Was Shylock Jewish?

The Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz: Taking Apart Shylock Using the SCM and BIAS Map

“…A tendency to see Shylock as the centre of the play, as opposed to Antonio, the Venetian merchant, appears in the historical record as early as 1598 when the play was listed in the Stationer’s Register as “the Jew of Venice” ( Drakakis, 2010 , p. 2). In her important realignment of the play’s early performance history, Emma Smith makes the point: “Almost every critic of The Merchant of Venice acknowledges Shylock as its most compelling figure, present in only five scenes and entirely absent from its final act” ( Smith, 2013 , p. 188). 2 Shylock’s accurate insights into his own condition, his grief, anger, and pursuit of revenge, give him the complexity of a tragic hero such as Macbeth; yet he is a Jew stereotype and his play – “Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy,” in the words of Harold Bloom – “is a profoundly anti-Semitic work” ( Bloom, 1998 , p. 171).…”

“…With respect to theater history, Emma Smith has recently overturned widespread critical assumptions “about the play’s Elizabethan context [that] do not stand up to close investigation. Recent criticism has used a partial and anecdotal version of theatrical and social history to reify Shylock’s ‘original’ cultural and ethnic Jewishness” ( Smith, 2013 , p. 188). She traces the origins of the physical features thought to signify the stereotyped Jew on the stage, including perhaps a red beard and “bottle” or hooked nose: fictions all.…”

“…The paucity of early modern references to specific visual signifiers of Jewishness suggests that Portia’s question in the courtroom, “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew? (4.1.171) is a real one” ( Smith, 2013 , p. 201). 6 Widespread claims that “Shylock draws on an existing and negative literary and theatrical caricature of Jewishness” are contrary to fact: “Jewish characters in drama before The Merchant of Venice are rare and sufficiently diverse to compromise any claim that they constitute an available stereotype” ( Smith, 2013 , p. 203).…”

“…6 Widespread claims that “Shylock draws on an existing and negative literary and theatrical caricature of Jewishness” are contrary to fact: “Jewish characters in drama before The Merchant of Venice are rare and sufficiently diverse to compromise any claim that they constitute an available stereotype” ( Smith, 2013 , p. 203). Furthermore, “the history of marked Jewish characters on the stage before Shylock does not support the assumption that Elizabethan audiences were primed to expect a wicked stereotype, or even that such a stereotype can be traced ( Smith, 2013 , p. 208). She suggests that in addition to anti-Judaic discourses, there were other factors at play when Shylock was created: issues also familiar to us today, such as immigration and xenophobia.…”

Marlowe and Shakespeare Cross Borders: Malta and Venice in the Early Modern World

“…Marlowe does not set up moral dichotomies between European and non-European or between Christian and Semitic/Jew, as does Shakespeare, as I argue later in this essay. 30 Integrated into the homogeneous culture of mercantilism and overriding greed, Barabas is not the exception but the rule in Malta. Those around him, both Christian and Muslim, differ only in degree and not kind in their rapacious and unscrupulous love of gold.…”