Summary of the History of the Jews in England

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The history of the Jews in England reveals at least three things:

1) It is clear that the Jews were persecuted, demonized, and murdered in England up until the expulsion of 1290. That persecution was based on both religious grounds and upon the position that the Jews held in the financial structure of the society.

2) It is also clear that Shakespeare had probably never met a Jew because Jews had been expelled three and one-half centuries before he lived.

3) But what remains less clear is precisely the image of the Jew that Shakespeare inherited after Jews were out of England for over 300 years.

It is safe to say that the image Shakespeare and his contemporaries held of the Jews was mostly unfavorable. One can stronlgy argue that the absence of Jews in England allowed a popular negative image of the Jew to become a deeply ingrained cultural stereotype that became part of the public imagination. Without flesh and blood Jews around to reveal absurdity of that stereotype of the demonic murderous Jew, it became an exaggerated and more powerful part of Elizabethan folklore. So Shakespeare probably relied primarily upon inherited cultural stereotypes, common folk-wisdom about the demonic Jew, as well as literary sources when he sketched his character of Shylock for The Merchant of Venice.

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