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Shakespeare and the Jews
First published in 1996, James Shapiro's pathbreaking analysis of the portrayal of Jews in Elizabethan England challenged readers to recognize the significance of Jewish questions in Shakespeare's day. From accounts of Christians masquerading as Jews to fantasies of settling foreign Jews in Ireland, Shapiro's work delves deeply into the cultural insecurities of Elizabethans while illuminating Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice . In a new preface, Shapiro reflects upon what he has learned about intolerance since the first publication of Shakespeare and the Jews .
320 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 1995
26 people are currently reading
328 people want to read
About the author
James Shapiro
21 books200 followersA specialist in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period, James S. Shapiro is Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2011, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He currently serves as a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
August 20, 2022
I was prompted to read Shapiro's book because we recently watched the 2004 film of the Merchant of Venice, in which Al Pacino plays Shylock as simultaneously an object of loathing and a man to be pitied.
A book with the title Shakespeare and the Jews seemed right on target for me to understand more of the world about which Shakespeare was writing. Where did The Jews fit? What were the circumstances that led Shakespeare to write this play which has often been seen as pitting virtuous Christians against a cruel and greedy Jew.
Shapiro puts the play into a wider context: In his preface to the 2016 edition, he emphasises an underlying argument of his book: ‘The Merchant of Venice largely concerns how individuals deal with those they perceive as different, and that hostility to difference – racial, national, sexual, religious – deforms those who are ignorant and coarsens any society that condones it’.
This book is also much wider than an analysis of the play, it’s a comprehensive and challenging portrayal of Jews in from the time of their first expulsion in 1290 up until the eighteenth century, with the focus on questions concerning Jews in Elizabethan times when Shakespeare was writing.
In the first chapters, he sets out the history of Jews in England, using multiple archival sources to demonstrate their continuing presence despite expulsions (nearly 50% of the book is taken up with notes, bibliography and index). Its chapter headings give a fair indication of the territory Shapiro covers, but no real clue as to the horrors of the prejudices and beliefs held in England over centuries. ‘First Jews and Counterfeit Christians’; ‘Myths, Histories, Consequences’ (horrific); The Jewish Crime’; “The Pound of Flesh”; ‘The Hebrew Will Turn Christian’; 'Race, Nation or Alien?’; and ‘Shakespeare and the Jew Bill of 1753’.
He shows that, over centuries, Jews were believed to be utterly different from the English - in religion, race, nationality, sexual characteristics and behaviour.
In the later chapters Shapiro explores the question of English cultural identity in late 16th and early 17th centuries at the time Shakespeare was writing. The great upheavals that followed Henry VIII’s break from Rome meant that religious affiliation within the Christian church itself lead to discrimination and exclusion depending on the monarch of the time and could be a matter of life and death. If a Catholic or Lutheran Christian was excluded from positions in society, where did that leave the Jews? Could you be English if you were Jewish? Or did you have to be a member of the Church of England?
Elizabethan views on Jews matter today, Shapiro argues, because Shakespeare is held to be at the heart of English identity, The Merchant of Venice is one of his most frequently performed plays, and new generations are confronted with the play’s themes and attitudes.
The last sentence of Shapiro’s Preface reads: ‘Sadly, twenty years on, Shakespeare’s play and this book’s subject – what ugly myths lead those with insecure identities to think and do when they feel threatened – remain as timely as ever’.
Even more sadly, intolerance and hate seem to be spreading ever wider.
It's not easy reading, but it's not an easy subject.
I haven’t watched this Youtube discussion between Howard Jacobson and James Shapiro, but I will.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8ZsY...
A book with the title Shakespeare and the Jews seemed right on target for me to understand more of the world about which Shakespeare was writing. Where did The Jews fit? What were the circumstances that led Shakespeare to write this play which has often been seen as pitting virtuous Christians against a cruel and greedy Jew.
Shapiro puts the play into a wider context: In his preface to the 2016 edition, he emphasises an underlying argument of his book: ‘The Merchant of Venice largely concerns how individuals deal with those they perceive as different, and that hostility to difference – racial, national, sexual, religious – deforms those who are ignorant and coarsens any society that condones it’.
This book is also much wider than an analysis of the play, it’s a comprehensive and challenging portrayal of Jews in from the time of their first expulsion in 1290 up until the eighteenth century, with the focus on questions concerning Jews in Elizabethan times when Shakespeare was writing.
