Merchant of Venice Part 9

Some Additional Words of Explanation

These are not quite random notes, but they are supplements and adjustments to what I have already posted in the first eight sections on The Merchant of Venice.  There are also some additional thoughts that come up when I examine the essays of others.  I find it particularly sickening to see the anti-Zionists and anti-Semites still active in the world of literary criticism, and especially when they try to exploit the ambiguities and witty conceits in Shakespeare’s play, though I take heart from a few sensible and moral commentators still at work in academe.

Clearing Away Post-Modernism and Anti-Zionism in Criticism

The relationship between “Shylock’s pound of flesh” and the Jew-hater’s obsessive fears of castration/circumcision belongs to the iconography of anti-Semitism.  It is a scandal that breaks out with regular force, even when it takes the form of a concern for the protection of infants and small boys by those who see it as an abuse of the integrity of the male body. There is a similar obsession in regard to attempts to outlaw kosher slaughtering of cattle or to ban academics from Israeli universities from participating in international conferences.  For just as anti-Zionists periodically truck out some new bundle of slogans based on human rights, anti-colonialism or free borders, the intentions are always the same—to defame, to delegitimize and to destroy Israel, Jews and Judaism. 

The lies, distortions and screaming seem shrillest when the voice is led by a Jew or a former Jew,[1] some self-hating individual who seeks to bolster his new place in the surrounding and dominant Christian society by pandering to the prejudices of his recently acquired and tenuously friendly co-religionists.  Hence the focus on Antonio as a likely New Christian in Venice: the term and the stigma that goes with it lasted not merely throughout the lifetime of a converso himself, spreading easily to his immediate family and extended circle of relatives, from one generation to another over many centuries.  Fearful of being exposed before his friends and neighbors, Antonio spits on the Jews he meets in the street, calls them obnoxious names, and sneers down from his exalted position in the hierarchy of the Republic.  Yet the more he complains, the closer the knife cuts.  Shylock, well adept at dealing with such pernicious enemies of his people and aware of what oblique and subtle words and gestures will slice through to the quick to set the opponent’s nerve throbbing, plays on the awkward position of Antonio and his blindness to what it is that so disturbs him whenever he sees a Jew or hears of their presence in his city—and he is particularly obtuse about the subliminal power of the deal he makes with the moneylender, Shylock’s whimsical condition of the pound of flesh.

Through A Glass Enigmatically:  The Mosaic Law

The glass makers of Venice, many of them Jews, lived and worked on the island of Muran,[2] making them Muranos, a short-step in word-play to the Marranos who had come from the Iberian Peninsula seeking refuge from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. The glass-making secrets and the manufacturing families tended to come originally from the land of Israel and the technology spread in the Diaspora with those families.  So important were these Jews to the Venetian government that, according to Samuel Kurinsky, they had at once to be protected in order that the manufacturing secrets and the commercial connections would not be given to rival cities and yet at the same time, because were Jews were the enemies of Christendom, their presence and activities had to be closely controlled.   This led eventually to their removal from the main part of the city, where they had first lived and worked on the Rialto, confinement on the island of Murano, whose name was often used for the entire territory of Venice, and then in the Geto or Ghetto:

The first ghetto was established neither on Murano nor on the Giudecca [Jew-Town] but on the contiguous island of San Geralomo.  The island was then at the northern boundary of the city. In 1516 the Jews were still essential for the for the continuation of commerce and banking but they were considered expendable for the trades.  The largely mercantile community was ensconced within the confines of a huge, fortress-like, defunct cannon-producing brass factory, termed a Geto, in Ventian lingo.  It became the eponym of a quarter to which Jews were confined.[3]

The glass-makers supplied the material for the mosaic makers of Venice to decorate the great churches, public buildings and private palaces of the elites in the city, thus establishing of a link between two sets of artisan-artists and their families.  George Sand describes these activities in her mid-nineteenth-century novel The Master Mosaic Workers.  Mosaics, with their intricate piecing together of small pieces of enamel and glass, of course, come smoothly towards the other mode of the Mosaic, the Law of Moses and the people who are a party to it.

