When “Shylock” Matters

Peloni:  The incident of Trump, the most pro-Israel and greatest friend the Jews have ever had in the White House to date, using an well known antisemtic trope, calls to mind the recent article by Jonathan Feldstein, Elon Musk, the Holocaust, and Antisemitism, in which he explains that situations such as Trump’s Shylock comment offer an important “learning opportunity and something from which positive things could come out”.

by Rafael Medoff

Italian actor Franco Branciaroli as Shylock.  (Photo by ArezzoTV, CC BY 3.0, Wikipedia)

President Donald Trump says he did not know that the term “Shylock” has antisemitic connotations, when he used it in a recent comment about unscrupulous bankers. Then-Vice President Joe Biden said essentially the same thing when he called predatory bankers “Shylocks” back in 2014. Should we believe them? Does it matter?

Ugly slurs about Jews and money became widespread in the Middle Ages. Employment restrictions that were imposed on Jews in Europe forced some of them to become money lenders; antisemitic borrowers who failed to repay their loans then found Jews to be convenient scapegoats. 

William Shakespeare helped solidify the stereotype in the public imagination in his play The Merchant of Venice, with his notorious depiction of the Jewish money-lender Shylock, who demanded a “pound of flesh” from a Christian client for defaulting on a loan.

American Jewish defense organizations have always been concerned about the impact of the stereotypes in The Merchant of Venice. As early as 1912, the Central Conference of American [Reform] Rabbis urged the U.S. College Entrance Examination Board to remove Merchant from its list of plays “to be intensively studied” as a prerequisite to college admission.  The Anti-Defamation League in 1917 launched a campaign to ban the study of Merchant in U.S. high schools, on the grounds that “Shylock is erroneously pictured as typical of all Jews.” Several hundred schools acceded to the ADL’s request. 

There is a major difference, of course, between those who knowingly and deliberately use Shylock to refer to Jews, and those who are not familiar with Shakespeare, and unknowingly use the word without understanding its history or the offense it could cause.

 On the same day in 2014 when Vice President Biden used the term Shylock, later that afternoon he made a passing reference to Asia as “the Orient.” His political opponents pilloried him for using a term they said has “unacceptable imperialist undertones.” But Biden simply was unaware that the word “Orient” had gone out of favor. It was, as he acknowledged about both of his controversial comments that day, “a poor choice of words.”

The same cannot be said for those who have knowingly invoked Shylock to attack Jews. Consider the case of The Tablet, the official newspaper of the Brooklyn diocese of the Catholic Church, which was harshly critical of Israel for capturing Adolf Eichmann in 1961. It reported that Eichmann was arrested by “believers in ‘an eye for an eye’…who–like Shylock of old–demand their pound of flesh.”

Bigotry has never been limited by borders. Antisemitic slurs about Shylocks and Jewish financial practices have long been featured prominently in the propaganda arsenal of the Palestinian Authority.

Hafez Barghouti, editor of the official PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, has described Israel as “the Shylock of the lands and settlement” and Israeli banks as “Shylock-style banks that empty our pockets.” Raymonda Tawil, who was Yasir Arafat’s longtime adviser (and mother-in-law) once claimed that Israel’s tax policies in Arab-populated regions reflect “the Jewish money-lender’s mentality.” 

On official PA Television in 2014, self-described journalist Akram Attalah claimed that Israel was using its search for three kidnapped teenagers as an excuse to harm Arabs. “Israel is a state that seizes opportunities in the style of Shylock, and it knows how to seize opportunities,” Atallah said. 

Mahmoud al-Assadi, who is currently the PA’s consul general in Saudi Arabia, likewise has invoked The Bard to attack the Jews. In an op-ed circulated by Fatah, the PA’s ruling faction, al-Assadi wrote: “The greatest playwright, William Shakespeare, correctly described the deceitful, greedy, trickster, extortionist, and lowly character of the Jews in the story The Merchant of Venice in the 16th century.”

Yahya Rabbah, a regular columnist for the PA’s Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, has suggested a more convoluted connection between Shylock and Israel. After comparing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s agreements with his political allies to the bargaining tactics of Shylock, Rabbah wrote that “there is one essential difference [between Netanyahu and Shylock], which is that the modern Shylock doesn’t lend to anyone, but rather owes everyone—without exception—his ability to survive.”

In the PA’s eyes, however, it is not Netanyahu alone who resembles Shylock, but all Jews, as PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas made clear in an infamous speech two years ago. Addressing the 11th session of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, on August 24, 2023, Abbas offered this antisemitic history lesson: “They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true. [Europeans were hostile to  Jews] because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money, and so on and so forth.” (Translations courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI.)

After the controversy over Vice President Biden’s remark in 2014, an ADL official remarked, “Clearly there was no ill-intent here, but Joe and I agreed that perhaps he needs to bone up on his Shakespeare.” It may not be realistic to expect busy American political leaders to bone up on their Shakespeare; probably the wisest thing for them to do is simply avoid using Shakespearean terms with which they are not fully familiar.

As for Palestinian Arab advocates and others who have used the Shylock image knowingly and viciously—it’s clear they know exactly what they’re saying.