In the first chapters, he sets out the history of Jews in England, using multiple archival sources to demonstrate their continuing presence despite expulsions (nearly 50% of the book is taken up with notes, bibliography and index). Its chapter headings give a fair indication of the territory Shapiro covers, but no real clue as to the horrors of the prejudices and beliefs held in England over centuries. ‘First Jews and Counterfeit Christians’; ‘Myths, Histories, Consequences’ (horrific); The Jewish Crime’; “The Pound of Flesh”; ‘The Hebrew Will Turn Christian’; 'Race, Nation or Alien?’; and ‘Shakespeare and the Jew Bill of 1753’.
He shows that, over centuries, Jews were believed to be utterly different from the English - in religion, race, nationality, sexual characteristics and behaviour.
In the later chapters Shapiro explores the question of English cultural identity in late 16th and early 17th centuries at the time Shakespeare was writing. The great upheavals that followed Henry VIII’s break from Rome meant that religious affiliation within the Christian church itself lead to discrimination and exclusion depending on the monarch of the time and could be a matter of life and death. If a Catholic or Lutheran Christian was excluded from positions in society, where did that leave the Jews? Could you be English if you were Jewish? Or did you have to be a member of the Church of England?
Elizabethan views on Jews matter today, Shapiro argues, because Shakespeare is held to be at the heart of English identity, The Merchant of Venice is one of his most frequently performed plays, and new generations are confronted with the play’s themes and attitudes.
The last sentence of Shapiro’s Preface reads: ‘Sadly, twenty years on, Shakespeare’s play and this book’s subject – what ugly myths lead those with insecure identities to think and do when they feel threatened – remain as timely as ever’.
Even more sadly, intolerance and hate seem to be spreading ever wider.
It's not easy reading, but it's not an easy subject.
I haven’t watched this Youtube discussion between Howard Jacobson and James Shapiro, but I will.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8ZsY...
Read
October 9, 2011A more accurate title would have been “Jews and Jewish Identity in England, 1290-1833,” but that wouldn’t have attracted as many readers (including me) as Shakespeare and the Jews, and we would have missed an interesting book. Quite a small proportion of the book is about Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, even about its influence: I’m not entirely convinced about the connections between the play and the “Jew Bill” providing for naturalization of Jews in 1753, especially after reading quoted passages from many antisemitic polemics that make no reference to the play at all. In a section called “Shakespeare, Englishness, and the Jews,” Shapiro does provide a fascinating look at various scholarly (and not so scholarly) attempts to absolve the quintessential English poet of either hatred of or sympathy for Jews. For him, controversies about the play bring out the prevalence of myth in conceptions of national identity, so that “censoring the play is always more dangerous than staging it.” Productions would do well to consider this book.
February 16, 2025
Wholeheartedly thrilled at how little of this was actually about Shakespeare. Last chapter was unnecessary, but I'm feeling kind so it's alright.
January 23, 2019
What I didn’t like:
1. Shapiro’s scope is much too broad. The book lacks focus. I picked it up thinking it would concern itself with Jews living in England during Shakespeare’s time, Shakespeare’s possible attitude toward Jews, the history of The Merchant of Venice, and how the play was received. Instead, we get a sprawling, 500-year history crammed into a stiffly written 230 pages. “Jews in England: A History” would be a better title. Shakespeare is almost peripheral.
The book seems as if it were compiled from essays from a grad student’s Jewish History class. You can see the thread running through them, but at the end of the day, the reader is forced to jump from subject to subject with very little idea of where they’re going. It’s disorienting.
2. Shapiro relies too much on direct quotations. This constant quoting really distracted me. I also thought it unnecessarily humble. I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and tell him, “Just say what you want to say! Include quotes only when they add texture! Don’t shy away from declarative sentences that are quote-free!”
3. The book’s biggest weakness was Shapiro’s hedging around the most interesting questions. As demonstrated by his overreliance on direct quotes, Shapiro lacks the confidence to say directly what he thinks. I think this circular style of writing comes from a desire to be “neutral” and to be thorough. But we all know neutrality is bullshit and that you can be engaging, direct, and thorough all at the same time.
What I did like:
The book assumed a better knowledge of Judaism and Christianity than I actually had, and so I slogged through it a little more slowly than someone brought up Jewish or Christian would have. Slogging aside, there was a lot to like about this book. While acknowledging that there were not many Jews living in England at this time, the book relates that they ~were~ there. The book also explores the fact that Judaism and Jewish people were vilified and “othered” in order to fulfill English people’s need to define their national identity in a time of social and religious upheaval.
