Donald Trump’s Shylock

President Trump’s denial that a GOP candidate in Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall, is “some kind of a Shylock-type guy” for suing some 700 patients for medical bills has precipitated “slings and arrows” from the president’s opponents. The ADL, in a post on X that does not name Mr. Trump but is clearly a response, calls the name Shylock “rooted in a longstanding antisemitic stereotype” and reckons its “use can reinforce harmful tropes about Jews.”What, though, if Shylock were not a villain but the hero of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”? That’s the case made by the scholar Robin Headlam Wells, who sees in the moneylender a figure of “of almost heroic proportions.” Ms. Wells reckons that Shylock’s oration “Hath not a Jew eyes” is “one of Shakespeare’s great set pieces, comparable with Henry V’s meditation on the cares of kingship, or even Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide.”Shylock is also praised by the self-proclaimed Bardolator, Harold Bloom. He writes in his “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” that “Shylock is one of those Shakespearean figures who seem to break clean away from their play’s confines. There is an extraordinary energy in Shylock’s prose and poetry.” Bloom asserts that Shakespeare gives Shylock lines that “burn with a terrifying spiritual rancor” and a “formidable spiritual intelligence.”Those rousing words hardly stopped the chief executive officer of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Amy Spitalnick, from taking to X on Monday to declare that Mr. Trump’s reference to the Shylock “was not an accident. He has consistently normalized antisemitic conspiracy theories and tropes.” One actor who played Shylock, though, Alexander Granach, sees in the role “human greatness and spiritual strength and a great loneliness.”Any sensitive watcher of the play perceives that Granach grasped the role inside out. Shylock’s antagonist, Antonio, is hardly sympathetic, and Shylock’s betrayal by his own daughter is enough to wound even the hardest of hearts. The forcible conversion to Christianity that follows Shylock’s trial by a kangaroo court only — at least to modern viewers weaned on freedom of faith — adds to the sympathy owed to this merchant of Venice. Mr. Trump also invoked the Jewish Venetian last year at a rally in Iowa. When told it was antisemitic, he responded “I’ve never heard it that way. To me, Shylock is somebody that’s a money lender at high rates. I’ve never heard it that way, you view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.” In 2014, President Biden, then a senator, decried “Shylocks who took advantage of these women and men while overseas.” He subsequently apologized.Mr. Trump’s Shakespearean riff comes amidst a hotly contested race in ruby red Kansas. All too many of those tarring the president as an antisemite on the hustings are doing so in hope of taking from the Republicans the House and Senate. The charge is rebutted by, say, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reckons that “Israel has never had a greater friend in the White House.” Mr. Trump’s critics, though, will have their pound of flesh.

Donald Trump’s Shylock

Donald Trump’s Shylock

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