“Don't know much about history.
Don't know much biology.
Don't know much about a science book.
Don't know much about the French I took.
But I do know that I love you.
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be … “
Don't know much biology.
Don't know much about a science book.
Don't know much about the French I took.
But I do know that I love you.
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be … “
[Wonderful World written by Sam Cooke, Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, performed by Sam Cooke.]
When I hear this song I don’t think about a slow dance in a gymnasium – I was, after all, just 9 years old when it was recorded by Sam Cooke in 1959. Likely this song first came to my attention when I heard Art Garfunkel’s 1977 album Watermark; after all, harmonies by James Taylor and Paul Simon would have been hard to ignore. These days, whenever I hear ‘Wonderful World’ played on the oldies station, I almost always think of William Shakespeare. Or more specifically, whenever I think of William Shakespeare, I think of this song.
Forgive me; that was not much of a segue.
William Shakespeare you ask? Indeed. More specifically - at the moment anyway - I am thinking about ‘The Merchant of Venice’, which was written by Shakespeare around 1597. Merchant is a "comedy" about a bitter [and detested] Jewish moneylender who seeks revenge against a gentile [the PC term for Christian] merchant who has defaulted on a loan. Merchant's controversial subject matter has earned it a reputation as a "problem play" that continues to ask difficult questions 400 years after it was first staged:
Does the play endorse the anti-Semitic attitudes of its Christian characters?
Does it critique the kinds of prejudices it portrays on stage?
Or does it merely dramatize racial and religious intolerance without taking a stance one way or the other?
Some background: officially, there were no “Jews” in 16th century England because they had been banished in 1290 under the Edict of Expulsion. Some studies suggest there were fewer than 200 Jews in Elizabethan England (only about 100 have been identified by historians). Most of these Jews were outwardly practicing Christians, though many of these were probably ‘Marranos’ (Jews who practiced their religion in secret).
So how were Jews perceived in the imaginations of Elizabethan audiences?
Jews were a popular target of hatred in Shakespeare's England in large part due the trial of Queen Elizabeth's personal physician, Rodrigo Lopez, a converted Portuguese Jew (and a Marrano). In 1594 Lopez was convicted of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth I and was executed as a traitor – meaning he was hanged, cut down (while still alive), and mutilated before a crowd of vengeful spectators.
Assuming there were no actual Jews publicly living in England, the worst kinds of stereotypes and legends about the entire group could prevail unchecked. Jews were accused of everything from sacrificing kidnapped Christian children on Easter to killing adult Christians for their blood to be used in Passover rituals. Shakespeare, with his pulse on the popular interest, presented The Merchant of Venice around 1597, hot on the heels of the Lopez trial. What's interesting about Shakespeare's Jewish merchant, Shylock, is that - depending on how you read the story - he is not a caricature of all-things-evil. Shylock is deeply flawed, but he's also complex and deeply human. When he famously asks, " … if you prick us [Jews] do we not bleed?" (3.1.6), he insists on the fact that Jews and Christians share a common humanity, despite the fact that he's been spit upon, kicked, and railed against for being “different”.
Why should you care about all of this? OK, stick with me here …
Let's say that you, circa your kindergarten days, make a deal with your younger brother in which, if the Tampa Bay Rays win the World Series, he has to stick his finger in a light socket. He's fine with the deal because, hey, the Tampa Bay Rays could never, ever win the World Series. And you're OK with the potentially devastating results, since he recently put glue in your macaroni and cheese. [That last part is blatant plagiarism, but it IS cited.]
Then somebody in Florida sells his soul to the devil [well, the Rays could have won the WS in 2008], and before you know it, your little brother is facing a pretty lively light-socket. He insists that you let him off easy because it's the merciful thing to do, but you counter that the two of you had a bargain, and you want justice.
Interesting word, justice. What does it mean, exactly? Justice according to the law? What if there were a law saying, for example, that white men were allowed to own black men? Or that a man can beat his wife, who, incidentally, isn't allowed to vote. Since those laws actually existed in United States history, does that mean they were just?
OK, not so much. "Justice" is clearly tied to something other than the law. Perhaps it's based in religion? Are we talking about divine law? *cough* the Crusades *cough*
So there's obviously something else going on in our heads when we think about justice, something like ethics or morality. But what do you do when justice according to the law is not the same as justice according to religion, which is not the same as justice according to morals or human decency? The point is, "justice" is not a word you can throw around like "glue" or "light socket." And yet "justice" has been used to justify a slew of actions – like literally cutting a pound of flesh from a man's chest.[i]
I will go on record here and say that I’m a firm believer that ‘all’ stereotypes are based on some type of statistical or historical information. This stance has gotten me into a pickle with some of my classmates [Sociology, Political Science, Cultural Anth.] but to this I say “grow up – it is what it is”.
One rather profound stereotypical perception is that Jews control all the money; the question is [if my posit that stereotypes are based in ‘fact’] when and why did we associate Jewish people with money in the first place? First let’s learn a little more about “God’s chosen people”.
According to the “history” presented by theologians, Jews served as slaves to the ancient Egyptians but were led by Moses to the “promised land” - the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands - which at that time was called Canaan and is today’s Israel [and yesterday’s Palestine]. In Canaan the newcomers warred with and overcame the existing population (yes this is a multi-millennial war) but eventually faced an occupation of their own by the expanding Roman Empire. Things didn’t really improve after the whole Jesus incident, and once Rome had assimilated and began promoting the new ‘Christian’ religion, the Jewish population spread out. In Europe they were again persecuted on a regular basis.
