Antisemitism and Literary Joy

This paper was adapted from a talk given at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism

If we follow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs literally, there would be nothing more useless than a conversation about poetry. Jews are currently under threat throughout Europe, and in many parts of the United States, and many of us have spent the last three years scrambling between emotional recovery, political concern and profound anxiety. 

But of course, simcha is a central Jewish value. We cannot just survive as political creatures; we must also thrive, as people and as Jews.

There are many ways to live joyfully as Jews, but for this essay I want to focus on an invention of the early twentieth century, which is the secularly literate Jew. The nineteenth century in Europe presented an array of cultural fruits: Beethoven, Flaubert, Bizet, Schopenhauer. Sometime around the turn of the previous century, Jews began to participate fully in the artistic culture of Europe. For many of us, it was a pivot of Jewish identity that held the promise of profound growth. We could carry with us the richness of our own history as a people, and we could also join in every conversation in London and in Vienna, or at least have those conversations in parallel with the more prestigious social worlds that excluded us. When Jews took these steps into mainstream culture, it was rarely done with naïveté. We could stand in the back of concert halls where the orchestra was playing Mahler’s fifth symphony, and we could hear both the pain and the glory in a trumpet call that echoes the sound of the shofar. We could either gingerly, or eagerly, inhale the pleasure of Wagner or of T.S. Eliot even as we knew that those authors were, to put it mildly, deeply problematic. 

In this essay, I want to return to the Merchant of Venice. In so doing, I want to begin by stating what I will not be doing. Chiefly, I will not be debating or contesting the issue of whether the play is antisemitic. As a prominent Shakespearean said to me privately, of course it is. Efforts to argue that the play is somehow not antisemitic are riddled with contradictions, and more fundamentally are motivated by a desire to take an important cultural figure and to make him our friend, our confidant, our hero. The play is clearly an antisemitic comedy, in which the villainous Jew initially passes for a citizen and for a human, but is ultimately revealed to be a faithless creature of vengeance who is, in the eyes of the play, rightfully punished with a forced conversion to Christianity. The stakes of this argument are high, because although every available piece of evidence points to this conclusion, some still try to deny it. Such denials have a troubling resonance with similar efforts to minimize antisemitism on the Left. In both cases, some would rather lose logic than lose friends. Honesty about the play is, inescapably, honesty about the culture that it reflects, and the hatred we face now.

I want to argue for a renewed version of the complex and often melancholy literary joy I described above. Literary joy is, at any rate, complex for everyone. As Jews, we must defend ourselves, but we cannot reduce our existence to an endless fixation on antisemitism, nor can we believe it is always our responsibility to define ourselves as Jews at every committee meeting. We do not need to perpetually apologize for our own presence, and we must not turn our backs on a shared cultural space that we helped to create.

I will briefly summarize the play. Bassanio begins the comedy as a cash-poor dashing aristocrat, who is in search of a marriage that will heal both his loneliness and his wallet. Then we meet Portia, who has money but no man, so it would appear that our hero and heroine are a perfect fit. The problem is that Bassanio does not even have enough money to present himself as a legitimate suitor to Portia, so he has to borrow that money from his friend, Antonio. Antonio, who probably has more than a friendly love for Bassanio, agrees to lend him the money, even though he does not have that money to lend. In order to get it, he must go to a third person, Shylock. When Antonio and Shylock negotiate the terms of this loan, the tension between them is palpable and explicit. Both men hate each other, chiefly on religious grounds, so the agreement they make is a bitter one. The collateral for the loan is a pound of Antonio’s flesh. Antonio is expecting to receive money soon, but that money does not arrive, so Antonio is unable to repay Shylock. By the end of act three, Portia is matched with Bassanio, Shylock’s daughter has eloped with a Christian, Lorenzo, and Shylock begins act four clinging to the only thing he has left to control, the pound of flesh that Antonio had, during that fraught earlier scene, offered as collateral for his loan. Shylock is offered a late delivery of the money he had lent, but he refuses it, taking the contract literally and asking the court to authorize the extraction of that pound of flesh from Antonio. We are meant to understand Shylock’s perverse literalism as emblematic of the perverse literalism of Jews as a whole, who, as Tolstoy lamented, insist on observing Shabbat.

