Shylock and the Jewish Question (review)

146 SHOFAR Fa112000 Vol. 19, No.1 Shylock and the Jewish Question, by Martin D. Yaffe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 210 pp. $32.50. This curious book seems to have been written in a mood ofexasperation with modem secular societies founded onenlightenmentprinciples. Even when they ostensibly retain a state religion, such societies relegate religion to the private sphere and employ secular legal systems to protect their citizens from one another and to adjudicate conflicting interests within the body politic.Yaffe seems to believe that a more secure basis for a modem society would be a combination of "biblical thought understood in its own terms, ... Socratic political philosophy understood in its own terms and ... the ongoing tension or overlap between them as the original backdrop to modem liberalism" (p. 165). As a test case, Yaffe ponders the role of the Jew in a largely Christian society, focusing on Shakespeare's Shylock, an imaginary Jewish moneylender living in an imagined Venice. Yaffe contrasts Shakespeare's solution to Shylock's problem, and the social ethos implied, with the solution and corresponding ethos Marlowe imagines in The Jew ofMalta, and with the principles informing both the liberal technocratic society as imagined by Bacon in The New Atlantis and the secularized commercial cosmopolis ofAmsterdam as described in Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise. Yaffe's reading ofShakespeare's The Merchant ofVenice, which he believes rescues Shakespeare from specious charges ofantisemitism, also demonstrates the superiority ofsocieties able to draw on biblical morality to regulate themselves over those which have sacrificed religion on the altars of individual self-interest, commercial prosperity, and scientific rationalism. Yaffe's readings ofparticular works by Marlowe, Bacon, and Spinoza develop this· theme in interesting ways. Marlowe imagines a world governed solely by Machiavellian principles, so that religious values have no real bearing on the way Christians, Jews, and Moslems treat each other, and success goes to the most vicious and cunning (with Barabas, Marlowe's Jew, edged out by the Christian governor in the final round). Bacon's utopian world ofBensalem includes a secular Jew named Joabin, who is willing to pay the price oftoleration by "forgo[ing] biblical morality wherever it comes into conflict with the [state's] policy goals ..." (p. 123). But the core of the book is the discussion of The Merchant ofVenice, which Yaffe claims is based on a fuller and more careful analysis of the text than we get from "modem critics." Yaffe complains that these critics find Shakespeare anti-Jewish, but he seems blind to the most persistent trend in current criticism and theatrical production of the play, which is to treat it as a representation ofantisemitism, so that whatever Shylock's vices and virtues might be, he is finally the victim of a hypocritical Christian culture complicit in the elopement and conversion of his daughter, in the stealing and appropriation of his wealth, and in his conversion to Christianity on pain of death. Yaffe is less interested in Venetian hypocrisy than he is in Shylock's violation of Jewish precepts-(l) dining on trefwith Christians even after he had earlier refused to do so and (2) murderously insisting on collecting the pound offlesh due him as collateral for Book Reviews 147 the forfeited loan. He defends two of the major Christian characters, the Duke and Portia, from charges of antisemitism. (Antonio, he con'cedes, has mounted a religious crusade against Jewish money lending and is personally meddlesome in the name of Christian charity, for which he is subtly rebuked by Portia in the final scene-but I would reply that she resents his competing for her husband's love and loyalty, not his excessive religious zeal.) Both the Duke and Portia, Yaffe argues, appeal to Shylock to treat Antonio with the mercy required by Jewish ethical standards. Yaffe reads the Duke's first speech to Shylock in the trial scene (ending with "We all expect a gentle answer, Jew"), as an implicit appeal to the Jew to replace what can only be a show of cruelty with Jewish compassion, but in fact the Duke refers explicitly only to the "human gentleness and love" displayed even by "stubborn Turks and Tartars." The lack of explicit...