Shakespeare and the Jews, by James Shapiro. ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1996. 317 pp. $29.95.
I am a Jew, and I teach Shakespeare. Ordinarily these two partsof my identity do not have much to do with each other, but theyeerily collide during a moment from the filmSchindler's List--specifically, when Amon Goeth, the fanatical concentrationcamp commandant, quotesThe Merchant of Venice. Goeth hasintruded on Helen Hirsch, his Jewish maid, as she--standing vulnerablyover a bucket in her wet blouse--prepares to bathe. He finds herattractive, but is in conflict about his desire because Nazi ideologymaintained that sexual contact with a Jew was a kind of bestiality.Goeth launches into a mock dialogue in which he ventriloquizesthe silent Helen's responses. "Is this the face of a rat?"he asks. "Are these the eyes of a rat?Hath not a Jeweyes? . . . I feel for you, Helen," he moves to kissher. Immobile, Helen says nothing. Goeth realizes what he hasalmost done. "No, I don't think so," he says, stoppinghimself. "You're a Jewish bitch. You nearly talked me intoit, didn't you?" Then, having blamed Helen for his lust,he savagely beats her.
"Hath not a Jew eyes?" is the most famous line fromShylock's most famous and troubling speech in which he arguesthat Jews are "fed with the same food, hurt with the sameweapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer" as Christiansare. It is hard to know quite what to do with this speech becauseon one hand Shylock's argument fits nicely with our cherishedideas about all men and women being created equal; on the otherhand--and looking at these lines out of their original contextit can be easy to forget this--the speech forms part of Shylock'sjustification for murderously seeking a pound of Antonio's fleshafter Antonio, Shylock's enemy and the merchant of the play'stitle, defaults on a loan: "If you prick us, do we not bleed?If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we notdie? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are likeyou in the rest, we will resemble you in that."
Shylock's speech and an audience's response to it make just thekind of ambivalent puzzle that students of Shakespeare enjoy chewingover. But what is "Hath not a Jew eyes?" doing inSchindler'sList ? What, to put the question another way, is a line fromShakespeare's complex speech about Jewish difference doing inthe mouth of a Nazi, in a movie about the Shoah? It seems crazilyout of place--an anachronism, absent from Thomas Keneally's noveland inserted into the film for dramatic effect--but it is notnecessarily inaccurate. The Nazis loved Shakespeare even thoughhe was the national poet of their English enemies, and maintainedthat they alone truly understood his plays. They loved in particularone Shakespearean comedy in which the merciless villain is a Jew:about fifty different productions ofThe Merchant of Venicesaw the German stage between 1933 and 1944. The real AmonGoeth, like his movie analog, might easily have seen the playperformed, even if he never quoted it to one of his Jewish victims.But if it is not, strictly speaking, anachronistic for a Nazito quote Shylock, the moment is still curious: why, in a moviereleased in 1993, do Steven Spielberg and his screenwriters chooseto have Goeth quote Shylock? Why do they imagine an agent of Hitler'sFinal Solution thinking about the difference between Jews andGentiles in Shakespearean terms that date from 1596? What, inother words, does Shakespeare have to do with the Jews?
This last question is not new, although since the Shoah increasinglyanxious suspicions that Shakespeare was an anti-Semite have lurkedin the margins of essays aboutThe Merchant of Venice.Jewish communities have protested productions of the play (mostrecently in Santa Cruz, California), trying to salvage their visionof a politically progressive Shakespeare, rather than an infinitelymalleable one, by silencing the play altogether. Academics, likewise,avoid the troubling possibility of Shakespeare's anti-Semitismwhen they tell their readers that there were no Jews in Englandfrom the time that King Edward I banished them in 1290 until OliverCromwell readmitted them in 1656. According to this argument,since no Jew's foot touched English soil during Shakespeare'slifetime we must absolve the bard of prejudice. To Shakespeare,living in a Londonsans shtetl, the Jews were effectivelyfictional characters; to arraign him on charges of anti-Semitism,therefore, is logically equivalent to condemning Dr. Seuss forbeing bigoted against grinches. One easy answer to our question,then, is that Shakespeare has nothing to do with the Jews. Butthis answer depends on a fairy tale: for more than a century historianshave been finding evidence of a tiny clandestine community ofElizabethan Jews in Shakespeare's England. The myth of total Jewishabsence, however, has proved strangely tenacious, perhaps in partbecause Shakespeare's absolution depends on it.
