In 1943 the SS Gauleiter, “district administrator,” of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, commissioned a performance of The Merchant of Venice at the famed Burgtheater to celebrate the deportation of allthe Jews; Vienna had become Judenrein “cleansed of Jews.”¹

When Werner Krauss, the Nazis'leading actor, first appeared on stage as Shylock, he made the audience shudder. According to the newspaper account:

Numerous stage productions of The Merchant of Venice took place in Germany during the first years of the Third Reich, and German radio broadcast it shortly after Kristallnacht, the Reich pogrom that brought about the end of viable Jewish life in Germany 9–10 November 1938.³

Hitler and his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, knew how to manipulate master narratives, and Shylock had long been a central figure in the Western imagination. Shylock represented the Jew as depraved, not so much as a satanic anti-Christ, but as a more human, realistic figure—as an anti-Jesus.

Jesus and Shylock embody the range of stereotypes regarding Jews and are probably the most influential Jewish figures in the Western Christian imagination. Jesus has been the model for goodness, although not because of his Jewishness, while Shylock has been the model for wickedness, precisely because he is a Jew. The presence of Jewish teachings within Christianity was countered by Christian theological supersessionism, yet the anxiety over that presence could not entirely be repressed. Jesus' Jewish background became a central problem with the rise of the quest for the historical Jesus. Both Jesus and Shylock are figures that negotiate the presence of Jewishness within the Christian realm. Through Jesus, central elements of Judaism's theology were brought to the heart of Christian theology, while through Shylock, the alien Jew became resident in Christian Venice.

Uncovering the historical context of Jesus' life and teachings brought the Jewish essence of his message to the fore. Jewish scholars since the early nineteenth century have enjoyed emphasizing that characteristic of Jesus as a loyal Jew, while Christian scholars were uncomfortable with such a claim, which denied the originality and uniqueness of Jesus.

By the early twentieth century, some Protestants had developed racist arguments that Jesus was not a Jew but an Aryan whose intention was the destruction of Judaism. Shylock, as the anti-Jesus, represents the figure of the Jew in the midst of the Christian world, who poisoned it from within. Assimilation of Jews into Christian society and the possibility of Jewish conversion to Christianity are central concerns of the play and reflect the disquiet of Shakespeare's era. The small but successful community of French Jews in medieval England had fallen into disfavor with the rise of English nationalism in the twelfth and thirteenth century, which resulted in their expulsion in 1290.⁴

While no recognized community of Jews existed in England during Shakespeare's lifetime, so-called “New Christians” had entered the country and flourished but had also attracted mistrust. The personal physician to Queen Elizabeth I, Rodrigo Lopez, a baptized Jew, came under suspicion for attempting to poison her. He was hanged in 1594 in a public spectacle well publicized throughout the country.⁵ Whereas in earlier centuries, Jews could simply be expelled as a foreign body, the early modern period, with its large-scale presence of baptized Jews, faced a different problem: the Jew was now concealed within the Christian, indeed, as a Christian.

Yet the converted Jew, at least in the popular imagination, was not fully a Christian. The transgendering that is so often at the center of Shakespeare's plots functions here as a transracial, transreligious identity: the Jew concealed in the theological appearance of a Christian. This unstable figure that was neither Jew nor Christian attempted to be both.

The difficulties in assimilating large numbers of baptized Jews into the church had become so fraught in Spain during the fifteenth century that scholars have recognized that the religious issue was infused with racial concerns: does baptism transform a Jew into a Christian, or does a Jew always remain a Jew, even when baptized? Such questions grew stronger as converted Jews—“New Christians” or, in hostile terms, “Marranos”—merged into Western European society, including sixteenth-century England. Race has for too long been mistakenly understood as a modern invention and as a repudiation of religion. The presence of the Jew as Christian, the Jew within the Christian, not only became the basis for modern racial theorists to reject the possibility of Jewish assimilation, which had been the promise of the Emancipation era, but reflected a theological problem for Christian self-un-derstanding. Had Jesus, in fact, fully transformed himself from Jew to Christian? Would his own transformation offer a legitimizing basis for the transformation of all Jews into citizens of European society? At stake was the rivalry between religion and race both as a basis for the nation-state and as the basis for personal identity

The problem of the Jewish presence at the heart of Christianity, not new or limited to historicist scholars of the New Testament, has long been negotiated through a variety of techniques—visual and written, popular and scholarly—in the presentation of Jesus' identity. The modern combination of religion and nationalism, both of which infuse blood with profound, transcendent meaning, became a formula for producing the concept of race, which further inflected Christian theologians' views of Jesus the Jew. The figure of Shylock, who has been presented on stage since the seventeenth century in a range of interpretations—as comic, tragic, heroic, sympathetic, and repugnant—can also be read for allusions to the question of the Jewish presence within the Christian realm and also for its connections with race. In the play's explorations of body and soul, money and blood, fathers, daughters, patrimony, marriage and conversion, religious difference, and transgendering, The Merchant of Venice expresses Christian concerns, racial and theological, about Jews. The sources for the play's plots—“the three caskets” and “the bond of flesh” from the Gesta Romanorum—were not particularly theological; Shakespeare added the biblical and theological allusions.⁶

