Chapter 28 - Shakespeare’s Rabbinic Virtues

Summary

This chapter considers grounds for hearing listening in The Tempest as a Jewish, and specifically Rabbinic, virtue, namely, the virtue of a “listening ear” (middat shmiat ha’ozen) described in Pirke Avot, a core text of Jewish ethical literature, published in Latin in 1541. I suggest that this publication witnesses a tension in the Reformation’s re-inscription of supersessionary tropes of Jewish otherness as spiritual deafness. I theorize this tension as sublimation of the memory of Jewish virtue ethics and ethical listening. I trace the oneiric distribution of signifiers of Jewish alterity in the figures of the vengeful, bookish, exiled Prospero and the dispossessed indigene alike, considering the implications of this reading of the spiritual subaltern as one who can hear but not access the spiritual bounty of their birthright. I suggest that the suppressed memory of Jewish virtue ethics in the Tempest surfaces in the memory of drowned books and fathers and in the play’s echoes of the Book of Jonah, particularly its auditory compulsion to mercy and its song of the deep. I demonstrate how the play bears witness to this sublimation in its “sounding” (plumbing and amplifying) of submerged memory and in the auditory virtue demonstrated by its percipients.