Shakespeare and the Jews (review)

Book Reviews 151 example, and later the critical responses to his published work is most impressive. Anyone interested in Philip Roth as an important American writer will fmd Philip Roth and the Jews indispensable reading. Jay L. Halio Department of English University of Delaware Shakespeare and the Jews, by James Shapiro. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 317 pp. $29.95. At times while reading Shakespeare and the Jews I wondered whether its title was not misleading: James Shapiro's study of Jews in England and English attitudes toward Jews from the twelfth century to the middle ofthe eighteenth is more than just a context for literary interpretation. The Merchant of Venice is the text which the historical account illuminates and to which it returns, but the account itself is so exhaustive (and so inherently fascinating) that it seems as ifwe could do without references to the play. And yet, as this important work of literary and historical recuperation makes clear, we cannot. The Merchant of Venice for at least the last two hundred years has stood as a perplexing index of English antisemitism, softened (perhaps?) by Shakespearean humanism, written in a time, we were told, when England had no Jews. What Shapiro has done is to demonstrate, fIrst of all, that there were Jews in England during Shakespeare's time, though in small numbers, and that Jews were very much part ofthe English consciousness. Then, in chapters developed through extensive research in documents of the medieval and early modem periods, Shapiro shows how English concerns about the status of Jews, the effIcacy of conversions, and the mysterious threat of circumcision are reflected in The Merchant of Venice, and how the play itself later was adopted by opponents of the "Jew bill" of 1753, a measure which gave Jews the right to become English citizens until, within months, it was repealed. While the question of Shakespeare's own attitudes is left unanswered (as it must necessarily be, given the available evidence), the attitudes he encountered and incorporated into his play form the remarkable subject matter of this study. By exploring English preoccupations with the Jews at a time when English nationalism and the English church were beginning to assert themselves, Shapiro examines questions ofracial, national, and religious identity that inform not only The Merchant ofVenice but also (to borrow Bryan Cheyette's phrase) the constructions of Jews in English culture for centuries to follow. Shapiro begins by posing the still problematic question, "Who is a Jew?," and demonstrates how neither racial nor 152 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 religious answers proved entirely satisfactory to those who had a stake in defIning Jewish "otherness." While Jews in early modem Europe (the period between 1550 and 1750 on which Shapiro focuses his analysis) were both encouraged and, through the Inquisition, forced to convert to Christianity, their sincerity as converts was often doubted. Shapiro points out that in fact "what individual Conversos actually believed ranged from devout Catholicism to equally devout Judaism, with all kinds ofpermutations in between" (p. 16). Yet ultimately none of these permutations mattered to the non-Jewish world, which saw a hidden Jew beneath every convert to Christianity and placed all Jews under suspicion of duplicity. Shapiro describes the "most notorious case" of Roderigo Lopez, a Christian of Jewish descent and physician to Queen. Elizabeth, who was hanged for complicity in a plot to poison the monarch (p. 73). He notes that even before the scandal developed, but especially afterward, Lopez was disparaged as a Jew. Interestingly, although historians have traditionally considered Lopez to have been framed, Shapiro points out that David Katz in a 1994 study "conclusively demonstrates that Lopez was involved in a conspiracy to poison the Queen"-not without an awareness of how such a conclusion might be received by members ofthe current Anglo-Jewish community (pp. 250-51, n. 139). I might add that once or twice in his own argument Shapiro himself discusses Conversos as Jews. Thus Shapiro consciously alludes to the fears of antisemitism that, derived from earlier experiences, still shadow discussions of Jewish identity in the English nation. At the same time, his own rare and apparently inadvertent lapses underscore...