The play, open to many interpretations, transmitted Christian theological and political conundrums regarding Jesus' Jewishness and Jewry, in general, to a wider audience, and such conundrums could easily be tilted according to the interpretation of the particular production. Those interpretations, in turn, correlate to the fluctuating problem of determining Jesus' identity as Jew or Christian and the status of Jews in society. Shylock underwent a positive transformation in the modern era, coinciding with Jewish emancipation in Europe. Initially presented as a comic figure on stage, and in the eighteenth century as a menacing figure, Shylock was transformed into a noble, tragic figure in the major nineteenth-century productions, representing the Jew who had been badly mistreated by Christian society but was not degenerate by nature. Still, the depraved Shylock always lurked in the imagination, able to return with ease in the Nazi productions.

The interplay between religion and nationalism that produced race took place with the greatest clarity and with the most horrendous results in modern Germany. Even as theology was exploited by modern German nationalism and racism, nationalism and racism were tremendously appealing to German theologians. What did racism have to offer theology? Why was Protestant theology in Germany so quickly drawn to nationalist discourse, and how was racial thinking shaped by the specific conundrum of Jesus' Jewishness? Hedda Gramley in her book on Prophets of German Nationalism has argued that nationalism offered a “new basis of legitimation” and a “venue for justifying and creating meaning” within Germany that helped to ease the turbulent transition to modernity and to bridge the ruptures caused by the erosion of traditional values.⁷

Gramley notes that both Protestants and Catholics emphasized the “world-historical Christian duty of Germans” but based their nationalisms on different sources.⁸ While Catholics claimed that their faith provided continuity between the Holy Roman Empire and the present, Protestants presented the Reformation as a sign that Germans were God's elect and possessed a religious mission with universal significance. Nationalism was not a kind of political religion, Gramley concludes, but rather religion boosted nationalism's appeal as an explanatory mechanism even as religious vitality waned.⁹ At the same time, precisely with the infusion of nationalism into theology, Christianity, defined as the triumph of Aryan culture, gave new life to religion.

Modern racial thinking offered theologians a new basis of legitimation and a means toinfuse modernity with theology. Paradoxically, the secularization processes that did so much to undermine the power of the Protestant church as an institution in Germany simultaneously allowed religious symbols to enter modern nationalism and political discourse and thus spread Christianity much further as a capillary power within society. One example is the widespread discourse of the early 1930s that Germany had been crucified in World War I and was being resurrected by the Nazi movement. The history of racism in Germany is the history of a transformation of Christian belief into the prime means of desacralizing German society, in which politics subsumed sacred symbols.

Both German nationalism and the racial anti-Semitism of theologians had protean natures, which appealed to right- and left-wing political interests. Germany's imagined nationalisms revitalized a wide range of political tendencies, which created not only political and cultural communities but theological positions as well. Indeed, theology made it easier for all points on the political spectrum to affirm nationalism and to accept racism by making bothinto Christian teachings. Similarly, nationalism offered Protestantism a role in the construction of the modern German state at a time when traditional theological claims were being challenged by the rise of historicism and science.

Racism, so central to modern nationalism, is often presented as the opposite of religion, and that classic dichotomy between religion and race undergirds the conventional distinction between Christian theological anti-Judaism and modern scientific racism. Yet that distinction fails to recognize the ways in which specific Christian theological teachings inform racial thinking. The German racial ideology that emerged in the late nineteenth-century expressed body-spirit dichotomies that exploited Christian incarnationalist theology. From its inception, modern race theory has stressed the inferiority of certain peoples' bodies as the literal encorporealization of degenerate morality and spirituality and has emphasized always the alleged threat posed by such degeneracy to supposedly superior races. Physiognomy has never stood alone. Rather, racial theory sees the body as a carrier of the soul and of its moral and spiritual qualities. Racists have worried about the spiritual threat of lesser races—and especially that of the Jews—because they regard the inferior bodies as vessels of corrupt spirits rather than causes of corruption.

The conundrum of race as incarnation is exacerbated by the supersessionist theology at the heart of Christianity's relationship to Judaism. In classic Pauline terms, Judaism represents Israel in the flesh, and Christianity represents Israel in the spirit.¹⁰

Yet if the spirit is incarnate in the body, then the Christian spirit finds itself ensared within the Jewish theological and scriptural body. The crucial relationship between body and soul characterizing modern racist discourse is a mirror of the body-soul dilemma at the heart of Christian metaphysics and is precisely the stamp that Christianity has placed on Western philosophy.¹¹ In the christological schema well through the nineteenth century, Jesus' body constitutes his Jewishness, while his Christianness lies in his spirit; the body is inferior to the spirit, as Judaism is inferior to Christianity. Jesus' maleness provides the crucialclue:if circumcised, he is both human and Jewish.¹² Why supposedly superior races should be vulnerable to the degeneracies of inferior races remained an unresolved puzzle, as much as the death of Christ, the promised messiah and incarnate God, was a central difficulty for Christian theology.