Reading the anti-Semitic bullshit widely espoused at the time, I was reminded of anti-immigration assholes. Shapiro really gets what kind of base human instincts lie as the foundation of this xenophobia in the conclusion (the best part of the book, in my opinion, because Shapiro lets down his hair a little and breathes some life into these comatose pages):
“Another argument that has been advanced in these pages is that racist fantasies continue to compel belief because they tap into some of the deepest fears people have of ‘turning’—especially of physical, sexual, or religious transformation. Dig deep enough and one discovers that the affirmation of cultural identity too often rests on the slippery foundation of prejudice and exclusion. Even as stories feed our hunger to imagine others as inferior, evil, and dangerous, they succeed in masking the extent to which the storytellers’ identities are formed (and often deformed) in the act of recounting such tales.”
(Reading this, I thought of men who must perform masculine heterosexuality in reaction to homophobia, depriving themselves of friendships and relationships with other men.)
I love reading minority history. So many people, especially today, harken nostalgically to a non-existent “better” time when things were simpler, and they didn’t have to deal with people who were different than them because, in their world, there ~were~ no people different from them, at least not people who mattered. This kind of thinking leads to a high school curriculum that represents peoples as unchanging. You can see this in the “New World” narrative: The white Europeans came to the brown Americas and lots of people died and today we have white people and brown people. The reality is there are many, many people with ancestors from both sides. Biracial people have been around forever, we’re just rarely mentioned. I liked reading this book because it reminds me that history isn’t white, isn’t linear, and is just as complex as we are.
One last note: I read and saw The Merchant of Venice when I was 12. I was raised in one of the most liberal cities in the country, but we never touched upon the play’s blatant anti-Semitism. In retrospect, I am horrified that we, as kids, were provided no context. I understand Shapiro’s desire to look at the play in its entirety, but I don’t know if I agree with him when he promotes its continued production. I think about my own experience watching the play as a kid and, had I not grown up with people who taught me a lot about anti-Semitism, I may have thought that Jewish people were like Shylock. What if Birth of a Nation were screened to middle schoolers? That’s how I think of this play.
1. Shapiro’s scope is much too broad. The book lacks focus. I picked it up thinking it would concern itself with Jews living in England during Shakespeare’s time, Shakespeare’s possible attitude toward Jews, the history of The Merchant of Venice, and how the play was received. Instead, we get a sprawling, 500-year history crammed into a stiffly written 230 pages. “Jews in England: A History” would be a better title. Shakespeare is almost peripheral.
The book seems as if it were compiled from essays from a grad student’s Jewish History class. You can see the thread running through them, but at the end of the day, the reader is forced to jump from subject to subject with very little idea of where they’re going. It’s disorienting.
2. Shapiro relies too much on direct quotations. This constant quoting really distracted me. I also thought it unnecessarily humble. I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and tell him, “Just say what you want to say! Include quotes only when they add texture! Don’t shy away from declarative sentences that are quote-free!”
3. The book’s biggest weakness was Shapiro’s hedging around the most interesting questions. As demonstrated by his overreliance on direct quotes, Shapiro lacks the confidence to say directly what he thinks. I think this circular style of writing comes from a desire to be “neutral” and to be thorough. But we all know neutrality is bullshit and that you can be engaging, direct, and thorough all at the same time.
What I did like:
The book assumed a better knowledge of Judaism and Christianity than I actually had, and so I slogged through it a little more slowly than someone brought up Jewish or Christian would have. Slogging aside, there was a lot to like about this book. While acknowledging that there were not many Jews living in England at this time, the book relates that they ~were~ there. The book also explores the fact that Judaism and Jewish people were vilified and “othered” in order to fulfill English people’s need to define their national identity in a time of social and religious upheaval.
Reading the anti-Semitic bullshit widely espoused at the time, I was reminded of anti-immigration assholes. Shapiro really gets what kind of base human instincts lie as the foundation of this xenophobia in the conclusion (the best part of the book, in my opinion, because Shapiro lets down his hair a little and breathes some life into these comatose pages):
“Another argument that has been advanced in these pages is that racist fantasies continue to compel belief because they tap into some of the deepest fears people have of ‘turning’—especially of physical, sexual, or religious transformation. Dig deep enough and one discovers that the affirmation of cultural identity too often rests on the slippery foundation of prejudice and exclusion. Even as stories feed our hunger to imagine others as inferior, evil, and dangerous, they succeed in masking the extent to which the storytellers’ identities are formed (and often deformed) in the act of recounting such tales.”
(Reading this, I thought of men who must perform masculine heterosexuality in reaction to homophobia, depriving themselves of friendships and relationships with other men.)
I love reading minority history. So many people, especially today, harken nostalgically to a non-existent “better” time when things were simpler, and they didn’t have to deal with people who were different than them because, in their world, there ~were~ no people different from them, at least not people who mattered. This kind of thinking leads to a high school curriculum that represents peoples as unchanging. You can see this in the “New World” narrative: The white Europeans came to the brown Americas and lots of people died and today we have white people and brown people. The reality is there are many, many people with ancestors from both sides. Biracial people have been around forever, we’re just rarely mentioned. I liked reading this book because it reminds me that history isn’t white, isn’t linear, and is just as complex as we are.
