Is Shylock Jewish? Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare’s Jews

273 Pages·2017·5.42 MB·English

by  Sara Coodin

IS SHYLOCK JEWISH?

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EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE AND PHILOSOPHY
Series Editor: Kevin Curran
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy takes seriously the speculative and
world-making properties of Shakespeare’s art. Maintaining a broad view of ‘philosophy’ that
accommodates fi rst-order questions of metaphysics, ethics, politics and aesthetics, the series
also expands our understanding of philosophy to include the unique kinds of theoretical work
carried out by performance and poetry itself. These scholarly monographs will reinvigorate
Shakespeare studies by opening new interdisciplinary conversations among scholars, artists
and students.
Editorial Board Members
Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
James Kearney, University of California, Santa Barbara
Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine
Madhavi Menon, American University
Simon Palfrey, Oxford University
Tiffany Stern, Oxford University
Henry Turner, Rutgers University
Michael Witmore, The Folger Shakespeare Library
Paul Yachnin, McGill University
Published Titles
Rethinking Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: From Lear to Leviathan
Alex Schulman
Shakespeare in Hindsight: Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy
Amir Khan
Second Death: Theatricalities of the Soul in Shakespeare’s Drama
Donovan Sherman
Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics
Thomas P. Anderson
Is Shylock Jewish?: Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare’s Jews
Sara Coodin
Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference
on Shakespeare’s Stage
Katherine Gillen
Forthcoming Titles
Making Publics in Shakespeare’s Playhouse
Paul Yachnin
Derrida Reads Shakespeare
Chiara Alfano
The Play and the Thing: A Phenomenology of Shakespearean Theatre
Matthew Wagner
Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form, and the Transformation of Comedy
J. F. Bernard
Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic: Selfhood, Stoicism, and Civil War in
Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra
Patrick Gray
Conceiving Desire: Metaphor, Cognition, and Eros in Lyly and Shakespeare
Gillian Knoll
For further information please visit our website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecsst

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IS SHYLOCK JEWISH?
CI TING SCRIPTURE AND THE
MORAL AGENCY OF SHAKESPEARE’S JEWS
♦ ♦ ♦
SARA COODIN

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across
the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with
high editorial and production values to produce academic works of
lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Sara Coodin, 2017
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 12/15 Adobe Sabon by
IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 1838 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 1839 3 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 1840 9 (epub)
The right of Sara Coodin to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Series Editor’s Preface xiii
Introduction: Is Shylock Jewish? 1
1. Renaissance England and the Jews 26
2. Parti-Coloured Parables 85
3. Stolen Daughters and Stolen Idols 140
4. Rebellious Daughters on the Yiddish Stage 197
Conclusion 245
Index 249

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PREFACE
Romanising non-English printed materials always presents a
challenge to those of us who write books in English. Those
challenges can become more complex when the task includes
transliterating both Hebrew and Yiddish into English.
Hebrew and Yiddish share a common script but not a single
standard transliteration system for rendering that script into
a Roman alphabet. There are multiple transliteration alpha-
bets to choose from for romanising Hebrew. In Yiddish, the
standard romanisation scheme is known as the YIVO trans-
literation alphabet; however, in actuality, the YIVO scheme
is often not used, a fact evident when we consider Yiddish
words like chutzpah, which the YIVO alphabet would trans-
literate as khutspe, an unlikely spelling almost never seen
in print or used in library catalogues. The widespread use
of non-YIVO transliterations of Yiddish words, titles and
names, along with the lack of accord between the translitera-
tion systems used to romanise Hebrew and Yiddish, presents
a set of puzzles to English-language researchers and writers
who, like me, do not aim to reproduce Hebrew type in their
book because their intended audience is primarily English-
speaking.
In the present book, I follow the YIVO transliteration
alphabet for romanising Yiddish words, titles and names,

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viii ] Is Shylock Jewish?
except in cases of widely used alternative spellings. For exam-
ple, I use the more common ‘Sholem Aleichem’ as opposed
to the unlikely YIVO rendering of ‘Sholem Aleykhem’. For
transliterating Hebrew into English, I adhere to the same rule,
maintaining commonly used spellings even where they differ
from the Library of Congress system whose transliteration
guidelines I follow throughout this book. Details of that sys-
tem can be found in Hebraica Cataloging (Washington, DC:
Library of Congress, Cataloging Distribution Service, 1987).
I also adhere to the conventions of capitalisation common to
specifi c time periods, geographical locations and languages
when I cite the titles of written and performed works. For
Yiddish titles, that means reproducing the capitalisation of
proper names and places along with the fi rst word of a work’s
title, but not capitalising other title words commonly capital-
ised in modern English. When citing early modern English
titles, I have made every effort to retain the idiosyncratic capi-
talisations and spellings of the early printed text, including
title words.
Unless otherwise noted, the edition of William Shake-
speare’s The Merchant of Venice that I cite from throughout
the book is the 1993 Oxford World’s Classics, edited by Jay
L. Halio. My use of particular English translations of the
Hebrew Bible is too lengthy a topic to be explained here, but
I discuss the particulars of the editions and translations I use
in the endnotes to Chapters 3 and 4.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book’s early life began as a collaborative research project
that then turned into a chapter of my doctoral dissertation.
These episodes of creative exploration and writing took place
under the guidance of my advisor and mentor at McGill Uni-
versity, Michael Bristol. I can confi dently say that this project’s
creative spark would not have ignited without his unwaver-
ing intellectual support and keen sense that scriptural cita-
tion was an important way into this particular Shakespeare
play. I do not know whether Mike was aware that my early
background in the study of the Hebrew Bible and its rabbinic
commentaries was going to prove as useful as it did, but for
that background I have my earliest educators at the Jewish
People’s and Peretz Schools and Bialik High School to thank.
Without the formative education in Hebrew Bible studies
and especially the Yiddish language – a true rarity in modern
Jewish primary and secondary education – I would quite
simply not have the intellectual or moral foundation that
proved so vital to this project’s development. For that educa-
tion I also need to thank both of my parents, for whom the
Yiddish language has always remained a centrepoint of
Jewish identity, culture and creative expression.
Funding for this project began when I was a doctoral
student at McGill University. The Fonds de Recherche du

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