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Jews on Trial

KTAV Publishing House, Inc.

Chapter One

ROBERT A. GARBER

There were scarcely any Jews in England during the two centuries after they were driven out in the year 1290. Upon their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in 1492, however, a few Marranos, outwardly professing Christianity, found their way to the island nation. Jewish refugees, often doctors or traders, settled in Bristol and London.

It is not known whether Doctor Rodrigo Lopez, a Marrano born about 1525, was born in Portugal, as some sources assert, or was a native Englishman. The name Lopez, a venerable one, was known in England. It is established that Dr. Lopez was member of the College of Physicians and a senior doctor at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. He, his wife, Sarah, and their children were living in London in 1559. By 1584, the doctor was appointed body-physician to the earl of Leicester. The earl was accused, on occasion, of resorting to poisoning his enemies, aided by his appointed physician.

Dr. Lopez discharged his duties so well that in 1586 he attained the post of chief physician to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. At court, Lopez became acquainted with the unrestrained Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, twenty-two years old in 1589 and no less than forty years the doctor's junior. Through Essex, Lopez was introduced to both Antonio Perez, former secretary to Philip II of Spain, and Don Antonio, the dimwitted pretender to the Portuguese throne. Don Antonio spoke only Portuguese, and Lopez, fluent in several languages, served as interpreter. Thus Lopez involved the queen in an ineffective scheme to invade Portugal.

About this time, rash Essex quarreled with the venerable physician, accusing him of speaking too freely about the young earl's medical problems.

Intrigue mounted. A messenger from the Spanish king presented a ruby-and-diamond ring to Lopez as an inducement to gain his aid in removing Don Antonio. Lopez, known to be irritable at this stage of his life and having tired of Essex and his friends, offered the ring to the queen. Her Majesty refused the proffered gift, perhaps because she knew it had originated with Philip, the Catholic king.

In 1593, foreign conspirators against Don Antonio were arrested at the home of Dr. Lopez. He was believed to be in league with the foreigners, one of whom had letters mentioning the "price of pearls." This was thought to be a coded reference to a conspiracy against Elizabeth, one of several supposed plots against the crown in those days.

Lopez was arrested and was interrogated by his antagonist, the earl of Essex. The questioning proved fruitless, and the queen admonished Essex for making accusations he could not prove. Essex was spurred to work harder to make a case against the doctor. Meanwhile, Lopez was taken to the Tower.

A month later his trial took place. The celebrated solicitor general, Coke, spoke for the prosecution, laying particular emphasis on the fact that the defendant was Jewish. Essex, by special appointment, presided in conjunction with others. He, too, referred to the doctor's religious background. Threatened with the rack, Lopez confessed to hearing proposals to poison the queen for 50,000 ducats, but he had only intended, he said, to cozen Philip. A jury found him guilty of plotting against Her Majesty. Most historians believe that the verdict was not justified.

The queen hesitated to sign the death warrant, and Lopez spent more than seven weeks in the Tower before she finally agreed to the sentence.

Dr. Rodrigo Lopez, at the end of his seventh decade of life, was hanged, drawn and quartered on June 7, 1594. The crowd at the regular place of execution, Tyburn, was unruly. On the gallows, the condemned man cried out that he loved the queen and Don Antonio as well as he loved Jesus Christ. The crowd thought this was hilarious, shouting "He is a Jew!" as the executioner did his work.

Lopez is often taken to be the model for Shakespeare's Shylock. Much of the plot of The Merchant of Venice can be traced to sources not original to the playwright, as is true, of course, with much of the work of the Bard. But Shakespeare's Jew has been traced to Dr. Lopez for several reasons.

The name of Shylocks adversary is Antonio, not a common one in the play's setting. The personality of the fictional moneylender mirrors that of the actual physician. The play refers pointedly to the use of the rack, and there is an odd reference to a wolf ("lopez") on the gallows. Shylock seems different from other characters brought to life by Shakespeare. It is not that he is Venetian; he could be English as well. It is that he is Jewish. And, with much being written contemporaneously about him, Lopez was the best-known of the few Jews in England when the play was written.