One last note: I read and saw The Merchant of Venice when I was 12. I was raised in one of the most liberal cities in the country, but we never touched upon the play’s blatant anti-Semitism. In retrospect, I am horrified that we, as kids, were provided no context. I understand Shapiro’s desire to look at the play in its entirety, but I don’t know if I agree with him when he promotes its continued production. I think about my own experience watching the play as a kid and, had I not grown up with people who taught me a lot about anti-Semitism, I may have thought that Jewish people were like Shylock. What if Birth of a Nation were screened to middle schoolers? That’s how I think of this play.
August 11, 2011
An absolutely brilliant work of literary criticism and history. Taking "The Merchant of Venice" as his starting point, Shapiro describes Shakespeare's and Elizabethan England's near obsession with the role of Jews (who had been expelled from England some decades earlier) in Christian society. The iconic "pound of flesh" as a metaphor for circumcision!
March 2, 2025
Shapiro's examination of how English anti-semitism differed from continental Catholic anti-semitism was interesting and also vindicated my bewilderment at a recent lecturer's insistence that England was the most historically anti-semitic European country. I do love to be proven right. This book was well-written and had some fascinating sections of close reading; I found the reading of Shylock's pound of flesh as Jewish appropriation of the Christian circumcision (the metaphorical circumcision of the heart) really compelling. I was a bit bored by the last chapter because I reckon you should either go fully into the way that Shakespearean anti-semitism became mythol0gised and appropriated by later English culture or not do that, but don't half-arse it. Still found this a really engaging read.
Want to read
October 5, 2012Saw a production of The Merchant of Venice at UT a few days ago that inspired much debate in my family about the treatment of Jews in and by Shakespeare. In researching anti-Semitism in the play, I found this book by a Columbia professor who visited UT last week. My parents and I will be curious to read it.
April 3, 2014
An academic text so Shapiro assumes the reader is familiar with much of the criticism of (especially) "The Merchant of Venice" but still worth reading by fans of the play.
October 31, 2024
Shakespeare and the Jews is not (nor is meant to be) an extensive analysis of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. In fact, commentary on the play features relatively infrequently in Shapiro's examination of 16th and 17th century England. Rather than focusing solely on the play or on the playwright, as one might anticipate from the title, the author strives to inform us of English attitudes and beliefs toward Jews so that we ourselves can surmise the impact that they presumably exerted on Shakespeare as he composed his famous dramas. I'd opine that Shapiro accomplished this goal rather well, too, although one may quibble over the accuracy of the title inasmuch as English society as a whole, not Shakespeare in particular, lies under Shapiro's magnifying glass.
Why should a reader in the USA have any interest in English attitudes toward Jews in the 15- and 16-hundreds? Need one remind others that the USA did not exist until the 18th century and that, before then, English history is also the history of most of us who call ourselves “Americans” today? Remember that the colonists who traveled to the New World in the 17th century (the single 16th century colony having vanished without a trace) were English. Their beliefs, attitudes and prejudices informed subsequent generations all the way into the United States of the 21st century. The history of which Shapiro writes is that of both modern-day England and the U.S. It is very much germane to English descendants on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
What impressed me the most about Shapiro's history? In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” i.e., the more things change, the more they remain the same. The radical prevaricators of the 21st century QAnon group are far from the first to concoct conspiracy theories. The great “Replacement Theory” is hardly the first to imagine the existence of a plot to replace a country's “native sons” with the progeny of immigrants. Xenophobia and other popular fears with the very same fallacious reasoning (if one can use such a word where reason does not appear to exist) abounded in Shakespearean England. Among the most astounding seems to have been a belief that Jews abducted, circumcised, and then crucified male Christian children, They were also “known” to capture adult males and forcibly circumcise them as well. Christian blood was collected and kept on hand to replace that which male Jews lost through menstruation. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
Even on a somewhat more rational level, divines and statesmen (there being little distinction between church and state) grappled with how to define Jewishness. Did the Jews constitute a nation even though there was no physical land area to give that nation a location? Were the Jews a separate and distinct race? Were they merely followers of a separate and distinct religion? Could a Jew truly and permanently convert to Christianity? How should the progeny of a Jew and a Gentile couple be defined?
There is yet more history to be learned from Shapiro's book. No other history book I've yet read informed me that all Jews were officially expelled from England in 1290, nor that they were readmitted by Cromwell's government in 1656. In reality, of course, borders were porous, and England was probably never totally deprived of its Jewish population.
