Shylock’s Pound of Flesh (2024)

There were Jews in Shakespeare’s London, though they were all either actually or notionally Christian converts. In all likelihood Shakespeare knew very little about Jewish life, and may have known few, if any, actual Jews. And yet he has the distinction, or notoreity, of having created one of the most recognisable Jews in art: Shylock. Shylock is not a Jewish surname, though Shelah or Selah is a Jewish first name. I like to think, though the play doesn’t spell this out, that the character is actually called Shelah Ararbanal, Or perhaps Shelah Benardout, since Benardout is my wife’s father’s family name — it derives, ultimately, from a Sephardic Spanish-Jewish tradition. I have no reason to believe either of these fanciful theories of mine are true, of course.

Anyway: Shakespeare’s fictional Jew is perhaps the most famous in art, outside the Bible. Charles Dickens, another gentile with only the haziest, which is to say, most prejudicial, comprehensions of Judaism, perhaps rivals Shakespeare with Oliver Twist’s fa*gin. Between them, though, they dominate the ‘famous Jews in literature’ stakes.

A gentile like both of these Englishmen, I know a little more about this topic than either, by virtue of the fact that I’m married to a Jew, and that we have raised our children as Jews. (Buy me a drink and ask me how much it cost to bat- and bar-mitzvah our children, and hear me go on and, indeed, on). This gives me a slightly more informed sense of Jewishness than either Shakespeare or Dickens possessed.

All this is by way of prelude to a discussion of one of the most famous episodes in Shakespeare: the Jew Shylock, having signed an agreement with a Venetian Christian called Antonio whereby he (the Jew) lent him (the Christian) a sum of money, to be repaid or else redeemed by a literal pound of flesh cut out of the Christian’s body, insists upon the legality of his contract. He is about to take his revenge upon Antonio with a knife, as per the image at the head of this post, when a clever lawyer (a woman in disguise called Portia) tricks him. The law, she says, allows Shylock his pound of flesh, yes. But … but if, in cutting it out of Antonio’s breast, Shylock excises even a fraction more or less than exactly one pound, or sheds even one drop of Antonio’s blood — blood being legally considered not part of his ‘flesh’ — then all his goods will be forfeit to the state and he himself will be executed.

It’s a neat dramatic twist, though modern post-Holocaust performances of the play tend to emphasise the “Hath not a Jew eyes?” elements of the play, in which Shakespeare, a vastly greater artist than Marlowe (the success of whose 1590 2D-melodrama Jew of Malta was a manifest influence on Shakespeare’s 1597 play) allows the quote-unquote ‘villain’ of the piece his perspective on events.

So my question: is there more to say about the ‘pound of flesh’? It’s an anti-Semitic slur, linked to the ‘blood libel’, the mendacious claim by which Christians justified persecuting and indeed killing Jews, because Jews allegedly killed Christian babies, drained their blood and used it to make their special Jewish bread, chollah. Jews don’t actually do this, I feel I should stress. I’ve eaten chollah most Friday nights as my Jewish wife has said the blessings, lit the candles and passed round the Kiddish wine (tastes like cough mixture, frankly) in a family ritual that has, as our kids have grown older, increasingly come to resemble the Friday Night Dinner of blessed channel 4 comedy memory. If there’s been Christian-baby-blood mixed into that bread, I’m basically Dracula. [Update: Over on Twitter, my friend Ian Mond corrects me on this: the blood libel more usually accused Jews of mixing Christian blood into unleavened matzah — of which I’ve also eaten a fair bit in my time— rather than the leavened chollah.]

But of course there hasn’t. The idea that Jews are vampires, feeding on the blood of Christians, is an ancient, wicked, though tenacious lie, one that has had ghastly material consequences for Jews in the world. The Merchant of Venice is part of that discourse. Why does Shylock insist upon his pound of flesh even when he is offered his monetary loan back with interest? Because, the play says, he is wicked, and Jews are sad*stic monsters. Is there anything else to say?

I think there is, and it goes back to Italy. Once again, I don’t see that it matters whether Shakespeare knew this or not (which is to say, I don’t think it matters that he didn’t). He adopted the ‘pound of flesh’ narrative from a particular set of sources, recognising its theatrical potential in terms of building-up dramatic tension and then releasing it with Portia’s clever legalistic jink. In the Cambridge University Press edition of the play, editor M M Mahood traces the path by which the plot-device reached Shakespeare: ‘the flesh bond,’ he notes, ‘has a long history as a folk tale’, being present not just in the proximate source from which WS took the story (Giovanni Fierntino’s Il Pecorone, 1380s) but lots of other prior texts as well: ‘the Ballad of Gernutus’, Alexandre Silvayn’s The Orator and others.

What else can we say about this plot-device, beyond noting how anti-Semitic it is? Well, let’s situate the device in terms of Renaissance Italy rather than Shakespeare’s London, since Venice is the setting but also the source of the play. Unlike England (from where Jews had been formally expelled in 1290 — not to be permitted back-in, formally, until Cromwell’s edict in 1655) Italy had an actual tradition of Jewish life. Indeed, there were a great many Jewish communities in Italy during the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-centuries. Dana E Katz [The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press 2008)] describes an interesting paradox: — though Italian Renaissance art is full of anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews, Italian political authority was actually notably tolerant of them. Katz surveys the many artworks of the period that ‘portray Jews as deviant outcasts of Italian society … images of punishment, commissioned or approved by the despotic rulers of Italy to humiliate and deprecate Jews.’ But she also notes things like this:

Marquis Francesco Gonzaga stated in a grida (proclamation) dated 2 March 1515 that the recent popular uprising against the Jews in Mantua greatly displeased him. The grida explains that Jews are tolerated by the Roman Church and must also be tolerated in the Gonzaga dominion by the marquis’s subjects. Accordingly Francesco declares, “no one under any condition, now or in the future, can dare presume to injure or displease any Jew in any way under penalty of three pulls of the cord [i.e., the rope hoist, an instrument of torture].” The marquis explains that the penalty is irreversible and will take place immediately. Moreover, if the offense committed against the Jew is particularly egregious, the marquis will adjust the punishment to fit the crime. Scholars, influenced by the rhetoric of contemporary state letters, princely decrees, and notarial registries, have portrayed the Renaissance as a period of unusual princely toleration for Jews and the Italian principalities as a safe haven for Jewish difference.

