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Can a cultural historian of Shakespeare's period speak about genetics and eugenics in relation to Jews and Moors? Not only did words like Jews, Moors, and race mean something different then from what they have meant since the nineteenth century, but a glance at a historical dictionary will tell us that the term genetics did not yet exist. 1 Therefore it might be the better part of valor for us as cultural historians to avoid such terms and, someone might suggest, even such topics altogether. The alternative is to sin boldly, i.e., to do what "really" shouldn't be done, but not naively, rather with the consciousness of stretching what is permissible. Some fears are productive, and taking some comfort from Claude J. Summers's essay on the early modern scholar's anxieties of anachronism, we hope to negotiate the narrow path between the Scylla of anachronism and the Charybdis of pedantry. 2 Can we talk about notions of genetics in Shakespeare or about notions of Jews and Africans? We suggest that if we historicize properly, a process in which, for instance, "genetics" will become something quite different from what it is at present, we can. When we examine genetics in Shakespeare, however, we find not just one idea of genetics but several. Also, when we let the terms Jew and Moor drift a little from their modern racial and religious moorings, in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice they move surprisingly close together as versions of the alien or Other. While the play, in its very obsession with otherness, demonstrates that racism was already fully operational, ironically, it also illustrates the extent to which the concept of "race" was still under negotiation, hovering between the spheres of religion and genetics.
With all the critical attention (in relationship to Shakespeare's play) given to what Jews could or could not do in Elizabethan England and Renaissance Venice, the depth of the underlying scientific and pseudo-scientific notions about inheritance has not yet been sounded. 3 Some of those notions are recondite and so complicated that even the most careful modern editors cannot hope to do them justice; others are so unpleasant (because they use human beings as a mere means to an end) that they seem to have been surrounded by taboos...