Both circumcised, we hate Christians both.”
Thus all the anti-Jewish prejudices of the Middle Ages are embodied in Barabas, who, lest the list should be incomplete, is also accused of fornication and of having crucified a child. His daughter with all her charm and loveliness seems to be created partly as a foil to the Jew’s grotesque personality, partly as a means of wounding him through the one weak spot in his anti-Christian cuirass—his affection for her.
The Merchant of Venice has its twin brother in the ballad of Gernutus, the Jew of Venice, preserved in Percy’s Reliques:
“In Venice towne not long agoe
A cruel Jew did dwell,
Which lived all on usurie,
As Italian writers tell.”
Both stories seem to be derived from an Italian novel by Giovanni Fiorentino, written about 1378, and first printed at Milan in 1554.
Shakespeare’s Shylock is cast in the same mould as Marlowe’s Barabas. He loathes the Christian and his manners, his masques, and merriments and foppery. He will not dine with him, lest he should “smell pork, eat of the habitation which your prophet, the Nazarite, conjured the devils into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.” His covetousness intensifies his superstitious hatred of the Gentile:
“I hate him for he is a Christian;