Wordplay and Letter-Manipulation

More paronomasia comes through bilingual puns, letter manipulation and cross-over allusions.[4]  Mississippi Fred Macormack runs through some sixteenth- and seventeenth- century pamphlets of pseudo-prophecy by supposed Jewish writers and in which the name of Shylock seems to appear: e.g., Caleb Shilocke.  This is probably, as Macormack suggests, more indicative of the entry of Shakespeare’s character into the popular imagination than a shared common source somewhere in the depth of lost traditions.  Cecil Roth is cited from his History of the Jews of Venice (1932) to the effect that no name of the sort shows up in Italian records of the pre-Shakespearian period, but there is a Shelachià ben Jeudà from Candia  who completed a manuscript of Maimonides’s Introduction to Pirqe Avot dated 2 Veadar 5163 (1403) in the archives of the Venetian Ghetto.[5]  In addition, somebody by the name of Maurice Brodskey from Melbourne ventures that the name derives from the Pirqe Avot, Chapter 5: וּשּﬥךּ שּﬥךּ  שּﬥיִ, שּﬥיִ (sheli  sheli v’shelachaw shelachaw—What is mine is mine and what is yours is yours) a saying that pouts this person in a middling place between the law and the breaking of commandments.  This is a saying Shakespeare could have gleaned, perhaps with the help of some of the Dark Lady’s musician friends, from a 1543 Latin translation by Paul Fagius: quod meum est, meum est; & quod tuum est, tuum est.”  But this would be rather ironic, in that Shylock wants what is Antonio’s, in the sense that the merchant has broken his conrttract and forefeit the pound of flesh.  Another suggestion offered is based on the vicinity in Genesis where Tubal’s name appears (ten lines before Shelach) —and with an extension of this ancient’s name to signify the world or the universe.  Shylock, broken down into letters and reversed (as well as the hardening of the final guttural from ךּ to קּ as to be read from right to left, yields קּלּ + יִשּ (kal-ish) or everyman.

But do these sets of word and letter games constitute in themselves a probative argument, even in the playful language of Shakespeare’s comedy?  At best, they serve as a set of witty hints towards associations between words, images and gestures more constitutive to the play, like the characters’ names which do not form into a worked-out allegory and merely indicate possible aspects of personality and function in the drama, aspects that are proved in close-readings of the action and speeches of The Merchant of Venice.  To call such readings and interpretations far-fetched, super-subtle and special-pleadings is to do no more than call the play a Baroque comedy or its figurative nature ingenious, subtle and full of conceits.[6]  To argue further that we in our post-Holocaust world are more sensitive to these possibilities of anti-Semitic discourse in the text of a late sixteenth-century play is to trivialize the gravity of the persecutions against Jews and Protestants in Catholic Europe running loose and the reactions of the persecuted—to hide, to run, to prevaricate and to resign themselves to martyrdom when other options seem to run out.  But they prevaricated in many ways, by temporizing, by internalizing their scruples, and by seeking to subvert the hegemonic order by infiltrating its bastions of power, both in the Church and in the State.  We fool ourselves immensely (in the form of delusional flattery) when loom back with nostalgia upon simpler ages; as though the men and the women of the past were perpetual children, dim-witted idiots and noble savages.  If anything, it is we with our turning away from elite educations in the classics, study of antiquities, and nice theological and philosophical distinctions who may be seen to approach the culture of the past in the form of sentimental savages, superficial idiots and retarded children. 

Someone once called anti-Semitism the socialism of the ignorant; we might better categorize it as the liberalism of the insane.  As Guy Millière has said,

For nearly two millennia, the European continent has been a land of persecution and hatred for the Jewish people.  The blood libels and the vilest accusations against the Jew have been accompanied by violence, pogroms, and confinement in ghettos and, of course, death camps.[7]

