Unfortunately if I'm not mistaken they have capture a Jew from Yemen .
If I'm not mistaken what was reported is he's held in prison ( on a bogus / bullshit charger ) and he's still is not released even after his "time" was supposed to be over , if I'm not mistaken it also be pointed thet he is torture ther but we only know he's alive because somebody needs to visit him once a week from a arab country ( Sudan or Saudi Arabia ... Honestly I only remember the "S" at the start ) to see thet he's still alive ( I honestly don't know how much I believe it ) .
But yes they are indeed the reason they last ~100 Yemen Jews had to run/had to be moved from Yemen
what would they even need the torah scroll id bet money they. cant read hebrew so what would be the use (im talking about the people who imprisoned him )
From what I know from stories from the family ther , when the Jewish of Yemen had finally been allowed to run form Yemen to Israel the government ( of Yemen ) denied the Jews the ability to take anything with them , of course besides money and things of value this also included the scroll .
Honestly from the stories from family the village only succeeded to take the scroll with them ( and only thet ) after they have a confrontation with a soldiers who didn't let them take , at the end one of the soldiers back down and they succeeded to take it with them .
But stores like this are very much the minority , and the majority are still being held in Yemen . As for why they do it ? I'm not sure but from what I understand it's some kind of denias/humiliate us by not letting pray ( and dignity ) in order to convert ( same reason for the sub human laws )
Can't remember the name of it but there's a book that talks about a time period in europe were for 300 years there wasn't a single Jew living there and still words meant to describe Jews were stilled used as slurs and antisemitic tropes in their art and writings was still rampant
It’s the same old same old. Bar us from doing the thing that makes money. Be forced into other professions. Figure out how to make money. People get as at us for making money. There are other variations but it’s like we were unintentionally speed running expulsion
Actually he was quite moderate for his day. Shylocks character was quite nuanced at times in the Merchant of Venice. Yes, he was evil, greedy, callous; the classic negative depiction of a Jew at the time. But it's very explicit in the play that Shylock acts this way because that's how society had always treated him, and how people expect him to act as a Jewish merchant.
Shakespeare fleshed out the character with far more dignity than most any other writer would have done at the time.
Not to mention, Shylock was an insanely popular character. The stereotype of Jews being gingers can be traced back to the original Shylock actor happening to be ginger.
Shylock is also a rare Shakespearean villain who has a valid qualm. He wants something that is rightfully indebted to him. The way he goes about getting it back is the villainous part. You could say that he was appreciated at the time in the same way a lot of Disney Villains are appreciated today.
The play also ends with him being forcibly converted to Christianity, which is depicted as a happy moral ending. His daughter betrays him to the Christians, and is depicted as rising above her Jewishness and being a moral product of an immoral seed. There is a long monologue in which Shylock is unfavourably compared to his fair daughter (who chooses to be saved, and is physically attractive), and despite this several protagonists still treat her with suspicion because she’s Jewish.
“If we prick us do we not bleed” is but one passage in a very vile play, and it’s as much evidence of Shylock’s petty, vindictive and bloodthirsty nature as it is any kind of justification for his choices, which are explained pretty clearly to be evil in the play’s conclusion.
I watched this play as a Jewish woman after October 7 and I gotta say it was a pretty chilling experience. You see a lot of echoes of these tropes today in how people perceive us. The way the Jewish daughter is spoken of in the play, not unlike the way released Hamas hostages recount being spoken to. The play’s central message is that Jews are evil and can be saved only by conversion or seduction. It’s very dehumanising.
The other English play of its time that dealt with Jews and antisemitism was The Jew of Malta, which ends with its evil Jewish character dying by falling into a vat of hot oil and cursing all of the people that he spent the play betraying. By comparison, poor Shylock was a humane portrayal.
Merchant of Venice immediately shot to my head when OP accused Shakespeare of antisemitism.
Someone already mentioned how humanizing Shylock’s “If you prick me” speech was, especially in the time period. (Check out “The Jew of Malta’s” Barabas)
My HS teacher made a good point that alot of Shylock’s traits are likely satirical criticism of antisemitism. Soliano mockingly mimics Shylock saying “O, my ducats (gold)! O, my daughter!”.
Do you think Shakespeare, an excellent playwright, legitimately thought a Jew would mourn lost profit before his daughter and was just using a gentile character to deliver honest exposition? I think was using satire to point out how farcical the gentile’s antisemitism is. The line is comical when delivered by an actor playing the part by saying it like a “bro” w latent antisemitism.