After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, many Spanish and Sicilian Jews migrated to Italy. Katz quotes Cecil Roth’s History of the Jews of Italy:

This period of expansion was from some points of view the golden age of Italian Jewish history. In the south, the ruined Jewries were being nursed back into life; in the north, there was steady growth, general prosperity and a ferment of intellectual activity. A flow of immigrants arrived from abroad, new centers were established in almost unbroken succession, the older ones constantly expanded . . . . Only in Italy did the Jews enjoy general well-being. A few setbacks are chronicled, but they are isolated and exceptional. If, during civic disturbances, the Jews may sometimes have suffered more than their neighbors, this did not betoken a persecutory spirit among the people.

This wasn’t toleration for toleration’s sake, of course. The reasons for it were economic. Katz again:

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) wrote in his Summa theologica that toleration of evil is necessary if greater evil should come from intolerance or the expulsion of deviance. In this sense, prostitution was permitted in medieval society lest men be destroyed by their own unchanneled lust and resort to the great sin of adultery, rape, or sodomy. Lepers, beggars, and the insane were also served by the medieval idea of tolerance as a result of their physical or economic impediments because their presence ideally inspired the generosity of Christian charity. The only forms of social dissent to go beyond the boundaries of tolerable behavior was that of heretics and hom*osexuals, for both were thought to have committed the greatest of sins that threatened the moral center of Christian civilization. By refusing to subscribe to ecclesiastical doctrines and authority, heretics scandalized the Church by publicly spreading heterodox beliefs, whereas hom*osexuals were labeled immoral and iniquitous by the Christian faith because of their sexual practices, which were thought to threaten the distinction between the sexes. The Thomistic conception of toleration moreover gave theological support to the continued civic participation of Jews in communities throughout Christendom. Christians were never to embrace Jews — whom Thomas calls “our enemies” — as members of the community, but as practitioners of evil rites whose work in the moneylending business served to induce economic prosperity.

Such tolerance had very clearly demarcated limits. Recently my wife and I had a four-day holiday in Shylock’s Venice during which, amongst other things, we visited the Jewish ghetto (this city is where the word originates). The locale struck me as, at first, surprisingly narrow and confining and then, when I thought about it for a moment, as not surprising in that respect at all. As Katz says, ‘Franciscan sermons, steeped in ecclesiastical law, condemned Christians found eating or drinking with a Jew, visiting a Jewish doctor, bathing in the company of a Jew, socializing with a Jew in their home, helping to raise Jewish children, eating a Jew’s unleavened bread, or renting a house to a Jew.’ And since we’re talking, here, about a Jew cutting a piece of flesh for money, it is worth noting the following:

[For Jews in Renaissance Italy] the rules regarding kosher meat were prohibitive. To eat kosher meat, Jews had to have their own butcher and a larger supply of animals than did the Christians — because a significant amount of the animal had to be discarded. Jewish butchers sometimes received permission to sell the discarded parts to Christians, but not always, as this was a source of tension and suspicion. For Angelo di Castro, a prominent fifteenth-century professor of law at Padua, consuming meat slaughtered by Jews was a mortal sin: “If a Jew purchases an entire lamb or calf, slaughters it and prepares it in other ways in accordance with his rites . . . but then sells, gives or otherwise yields the hindquarters . . . it is clear that the Christian who accepts and consumes this meat has committed a mortal sin.” The reason, di Castro explained, was that eating this meat was contrary to Christian law, which prohibited Christians from using or consuming “Jewish food,” defined as food purchased and prepared by Jews. John Capistran, a powerful fifteenth- century Franciscan friar, went further, arguing that all food merely handled by Jews was impure: “How can it be fitting for Christians to eat the meat which the criminal and putrid hands of the unbelieving, faithless Jews treat as refuse?” Given this rhetoric, the sale of meat to Christians was potentially fraught with danger. [Flora Cassen, ‘The Sausage in the Jews’ Pantry: Food and Jewish-Christian Relations in Renaissance Italy’, in Hasia R. Diner and Simone Cinotto (eds), Global Jewish Foodways: A History (University of Nebraska Press 2018), 31–32]

This, I think, is what lies behind the ‘pound of flesh’ that Italian Shylock tries to extract from Italian Antonio. In terms of the play Shylock is a usurer; but behind that is a sense that he is a butcher — think of the flensing knife he has ready to flourish when he thinks Antonio is his. Jewish butchers are the complicated, paradoxical source of meat that is at once delicious and taboo. Underlying this mythos is the brute fact that it is Christians, not Jews, who eat the flesh and drink the blood of their (human) God. And the story plays on the fact that Christians can eat blood — black pudding, for instance — where Jews cannot: blood is not kosher, so blood would be one of the butchery products that Jews would sell to Christians. That which Shylock is not permitted to shed is precisely that by which Italian-Jewish butchers might turn a tidy profit. The whole conceit turns on a sense of which flesh is fungible — purchasable, in effect, as from a butcher’s — and which not. The play’s denouement, in which the flesh is fine, but the blood not-kosher, stands as a potently ironic commentary upon, precisely, Jewish dietary law.