A classic speaks differently to each individual and in each new context. On Monday 28 May 2012, I saw The Merchant of Venice performed by Habima, the Israeli National Theatre. The venue was the replica of Shakespeare’s wooden, roofless, Globe Theatre. It was a hot London night, and the noise of flying machines occasionally confronted our fantasies of authenticity, if the fact that the performance was in Hebrew had not.
London is, after having been the hub of the British Empire, a multicultural world city. The Globe hosted theatre companies that summer from all over the world to perform Shakespeare in their own languages: Shakespeare from Pakistan, South Africa, Georgia, Palestine, Turkey, China and all over the world.
Since some rather nasty medieval stuff, London and Jews have got on fairly well. London stood firm against Hitler, and the local Blackshirts too; it did not mind much whether Jews stayed separate or whether they immersed themselves in its vibrancy; it did not feel threatened; it just let Jews live engaged lives. But London’s very post-nationalism, and its post-colonialism, has functioned as the medium for a rather odd new kind of intolerance.
Sometimes, we define our own identities in relation to some ‘other’. Early Christianity defined itself in relation to the Jews who refused to accept its gospel, and it portrayed them as Christ-killers. Some people who wanted to embrace modernity constructed their identities in relation to the image of the traditional Jew with his beard and coat, standing against progress. Some others who were afraid of the new found they could define themselves against the modernist Jew. Nineteenth-century nationalists often defined Jews as foreigner. Twentieth-century totalitarianisms, which had universal ambition, found their ‘other’ in the cosmopolitan or international Jew.
These processes created an invented image of ‘the Jew’, of which the antisemites portrayed themselves as victims. Antisemitism has only ever portrayed itself as defensive – never as aggressive.
Some people who love London’s relaxed, diverse antiracism look for an ‘other’ against which to define themselves. They find Israel. They make it symbolize everything against which they define themselves: ethnic nationalism, racism, apartheid, colonialism. London’s shameful past, not to mention in some ways its present, is cast out and thrust upon Israel. London has twice elected Ken Livingstone, a socialist who embraces this kind of anti-Israel scapegoating, as its Mayor.
We can tell that this hostility to Israel is as artificially constructed as any antisemitism by looking at the list of theatre groups against which the enlightened did not try to organize a boycott. Antizionists have created a whole new ‘-ism’ around their campaign against Israel – a way of thinking about the whole world. Within this antizionist framework, a caricature of Israel is endowed with huge symbolic significance. It is a significance which relates only here and there to the actual State of Israel, to its complex conflict with the Palestinians, to its relationship with the Arab and Islamic states which neighbour it and to the diversity of existing Israeli men and women which inhabit it If the Palestinians stand, in the antizionist imagination, as symbolic of all the victims of ‘the west’ or ‘imperialism’, then Israel is thrust into the centre of the world as being symbolic of oppression everywhere. Like antisemitism, antizionism imagines Jews as being central to all that is bad in the world.
One of the sources of energy for this special focus on Israel comes from Jewish antizionists. For them, as for many other Jews, Israel is of special importance. For them, Israel’s human rights abuses – real, exaggerated or imagined – are sources of particular pain, sometimes even shame.1 Some of them take their Jewish preoccupation with Israel and try to export it into the cultural and political sphere in general, and into non-Jewish civil society spaces where a special focus on the evils of Israel takes on a new symbolic power. But the Jewish antizionists, so fond of speaking ‘as a Jew’, are so centred on Israel that they often fail to understand the significance of the symbolism which they so confidently normalize in the antiracist spaces of old London.
Is The Merchant of Venice an antisemitic play, or is it a play which intimately depicts the anatomy of persecution, exclusion and bullying against a Jewish character? When I see a production of The Merchant of Venice, it is always the audience that unsettles me. The play tells two stories which relate tangentially to each other. One is the story of Shylock, a Jewish money lender who is spat on, excluded, beaten up and, in the end, mercilessly defeated and humiliated. The other is an apparently light-hearted story about an arrogant, rich, self-absorbed young woman – clever but not wise, pretty but not beautiful – and her antisemitic friends. Shakespeare inter-cuts the gruelling, detailed scenes of the bullying of Shylock with the comedic story of Portia’s love-match with a loser who has already frittered away his own inheritance.
