Shakespeare and the Jews [twentieth anniversary edition] 9780231541879

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
A Note on Texts
Introduction
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
Conclusion
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Shakespeare a nd the Jews

Shakespeare a n d th e Jews J a m e s S h a pi r o

Twentieth Anniversary Edition With a New Preface

Columbia University Press New Yor k

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press Preface © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-231-17867-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-54187-9 (e-book) Library of Congress Control Number : 2015959984

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover image: Detail from Thomas Coryate’s Coryat’s Crudities. Courtesy of the Huntington Library References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Co n t en t s

Preface to the twentieth anniversary edition vii acknowl edgments a note on texts

Introduction

xiii xvii

1

1. False Jews and Counterfeit Christians 2. Myths, Histories, Consequences 3. The Jewish Crime

113

5. The Hebrew Will Turn Christian 6. Race, Nation, or Alien? 225

Illustrations follow page 50

289

131

167

7. Shakespeare and the Jew Bill of 1753

notes 231 select bibliography index 305

43

89

4. “The Pound of Flesh”

Conclusion

13

195

P reface to the Twentieth A n niversar y E dit ion

When I wrote this book twenty years ago, there were things that I had failed to see. I ended Shakespeare and the Jews with a plea that, however uncomfortable the play made Jews feel, it would be a mistake to censor or suppress The Merchant of Venice. For, like a canary in a coal mine, the play in performance identified what was often undetectable in a culture: the presence of noxious and residual bigotry. At the time I began my research, productions of The Merchant of Venice still generated the sort of controversy rarely seen today; the play remained a risky one to produce, at least in New York City, where I grew up and now taught. Those in the theater world—and in the Jewish community as well—had not forgotten the blowback in 1962 when Joe Papp decided to inaugurate the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park with the play. Papp had cast George C. Scott as Shylock; it didn’t help that the actor’s portrayal was deeply sympathetic (“I played Shylock as though he were dead right,” Scott later said, “and that he was screwed”). Invoking the Holocaust—those “grisly events of the recent past”—the New York Board of Rabbis protested in a letter to the New York Times that Shakespeare’s play offered “a distortion and defamity of our people and our faith,” and members of the Jewish War Veterans picketed in an unsuccessful campaign to ban a telecast of Papp’s production to two million television viewers.1 A decade after Shakespeare and the Jews was published, New York’s Theatre for a New Audience decided to stage the play. I was brought in to help out with

viii Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

the production, and I was asked to come along, no doubt because of what I had written, when the founder of the theater company arranged a meeting with a representative of a national Jewish organization; it would help to know whether the production would lead to fresh protests. With that encounter still in mind, I arrived at the first read-through a week or so later, where I was surprised to see, seated rather stiffly with his back to me at the rehearsal table alongside members of the cast, a man in a dark suit with a small black kipah on his head, a kind favored by modern Orthodox Jews. I swore quietly to myself, wondering how a Jewish organization had managed to infiltrate the rehearsal room. Only when the man wearing the kipah started reading the part of Shylock did I realize that he was F. Murray Abraham, the Academy Award–winning actor, who had come to the first rehearsal already in character. He proved to be a powerful and restrained Shylock, the best I have ever seen. There was no public protest, nor was there any when that production was staged not long after as part of a Royal Shakespeare Company festival in Stratford-upon-Avon, nor would there be a few years later when Al Pacino played Shylock at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park—for the first time since George C. Scott had done so—and subsequently on Broadway. The anxiety that Jews felt about seeing the play performed, still palpable when I was writing Shakespeare and the Jews, seemed to have all but disappeared. I had turned in the manuscript of Shakespeare and the Jews over a year before it was eventually published, and in the interim I was invited to lecture in Israel. During my visit I learned that a production of The Merchant of Venice, in Hebrew, was being staged at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv, and I went to see it. I was aware of the play’s complicated history in Israel, how in the 1930s, even before the creation of the State of Israel, there had been a “trial” of the play by Jewish intellectuals who debated whether it should be staged at all, with those in favor prevailing. And I had noted in the closing pages of my book that when the British director Barry Kyle staged a production in Israel in 1980, he had been prevailed upon to omit Shylock’s consent to become a Christian. 2 I was curious to see what this latest version of the play might reveal about Israel in 1994, in the aftermath of the First Intifada, a quarter-century of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and the recent signing of the Oslo Accords. The production at the Cameri was directed by Omri Nitzan and starred Yossi Graber as Shylock. I found it a bit jarring at first watching a version of the play in Hebrew, with an all-Jewish company, but the production was riveting and these distractions soon forgotten. At the outset, Graber’s Shylock seemed predictable, familiar from any number of contemporary productions: an assimilated and secular Jewish businessman. But after his daughter Jessica abandons him, he became radicalized, shockingly so. When his Christian adversaries taunt him in act 3, an enraged Shylock pantomimes spraying them with bullets

