Shakespeare foresaw modern antisemitism's playbook.

In “The Merchant of Venice,” the English playwright provides a description of Judeophobia before the word existed.

Sir John Gilbert's Shylock after the trial, an illustration to “The Merchant of Venice” (photo: Emory University, GA, USA/Wikipedia)

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This essay is based on a chapter in Ruth Vanita’s recent book, “Shakespeare’s Re-Visions of History: Social Collusion, Violence and Resistance.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Shakespeare had probably never seen a Jew because King Edward I expelled Jews from England in 1290.

But, as literary critic Harold Bloom argues, Shakespeare knows everything about us.

In “The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare provides a description of Judeophobia (a fear, dislike, or prejudice against Jews) before the word existed. A phobia is an irrational fear of something that cannot possibly harm us. As we know, Judeophobia is alive and well, and continues to have devastating effects, but most people do not realize that its history predates the Holocaust by more than 1,500 years.

Shakespeare’s description of a phobia occurs in the courtroom where Shylock demands that the court uphold his contract with Antonio. For those who do not recall the plot of “The Merchant of Venice,” Antonio, a merchant, cannot lay his hands on ready cash, which his close friend Bassanio wants in order to woo a rich lady, Portia, in style.

Antonio (who, most critics now agree, is in love with Bassanio) borrows the money from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender whom Antonio hates and despises. Shylock suggests that they enter into a contract for an interest-free loan, but if Antonio cannot repay the loan on time, the forfeit will be a pound of Antonio’s flesh.

Antonio agrees, but his ships get delayed, and Shylock insists on fulfilling the contract. Portia, disguised as a lawyer, wins the lawsuit on Antonio’s behalf, and Antonio forces Shylock to convert to Christianity in order to avoid execution.

In the courtroom, when Shylock is asked why he chooses a pound of Antonio’s flesh over the large sums of money that Antonio’s friends are offering him, he replies:

Some men there are love not a gaping pig;

Some that are mad if they behold a cat;

And others, when the bagpipe sings i’ the nose

Cannot contain their urine; for affection,

Master of passion, sways it to the mood

Of what it likes or loathes. Now for your answer:

As there is no firm reason to be rendered

Why he cannot abide a gaping pig,

Why he a harmless necessary cat,

Why he a woolen bagpipe …

So can I give no reason, nor I will not,

More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing

I bear Antonio, that I follow thus

A losing suit against him. Are you answered?¹

Some commentators wonder why Shylock does not cite his real reasons. But Shylock has earlier repeatedly given his reasons, both to Antonio and to others. When Antonio first asks Shylock for a loan, Shylock points out that Antonio has frequently berated him in public for being a moneylender (one of very few professions open to Jews in Europe) and has called him “misbeliever” and “cut-throat dog.” Antonio has also kicked him and spat on him. Shylock asks why Antonio wants to borrow money from a dog.

This would be a sensible person’s cue to apologize. But Antonio is not sensible; he is consumed by hate. He replies that he is likely to call Shylock a dog again, to spit on him again, and to “spurn” him again. He adds that if Shylock lends him money, he should do so not as a friend but as an enemy so that Shylock can “with better face / Exact the penalty” if Antonio fails to return the money on time.

After Antonio fails to return the money, Shylock clearly tells Antonio’s friends, Salerio and Salanio, his reasons for hating Antonio and wanting revenge on him:

“He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what's his reason? I am a Jew.”

Shylock follows this with one of the two most famous speeches in the play:

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? …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?”

Shylock goes on to say that a Christian will take revenge if a Jew wrongs him, and since Jews are human like Christians in every other way, they too will take revenge if they are wronged. But Salerio and Salanio are not moved by this passionate plea. Their response is to immediately call another Jew, Tubal, and his whole “tribe,” that is, all Jews, devils.

It is, therefore, futile for Shylock to state his real reasons in court. He is a lone Jew surrounded by vicious Jew-haters, with the possible exception of Bassanio, the only character in the play who does not express hatred of Jews, does not use the word “Jew” as a term of abuse, and does not abuse Shylock. If the Christians in court had the slightest awareness of their antisemitism, they would understand Shylock’s description of irrational hatred as applicable to them. But since they have none, they do not.