Not every single individual and not every community on the Continent and not every moment of the past two thousand years; there have been those sensitive and wise enough to see through the hypocrisy and contradictions.  Hence a play like The Merchant of Venice, though it is in itself susceptible to misrepresentation in its performances and its critical place in literary history, as we see each time a modern production is mooted.  Yet one of our lens to see through current hatred of Israel, Zionists and Jews can be this very Shakespearian comedy, insofar as we not only have to fight against the heavy cloud of changes from our own culture back to the England of the late sixteenth century still vexed by the storms of the Reformation and threatened by the Catholic powers across the Channel, but to wrestle with the demons of artistic distortion and prejudices of our intellectual classes in the media, in academe and in seats of government.[8]  The first struggle can teach us much about how civilizations develop and mature, even as it reveals how history can lose touch with its roots and fall prey to regressive emotions; the second forces us to be vigilant and alert, cautious as we wrestle all night with the unknown angels of politically-correct obfuscation and the psycho-babble of media-cum-managerial jargon.

What Is Anti-Semitism Anti?

It is said that the difference between ant-Semitism and other racial or religious prejudices is that Jews are not thought to be inferior—stupid and lacking in imagination—but superior, threatening in their intelligence, cunning and duplicity.  The non-Jews know that Jews are wrong in their religion, to be sure, but they are frightened because what they know about themselves and their place in the world is that they are innocent and consequently naïve, or at least should be, and fear the original sin constantly eating away at their stability and security in the world, and they also know that what is most important to know in and about the world comes either from revealed truths which they may be mistaken in interpreting or through faith which is also a worrisome and precarious faculty.  The other factor in instigating anti-Jewish feelings—and hence the laws and institutions, as well as customs—which work hard to keep the Jewish danger at bay—is that for Christians the truth and the authority to interpret and apply those truths has a hierarchical structure; the determinant of what is or is not true or proper or even merciful comes not from the essence of the situation, a careful measuring of circumstances, and a constant revision of consequences in the light of reality and common sense, but from the power of the individuals and groups making the assertions and allegations.

 As José Faur points out, Jews inhabit a horizontal legal and metaphysical space, wherein God has placed Himself on the same level as the human beings he has entered into a pact with, the br’it and the contractual commandments of the Law.  Hence they can and must argue amongst themselves and enter into endless bargaining with God.  They therefore are always questioning the sources and validity of hierarchical power, making temporary compromises, to be sure, but not accepting such matters as fixed and closed and beyond further discussion.  In other words, for the Jew, “If you can argue with God, what else can’t you do?”  Not only can but also a Jew must argue with God and his or her fellows.  A court of law that reaches its decision by unanimity is suspect on two grounds: first, that the court may be over-awed by a single dominating charismatic voice; and second, that insufficient investigations and debate have occurred.  Decisions are not to be reached once and for all, but as appropriate for the specific case and occasion.  Precedents are useful parts of the ensuing considerations but are not determinative; every new debate and discussion must go back to the basic principles and work out towards the details of time and place, the individuals involved and the situation that prevails.  Mercy and justice, moreover, are not opposite qualities or forces, but aspects of each other: justice applied with due consideration for the circumstances of all parties concerned is merciful—to consider only Antonio’s condition, for instance, without taking into account Shylock’s and his family, his state of health, his daughter’s needs and wishes, and the object lesson shown to the rest of the populace cannot be other than a mere show of justice or of mercy. 

While every Christian character in The Merchant of Venice is deeply flawed in their words and deeds, most professing ideals they do not really believe in and incapable of living up to their own high standards, and thus in need of some scapegoat or whipping-boy like Shylock and the rest of the Jews in order to maintain their delusional superiority in the society they inhabit, Shylock knows that he is flawed, recognizes his limitations, attempts to make amends and gestures of friendliness, and pursues his course with the understanding that a strict legalism will at some point have to be stopped by the officials of the court—he cannot literally have Antonio’s pound of flesh, spilt blood and all—but he wishes to push the members of ruling elite to the point where they have to recognize their own limitations and flaws, to enter into a negotiations with him, as he attempts to do when they reach their outrageous decision to confiscate all his goods and force him into baptism.  Once he has realized what the actual state of affairs is in Venice and in Antonio’s financial status, the old Jew starts to play up the role he sees that everyone expects of him,[9] and so playing off their expectation of a whole list of cliché deformities characteristic of the stage Jew—his greed, his narrow-minded legalism, his hatred of Christians and Christianity, his lack of compassion and so on—he can use his cunning, his rabbinical version of ancient Greek mētis, to play them as a fisherman plays his line, as a hunter waits patiently inside his “blind”, and as a chess-master feints and draws on his opponent’s weaknesses to make his final move. 

Shylock’s case against Antonio is not merely to gain financial advantage: he has several goals, not least of which is to participate in a Christian legal system with full rights, something seemingly against him by the prejudice of all individuals but inherently possible in the way Venice has to operate in its international dealings with other Christian and non-Christian nations.  He also wants to expose the bigotry in those he has been kind to, so as to force them to behave according to—if not believe in—the humanity of any Jew who lives and trades in Venice.  At the same time, as we have hinted, following Florence Amit’s lead, Shylock is using the trial to temporize, to provide time for Jessica and Lorenzo to depart from the confines of the Republic and take themselves and their inherited wealth to a jurisdiction where the state and the church cannot confiscate those goods.

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NOTES

[1] Aloni, Udi. “Oh, Weakness; or, Shylock with a Split S” from What does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and other Specters (New York: Columbia University Press, 20122) online at http://cup.columbia.edu/ media/6949/aloni-excerpt.  Like those self-loathing anti-Zionists who try to pervert the Dreyfus Affair into some explanation and justification for their post-modernist version of anti-Semitism, Aloni uses the speeches and characters of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to try to bolster his Edward Said’s view of the suffering Palestinians and the evil, fascististc Occcupation Israelis.  To do this, the Israeli author has to turn everything inside out, backwards and upside-down.  This is a feat that justifies my additional comments on the play.

[2] Kurinsky, Samuel.  “The Judaic Origins of Venetian Glass Part I—The Formative Period” Hebrew History Federation, Fact Paper 29-I online at http//:www.hebrewhistory.info/ factpapers/fp029-1_venetian; and Fact Paper 29-II online at http:www.hebrewhistory.info/factpapers/fp029-2_venetian.  See also Anon.  “16^th-century Jewish Ghetto in Venice: Italy History” Visit Venice Italy online at http://www.visit-venice-italy.com/ghetto-venice-italy

[3] Kurinsky, “The Judaic Origins of Venetian Glass, part II’.  For further historical details, descriptions of the Ghetto and its synagogues, art treasures, and architecture, along with photographs, see Giovanina Reinisch Sullam.  Jewish Art Treasures in Venice/Tresori d’Arte Ebraica a Venezia.  (New York: International Fund for Monuments, n.d).

[4] MacDowell, Mississippi Fred.  “Why was Shylock Named Shylock?” On the Main-Line (26 April 2012) online at http://www.onthemainline.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/04/why=ewas=shylock-named-shylock.  This also has a few pages of discussion by readers of the blog and I have referred to them in the body of the text.

[5] Sullam, Jewish Art Treasures in Venice, p. 42, n. 83.

[6] In the first part of his three-part essay « The Ancient Grudge,”  Jack D. Spiro presents some of the background to the usual tropes of anti-Semitism that lie behind the speeches in The Merchant of Venice, and the critic calls for a careful reading particularly of those parts of the play normally taken as presenting a softer, more humane version of Christianity, such as Portia’s monologue on mercy, or even Shylock’s plea for being  considered a man like all others argument is that every character in the play subverts those Christian and Renaissance ideals that the comedy seems to hold up against hypocrisy and prejudice.  But Spiro contends that Shakespeare’s aim was  cast doubt on those professed superlatives, all parties being guilty of asking too much of themselves and the world than is possible in a human environment.  See Spiro  Jack D. “The Ancient Grudge: The Merchant of Venice and Shylock’s Christian Problem” (in three instalments) VCU Menorah Review No. 70 (2009) online at http://www.menorahreview. org/article.aspx?id=66, 73 and 77

     Not all ideals but more realistic and tolerant attitudes are required in both the public and private spheres, in groups and in the moral interior of individuals.  He also hints that the Jewish principle that the Law was made for man and not man for the Law underlies the play.  However, despite his scholarship in the backgrounds to the various strands of the play and his careful reading of the text, he overstates the case and does not credit the playwright or his original audience with sufficient acumen to see beyond the strict paradigms that most educated Englishmen would have taken with a grain of salt, even Attic salt (that is, the wit to apply common sense and scepticism to everyone in the drama).  Furthermore, when we come to the second section of Spiro’s essay, his long denunciation of Chaucer for the anti-Semitic nonsense in The Prioress’s Tale from the Canterbury Tales, the critic flattens out the tonalities of the poem, misreads the female narrator’s insane ranting as though they were Chaucer’s own private views, and does not measure the motifs and images in that tale with its sources, such a comparative reading showing that Chaucer went out of his way to undercut their contradictions and incoherence.  Chaucer, like Shakespeare, was aware of and sympathetic towards Jews and Judaism through his circle of friends amongst recent immigrants, travellers and resident aliens; and, in Chaucer’s case, through his travels on the Continent on behalf of his patron John of Gaunt; and perhaps even a family history of conversion around the time of the 1290 expulsion of Jews and the forbidding of Jewish institutions in the realm.  In brief, Spiro does not take into account either the remainder of small clusters of Jewish individuals and families, nor the regular visits by Jewish merchants, professionals and refugees into England. 

[7]Guy Millière, « Europe’s’Moral Values’ » Gatestone Institute (31 July 2013) online at http://www. gatestoneinstitute.org/3905/europe-moral-values

[8] In the previous section of this essay we mentioned the discovery by a reporter of a chess set in the Brussel’s Jewish Museum in which the two sides were made up of glass figures representing Chasidic Jews and Catholic clergy.  The reporter was able finally to identify the artist who made these chess pieces as Gainni Toso, the scion of a seven-hundred-year-old Venetian family from Murano who now works and teaches in the United States.  The set seen in Brussels had been created by him in 1969.  Since then other glass-makers have made similar sets representing different groups of Jews and Christians.  See: Anon. “Gianni Toso” Revere Glass School online at http//:reverglass.com/x1/index.php?option= com_content& view=article&id=115&itemid=652

While it is unlikely that such a conception would have been possible until relatively lately—though Jews were master chess players for hundreds of years and traditional glassblowers were making a variety of ritual and decorative objects for the Jewish communities in Italy and elsewhere, two things seem more possible, and indeed probable: (1) Jews faced themselves off against their hostile neighbours and rulers and tried to play a game of strategic moves similar to chess in order to survive; and (2) as we suggested previously, the glass figures representing Jewish types indicate a way of imagining the characters in Shakespeare’s comedy with more depth and cunning than the mere static and occluded characters in the commedia del’arte and other festival masquerading games.

[9] Spiro comes close when he says “Stereotypes and myths are being punctured  relentlessly by Shakespeare[,] the kinds of bigoted generalizations fabricated by Marolwes [sic] most recent success in the London theatre, some of that success adventitiously stemming from the Lopez trial” (“The Ancient Grudge,” Part 2) p. 7.  It is important, however, to see (a) that Shakespeare’s gambit is to have Shylock aware that he is playacting his role as the caricature of a Jew and not just Shakespeare implying through the action and the echoes of Marlowe’s play tlo does not “fabricate” the slanders and slurs in The Jew of Malta but rather exploits and exaggerates them, as they are the stuff of popular carnival typologies and anti-Jewish sermons throughout the Middle Ages.  For more on the trial of the physician of Queen  Elizabeth I, Dr Gaspar Lopez, and the part played by Dr Hector Lopez, another Portuguese Marrano in London, see Charles Meyers and Norman Simms, “Troubled Souls: Why Conversos and Crypto-Jews Came to England After the Expulsions at the End of the Thirteenth Century” in Meyers and Simms, ed. Troubled Souls: Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries. (Hamilton, NZ: Outrigger, 2001)  pp. 164-189.

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For the whole of this essay in its several parts see http://simmsdownunder.blogspot.com/dynamics of anti-semitism.