European Judaism

History has largely ignored Anglo-Jewish history in the years between the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and their readmittance in 1656 by Cromwell. This article revisits that period and disputes the misconception that the Period of Expulsion left England without any Jews for nearly 400 years. Although the small Jewish population ebbed and flowed with the rising and waning tides of English anti-Jewish hostilities, it nevertheless persevered. This article highlights some of the more well-known and thus well-documented of these Jews, the majority of whom were Crypto-Jews of Spanish or Portuguese origin.

Elizabeth I had people of Jewish origin in her personal circle, such as the famous physician Rodrigo Lopez, who was a relative of an influential Jew called Álvaro Mendes. Mendes was born in Portugal, and later took refuge in the Ottoman Empire, where he was known as Salomon ibn Ya’ish; we know that he exchanged correspondence with Elizabeth I, and the queen always favoured him in her missives to Sultan Murad III. The queen knew that Mendes received, while a Christian, a knighthood in the Order of Santiago, since she dubbed him ‘Eques’ in her correspondence. So even if ibn Ya’ish lived exiled in the Ottoman Empire, Elizabeth I still considered him a ‘Westerner’. The question that arises is: to what extent did this pragmatic diplomacy of Elizabeth I with Islamic states where some ‘Western’ Jews appear as pivotal elements shape their image in Elizabethan England, especially in the eclectic circles in which Shakespeare lived?

Aemilia Bassano Lanier was partially of Jewish origin and came from a Venetian family of court musicians. She was brought up in the court and was educated by Countess Susan Bertie and the Duchess of Suffolk. Her work entitled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is a long narrative poem articulating a woman-centred account of the Bible. As a woman of partial Jewish descent, Aemilia, who has ‘a voice of her own’, deals with the maltreatment of women and compares them to Christ in their silent suffering. At her time, women were often expected to be silent within society, creating an absence rooted in their lack of voice. Both Christ and women sacrifice themselves for the betterment of mankind. This article will deal with Aemilia Lanier’s new perspective upon biblical women and the Passion of Christ as reflected in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.

Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1612) has attracted scholarly attention for its representation of English attitudes towards Islam, the economic and cultural allure of piracy, and the religious and political stakes of conversion. Yet the play also deserves to be considered for its treatment of Jewish characters, whose dynamicity complicates early modern understandings of Jewish difference. Daborne’s play links Jews to renegades – individuals who threaten England’s integrity by rejecting religious and national ties for the sake of personal profit. Applying the epithet ‘Renegado Jew’ to its main Jewish character, A Christian Turned Turk seeks to define the relationship between these two bogeymen of the English imagination. Drawing on a biblical origin story for renegades, as well as parallels between the play’s main Jewish and renegade characters, I argue that A Christian Turned Turk offers Jewishness as the proper lens through which to understand the allures and dangers of renegadism.

This article takes up one of the most perplexing and thoroughly examined questions posed by Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice–the origin and extent of Antonio’s melancholy. While many critical responses point to anxieties towards his ventures abroad, unrequited romantic love or general indecisiveness to explain the merchant’s sadness, this reading asserts that his atrabilious nature must stem from something more latent, comprehensive and socially binding. This article argues that it is Antonio’s unwanted, yet pre-existing and indisputable similitude with Shylock, the Jewish usurer, that incites an internal sadness; Antonio’s insistence upon his absolute difference to Shylock’s profession, religion and humanity ignites and prolongs melancholy, since those are, ironically, the very things that make them so similar and renders his opposition unsuccessful.

The article explores Shakespeare’s secularized retelling of the Christian theological narrative of deceiving the Devil, with Antonio playing the role of Christ and Shylock as the Devil. The article argues that recasting the contest between Christ and the Devil in the world of Venice sets the stage for Shakespeare’s larger exploration of the pervasive nature of deceit in human affairs. Although it seems that Shakespeare’s characters are resigned to live in a fallen world where truth is obscured, Portia’s invocation of mercy may be Shakespeare’s attempt to offer some hope of an earthly salvation. The article argues that this portrait of a world filled with deception resonated with Shakespeare’s audience. Men and women in early modern England lived in a world where they often had to hide their religious identities and loyalties. This interpretation challenges more recent attempts to see the play as primarily concerned with race and tolerance.