Shylock’s explanation of irrational disgust is, I suggest, an early account of what is now called a phobia. While pretending to describe his own phobia, he actually describes Judeophobia. Fear and hatred of pigs, cats, and bagpipes, is irrational because none of these can harm a human. Jews were a minuscule minority in Europe and had no power to hurt Christians. They are still a tiny minority in the world today. Thus, fear and hatred of Jews has no rational basis. It was a phobia. One cannot argue away a phobia because it is pathological.

There is, Shylock points out, “no firm reason” why someone should loathe a cat, a pig or a bagpipe but the loathing is nevertheless real. Jew-haters in the play go around looking for and inventing unconvincing reasons for their hatred. They would do better (as would Jew-haters in life) to adopt Shylock’s honest account of their hatred as visceral, not rational.

Antonio, like most Christians at the time, is a hypocrite. Like them, he pretends to hate moneylending but he makes use of moneylenders. Shylock is not the only moneylender from whom Antonio borrows. In his letter to Bassanio, he writes that his “creditors grow cruel.”

Tubal confirms that Antonio has multiple creditors: “There came divers of Antonio's creditors in my company to Venice that swear he cannot choose but break.” But Antonio had earlier said that he never gives or takes interest-bearing loans. So it turns out that this is a lie. He has taken loans besides the loan for Bassanio.

No Venetian attempts to lend Antonio money to repay his debt before it falls due. That Bassanio and Antonio approach Shylock for a loan indicates that no Christian is willing to give an interest-free loan. Queen Elizabeth, who ruled England for most of Shakespeare’s lifetime, herself took interest-bearing loans from several financiers, such as Horatio Palavicino (who was a Christian). Therefore, Antonio’s hate is not based on Shylock’s moneylending. It is based on Judeophobia.

Today, politicians, activists, preachers, and bumper-stickers adjure us to stop hate. Trying to stop hate is a significantly different matter from trying to stop hate crime. Is it possible to stop hate? Should one try to control the thoughts and feelings of others? Is it possible to hate without acting hatefully? The last of these questions is explored in a dazzling exchange between Shylock and Bassanio. This exchange follows Shylock’s explication of what is now called a phobia.

Bassanio: Do all men kill the things they do not love?

Shylock: Hates any man the thing he would not kill?

Bassanio: Every offence is not a hate at first.

Shylock: What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?

Bassanio’s first question is not about hate but about antipathies. People who dislike bagpipe music do not try to destroy all bagpipes or bagpipers. His question is premised on the principle of tolerance — one does not have to love everyone but one must coexist with things and people that one does not love. Bassanio intends his question (Do all men kill the things they do not love?) to be rhetorical but Shylock answers it with a profound psychological question (Hates any man the thing he would not kill?), shifting from dislike to hate.

Is not the wish to get rid of the hated thing always inherent in hate? If those who hate bagpipe music could destroy all bagpipes, would they not wish to do so? If one does not wish to kill something, perhaps this means that one does not really hate it. In Antonio’s and other Christians’ hatred of Jews, the seeds of murder lie buried, ready to germinate on any pretext.

Bassanio responds by pointing to the grey area between hatred and love. One may find people’s behaviour offensive and for that reason may not like them but one need not go as far as to hate them. This is a good description of Bassanio’s own attitude to Shylock before the bond falls due.

Bassanio’s phrase at first is important. Hate takes time to grow. Hatred for Jews had grown over many centuries, therefore Antonio’s hate is neither original nor impressive. It makes Antonio blind and deaf to what is before him. Shylock’s hatred, as he tells Antonio, has developed over a long period of enduring individual abuse (“Still have I borne it with a patient shrug”) as well as his awareness of the abuse of Jews in general (“For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe”), but Antonio does not hear what he is told.

Shylock’s final answer to Bassanio, “What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?” is unanswerable. One may not like snakes but one would not try to kill all of them. However, killing a snake that has stung one is simply a matter of self-defence.

Antonio’s diagnosis of the situation is much like many Jew-haters’ diagnosis of Israel’s self-defence. Antonio tells his friends that it is pointless to argue with Shylock because nothing can be harder than “his Jewish heart.” So also, we are told, Israeli Jews are implacably cruel, which is why they kill Gazans for no reason.

Likewise, Antonio’s friend Gratiano, who hurls more abuses at Shylock than anyone else does, asks, “Can no prayers pierce thee?” No commentator thus far has bothered to dwell on Shylock’s answer, “No, none that thou hast wit enough to make.” This reply is crucial. Shylock does not simply say “No.” He says that Gratiano lacks the intelligence to offer a prayer (which meant a plea) that would work.

