From Jesus to shylock: Christian supersessionism and "the merchant of Venice"

Harvard Theological Review

Volumn 99, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 407-431

  Heschel, Susannah ^a  

^a DARTMOUTH COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67649713917     PISSN: 00178160     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0017816006001337     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. Rodney Symington, The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the Third Reich (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2005) 250-51
2. cited by John Gross, Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992) 322
3. James Shapiro, "Shakespeare and the Jews," in: The Merchant of Venice (ed. Martin Coyle; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998) 73-91; at 90
4. Salo Wittmayer Baron, Late Middle Ages and Era of European Expansion 1200-1650 (vol. 11 of A Social and Religious History of the Jews; 2d ed.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1967) 201-11
5. Dominic Green, The Double Life of DOctor Lopez: Spies, Shakespeare, and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I (London: Century, 2003)
6. Hedda Gramley, Propheten des deutschen Nationalismus: Theologen, Historiker und Natio-nalökonomen 1848-1880 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2001) 20
7. Gramley, Propheten, 90
8. For examples, see Romans 7:5-6, 8:2
9. David L. Hodge, "Domination and the Will in Western Thought and Culture," in Cultural Bases of Racism and Group Oppression: An Examination of Traditional "Western " Concepts, Values, and Institutional Structures Which Support Racism, Sexism, and Elitism (ed. John L. Hodge, Donald K. Struckmann, and Lynn Dorland Trost; Berkeley: Two Riders, 1975) 165-72
10. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). The disappearance in the modern period of art depicting Jesus' genitals, noted by Steinberg, is not so much an abandonment of the question of his human nature but the troubling specter that his circumcised genitals would reveal his Jewishness
11. cited in Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) 25
12. Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)
13. Walter Grundmann, "Mendelssohn und Hamann," in Germanentum, Christenum und Judentum. Studien zur Erforschung ihres gegenseiligen Verhältnisses (ed. Walter Grundmann; vol. 3; Leipzig: Georg Wigand, 1943) 1-48
14. Sylvia Tomasch, "JuDecca, Dante's Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew," in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) 275-300
15. Walter Grundmann, Jesus der Galiläer und das Judentum (Leipzig: Georg Wigand, 1940)
16. Peter Head, "The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus," Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus [JSHJ] 2 (2004) 56-90
17. on Lagarde, cf. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961)
18. Richard W. Lougee, Paul de Lagarde, 1827-1891: A Study of Radical Conservatism in Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962) esp. 144-49, 151-54
19. Albrecht Ritschl, Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche (2d ed.; Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1857)
20. Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) 46
21. Karl Gutzkow, Wally die Zweiflerin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965)
22. Siegfried Leffler, Christus im Dritten Reich der Deutschen. Wesen, Weg und Zielsetzung der Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen (WeiMar, 1935) 29-30
23. cited by Kurt Meier, Die deutschen Christen. Das Bild einer Bewegung im Kirchenkampf des Dritten Reiches (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964) 8
24. for other, similar statements, cf. Gerhard Besier, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich. Spaltungen und Abwehrkämpfe 1934-1937 (Munich: Econ Ullstein List, 2001) 256
25. Susannah Heschel, "Theology as a Vision for Colonialism: From Supersessionism to Deju-daization in German Protestantism," in Germany's Colonial Pasts: An Anthology in Memory of Susanne Zantop (ed. Marcia Klotz, Lora Wildenthal, and Eric Ames; Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) 148-64
26. Leopold Dukes, "Qu'est-ce que le Christianisme a pris au Judaisme, ou de la morale dite chrétienne," Archives Israelites [AI] 10 (1849) 14
27. Augustus Neander, The Life of Jesus Christ in its Historical Connexion and Historical Development (trans. John McClintock and Charles E. Blumenthal; New York: Harper & Bros., 1850) 35
28. Abraham Geiger, Das Judentum und seine Geschichte. In zwölf Vorlesungen (Breslau: Schlettersche Buchhandlung, 1864) 117-18
29. Franz Delitzsch, Jesus und Hillel. Mit Rücksicht auf Renan und Geiger (Erlangen: Verlag von Andreas Deichert, 1866) 7, 11
30. "Geigers Antwort an Franz Delitzsch," in Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben [JZWL] 10(1872)309
31. Cited by Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (trans. Barbara Harshav and Christian Wiese; Leiden: Brill, 2005) 187
32. Halvor Moxnes, "The Construction of Galilee as a Place for the Historical Jesus, Part I," Biblical Theology Bulletin [BTB] 31:1 (2001) 26-37
33. idem, "The Construction of Galilee as a Place for the Historical Jesus, Part II," BTB 31:2 (2001) 64-77
34. Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (trans. Charles Edwin Wilbour; New York: Carleton, 1864) 224-25
35. Ernest Renan, Oeuvres complètes de Ernest Renan (ed. Henriette Psichari; 10 vols.; vol. 5; Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947-1961) 1142
36. cited by Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (trans. Arthur Goldhammer; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) 70
37. Ann Stoler, "Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth," Political Power and Social Theory [PPST] 11 (1997) 198