from an imaginary submachine gun. And by the trial scene in act 4—by which time he had grown a beard and wore a large white kipah, the kind associated with right-wing West Bank settlers—his transformation into what the director called a Jewish “terrorist” was complete.3 I subsequently learned that the production had itself sharply changed course in the midst of rehearsals. Its translator and dramaturge, the Shakespeare scholar Avraham Oz, recalled arriving at rehearsals on the day that Nitzan “decided to transform the vengeful Shylock of acts 3 and 4 . . . into the image of a Jewish settler in the West Bank.”4 What had prompted that change was the massacre the previous day of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers and the wounding of 125 others at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims. The mass murderer would no doubt have shot even more of those at prayer had not some of the survivors managed to subdue and beat him to death. The killer, dressed in his Israeli army uniform, was a Jewish doctor: Baruch Goldstein, an American-born, thirty-seven-year-old West Bank settler. Not everyone who saw the production found all this as chilling as I did. The right-leaning reviewer for the Jerusalem Post simply ignored how Shylock turned terrorist and chose instead to fault the production for not offering a more traditional version of Shakespeare’s “romantic comedy.” The more centrist reviewer for another Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, while acknowledging that this “Shylock is a fanatic” and that you can “see what religious fanaticism does to people,” nonetheless refused to judge Jewish hatred, to the point of excusing it: you can “understand what brings Shylock to that point,” he argued, and “even if you cannot identify with him and his actions, you can forgive him.”5 I felt personally implicated in what I had seen: Goldstein, a year younger than I, had grown up near where I had in Brooklyn and had attended, as I had for a few years, the Yeshivah of Flatbush. We had been indoctrinated in similar ideologies, religious and Zionist. Haunting tales of persecution we were exposed to at a formative age left deep impressions. I can still recall the terror I felt as a child when a pair of nuns approached me while I shopping with my mother in a department store; I dashed to hide myself in a rack of overcoats, convinced that the nuns were hunting for Jewish boys to abduct and convert. I continued to be preoccupied by the myths and stories to which I had been exposed early on, and it seems that in his own and violent way Goldstein was too. I still wonder why such preoccupations drove me to find an outlet in writing books like this one (and another on the Oberammergau Passion Play 6 ) while leading Goldstein on a murderous path to the Cave of the Patriarchs. Great productions often seem to anticipate social and political upheaval, so it should not have been surprising—though it came as a terrible shock—when Omri Nitzan’s revival of The Merchant of Venice proved prophetic. On November 4, 1995, a short stroll from where I had seen the play eighteen months earlier, Yigal Amir, a

ix Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

x Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

radicalized and violent religious nationalist cut from much the same cloth as Yossi Graber’s Shylock, gunned down Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, following a rally in support of the Oslo Accords. There were a few things that I wanted to accomplish in writing Shakespeare and the Jews and thought I’d got right. I hoped that scholars would stop insisting that because there were few Jews in Shakespeare’s England there were no Jewish questions either, and this proved to be the case.7 And I hoped that my evidence that Jews were so threatening to Elizabethans precisely because they didn’t outwardly appear all that different from Christians and so could pass (and for that reason Shakespeare doesn’t give Shylock a hook-nose or a red beard) would win over those still wedded to outdated notions of how Jews were imagined in post-Reformation England. But some myths die slowly and in this I proved less successful. 8 But I wish in retrospect that I had been more explicit about an underlying argument of the 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 intolerant and coarsens any society that condones it. What I had got wrong then, because of my own ingrained ways of thinking about bigotry (which had focused too narrowly on what others thought about or did to Jews), was made painfully clear by Nitzan’s production and its aftershocks. That production truly served as a canary in the coal mine, but I had not taken seriously enough the dangers of poisonous Jewish intolerance, directed not only against outsiders, including residents denied the rights of citizens (the hollow legal grounds that justifies persecution in The Merchant of Venice), but also, and increasingly, against fellow Jews. 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. Notes

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

See “ ‘Merchant on TV Protested,” New York Times, June 19, 1962, p. 34; Helen Epstein, Joe Papp: An American Life (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), pp. 175–76; and Kenneth Turan and Joe Papp, Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Every Told (New York: Doubleday, 2009), p. 156. See pp. 228–29 and note 9, pp. 286–87. Christopher Walker, “Shylock Draws Tel Aviv Raves and Walkouts,” Times of London , June 1, 1994, p. 11. Avraham Oz, “Strands Too Far Remote: A Note on Translating the Political and the Politics of Translation,” in Shakespeare, Text , and Theater: Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio, ed. Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), p. 136. Naomi Doudai, “It’s Us Against Them in This Staging of Merchant ,” Jerusalem Post , May 31, 1994, p. 7. For the quotation from Yedioth Ahronoth , see Walker, “Shylock Draws Tel Aviv Raves and Walkouts.” See also Avraham Oz, The Yoke of Love: Prophetic Riddles in The Merchant of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), pp. 208–9.

6. 7.

8.