According to secular archeology, by the late Bronze Age, Egyptian archives indicate that Jerusalem was already a Canaanite city-state recognizing Egyptian over-lordship. Politically and culturally it was dominated by Egypt. This Canaanite city-state system had broken down by the end of the Bronze Age, but according to secular, archaeological records, by the 9th century BCE the so-called Kingdom of Israel had emerged as an important local power before falling to the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE. There was also a smaller “Kingdom of Judah” which existed concurrently and shared a southern border with the “Kingdom of Israel”. [So we now have the Israeli Jews and the Judean Jews.] In the 7th century BCE Jerusalem had become a city with a large population and clear dominance over its neighbors, probably as the result of a cooperative arrangement with the Assyrians [who wished to control the valuable olive industry]. Following the fall of the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Cyrus the Great, 539 BC, some ‘Jewish’ exiles returned to Jerusalem and were absorbed into the subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms [e.g., Greek] that followed the conquests of Alexander the Great, but in the 2nd century BCE the Judeans revolted and created the Hasmonean Dynasty. This, the last nominally independent ‘Jewish’ kingdom, came to an end in 63 BCE with its conquest by Pompey of the Roman Republic.
It’s probable that, during the first century C.E., the people of the time, both Romans and Jews, saw the Jesus movement as a reform sect of Judaism. Both Christians and Jews stepped up their proselytizing - and attempts to consolidate their respective faiths from the threat of "heresies" - with the Romans acting as bemused onlookers to all these squabbles. The subsequent 4th Century Christian “success” in the Roman Empire, leading to Constantine's conversion and the eventual orthodox Christian monopoly under Theodosius, however, left the Jews in a decidedly inferior political position [to say the least].[ii]
By the 1920s, it was clear that the idea of an Israelite conquest of Canaan - the story of the book of Joshua - was not supported by the archaeological record. After 200 years of archaeology, there is still no direct evidence of the existence of David or Solomon, et al – the rather obvious and realistic conclusion is that they (these men, among many others) must be fiction, the product of Jews of the 6th and 5th century Persian Empire. It is entirely probable that the Jews originated as a "mixed multitude" of settlers sent to Jerusalem by the Persians, where they then concocted a past for themselves. If you are interested in such histories and legends, there is a very good resource HERE.[iii]
Blah blah blah. I know, I know. Don’t give up.
It really was not my intent to make this into a sermon, but so much [if not all] of what we today call ‘civilization’ is based on Bronze Age religion(s) that it is difficult to explain any Cultural Literacy without going to the roots. In Christian beliefs one cannot loan money to another and charge interest. This is known as usury. In fact, the whole idea of working with money for a living was the equivalent of a “dirty job”. Society looked down on tax collectors, currency exchangers, and any other types of people that worked with money. Jewish people similarly couldn’t lend money due to their own views of usury, but with a clever catch: they couldn’t charge interest to other Jews, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t charge interest to anyone else [religion is funny that way, you know?] When banking took off in Europe some Jewish folks were there to finance everything from wars to explorations to something called “the New World”. Banking became important to society. Of course, over time Christians came around to the whole charging interest thing as well. Just sayin’.
Flash forward to NOW and you see an overwhelming representation of Jewish people within industries that revolve around the exchange of money. At the same time, Jews have created a powerful social network. They marry each other, keep traditions close, and keep it in the family. They employ each other and help each other out. This isn’t discrimination - it’s a classic case of how well networking works. While most Americans keep reminding each other that we are, each of us, ‘independent’, and while certain outspoken groups fondly, even fanatically espouse the brain-sickly notions of Ayn Rand, the Jews have quietly and efficiently taken the best parts of socialism to a new level. This would account for why they have centralized around certain industries and still do - not much has changed over time.
Today many Jewish people are Captains of Business. Not only do they dominate finance, they have some serious representation in technology and entertainment – and, seemingly and most of all, GOVERNMENT. As a result of rising to such prominent positions within American society, Jewish people get much more scrutiny than their relatively small population would normally account for. Depending on how you count they’re about 2% of the population in the US, but it just so happens that when something happens to someone involving *money* we actively seek out to see if they were Jewish.[iv]
Hey. My accountant is Jewish; so is my attorney. And no, I did not go through the Jewish Yellow Pages looking for professionals. The thing is, in this town and in (probably) most others, most of the accountants and lawyers are Jewish. It is what it is. Anyway I happen like both my accountant and my attorney. But yeah, they do tend to refer each other … that much is definitely true.
When I think of Shylock, however, I don’t think of either my CPA or my lawyer. I actually think of Joe Lieberman and his ilk, and I can fully appreciate why the Elizabethans bought into Shakespeare’s play, and more to the point, why Merchant of Venice is timeless. I have a good friend who periodically tries to convince me that the Zionists took over the world centuries ago; that Netanyahu is actually President of the United States in absentia; that AIPAC is the drummer our Congress marches to. Aside from the middle one, I can’t really argue with her all that much. Does this mean I am anti-Semite? I don’t think so, but then, I am not really pro-Semite either. What I am is still enough of an Idealist to HOPE that America will get back on track. But I am enough of a realist to know that throwing money around like it is glitter at a Footloose taping is not the way to accomplish this.
