There are two Jews whom everyone knows. The first is Judas and the other is Shylock. Shakespeare’s Shylock has cringed on the stages of the world. That is why an English pogrom is discussed here. Shylock is no more typical of all Jews than Judas is typical of the Twelve Apostles. From each of them—the one real, the other imaginative—the Gentile can learn of himself.
There were Jews in England at the time of the Saxons. They are mentioned in a charter in 833. They were deported to Europe in 1290 and allowed back under Cromwell in the seventeenth century. During this time there were hardly any Jews in England, but they lived on in the narrow insular minds of the people in the form of myths, some of which are still believed today.
Every schoolboy who has wrestled with The Canterbury Tales remembers the Prioress’s Tale of the little boy who sang a hymn to Our Lady as he passed through the Jewish quarter “in a great city” (in Asia) on his way to school. The wicked Jews cut the throat of the Christian boy, and although dead he continued to sing his hymn, because the Mother of God had placed a grain of corn upon his tongue. What happens in Asia happens in England, too:
“O young Hew of Lincoln, slain also By cursed Jews, as it is notable.”
It happens in Scotland also, as recorded in the ballad of “The Jew’s Daughter” who killed a Christian boy and threw him into a well. This dead boy cries too.
There are five variations on the theme of a murdered Christian boy recorded in the twelfth century, and fifteen are recorded in the thirteenth. Each century makes its own contribution to the myth—there were thirty-nine “slayings” in the nineteenth century. The reader is invited to partake in two small studies in detection—those of the Lincoln boy and of the Norwich boy.
A Christian child named Hugh of Lincoln was reputed to have been stolen by Jews in 1255, fattened on bread and milk for ten days and ritually crucified. The earth would not retain the corpse and in a panic the Jews threw it into a well belonging to a Jew named Copin. It was discovered there by his mother. It bore the marks of scourging, crowning with thorns and crucifixion. This, it was alleged, had taken place before a large number of Jews—some said that the boy was crucified before all the Jews in England.
In his trial Copin is alleged to have admitted that the crime had been committed and took place as a ritual ceremony once a year. Copin was executed, eighteen Jews hanged at Lincoln and ninety imprisoned in London under sentence of death, which they escaped by paying a large fine. (It is a strange coincidence that the Jews were accused of this and allied crimes whenever the King wanted money. Henry III, the monarch in question, was in financial distress. He deputed his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, to tax the Jews. In three years they had paid one-fifth of the national debt. Even this was not enough, so Henry sold the Jews to his brother.)
The boy Hugh was “canonised” by the people as a child martyr. He is no longer in the Christian calendar. He figures much in medieval ballads but surprisingly little in official documents of that time. It cannot be proved that there was any truth at all in the allegation.
A century before, however, another child had been “canonised” by the people of Norwich. Visions and miracles were reported from his tomb in Norwich Cathedral where people prayed to St. William, martyred by the Jews. This story is again worth examining.
The story goes that the body of a boy was found on Holy Saturday, 1144, in a wood near Norwich. He was subsequently identified as a tanner’s apprentice named William. On his body were marks which indicated that he had been crucified.
His uncle was a priest called Sturt and he accused the Jews of the crime, offering to undergo trial by ordeal before the diocesan synod to prove his accusation. His offer was not accepted. Five years later, a Jew named Eleazar was murdered and when the Jews requested justice the bishop counter-charged them with the murder of William.
The story as told depends upon one authority, Thomas of Monmouth, a monk, whose sources came, he admits, from hearsay gossip in the monastery. From this moment, however, he enters into the scene personally. William was buried in the monks’ cemetery. The founder of the monastery came back from the dead three times and told Thomas in a vision that the child’s body was to be translated from the cemetery to the chapter-house. It was again translated later (this time to the cathedral), exactly ten years after the crime; and from this moment popular devotion begins.
Thomas was now prepared to substantiate his charges. He discovers—nearly ten years after the crime—a Christian serving-woman who tells him that she was an eye-witness of part of the proceedings. She said she saw, through a crack in the door, the boy tied to a post in a Jewish house. Afterwards she said she had found a boy’s belt in the room. Later still she pointed out to him, he said, the marks of martyrdom in the room—this after ten years! And as final and incontrovertible evidence he quotes from a convert Jewish monk Theobald who told him that every year a Christian must be sacrificed by Jews in some part of the world, for without the shedding of blood they would never return to their fatherland.
