By Prof. Dr. Mohammed Kareem Al-Saadi
The history of world literature serves as an important gauge for uncovering the shifts that occur in politics and other fields utilized by power structures to achieve historical ambitions. Literature is a genuine reflection of global transformations, as it monitors and illustrates these variations across the ages. Therefore, the reality of any human phenomenon transforming—especially those with deep historical roots firmly embedded in the collective negative consciousness, which later morph into a different phenomenon influencing the world and its order—raises significant question marks regarding the historical shifts that have occurred with such phenomena.
By studying certain representations documented specifically by dramatic literature, as well as other frameworks in sociology, psychology, and even ethics in previous centuries, the nature of various human systems is revealed. These representations carry connotations that illustrate past behaviors and the structural changes that have occurred within global systems in general, and specifically within the mechanisms applied in Middle Eastern systems today.
Among these shifting representations is the character of the marginalized outcast across many centuries and decades. The historical connotations provide us with perceptions of this character’s past reality versus its current status. This includes the Jewish character, which is highly influential today in shaping global events through the formation of the New World Order, and what this transformation conceals regarding the control and shaping of consciousness within political systems—especially among those who have aligned themselves with this character’s trajectory and varied policies.
Undoubtedly, the literature and art produced in past centuries serve as the finest witness that this character lived in global marginalization and a state of isolation on both European and international levels. This was made publicly evident in the most important play to address such a figure: The Merchant of Venice, authored by the renowned playwright William Shakespeare. The play provides a clear indication of the nature of this character, who represented the Jewish community at the time as a society occupying the lower rungs of the human ladder within the Old World Order.
In this section, we will discuss this transformation, which is considered a primary shift in the New World Order, particularly after the decline of former colonial empires and the rise of superpowers that attempted to reshape the global system. This character has become a fundamental element in the emergence of this new order, appearing in a guise completely different from the past, and actively driving new events in a reversal of its previous image. But why has the transformation of this character become so clear after it was intellectually and humanly regressive? And how managed this change to erase the previous image depicted in Shakespeare’s play, which will form an essential part of our discussion?
In this play, Shakespeare views Shylock—the Jewish character residing in the city of Venice—as a figure operating on the principle of dominating Christian merchants by greedily lending them money with usury (interest), as the plot illustrates. This provokes constant anger and disdain toward him from the merchants and citizens of Venice, particularly a young man named Antonio. This mutual animosity and hatred intensify between the two parties (Shylock and Antonio) when they meet in the marketplace, and the young man hurls rebukes at Shylock the Jew, including terms like “infidel,” “dog,” and “cutthroat.” The Jew repeats these very words back to Antonio when the young man seeks to borrow money from him following a string of hardships. As the events of the play unfold, the character of Shylock the Jew is laid bare with all the traits depicted by Shakespeare. The plot culminates in the victory of the young man, as the court rules that Shylock cannot cut a pound of flesh because doing so would contradict the explicit terms of the loan agreement without shedding a single drop of blood; shedding blood would subject Shylock to the confiscation of his money and property under Venetian law (1). These events illustrate the reality of the Jewish character in Europe during past centuries, and we attempt in this chapter to verify the nature of this character and the extent of its credibility regarding historical Jewish figures.
This character in The Merchant of Venice, which was performed numerous times on Western stages—particularly in Europe and specifically in Great Britain during Shakespeare’s time—was a natural reflection of the actual reality and status of this figure. Furthermore, the isolation and ferocity this character previously endured when dealing with anyone attempting to approach it, alongside its efforts to preserve its own entity, stem fundamentally from being an outcast in societies due to the inner intentions and actions its nature harbors toward others. The psychological state this character reached is revealed through its interactions with the surrounding environment in European countries, which enjoyed a privileged cultural outlook and later achieved a scientific advancement through which they invaded the world and dominated many nations.
