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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Was Shakespeare Anti-Semitic?
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
If Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin really tried to pull the Merchant of Venice from public library shelves, she was probably responding to false claims that The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic.
The organized Jewish community and Jews in academia have a fairly sizable industry devoted to analyzing Shakespeare's alleged anti-Semitism.
Even though the term anti-Semitic is anachronistic in the Elizabethan period and really does not apply until the 2nd half of the 19th century, a superficial reader might conclude that The Merchant of Venice is Judeophobic.
Jewish anti-Goyism thrives on such misreadings. If the greatest English writer of all time could be an anti-Semite, then any goy is potentially a blood-thirsty animal waiting to rip out a Jewish throat and to drink Jewish blood.
With such logic high school English classes can be turned into venues for Zionist propaganda and indoctrination.
Shakespeare was almost certainly aware of the case of Simon of Trent and may indeed have been attempting to depict a psychology that could undertake such a crime.
Yet, Shakespeare is not particularly interested in gore in this play and leaves the audience wondering whether Shylock could have committed such a crime just as Ariel Toaff wonders about the truth of the accusations in the case of Simon of Trent.
Shakespeare has created a drama of immense ethical complexity with a lot of subtlety, perceptiveness, and irony.
If Shylock is a monster -- and Shakespeare never informs the audience whether he is, the audience must wonder who or what made him a monster.
Shakespeare is quite aware that many villainous people can use all sort of histories of victimization to justify their actions at a later date.
Such justifications do not make villainous actions any less villainous, but they may suggest other villainies that may be legal albeit atrociously immoral or unethical.
Shakespeare is making a comment on the social cultural and economic developments of his time period when a contract becomes as effective a weapon as a sword.
At the same time, Shakespeare shows some scathing irony in the portrayal of the money grubbing and materialism of supposedly ethically superior Christians. A lot of the classical allusions in the superficially happy ending are sarcastic to say the least.
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Monday, September 08, 2008
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2 comments:
Joachim concernig this, from over at Phil's net den:
I am quite worried when people try to put German Nazism, Zionism, the Holocaust and other political situations beyond rational understanding. Such people are up to something bad.
Read Raul Hilberg's autobiography. In it he reports something that will fill you with joy: he felt his work was obstructed by Israeli librarians, the utter gatekeepers.
But he also reports that German kids kept asking him: Why? Why did it happen? And he answered: Ultimately there is no answer. If I remember correctly.
LeaNder refers to a comment on the Mondoweiss.
It took a long time even to translate The Destruction of European Jewry into Hebrew though specialists, of course, could read it in English.
There is nothing particularly anti-Zionist or pro-Zionist about the book, and its neutrality on the issue might have been a problem, but its general narrative of the Holocaust simply did not agree with that of Zionism while his discussion of Jewish collaboration with the German Nazis entered into political territory that was hotly contested in Israel from before the time of the book's publication until the late 70s or early 80s.
I should probably go back and reread Hilberg's writings, but as I remember, Destruction was limited by a lack of access to E. European and Soviet archives and his framework made the Holocaust more difficult to understand.
In analyzing the Holocaust, I would propose that there may have been two separate but connected Holocausts taking place in parallel.
(LeaNder has seen the comment before.)
The two Holocausts are the German government's mass murder and that of E. European and Soviet populations that were very angry at and very fearful of Jewish revolutionary radicalism.
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