Upon this statement that Thomas attributes to the monk Theobald the vast edifice of ritual-murder stories has been built.1 This was the first time the lie was told, and over and over again it was to be repeated in various forms. The lie was told in Northampton in the 1370s and they tied Jews between horses and tore them apart. The lie propagated itself. It was the perfect excuse for hatred and pogrom.
The history of the Jews in England seems to hinge on money. The dealings of the monarchy with them were one long exaction. In turn they sought their revenge by usury. The first outburst of pogrom seemed to set the pattern. At the coronation of Richard Lion Heart some Jews were expelled from Westminster Abbey and there was an outburst of popular fury. The houses of Jews were ransacked and plundered. The King conducted an inquiry and three Gentiles were hanged. Two suffered because they had robbed a Christian on the pretence of his being a Jew, and the third hanged because the Jewish house he burned set fire to the next, which belonged to a Christian.
The time was that of the First Crusade and the example set in London touched off in the provinces a wave of pogrom which thundered impartially on the infidelity and the wealth of the Jews. Now when Jews were murdered their bonds of debt were usually burned and their movables seized. As these would normally become Crown property the Exchequer suffered. After a vicious pogrom in York the judges on circuit were instructed by the King to inquire who were the murderers—not to punish them, but to secure the property which had been stolen.
Richard declared the Jews Crown chattels. Their property was to be registered, and each bond sealed before two Christian lawyers. In this way the Crown could not lose.
Their final expulsion from the kingdom was again bound up with money. After being sold by King Richard to Prince Edward they were sold by Prince Edward to some merchants in France, and in 1287 King Edward arrested and imprisoned the whole nation (about sixteen thousand) and made them buy their freedom. The collection of their freedom money exhausted their resources and they became expendable. All their immovable property was taken over by the Crown and they were expelled from the realm with just enough money left to subsist on. After being bought and sold like cattle they were banished when they could no longer be milked. Even after they had gone the memory of their money still haunted the English, who, for many years, dug in the ground on which Jews had lived in the hope of finding treasure.
It is not surprising, then, that the greatest of English dramatists should create in Shylock a type which answered to the long drag of racial memory, a figure of a Jew who sought to have his bond, his pound of flesh, his revenge on those who had treated him unjustly.
The idea of a creditor offering as a security for a loan a pound of his flesh was not Shakespeare’s. There were legends about it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The main characters are a knight and a creditor, both Christians. The judgment excuses the knight from payment, a plea having been made by a woman in disguise as a knight. The basis of the judgment is the same in the fable as Shakespeare makes it in the play. Flesh may be taken but not blood.
The substitution of the Jew for the Christian creditor was first made in an English medieval poem round about the time that the Jews were expelled from England in 1290. Subsequently it passed into European literature.
The role he acquired there is somewhat different from that in which Shakespeare casts him. Marlowe puts him in Malta as a rich Marrano whose ships sail the oceans of the world. His purpose in life is to kill Christians and gain wealth and power. He is a hybrid by Tamerlaine out of Faust, a poisoner, a liar, a traitor, a usurer, an intriguer.
Shylock, on the other hand, is no villain, and he is no hero. Marlowe gives him a loaded name—Barabbas; Shakespeare an English one. Shylock’s purpose is the acquisition of wealth for its own sake. He lives in that static world which fosters the adventures of others, and to that extent is parasitic upon them.
Antonio is a bold adventurer, a Venetian counterpart to an Elizabethan sea-dog. In debt because of his spending he goes to Shylock, the money-lender, whom he despises and insults. A bond is agreed upon and signed before a notary. If Antonio fails to repay within the stated time the forfeit will be a pound of his flesh. Antonio fails to honour his contract.
Shylock is only on the fringe of citizenship, nevertheless he can and does bring a lawsuit to secure his pound of flesh, refusing repayment of a higher sum by friends of the defendant. He wants Antonio’s blood.
He is within the law, within his rights, asking of a Christian court that it should mete out the justice of Christian law. Nevertheless it is not as a usurer that he stands before the court but as an avenger. He says:
“‘Shylock, we would have monies;’ you say so; You that did void your rheum upon my beard And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold: money is your suit.
