Shakespeare and the Jews

James Shapiro

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231541879
• Edition: 20
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1996, James Shapiro's pathbreaking analysis of the portrayal of Jews in Elizabethan England challenged readers to recognize the significance of Jewish questions in Shakespeare's day. From accounts of Christians masquerading as Jews to fantasies of settling foreign Jews in Ireland, Shapiro's work delves deeply into the cultural insecurities of Elizabethans while illuminating Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. In a new preface, Shapiro reflects upon what he has learned about intolerance since the first publication of Shakespeare and the Jews.

I

False Jews and Counterfeit Christians in Early Modern England

Marrano. A nickname for Spaniards, that is, one descended of Jews or infidels, and whose parents were never christened, but for to save their goods will say they are Christians. Also as Marrana.

—John Florio, 1611

If extraordinary care be not taken herein…under pretext of Jews, we shall have many hundreds of Jesuits, Popish priests, and friars come over freely into England from Portugal, Spain, Rome, Italy, and other places, under the title, habit, and disguise of Jews.

—William Prynne, 1656

Marrano. A Jew counterfeitly turned Christian.

—James Howell, 1660

Any discussion of the presence of Jews in Shakespeare’s England depends upon what one means by Jew. The answer to that question is as difficult and complex today as it was two thousand years ago when Paul tried to articulate the difference between Jew and Gentile in Romans and Corinthians. The question of who and what was a Jew was no less complicated in Shakespeare’s day; indeed, it was arguably more so, with the rapid proliferation of categories like “false Jew” and “counterfeit Christian.”

Until the sixteenth century the question of who was a Jew had rarely (if ever) come up in England. There was little reason that it should have. Sermons, paintings, Chaucer’s Prioress's Tale, Corpus Christi plays, and a host of other sources confirmed that Jews, who had been subject to persecution and then exiled from England’s shores in 1290, were the accursed descendants of those who had killed Christ and who continued in their devilish ways. Such people could hardly be mistaken for fellow Christians. Although chroniclers reported that after 1218 Jews had been required to wear distinctive badges so that they would not be confused with Christians, no one in medieval England ever commented on the seeming inconsistency between this decree and the widespread belief that Jews were recognizably different.¹

By the early seventeenth century, however, in the wake of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, the Protestant Reformation, and the expansion of English overseas travel and trade, the question of who was a Jew began to be asked with greater frequency and, on occasion, urgency. Thousands of Iberian 14 Marranos throughout Europe, including a few who had emigrated to England, were now masquerading as Christians, even as a handful of Englishmen were passing themselves off as Jews. The study of Hebrew, Cabala, and rabbinical sources was on the rise. English Protestant sects were emulating Jewish Sab bath observance and dietary laws. Claims that the ten lost tribes of Israel had been discovered in the New World were finding their way into print. The resulting desire to know who was a Jew led to the no less puzzling question of what was a Jew, as early modern English writers tried to define what distinguished the Jews from themselves. One of the effects of this sustained interest in the nature of the Jews was the pressure it put on what had been assumed to be, in comparison, a stable English and Christian identity.

I. Who is a Jew?

No event in the early modern world complicated the issue of Jewish identity more than the Spanish Inquisition.² Its shock waves were felt as far away as the shores of Turkey, England, and the New World. Like Ferdinand and Isabella’s decision to expel the remaining Jews from Spain in 1492, the Inquisition, first introduced in Castile in 1478, was an acknowledgment of a serious failure. Hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews, including much of the social and intellectual elite, had undergone conversion to Christianity in the late fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries, some voluntarily, some by force. By 1492 over three-quarters of Spanish Jewry had converted. The decision to banish those who had refused to convert was thus a belated effort to mark a clearcut distinction between Christian and Jew. The hope was that with their former coreligionists in exile, New Christians would be less tempted to return to the faith they had abandoned.³ Contrary to what many now believe, the purpose of the Inquisition was not to persecute Jews—in theory there were none left in Spain, and, after the required conversion of all Jews by Manuel I, none in Portugal either—but to discover the few apostates among the many Jews who had undergone baptism. Indeed, as early as 1449, Conversos had been the object of attack and of legislative curbs.⁴ Despite its efforts to extract confessions and its public autos-da-fe, which offered theatrical displays of faith and brutal punishment of heretics, the Inquisition also failed in its mission insofar as the prospect of a camouflaged Jewish presence continued to haunt the Spanish and Portuguese. The subsequent institution of limpieza de sangre, blood laws that distinguished between those of Jewish lineage and Old Christians, signaled yet another failure, since adopting them meant abandoning the fundamental tenet of Christianity as a religion based on brotherhood, substituting for it a model (like that of Judaism) based on lineage.⁵ Nonetheless, neither persecution nor racial laws could resolve the threat to Iberian Christian hegemony and identity posed by the counterfeit Christian.