The plea that none of the Christians has the intelligence or the imagination to make would incorporate an apology for the way they have treated Shylock in particular and Jews in general. Even when pleading for his life, Antonio lacks the grace to express regret for having spat on and kicked Shylock. Few critics have commented on this strange absence of an apology.

Shylock is not “incapable of pity” as the Duke accuses him of being. But he is impervious to arguments from “Christian intercessors,” who, like Gratiano, precede their prayers by calling him “harsh Jew.” The Duke and Portia conclude their speeches on mercy by addressing him as the Jew who must accept a Christian theological argument, “Therefore, Jew, / Though justice be thy plea, consider this - / That, in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation.”

Nor is Shylock incapable of love, as some critics claim. His anguished reaction when he hears that his daughter (who has converted to Christianity and run off with a Christian) has exchanged for a monkey the ring that her mother gave her father, contributes nothing to the plot and exists only to show that love, like revenge, matters more to Shylock than money: “It was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.”

Today, both Israelis and anti-Israelis, Jews and Jew-haters, invoke Shylock to discuss Israel. Those who denounce Israel compared Israel to Shylock and treat the Israel-Hamas war as unique. They ignore much more devastating wars and atrocities in Syria, Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, and China, to focus their ire on Israel. They demand of Israel a non-violent reaction that they would not demand of any other nation.

The way Shylock is viewed provides an exact parallel. A great deal of angst has been expended on the horror of seeing him sharpening his knife. Characters in the play express horror and so do spectators, readers, and scholars. What is often forgotten is that Elizabethan audiences were not sheltered from the tearing out of flesh and the shedding of blood in the way that most modern spectators are sheltered even from the painful deaths of the animals they eat. Many Elizabethans chose to entertain themselves by going to witness public torture and executions.

Shylock wants to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio’s chest; executioners in London and elsewhere routinely butchered living men in public, cutting out their genitals, heart, and intestines (more or less a pound of flesh) and burning them, then chopping the bodies into pieces. Murderers and those accused of being traitors, Anabaptists or Catholics were not the only ones to suffer such executions; rapists, poachers, robbers, petty thieves, and arsonists did too. Stealing more than five pence or even birds’ eggs could be punished with execution.

Ears were cropped, hands were cut off for a variety of offences, such as robbery, assault or publishing writings to which the monarch objected. In 1579, the right hands of John Stubbs and his publisher were cut off in public. Stubbs was in danger of execution but the sentence was reduced to dismemberment.

Members of the public were witnesses to such torture and killing but were also participants. Offenders placed in the pillory were seriously injured, blinded or killed by London mobs. Even those who did not seek out such bloody spectacles could not avoid them entirely because the heads of executed men were exhibited on London Bridge.

Why is it that English people who, until the nineteenth century, witnessed and often delighted in whippings, public executions and pilloryings (the last hanging, drawing and quartering took place in 1782 and the last pillorying in 1839), felt peculiar horror at the sight of Shylock with a knife? Or the Germans, for that matter, who had in 1600 inflicted incredibly horrible tortures on the Pappenheimer family before executing them (including a ten-year-old), for witchcraft? I suggest that the shock arises from the “normal” situation being reversed.

It is not the sight of execution that is unbearable. Elizabethans and even Victorians were used to that in life and on the stage. It is the sight of a Jew as executioner that is unbearable. The Jew, like Dr. Lopez (a Jew converted to Christianity), hanged, drawn and quartered in London just a couple of years before “The Merchant of Venice” was first staged, must be a victim and nothing but a victim.

Therefore, Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” (which depicts numerous atrocities including several mutilations, murder and cannibalism) is labelled a “lamentable tragedy” but the Quarto describes Merchant as a history with “the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh.”

Likewise, protestors around the world who depict Israelis as murderers express no outrage about Nigerian Islamists beheading Christians, Yemenis torturing and killing Druze, the Chinese government imprisoning and humiliating Uyghur Muslims, Iran hanging gay men, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan publicly executing people for various crimes, and Sudan chopping off hands for theft. They mock, as one of my old students mocked, when I mentioned the 1,500-plus years of persecution of Jews.

It is not killing that is horrifying. It is Jews defending themselves that is horrifying. Because Jews are supposed to be perpetual victims, not warriors.

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1. Norton Shakespeare, 4.1.47-56, 59-62