Anti-Judaism

“[To] call someone a Jew amounts to an instigation to work him over until he resembles the image.”

After all, Jews and their synagogue had long been the whipping boys of preachers and exegetes: “If hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian,” as both Erasmus and Luther put it at much the same time.

It is true that the characters in the Merchant make greater claims to sympathy and humanity than those in its influential predecessor, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (ca. 1589), in which not only the title character, but Christian and Muslim protagonists as well, are cynical distillations of villainy. But these claims are just one symptom of a

But if the Jews do not instruct through their history or their presence, and if that presence is so dangerous to Christ and to Christians, why do the Jews survive in Christendom at all?

But this insistence on a bright contrast between the attitudes and practices of the spiritual Christian toward commerce, and those of the fleshy Jew, was becoming more difficult to maintain in a world in which the wheels of commerce were accelerating, and from which the Jews themselves had vanished.9

Many of his tracts were written in German rather than in the Latin of the learned. These, combined with his efforts to translate the Bible into a language intelligible across the wide variety of dialects that stretched from the Netherlands to Poland, accelerated the birth of a modern German capable of serving as a language of culture.

Communication and interpretation have long been associated with lending and obligation, as the etymology of those words themselves makes clear.33 In Shakespeare’s age, a number of prominent theorists understood every communicative act, regardless of whether it involved words, objects, or money, as a promise of meaning to others. Words are, to quote

As far as her enemies were concerned, Spain’s unprecedented evangelical success had created a “Jewish” empire threatening the world with its tyranny.45

“I declare that neither pope nor bishop nor any other person has the right to impose a syllable of law upon a Christian man without his own consent.”