38. Ernest Renan, "Des religions de l'antiquité et de leurs derniers historiens," Revue des deux Mondes 23/2 (1853). Renan's study of Semitic languages, L'histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques was published in 1855 to great acclaim. Awarded the Volney prize by the French Academy, he argued that Semites lack mythology because they are instinctually monotheistic. Lacking mythology was no longer viewed as a triumph over paganism but a deficit of religion, which reflected the Semites' intolerant and exclusivist nature and stood in utter opposition to Aryans in religion, language, and ways of thinking
39. George S. Williamson writes of Renan, "Compared to the Aryans, the Semites lacked scientific and artistic originality, had created no national epic or mythology, showed no ability to think abstractly, and could not organize large governments or military campaigns."
40. George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 224. Judaism was unable to progress and developed a rigid legalism; the mantle of the classical prophets had passed to Jesus. Renan's study set a new agenda for the next Decades, sparked a broader European questioning of the value of monotheism, and encouraged a redirection of Christianity
41. Heinrich von Treitschke, "Unsere Aussichten," in Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (ed. Walter Boehlich; Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1965) 10, 11
42. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (trans. John Lees; intro. George L. Mosse; New York: H. Fertig, 1968)
43. Marcia Klotz, "The WeiMar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-Colonial World," in Germany's Colonial Pasts, 135-47
44. Susannah Hcschel, "Theological Bulimia: Christianity and Its Dejudaization," in After The Passion is Gone: American Religious Consequences (ed. Michael Berenbaum and Shawn Landres; Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2004) 177-92
45. See the "Principles of the Religious Movement of German Christians," first issued in June 1932, in John Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches (New York: Basic Books, 1968) 339-41
46. Susannah Heschel, When Jesus Was an Aryan: Christians, Nazis, and the Bible (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). The best study of the Deutsche Christen is Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
47. Walter Grundmann, "Das Heil kommt von den Juden: Eine Schicksalsfrage an die Christen deutscher Nation," Deutsche Frömmigkeit [DF] 9 (1938) 1
48. Doris L. Bergen, "One Reich, One People, One Church": The German Christian Movement and the People's Church, 1932-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 509
49. Gregor, "vom jüdischen Einfluß befreit," Thüringer Gratwanderungen, 138
50. Walter Grundmann and Karl Friedrich Euler, Das religiöse Gesicht des Judentums. Entstehung und Art (Leipzig: Verlag Georg Wigand, 1942) Vorwort
51. Heschel, "Theological Bulimia," 177-92
52. Jean François Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews" (trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)
53. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989) 125
54. Jacques Derrida, "What is a 'Revelant' Translation?" Critical Inquiry [CI] 27 (2001) 174-200, at 186
55. For a study of medieval images of Jew as dog, see Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters: Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006)
56. The motif of Jews stabbing Christ lies behind medieval Christian accusations of Jewish host desecration. See, for example, the fifteenth-century English play, "The Croxton Play of the Sacrament," in Non-cycle Plays and Fragments (ed. Norman Davis; New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)
57. For a discussion of the motif of Jewish stabbing in the Croxton play, see Sister Nichola Maltman, "Meaning and Art in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament," English Literary History [ELH] 41:2 (1974) 149-64
58. and Lisa Lampert, "The Once and Future Jew: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Little Robert of Bury, and Historical Memory," Jewish History [JH] 15 (2001) 235-55
59. Gil Anidjar, "Christians and Money (The Economic Enemy)," Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network [EP] 12:4 (2005) 500
60. Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 22-33
61. Lynda E. Boose, " 'The Getting of a Lawful Race': Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman," Women, "Race" and Writing in the Early Modern Period (ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker; London: Routledge, 1994) 36
62. Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 27 and 140-41
63. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Politics (Madison, Wis.: University of Wiconsin Press, 1989)
64. Gustav VolkMar, Die Religion Jesu und Hire erste Entwicklung nach dem gegenwärtigen Stande der Wissenschaft (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1857) 52
65. cited in Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 161
66. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. Eric Prenowitz; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 12
67. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
68. Joel Berkowitz, Shakespeare on the Yiddish Stage (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002)
69. Landeskirchen Archiv, Eisenach, Germany, C III 2a, folder: Institut 1938-1944. Letter from Schultz to Roenck, 2 August 1944
70. Lynda E. Boose, "The Comic Contract and Portia's Golden Ring," Shakespeare Studies [SS] 20 (1988) 241-54
71. Thomas Luxon, "A Second Daniel: The Jew and the "True Jew" in The Merchant of Venice," Early Modern Literary Studies [EMLS] 4.3 (1999) 1-37; here, 16