Shylock and the Idea of the Jew

Abstract

Current criticism notwithstanding, The Merchant of Venice seems to me a profoundly and crudely anti-Semitic play. The debate about its implications has usually been between inexpert Jewish readers and spectators who discern an anti-Semitic core and literary critics (many of them Jews) who defensively maintain that the Shakespearean subtlety of mind transcends anti-Semitism. The critics’ arguments, by now familiar, center on the subject of Shylock’s essential humanity, point to the imperfections of the Christians, and remind us that Shakespeare was writing in a period when there were so few Jews in England that it didn’t matter anyway (or, alternatively, that because there were so few Jews in England Shakespeare had probably never met one, so he didn’t really know what he was doing). Where I believe the defensive arguments go wrong is in their heavy concentration on the character of Shylock; they overlook the more encompassing attempt of the play to offer a total poetic image of the Jew.