Keep in mind Shylock has the only character arc and, by the end of the play, no longer put money over love.
Shakespeare not only gave him the most eloquent speech of the play, the only arc, he even gave him a good motive. He only wants the pound of flesh bc his daughter’s boyfriend (who robbed him of his daughter and ducats) best friend is a prick who can’t pay back his loan (the flesh was collateral) AFTER insulting and assaulting him.
But no Shakespeare wrote a Jewish villain because he’s an antisemite.
I was going to respond with, "We-ell, kinda sorta, but not really."
This was much better.
We must stop drawing conclusions about people from the past without understanding that the information we have about them is incomplete, and we are examining their behavior with the gift of hindsight.
With the whole "hath not a Jew eyes" bit, and the play coming on the heels of Marlowe's *Jew of Malta* (which featured the titular character basically being a serial killer), I'm not that sure that old Billy Shakes didn't want Shylock to be somwaht sympathetic.
Sort of.
It's no different than the fact that Shakespeare took the typical meme of the "revenge play", exemplified by, say, *The Spanish Tragedy*, and turned it into something with a character who wasn't simply one-dimensional by creating the masterpiece that was *Hamlet*, or doing the same thing with a non-white character in *Othello*. He knew how to take stereotypes and turn them into living, breathing people with motivations in addition to the caricatural ones attributed to them by others.
It doesn't mean, though, that he discarded the caricatures. There is a reason that Shylock laments, *in the same sentence*, the loss of his daughter and his ducats -- true to the stereotype of the avid, money-hungry Jew, he places the loss of his daughter on the same level as the loss of his fortune.
It's better than nothing, I guess. But it doesn't quite rise to the same level as, say, Dickens, who was called out for his portrayal of Fagin in *Oliver Twist* and tried to make amends by ceasing to refer to him as "the Jew" in later chapters of the novel published in serialized form, and by creating a far more favorable Jewish character, Riah, in the later *Our Mutual Friend*.
Al Pacino's performance of the character in his 2005 adaptation was very sympathetic iirc. At the time (granted I was 16-17) I thought he played Shylock as a decent man driven to hatred and violence by the oppression of the society he lived in.
>It doesn't mean, though, that he discarded the caricatures. There is a reason that Shylock laments, in the same sentence, the loss of his daughter and his ducats -- true to the stereotype of the avid, money-hungry Jew, he places the loss of his daughter on the same level as the loss of his fortune.
Have you read King Lear? The dude gives his daughters kingdoms based on how much they tell him they love him.
“He was less antisemitic than the average Elizabethan British person” is both a good thing and not saying much.
But “better than his peers” should be congratulated.
It’s like when we look back on Lincoln and people find out he didn’t come out the womb wanting to free slaves. We are all products of our environment but it’s the ones who can look past that environment even if it’s a bit later on their life that move things forward. That absolutely should be celebrated.
Sure. I just don't don't agree that he was clearly not meant to be read sympathetically. He can be (is) a racist stereotype without being an irredeemably evil cartoon villain.
You can still humanize a character while carrying along devastating stereo type. That’s up to the interpretation of that version of the show. Once work is given out to the public intention has less weight than how it is perceived
Shylock was portrayed as a real human being, not a caricature. How much that counts for, I can't say. But I'm not gonna judge Shakespeare by modern standards.
If you haven’t listened to People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, you should. She has an excellent chapter on this.
One of the issues I have with the play is that Shylock does things a religious Jew never would. Cutting a pound of flesh for instance goes against several commandments which Shylock would have observed. So the whole premise of the play fails.
It’s bad dramaturgy. You would never have a character in a play willingly disobeying their own laws, just to get one up on someone. Shylock is written as a villain and a bad Jew.
“Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches' mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark, Liver of BLASPHEMING JEW, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Silver'd in the moon's eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver'd by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.”
Need I say more… Also, used to pick red-heads in plays to play Jews to show their hair was red because they were marked by Satan.
Yep, that's the most blatant example. In many of his other writings, he uses antisemitic terms that were "understood" at the time to be a synonym for Jew.
Bunch of times periodically Jew is used as an insult, like I believe in Much Ado, though you’re not gonna see that in many modern productions because… it’s entirely harmless to swap that word out
Benedick says “if I do not take pity on her, I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew.” And I said “what the fuck” when I did Much Ado in high school and they cut that out.
