How “Shylock”, character of Shakespeare, has grow to be an anti -Semitic time period | EUROtoday

It was using the time period “Shylock” that shocked a number of folks. When he bought off the aircraft, he claimed: “The sense of the term Shylock is someone who lends money at high rates. You see it differently. I have never heard that, ”he added. Difficult, however, to believe that the American president ignores that this term has taken, since his appearance in a work by William Shakespeare, an anti -Semitation connotation.

Originally, it isn’t a standard title. Shylock is certainly the title of a fictitious character within the play The Venice service providerwritten by the British novelist round 1600. Lender on Venetian wages, it’s the important villain of the play. In it, Shylock notably opposes his Christian rival Antonio, to which he lends 3,000 ducats, with a flesh ebook as assured.

“The portrait has crystallized and nourished an anti -Semitic stereotype”

When he goes bankrupt, Shylock intends to recuperate his due. He is motivated by revenge, Antonio having insulted him, attacked, having profaned the Jewish faith and inflicted appreciable monetary losses. At the top of the story (spoiler), the outdated usurier, reached by the illness, loses all the things: accused of homicide, he’s then pressured to offer in all his remaining property to Jessica (his daughter) and Lorenzo (the lover of his daughter and good friend of Antonio). Above all, he’s pressured to transform to Christianity.

If The Venice service provider remains to be performed at the moment, it divides, specifically due to its illustration of the Jews. As Robert Wistrich explains in Antisemism: The Longest Hated“The portrait [de Shylock] Has crystallized and nourished an anti -Semitic stereotype that other authors were going to resume throughout the following centuries ”.

Read too Maupassant, Baudelaire, Woolf… They are crazy, these writers! The play is accused of conveying tropes then underway in England of the Elisabethaine era. An interpretation of the play wants William Shakespeare wanted to oppose the mercy of the main Christians characters to that of Shylock, an avenging man, devoid of religious grace and mercy. Her forced conversion at the end of the book can be seen as a “joyful ending” by some readers, because she buys her unbelief and her desire to kill Antonio.