However, this character remained unchanged; rather, its isolation deepened because of the self-segregation it practiced against the social environment composed of non-Jews. Although the number of Jews was small compared to the general population of Europe, this small number carried a social impact that drove Europe’s and the world’s most famous writers to address them, making their traits and dealings the central plot of their plays. Shakespeare and other observers of these characters found that despite their small numbers, they had a clear impact on exposing the realities and traits of individuals and groups, conveying their way of thinking, and illustrating their emotional sphere that distinguished them through distinct and expressive behavior. These emotional ideas had an impact on forming their personalities, as well as the traits and behaviors that characterized them, even though:
“This relatively small percentage of the population is too large for its danger to be offset by the rest of the population considered normal. Their mental state is that of an entirely agitated group, governed by emotional ideas and wish-fantasies in a state of ‘collective possession'” (2).
These characteristics, pointing to their wish-fantasies, aided them in utilizing methods, means, and tactics to obtain certain privileges within the societies they inhabited, even if through improper means. This demonstrates the transformations that occurred within them. The methods exposed by Shakespearean literature served as precursors for what the future behavior of this character would become in its shift toward economic, and subsequently political, dominance.
The nature of the Jewish quarters, which were the centers of Jewish congregation in Europe, possessed characteristics that indicated the problematic nature of this character and its psychological composition, which attempted to project the opposite. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock outwardly appeared wealthy, playing on the chords of money and usury, yet internally he was a usurious character riddled with opportunism. It was also a character suffering internally from the very perspective it created as a form of defense. At the same time, the Jewish quarter where they gathered suffered from the exact same issue—internal ruin—yet it was surrounded by walls and isolated from others despite its internal deterioration.
These internal conditions of the European Jewish quarter are presented to us by the Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem through this visualization, as he provides an example of a Jewish town, the town of Kasrilevke, which he describes as follows:
“The town itself is a chaotic jumble of wooden houses built around the marketplace at the foot of the hill… Kasrilevke is as crowded as a slum, and it is indeed a filthy quarter… its streets are as twisted as a Talmudic discussion, bent in the shape of a question mark, from which branch out alleys, lanes, and backyard pens. The richest Jew there can be found in one of four images: rich, poor, a peddler, or a craftsman, and the Shtetl (*) is usually culturally and ethnically independent or separated from its surrounding environment” (3).
These attributes reveal the nature of this character even from within, and its most distinguishing feature is the cultural separation from the environment in which Jews lived in Europe and other regions.
Historically, the Jewish character in Europe was distinguished by fixed traits indicating that the perception of it was realistic rather than imaginary or biased. Shakespearean literature in the text of The Merchant of Venice chose these traits to demonstrate their reality and alignment with the Jewish character. It is a character that occupied the lower echelons in Europe for reasons that placed it within this classification in the sociological and historical dimensions of a region that was the center of the world, where non-Europeans were not permitted to lead the civilized scene—especially regarding the religious distinction of the European from the Jewish character. Despite the antiquity of Jewish communities in Europe, they remained distinct from others in religious, social, economic, and political spheres; hence, it was easy to distinguish a Jewish person from a European, particularly a Christian, on the Old Continent.
Shakespeare presented numerous traits illustrating the nature of this character, crafting some of these features through scenes that highlight each trait—ranging from greed, malice, and envy to the attempt to use religion to justify actions aimed at acquiring money, dominating others, and imposing humiliating conditions upon them. Shakespeare introduces the trait of envy and extreme avarice for money in the third scene through Shylock’s dialogue with Bassanio, depicting these traits through Shylock’s own words:
“Shylock: No, no, no, no: my meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient. Yet his means are in supposition: he hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies; I understand moreover upon the Rialto, he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath, squandered abroad” (4(
Shakespeare addresses the trait of extreme possessiveness over money through Shylock, who describes the guarantor’s wealth as vast and his ships as filling the seas, yet he does not believe they guarantee the money he wishes to lend. His intense anxiety leads him to anticipate events that he believes could destroy the guarantor’s wealth at sea, explaining this through the following dialogue:
“Shylock: … Ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, water-thieves and land-thieves, I mean pirates” (5).
