“Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy”, by Joe Gross

 

384 pages, Touchstone, ISBN-13: 978-0671883867

Shylock, the villainous Jewish usurer of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, has elicited sharply divergent responses, as Joe Gross reveals in Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, an invaluable, entertaining study of the legend of the rapacious Jew. Shylock has come down to us as any number of things: to Heinrich Heine, German poet, journalist, essayist and literary critic, The Merchant of Venice was a grand analogy between the conflict of Hellenism (represented by Portia) and Hebraism (represented by Shylock); to John Ruskin, English art critic, patron, draughtsman, artist, social thinker and philanthropist, Shylock was the personification of rapacious capitalism that had to be resisted through the power of mercy; to Theodor Reik, Austrian psychoanalyst and a pioneer of lay analysis, Shylock was an oral-aggressive personality and his demand for a pound of flesh a symbolic circumcision of Antonio (well, what else would you expect from a Freudian?); to Ernst Lubitsch, German-American film director, producer, writer and actor, Shylock was a way in which to attack the Nazis in satirical fashion in To Be or Not to Be, from 1942; to C. S. Lewis, British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer and Christian apologist, Merchant was a fairy tale, while to Frank Kermode, British literary critic, Merchant was an allegory; and to M. C. Bradbrook, British literary scholar and authority on Shakespeare, thought that there were Shylocks as well as martyrs in the concentration camps and seemed to recommend forcible baptism for Jews who were criminals. Damn.

(And don’t even get me started on what Alexander Pushkin, Karl Marx, Henry James, Ellen Terry, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, James Joyce or T. S. Eliot had to say about the guy).

Shylock is more than a study of a definitive character from a literary masterpiece; it is also a study of historic antisemitism and of changing attitudes towards the same in the centuries since Shakespeare wrote it. As Gross makes us see, it is important to understand that Shakespeare’s Jew was not the sympathetic character that our modern interpretations make him out to be (indeed, Shakespeare was writing about a prototypical, villainous, usurious Jew). But, being Shakespeare, he couldn’t help but write with insight and imagination, and simply to make Shylock a run-of-the-mill stock villain would not be nearly as good theater as if he were human too, with feelings that an audience could share (I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?...If you prick us, do we not bleed?). Those actors who showed Shylock’s humanity as well as his villainy, and who portrayed a tragic or sorely misused Shylock, may often, Mr. Gross says, “have gone too far, but it is Shakespeare himself who gave him their opening”.

The antisemitism of the 16^th Century was not the antisemitism of today; then, it was a matter of belief and not blood or genetics (thanks, Nazis); thus Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, is accepted by the Christians at Belmont because she has converted and dissociated herself from her father, while Antonio is perfectly willing to let Shylock keep half his property on certain conditions, one of which is that he will convert to Christianity. This is not the antisemitism of the 20^th Century that machine-gunned Jews and threw them in pits, or herded Jewish men, women and children to the gas chambers. It is hardly possible to read The Merchant of Venice today without thinking of the abominations to which antisemitism, or any variety of racism, leads. Shakespeare’s play, and other works of literature in which Jews were vilified, ranging from novels and detective stories to the poems of T. S. Eliot, contributed to antisemitism and made it socially acceptable (and lest we think we modern Americans are immune to such junk, I need only say the names Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to dissuade you of that). After the Holocaust one can hardly play The Merchant of Venice straight.