The Merchant of Venice remains a ‘problem play’ for contemporary production. Whether the play is inherently antisemitic or not, it remains one of the most popular of the canon. I will consider how actors and their directors can, with the wisdom imparted by twentieth-century psychology and Stanislavskian-derived ideas of objectives, circumstances and subtext, seek to circumvent the challenges and infuse problematic text with more acceptable interpretations. Possible reinterpretations of Shylock are centrally considered, but the characters and motives of Jessica, Portia, Antonio and Bassanio are also scrutinized. Such re-evaluation of the underlying motivations seems a reasonable resolution for keeping the text intact while undermining any inherent negative stereotyping. However, once we admit of this subversion of a writer’s intentions, what might the consequences be if there are those who wish to use the same tools to create anti-humanitarian theatre?

As to the risks of what I call the ‘triangulation’ of both public power and private emotion, I extend my earlier treatment of ‘mediation’ in The Merchant of Venice to Measure for Measure, King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest, linking to them Shakespeare’s Sonnet 134. For Shakespeare, whether poet or playwright, a private triangulation of direct romantic obligation is as nettlesome as the public official’s similar behaviour – as when the Duke ‘outsources’ Viennese power to Angelo – and the results are quite as disastrous. The complex and highly legalistic sonnet concerns the triangulation of passion from the speaker to a friend. The beloved winds up ensnaring both through ‘the statute of [her] beauty’. The word ‘surety’ – used centrally in the poem and twice in Merchant – pinpoints, through the delegation to a third party of obligations otherwise charged directly to two committed parties, the underlying Shakespearean problematic

The first translation of Shakespeare’s Othello into Hebrew, Ithiel ha-Kushimi-Vinezya, was published in 1874. The translation, by the Jewish convert to Christianity Isaac Edward Salkinson, was made following an explicit request by one of the most prominent figures of the late Hebrew Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), Peretz Smolenskin. I will examine how the two negotiated one of the most controversial cruxes in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The crux, found in Othello’s final speech (5.2), reads in the First Quarto (1622) as ‘the base Indian’ who ‘threw a pearl away, / Richer than all his Tribe’, while in the First Folio (1623) it reads as ‘the base ludean’. I will meditate on the Indian-Iudean crux, and offer a critical reading of Salkinson’s ‘solution’ and his ‘mistranslation’ of ‘pearl’ to ‘sapphire’ on the same line, in light of Smolenskin’s critique of Hebrew literature. In so doing, I will offer an understanding of the role of the Hebrew translator in their era and of translation in general.

In this article, I examine the character and reception of the Hebrew translations of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet, Tiedge’s Urania, and the New Testament produced in the second half of the nineteenth century by Isaac Salkinson, a Jew converted to Christianity and employed as a missionary by the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews. I focus on a salient feature of these translations, that is the use of biblicizing techniques. In contrast to previous studies, I tie the production of all of Salkinson’s translations to his activity as a missionary.

Dror Abend-David’s Scorned My Nation in its comparative literary analysis of the German, Yiddish and Hebrew translations of The Merchant of Venice concludes that cultural context and political intentions changed dramatically between the two Hebrew translations in 1921 and 1972, limiting his textual analysis to the closing line of Shylock’s famous speech: ‘it shall go hard’. I examine two key words in that speech in the two translations to detect which biblical texts the translator called on, consciously or unconsciously, and gauge what the literary resources of the Hebrew language can make of Shylock and his complaint and whether the language portraying Shylock and his complaint did actually change over those fifty years.

This article examines the way in which Meir Wieseltier’s translation of Macbeth into Hebrew affects the way Shakespeare’s play is perceived by young Israeli readers. I argue that Hebrew, being the language of the Bible and studied by Israeli youth from childhood, creates instant allusions and intertexts, and therefore alters the way the play is perceived in Israel today.

In this article, I address contemporary Hebrew translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, specifically those by the Israeli poet Anna Herman. My reading of Herman’s translation of Sonnet 18 contextualizes this translation in the Hebrew translation history of the Sonnets. I discuss how Hebrew retranslations of the Sonnets illuminate and complicate our understanding of shifts in the development of modern Hebrew writing and translation from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. How do Herman’s translations ‘compare’, as it were, with the translations that have come before, particularly those by male translators? As part of a neoformalist turn in contemporary Hebrew poetry, I call attention to the ways in which Herman’s translations, which were published in 2006, revitalize our reading of the original Shakespearean English and the Hebrew translations that followed, thereby constituting an altogether contemporary text.

This article will discuss two points, half a century apart: the first Hebrew press review of The Merchant of Venice, and the press coverage of the first production of the play on the Hebrew stage and the public debate that accompanied it. The first review was published in the first Hebrew daily HaYom in St Petersburg on 23 August 1887 and addressed the showing of Merchant by Russian actors. The reviewer was the writer and critic David Frischmann. Merchant was first presented in Hebrew in May 1936 by Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv, directed by Leopold Jessner, who had escaped from Germany. The Hebrew press of the time provided extensive coverage around the production of the play in the context of the violent riots in Palestine and the rise of Nazism in Europe. Among the participants in the public debate were major representatives of the intellectual elite of the time.

