This book explores responses to The Merchant of Venice by Jewish writers, critics, theater artists, thinkers, religious leaders and institutions.

Shylock, the cunning moneylender in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, is one of the great familiar figures of the world of drama. He is also one of the most controversial characters ever conceived. Photos.

This book investigates the enduring use of his image in modern culture and politics, exploring the origins and impact of Svengali and his helplessly mesmerised female victim Trilby in an age already rife with discussions of race, covert persuasion and the unconscious mind."--BOOK JACKET.

Conversion and Reform analyzes the work of those British reformists writing in the 1790s who reshaped the conventions of fiction to reposition the novel as a progressive political tool. Includes new readings of key figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Holcroft.

This is a comprehensive critical study of the nineteenth-century French grand opéra La Juive, by Halévy.

“Outstanding . . . A delightfully written work of serious scholarship.” —Jewish Book World Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the nineteenth century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, Jarrod Tanny examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the nineteenth century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il’ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives. “Traces the emergence, development, and persistence of the myth of Odessa as both Garden of Eden and Gomorrah . . . A joy to read.” —Robert Weinberg, Swarthmore College

Examines the origins of the deicide accusation, the claim that the Jews killed Jesus, which has always been the main antisemitic cliché. Although St. Paul, who made the sacrifice of God's son a centerpoint of the new religion, can be regarded as the inventor of Christian antisemitism, he did not level the accusation of deicide against the Jews. Argues that it was the authors of the Synoptic Gospels, who wanted both to placate the Roman rulers by diverting the guilt from them and to dissociate themselves from Jewish nationalism after 70 CE, who accused the Jews. The image of Abraham's sacrifice always lurked behind the Crucifixion in Christian theology; Isaac was regarded as a spiritual ancestor of Christians. Abraham's sacrifice which was thwarted by God posed a theological problem for Christianity: if God prohibited the sacrifice of children, how could He sacrifice His own son? The problem was solved by diverting the accusation of infanticide from God to His people. In the Middle Ages, the notion that the Jews were capable of killing children was transformed into the belief in ritual murder. Scenarios of many blood libels included crucifixion of the victim. In the views of that epoch, the Jews needed to consume Christian blood because it was their only substitute for the Eucharist, essential for salvation. The image of the Jew as a ritual murderer, and at the same time the devil's henchman and a traitorous Judas, was adopted by classical English literature, the most striking example of which is Shakespeare's Shylock.

Containing 2,500 entries, this Dictionary includes entries that cover ancient, medieval, and modern antisemitism; pagan, Christian, and Muslim antisemitism; religious, economic, psychosocial, racial, cultural, and political antisemitism. A comprehensive scholarly introduction discusses the definitions, causes, and varieties of antisemitism.

Anti-Semitic sentiments are seen here as reflecting deep-seated, irrational responses to the Jewish people, rooted in the teachings of the church and exploited by men who needed an outlet for religious, social, and economic frustrations.

Examples range from film's early days to the present, from Europe, Israel, and the United States.