InShakespeare and the Jews, James Shapiro not only explodesthe myth of total Jewish absence (we can only hope once and forall), but also explores "the complex role of literature intransmitting such myths." Shapiro is an English professorat Columbia University, and in many ways his book is a deeplypersonal attempt to reconcile his professional identity with hisJudaism, but it is not a memoir. On the contrary,Shakespeareand the Jews is a monument of research from which I will happilysteal whenever I next teachThe Merchant of Venice. Anacademic gumshoe who has sleuthed his way through libraries fromLos Angeles to New York, Great Britain to Israel and back again,Shapiro presents a rich collection of unpublished manuscriptsas well as hitherto unscrutinized books from the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, all of which he uses to turn the usualstory about Jews in Shakespeare's England inside out:
Ultimately it is not the raw number of Jews in early modern England that is of interest as much as the kind of cultural preoccupation they became, that is, the way that Jews came to complicate a great range of social, economic, legal, political, and religious discourses, and turned other questions into Jewish questions as well.
Where earlier historians argued that the citizens of Shakespeare'sEngland would not have recognized Jews as even a topic of conversation,Shapiro contends the opposite: the Jews were a dominant Englishconcern. Not only did "Englishness" come to be "inpart defined by its relationship to Jewishness," but "theEnglish were obsessed with Jews in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies."
The immensity of these claims does a disservice to Shapiro's otherwiseformidable scholarship: he overemphasizes the stability of EnglishChristian identity in order to portray the Jews as a threat tothat identity. More importantly, he ignores the other kinds ofpeople whom the English perceived as imperilling "Englishness"as much as, if not more than, the Jews. For example, in both 1596and 1601 Queen Elizabeth signed proclamations authorizing theimmediate deportation of all Africans living in England to Spain.Other threats to English identity were internal: in the last thirtyyears of her reign Elizabeth's government executed almost 200people for secretly practising Catholicism. The English were notobsessed with Jews: they were xenophobes, obsessed with controllingor banishing all aliens and dissenters from the state-controlledChurch.
Although I am unconvinced by some of Shapiro's larger theoreticalfireworks,Shakespeare and the Jews is nonetheless an importantbook for anyone interested in the history of how Jews have beenrepresented, and howThe Merchant of Venice takes partin that history. The book's chapters work separately and as aninterdependent whole; in each of them the author links his argumentsto case studies, many of which have never before seen print. Methodologically,what distinguishes Shapiro is a fascinating central question:where his predecessors asked simply whether there were any Jewsin Shakespeare's England, Shapiro asks who did and who did notcount as a Jew.
Take, for example, the issue of Jewish conversion to Christianity,and specifically the notoriously murky history of Dr. RoderigoLopez-- a Portuguese-born convert who was accused, tried, convictedand executed in 1594 for plotting to poison his patient, QueenElizabeth. It has long been speculated that Lopez was Shakespeare'smodel for Shylock; perhaps because of this, among some historiansand literary critics the guilt or innocence of Dr. Lopez is asmuch a test of faith as, in other circles, an opinion regardingwhether or not Oswald acted alone. For Shapiro's purposes, theold story gets newly interesting at Lopez's execution. On thescaffold before he was hung, drawn, and quartered Lopez proclaimed--andthis is taken from a famous contemporary account--"that heloved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ; which, comingfrom a man of the Jewish profession moved no small laughter tothe standers-by." Lopez had not, in fact, professed Judaismfor many years, at least not in public: he had converted to Protestantism,but was still "suspected to be in sect secretly a Jew."
Shapiro argues that Jewish conversion was a philosophical headachefor the English far beyond the Lopez case: rumors circulated throughoutEurope that alleged Jewish converts continued to practice Judaismquietly at home while hypocritically attending Church on Sunday.It was impossible, therefore, to tell whether or not a Jew hadsincerely converted to Christianity. Moreover, if Jews wereraciallydifferent (and our own era's volatile definitions of race werejust forming in Shakespeare's day), then a further question concernedwhether or not it was physically possible for Jews to convertto the Christian race. Some English writers still believed inthefoetor judaicus--a legend concerning distinctive Jewishbody odor that dated from the middle ages--and argued "thatJewish converts were newly 'aromatized by their conversion' having'lost their scent with their religion.'" For skeptics, however,the logical unlikelihood of such an aromatization made even thepossibility of Jewish conversion doubtful. While to the postmodernmind these may seem peculiar worries, some early modern EnglishProtestants firmly believed that Christ's second coming was justaround the corner, and that--as Paul had stated inRomans--theconversion of all Jews to Christianity was a necessary prerequisiteto the millennium.