For the historical revelations I found in it, I feel that Shakespeare and the Jews is quite worthy of a five-star rating. However, I must confess that I found Shapiro's recounting of this history to become tedious at times, requiring concentrated effort to absorb the factual content. Considering only the level of interest generated by what I considered to be rather dry narrative, assigning three stars would be my limit. Still, the book is quite informative in addressing a topic that I've not seen explicated elsewhere, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to readers interested in this period of English history.
Why should a reader in the USA have any interest in English attitudes toward Jews in the 15- and 16-hundreds? Need one remind others that the USA did not exist until the 18th century and that, before then, English history is also the history of most of us who call ourselves “Americans” today? Remember that the colonists who traveled to the New World in the 17th century (the single 16th century colony having vanished without a trace) were English. Their beliefs, attitudes and prejudices informed subsequent generations all the way into the United States of the 21st century. The history of which Shapiro writes is that of both modern-day England and the U.S. It is very much germane to English descendants on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
What impressed me the most about Shapiro's history? In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” i.e., the more things change, the more they remain the same. The radical prevaricators of the 21st century QAnon group are far from the first to concoct conspiracy theories. The great “Replacement Theory” is hardly the first to imagine the existence of a plot to replace a country's “native sons” with the progeny of immigrants. Xenophobia and other popular fears with the very same fallacious reasoning (if one can use such a word where reason does not appear to exist) abounded in Shakespearean England. Among the most astounding seems to have been a belief that Jews abducted, circumcised, and then crucified male Christian children, They were also “known” to capture adult males and forcibly circumcise them as well. Christian blood was collected and kept on hand to replace that which male Jews lost through menstruation. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
Even on a somewhat more rational level, divines and statesmen (there being little distinction between church and state) grappled with how to define Jewishness. Did the Jews constitute a nation even though there was no physical land area to give that nation a location? Were the Jews a separate and distinct race? Were they merely followers of a separate and distinct religion? Could a Jew truly and permanently convert to Christianity? How should the progeny of a Jew and a Gentile couple be defined?
There is yet more history to be learned from Shapiro's book. No other history book I've yet read informed me that all Jews were officially expelled from England in 1290, nor that they were readmitted by Cromwell's government in 1656. In reality, of course, borders were porous, and England was probably never totally deprived of its Jewish population.
For the historical revelations I found in it, I feel that Shakespeare and the Jews is quite worthy of a five-star rating. However, I must confess that I found Shapiro's recounting of this history to become tedious at times, requiring concentrated effort to absorb the factual content. Considering only the level of interest generated by what I considered to be rather dry narrative, assigning three stars would be my limit. Still, the book is quite informative in addressing a topic that I've not seen explicated elsewhere, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to readers interested in this period of English history.
May 9, 2017
I found myself very impressed with Shapiro's work. I picked this book up because I'm a fan of Shakespeare, and I'm a fan of learning more about cultures that aren't my own. So, what better decision than to buy Shakespeare and the Jews? Though, be warned--this book is mostly about Shakespeare's England and its reaction to Jewish folks rather than Shakespeare and The Merchant of Venice. That's not to say that Merchant isn't also heavily mentioned--but to fully understand everything at play (pun intended), we must also understand Shakespeare's England's anti-semitism. And that topic is one that hasn't been discussed yet. Hence, Shapiro's encompassing book.
In the time I spent reading this with my coffee, on trains, and in my classroom, I discovered that there was a lot I didn't know about Jewish history. Of course, I knew what we'd probably consider the basics in a high school history class, but I think that just proves Shapiro's point that nobody has really ever talked about this before. James Shapiro certainly had his work cut out for him, and I think he did a fantastic job of shedding light onto such an ignored subject.
He discusses the "pound of flesh" myth, the difficulties of Catholicism vs. Protestantism vs. Judaism, the history that led to the "wandering Jew" stereotype, and general anti-semitic anxieties of the time. One of the anxieties that truly shocked me was the reaction to a Jewish person converting to Catholicism. I would have thought that after converting and assimilating, there'd still be some worries, but overall--hey, they converted, right? Nope, not right. Because after they converted, well, how would real Englishmen know that they wouldn't just convert back to Judaism after so easily converting to Catholicism? And how did they know that they weren't just faking being assimilated. After all, they might be Catholic in public in order to save face, and remain Jewish at home.
Additionally, how does all this relate to Shylock and Jessica in Merchant? What with Jessica's conversion, and Shylock's want for Antonio's pound of flesh. And even more interestingly is how Shylock became an actual figure in Shakespeare's England--somebody published books whilst using Shylock's name as a pseudonym.
It's a big task, but Shapiro masterfully lays out how England affected Shakespeare himself, and how Shakespeare's Merchant affected England right back.
