Exploring Contemporary Jewish Identity and Anti-Semitism via Metalepsis in Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name (2016)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Given that many of the critically acclaimed works from his canon extensively (and comically) explore Jewish identity, it is no surprise that the Hogarth Press selected Howard Jacobson to write a contemporary adaptation of The Merchant of Venice for the ‘Shakespeare Retold’ series, a project which commissions some of the world’s most renowned authors to modernise and novelise Shakespeare’s plays. In addition to a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Merchant, Jacobson’s novel, Shylock Is My Name, features metalepsis with the presence of Shylock as a character. Jacobson’s metaleptic inclusion of Shylock into his narrative affords a rich juxtaposition between Shakespeare’s early modern Jew and Jacobson’s twenty-first century (Anglo-)Jew, Simon Strulovitch. In contrast to Shylock, Strulovitch’s Jewish identity is elusive and indefinable in Jacobson’s post-Holocaust England. Whereas Shakespeare’s Merchant has often been attributed to informing public perceptions of Jews and Jewishness over the centuries, Jacobson’s twenty-first century adaptation establishes the absence of a concrete sense of Jewish identity in his modern equivalent. Conversely, the depiction of contemporary anti-Semitic rhetoric is nearly identical to the anti-Jewish diatribes of Shakespeare’s play. Thus, whereas Jacobson’s metalepsis illustrates fluidity and diversity within Jewish identity, the anti-Semitism of the novel matches, sometimes verbatim, that of Shakespeare’s Merchant.