Shakespeare and the Jews by James Shapiro (review)

Reviews415 of Ireland is to be regretted for other reasons. The book is thus an eloquent witness to a mood of European unity touchingly invoked at its beginning, and to a reality of European differences which is still with us. HANS-JÜRGEN DILLER Ruhr-Universität Bochum James Shapiro. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Pp. ix + 317. $29.50. Shakespeare and the Jews is a title too limited for this wide-ranging study of the status and image of Jews in early modern England, for Shakespeare's treatment of Jews is only a small part of James Shapiro's subject. Making sense of a dense sample of cultural records—from pictorial images to play-scripts to law documents—Shapiro considerably clarifies our interpretations of English interpretations of Jewishness from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment era. In so doing he expands work begun by the historian David Katz but widens Katz's analytical scope to suggest that England's developing notion of its own national character was intimately involved with ideas about Jews. Shapiro demonstrates that the late thirteenth century, when Edward I formally expelled Jews from England (though some remained), heralded centuries of English interest in Jewish social and religious practices and Jewish physical attributes, usually expressed in wild distortions of fact. These distortions—for example, that Jewish men menstruated, that Jews liked to circumcise, castrate, or eat Christians, and that Jews were closet Christians who converted on their deathbeds—cannot be excused or explained by the fact that few real and practicing Jews were available during the Renaissance for English acquaintance (in fact, Shapiro demonstrates that religious Jews were not unknown in early modern London). Shapiro argues that fictions of the sexually ambiguous Jews helped to constitute useful "Others" for a culture increasingly seeking to stabilize its own categories of gender just as tales of Jewish converts to Christianity helped to confirm the spiritual Tightness of a Protestant nation. Radical Puritans especially looked for the biblically predicted conversion of the Jews as an augur of the millennial age. Finally, English economic interests were at stake in the rhetoric of conversion. Shapiro quotes sixteenth-century reformers such as Peter Martyr and Hugh Broughton to show that wealth-consciousness subtly permeated English Reformation discourse about Jews: Martyr called Jews a "commodity " to Christian nations (for their preservation of the Bible), while Broughton more baldly called for the conversion of Jews in Constantinople to bring Turkish commerce under English control (p. 146). And where is Shakespeare in all this? Those reading Shapiro's book 416Comparative Drama for a sustained reassessment of The Merchant of Venice may be disappointed , since references to the play remain peripheral to the main task of illuminating early modern ideas about Jews. Nevertheless, those same readers will find their understanding of the "pound of flesh" bond, of Shylock's reaction to his daughter's superficial conversion, of the Venetian court's perplexing treatment of Shylock as both licensed Jew and "alien" (a vexed distinction during the Renaissance), and of Shylock's forced baptism immeasurably enhanced by Shapiro's revelations of what these things culturally meant. Shapiro shows no interest in answering the conventional scholarly question: whether Shakespeare's presentation of Shylock is/was humane or virulently anti-Semitic. Shapiro's comment on an ambigous Shakespearean passage in Sir Thomas More seems to describe his reading of Merchant as well: Shakespeare seems "to be repudiating . . . anti-alien libels while at the same time retaining the dramatic sense of staging . . . anti-alien attacks (and thereby potentially inflaming anti-alien sentiment)" (p. 186). Insofar as the staging of Shylock is concerned, this conclusion is commonplace: Shakespeare's Jew both is and isn't an anti-Semitic creation. But what is far from commonly understood, and what Shapiro has painstakingly brought to light, is the detailed nature of the retained and resisted libels and attacks which color Shylock's character and situation. Who knew, for example, that a fifteenth-century Italian statute briefly required Jewish women to display female "circumcision" by wearing earrings—and that Shylock's expressed wish that Jessica wear his stolen jewels in her ear thus imagines her return as "a...