Of course, Shapiro goes much more in depth about that topic than I'm willing to, but the amount of thought and care that he puts into each subject is incredible. Honestly, if you're a fan of Shakespeare or want to know more about Jewish studies (and discover a multitude of various other authors and titles through Shapiro's bibliography), I'd highly recommend Shakespeare and the Jews.
Get the full review here!
In the time I spent reading this with my coffee, on trains, and in my classroom, I discovered that there was a lot I didn't know about Jewish history. Of course, I knew what we'd probably consider the basics in a high school history class, but I think that just proves Shapiro's point that nobody has really ever talked about this before. James Shapiro certainly had his work cut out for him, and I think he did a fantastic job of shedding light onto such an ignored subject.
He discusses the "pound of flesh" myth, the difficulties of Catholicism vs. Protestantism vs. Judaism, the history that led to the "wandering Jew" stereotype, and general anti-semitic anxieties of the time. One of the anxieties that truly shocked me was the reaction to a Jewish person converting to Catholicism. I would have thought that after converting and assimilating, there'd still be some worries, but overall--hey, they converted, right? Nope, not right. Because after they converted, well, how would real Englishmen know that they wouldn't just convert back to Judaism after so easily converting to Catholicism? And how did they know that they weren't just faking being assimilated. After all, they might be Catholic in public in order to save face, and remain Jewish at home.
Additionally, how does all this relate to Shylock and Jessica in Merchant? What with Jessica's conversion, and Shylock's want for Antonio's pound of flesh. And even more interestingly is how Shylock became an actual figure in Shakespeare's England--somebody published books whilst using Shylock's name as a pseudonym.
It's a big task, but Shapiro masterfully lays out how England affected Shakespeare himself, and how Shakespeare's Merchant affected England right back.
Of course, Shapiro goes much more in depth about that topic than I'm willing to, but the amount of thought and care that he puts into each subject is incredible. Honestly, if you're a fan of Shakespeare or want to know more about Jewish studies (and discover a multitude of various other authors and titles through Shapiro's bibliography), I'd highly recommend Shakespeare and the Jews.
Get the full review here!
September 2, 2024
Shakespeare may not have drawn Shylock from a real character, but his genius has embodied in the most lifelike form the Jew’s vengefulness and the causes that nourished it. How many cities of the world are there where he might hear these words: “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” [Burton]
Shapiro’s book is made up of the seven following chapters:
1. False Jews and Counterfeit Christians
2. Myths, Histories, Consequences
3. The Jewish Crime
4. “The Pound of Flesh”
5. The Hebrew Will Turn Christian
6. Race, Nation, or Alien?
7. Shakespeare and the Jew Bill of 1753
The seven chapters that follow are interconnected and symbiotic. The first two attempt to elucidate some folklores and fallacies about who and what was a Jew and how many Jews there were in Shakespeare’s England.
The subsequent two chapters also form a pair, reconnoitering Elizabethan philosophies of Jewish delinquency, particularly the unproven “Jewish crime” in which Jews supposedly kidnaped, circumcised, then formally assassinated Christians.
The Merchant of Venice figures essentially in chapters 3 and 4, as well as in chapter 5, which focuses on conversion. The discussion of conversion and of the potential unpredictability of religious identity leads to the central concerns of chapter 6: how post-Reformation theology fashioned insolences toward Jewish national, racial, and political status.
The last chapter brings the account to a close with the “Jew Bill” controversy of 1753. This debate over what constituted a natural-born subject discloses how ideas about Jews that arose in Shakespeare’s lifetime continued to effect notions of English identity.
Thus, this book basically explores how the figure of the Jew preoccupied Elizabethan authors; it shows in detail how ideas of Jewish ambiguity, alienness, hatred, and duplicity helped to shape by contrast an emergent image of pure English Christian nationhood, even in a world where actual Jews were infrequent.
The threat to such purity came expressly from the way that Jews were supposed always to slip across clear religious, political, racial, and even gender lines — something evident, say, in the common distrust that all Jewish converts were actually ‘marranos’, practicing their old faith clandestinely.
During the course of this study, so robustly betted against any idea of an “eternal antisemitism,” The Merchant of Venice serves Shapiro as a commanding analytic instrument. It works like locater to help him focus on certain fantasies of Jewish menace—ritual murder or castration—or apocalyptic wishes for Jewish conversion, that haunt Elizabethan England, and the play itself.
Yet even as Shapiro’s book brings out so richly the historical and critical stakes of Shakespeare’s play, it is often hard to hear amid his myriad examples the distinct note of Shylock’s voice, his rage or doubt or obsession.
