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Shylock on the mind: Jewish versus Christian Readings of The Merchant of Venice

Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, presented a paper at a seminar organised jointly by JPR and the European Association for Jewish Culture in October on The Merchant of Venice in connection with a new production of the play directed by Julia Pascal at the Arcola Theatre, London. The seminar was chaired by Julia Pascal.

 

Professor Heschel, whose scholarly research focuses on Christian-Jewish relations in modern Germany, presented the play as a reflection of a longstanding conundrum in Christian theology: the presence of Judaism within Christianity. While often produced as an anti-Jewish play, The Merchant of Venice is about the Jew of the Christian imagination and simultaneously about Christianity’s self-understanding about the presence of Jews and Judaism in its midst. Tracing the literary clues to the play’s textual critique of Christianity, Heschel pointed out that the cross-dressing of the courtroom scene in Act 4 calls our attention to the drama of Portia, disguised as a man, speaking the logic of Talmudic casuistry disguised as Christian mercy against Shylock. The mercy that Portia invokes:

 

 “The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven”

 

is juxtaposed to Shylock’s insistence on the literal words and legality of his bond with Antonio, and yet it is ironically Portia’s literalism and legalism that triumphs over Shylock. It is her insistence on vengeance that brings about his ruin, all for the sake of protecting Christian blood; the female Christian out-Jews the male Jew in the rabbinic pilpul he has developed and “out-Jews” him in his capitalism, decircumcising him by forcing his baptism. Her words, evoking those of Jesus and Christianity, ironically rest on the literal-mindedness that Christians claim of Jews and also claim to have rejected and purged in their supersession of Judaism.

 

The difficulties in assimilating large numbers of baptized Jews into the church had become so fraught in Spain during the fifteenth century that scholars have recognized that Christian theological concerns over Jewish baptism became infused with racial concerns, again reflected in the play: does baptism transform a Jew into a Christian, or does a Jew always remain a Jew, even when baptized? Can Christians lose their religious identity through the presence within society of Jews and, within the church, of baptized Jews? Launcelot expresses that fear when he tells his blind father:

 

        “I am a Jew if I serve the Jew any longer” (act 2:2).

 

Such questions grew stronger as converted Jews - “New Christians” or, in hostile terms, “Marranos” - merged into western European society, including sixteenth-century England. Race has for too long been mistakenly understood as a modern invention and as a repudiation of religion. The presence of the Jew as Christian, the Jew within the Christian, eventually became transmuted into modern racist rejection of Jewish assimilation, which had been a promise of the Emancipation era. Assimilation and conversion of Jews into Christians reflected a deeper theological problem for Christian self-understanding. Had Jesus, in fact, fully transformed himself from Jew to Christian? Would his own transformation offer a legitimizing basis for the transformation of all Jews into citizens of European society?

 

What the play also explores, Heschel argued, is how Christianity created its own ineradicable theological trap: the religion of mercy and forgiveness came into being through a sin that Christian culture considered unforgivable, the Jews’ act of deicide. That which the Christian cannot forgive of Jews becomes the foundation of Christian faith, the moment that can never be forgotten, the Eucharist taken in memory of that conversion, an inversion of Lear’s comment to Cordelia, “Forget and forgive” (4.7.84) as Henry F. Smith has pointed out. No repentance is possible, since the Jews cannot acknowledge the act of deicide without acknowledging Jesus as Christ, itself an act of conversion, not atonement. After all, what sort of mercy and forgiveness does the Christian court offer Shylock? As punishment for his refusal to convert his alleged vengeance into forgiveness, his property is confiscated and he is offered the alternative of death or conversion to Christianity, itself the death of his identity and spirit. The religion of forgiveness at its heart was unforgiving.

 

 

Professor Susannah Heschel is Chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany and her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, which won a National Jewish Book Award. She has also edited several volumes including Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (with David Biale and Michael Galchinsky) and has written extensively on feminism and Judaism. She edited a classic collection, On Being a Jewish Feminist, first published in 1983.