“The Christian Will Turn Hebrew”: Converting Shylock on Stage

“THE CHRISTIAN WILL TURN HEBREW”: CONVERTING SHYLOCK ON STAGE Shaul Bassi During his walking tour to Scotland in 1818, John Keats described in a letter to his brother Tom his encounter with an eccentric traveler who had seen Edmund Kean playing Shakespeare in Glasgow “in Othello in the Jew, I mean, er, er, er, er the Jew in Shylock! He got bother’d completely in vague ideas of the Jew in Othello, Shylock in the Jew, Shylock in Othello, Othello in Shylock, the Jew in Othello, &c &c &c, he left himself in a mess at last.”1 Bearing witness to the relevance of the two best known Shakespearean outsiders for a social outsider such as Kean, the confusion of this anonymous spectator also implies a closer kinship between the two Venetian plays than has traditionally been acknowledged. As Gil Anidjar has observed, the common theme of the stranger in Venice appears to have been considered less compelling than a series of powerful critical categories that have set The Merchant of Venice and The Moor of Venice apart (comedy vs. tragedy, religion vs. race, theology vs. politics, and, crucially, Jew vs. Muslim).2 In this essay I intend to outline some historical analogies between Shylock and Othello as a means to measure the distance that separates Shylock, the most famous Jewish role, from Jewish theatre, meaning by that a site where all the complexities of Jewish experience and representation are addressed. My title plays on the closing moment of Act I when the bond of the pound of fl esh has just been sealed and, as Shylock leaves the stage, Antonio comments: “The Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind.” (1.3.175). The instant in which the relationship between Jew and Christian appears to be at its most cordial becomes the occasion of an anti-Semitic slur that foreshadows 1 Maurice Buxton Forman, ed., The Letters of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935) 184. 2 Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab. A History of the Enemy (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2003) 101–112. 114 shaul bassi Shylock’s fi nal conversion.3 In reversing that line—“The Christian will turn Hebrew”—I pose the question of whether the product of an all-Christian culture, such as Shylock’s unmistakably is, can ever be “converted” to Jewishness when transferred from the page to the stage. Since the question of audience response is crucial for my argument, I should clarify that I bring to this subject a specifi c European perspective, for which Jewish presence is, unlike in New York or Tel Aviv, at best a minority one. Let me preliminarily rehearse the more established opinions on the matter. As Harold Bloom puts it quite bluntly: “One would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare’s grand equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work.”4 Much as I am tempted to subscribe to this view, Bloom’s purely textual reading needs to be measured against a long and varied theatrical tradition that highly complicates it and cannot be restricted to the play’s use as propaganda in Nazi Germany.5 As for more optimistic interpretations, a standard critical gesture, whose implied objective is to absolve Shakespeare from any charge of anti-Semitism, is to pit the more humane Shylock against the wicked Barabas of Christopher Marlowe. It is again Harold Bloom who offers a convincing counter-argument: “I fear that Shakespeare’s revision- ary triumph over Marlowe is to give us a psychologically persuasive Jewish devil, rather than the caricature, Barabas. ‘I’ll show you a Jew!’ Shakespeare triumphantly implies, while creating a personage far more frightening than Marlowe’s cardboard fi end.”6 If the Jew of Malta can potentially stimulate only the most paranoid judeophobic fantasies, it is precisely the ambivalence of Shylock’s morality and psychology that can perversely trigger more sophisticated forms of anti-Semitism, providing 3 As Michael Ragussis has observed, the oldest and most persistent manner of representing the Jew in Western culture is as a fi gure of conversion. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 58. 4 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999) 171. 5 For Shylock’s stage and critical history, the most accurate study is: John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992). Earlier accounts are: Toby Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); Bernard Grebanier, The Truth About Shylock (New York: Random House, 1962); Hermann Sinsheimer, Shylock: the History of a Character (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963). 6 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Infl uence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) xliii–xliv..

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