Shakespeare offers us an intimately observed depiction of antisemitic abuse, and, each time the story reaches a new climax of cruelty, he then offers hackneyed and clichéd gags in the other story, to see if he can make us laugh. It is as if he is interested in finding out how quickly the audience forgets Shylock, off stage, and his tragedy. And the answer, in every production I have ever seen, is that the audience is happy and laughing at second-rate clowning, within seconds. And I suspect that Shakespeare means the clowning and the love story to be second rate. He is doing something more interesting than entertaining us. He is playing with our emotions in order to show us something, to make us feel something.2
Now, the audience at this particular performance was a strange one in any case. It felt to me like London’s Jewish community out to demonstrate its solidarity with Israel and to protect the Israeli cousins from the vulgarities which they knew their city was about to inflict. The audience was uneasy because it did not know in advance what form the disruption was going to take. In the end, the atmosphere was a rather positive and happy one, like an easy home win at football against an away team which had threatened a humiliating victory. Solidarity with Israel meant something different to each person there. One man ostentatiously showed off a silky Israeli-flag tie. Others were Hebrew speakers, taking the opportunity in London to see a play in their own language. Some in the audience would have been profoundly uncomfortable with Israeli government policies but were keen to show their oneness with those parts of their families which had been expelled from Europe two or three generations ago and who were now living in a few small cities on the Eastern Mediterranean.
The audience may not have been expert either in Shakespeare or in antisemitism. Most people think of The Merchant of Venice as an antisemitic play. Shylock is thought to be an antisemitic stereotype, created by Shakespeare for audiences to hate. Are we supposed to enjoy the victory of the antisemites and the humiliation of the Jew? But what was this audience thinking? If it is simply an antisemitic play, why would we be watching it, and why is the Israeli National Theatre performing it? And if it is a comedy, why aren’t the jokes funny, and why does Shakespeare offer us a puerile game-show?
I don’t think this audience cared much. It was there to face down those who said that Israeli actors should be excluded from the global community of culture, while actors from all the other states, which had been invited to the Globe, were celebrated in a festival of the Olympic city’s multiculturalism. So, the audience was happy to laugh loudly and to enjoy itself. We saw on stage how Shylock’s daughter was desperate to escape from the original Ghetto, the darkness and fear of her father’s house, the loneliness of being a Jew. We saw how she agreed to convert to Christianity because some little antisemitic boy said he loved her; we saw how she stole her father’s money so that her new friends could spend it on drunken nights out. And we saw Shylock’s despair at the loss and at the betrayal and at the intrusion. Perhaps his unbearable pain was also fuelled by guilt for having failed his daughter since her mother had died. Like the ‘hunchback’ in Verdi’s Rigoletto, Shylock’s humiliation and his powerlessness had rendered him incapable of navigating the responsibilities of fatherhood, both to protect but also to nurture; he had felt forced to over-protect and had thereby been unable to nurture his daughter into self-reliant adulthood.
And then the audience laughed at silly caricatures of Moroccan and Spanish Princes, and at Portia’s haughty and superior rejection of them. And now, not representations of antisemites but what many in the audience saw as actual antisemites, hiding amongst them, unfurl their banners denouncing ‘Israeli apartheid’, and their Palestinian flags, and they stage a performance of their own. The Palestinian people undergo the familiar indignity of being represented by those whose sympathy and friendship for them had evolved into hatred for Israel; of being represented by a movement for the silencing of Israeli actors; of being represented by those who show contempt for Jewish Londoners in the audience, who de-humanize them by refusing to refer to them as people but instead referring to them simply as ‘Zionists’. And a ‘Zionist’ does not merit the ordinary civility with which people in a great city normally, without thinking, accord to one another.
The artistic director of the Globe had already predicted that there might be disruption. There often was, he said dryly, at this unique theatre. Pigeons flutter onto the stage but we ignore them, he said. And today, people should not get upset; they should not confront the protestors; they should allow the security guards to do their job.
One protestor shouted, ‘No violence,’ as the security guys made to take her away. They took a few away, the actors didn’t miss a word, and the audience, largely Jewish but also English, showed its stiff upper lip and pretended that nothing had happened. Some time later, another small group of protestors, who had wanted to exclude Israelis from this festival because of their nationality, stood up and put plasters over their own mouths to dramatize their own victimhood. Antisemites always pose as victims of the Jews, or of ‘Zionism’, or of the ‘Israel lobby’. And the claim that Jews try to silence criticism of Israel by mobilizing a dishonest accusation against them is now recognizable as one of the defining tropes of contemporary antisemitism.
Meanwhile, on stage, the antisemitic Christians are positioning themselves as the victims of Shylock. They have spat on him, stolen from him, corrupted his only daughter, libelled him, persecuted him and excluded him. Now he’s angry. He’s a Jew, so he can be bought off, no? They try to buy him off. But for Shylock, this is no longer about the money. It is about the desperate fury of a man whose very identity has been trampled upon throughout his life. And at that moment, I could sympathize with him more than ever. I imagined my own revenge against the articulate poseurs who were standing there pretending to have been silenced. Shylock is a flawed character; Shakespeare does not imagine him perfect. Israel is not perfect either. But how much more relevant is a play which shows the destruction of a man who is powerless to resist it? Racism does not only hurt angels; it also hurts flawed and ordinary people, and it has the power to transform good people into angry, frightened and vengeful people. Obviously, these truths can be followed around circles of violence in these contexts, from the blood libel, Christ-killing and conspiracy theory, to Nazism, to Zionism and into Palestinian nationalism and Islamism. Only the most self-righteous ones imagine that it all comes out in the end into a morality tale of good against evil.