James Shapiro, Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (New York: Pantheon, 2000). For the rich body of scholarship on Englishness and Jewishness since published, see especially: Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Diff erence from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Eliane Glaser, Judaism Without Jews: Philosemitism and Christian Polemic in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Janet Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Achsah Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Miriamne Ara Krummel, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Eva Johanna Holmberg, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). See in this regard my exchanges with Stephen J. Greenblatt in the New York Review of Books: “Shylock in Red?,” October 14, 2010; and “Shylock on Stage and Page,” December 9, 2010.

xi Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Ack n o wl ed g m e n t s

This book could not have been written without the support of many friends, colleagues, and institutions. First and foremost I’d like to thank those who read various drafts of the book and gave generously of their time in helping to make it better: David Bevington, Michael Bristol, Mark Thornton Burnett, Philippe Cheng, Harold Fisch, Coppélia Kahn, David Scott Kastan, M. Lindsay Kaplan, Theodore Leinwand, F. R. Levy, Claire McEachern, John McGavin, Arthur F. Marotti, James  V. Mirollo, William  F. Monroe, Martin Orkin, Mark Petrini, Phyllis Rackin, Robert Stacey, Herbert and Lorraine Shapiro, Michael  T. Shapiro, William Sherman, Debora Shuger, Michael Seidel, Edward Tayler, Michael Warren, Linda Woodbridge, James Young, and Froma Zeitlin. Maurice Charney, Annabel Patterson, and an anonymous third reader for Columbia University Press provided incisive criticism. Robert Griffi n, Richard McCoy, and Alvin Snider deserve a special note of thanks for their many suggestions. The students in my graduate seminars on “Englishness and Jewishness” offered many insights, and three outstanding graduate research assistants— Michael Mack, Aviva Taubenfeld, and Chloe Wheatley— helped out immeasurably. Support for this project was provided by three endowed lectures— the James Parkes Lecture at the University of Southampton and the Nadav Vardi Memorial Lecture and the Shimshon Carmel Lecture at Tel Aviv University. A yearlong grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities provided the time and support needed to complete the research and writing, as did a

short-term grant from the Henry E. Huntington Library. A Fulbright award, sponsored by Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities, facilitated early stages of research. This book profited enormously from the responses of audiences at a numxiv ber of colleges and universities, including Tel Aviv University, the University Acknowl- of Southampton, Columbia University, Queen Mary and Westfield College, edgments the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois at Urbana, Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Houston, Wayne State University, the City University of New York, the University of Alberta, Brown University, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California at Los Angeles. I am also grateful for the suggestions made by those who heard portions of this book delivered at meetings of the Modern Language Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and at the Shakespeare Festival at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The account that follows would not have been possible if considerable ground had not been cleared by scholars working in a range of disciplines. The study of the place of the Jews in English culture and history has undergone a renaissance of late, and I owe a large debt to the work of Robert Stacey, Miri Rubin, Tony Kushner, David Cesarani, Nabil I. Matar, Arthur H. Williamson, Todd  M. Endelman, David Feldman, Bryan Cheyette, Michael Ragussis, Richard H. Popkin, and, above all, David S. Katz. My understanding of the consequences of the English Reformation has been informed by the magisterial work of Patrick Collinson and Christopher Hill as well as by the revisionist history offered by Eamon Duff y and Christopher Haigh. Sander Gilman’s influential work on Jewishness, race, and gender has also shaped my thinking, as has Howard Eilberg- Schwartz’s anthropological approach to Jewish identity. And I am deeply indebted to the understanding of Shakespeare’s place within our culture mapped out by Michael Bristol, Annabel Patterson, and Stephen Greenblatt. Though I fi nd myself differing at various points with many of these scholars, I am nonetheless grateful for the theoretical clarity and historical specificity they have made available. A number of outstanding archival collections— and archivists—made this research possible: the Henry  E. Huntington Library (whose superb photographic and reader services staff deserve special thanks), the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library, the Israel Solomons Collection at the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary (especially Sharon Liberman Mintz), the Macotta Library at the University of London, the James Parkes Library at the Univer-

sity of Southampton, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Yale University Library, the McAlpin Collection at the Union Theological Seminary Library, and the Columbia University Library. Part of chapter 7 first appeared in Shakespeare Survey as “Shakspur and the xv Jewbill”; I would like to thank Cambridge University Press for permission to Acknowlreprint this material here. I am deeply grateful to my outstanding manuscript editor, Susan Pensak, edgments and to Teresa Bonner, the book’s talented designer. Jennifer Crewe, my editor at Columbia University Press, has been wonderfully supportive from first to last. So too has my family, including my late uncle, Stanley Snyder, whose early enthusiasm for the project was warmly appreciated. My greatest debt is to Mary Cregan. She first encouraged me to write this book, patiently read and improved successive drafts of it, and provided intellectual companionship, and much more, through the years that it took to complete it.

A Note on Text s

In the interest of making early modern texts more accessible, I have silently modernized the spelling and punctuation of quotations throughout (except for titles, where I have regularized capitalization but kept the original spelling, so that sources can be tracked down more easily). Quotations from The Merchant of Venice are cited from William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay L. Halio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Shakespeare a nd the Jews