To make sense of Israel’s trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice, Marco Roth turns to the trial of the moneylender Shylock, and Shakespeare’s portrayal of Jews’ supposed mercilessness:
The Merchant of Venice offers up a theater of justice in the case of a Jew who is both wronged and vengeance-seeking. This Jew operates in a hypocritical Gentile world governed by Gentile laws both written and unwritten, according to which the audience judges the Jew’s case according to its own prejudices. In this way The Merchant of Venice continues to provide a paradigm for certain ideas of justice and fairness, both for Jews and about Jews.
Whatever the merits and measure of Shylock’s anger, the play also continuously invites us to find him repulsive, to jeer from his first line (“Three thousand ducats, well.”). We are to despise him—for this is what it means to be a Jew: to be despised, not for anything in particular but precisely for nothing in particular, only because a Jew.
I would suggest that a lot of what Jews have recently perceived as anti-Semitism—at least from institutions and otherwise mild-mannered advocates of boycott and sanctions and shunning—would be better understood more specifically as Shylockism, a subtype of anti-Semitism that often does not feel like “Jew hating” to those engaged in it.
Shylockism often comes across as a wish to save Jews from themselves, most especially from Jewish anger, however righteous, by making them into something else, either through assimilation/conversion (as with Shylock’s daughter, Jessica) or through an extra-legal but pseudo-legal framework—adherence to a higher law—that will ensure a happy end for everyone, once the Jews have renounced their claims.
Shylockism also effectively names the persistence of a certain kind of imaginary Jew who lives in the heads of Gentiles. [For instance]: Josep Borrell, the European Union’s head of foreign policy, used a visit to Kibbutz Be’eri to ask Israelis, “not to be consumed by rage.” . . . Borrell is basically saying “don’t be so Old Testament.”
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/shylock-at-the-un