One misses the play’s more eccentric insinuations about the roots and dramatic transforms of antisemitic abhorrence, and the ways such revulsion can be turned back against those who speak it.
In the Concluding chapter the author says: “In retrospect, this book has explored what happens when “facts of history” are grounded in “idle tales.” I have tried to account for why some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries told stories about how Jews threatened to contaminate or transform the English body and body politic. And I have tried to connect this to stories told by historians who claim that there were no Jews or Jewish questions in Shakespeare’s England. Stories retain their currency because they tell us what we want to hear, even if at some level we know them to be untrue. The fantasy that when Jews “were unknown…each Briton might then call his birthright his own” will no doubt continue to appeal to those who long for this imaginary golden age. Anglo-Jewry has been no less fond of sentimentalizing the past. Until quite recently its historians had celebrated a romantic version of the past that traced a more or less direct line from Expulsion to Readmission to Emancipation; this triumphant march toward toleration and emancipation ignored a good many complications and ended all too abruptly in the 1850s, before things began to unravel under the pressure of large-scale immigration.”
A very thought-provoking tome. Give it a go if you are a Shakespeare addict.
Shapiro’s book is made up of the seven following chapters:
1. False Jews and Counterfeit Christians
2. Myths, Histories, Consequences
3. The Jewish Crime
4. “The Pound of Flesh”
5. The Hebrew Will Turn Christian
6. Race, Nation, or Alien?
7. Shakespeare and the Jew Bill of 1753
The seven chapters that follow are interconnected and symbiotic. The first two attempt to elucidate some folklores and fallacies about who and what was a Jew and how many Jews there were in Shakespeare’s England.
The subsequent two chapters also form a pair, reconnoitering Elizabethan philosophies of Jewish delinquency, particularly the unproven “Jewish crime” in which Jews supposedly kidnaped, circumcised, then formally assassinated Christians.
The Merchant of Venice figures essentially in chapters 3 and 4, as well as in chapter 5, which focuses on conversion. The discussion of conversion and of the potential unpredictability of religious identity leads to the central concerns of chapter 6: how post-Reformation theology fashioned insolences toward Jewish national, racial, and political status.
The last chapter brings the account to a close with the “Jew Bill” controversy of 1753. This debate over what constituted a natural-born subject discloses how ideas about Jews that arose in Shakespeare’s lifetime continued to effect notions of English identity.
Thus, this book basically explores how the figure of the Jew preoccupied Elizabethan authors; it shows in detail how ideas of Jewish ambiguity, alienness, hatred, and duplicity helped to shape by contrast an emergent image of pure English Christian nationhood, even in a world where actual Jews were infrequent.
The threat to such purity came expressly from the way that Jews were supposed always to slip across clear religious, political, racial, and even gender lines — something evident, say, in the common distrust that all Jewish converts were actually ‘marranos’, practicing their old faith clandestinely.
During the course of this study, so robustly betted against any idea of an “eternal antisemitism,” The Merchant of Venice serves Shapiro as a commanding analytic instrument. It works like locater to help him focus on certain fantasies of Jewish menace—ritual murder or castration—or apocalyptic wishes for Jewish conversion, that haunt Elizabethan England, and the play itself.
Yet even as Shapiro’s book brings out so richly the historical and critical stakes of Shakespeare’s play, it is often hard to hear amid his myriad examples the distinct note of Shylock’s voice, his rage or doubt or obsession.
One misses the play’s more eccentric insinuations about the roots and dramatic transforms of antisemitic abhorrence, and the ways such revulsion can be turned back against those who speak it.
In the Concluding chapter the author says: “In retrospect, this book has explored what happens when “facts of history” are grounded in “idle tales.” I have tried to account for why some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries told stories about how Jews threatened to contaminate or transform the English body and body politic. And I have tried to connect this to stories told by historians who claim that there were no Jews or Jewish questions in Shakespeare’s England. Stories retain their currency because they tell us what we want to hear, even if at some level we know them to be untrue. The fantasy that when Jews “were unknown…each Briton might then call his birthright his own” will no doubt continue to appeal to those who long for this imaginary golden age. Anglo-Jewry has been no less fond of sentimentalizing the past. Until quite recently its historians had celebrated a romantic version of the past that traced a more or less direct line from Expulsion to Readmission to Emancipation; this triumphant march toward toleration and emancipation ignored a good many complications and ended all too abruptly in the 1850s, before things began to unravel under the pressure of large-scale immigration.”
A very thought-provoking tome. Give it a go if you are a Shakespeare addict.
