It was imperative in this particularly menacing moment in English history, not to

openly portray the widowed Shylock as a caring father, mourning the loss of his beloved only

daughter. To elicit sympathy for him by endowing him with the ability to love, would more

than any other humanizing trait, expose the writers subterfuge. But the clues are plain to see

for those in the audience not blinded by their bias. Even as Shylock rants about the money,

we are given to understand, it’s not about the money. We know he was not the slightest bit

persuaded by an offer of twenty times the loan amount, if he withdrew his claim. So money is

clearly not his deepest concern. When he tells his Jewish friend Tubal that there are “no sighs

but of my breathing; no tears but of my shedding”, he is not thinking about the money he has

lost, but about his daughter.

And when he learns that his daughter has “given his turquoise ring for a

monkey”, his distress is again not about the money: it was the ring his beloved wife

Leah had given him, “I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys”.

“J’accuse”

It is this man, half crazed by grief and persecution, that enters the courtroom seeking

revenge, his pound of flesh. But he also seeks to challenge the Christian world; “If a Christian

wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?”. This is his “J’accuse”.
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Both Shylock and the Judge, the Duke of Venice, are acutely aware of the wider significance

of this trial. Venice is the world’s greatest trading hub and ships from all corners of the globe

pass through. Justice, especially to an alien, must be seen to be done. The Venetian economy

and of course the Duke’s own coffers depend on it.

The stakes are further raised as the trial involves not just the two merchants, Shylock

and Antonio, but also Antonio’s young playboy clique, Bassanio, Lorenzo and Gratiano,

scions of the Venetian nobility.

The personal narratives run parallel to the great economic and cultural shifts of the

time. The growing power of commerce represented by the Jewish money lender, that

threatens the old world order represented by the nobility.

In defence of Portia, a Renaissance Woman

Up to this point we have looked at some of the devices the writer uses to hide, albeit

in plain sight, the forbidden story of the tragedy of Shylock. But we now come to the over-

arching subterfuge; the simultaneous telling of another story as a distraction, the story the

audience will want to believe - the story of the evil Jew who gets his just deserts through the

courage and the brilliance of Portia.

Yes, Portia the beautiful, most intelligent and extremely wealthy heiress, a

renaissance woman, is the undisputed hero(ine) of the overt narrative. She takes on the male

world of the law and wins with more than just a dash of style – she is everybody’s darling. It

is her dazzling image that takes the lime light, and has incidentally, made her a modern

feminist icon.

But if we sneak a peek into the shadows there are questions lurking:

Should we ignore that she misled the court by hiding her vested interest in the case? She is

after all the fiancé of Antonio’s best friend Bassanio.

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And does it matter that she did not cross-examine Antonio to expose his persecution of

Shylock?

And surely it is dodgy, one could say ”Jewish”, to use the bias of the court against the Jew to

win? convicting Shylock on a bogus charge? Because in fact Shylock did not break the law.

He only petitioned the court to rule on the legality of the loan agreement and only insisted on

getting what he was legally entitled to.

Oh but Portia knew exactly what she was doing. Having charmed the court and

knowing their bias against the Jew, she knew they would not examine her ruling too closely.

She gave them what they wanted - and what the Elizabethan audiences wanted.

So does any of this tarnish her? After all she only did what any ambitious and talented

male lawyer would have tried to do. And who says a woman must be nice?

And should we judge her for a bias that she was born into? Is it fair to expect her to be a hero

of the values of a different time? Can we blame her for being turned off the Prince of

Morocco because of the colour of his skin? At least to her best friend Nerissa, she is an

“honest hypocrite”, admitting that she is not so good at heeding her own good advice.

In the forbidden story, the allegory of the tragedy of a man, there are no heroes, and

perhaps no villains either.

This courtly conspiracy of hypocrites

In fact, everything that the Jew is accused of - greed, dishonesty, vengefulness, blood-

lust and inhumanity - his accusers are themselves guilty of at every turn. The writer, who of

necessity must not overtly accuse the accusers, does so implicitly; every claim to the higher

moral ground is undermined:

Antonio who is cruel and demeaning to the Jew, is ‘too’ kind to those whose patronage he

seeks. In business it is he who is corrupt and greedy. And he ‘doth protest too much’ the

selflessness of his love for Bassanio, which when unrequited, curdles into a masochistic lust
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to martyr his own flesh – In his final declaration to Bassanio he puns: “For if the Jew do

cut but deep enough, I'll pay it (the debt) presently with all my heart.”