What are they thinking, the protestors? Do they understand the play at all? Are they moved by the sensitivity of the portrayal of the anatomy of antisemitic persecution? Perhaps they are, and they think that Shylock, in our day, is a Palestinian, and Jews are the new Christian antisemites. One man exclaimed, full of thespian English diction: ‘Hath not a Palestinian eyes?’ He was referring to the moving, universalistic speech with which Shylock dismantles the racism of his persecutors. This protestor mobilized the words given by Shakespeare to the Jew, against actually existing Jews. The experience of antisemitism was totally universalized, as though the play was only about ‘racism in general’ and not at all about antisemitism in particular. And the point, that a longing for vengeance is destructive and self-destructive, no matter how justified it may feel, was, of course, totally missed.
Somebody replied with comedic timing: ‘Piss off !’ Everybody cheered. There was an understanding that the boycotters had mobilized all the disruption they had to mobilize and that they had failed really to make an impression.
Or do the protestors think that it is an antisemitic play? If so, maybe they feel that the subtext of this Israeli performance of English antisemitism is to offer a justification for everything that Israel does. Do they think the Israelis are taunting London, and by proxy the Palestinians, and trying to make them feel guilty? It is a common antizionist claim that the source of Zionist power today is a kind of moral blackmail; the accusation is one of Zionist readiness to mobilize historical Jewish victimhood as a tool, a source of Jewish power. This, again, is an old libel – that the Jews are so clever and so morally lacking, that they are able to benefit from their own persecution. When will the world forgive the Jews for antisemitism and the Holocaust?
The climax of the play sees Antonio, the smooth-tongued antisemitic merchant who has borrowed money from Shylock which he now cannot pay back, tied up in the centre of the stage like Christ on the cross. And the antisemites demand that the Jew displays Christian forgiveness. But the Jew, who has been driven half mad by antisemitic persecution, does not forgive: he wants his revenge.
Venice, for Shakespeare, is symbolic of the excitement and dynamism of the emerging modern world: a cosmopolitan world of freedom and business. Venice is strong because it has law; the powerful are prevented from stealing from the weak; contract is enforced by law; citizens are able to trade because they are able to rely on the agreements that they make. So how is the Venetian court to protect the powerful Antonio from Shylock without debasing its most valuable asset? Portia – the erudite, plausible antisemite – offers a justification, however, which both brings the desired result and also appears to protect the principle of law. And before you know it, Antonio is free, and Shylock is trussed up ready for crucifixion. And the Christians do not forgive either; they show no mercy. They humiliate Shylock, they take his money, and they force him to convert to Christianity. He ends up on his knees, bareheaded, without his daughter, without his money, without his livelihood, and he says: ‘I am content.’
The day after the performance, one of the leaders of the boycott campaign, Ben White, tweeted a picture of the beautiful Jewish face of Howard Jacobson. Jacobson is a novelist who was shortly to win the Man Booker Prize for literature; and he is an opponent of the campaign to exclude Israeli actors from London. White added the text to his tweet of Jacobson’s face: ‘If you need another reason to support a boycott of Habima, I present a massive picture of Howard Jacobson’s face’ (Weissman 2012).
This incident later became an issue in the court case between Ronnie Fraser and the University and College Union (see Chapter 6). Jacobson wrote in his witness statement in the Fraser case:
Had Ben White tweeted his disagreement … on intellectual grounds I’d have no reason to complain. But I was extremely alarmed – and I must say distressed – to see him invoking my appearance. I did not understand what my face had to do with the argument and why he used the word ‘massive’.
I am aware that I look Jewish. Massively Jewish. I don’t know. Massively Jewish-featured I don’t know. But Jewish yes. So how does the fact bear on the proposed boycott? How does it constitute a reason to support it? What does the face betoken that it might strengthen people in their commitment to boycott an Israeli theatre company?
I have addressed the subject of anti-Semitism in my novels and articles; I have warned against finding prejudice where there is none; and have often spoken of how little anti-Semitism I have faced in this country. I don’t go looking for it. I would rather not find it. But to see my appearance adduced as an argument to support a boycott of Habima convinced me that on this occasion anti-Semitism had found me.
It hardly seems controversial to say that while criticism of Israel may well be entirely legitimate, some forms of criticism of Israel may be antisemitic. Defining which kinds of criticism are which is a matter for judgment, and it is the subject of this book.