Shylock believes these events might ruin the guarantor’s wealth, illustrating his intense obsession with money. Shakespeare also addresses other traits reflecting that period, including the lack of emotion, malice, and religious hatred harbored by the Jew against the other religion in Europe, alongside his lack of respect for the religious privacy of others. He introduces this trait as well in the following dialogue:
“Shylock: Yes, to smell pork; to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (6).
This trait renders the Jewish character disrespectful toward others in its dealings. The author then moves to a trait linked to exploiting religion to acquire money through usury. In the dialogue between Shylock and Antonio, the latter attempts to expose Shylock’s distortion of the prophets’ words to achieve his ambitions, as Antonio explains in his dialogue:
“Antonio: This was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for; A thing not in his power to bring to pass, But sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven. Was this inserted to make interest good? (…) Mark you this, Bassanio, The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” (7(.
This evil Jewish soul, which uses everything to achieve its aims—even distortion and changing religious meanings to make usury permissible—makes its owner characterized by internal ugliness, false elegance, and sweet words that wrap falsehood in the garments of truth. These traits make the character cruel and devoid of mercy, which Shakespeare highlights in Antonio’s dialogue:
“Antonio: I pray you, think you question with the Jew: You may as well go stand upon the beach And bid the main flood bate his usual height; You may as well use question with the wolf Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb; You may as well forbid the mountain pines To wag their high tops… You may as well do any thing most hard, As seek to soften that—than which what’s harder?—His Jewish heart” (8(.
We notice that Shakespeare, through Antonio, did not say “Shylock” but rather generalized the trait to every Jew by repeating the word. He also introduces the trait of ruthlessness. In the following dialogue, Portia attempts to request mercy from Shylock:
“Portia: Then must the Jew be merciful.
Shylock: On what compulsion must I? tell me that.
Portia: The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath…
Shylock: My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, The penalty and forfeit of my bond” (9).
In addition to this, the traditional Jewish character is marked by negative traits stemming from its essence, suffering in its mentality from internal perceptions manifested in its external behavior, including:
The contradiction complex between feelings of supremacy and feelings of inferiority and persecution.
The isolation complex from humanity generated by both views: supremacy on one hand, and inferiority in the eyes of others on the other.
Megalomania (inflation of the ego) through perceptions derived from certain texts that considered Jews to be God’s chosen people, which deepened later through what was formulated in the Jewish Talmud (*) (10).
Footnotes:
See: The Prose Introduction, William Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, Arabized by: Arabization Department at the International Press Center, Jounieh: International Press Center for Publishing and Distribution, n.d., p. 5, p. 16.
Carl Gustav Jung: Modern Man in Search of a Soul [Translated into Arabic as “Digging into the Depths of the Soul” by Nihad Khayat], Beirut: University Institution for Studies, Publishing, and Distribution, 1996, p. 11.
Shtetl: A Yiddish word meaning “small town,” referring to a Jewish population center ranging between one thousand and twenty thousand people, where life revolved around the synagogue and the market. Source: Dr. Rashad Abdullah Al-Shami: The Israeli Jewish Personality and the Aggressive Spirit, Kuwait: Alam Al-Marifa, 1986, pp. 12-13.
Dr. Rashad Abdullah Al-Shami: Same source, p. 13.
(4) William Shakespeare: Same source, pp. 37-38. [Note: English text matches Act 1, Scene 3 of the original play].
Same source, p. 38.
Same source, p. 38.
Same source, p. 40.
Same source, p. 102.
Same source, pp. 106-107.
Talmud: The Jewish oral tradition that includes the interpretations and scholarly efforts of rabbis in explaining religion. See: Dr. Rashad Abdullah Al-Shami: Previous source, pp. 20-21.
.See: Dr. Rashad Abdullah Al-Shami: Same source, pp. 26-30.