May 4, 2019
First, this book has far less Shakespeare than I anticipated when I first read about it. Nevertheless, the book is a very interesting look at how the English thought about the Jews in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, how those thoughts about Jews defined what it meant to be English, how those thoughts found their way into the Merchant of Venice and then how the Merchant of Venice came to define Jewishness for the English well into the Nineteenth Century. Mr. Shapiro also looks at scholarship around The Merchant of Venice and what those interpretations said about the scholars.
Mr. Shapiro is an academic and this is not an easy read for the lay reader. Nevertheless, the book is well-researched and responds well to other contemporary thoughts about the role of Jewishness in defining the English nation.
Mr. Shapiro notes that for 16th and 17th Century England, notions of race, nationhood, sexuality and culture were bound up in religion, particularly given the tumultuous British history of religion from Henry VIII all the way through the Restoration. He contrasts his scholarship with that of his contemporaries who only focus on on only one of those items without thinking about how they all interrelated. These notions all came together in arguments for and against nationalization of English Jews in the mid-18th Century.
Mr. Shapiro published this book in 1996. He could not have possibly foreseen the current debate over The Wall, immigration and who is an American. Nevertheless, his discussion of how the concepts of English and Jewish were opposed to each other and how that opposition played out in political debate reads eerily about our own political debates about who belongs in America and what there status should be. For that reason alone, you should read this book.
I want to thank my mother-in-law who bought this book for me. She has known me for over 25 years and always seems to know what I want to read.
Mr. Shapiro is an academic and this is not an easy read for the lay reader. Nevertheless, the book is well-researched and responds well to other contemporary thoughts about the role of Jewishness in defining the English nation.
Mr. Shapiro notes that for 16th and 17th Century England, notions of race, nationhood, sexuality and culture were bound up in religion, particularly given the tumultuous British history of religion from Henry VIII all the way through the Restoration. He contrasts his scholarship with that of his contemporaries who only focus on on only one of those items without thinking about how they all interrelated. These notions all came together in arguments for and against nationalization of English Jews in the mid-18th Century.
Mr. Shapiro published this book in 1996. He could not have possibly foreseen the current debate over The Wall, immigration and who is an American. Nevertheless, his discussion of how the concepts of English and Jewish were opposed to each other and how that opposition played out in political debate reads eerily about our own political debates about who belongs in America and what there status should be. For that reason alone, you should read this book.
I want to thank my mother-in-law who bought this book for me. She has known me for over 25 years and always seems to know what I want to read.
May 28, 2021
This is an amazing book. It’s by no means an easy read, but it’s well worth the investment. Well researched and intelligent, it details the way the English thought about Jews from the 13th to 19th centuries and how that thought was shaped by ideas about religion, race and nationality. It gives a new perspective to readings of The Merchant of Venice. It is also particularly relevant to these times of rising nationalism, bigotry, xenophobia and racism. Shapiro sends a warning about the tendency of people to believe stories they want to believe, especially when they are about someone they dislike or disagree with.
May 16, 2018
Really interesting book discussing Jews during the early modern period and Shakespeare's relationship to and with England's Jewish community. I learned a lot, and this book is pretty important scholarship. Shapiro is cited by many other articles and books I read for my Merchant of Venice paper, and this work is pretty seminal.
August 15, 2020
I used this book while writing my honors thesis for my undergrad degree. It was a great source of relevant material, and Shapiro has a great balance between historical research and textual nuances from the play itself that created a complete picture of who Shylock was and what that meant in the context of the time period. I would recommend it!!
April 4, 2021
I feel as if this, my first reading of this intense and informed examination of Jews in the time before during and after Shakespeare, requires rereading and redipping into this prodigiously researched book. There was nothing straightforward here. Who was a Jew, what did he want, what did it mean for the country, for Christians.
July 28, 2025
I reread this to prepare for a lecture I'll be giving in November on The Merchant of Venice at my school. It's cultural history rather than literary criticism, so a little out of my usual realm, but I am so glad to have come back to it. (My annotations from the first reading are pretty awesome, by the way.)
October 15, 2019
A comprehensive tale of Jews in Shakespeare's time but not much about the Jew in Shakespeare's work.
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October 14, 2024Dear James,
I love you more than I love my family. Thank you for this book 🧎♀️
without it my dissertation would not be possible
I love you more than I love my family. Thank you for this book 🧎♀️
without it my dissertation would not be possible
August 22, 2020
Extremely interesting history of Jewish struggles. I do wish that Shapiro included some more analysis on the Shakespeare element of the title, but don’t mind too much because it was necessary to educate myself about the history of an oppressed people
June 9, 2021
Less about Shakespeare and more about English culture & history between the years 1500-1750s. Learned something new with every page! I wish I had discovered this book sooner.
December 13, 2014
It was useful
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews