Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June, those opposing the decision have engaged in fierce debate about the place of religious reasoning in the justice system. These conversations tend to be dominated by the assumption that “religious” is synonymous with “Christian.”
But making religious moral reasoning synonymous with Christian moral reasoning causes danger for us all – and is a mistake as old as Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare’s plays are nearly synonymous with English literature the world over. Crowds have cheered at the same deceptions, double-crosses, and confessions of love for the last 400 years. His plays are the groundwork and source material for beloved cultural touchstones both classic and modern, and the influence that his writing has on cultural beliefs is foundational and far-reaching. This can prove an issue, however, when it comes to some of his more problematic plays, including “The Merchant of Venice.”
Bassanio wishes to marry a woman named Portia but has no money to pay for the journey to woo her, so he asks his friend Antonio for a loan. Antonio has no money to lend Bassanio so he asks Shylock, the titular Jewish merchant, for a loan instead. Shylock agrees, but states that if Antonio doesn’t pay back the loan in time then he must give Shylock “a pound of [his] flesh.” Antonio agrees.
When Antonio has no money to repay the loan, Shylock takes him to court. Portia sneaks into the courtroom disguised as a male lawyer, and asks Shylock to be merciful and accept money in repayment of the loan. He refuses, and insists on obtaining Antonio’s pound of flesh, which Portia accepts on the condition that he do so without spilling any of Antonio’s blood, an impossible task. Shylock is then punished by the court for attempting to kill a Venetian citizen, is forcibly converted to Christianity on pain of death, and returns home to find that his daughter has stolen his fortune and eloped with the friend of his enemy.
Shylock, the titular merchant and Jewish character, is perhaps most famous for his “hath not a Jew eyes” speech. This soliloquy is often cited by scholars and laypeople alike as exonerating the play (and by extension, Shakespeare) from accusations of antisemitism. If the Jewish character in question has a whole soliloquy on the inherent humanity of Jews, doesn’t that prove the play’s innocence?
The issue with this argument is that it ignores the last line of the soliloquy, the thesis of Shylock’s argument: “And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”
Shylock argues that if Jews are human, then they seek revenge when they are wronged, just like everyone else. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong or inhuman in a desire for revenge. But this definition of humanity as being founded on revenge is stated by a Jewish character, set in contrast to how the Christian characters in the play define humanity. That’s a problem.
Shakespeare lived in the late 1500s, long after the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, and almost a century before their readmittance in 1656. Elizabethean Christians in England, then, would have their opinions on Jews shaped entirely by popular and religious media. And among those religious ideas is the belief that the Jews, in their obsession with revenge and the letter of the law, rejected Jesus and his teachings of compassion and mercy. Christians, by accepting Jesus and his message, are then saved, and the Jews are doomed. (Whether Jews’ status of forsakenness is irrevocable or not varies by time, denomination, and region, but the worst of it culminated in the exclusion of Jews from public life and legal rights, ghettoization, community expulsions, the kidnapping of Jewish children, and pogroms.)
Merchant is generally analyzed as a comedy: Shylock is commonly seen as the villain, and so his famous monologue’s argument about the nature of humanity is intended to reflect negatively on him, a foil to the heroes and not taken as moral truth. Shakespeare has his Jewish character defining humanity as the state of seeking revenge, and he has his Christian characters define humanity as the state of owing mercy. Portia, in her famous speech in the courtroom, argues against Shylock’s demands for justice, saying that Shylock should seek and exhibit mercy instead.
Her argument rests on one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity, the belief in original sin: that Adam and Eve, by consuming the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, doomed all of humanity, and because of that all humans are born sinners and are by nature sinners. This being the case, if the actions of individuals should be evaluated by God through the lens of justice, no human being would attain salvation. As such, one must pray for mercy, and learn from that prayer to be merciful in their dealings as well. As she states
[Mercy] is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
This dichotomy of mercy and vengeance is foundational in classic Christian antisemitism, enshrining the idea that Jews are obsessed with revenge, with the letter of the law over the spirit of it. In this worldview, Christians have a monopoly on mercy.
This is, of course, false. Jewish law places the utmost importance on human life. Christianity is neither the originator nor the arbiter of justice, and indeed, none of the Christians in this play are particularly merciful. But this idea of Judaism as a vengeful religion that puts the letter of the law before the life of human beings is a deep-rooted falsehood, a well-believed and beloved lie. Countless Jews have been expelled, forcibly converted, and killed because of it.
Portia, for all of her talk of mercy, has none to spare for Shylock. She wields the law like a scalpel, and so a trial that begins with Shylock taking Antonio to court for defaulting on his loans ends with Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity on pain of hanging, and his entire fortune being confiscated by the state. Half of it is then awarded to Antonio, the man who owes him 3,000 ducats, whose good friend then robs Shylock and runs away with his daughter Jessica and his late wife’s ring, the one thing he has to remember her by.
An Elizabethan Christian audience member might have seen Shylock’s downfall as poetic. Watch as Shylock, the Jew, is undone by the very justice system which he prioritizes over human safety. A Jew confronted with the text, however, whether in Shakespeare’s time or in ours, is struck with the disquieting realization of just how futile it would be for a Jew in 16th century Venice to seek redress against a Christian defendant before the court. Shylock is fighting a losing battle. As a Jew, he has no grounds on which to demand justice, mercy, or morality. Even when in the right, he is perpetually wronged by the very system that is supposed to uphold justice. This discomfort, however, would likely not have occurred to Elizabethan Christians. The concept of the Jew as a scheming villain in theater was previously established by Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’, and the categorization of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ as a comedy makes it unlikely that the Elizabethan audience would have sympathized with Shylock, the villain in the story. Nobody mourns when a monster is defeated when the monster looks nothing like them.
So how do Jews deal with this text?
The Yiddish-language theater gives a compelling answer: rewrite it in translation. Shakespeare’s plays have always enjoyed great popularity in Yiddish theater, some becoming so prolifically and culturally performed that theatergoers may not have been aware that the original play was not written in Yiddish.
YIVO’s interview with the late Harold Bloom, a renowned professor and literary critic, attests to the Yiddish world’s fondness for Shakespeare. Bloom describes seeing the great Yiddish actor Maurice Schwartz performing the role of Shylock in the Yiddish rewrite of Merchant of Venice at the Second Avenue Theatre in the late 1930s. “Schwartz, an enormous man with a big black beard and a booming voice, stands brandishing an enormous scalpel as he closes in on the actor playing Antonio, who is stripped to the waist and trembling, intent on collecting the pound of flesh Antonio owes him. And then, with a histrionic shudder that rippled through the crowd, Shylock throws down the scalpel and exclaims ‘ich bin dach a yid!’ – ‘but I am of course a Jew!’”
In this version of the play, Shylock stops his vengeful action because of a moral duty imposed upon him by virtue of his Jewishness. Even to his financial detriment, even when he is in the right in the eyes of the law, even when Antonio has mocked and mistreated him for their entire relationship, in the Yiddish rewriting of the play Shylock does not, cannot, exact his revenge on Antonio.
In the Yiddish “Merchant of Venice”, it is the Jew who shows mercy to the Christian, undeserving as he may be. Here, morality is centered within the domain of Judaism. For all of Portia’s empty words on the nature of mercy and morality as divine, as the key to salvation, it is by the hand of a Jew that the verdict is executed. Not with a scalpel wielded as the law, not with the “justice” of the original English text (which leaves Shylock destitute and forcibly converted to Christianity), but with Jewish mercy. With the refusal on the part of a man wronged to exact justice in a manner that would irrevocably harm the one who wronged him.
This idea is mirrored in Halacha (Jewish law). The liturgy in Exodus 21:24, in the context of tort law, states that one should pay “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This line has often been cited by Christian philosophers as evidence that the “God of the Old Testament” is cruel and unmerciful, while the “God of the New Testament,” with his tenet of turning the other cheek, is kind and merciful. The issue here is in arguing that Jews worship a cruel and unmerciful God while Christians worship a kind and merciful God. Both because that gets into dualism and because it forms the root of the “synagogue of Satan” argument and says that Jews are at best misguided or are tricked into, and at worst knowingly and intentionally, worship the root of all evil.
In Halacha, the Talmud (Jewish oral tradition) confronts Exodus 21:24 differently. The rabbis do not read this literally, instead ruling that the text means that one should pay the monetary value of an eye for an eye, and the monetary value of a tooth for a tooth. Unlike what “Merchant of Venice” and its Christian audiences may assume, the Jewish tradition distinguishes between revenge and justice.
To Jews, there is mercy inherent in the system and administration of justice. No matter what Portia, or anyone else, might argue.
