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,........

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