James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews: 20th Anniversary Edition. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2016. Paperback, 317 pages.

Summary

James Shapiro's most provocative claim in Shakespeare and the Jews is that “the English turned to Jewish questions in order to answer English ones” (1). In the preface to his Twentieth Anniversary Edition, he asserts that his earlier edition does appear to have convinced his audience that there were, in fact, Jewish questions in Shakespeare's time, but he laments his lack of success in convincing scholars that Jews were threatening “precisely because they didn't outwardly appear all that different from Christians” (x). The broader significance of his thesis is that the Jewish questions provide “unusual insight into the cultural anxieties felt by English men and women at a time when their nation was experiencing extraordinary social, religious, and political turbulence” (1). At its core, Shapiro's book is a crisis-text; it stands in that long line of texts that try to root the irrefragable psychic disruptions of the early modern period in some kind of discernible social phenomena. Douglas Bush, for example, writing in 1945, attributed anxiety, what he called the melancholy strain in Tudor-Stuart literature, to an array of causes as diverse as indigestion, Puritanism, and the bubonic plague. Lynn White added death and the devil to the list, and Bill Bouwsma trumped the devil with the ineluctable movement of time. Stephen Orgel returned our attention to indigestion, or potential indigestion, with his essay, “Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” and Mark Brietenburg indicted patriarchal privilege itself with his famous quip that “‘anxious masculinity’ is redundant.” And Shapiro adds Jews to the list of anxiety causing phenomena.

We know, of course, that in the period before the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, Jews were a source of anxiety, and that this anxiety was codified in texts such as the Leges Edwardi Confessoris dating from around 1120:

Be it known that since [sic] all Jews, wherever they are in the kingdom, ought to be under the liege guardianship and protection of the king; nor can any one of them subject himself to any wealthy man without the license of the king, since the Jews and all their possessions are the king’s. But if anyone shall have detained them or their money, the king can demand it as his own property, if he can and wishes to.