The Merchant of Venice, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and the Perils of Shakespearean Appropriation

Abstract

Inundated daily with horrifying images and vitriolic rhetoric, few readers would fail to recognize magnitude of Arab-Israeli conflict, its impact on regional and global politics, and suffering it has caused so many Israelis and Palestinians. Yet many would be surprised at regular invocation of Shakespeare in this struggle. The following episode is merely one illustration of how The Merchant of Venice, and especially figure of Shylock, has become, to some, inextricably linked both to military contest and to war of words that surrounds it: on 18 December 2003, Jerusalem Post reported a serious escalation in local fighting as Hamas militants attempted to blow up an Israeli outpost near Rafah, apparently in response to killing of six Palestinians in same town by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) less than a week earlier. (1) Although Israeli politicians, as always, vowed to bring swift and severe justice to perpetrators of this incident, those involved were never accurately identified, apprehended, or brought to trial, though they were, of course, roundly convicted in absentia by Israeli politicians and media. Only two days later (on 20 December), Israeli citizens watched with rapt attention and barely less concern another trial at Pargod Theatre on Bezalel Street in Jerusalem when Shylock took stand in his own defense for the theatrical vilification of Jew provoking anti-Semitism throughout world of type that led to Holocaust, and helping to fuel and perpetuate seemingly insolvable conflict between Israelis and their Arab neighbors. The mock trial was part of week-long International Shylock Festival, an annual event devoted to discussion and lively debate about cultural legacy of The Merchant of Venice, a play that Arieh Mark, theater's artistic director, claimed continues to get staged [only] because of continuing hatred of Jews. The play, therefore, constitutes an implicit argument for a well-defended Jewish State and justifies Israeli government's harsh treatment of Palestinian militants and IDF's frequent military incursions into Gaza and West Bank in name of security that has proven elusive in past. For Mark, ongoing conflict with Arabs is no less invidious than unforgettable horrors Jews experienced in Europe before their return to their ancestral homeland: nothing has changed since we became a free people. In some places hatred for Jews is stronger than it was night before holocaust, rendering threat posed by Shylocks legacy remarkably current. (2) He seemed to have a legitimate grievance; in same month, a respondent to a popular Iraqi online forum repeated a long standing truism, arguing (in Arabic) that European poets speak about Jews with veneration and admiration, except William Shakespeare in his play The Merchant of Venice where he showed Shylock ... as a symbol of human cruelty, thereby appropriating Shakespeare for Arabs and enlisting him in Palestinian jihad to expel their Israeli occupiers. This attitude was hardly confined to a radical fringe nor limited to obscure coordinates of internet, but was repeated in mainstream media. Fatina Salih al-Kurdi, writing in Kuwaiti weekly Majallat al-Kuwait, suggested that one of ways readers might verify that history of Jews is full of blood, treason, falsehood, deceit, killing, and destruction, is to notice that these depictions figure so prominently in works of writers such as Shakespeare. (3) In Israel, Occupied Territories, and in neighboring Arab nations, productions and discussions of The Merchant of Venice do not universally evoke discomforting ambivalence that Western audiences have come to expect, and instead are often marked by their thematic clarity, by their presentation of Shylock as a figure either of universal opprobrium or unqualified sympathy, of broken submission or indignant defiance, and by his uncanny similarity to political figures, both past and present. …