...October 30 continued...Shakespeare and the Jews

My adopted cousin, Ruth Grimsley, from the UK, a very, very bright lady with whom I am having a rousing e-mail dialogue has asked me if I thought that Shakespeare knew any Jews in his time. Yes, there were Jews in Elizabethan England and London in particular. They were not allowed to practice their religion openly, but otherwise were permitted to engage in trade, professions, etc. They were *marranos* from Spain and Portugal, usually, but other Jews visited from time to time during the period of Exclusion,including one Joachim Gaunse, who helped found the mining industry inWales. But whether Shakespeare and Marlowe actually knew Jews personally or not is quite irrelevant, or so it seems to me. They were mainly drawing on literary tradition and other sources for their portraits.

Any judgment concerning Shakespeare's anti-semitism must, then, be made on the basis of _"Merchant of Venice"_. The observation of some that "Shakespeare--and the English--didn'thave any Jews to hate" because Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 and were not permitted to return until 1658 is not quite accurate. Witness the celebrated execution of Lopez, the Queen's physician. But whatever the"physical" presence of Jews in England was, they were certainly present in other ways. They were much in evidence in the Bible which literate Englishmen were privy to. They were evident in sermons and in the liturgy. They were evident in the cycle plays, some of which were still alive in Shakespeare's day. In short, they were very much a part of the culture of Shakespeare's time. What anti-Semitism is, is perhaps impossible to determine. Maybe the perennial question "What (or who) is a Jew?" can provide an approach to anti-Semitism as well. A late friend, a psychologist preferred this answer. "A Jew is a person who considers him- or herself to be a Jew or whom others consider to be a Jew." I'm not saying that I agree...but neither do I have any quarrel with that definition.