Questions concerning who does and does not count as a Jew werenot limited to abstract theological debates. The medieval confidencein a recognizable physical difference between Jew and Gentilehad evaporated, replaced in Shakespeare's day by a fear that itwas impossible to know that difference, impossible to know whomight be a Jew. Since many of the English mistakenly believedthat Jews habitually poisoned wells--and that they otherwise keptbusy with the abduction and crucifixion of Gentile children inorder to make matzoh out of their blood--their fear was genuine.In twentieth century productions ofThe Merchant of Venice,when Portia, the heroine, walks into a courtroom where Shylockand Antonio are standing next to each other and asks "Whichis the merchant here and which the Jew?" her question makesno sense; this is because Shylock wears a distinctive costumethat marks him out as visibly different than the other characters.No one knows what costume the actor who originally played Shylockwore on Shakespeare's stage, but for Portia's line to work thepossibility of an on-stage, visible and disturbing confusion betweenJews and Gentiles must have existed. This possibility shows howhard it was to demarcate what Shapiro calls "all too fluidreligious boundaries."
Shapiro's most vivid case studies concern people who crossed theseboundaries, among which are "false Jews" and "Judaizing"English Protestants. "False Jews"--con artists oftenin the pay of Jesuits trying to reclaim Protestant England forthe Pope--would testify their ways from town to town seriallyconverting to Christianity in public displays unsurprisingly similarto the hoopla that surrounds tented faith healers today. One suchfalse Jew was "Ramsey the Scot" who--having been circumcisedand knowing a bit of Hebrew--successfully convinced the Baptistpastor of the town of Hexham that he was an Italian Jew namedJoseph ben Israel, and that he wanted to convert. He was promptlybaptized in the River Tyne, only to be exposed as London-bornThomas Ramsey and a Jesuit agent in the next (less gullible) townhe visited. Shapiro points out that Ramsey's story is
valuable for what it tells us about the criteria that the congregants in Hexham. . . seized upon in identifying someone as Jewish. It was not Ramsey's physical appearance (other than the mark of circumcision) that compelled belief, but his knowledge of Hebrew and of the Scriptures. . . .
For the xenophobic inhabitants of Shakespeare's England, falseJews personified their worst nightmares of covert invasion byhypocritical Jesuits.
Judaizers, in contrast, were devout Protestants who sincerelyembraced Old Testament teachings. John Traske, Shapiro's strikingexample, wanted the English to follow Jewish dietary laws. Traske,and other Judaizers like him, unwittingly spread the dangerousidea that Christians could convert to Judaism, whereas ordinarilyonly Jewish conversion was thought possible. Traske, in otherwords, blurred the lines between Jew and Gentile. Shapiro's accountof the overreaction to Traske's teachings shows how seriouslythe English authorities took such blurring:
Traske was accused of "having a fantastical opinion of himself with ambition to be the father of a Jewish faction." The Star Chamber also found him guilty of "teach[ing] that the law of Moses concerning the differences of meats forbidding the eating of hog's flesh, conies, etc., is to be observed and kept." Traske was summarily expelled from the ministry, fined, and sent to prison in the Fleet for the rest of his life. The punishment did not stop there, however, for he was also sentenced "to be whipped from the prison of the Fleet to the Palace of Westminster with a paper on his head," and "then to be set on the pillory and to have one of his ears nailed to the pillory, and after he hath stood there some convenient time, to be burnt in the forehead with the letter "J" in token that he broaches Jewish opinions." Twelve days later Thomas Lorkin reported that "the sentence against the Jew hath been put into execution." And if this were not enough, insult was added to injury; while in prison Traske was "only allowed [to eat] the. . . meats in his opinion supposed to be forbidden."
Traske's punishment left the lines he blurred between Jews andGentiles just as blurry as they were before he was sent to theFleet: the authorities made Traske's invisibly abstract "Jewishness"painfully concrete and visible by branding him with the "J."On the other hand, Traske's pork-only diet in prison violatedthe very Jewishness the "J" was meant to convey.
I would find it comforting to believe that Traske's punishmentcould only have taken place during the distant past of the lesscivilized Renaissance, that the anxiety the English felt concerningwhat makes a Jew different were particular to Shakespeare andhis era, and that their sometimes violent responses to that anxietycould never happen today. Unfortunately,Shakespeare and theJews shows us thatThe Merchant of Venice marks thehistorical transition from a medieval idea of Jews as homicidalbogeymen to a conviction that Jews are different than Gentiles,but that the nature of that difference remains strangely difficultto define. Shakespeare gave this new understanding of Jewish differenceits first voice; in movies likeSchindler's List we continueto hear the echoes.
Return tobradberens.com "More Writing" page.