Is Shylock Jewish? Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare's Jews by Sara Coodin

Sara Coodin's Is Shylock Jewish? Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare's Jews contests historicist interpretations of Shylock as a "product of the Elizabethan anti-Semitic imagination" (9). Instead, she argues, Shakespeare's audience would have valued Shylock as a Jew with privileged access to the moral content of Hebrew scripture. In The Merchant of Venice, the Genesis narratives to which Shakespeare alludes establish how Shylock "gives voice to a Judaic moral vision intended to counter Christian assertions" (189). It is only by considering Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, through the "multi-vocal" discourse of scripture and rabbinical commentaries, Coodin contends, that we can understand Shakespeare's nuanced depiction of Jews (18).

In chapter 1, Coodin argues that critical presumptions of English anti-Semitism have "helped legitimise the fiction of an English past free from affinity for Jews" (27). Coodin offers a more complex perspective on Shylock by examining contemporary interest in Hebrew scripture and the Hebrew language itself. Henry VIII's impetus to divorce his wife compelled him to consult rabbinic interpretations; Protestant theologians, Christian Hebraists, and translators viewed Jews not as "well poisoners and ritual murderers" (41) but as scholars and spiritual authorities. Indeed, English institutions of higher education adopted Hebrew as a "third Classical language," studied "alongside Greek and Latin" (49). Coodin's argument that "Jewish identity is constructed discursively in [Merchant] through biblical exegesis" (87), however, is not as original as she claims. I do wish she had acknowledged relevant scholarship such as Jeffrey Shoulson's Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity and my own Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage.¹ But this avenue of inquiry effectively sets up her investigation of Shylock's and Jessica's dilemmas alongside the "moral quandaries" (18) experienced by their biblical counterparts.

Shylock's allusions to the "Genesis Jacob cycle" (128) are the subject of chapter 2. While the Christians view the pound of flesh Antonio promises to Shylock as payment for a forfeited loan as a "mere financial arrangement" (128), for Shylock the flesh bond is occasion to ruminate on monetary transactions between "rival tribes" (128) as Jewish midrash—a discursive mode of inquiry drawing on multiple scriptural commentaries. Shylock analyzes Jacob's scheme to acquire Laban's sheep so that he may acquire moral guidance on the practice of charging interest. In Christian typology, Jacob's plan is divinely orchestrated; thus, Antonio and Bassanio chide Shylock for justifying his usury as a righteous act of his own agency. But Coodin offers a different reading here, drawing on rabbinical commentaries that emphasize Jacob's work ethic and self-reliance. From this perspective, Antonio and Bassanio are impetuous money-grabbers, whereas Shylock rigorously deliberates his financial and social behavior.

Shylock lays claim to "a distinctive moral universe that is recognisably Jewish" (89), but Jessica's desire to convert renders her vulnerable to the Christian community's "partisan moral vision" (189). In chapter 3, Coodin focuses on the play's allusions to Rachel's theft of her father's idols, as well as Dinah's abduction and her exogamous marriage (Genesis 31 and 34). Jessica's dilemmas regarding intermarriage and familial consent, Coodin argues, draw from Dinah's and Rachel's respective conflicts. Shylock's command for Jessica to stay indoors may be read as "a concern with Jessica's capacity for moral choice" (159). Jessica's "immature sensibility" (170) makes her, along with Rachel, and Dinah in particular, "morally unable to anticipate future consequences with any degree of pragmatic skill" (170). Dinah does not understand the implications of the consent she gives to a member of a rival tribe. As with Dinah's predicament, Rachel's theft of her father's idols and secret hoarding of them in her husband's home put her in the "liminal margins of ethnological communities" (142)—between Laban's idolatry and Jacob's monotheism. Their displacement also illuminates the consequences of Jessica's misguided decisions. Rather than having moral agency of her own, Jessica is schooled by Lorenzo, who cites Christian conduct manuals prescribing chaste, silent, and obedient women.

In her fourth and final chapter, Coodin examines Jessica's character in Yiddish adaptations—such as Meir Jacob Freid's novella Der koyfmann fun Venedig (1898) and Maurice Schwartz's play Shayloks tokhter (1947)—and it is here that her argument about an essentially Judaic moral content in Shakespeare's play truly comes to fruition. Freid and Schwartz explicitly confront their Jessicas with Dinah's and Rachel's moral dilemmas regarding filial disobedience, interfaith marriage, and Jewish identity. Freid's Jessica (actually named "Dinah") weds a Christian man because Shylock fails to instill in her "a firm sense of Jewish values" (204). Because this daughter lacks a foundational sense of her Jewish identity, she is vulnerable to intermarriage and assimilation. Schwartz's Jessica, differently, becomes empowered through her moral choice to defy Christian husband and Jewish father in her attempts to rescue Roman Jewish victims of the Inquisition. Coodin argues that Yiddish writers use "Shakespeare's cultural capital" to "ennob[le] Yiddish as a language" (198), and, in Freid and Schwarz, Shakespeare's Jessica is another means to a Jewish end. Jessica's predicament is a midrashic opportunity to examine a Jewish woman's role in society as well as existential questions about Jewish identity. Jessica's is "a narrative of assimilation, which looms as an archetypal crisis of modern Jewish life" (202). In a clever denouement, Coodin establishes a continuum that runs through Dinah, Rachel, Jessica, and the Jewish daughters of Sholem Aleichem's story "Chava" (1906) and Philip Roth's novel American Pastoral (1997).

Is Shylock Jewish? overstates its claim that "virtually no scholarship [on Merchant] has discussed the Judaic interpretive tradition" (12), but Coodin ultimately delivers compelling and innovative material. Her final chapter on Jessica's moral agency in the play's afterlife, especially, will provide a launching point for further research.