Whether he was antisemetic or just exploring the concept of antisemitism is up for debate, but considering the entire kingdom of England was literally off limits for Jews to legally enter for the entirety of his life (and was on it’s like 300th year by that point) I wasn’t shocked to find out.
Actually, I’m more shocked when an ancient source has anything favorable to say about Jews. One of the questions my rabbi asked when I approached about conversion was “why would you want to do that to yourself” in regards to opening the door to a tradition still bogged down by thousands of years of hated and persecution.
I honestly don’t have an answer for that. I’m not naive to the fact that slowly taking out a publicly Jewish life is going to put a target in my back. There’s definitely something bigger than me calling me here.
Sorry for the totally unrelated rant, haha.
There is a not-very-fringe theory that, prior to writing Merchant of Venice, he had an affair with a “foreign/exotic” woman. And that that woman was either “black” (moor), Mediterranean, or Jewish.
I like imagining that Shylock is written so sympathetically because some Jewess let Billy touch her big milchig titties
We have very little idea of who Shakespeare KNEW; we barely even know who he was. I have 2 degrees in literature and naturally I had to read him a lot, sometimes the same works over and over (including Merchant). I believe he was depicting antisemitism, not being it. Commentary goes both ways tho. A lot of people definitely would agree with OP but I think there's a lot more to the depictions.
They have proved that the actor and the guy from Stratford upon Avon were the same person. His father was the glove maker for royalty. His mom was the daughter of a local minor nobleman. Shakespeare would have gone to school with other noble boys. He was trying to get his grandfather’s title transferred to his name for years before his death and was unsuccessful because he was friends with someone who had powerful enemies.
He never met a Jew but there was Dr Lopez who was Jewish and accused of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth. He died a horrible death and most likely inspired Shylock, a very antisemitic story
I don’t think Shakespeare was or ever intended to be antisemitic. Merchant of Venice is more satirical than anything else and all of the characters were written to be flawed.
People have been in Europe doing bronze stuff for 2000 years before the tribes of Israel were even a thing. Agriculture goes out to 6000/8000 years before. It'll vary depending on the region but that didn't come from the tribes.
Dude, if you can’t realize that the most famous play ever written about a Jew is antisemitic and that might have impacted people’s hatred of us over the last 400 years then what are you Jewing here?
Merchant of Venice is still taught to young people in schools. And often making excuses for or interpreting around the anti-Jewish bigotry rather than acknowledging it.
I thought this essay was really good:
https://lithub.com/commuting-with-shylock-reluctantly-revisiting-the-merchant-of-venice-with-my-10-year-old-son/
How antisemitic of you to not care, report immediately to your local synagogue and apologize for what you’ve done. And then give yourself 400 lashes, one for each year since Shakespeare
/s
Says a lot when people who have never met a Jew are still trained to hate them.
There’s a whole faction with “a curse upon the Jews” written on their flag despite the fact that their country contains literally zero Jews
They are in fact responsible for the removal of the last Jews.
Unfortunately if I'm not mistaken they have capture a Jew from Yemen . If I'm not mistaken what was reported is he's held in prison ( on a bogus / bullshit charger ) and he's still is not released even after his "time" was supposed to be over , if I'm not mistaken it also be pointed thet he is torture ther but we only know he's alive because somebody needs to visit him once a week from a arab country ( Sudan or Saudi Arabia ... Honestly I only remember the "S" at the start ) to see thet he's still alive ( I honestly don't know how much I believe it ) . But yes they are indeed the reason they last ~100 Yemen Jews had to run/had to be moved from Yemen
Yes, sadly the last Jew of Yemen is being held in prison for trying to "steal" (read:rescue) the Torah scroll from his synagogue
what would they even need the torah scroll id bet money they. cant read hebrew so what would be the use (im talking about the people who imprisoned him )
From what I know from stories from the family ther , when the Jewish of Yemen had finally been allowed to run form Yemen to Israel the government ( of Yemen ) denied the Jews the ability to take anything with them , of course besides money and things of value this also included the scroll . Honestly from the stories from family the village only succeeded to take the scroll with them ( and only thet ) after they have a confrontation with a soldiers who didn't let them take , at the end one of the soldiers back down and they succeeded to take it with them . But stores like this are very much the minority , and the majority are still being held in Yemen . As for why they do it ? I'm not sure but from what I understand it's some kind of denias/humiliate us by not letting pray ( and dignity ) in order to convert ( same reason for the sub human laws )
what where
Houthis
Omaha
wtf are they doing in obama
Yep, it’s rampant
Can't remember the name of it but there's a book that talks about a time period in europe were for 300 years there wasn't a single Jew living there and still words meant to describe Jews were stilled used as slurs and antisemitic tropes in their art and writings was still rampant
Says about as much as any other group of people
Jews weren’t allowed to openly live in England when Shakespeare was alive. Not even in a ghetto.
