SHYLOCK
SHYLOCK is ‘the Jew that Shakespeare drew’. He is not the Jew of real life, even in the Middle Ages, stained as their story is with the hot tears—nay, the very heart’s blood—of the martyred race. The mediaeval Jew did not take vengeance on his cruel foes. Nay, more than this: with a sublime magnanimity he could actually preach and practise widest benevolence towards his oppressors. Throughout the Middle Ages, when Jews were daily plundered and tortured, and done to death ‘for the glory of God’, not a word was breathed against the morality of the victims. They suffered because they were heretics, because they would not juggle with their conscience and profess a belief that did not live in their souls. But Jewish ethics soared to still nobler heights. The Jew preserved his integrity in spite of his suffering; but more than this, he forgave—ay, even blessed—its authors. The Jews hunted out of Spain in 1492 were in turn cruelly expelled from Portugal. Some took refuge on the African coast. Eighty years later the descendants of the men who had committed or allowed these enormities were defeated in Africa, whither they had been led by their king, Dom Sebastian. Those who were not slain were offered as slaves at Fez to the descendants of the Jewish exiles from Portugal. ‘The humbled Portuguese nobles’, the historian narrates, ‘were comforted when their purchasers proved to be Jews, for they knew that they had humane hearts.’
MORRIS JOSEPH, 1891.