AntiSemitism In Shakespeare

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Anti-Semitism In Shakespeare’s Time Essay, Research Paper

A common assumption is that the forced conversion reflects the ideas of people “back then”. But as I have said before, and will say again, one must be cautious in ascribing beliefs in general to any large group of people in any time. Even in NAZI Germany where anti-semitism was state policy, did everyone hate Jews? Certainly not.

Nevertheless, we can often discern large-scale trends in belief, so long as we keep in mind that these trends are rarely if ever universal and often exist simultaneously with other strong, contradictory trends.

This issue is complicated by one fact in particular: it is not at all clear how many Jews even lived in England in Shakespeare’s time. Jews as a group were expelled from England in the late middle ages, and so it is quite likely that few practising Jews would have been left; Shakespeare quite likely knew none, and neither did the members of his audience. There were at least a few people around who were converted Jews, Jews who practiced Christianity.

The most famous of such people is Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who had converted to Christianity and had become by the early 1590’s the most prominent physician in London, for he was the royal physician who attended to Elizabeth. But Lopez was implicated in a plot to murder the queen and was hanged for treason.

The Lopez case highlights one thing clearly. It reminds us that the Elizabethans did not generally have the concept that we call “racism.” The idea of inherent superiority of one distinct group from another based on ancestry is a relatively recent development in the history of ugly thought. Thus, Lopez, a Jew by birth, could rise quite literally to the top of his profession, because he was a Christian, and thus not really a Jew in any important sense. In the same way, Othello is generally accepted in the world of Venice despite his racial background because he is a Christian and therefore is one of the Venetians, despite his dark skin.

My point here is that Jewishness was not a real issue in the lives of most Elizabethans, first because inherent Jewishness was not an established concept. Christians were opposed to those who were not Christians or who were blasphemers but that intolerance extended in all directions including within English society itself. Our old friend Marlowe was condemned for blasphemy and was reviled no less than Jewish characters in plays. Moreover, Jewishness was not a characteristic of real people for the English, it was the characteristic of dramatic characters, literary types. To make a character a Jew is to conveniently introduce a character with particular traits such as greed, hatred of Christians and so on. Shakespeare makes Shylock much more than a simple type, but that literary type is to be distinguished from what we would now call a stereotype in that it really has no social function in Shakespeare’s England.

For this reason, it is my view that while the play intends us to see Shylock as a villain, it is not an anti-semitic play in the sense most modern people tend to think of it, because semitism was not the same in Shakespeare’s England as it is now. As your note points out, there had been no holocaust in Shakespeare’s time, and official Christanity removed any debate over religion in general. My point here is that for the play to be anti-semitic in any real sense, there has to be a sense that its audience would be more inclined to treat Jews badly afterwards but treatment of Jews in Shakespeare’s England is a non-issue. Without semitism, there can be no anti-semitism.

Many people would disagree with this view and argue that the absence of a real Jewish community is not relevant. Many modern critics would contend, for example, that Jews and other foreigners in English plays take advantage of and help build a sense of “otherness” which in term consolidates the identity of the English nation. That is, the English are given a sense of themselves by contrasting themselves with outsiders. Moreover, they can aggrandize themselves by demonizing those others. English identity, it can be argued, is acheived on the backs of marginalized, oppressed groups such as Jews, Moors and others.

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