This article discusses different responses to Michael Radford’s 2004 screen rendition of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It examines selected newspaper reviews, as well as academic papers that critique the filmic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, taking into account its representation of Shakespeare’s Jew. The article interrogates to what extent the medium – theatre or cinema – affects the way the audience experiences the work, especially when dealing with an issue as complex as antisemitism. In this manner, Radford’s attempt to historicize the events in Merchant is viewed as a form of attenuating the antisemitic elements in the play.

This article deals with Shakespeare’s reception among German Jewish youth in the early twentieth century. The Jewish youth movements played an appreciable role in Jewish education and culture. The various Jewish youth movements reflected the German Jewish society of the time. Despite the influence of the German youth movement, the young people developed their own German Jewish Bildung canon. Many young Jews in Germany perceived Bildung as an ideal tool for full assimilation. Bildung placed an emphasis on the Jewish youth as an individual, and so served as an ideal tool for full assimilation. My thesis is that by means of the youth movement, German Jewish youth could develop new interpretations of identity, through the creation of a European Bildung ideal, which includes an awareness of the significance of Shakespeare.

Because of its potential for fostering antisemitic stereotypes, in the twentieth century The Merchant of Venice has a history of being subject to censorship in secondary schools in the United States. While in the past it has often been argued that the play can be used to teach tolerance and to fight societal evils such as xenophobia, racism and antisemitism, I argue that this is no longer the case due to the proliferation of performance methods in the classroom, and the resultant emphasis on watching film and stage productions. Because images – particularly film images – carry such strong emotional valence, they have the capacity to subsume other pedagogical aspects of this drama in their emotional power and memorability. I therefore question whether the debate over teaching this play is truly a question of ‘censorship’, or simply educational choice.

Israeli doctors enjoy the dubious reputation of being unfeeling, arrogant and altogether incapable of listening to patients’ concerns, to such an extent that the success of treatment can be seriously compromised, on both a scientific and human level. In an attempt to combat these shortcomings, Israel has followed other countries’ lead in incorporating exposure to the humanities as an integral part of the medical curriculum. I argue that Shakespeare’s theatre provides a unique platform for discussion of the ways in which we approach our own and our patients’ mental and physical pain. I address the particular challenges of teaching Shakespeare to multicultural Israeli medical students and the value of drawing on performances in Hebrew and Arabic as well as English. I employ performance theory and cultural studies to shed light on the insights to be gained by exposure to Shakespeare performance which can directly impact these future medical practitioners’ experience.

This article gives due and extended attention to the performance in 1943 of The Merchant of Venice in Vienna, examining the ways in which Shylock was portrayed and potentially misused for propagandistic purposes by the regime. The approach will be both primarily analytical and comparative. Archival material sourced from the theatre museum in Vienna (Theatermuseum) and the Burgtheater will form the base of this research. The question ‘How was Shylock performed under the Nazis?’ will be accompanied by ‘To what extent was the play modified?’ and ‘How does the infamous Vienna production differ from previous, celebrated productions?’ Considering that Merchant is a play which, up until today, often upsets audiences, analysing a Nazi performance might seem too crude an endeavour. This article, however, aims to demonstrate that no matter how painful or uncomfortable a topic may be, ‘Erinnern macht frei’ – remembrance can set you free (Marko Watt).

Shylock’47 was a Hebrew-language stage production presented by the Pargod Theatre in New York in 1947. Conceived and directed by Peter Frye, it was a metatheatrical play-within-a-play that interrogated the idea of producing The Merchant of Venice in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It combined original scenes culled from Shimon Halkin’s Hebrew translation of Merchant with present-based transitional scenes, created mostly through improvisation and discussion between director and cast. What eventually emerged was a script based on Shakespeare’s text with added dramatized discussions about the play’s meaning and relevance to Jews at that particular moment in history.

Can The Merchant of Venice be performed in Germany after the Holocaust, and if so, how? Is the claim that the play is a touchstone for German-Jewish relations, with a philosemitic tradition – and therefore eligible to be performed today – verifiable? The article begins by briefly surveying this tradition from the Jewish emancipation in the mideighteenth century, which, with a few relapses, continued – especially in productions directed by Jews and/or with Jewish actors in the role of Shylock – until the rise of the Nazi regime, to be resumed after the Second World War. The main part analyses a test case, staged by the Israeli director Hanan Snir at the Weimar National Theatre (1995), and intended rhetorically to avenge the Holocaust on the German audience: Merchant as a viciously antisemitic play with in a play, directed by SS personnel in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp with eventually murdered Jewish inmates compelled to play the Jewish parts.

