Anti-semitism in Shakespeare's time

A detailed Summary of Anti-semitism in Shakespeare's time


A common assumption is that the forced conversion reflects the ideas of people "back then". But as I have said before, and will say again, one must be cautious in ascribing beliefs in general to any large group of people in any time. Even in NAZI Germany where anti-semitism was state policy, did everyone hate Jews? Certainly not.

Nevertheless, we can often discern large-scale trends in belief, so long as we keep in mind that these trends are rarely if ever universal and often exist simultaneously with other strong, contradictory trends.

This issue is complicated by one fact in particular: it is not at all clear how many Jews even lived in England in Shakespeare's time. Jews as a group were expelled from England in the late middle ages, and so it is quite likely that few practising Jews would have been left; Shakespeare quite likely knew none, and neither did the members of his audience. There were at least a few people around who were converted Jews, Jews who practiced Christianity.

The most famous of such people is Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who had co


nverted to Christianity and had become by the early 1590's the most prominent physician in London, for he was the royal physician who attended to Elizabeth. But Lopez was implicated in a plot to murder the queen and was hanged for treason.

The Lopez case highlights one thing clearly. It reminds us that the Elizabethans did not generally have the concept that we call "racism." The idea of inherent superiority of one distinct group from another based on ancestry is a relatively recent development in the history of ugly thought. Thus, Lopez, a Jew by birth, could rise quite literally to the top of his profession, because he was a Christian, and thus not really a Jew in any important sense. In the same way, Othello is generally accepted in the world of Venice despite his racial background because he is a Christian and therefore is one of the Venetians, despite his dark skin.

Many people would disagree with this view and argue that the absence of a real Jewish community is not relevant. Many modern critics would contend, for example, that Jews and other foreigners in E

Some common words found in the essay are:
Shakespeare's England, Christian Venetians, Elizabeth Lopez, Moreover Jewishness, Jews Nevertheless, Shakespeare's Jews, Christians Shakespeare, , Portuguese Jew, Christian Jew, shakespeare's england,

Approximate Word count = 726
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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