‘A Whiff of Jewish Pronunciation’ – Listening to Shylock in Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT The essay confronts the fraught topic of Shylock’s shifting functionalization as a figure of Jewish difference. It does so by focussing on a particularly significant facet of the discourse: the fascination with Shylock’s manner of speaking, especially with the accent that writers have presumed to hear in his lines or that actors have used in playing the role. This remarkably ubiquitous fascination is studied by analysing scholarly as well as non-scholarly texts that discuss The Merchant of Venice. It is shown how ideas about Shylock’s linguistic articulation have always also been ideas about the socio-cultural articulation of Jewish people. The focus is on Germany at two specific historical moments: the time around 1800 and the early twentieth century, i.e., the eve of the ‘Third Reich’. A string of seminal pronouncements by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Gundolf and Arnold Zweig are interpreted as suggesting a society in which an anti-Semitic and class-ridden ideology of clear-cut articulatory and ethnic differentiation has vied with a xenophonic vision of multi-accentuality.