Introduction
Reading Shakespeare’s plays, and understanding that he was born over three hundred years before World War II started, might make a student wonder why being called a Jew was viewed as an insult among Shakespeare’s characters and audiences. Our culture today, abhors the idea of such anti-Semitism, so why was it so accepted during the famous playwright’s time? Why did it lend some humor to the plays, and not create some sense of shock or revulsion? Within Shakespeare’s life, there were no practicing Jews living in England, or better put, the Jewish people that lived in England were converted Christians or never claimed to be of the Jewish faith. That might be one of the answers. It wasn’t until the middle of the seventeenth century that Jews who practiced Judaism were welcomed back into England. It might be more accurate to say, Jews were allowed to move back to England, but might not have been completely welcome by the Protestant citizens; most Christians, Catholic or Protestant, seemed to have some biased views about the Jewish people and their religion.
Jews have been treated poorly more often than they have been treated fairly for most of their existence. To understand the persecution and stereotypes of Jews in Shakespeare’s day, we don’t have to travel back to the days of enslavement in Egypt, or the almost continuous occupation of Jerusalem by a conquering nation like the Greeks or Romans. It is easier to start off in the medieval ages. The Formation of a Persecuting Society, writing by R. I. Moore, gives a thorough overview of the treatment of Jews from 950 to 1250 CE. In his introduction, Moore suggests the complex question: “Whether religious unity was in fact necessary…to the cohesiveness of medieval society.”[1] This is echoed in the introduction to The Merchant of Venice: “The impulse behind these persecutions was the conviction that a stable society required a shared belief system.”[2]
Moore writes of a culture of persecution that puts heretics, lepers, and Jews in the same basket of hate and isolation. In fact, Jews were classified as enemies of society along with the heretics and lepers, but this classification umbrella also covered prostitution, homosexuals, and any type of person or group that did not completely conform within the Christian ideology of that given time.[3] In 694, Spain held the seventeenth Council of Toledo and put the entire Spanish population of Jews into slavery; overnight Jews became serfs who belonged exclusively to the crown. Jewish wealth also became the property of the Spanish royal treasury. These decrees were made under dubious rumors of Jews rebelling against their Christian rulers overseas and were planning to do the same in Spain. Under this type of royal decree, Jews were protected by the crown, but also forbidden to practice their religion, and their children were married to Christians at an early age.