Bassanio schemes to win the hand of the wealthy heiress Portia to pay off his mounting debts,

despite knowing that this puts the life of his best friend Antonio at risk.

Lorenzo schemes with Antonio and his friends to steal away the teenaged Jessica and her

father’s money.

The Duke who is the judge, is no less complicit. Beholden to the aristocracy, he

was more than willing to compromise the fairness of his court.

And our hero(ine) Portia, so eloquent and merciful, smiled sweetly as she turned the knife...

It was not Shylock but this courtly conspiracy of hypocrites that got their pound of

flesh, cutting out all that was nearest to his heart. Ultimately the court found the Jew guilty;

not so much of breaking the written law, but of rejecting their pleas to show mercy to

Antonio. It was Shylock’s ‘inherently Jewish’ lack of mercy that justified his punishment and

enabled the nobles of Venice to remain blind to their own crimes. “Without Jewish guilt,

there can be no Christian innocence”.

Is it not reasonable to think that the average Elizabethan in the audience and the Master of the

Revels who was the official censor of the theatre, would have felt most gratified?

Ah Jessica, but how should we judge you?

Should we say it was your innocence? and Lorenzo’s aristocratic glamour that

seduced you? Yet you yourself seemed so enthusiastic.

The writer having orchestrated this mystery, keeps us hanging till the end, and then in a kind

of postscript to the play, we are given two intriguing counterpoints:

In the final act, just before the young elopers join with the others in their victory

celebrations, we find them, in the moonlight of Belmont, in the garden of Portia’s palace.

They compare themselves to famous lovers from classic literature. But hidden within this
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charming conceit is the unmentioned fact that the four pairs of lovers that they name, all

came to tragic ends. Are they fated to be punished for the grief they have caused her father?

What kind of victory is this? It’s no way to end a comedy!

The second discordant note is sounded in the final lines of this final scene, and again
the playwright finds a way of turning the need for discretion to dramatic advantage.

Lorenzo and Jessica, having squandered all the money and jewels they stole from her
father on fast living and a pet monkey etc, receive a letter from the court that on her father’s
death, all his wealth is willed to them. Lorenzo is jubilant, “You (the court) drop manna in
the way of starvéd people”. But Jessica, who most piques our interest, is screamingly silent -
an inexpressible confusion about her father? about herself?
Was there ever a more poignant absence of words to end a play? And what censor
could find fault with what she didn’t say?

Has The Merchant of Venice caused real harm?

We return to the question I raised but left unanswered: has The Merchant of Venice

caused “real harm to the Jews for some four centuries now” as the Shakespeare scholar

Harold Bloom was “pained to think”?

We know historically that performances of the play pandered to the anti-Jewish bias

of the time. Shylock, typically portrayed as a grotesque buffoon, hissing and cackling evilly,

was guaranteed to fire up the audience. The jeering echoes of the famously rowdy

Elizabethan audience still haunt the Shakespeare stage. The play was no less a favourite with

the Nazis after nineteen thirty three in Germany.

But the question is, and this is what matters, did anyone in these audiences actually

become an antisemite because of the play? Wouldn’t anyone watching such a travesty of the

written play, that was not already an antisemite or so inclined, be horrified?

Despite the fashion, post holocaust, to portray Shylock sympathetically, scholars such

as Harold Bloom and Anthony Julius and theatre goers and readers, myself included

(initially), have found the play to be fundamentally antisemitic. Does it work to attribute
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fiendish traits to Shylock and at the same time insist on his humanity? – isn’t this a kind of

liberal antisemitism?

I admit that my own sensitivity to anti-Jewish tropes had me reeling and it took an act of will

to re-examine why and how these tropes were being used, in the climate of the time in which

the play was written.

Elizabethan Eyes

‘In the climate of the time in which the play was written’ is the critical point.

In “Censorship and Interpretation”, Patterson argues that the two nouns that make up the

title of the book are inextricably linked. So much so that it is impossible to interpret the

meaning of the play without knowing the conditions of censorship that were in place when

it was written. Perhaps more than any other Elizabethan play, The Merchant of Venice can

only be understood if seen within the original context – which included a heightened risk to

the writer of imprisonment or worse. We must understand that the play is the end result of

a self censoring process. Like lawyering a newspaper article to ensure against being sued for

libel, the playwright had to scrutinise each line with the particular current conditions of

censorship in mind, and where needed, find another way to say it.