What should I not say to you? Should I not say Has a dog money?”
Every dog has his day. The Christian has treated the Jew like an animal, and like an animal at bay he has turned. Shakespeare allows Shylock to speak for his nation:
“Hath not a Jew eyes? ... hands, organs, dimensions ... fed with the same food ... warmed and cooled by the winter and summer as a Christian is?”
The question hangs in the air. Is the Jew not a member of the human family?
Christians keep slaves, he argues:
“Which like your asses, and your dogs and mules you use in abject and slavish parts, because you bought them; shall I say to you let them be free ... that their beds be made as soft as yours ... You will answer: The slaves are ours.”
So too is his pound of flesh. He bought it. They treat slaves as if they were animals—“The villainy you teach me I will execute.”
For the first time in their European history they have been allowed to defend themselves. The Gentiles have been confronted with the caricature they have made. The scapegoat has become articulate. What the Christian has conceived him to be, that is what he has become.
Portia enters the scene. To the hard male discipline of justice she brings the mercy that drops as gentle rain from heaven, introducing that quality of equity which is the operation of law inspired by love.
The charges Shylock has brought, incidentally, have not been answered. The court remains unmoved, frozen in its prejudice. Shakespeare has mirrored the Gentile mind with the exactitude of genius.
Portia—in disguise, of course, for that arrogant masculine world would not learn its lessons from the other half of human nature—pleads as in the fables. It is flesh on the bond, not blood—it is one pound of flesh, neither more nor less. (What legal value has this argument? If you contract to an act you contract to its natural consequences.) So the claim is refused. And, according to the pattern of so many of the edicts levied against Jews, Shylock’s property is confiscated and he is forced into baptism. As always, the Jew is an outlaw.
But the lesson of Portia is not a lesson in law. The Jew must learn that Christians know mercy and show mercy to each other. But they show him none. That they have justice for one another but not for him. Italians are not Julius Caesars; all Scots are not Macbeths; but every Jew is a Shylock. Shakespeare was not being malignant. He simply made a myth into a person. He simply mirrored his times. No one bothered to teach the Jew that the quality of mercy is not strained.
The lesson goes one stage deeper. The patriarchal, lex talionis figure of the Old Testament Jew is confronted in Portia with a new kind of Eve whom the old Adam knows not. She is the Christian woman—Dante’s Beata Beatrice—whose noblest fulfilment finds itself in Mary, the Mother of God, tamer of the Boanerges, Maria Assumpta, the reminder that God’s love comes through her as God’s justice came through Moses. Shylock and his brothers live on their Mosaic heritage. God’s law and God’s righteousness is one side of his image. God’s love and God’s mercy is the other. Of the Prodigal Son the Jew can only say that he has received his deserts when he competes with the swine for pig-swill. The Prodigal Father waits for the Shylocks too.
The reader must be patient, for the next pogrom springs backward into the pre-Christian era. It is pogrom in Persia, or to be more accurate it is pogrom which never was. The reason why the pogrom was still-born is due to a woman, Esther. The reason why it is treated here is that the story of Esther is a kind of commentary on The Merchant of Venice.
Portia we have seen as the New Testament Eve leavening justice with love and bringing mercy to Christians but not to Jews. Here now is Esther the Old Testament Eve gaining mercy for Jews and vengeance on Gentiles. (Portia before the Duke of Venice, Esther before the King of the Persians—history is made by men who listen to their women and by men who do not.) Each speak with the voices of their separate race and their message is one of mercy, though Esther has less than Portia.
To the Catholic mind (not to the Protestant—its anima is no higher than Esther) comes the transcending figure of Maria Assumpta, the loving Jewess through whom God’s love became Incarnate. Our need of that figure—of the quality of mercy she symbolises—is for some poet to declare, for we sense our need rather than deduce it. She is Portia to the Jew and Esther to the Gentile and both have need of her.
Ritual murder was alleged as the motive for Polish pogroms at Kielce, July 4th, 1946, and at Czestochowa, 1946. Cp. The Jews in the Soviet Satellites (Syracuse University Press), p. 253.↩︎