The resulting destabilization of cultural identity has triggered considerable debate among historians of the Inquisition about whether, as one writer puts it, “the majority of the Conversos were real Jews”⁶—whatever “real” means—or whether this notion of secret Jewish heresy is merely a “fiction,” since the New Christians after several generations of separation from Judaism were so “detached from Judaism” as to be basically Christian.⁷ One of the stranger twists in the history of this debate is that Jewish historians have eagerly supported the inquisitors’ claim that apostasy was widespread among the Conversos. Thus, while the tortured victims of the Inquisition insisted upon their fidelity to Catholicism (to save their lives, family, or property, or simply because it was true), the inquisitors and a good many Jewish historians since then have preferred to believe otherwise. This has certainly been the case in scholarship written not long after the Holocaust, when Jewish historians read back into sixteenth-century history the cruel lesson of the twentieth: anti-Semites make no distinction between observant and apostate Jews. Thus, for Yizhak Baer, Conversos “and Jews were one people, united by bonds of religion, destiny and messianic hope which in Spain took on unique coloration typical of the people and country.”⁸ Baer’s equally influential disciple, Haim Beinart, similarly elides the distinction between Jew and Converso, and sees in the Inquisition a paradigm of Jewish survival:

Out of the deeds done to Jews and Conversos alike shines the internal strength of a Jewry rich in spirit and deed, a Jewry that was able to hold its stand against great waves that tried to engulf her. The deeds of those tried by the Inquisition, those who as marytrs sanctified the Name of God, their vicissitudes and sufferings, may serve as beacons of light for Jewry wherever they are.⁹

While the traumatic history of European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s goes a long way toward excusing the distortions of such claims, the approach taken by Baer, Beinart, and their followers nonetheless occludes one of the most unsettling issues generated by the Inquisition: who was a Jew, and how could you know for sure? What the Inquisition thought to be Jewish was in large part based on fantasy. Reviewing Inquisition testimony, Jerome Friedman has argued that most “records indicate that New Christians were convicted of being secret Jews because they often abstained from pork, used olive oil rather than lard, changed sheets every Friday, called their children by Old Testament names, prayed standing rather than kneeling, or turned to face a wall when hearing of a death,” which, he adds, is like accusing people of being Jewish today because they have been observed “reading The New York Times, eating bagels, or supporting the American Civil Liberties Union.”¹⁰ This list of offenses gives some sense of how rapidly Jewish cultural memory had faded in 16 over a century without instruction in Jewish law and customs. To what extent were these crypto-Jews—who for the most part were raised as Catholics, only to learn of their Jewish heritage at the age of twelve, or even twenty—to be considered Jewish?

Not surprisingly, sixteenth-century Jewish authorities found themselves at a loss in dealing with the complexities created by the Inquisition, for the situation required a fundamental reconsideration of whether Conversos were Jews or not. As might be expected, rabbinical opinion differed considerably over time and place (distant Ashkenazic Jewish authorities being on the whole less tolerant in their judgment than the Sephardic ones who had a clearer sense of the strain that Iberian Jews were under). For the most liberal interpreters, the Conversos were Jews; for others, they were only to be treated as Jews “in matters relating to family law” (e.g., divorce cases); still others concluded that the Conversos were non-Jews in every respect (and, for some, “worse than non-Jews”).¹¹ Even as Christian Spain adopted the term Marrano to describe lapsed New Christians, rabbis struggled with their own new categories, distinguishing, for example, between anusim, those whose conversion was forced, and meshumadim, those who embraced Christianity voluntarily. Jewish communities that accepted the Iberian Conversos usually required the men to undergo circumcision before further reeducation or integration into the new community in order to demarcate all too fluid religious boundaries.¹² This particular requirement sometimes met with resistance from those unwilling to commit to total affiliation with the Jewish community. For example, recent scholarship has shown that a good number of Jews living in England in the period from 1650 through 1720 fell into this category; these uncircumcised individuals were described by London’s Jewish authorities in the 1680s as “those who have withdrawn in order to enjoy their liberty.”¹³ Yosef Kaplan has argued that the “members of this marginal group sharpened the ‘boundary crisis’” within London’s small Jewish community “by virtue of the de facto recognition of their right to live a Jewish life according to their own rights.”¹⁴ Marking cultural boundaries proved difficult for both Jewish and Christian authorities.