Meanwhile, Portia has not only captured Bassanio’s heart, but that of the audience as well. She has (arguably) rebelled against the rules set by her own deceased father, and she has adopted a male disguise to pose as a judge in the process of collection initiated by Shylock. She handles this, and a series of subsequent romantic games, with grace and wit. The richness and luminosity of her character is at the center of the play, and in the end we are both happy that she has found her man and also happy that she is in the driver’s seat of her marriage and its finances. Showing ingenuity, agility and no small amount of humility and humor, she wins the play as she defeats its villain. She is one of Shakespeare’s most captivating creations.

This context makes two of the most famous moments in the play both more clear and more troubling. When Portia, disguised as Balthazar, gives her transcendently beautiful speech which begins, “the quality of mercy is not strained,” she does so within a deeply antisemitic framework. She is lecturing a hard-hearted Jew on mercy, a quality that he should possess but does not, and his refusal to hear her sermon becomes the dramatic excuse for his forcible conversion.

The second moment is earlier in the play, the famous speech where Shylock says, “Hath not a Jew eyes?”. If taken out of context, it sounds like a defense of Jewish humanity. At one point it was common for Jewish critics, and readers, to lift that speech out of the play and present it as a positive statement, a sign that Shakespeare was, just maybe, on our side. Now, I hope, the time for such naive misreadings has passed. We are gaslit enough by the larger culture; we do not need to gaslight ourselves. In context, everything positive about Shylock’s speech is reversed. Before he asserts that he, and all Jews, have humanity, he has already said that he hates Antonio because Antonio is a Christian (1.3.42), he disowns his own daughter on the same basis, and then immediately after his speech on his own humanity, he reveals himself to be more deliberately inhuman than any of his gentile enemies.  Thus, there is a moment when the idea that Shylock might be human seems to be offered in the imagination of the play, but it is predicated and quickly superseded with a resounding confirmation of his congenital viciousness. At the trial scene that follows, Shylock attempts to claim the full rights of citizenship, but then reveals himself to be driven by an inveterate desire to shed Christian blood.

The conjunction of artistic beauty and social hate is neither unique to this text nor to Shakespeare’s time; when the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance in Paris was interrupted by protestors who claimed to be advocating for Palestine, we saw a similar combination. The disruption was ugly both on aesthetic and on moral grounds, but that did not stop the orchestra from playing, nor should it stop us from pointing out the links between the moralistic antisemitism of previous centuries with its current echoes in the common spaces of some of our colleges, and in the actions of countries such as Ireland and Spain.

We can enjoy the art of Europe even as we defend ourselves as Jews. 

We can find a model of how we can do this, in a scene in the Merchant of Venice that has received less attention. Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, spends most of the play desperately trying to escape her father’s control. She wants nothing more than to shed both him and her own Jewishness, putting all her faith in a vision of religious conversion and wifely obedience to her Christian husband, Lorenzo. In one key scene late in the play, these two newlyweds discuss the power of music. 

Up until this point in the play, Shylock has been the organizing antagonist, a figure of vengeance, exclusion and narrowness who has defined, by inversion, the play’s comedic virtues of forgiveness, inclusion, and magnanimity. That conceit, wherein the Christian majority, both onstage and off, defines itself against the most notable Jew in the play is why this play’s machinery of festivity is so fundamentally antisemitic. In addition to the open and crude antisemitism of comic figures such as Lancelot and Solanio, almost everyone in the play has contempt for Shylock, who is associated with everything that is wrong with spiritual and moral community. His daughter, Jessica, is more ambiguous. She detests her father, and yearns to escape and convert to Christianity, a religion that she does not seem to understand at all. While her father is converted by force, an action that the play celebrates, Jessica converts of her own freewill. Nonetheless, she seems unable to fully shed her Jewishness, a portrayal that has led many critics to compare her with Conversos, who were publicly Christian but often suspected of secretly maintaining Jewish rituals and beliefs. Shylock hates music (2.5.30-31), while Jessica, on the other hand, reflects with nuance on its power to shape emotion.

Lorenzo is full of instructions for Jessica on how to be a new person. Though we may be offended by Lorenzo’s personality, it is hard to resist being charmed by his words. In 5.1, he begins by introducing both music and his pedagogy on how she should receive it:

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.

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.

