Anti-Judaism

It is true that the characters in the Merchant make greater claims to sympathy and humanity than those in its influential predecessor, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (ca. 1589), in which not only the title character, but Christian and Muslim protagonists as well, are cynical distillations of villainy. But these claims are just one symptom of a

But this insistence on a bright contrast between the attitudes and practices of the spiritual Christian toward commerce, and those of the fleshy Jew, was becoming more difficult to maintain in a world in which the wheels of commerce were accelerating, and from which the Jews themselves had vanished.9

“I declare that neither pope nor bishop nor any other person has the right to impose a syllable of law upon a Christian man without his own consent.”

Communication and interpretation have long been associated with lending and obligation, as the etymology of those words themselves makes clear.33 In Shakespeare’s age, a number of prominent theorists understood every communicative act, regardless of whether it involved words, objects, or money, as a promise of meaning to others. Words are, to quote

But if the Jews do not instruct through their history or their presence, and if that presence is so dangerous to Christ and to Christians, why do the Jews survive in Christendom at all?

It was in its Renaissance that western Europe achieved what the Middle Ages had at most dreamed of: a world free of Jews.

The specifics of Freud’s reconstruction have not found much favor with Egyptologists, but his arguments about memory and history have been very influential. Freud suggested that, much like individuals who have suffered trauma, societies repress the memory of horrific events in their past because these are too painful to confront or document directl

Any number of European princes channeled Jewish economic activity toward lending at interest to Christians, so that they could then expropriate a considerable share of the proceeds from the Jews in the form of loans, taxes, and extraordinary seizures called captiones, “takings.” We can think of this as a novel form of indirect taxation. At a time w

Certainly the task of cutting is critical: the mid-twentieth century, for example, experienced the depth of horror that can be produced when nations fantasize their ancestry in the past. But no amount of cutting can eliminate the historian’s need to generalize, that is, to create connections and continuities between nonidentical things. And cutting