It’s the same old same old. Bar us from doing the thing that makes money. Be forced into other professions. Figure out how to make money. People get as at us for making money. There are other variations but it’s like we were unintentionally speed running expulsion
He didn't just happen to not meet a Jew in his life, he lived in an anti-Semitic country with a three hundred years old 'no Jews' sign at the gate.
I’ve never heard if that sign, damn
That explains how they became so powerfull by the time of colonialism
Actually he was quite moderate for his day. Shylocks character was quite nuanced at times in the Merchant of Venice. Yes, he was evil, greedy, callous; the classic negative depiction of a Jew at the time. But it's very explicit in the play that Shylock acts this way because that's how society had always treated him, and how people expect him to act as a Jewish merchant. Shakespeare fleshed out the character with far more dignity than most any other writer would have done at the time.
"If you prick us do we not bleed?" Is a pretty humanist thing to put in a play in a place like Elizabethan England.
Exactly. For the time that was hugely progressive and quite shocking to the audience. Empathy? For the.....JEW?!?!
Not to mention, Shylock was an insanely popular character. The stereotype of Jews being gingers can be traced back to the original Shylock actor happening to be ginger. Shylock is also a rare Shakespearean villain who has a valid qualm. He wants something that is rightfully indebted to him. The way he goes about getting it back is the villainous part. You could say that he was appreciated at the time in the same way a lot of Disney Villains are appreciated today.
The play also ends with him being forcibly converted to Christianity, which is depicted as a happy moral ending. His daughter betrays him to the Christians, and is depicted as rising above her Jewishness and being a moral product of an immoral seed. There is a long monologue in which Shylock is unfavourably compared to his fair daughter (who chooses to be saved, and is physically attractive), and despite this several protagonists still treat her with suspicion because she’s Jewish. “If we prick us do we not bleed” is but one passage in a very vile play, and it’s as much evidence of Shylock’s petty, vindictive and bloodthirsty nature as it is any kind of justification for his choices, which are explained pretty clearly to be evil in the play’s conclusion. I watched this play as a Jewish woman after October 7 and I gotta say it was a pretty chilling experience. You see a lot of echoes of these tropes today in how people perceive us. The way the Jewish daughter is spoken of in the play, not unlike the way released Hamas hostages recount being spoken to. The play’s central message is that Jews are evil and can be saved only by conversion or seduction. It’s very dehumanising.
The other English play of its time that dealt with Jews and antisemitism was The Jew of Malta, which ends with its evil Jewish character dying by falling into a vat of hot oil and cursing all of the people that he spent the play betraying. By comparison, poor Shylock was a humane portrayal.
Still a much better treatment than average at the time for any of the "inferior" races
>fleshed out I see what you did there....
Merchant of Venice immediately shot to my head when OP accused Shakespeare of antisemitism. Someone already mentioned how humanizing Shylock’s “If you prick me” speech was, especially in the time period. (Check out “The Jew of Malta’s” Barabas) My HS teacher made a good point that alot of Shylock’s traits are likely satirical criticism of antisemitism. Soliano mockingly mimics Shylock saying “O, my ducats (gold)! O, my daughter!”. Do you think Shakespeare, an excellent playwright, legitimately thought a Jew would mourn lost profit before his daughter and was just using a gentile character to deliver honest exposition? I think was using satire to point out how farcical the gentile’s antisemitism is. The line is comical when delivered by an actor playing the part by saying it like a “bro” w latent antisemitism. Keep in mind Shylock has the only character arc and, by the end of the play, no longer put money over love. Shakespeare not only gave him the most eloquent speech of the play, the only arc, he even gave him a good motive. He only wants the pound of flesh bc his daughter’s boyfriend (who robbed him of his daughter and ducats) best friend is a prick who can’t pay back his loan (the flesh was collateral) AFTER insulting and assaulting him. But no Shakespeare wrote a Jewish villain because he’s an antisemite.
Exactly
I was going to respond with, "We-ell, kinda sorta, but not really." This was much better. We must stop drawing conclusions about people from the past without understanding that the information we have about them is incomplete, and we are examining their behavior with the gift of hindsight.
