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The Dudleian Lecture at Harvard Divinity School 27 April 2006
In 1943 the SS Gauleiter , "district administrator," of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, commissioned a performance of The Merchant of Venice at the famed Burgtheater to celebrate the deportation of allthe Jews; Vienna had become Judenrein "cleansed of Jews." When Werner Krauss, the Nazis'leading actor, first appeared on stage as Shylock, he made the audience shudder. According to the newspaper account:With a crash and a weird train of shadows, something revoltingly alien and startlingly repulsive crawled across the stage.... The pale pink face, surrounded by bright red hair and beard, with its unsteady, cunning little eyes;the greasy caftan with the yellow prayershawl slung round; the splay-footed, shuffling walk; the foot stamping with rage; the claw-like gestures with the hands; the voice, now bawling, now muttering--all add up to a pathological image of the East European Jewish type, expressing all its inner and outer uncleanliness, emphasizing danger through humor.
Numerous stage productions of The Merchant of Venice took place in Germany during the first years of the Third Reich, and German radio broadcast it shortly after Kristallnacht , the Reich pogrom that brought about the end of viable Jewish life in Germany 9-10 November 1938. Hitler and his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, knew how to manipulate master narratives, and Shylock had long been a central figure in the Western imagination. Shylock represented the Jew as depraved, not so much as a satanic anti-Christ, but as a more human, realistic figure--as an anti-Jesus.
Jesus and Shylock embody the range of stereotypes regarding Jews and are probably the most influential Jewish figures in the Western Christian imagination. Jesus has been the model for goodness, although not because of his Jewishness, while Shylock has been the model for wickedness, precisely because he is a Jew. The presence of Jewish teachings within Christianity was countered by Christian theological supersessionism, yet the anxiety over that presence could not entirely be repressed. Jesus' Jewish background became a central problem with the rise of the quest for the historical Jesus. Both Jesus and Shylock are figures that negotiate the presence of Jewishness within the Christian realm. Through Jesus, central elements of Judaism's theology were brought to the heart of Christian theology, while...