The need to disguise subversive messages was a fact of life in England in 1596, and a

sophisticated theatre goer, well practised in the Elizabethan sport of deciphering what lies

behind a pun, a sly allusion or a metaphor, was well qualified to find the hidden meanings.

But today’s theatre goer, and even the canniest critic or the most erudite

Shakespeare scholar, if they do not know to factor in the effect of censorship at the time of

writing, will not even know to look for hidden meanings. How else can we explain this 400

year long misinterpretation? We must look with Elizabethan eyes.

This monumental act of faith

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The playwright wrote many plays with hidden allegories. But in no other play was the

quest more quixotic or more perilous – how to disturb the assumptions of at least those not

irredeemably afflicted by this longest hatred, and how to do this at the very time it was most

dangerous to do so – in the hostile atmosphere immediately after the trial of the queen’s

doctor, the converted Jew Roderigo Lopez, who was hung before a jeering mob then hacked

to pieces.

The Brave Mr Kean

In 1814 the actor Edmund Kean did something unprecedented; he portrayed Shylock

sympathetically. His Drury Lane opening night performance “roused the audience to almost

uncontrollable enthusiasm.” Jane Austen in a letter to her sister wrote: “So great is the rage

for seeing Kean” we could barely get seats for Saturday. And contemporaries noted that

“Kean had brought dignity and humanity to the character”. One critic wrote that “the actor

Edmund Kean was willing to see in Shylock what no one but Shakespeare had seen in over

two hundred years – the tragedy of a man.”

POSTSCRIPT : How is all this relevant in2024?

On page one of this essay I wrote: “Yes I was mortified? But also angry. Fie on these

Englishmen! these giants of literature (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, TS Eliot) that

composed the songs of our humanity; how is it possible that they did not know better?

But I had no answer.”

Does this re-interpretation of The Merchant of Venice contain an answer? How such a

visionary Christian reformer such as Martin Luther could end up so virulently anti-Jews. Or

how the Jewish “banality of evil” writer Hannah Arendt, could join her lover, the influential

German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in perhaps the most breath-taking blame-shift of all

time, that the holocaust would not have happened if the Jews had not cooperated with the
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Nazis. And earlier I had questioned whether we can blame Portia for conforming to the mores

she was born in to?

So let see what materials we have gathered to explain how good and clever people can

be antisemitic. David Nirenberg documents how Christian writings and teachings have

historically defined Christianity by how it differentiates itself from Judaism. Christianity was

designed to be anti-Judaism (ie Judaism as defined by Christianity). In its simplest

formulation, Christianity is love and mercy and moral integrity and is the antithesis of

Judaism’s hatred, vengefulness and moral corruption which is also the rational in The

Merchant of Venice.

David Nirenberg, based on his massively extensive document research on Christian

Theological writings, concludes that, Christian attitudes are the foundation of western culture,

and whether you are Christian, atheist or Jew, anti-Judaism is integral to this world view.

TS Eliot, like the church and like Hitler believed that western culture was being

corrupted by Jews. They all used the same Christian or ‘Shylock’ model, as did Dickens in

the character of Fagin and Chaucer in his blood libel in the Canterbury Tales. Let me be clear

that the equivalence implied here is a narrow one and applies mainly to attitudes to Jews.

The historical Christian model of a Jew is the Christ murderer, Shylock with a knife poised to

plunge into Antonio’s heart – a devil in our midst that will destroy us. He may look like one

of us but you can recognise him by his behaviours, his greed and cunning etc. This image is

so deeply seated into western culture that almost inevitably it becomes our default reality. It

is our cultural inheritance and its effect can be likened to the way our genetic inheritance

operates. You will see confirmation of this ‘reality’ in every aspect of our culture; our

education, our institutions , our languages, our politics and economics and our social

structures. Our brain will tend not see anything that is inconsistent with our unconscious
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biases - it will simply not compute. The Merchant of Venice relies on this psychology ‘to

hide its forbidden message in plain sight’.

But unlike 400 years ago, the great majority, at least intellectually, reject such

unsophisticated notions. But this does not remove ones unconscious bias. We may suppress

it, we may contextualise it, but we can’t delete it. We may even be conscious of this and try

to manage it - and I believe most do so more or less successfully. However the most

disturbing category are those who are totally unconscious of their underlying cultural

antisemitic inheritance or for some reason are compelled to deny its existence. This is how

good, caring, informed and intelligent people, including Jews, can be antisemites. This is how

we can have good people, including Jews, denying Israel’s right to exist, while truly

believing they are being morally rigorous. Or they may believe the horrific loss of innocent

Palestinian lives in Gaza confirms Israel’s illegitimacy, while being oblivious to the

screaming hypocrisies of this argument. Without any understanding of how unconscious bias

can control us, antisemitism will always win the argument. This is how antisemitism can stay

latent within us and then suddenly break out, whenever there is a perfect storm. This has

always happened in times of great troubles and when the need for a scapegoat becomes

overwhelming.