Shakespeare is known to have written quickly to meet demand, and much is made of the first appearance of the play not long after the execution at Tyburn. Although the exact date of composition of The Merchant of Venice remains uncertain, it is certain that the case of Dr. Lopez was very well known when the play was performed at Shakespeare's theater. And that may be the best argument that Shakespeare, the quintessential showman, used him as the model for a Jew. Surely the famous trial and death of Dr. Lopez stimulated the Bard to place his Jew in a courtroom.

Chapter Two

C.M. SILVER

Jews in the News

The single most famous trial of any Jew is certainly that of Jesus. The second-most famous trial of a Jew, at least in the Western world, is that of Shylock and his pound of flesh in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The mention of Jesus is not gratuitous: Shakespeare may have not had the parallels uppermost in mind while crafting the scenes of Shylocks downfall, yet the tales intersect in one key aspect: they share with each other, as well as with the common practice of Shakespeare's own time, the element of public spectacle. A significant point overlooked by both the champions and the detractors of Mel Gibson's film The Passion is that public executions in ancient times were noisy, bloody, gruesome, and long-drawn affairs, largely in order to maximize their entertainment value. In a day when we lapse into deathly ennui because there is nothing worth watching on any the 200-plus channels available on our cable television, we can barely appreciate a life before mass communication media made Entertainment On Demand possible. Citizens of Jerusalem under Roman rule did not have available to them the luxury of channel surfing; the biblical counterparts of couch potatoes were denigrated in the Mishnah (in Pirkei Avot, for example, the tractate known in English as "Ethics of the Fathers") as "sitters-around on street corners" (yoshvei kronot in Mishnaic Hebrew). These good-for-nothings did the pre-electronic equivalent of channel surfing by standing about in the middle of town and watching life and commerce unfold around them.

For all the terror unleashed in the wave of crucifixions under Roman rule, it must be remembered that not every Jew was automatically a partisan of every crucified man. The rule of Rome was abominable, every bit as inhuman and devastating as the Nazi program nearly two millennia later. In the Roman wars of conquest and subjugation of the Jews, and in the famine and general destruction that followed, it has been estimated, perhaps as many as two million Jews perished.

And still, the mythification of Masada notwithstanding, it is no simple position to take that the Jews must have stood uniformly in closed ranks alongside every one of their brethren who was nailed to the cross. While death and suffering were widespread and indiscriminate under the Romans, crucifixion was reserved for political revolutionaries. Throughout human history, even under the worst of circumstances, the majority of any society prefers to be left alone: to endure current hardships rather than trade them for horrors they know not of. The anger with which a crowd might have watched a crucifixion was undoubtedly a mixture of loathing and hatred for the Roman oppressor, along with a dose of anger at the political insurgent for endangering the innocent by creating an unstable situation in an already unstable society. This, mixed with a large dose of relief that the spectator was not the person being nailed to the cross. In a world with neither television nor radio, neither CDS nor cinema, any excitement served at the very least to break up the monotony of the banausic, the daily routine.

Readers who take exception to this are urged to read descriptions of the public tortures and executions in Shakespeare's day (not to mention the equivalent of the sports-bar Monday Night Football scene: bear baiting). The public confession and execution of Dr. Lopez, for example, was a cause celebre in the England of its time, and occasioned not merely parlor talk but successful revivals of Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta, a rip-roaring tale of a Jew who does not get put on trial because he so palpably deserves his ultimate destruction.

As a sidebar we should observe that the discussion of whether the Jews killed Jesus is chilling in its simple-mindedness. Jesus was a Jew. He was a Jew living in a society where nearly everyone else was Jewish. He was a political rabble-rouser, or revolutionary, or Zealot, or a babbling madman who attracted people with dangerous ideas. Or the son of God, a notion so extremely radical that any normal society would have rejected him outright.

The Jewish view of Jesus in his own time must be seen in the proper light. He not only affronted the Romans - which was something that people did from time to time. He also affronted his Jewish compatriots by breaking with established rabbinic norms, as promulgated by the Pharisees, the forerunners of modern mainstream Judaism. In later years, to the extent that claims were made, for or about him, that he was divine, the rabbinic view was one of outrage at so preposterous a notion, and the Talmud contains fanciful insults as rabbis seek to outdo one another in making up punishments for the upstart Yeshu.