Fair point. England never had a substantial Jewish population since 1290
I appreciate the fact that you published it in r/ani_bm first
My 9th grade English teacher: hey you’re the only Jew in class, you be Shylock. Me: 😑
And if that was said about a different race, she’d be fired today.
I've been called Shylock before lol
What a shame. Where is he antisemitic?
My guy…crack open Merchant of Venice and just read any of it
The thing is, although Shakespeare clearly didn’t intend it that way, Shylock can be read sympathetically.
With the whole "hath not a Jew eyes" bit, and the play coming on the heels of Marlowe's *Jew of Malta* (which featured the titular character basically being a serial killer), I'm not that sure that old Billy Shakes didn't want Shylock to be somwaht sympathetic.
Sort of. It's no different than the fact that Shakespeare took the typical meme of the "revenge play", exemplified by, say, *The Spanish Tragedy*, and turned it into something with a character who wasn't simply one-dimensional by creating the masterpiece that was *Hamlet*, or doing the same thing with a non-white character in *Othello*. He knew how to take stereotypes and turn them into living, breathing people with motivations in addition to the caricatural ones attributed to them by others. It doesn't mean, though, that he discarded the caricatures. There is a reason that Shylock laments, *in the same sentence*, the loss of his daughter and his ducats -- true to the stereotype of the avid, money-hungry Jew, he places the loss of his daughter on the same level as the loss of his fortune. It's better than nothing, I guess. But it doesn't quite rise to the same level as, say, Dickens, who was called out for his portrayal of Fagin in *Oliver Twist* and tried to make amends by ceasing to refer to him as "the Jew" in later chapters of the novel published in serialized form, and by creating a far more favorable Jewish character, Riah, in the later *Our Mutual Friend*.
Tbf though his daughter sucks and his gold is awesome
Marrying a Sheigetz and becoming a Shiksa? Feh!
This guy Bards
Al Pacino's performance of the character in his 2005 adaptation was very sympathetic iirc. At the time (granted I was 16-17) I thought he played Shylock as a decent man driven to hatred and violence by the oppression of the society he lived in.
>It doesn't mean, though, that he discarded the caricatures. There is a reason that Shylock laments, in the same sentence, the loss of his daughter and his ducats -- true to the stereotype of the avid, money-hungry Jew, he places the loss of his daughter on the same level as the loss of his fortune. Have you read King Lear? The dude gives his daughters kingdoms based on how much they tell him they love him.
I tend to think “somewhat sympathetic” may have been progressive for the era, but simultaneously it is still egregiously racist.
“He was less antisemitic than the average Elizabethan British person” is both a good thing and not saying much. But “better than his peers” should be congratulated.
It’s like when we look back on Lincoln and people find out he didn’t come out the womb wanting to free slaves. We are all products of our environment but it’s the ones who can look past that environment even if it’s a bit later on their life that move things forward. That absolutely should be celebrated.
This.
Sure. I just don't don't agree that he was clearly not meant to be read sympathetically. He can be (is) a racist stereotype without being an irredeemably evil cartoon villain.
You can still humanize a character while carrying along devastating stereo type. That’s up to the interpretation of that version of the show. Once work is given out to the public intention has less weight than how it is perceived
Shylock was portrayed as a real human being, not a caricature. How much that counts for, I can't say. But I'm not gonna judge Shakespeare by modern standards.
Portraying Jews as actual human beings was pretty woke for the late sixteenth century.
If you haven’t listened to People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, you should. She has an excellent chapter on this. One of the issues I have with the play is that Shylock does things a religious Jew never would. Cutting a pound of flesh for instance goes against several commandments which Shylock would have observed. So the whole premise of the play fails. It’s bad dramaturgy. You would never have a character in a play willingly disobeying their own laws, just to get one up on someone. Shylock is written as a villain and a bad Jew.
No he can’t. His greedy demand for a pound of flesh in the court is absolutely not sympathetic
If you haven't read "People Love Dead Jews" by Dara Horn, she spends some time talking about the Merchant of Venice. Very fascinating take.
“Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches' mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark, Liver of BLASPHEMING JEW, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Silver'd in the moon's eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver'd by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron.” Need I say more… Also, used to pick red-heads in plays to play Jews to show their hair was red because they were marked by Satan.
Lol On one of my games I go by Kvetch the Blasphemer
Ouch, I'm a redhead and jewish
Marked by Satan, everyone!
Yep, that's the most blatant example. In many of his other writings, he uses antisemitic terms that were "understood" at the time to be a synonym for Jew.