It is likely that what individual Conversos actually believed ranged from devout Catholicism to equally devout Judaism, with all kinds of permutations in between, including ambivalence and confusion about their cultural identity.¹⁵ Yirmiyahu Yovel has persuasively argued that the ensuing mixture of Jewish and Christian beliefs also “led to various cases of skepticism, secularism, neopaganism, rationalist deism, or (in most of these cases) to a rather inarticulate confusion of symbols and traditions.” Some surely experienced forms of a religious duality unprecedented in the West, which would have profound implications for the development of the history of ideas in Europe. According to Yovel, this

duality penetrated the consciousness (and the subconsciousness) of the most w. ardent Judaizers. Even the Marrano martyrs and heroes were rarely Jews in the conventional sense. The clandestine character of worship, the Catholic education, the lack of Jewish instruction, and the isolation from Jewish communities outside Iberia created a special phenomenon in the history and sociology of religion: a form of faith that is neither Christian nor Jewish.¹⁶

Rather than stamping out crypto-Judaism, the Inquisition unexpectedly created and exported a new problem: the fear that some Christians were not really Christians. As such, Converso apostasy was pernicious, and was made even more troubling by the fact that, with the widespread dispersion of Iberian Conversos (especially after the institution of the Portuguese Inquisition), these counterfeit Christians could be found anywhere. The Inquisition ultimately revealed that, torture notwithstanding, it was next to impossible to root out marranism or to know what faith people really professed. Faith was disguisable, religious identity a role one could assume or discard if one had sufficient improvisational skill.

II. The English perspective on marranism

English interest in these events in Spain and Portugal peaked in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at a time when England was at war with Spain and anti-Catholic sentiment ran highest. While in Tudor and Stuart accounts of the events in Spain there is almost no interest in how the Spanish mistreated their Jewish population, there is considerable attention paid to the threat Marranos posed to the Spaniards, and the Inquisition itself to Spain’s social fabric. John Foxe’s observation in his Actes and Monuments is representative in its insistence that the Inquisition strayed from its initial premise of rooting out apostate Jews, in the end trapping all kinds of others in its net. This failure to discriminate meant that those who were not even Jews were subject to the greed and self-interest of the inquisitors. For Foxe, the “cruel and barbarous Inquisition of Spain, first began by King Ferdinand us and Elizabeth his wife,” was “instituted against the Jews” who, “after their baptism maintained again their own ceremonies.” Yet “now it is practiced against them that be never so little suspected to favor the verity of the Lord.”¹⁷

The confusion generated in Spain and Portugal over the status of secret Jews also led other early modern English writers to warn of the proliferation of marranism. James Howell writes that “the tribe of Judah…is settled in Portugal,” where “they give out to have thousands of their race, whom they dispense withal to make a semblance of Christianity, even to church degrees.” Howell adds that this “makes them breed up their children in the Lusitanian language; which makes the Spaniard have an odd saying, that El Portugueie se crio delpedo de un Judio,” that is, a “Portuguese was engendered of a Jew’s fart.”¹⁸ Henry Blount writes in a similar vein of the Jews’ “boast” in Portugal and Spain “to have millions of their race to whom they give complete dispensation to counterfeit Christianity, even to the degree of priesthood, and that none are discovered but some hot spirits, whose zeal cannot temporize.”¹⁹

A Londoner in early Stuart England, curious about what the word Marrano meant, might have turned for help to John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary (Florio was himself of New Christian descent), where the term is defined as “a nickname for Spaniards, that is, one descended of Jews or infidels, and whose parents were never christened, but for to save their goods will say they are Christia...