What does The Merchant reveal about antisemitism?

Antonio a self righteous Christian is a tortured soul. He makes money by buying and reselling

at a profit – tantamount to usuary and called ‘Judaising’ by the church. He is in love with

Bassanio, an aristocratic youth whom he grooms with loans of money that Bassanio never

pays back. He is ashamed and secretive about this passion, as homosexuality is considered an

abomination by the church. This makes his pretence of high Christian morals hypocritical to

himself. He is depressed about his business possibly failing and about Bassanio wanting to

marry Portia. He covers all his insecurities and self hatred with his over the top generosity to
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his Aristocratic young friends whose patronage he courts. He agrees to allow Bassanio put his

life at risk. He directs all his self hatred into self righteous persecution of Shylock.

So why does he hate Shylock: Because he knows he is guilty of all the things he accuses Jews

of doing. And by re-directing his self loathing onto Shylock he wipes away his own sins. He

desperately needs Shylock as a scape goat. Otherwise he would no outlet for his self hatred.

He seems to welcome his death by shylocks knife.- a kind of suicide.

Antonio is one model of Christian anti-Judaism

Antonio represents modern 16th centuary Christian society. Commercially,

ambitious, and using money to get social acceptance from the ruling class. He is

in many ways a competitor with the Jews. But he must differentiate himself

from the Jews, He Christian morals. He doesn’t charge interest, and he is

generous with his money to those whose patronage and approval he wants. But

he is a hypocrite who hides his sins and accuses the Jew of committing the sins

he himself is guilty of. His self esteem relies on his friends thinking he is such a

generous friend and such a good Christian. Only he knows it isn’t true. He

psychologically needs to vent his self loathing onto the Jew.

The Nobility and the Ruling class – a second model of anti-Judaism.

The Ruling class need a scapegoat to blame for their own failures. Britain in the

16th Century was booming as a trading power but there was great

dissatisfaction and rebelliousness among the population who suffered poverty

mistreatment and lack of freedoms. Jews were expelled from England in 1390

by Charles 1 for their economic crimes and being too successful. For their moral

crimes and religious crimes. But really they were expelled for the economic
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failures of the crown who were eager to confiscate the wealth and property of

the Jews.

The Church

I the 16th and 17th Centuries there were ongoing religious conflicts between

Catholics, Protestants and Puritans. Jews were the common enemy that all could

unite about. Even though there were no Jews in England, they remained a

common subject in Church sermons and Christian teaching and were the villains

of the morality plays. Jews, despite their absence, remained the source of evil in

the world. The Church were persistent in blaming Jews for all that was wrong in

the world and hypocritical about their own immorality.

Both are necessary. There is no point in blaming Jews unless this serves a purpose.

There is no point to self righteousness unless we have something to hide, from ourselves or

from each other. And guilt of many sorts is something the west has in abundance. How

irresistible it must be to blame the Jews when this has the power to make us moral heroes.

Our own moral failings seemingly disappear. By denying the humanity of the Jews, we save

humanity. It’s heady stuff, like a drug that instantly removes all problems and gets you high.

Can we blame Portia? And no wonder the Western world can’t break the habit. Yes hypocrisy

is addictive.

The Merchant of Venice, in the most surprising ways, does indeed provide a three

dimensional description of the mechanics of antisemitism? And in our own particular

moment in this history, we again, day by day, witness its power to confuse the world.

The General Population

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It was often easier to believe what the church told them about Jews than to take responsibility

for their own failings. They were eager to embrace the idea that Dr Rodrigez Lopez was

guilty of a plot to destroy England with a Nationalistic fervour that would replace their

dissatisfactions with the Crown and authority.

Bibliography
Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. By W. Shakespeare & Annabel Patterson.
Censorship and Interpretation. By Annabel Patterson.
Roderigo Lopez, Physician to Queen Elizabeth 1. By GM Weisz & Donatelli Lippi.
Anti-Judaism, The Western Tradition. By David Nirenberg.
Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human..By Harold Bloom.
‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’ By Janet Clare.
T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. By Anthony Julius
Shylock at the U.N. Tablet Magazine 28.2.2024. By Marco Roth.

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