How does Shakespeare’s ambivalent character Shylock affect British theatre artists of Jewish heritage today? Since the 1970s, stage adaptations of The Merchant by British Jewish directors and actors have struggled to glean an interpretation that would make The Merchant relevant or palatable for a post-Shoah generation. This article has a double focus: we discuss the difference between the adaptations of the older generation – Arnold Wesker’s character rewriting in The Merchant (1976) and Charles Marowitz’s deconstruction in Variations on the Merchant of Venice (1977) – and the contemporary revision in Julia Pascal’s 2008 The Shylock Play. Secondly, we focus on the reaction of contemporary Jewish theatre artists in Britain to the centrality of Shylock as the canonical figure of the Jew in Britain. We asked a number of contemporary British Jewish theatre artists – from Tom Stoppard to Samantha Ellis – about their personal relationship to Shylock and we present a digest of their responses.

Rewriting Shakespeare has become a global genre. Arnold Wesker was one of the trailblazers of the genre with his The Merchant (1976). This article argues that Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant, with both its subversion and extension of Shakespeare’s play, in theme, plot and characterization, engages with Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice by means of a counter-discourse. Wesker rewrote Shylock by focusing on two episodes in Shakespeare’s play: Jessica’s conversion to Christianity and Shylock’s self-defence. Wesker’s rewriting disrupts the binary as well as Christian conceptions to bestow upon the Jew the ‘protean quality’ of representing just about any sort of ‘Other’ but themselves. Wesker’s Shylock has a rounded humanity and is a cultured, humorous and book-loving Renaissance man. Wesker puts Shakespeare’s work under scrutiny as a culturally constructed world where life can be repositioned, and margins moved to the centre to be in a new light.

Julia Pascal’s The Yiddish Queen Lear, a dramatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, merges racial identity politics with gender politics as the play both traces the history of the Yiddish theatre and offers a feminist criticism of Shakespeare’s text. The use of Lear as a source text for a play about Jews illustrates that contemporary Jewish engagements with Shakespeare are more varied than reinterpretations of The Merchant of Venice. Identity politics are employed in Pascal’s manifestation of the problematic relationship between Lear and his daughters in the form of a conflict between the play’s protagonist Esther, who struggles to preserve the tradition of the Yiddish theatre, and her daughters who prefer the American cabaret. Gender politics are also portrayed with Pascal’s use of a strong woman protagonist, which contributes to the feminist criticism of Lear as well as subverting the stereotypical representation of the domestic Jewish female figure in other dramatic texts.

In the Western world, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is controversial due to its stereotypical description of Jews as evil and greedy. In China, the work was not widely known until its translations came out. This article deals with two Chinese renderings of Shakespeare’s classic, by Laura White (1914–1915) and Shiqiu Liang (2001/1936) respectively, which reconstruct the image of Shylock and Jews on the basis of the translators’ perceptions of the original figure, combining their identities and social backgrounds. In imagology, based on the ideas of Pageaux (1989/1994), the image of the ‘other’ can be analysed on three levels: lexical items, larger textual units, and plot. On the face of it, the image of the ‘other’ in translation can originate in either the source or target culture. However, the present article, which focuses on the lexical level, shows that there is a third possibility – a lexicon that blends two or more cultures.

The article deals with the 1940 and the 1986 stagings of The Merchant of Venice in Hungary and with the forty-six-year gap between them. Comparing these events, the article draws attention to the ways in which the dominant ideology of these entirely different regimes influenced the interpretation of Shakespeare’s play and its staging.

Productions, adaptations and spinoffs of The Merchant of Venice since 1945 generally employ one of four strategies: continuing, historicizing, decentring and universalizing. Continuing means following nineteenth-century English productions in making Shylock a sympathetic outsider. Immigrant Shylocks still appear on English-speaking stages, but often seem sentimentalized and anachronistic. Historicizing means making the play reflect historical circumstances, such as the Holocaust, so that Shylock, however sharp-edged, automatically attracts sympathy. Decentring means making Jessica’s story at least as important as Shylock’s. Many recent productions and prose adaptations explore Jessica’s plight as immigrant’s daughter, belle juive, forlorn wife or remorseful child. Universalizing means mapping the play’s Jewish-Christian conflict onto other racial, religious or ethnic antagonisms, as in The Merchant ON Venice, about a Muslim ‘Shylock’ and his Hindu neighbours in Los Angeles.