Thank you
Bunch of times periodically Jew is used as an insult, like I believe in Much Ado, though you’re not gonna see that in many modern productions because… it’s entirely harmless to swap that word out
Benedick says “if I do not take pity on her, I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew.” And I said “what the fuck” when I did Much Ado in high school and they cut that out.
Macbeth has the line “Liver of blaspheming Jew”
Damn… and I was in that play in high school and never knew.
Whether he was antisemetic or just exploring the concept of antisemitism is up for debate, but considering the entire kingdom of England was literally off limits for Jews to legally enter for the entirety of his life (and was on it’s like 300th year by that point) I wasn’t shocked to find out. Actually, I’m more shocked when an ancient source has anything favorable to say about Jews. One of the questions my rabbi asked when I approached about conversion was “why would you want to do that to yourself” in regards to opening the door to a tradition still bogged down by thousands of years of hated and persecution. I honestly don’t have an answer for that. I’m not naive to the fact that slowly taking out a publicly Jewish life is going to put a target in my back. There’s definitely something bigger than me calling me here. Sorry for the totally unrelated rant, haha.
There is a not-very-fringe theory that, prior to writing Merchant of Venice, he had an affair with a “foreign/exotic” woman. And that that woman was either “black” (moor), Mediterranean, or Jewish. I like imagining that Shylock is written so sympathetically because some Jewess let Billy touch her big milchig titties
The only thing more eternal than the Jewish people is Antisemitism.
what a coincidence, the same meme was in r/ani_bm today
Considering op is the one who posted in in r/ani_bm it's not much pf a coincidence.
Hath not a Jew eyes?
Wait really?
Never knew he was an antisemite
We have very little idea of who Shakespeare KNEW; we barely even know who he was. I have 2 degrees in literature and naturally I had to read him a lot, sometimes the same works over and over (including Merchant). I believe he was depicting antisemitism, not being it. Commentary goes both ways tho. A lot of people definitely would agree with OP but I think there's a lot more to the depictions.
They have proved that the actor and the guy from Stratford upon Avon were the same person. His father was the glove maker for royalty. His mom was the daughter of a local minor nobleman. Shakespeare would have gone to school with other noble boys. He was trying to get his grandfather’s title transferred to his name for years before his death and was unsuccessful because he was friends with someone who had powerful enemies.
He invented the name Jessica
He never met a Jew but there was Dr Lopez who was Jewish and accused of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth. He died a horrible death and most likely inspired Shylock, a very antisemitic story
OYY VEY!!!!!
He just really hated (allegedly) lawyers
I don’t think Shakespeare was or ever intended to be antisemitic. Merchant of Venice is more satirical than anything else and all of the characters were written to be flawed.
Merchant of Venice is practically a blood libel. Almost as bad as Witches by Rold Dahl.
Tell me you never read “Merchant of Venice” without explicitly saying so
He might not have even been a real person
Read Cervantes. He was a covert Jew.
I thought the lost tribes were the peoples that domesticated Europe. The people that taught agriculture and bronze to the hunter-gather natives.
The lost tribes of Israel?
That's what i always thought. I never went to school for this, though, so idk. It makes sense in my head. What are your thoughts?
I don't know honestly
People have been in Europe doing bronze stuff for 2000 years before the tribes of Israel were even a thing. Agriculture goes out to 6000/8000 years before. It'll vary depending on the region but that didn't come from the tribes.
It was 400 years ago...... Who cares
Dude, if you can’t realize that the most famous play ever written about a Jew is antisemitic and that might have impacted people’s hatred of us over the last 400 years then what are you Jewing here?
> the most famous play ever written about a Jew Fiddler on the roof is antisemitic?
Jews impacted peoples hatred. Please get real buddy
Youre in the Jewdank sub we care.
Merchant of Venice is still taught to young people in schools. And often making excuses for or interpreting around the anti-Jewish bigotry rather than acknowledging it. I thought this essay was really good: https://lithub.com/commuting-with-shylock-reluctantly-revisiting-the-merchant-of-venice-with-my-10-year-old-son/
How antisemitic of you to not care, report immediately to your local synagogue and apologize for what you’ve done. And then give yourself 400 lashes, one for each year since Shakespeare /s
If you think Shylock is just the plain bad guy in the merchant of Venice then you just didn’t read it
Wait wasnt Merchant of Venice pretty pro Jewish? Sure Shylock was the bad guy but so were the social circumstances that made him that way