Stolen Daughters and Stolen Idols

Chapter 3 continues the discussion of the Genesis Jacob cycle’s intertextual relationship to The Merchant of Venice, focusing intently on Shylock’s daughter Jessica. This chapter examines how Jessica’s character is informed by two key biblical figures from that cycle of stories: Dinah and Rachel. The story of Dinah’s abduction by a non-Jewish prince contains several notable ambiguities on the question of her consent, which is sometimes figured as rape, other times as a love affair. By examining a series of different translations of Genesis 34, this chapter discusses how our understanding of Jessica’s motivations can be developed and explored through contemporary Renaissance renditions of Dinah’s story. Then, through a discussion of the biblical Rachel who, like Jessica, steals valuables belonging to her father, the chapter discusses how Renaissance writers used Rachel’s story to address women’s moral education in 16th and 17th century English conduct manuals. By examining ways in which Rachel was figured as an agent of liminality and transgression, this chapter offers new contexts for interpreting Jessica’s absconsion from her father’s Jewish household, her romance and marriage to Lorenzo, and her longed-for conversion to Christianity.

Renaissance England and the Jews

Chapter 1 discusses historical evidence regarding how Jews or ‘Hebrews’ and were imagined, represented, and encountered by Englishmen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This chapter considers English attitudes towards Jews as well as Hebrew, the language most closely associated with the Jewish people; and argues that these encounters reflected complex, morally ambivalent responses that are not easily dismissible as flatly anti-Semitic, as some influential recent scholarship has insisted. Among the evidence this chapter discusses is Henry VIII’s solicitation of rabbinical opinion on the Great Matter of his divorce, the Classicist Robert Wakefield’s text Oratio de utilitate trium linguarum, English writers’ prefaces to their translations of Classical texts, and the inventor Simon Sturtevant’s instructional text Dibre Adam, or Adams Hebrew Dictionarie.

Conclusion

The question that prompts this book – Is Shylock Jewish? – asserts that Jewishness represents a vital and sufficient category of inquiry into Shakespeare’s ‘Jewish play’. In prototypically Jewish form, the book answers that question with another question: What does it mean to be Jewish? Although I have not attempted to argue for a singular model of Jewish culture or identity in the preceding pages, I have outlined a series of hermeneutic strategies that identify particular modes of reading as recognisably Judaic, evoking a distinctive orientation to practical moral questions. By considering the question of what constitutes a Jewish reading of a shared set of biblical stories, I have discussed how midrashic reading strategies constitute a tradition that has remained both conventional and responsive over time. The tradition’s responsiveness arises from instances such as the one that Shakespeare scripts into his play, in which Shylock endeavours to find new meaning in a familiar biblical parable....

Introduction: Is Shylock Jewish?

The introductory chapter of the book begins by acknowledging the long, painful historical legacy associated with Shakespeare’s Shylock, and his character’s deep imbrication with persistent and invidious anti-Semitic stereotypes. Rather than attempting to bypass that legacy, the introduction outlines how the book will delve even deeper into the primary designation the play assigns to Shylock and Jessica -- “Jew,” asking whether Shakespeare endows his Jewish characters with a source of ethical deliberation and moral agency that is more than a mere amalgam of historical anti-Semitisms. If Shylock and Jessica are Jewish in a way that transcends invidious stereotypes, what is it that makes them recognizably so? The introductory chapter outlines the central argument of the book: Merchant’s Jewish characters are constituted via distinctively Jewish ways of reading and interpreting foundational stories, epitomized in the play through Shylock’s citation of the parable of the parti-coloured lambs as he explicates his lending practices to Antonio. The Merchant of Venice deploys Judeo-Christian biblical inter-texts in ways that deliberately call attention to their divergent interpretive traditions, producing a nuanced and challenging point of entry for audiences, who must decide whether and to what degree they are willing to interpret Shylock’s utterances through the lens of his distinctive way of seeing and evaluating the world rather than evaluating him through the eyes of his persecutors.

Rebellious Daughters on the Yiddish Stage

Chapter 4 expands on the previous chapter’s discussion of Jessica, exploring how her character was interpreted by Yiddish writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter addresses the ways in which Jewish writers used the biblical Dinah and Rachel inter-texts to develop Jessica’s character within Yiddish-language translations and adaptations of The Merchant of Venice, including Meyer Freid’s 1898 novella Der koyfmann fun Venedig, and Maurice Schwartz’s 1947 play Shayloks tochter. Through appeals to these biblical stories, Yiddish-language writers produced distinctively Judaic re-workings of Shakespeare’s comedy that emphasised Jessica’s unique subjectivity and relocated her – and the experience of young Jewish women situated at the margins of their communities -- at the play’s vital centre. This chapter discusses how these writers’ creative revisions to Jessica’s character echoed a series of concerns shared by nineteenth and twentieth-century Jewish writers, including Sholem Aleichem and Philip Roth, about the changing role and place of women within modern Jewish life.

Parti-Coloured Parables

Chapter 2 examines a key biblical intertext for Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that Shylock references act 1, scene 3 of the play. Known as ‘the Genesis Jacob cycle,’ chapters 12-50 of the biblical Book of Genesis chronicle the exploits of the patriarch Jacob, including his rivalry with his twin brother Esau; the deception of his blind father Isaac with the aid of his mother; and the parable of the parti-coloured lambs. This chapter examines the Judaic interpretive legacy surrounding these stories, and argues that Shylock’s citation of episodes from the Jacob cycle models a form of midrash, a distinctively Judaic mode of scriptural exegesis. This chapter develops the argument that Shylock’s distinctively Judaic mode of explicating and using these stories offers a notable counterpoint to the Christian interpretations of these same scenes, interpretations voiced by Antonio and reiterated by scholars, who frequently align it with the archetypal perspective of the play or its author. This chapter asks how reading Shylock’s character instead through his own self-proclaimed identification with the Jewish Jacob positions readers of this play to see and understand Shylock differently from how he has been read by Antonio and a wide variety of the play’s critics.