Part of what we need to understand when we look at the relationship between anti-semitism, the history of the Jews in England, and Shakespeare's work, is the precise nature of historical anti-semitism. The kind of anti-semitism we most often think of today is that typified by Nazi Germany; this is not the same kind of anti-semitism that existed before and in Shakespeare's England.

Racial Anti-Semitism

The Nazi program of racial purity, which culminated in the Holocaust of WWII in which 6 million Jews were murdered, asserted that Jews were racially inferior and therefore must be exterminated in order to further the ideal of a pure Aryan race. At one basic level, this is anti-semitism on racial grounds. A Nazi did not care if a Jew believed in God, observed Shabbat, or ever prayed. A Jew was a Jew by blood, and nothing could erase that.

Religious Anti-Semitism

 
Shakespeare's age based their anti-semitism on religious grounds because the Elizabethans inherited the fiction, fabricated the by early Church, that the Jews murdered Christ and were therefore in league with the devil and were actively working to subvert spread of Christianity. (In the graphic to the right, you can see a clear depiction of this attitude; in the graphic, a Jew poisons a Christian water supply by dropping some potion into the well.) The religious grounds of this anti-semitism means that if a Jew converted to Christianity, as Shylock is forced to do in The Merchant of Venice, then all will be forgiven as the repentant Jew is embraced by the arms of the all merciful Christian God of love. In fact, some Christian believed--as do some fundamentalist sects today--that the coming of the Kingdom of God was aided by converting the Jews to Christianity. 
 

 

 

A Note on the Notion of Jewish Responsibility for the Death of Jesus

Jews do not accept the blame for the crucifixion of Christ for many reasons, a few of which I will outline here:

1) the accounts of the crucifixion and the events leading up to the crucifixion were written by people who were obviously biassed against the Jews and who lived decades after the time of Jesus

2) those accounts were partly motivated by the desire to exonerate the Romans from any responsibility for the execution of Jesus because, around the time that the gospels were written, Christianity had become the official state religion of Rome under Constantine.  To read more, look at  The Emperor Constantine and Jerusalem

3) when Jesus was executed in Judea, Judea was under the rule of Imperial Rome and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, was the ultimate political authority in the land

4) Crucifixion was a Roman form of execution

5) the New Testament makes it clear that the Romans, and not the Jews, nailed Jesus to the cross
 

 

Click here to visit the Nizkor Holocaust Project
Click here to visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
 

Go to The History of the Jews in England / Index Page / Geocities