Such harmony is in immortal souls,

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

The transcendent beauty of his poetry is dependent on a friction between gentle impulses and violent ones. The moonlight is both sweet and sleeping, an assonance that establishes a mode of grace and harmony in the face of change. A bank is a flat area near a river, and here it is a way of imagining the stage that faces the audience. So the audience is presented as the flowing river that faces them. When music “creeps” in their ears, the implicit danger of this metaphoric vehicle is contrasted with a different kind of tactile sensation, the “touches of sweet harmony.” Jarringly, Lorenzo gives a direct command to Jessica to sit, speaking to her in the mode of a master to a servant, not a husband to a wife.

Following this, they look up at the sky. In the Globe Theater, the ceiling of the stage canopy was painted with the stars of the heavens, so his reference to the sky being “inlaid” interweaves the natural with the artificial, the real and the imagined. The Globe’s stage sky is painted, not inlaid, but the heavens that the audience normally saw at night was both real and “painted” by the hand of God. The gold that he imagines resonates with the golden floor of heaven. He celebrates the earthly music they hear, as well as the heavenly beauty of music they cannot hear because they are housed in a body, a “muddy vesture of decay.” Next, Jessica responds with a deceptively spare and direct line:

JESSICA 

I am never merry when I hear sweet…music.

Jessica calls the music sweet, which sounds like a paradox. How is it possible that she can acknowledge its sweetness, and at the same time not feel merry about it? Lorenzo’s answer compares Jessica to wild beasts. His basic argument is that to be “merry” is to be loose and unrestrained. She may, according to him, feel pleasure, but not merriment.

LORENZO 

The reason is, your spirits are attentive.

Here, he means “attentive” in the sense of still, waiting. He approves of her joy, but cautions her to understand that pleasure, and to contain that impression, within the passivity of reception. “Merry” is here counterpoised with “attentive.” “Merry” is related to mirth, and it has a connotation of pleasure and active conviviality. Attentive denotes subservience and restraint, related to the French attendre, to wait. He is a newly anxious husband who seeks to domesticate the body of a wife whom he has seen to be a rebellious cross-dresser. He then goes on to lecture Jessica on the effect that music has on wild animals, rendering them charmed and motionless:

For do but note a wild and wanton herd

Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,

Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,

Which is the hot condition of their blood,

If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,

Or any air of music touch their ears,

You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,

Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze

By the sweet power of music. Therefore the poet

Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods,

Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage,

But music for the time doth change his nature.

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

So trees, stones, and floods, as well as wild horses, have an ear for harmony, and an ability to allay their inherent wildness in favor of awe and silence. There is no stone that rejects the power of music, but there are some people who do, and the “man” that Lorenzo envisions, as being a contrarian music hater, one who is not to be trusted, is both broadly figurative and very specific, as a reference to Jessica’s Jewish father. The only kind of thing that can reject music, and by extension grace, is the kind of person who has “no music in himself,” and thus can hear none coming from the outside world. 

Jessica as a model for a Jew in the modern world. First, she is only allowed a brief remark of self-reflection, sandwiched between massive speeches where she is instructed on who and how she should be, an experience many of us can find familiar. Second, she is caught in a paradoxical position. Having played the part of the self-hating Jew who betrays her people, she then finds herself only granted conditional acceptance in the mainstream culture. Even her one line in this exchange captures her paradoxical position. Metrically, her first ten syllables of the line are these:

I am never merry when I hear sweet

At the point when iambic pentameter would typically end the line, she continues, and the final word, “music”, hangs outside the line, as if she feels it to hang just outside her grasp, an effect I have marked with three dots. She does not fit neatly into her new social world. She is off-rhythm. And so are we.

To be Jewish and either American or European, right now, is to embody contradictions. If we follow Jessica’s lead, we can hear the enchantment of Western culture, including the poetics, music and hate. We can, and perhaps must, hear that beauty with a difference, relishing both our pleasure and our resistance, both our musicality and our grief. Like Jessica, we stand on a dividing line, and we hear music defiantly. Jessica claims agency and ambivalent joy just outside the meter of a dangerous and beautiful world.

Put another way, we can return to the concert halls, in Vienna and in Tel Aviv. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is playing Mahler and Tchaikovsky in the next few weeks.

This play is our enemy, but the Western civilization that it so deeply reflects is an essential ally in our quest to preserve Maslow’s more basic protections. So there is a joy and also a necessity to find the poetic, legal and theological details of our broken pleasure in the face of European art, and in the interstices of its oppressive beauty. Poetry alone will not save us, but we cannot survive without it.