Douglas Mercer
February 28 2025
In the series The Man in the High Castle there is a scene in a National Socialist classroom where the teacher is discussing Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice. The teacher reads the famous (or infamous) plea of Jew Shylock:
I am a Jew
Has not a Jew eyes?
Has 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 to we not bleed?
If you poison us do we not die?
A student then says to the teacher that Shakespeare in this passage is saying that the Jew is a human being and, as such, it should not be taught. The teacher is frightened by this response and quickly dismisses the class in embarrassment. The scene is meant to demonstrate that the teacher realizes that the younger generation is going to be more radical than hers was, and understands that if she is to survive she will have to adopt a stricter ideology.
Of course they did not choose this speech for no reason. Although this series was one of the rare ones that did often show the National Socialists in a positive light, in the last scene the German protagonist hurls himself over a cliff as he realizes he made the wrong choice in following Hitler. And the speech by Shylock is the quintessential one they go to when they want to prove their thesis: everyone is equal, we are all human beings, and most especially the Jew.
But is it true? Is the student, correct? Is what the scholars call Shakespeare’s unparalleled “humanity” really at play here?
Let us remember that when Adolf Hitler saw his first Jew on the streets of Vienna, dressed in black with his greasy locks and snarling his wicked Yiddish he was astonished and his first question was: Is this a Jew? And then in increasing amazement this question led to an even more pointed one: is this a human being?
Jew Harold Bloom downgraded the importance of Shylock’s speech writing that at one time it might have been necessary but everyone knows better now. Meaning that now the whole world knows as an obvious fact that the Jew is a human being, it goes without saying, is beyond the scope of discussion. What he writes is: “I am not moved by the Hath A Jew litany since what he is saying there is now of possible interest only to wavering skin heads and other sociopaths.” From his perch in the rarefied air the Ivory Tower Bloom has obviously not encountered any skinheads, for from my understanding what they are known for is not “wavering.” And Bloom thinks this question of the Jews is settled. Perhaps it is in polite society, but then that is never where one goes looking for truth.
Nietzsche was more perceptive when he said that when the Jew steps forth in innocence the danger is great. And that is what Shylock is doing, stepping forth in innocence, disingenuous innocence.
Is the Jew a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Is the Jew a human being?
***
The standard line is that in Shylock Shakespeare was parodying the so-called cartoon like version of the Jew in Marlowe’s The Jew Of Malta.
As for myself I walk abroad at night
And kill sick people groaning under walls
And sometimes I go about and poison wells
But it is always good to actually read the words of a text and take them at face value, rather than assuming you know what they mean. In Shakespeare’s play Shylock is simply called The Jew in the dramatis personae, he has Shylock say he dreams of money bags at night, the very first word he utters in the play is ducats. He also uses the word usury multiple times and speaks of money breeding as farm animals do thus turning usury into a natural process like procreation; and he dislikes Antonio because he lends “gratis” and so drives down the rate of “usance.” As Shylock approaches a character says lest the devil cross my prayer because here he comes in the likeness of a Jew. Shylock is presented as a loathsome character and everyone has contempt for him.
In Act Five the Jew has disappeared from the play entirely and thus we get Shakespeare’s most perfect version of earthly paradise, Belmont.
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with images of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholds
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still inquiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls
This is a world that is like Elysium, an idyll away from the world of Venice and money and usury. This is the pure gentile world of perfect bliss where the moon shines bright and the sweet wind gently kisses. Any objective reading of the play shows this to be so; but to the scholars Shakespeare is the child of nature and never could have sincerely meant that earthly paradise was one from which Jews were banished. Why? Because they a priori assume that he could not have—he was Shakespeare after all and he not only invented the human but included everyone in it.
Post “Holocaust” the fact that the Jews are like everyone else is simply taken as a hard fact, and they enlist Shakespeare in their ideology and use a speech which (though on the surface only) supports this. And on the very off chance that I am wrong, that William Shakespeare was in fact travestying his good friend Kit Marlowe and was giving a poetic plea for all of humanity, well then, as the saying goes, the less Shakespeare he.
