Abstract for:  “Shakespeare in Advance of Hobbes:  The Judaizing of Christianity as a           

                        Motif in The Merchant of Venice”

                                                           Aryeh Botwinick

                                                           Temple University

I have found some remarkable Rabbinic precursor-texts for some of Portia’s legalistic arguments in The Merchant of Venice, which highlight new ways of conceiving of Hobbes’s relationship to Shakespeare and the role of Rabbinic Judaism generally in facilitating the birth of modernity.  The Merchant of Venice is often read (even today) as an anti-Semitic tract that constitutes a blemish on Shakespeare’s reputation and needs to be historically and psychologically vindicated.  What seems apparent from a close reading of the play, however, is how the stark dichotomy that classical Christian theology draws between law and mercy (the stringencies of law personifying Judaism and the ameliorations of mercy representing Christianity) gets overcome through an appropriation of Jewish techniques of legal textual interpretation.  For example, the Rabbis interpret the Biblical mandate of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” as imposing the penalty of monetary compensation for injuring another human being, rather than literally maiming the inflictor of the injury in the same way that he caused harm to the aggrieved party.  The Rabbis argue that if we seek to replicate upon the body of the injurer the wound that he visited upon his victim, there is no way to guarantee that its scope could be confined to exactly the same degree as occurred with the original victim.  Injuring the injurer in a comparable way to what he wrought upon his victim might lead to his suffering much more serious harm than that endured by his original victim – or even to his death.  The Rabbis argue that the only way to ensure equivalence between what the injured party has suffered and the punishment being meted out to the injurer is to fix variable monetary amounts for the infliction of diverse bodily injuries.  The Rabbis suggest that the equivalence between crime and penalty can only be achieved through artificial stipulation of financial worth (e.g., removing someone’s arm requires one to pay ten million dollars in damages)– and not through reliance on natural processes and reactions (the severance of the arm of the criminal in compensation for the severance of the arm of his victim) coinciding.

This Rabbinic understanding of “an eye for an eye” exactly prefigures Portia’s argument as to why Shylock is not entitled to Antonio’s pound of flesh for failing to live up to his agreement.  It is this Rabbinic amelioration of stark Christian dichotomies that makes modernity possible.  The softening of the dichotomy between law and mercy – relegitimating law as the primary mechanism for regulating human affairs – reconfirms the unbridgeable metaphysical distance that separates human beings from God, and contributes toward infusing into European Christian civilization the energy and dynamism to fashion modernity which stems from the absence of a secure cosmic anchor.  The conception of God being literally unapproachable by us and the consequent assigning of primacy to mechanisms of law in governing human affairs are of course central to Hobbes’s political teaching.