However, the boy is enticed with an apple “reid and white” and stabbed in the heart with a little pen-knife by the Jew’s daughter, who then laughingly lays him out on a dressing board, dresses him like a swine, puts him in “a cake of lead” and casts him into a filthy draw-well. Lady Helen, the boy’s mother, misses him in the evening and runs to the “Jewis castel,” calling upon her “bonny Sir Hew.” He answers from the bottom of the well.
And so one century religiously handed down to the next its fictions and its prejudices.
Yet, the Jew is as hard to keep out as Nature herself: Expellas furca tamen usque recurret. In 1410 we hear of a Jewish physician named Elias Sabot who came from Bologna with permission to settle and practise in any part of the realm. There is also reason to believe that the Jewish remnant left in England after Edward’s expulsion was strongly reinforced by the immigration of refugees from Spain towards the end of the fifteenth century. The reign of Queen Elizabeth was also distinguished by the influx of many foreigners—merchants, miners,[128] and physicians—and it is highly probable that there were Jews amongst them. But how perilous such a venture was can be seen from the following episode. In the year 1581 a certain Jeochim Gaunz, or Gaunse, came over with a proposal to furnish to the English Government some new information concerning the methods of smelting and manufacturing copper and lead ores, and conducted experiments in the mining districts of Cumberland. For some nine years the enterprising stranger lived in London unmolested, because unsuspected. But on an evil day, in September 1589, he went to Bristol, and there fell in with the Rev. Richard Crawley, a clergyman interested in Hebrew. On finding that Gaunz knew that language, Mr. Crawley cultivated his acquaintance, and in the course of one of their learned discussions Gaunz betrayed his Judaism. The discovery led to his arrest. Cross-examined by the local magistrates, he boldly confessed that he was a Bohemian Jew, born and bred, unbaptized and absolutely unable to accept the claims of Christianity to a divine origin. He was sent before the Privy Council at Whitehall, where all traces of him are lost.
But the unpopularity of the race in Elizabethan England, apart from Gaunse’s case, is abundantly attested by the Elizabethan drama. A few authors made occasional attempts to whitewash the stage Jew; but these attempts, somewhat dubious at the best, were certainly not successful. That the general opinion of the Jew continued to be anything but a favourable one, is implied by casual references in various plays, and is manifestly proved by the delineation of the Jewish character in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s Shylock are both replicas of the Jew as conceived by mediaeval imagination: a money-monger fabulously rich, ineffably tender to his own people, incredibly cruel to the Christian. It is a portrait drawn by prejudice and coloured by ignorance. The two great dramatists adopted the popular lay-figure and breathed into it the spirit of life. The result is a gruesome monstrosity, animated by genius.
Barabas in the first scene of the play “is discovered in his counting-house, with heaps of gold before him.” This wealth is the fruit of extensive trade with the lands of the East. Every wind that blows brings to the Jew of Malta
“argosies
Laden with riches, and exceeding store
Of Persian silks, of gold, and oriental pearl.”
In all this prosperity Barabas sees a fulfilment of the ancient blessing bestowed by Jehovah on the sons of Israel; a proof and a pledge of the Lord’s continued favour to His chosen people:
“Thus trowls our fortune in by land and sea,