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Not OK Anymore: Antisemitism Worse than Shakespeare

Not OK Anymore: Antisemitism Worse than Shakespeare

Last updated on: April 28, 2016 at 10:52 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Not OK Anymore: Antisemitism Worse than Shakespeare 2016-04-28T22:52:10-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Not OK.

William Shakespeare may be the greatest writer in the English speaking world and a brilliant Christian thinker, but he was also limited by his time period. Shakespeare’s science is acceptable, given what was known when he wrote and his theology is mainstream Christian given the limits of the sixteenth and seventeenth century of turmoil in the European Christian world. In some areas of sexual ethics, Shakespeare’s time was saner than our own, but in other areas, such as the nature of womanhood, Shakespeare has some important defects. A joy of reading Shakespeare is that his assumptions are different than those of a twenty-first century person in same areas and this allows us to challenge our own ideas.

What do we believe that Shakespeare might have found ridiculous? Could he be right? Why do we believe what we believe?

These are good questions. We should also give credit to people who are better than the mistakes of their times. If you are my age, you might have had a nice relative with views of race that were amazingly good given the culture in which they grew up, but were shameful for today. If you keep living, you have to keep changing and examining your ideas. One thinks of L.M Montgomery (of Anne of Green Gables fame) who begins her literary career as a progressive and fairly daring writer, but ended to the right of where society ended up. Thank God. Because the other trick is that sometimes progress is just going bad.*

One area where today ought to be better than yesterday is in non-Jewish people’s attitudes toward Jewish people. God help us: after witnessing centuries of oppression and evil done to Jewish people culminating in the Holocaust: enough. Never again.

Sadly, this is becoming less true and there is no good reason for it except the passage of time. Too many people were not alive to witness where anti-Semitic rhetoric ended up. One man old enough to know better, former mayor of London Ken Livingstone, spoke the evil filth that appears daily from younger people in my Twitter feed. “Ironic” pictures of ovens appear in social media threads about Jewish people. I have seen Jewish friends called words I will not repeat by progressives on social media.

Christians have a particular historic shame in our toleration and even support for pogroms in Tsarist Russia. I have had serious Christians in the last ten years recommend the anti-Semitic piece Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book purportedly about Jewish plans to rule the world, but created by the Tsarist secret police to stir up pogroms. Followers of one political candidate for President routinely trade in Jewish stereotypes in social media.

In this context, it is painful to read Merchant of Venice which is supposed to be a comedy, ending as it does in a wedding, but is tragic in the picture of the Jewish people it presents. The stereotypes of Jewish people as greedy, controlling, or hating Christians are present. Jewish culture is not presented favorably. William Shakespeare is (at times) at his worst in Merchant of Venice.

There is more to the play than this offensive material, much more, but we should not rush past it. We should stop, consider, and realize that such stereotypes had a long history before Shakespeare and that by using them, William Shakespeare was aiding the later devilish work of Julius Streicher.

I am reminded of certain “clever” alt-right folk who claim that repeating anti-Semitic language does not make them anti-Jewish because they are engaging in shock rhetoric. Americans have become so PC, they claim, that these devil words must be used to rock our complacency. This is the worst kind of nonsense because it ignores the lives of Jewish people who still face global threats and routine discrimination. To skim by Shakespeare’s defects is this area is not acceptable because his errors had consequences . . .like all our errors do, God help us.

And yet for the time, the play is an advance. Shylock, the Jewish money lender, is a bad person and is a mass of offensive stereotypes drawn from the Middle Ages. He plots revenge against the somewhat insufferable Christian hero, but while doing so he also says this:

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my 1290
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

Ken Livingstone should read these words and digest them. The alt-right should read these words and consider what they are saying. We should all acknowledge that in his genius and humanity, before the lesson of the Holocaust, William Shakespeare could do better than many of our modern statesman in understanding the common humanity of all people.

One need not agree with the different ideas a person might have to recognize that they too are a soul created in God’s image.

One need not condone every choice a person might make to know that they should be treated as we would wish to be treated.

The Christians in The Merchant of Venice fail at the Golden Rule, the central ethical teaching of the Jewish rabbi that we believe is the Son of God.

William Shakespeare was a great man, but he made mistakes. Most of those mistakes were the product of his education and his culture. He found it hard to know better, but in The Merchant of Venice he could go beyond the stereotypes.

We do not do as well and we have no excuse.

God have mercy on us: sinners.

———————-

*One of the favorite observations of CS Lewis.

William Shakespeare went to God four hundred years ago. To recollect his death, I am writing a personal reflection on a few of his plays. The Winter’s Tale started things off, followed by As You Like It. Romeo and Juliet still matter, Lady Macbeth rebukes the lust for power, and Henry V is a hero. Richard II shows us not to presume on the grace of God or rebel against authority too easily. Coriolanus reminds us that our leaders need integrity and humility. Our life can be joyful if we realize that it is, at best, A Comedy of Errors. Hamlet needs to know himself better and talks to himself less. He is stuck with himself so he had better make his peace with God quickly and should stay far away from Ophelia. Shakespeare gets something wrong in Merchant of Venice . . . though not as badly as some in the English Labour Party or in my Twitter feed.

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