Jesus' political message of overthrow of Rome may have been ideally suited to his audience; at the point at which divinity was claimed for him, though, it should come as no surprise to anyone that his fellow Jews rejected him. For at that point, Jesus suddenly ceased to be One of Us.

Shylock is another story. To the extent that popular images of subcultures are established in the general mind of society by the entertainment available to people, it is troubling to contemplate that the English-speaking world's view image of the Jew is dominated by Shylock and Tevye. They are attended, of course, by the array of characters who have trotted onto the global stage with the existence of the State of Israel, but I would argue that no Israeli political figure is seen as lovable in the way Tevye is lovable. This leaves us with an image in the arena of global opinion much closer to the apparently unreasonable greed and vengefulness of Shylock than to acceptance of the sweet, bumbling Tevye.

The Dark Night of the Channel Surfer

The theme of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice is the theme of contemporary life: that of deadly ennui, and of the alienation experienced in a society which caters to every whim. The play speaks to many of our most up-to-date issues. Shakespeare's Venice is a society created for commerce. It is a successful Republic, a nation-state in which adherence to the principles of the Republic is meant to transcend every other form of allegiance, giving rise to a nation founded on a belief in principles rather than on any social grouping based on a false distinction - or rather, on a false similarity. It is as false to state that all French speakers are fundamentally alike as it is to state that all black people, white people, Fiji Islanders, or Roman Catholics are alike - alike especially to the extent that they require an independent state in which to practice their alikeness unfettered, unopposed by the Great Outside who, by their very un-alikeness, threaten the artificial community and its members. The notion of the Republic is meant to transcend this, and there appears to be a very real sense in which Shakespeare's audience would have accepted this setting as fundamentally different from all other societies of their time, which were based primarily on distinctions of religion, language, and social class. The Republic was a society in which there were no distinctions; where men - and perhaps women - were free to exercise the basic function of the society: the transacting of business.

Shakespeare set two plays in Venice, both of them about outsiders, and both about outsiders in whom the Otherness ultimately gives the lie to the notion of the Republic as a society without distinctions. Or rather, a society whose measuring-sticks are wealth and achievement. In the society of Shakespeare's Venice, the wealthy and the accomplished lord it over the less successful and the unattained. And attainment is, as the core story of The Merchant of Venice makes clear, a socially acceptable proxy for romantic love.

Romantic love ... The play opens with its title character - Antonio, the Merchant himself - sighing, "In sooth I know not why I am so sad," a sentiment echoed precisely by the heroine, Portia, on her first appearance: "By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world." Antonio and Portia are, respectively, the wealthiest man and the wealthiest woman in Venice. They are also, by the way, both destined to fall uncontrollably in love with Bassanio, the rogue who is the only character willing to call the Venetian spade a spade. He discloses to Antonio, without dissembling, his own intention to marry Portia for her money, a goal Antonio agrees is worthy of attaining, and a gambit that Antonio is pleased to finance for his beloved friend. When the game goes awry, Antonio falls into the trap. The whole of the fourth act of the play is given over to the trial of Antonio - which magically transforms in medias res into the trial of Shylock.

To the modern reader of the play, it may seem that there is dramatic tension in not knowing how the trial scene will play out. Will Antonio die? Will the Jew turn merciful, as he is being urged to do? This enlightened perspective is probably dead wrong. To our modern Western sensibility (especially when we are educated Jews, living in the freedom afforded us in twenty-first-century America), it appears that only two people know what the actual outcome of the trial is to be: Shakespeare and Portia.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Jews on Trial by BRUCE AFRAN MICHAEL J. BAZYLER PHILIP S. CARCHMAN REBEKAH MARKS COSTIN MICHAEL CURTIS ROBERT A. GARBER C.M. SILVER SALLY STEINBERG-BRENT JOYCE USISKIN Copyright © 2005 by Princeton Jewish Center. Excerpted by permission.
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