As a religion of incarnation, Christianity rests on a fragile boundary between the human and the divine, the carnal and the spiritual, and the Jewish and the Christian. Its instability was highlighted both by the rise of theological historicism and by the insistence on Jesus' Jewishness pursued by Jewish theologians of the nineteenth century. Where, in fact, does Christianity begin and Judaism end? The figure of Jesus is the lynchpin: he is at once a Jew and the focus of Christianity. Jesus begins his life as a Jew but ends his life as a Christian. Shylock, too, begins as a Jew but ends as a Christian—or does he? Once his conversion is mandated, he disappears from the play and is not present in the final scenes of act 5. He thus rehearses the anxiety at the heart of Christian belief in Jesus: Can a Jew become a Christian? Can Judaism, the religion of the flesh, be transformed into Christianity, the religion of spirit? The anxiety over conversion is reinforced by the Protestant rejection of Catholicism's doctrine of transubstantiation, that the wafer and wine are transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. Conversely, if Christ is present sacramentally in the wine and wafer, is the Jewish body of Shylock still present in the converted, Christian Shylock, the Jew and Judaism incarnate in the Christian?

Incarnation is linked to race within Christianity as well through the Virgin Mary in whose womb God's wordis made flesh. The link between Judaism and maternality is figuredin Christian self-understanding, as Lisa Lampert points out, inimages such as Bernard of Clairvaux's reading of the olive tree in Paul's letter to the Romans. Bernard describes Christianity as sons who suck milk from the mother, Judaism, and as branches that suck the sap from a tree's roots. Thus Christianity supersedes the mother religion and holds fast the salvation “which the Jews lost.”¹³

Maternity also links religious doubt with Jewishness. A text of antiquity in which the midwife doubts Mary's virginity and then finds her arm witheredin punishment is linked in medieval texts, Lampert points out, to the doubting Jew. Medieval Christian texts about doubt and midwives point to doubt as tropes of Jewish and female but also suggest the anxiety over the actual dominance in medieval European Christian society of Jewish women as midwives, who brought forth Christian babies.¹⁴

Given the role of the midwife in determining the true patrimony of the baby, information secured by her during the mother's labor pains and transmitted to the father waiting outside the door, the Jewish midwife bore secret knowledge that might or might not have been transmitted accurately. She mirrored the role of Judaism as midwife to divine revelation. Has she transmitted God's patrimony of Christianity accurately? Christianity itself was incarnated and born within a Jewish world, as the modern questers for the historical Jesus recognized. As theology gave way to history, the “womb” within which Jesus' own religiosity developed was no longer that of the Virgin Mary, as in classical Christian doctrine, but in a historicist sense, it was first-century Palestinian Judaism. That Christianity was incarnated within Judaism was the great anathema for racist theologians of the Aryan Jesus, who sought to portray him either as seeking the destruction of that womb, Judaism, or as actually having been incarnate in the world of Hellenism. This fact of Hellenism, they claimed, had been suppressed and distorted by Jews.¹⁵

Because the physical and the spiritual stand in intimate relation, the visible body as a marker of an invisible spirit, hermeneutics became central to racism. If the spiritual is incarnate in the physical, the soul in the body, it is crucial to know how to read the external, bodily signs for indications of the internal, invisible spirit. In its incarnationist aspect, racial thinking reifies christianist thinking. Even those racial theorists who were utterly opposed to Christianity and had never read a work of Christian theology had nevertheless imbibed “christianism,” in Sylvia Tomasch's term, which indicated the broader acculturation of the Christian within Western thought.¹⁶

One of the central arguments among German racialanti-Semites was whether Christianity had been locked in a battle with the Jews since its inception—with German Christianity infected with and desperately trying to overcome and destroy Judaism—or whether Christanity itself was a version of Judaism, which promoted a Jewish ethic that undermined the strength of the German nation. In both scenarios, the pure Germanic spirit is seen as beaten down by a Judaism masquerading as Christianity. For anti-Semites, who perceived Christianity as a masquerade of Judaism, the only answer was a Germanic Christianity purged of all Jewish influences. Hence Nazi theologians argued that the notion of a Jewish Jesus was the result of a misinterpretation by Jesus' disciples, all of whom were Jews, and exacerbated by Paul, who corrupted Jesus' message with his Jewish-Pharisaic teachings. Jesus was himself not Jewish but a Gentile “Son of Man.” When Jesus proclaimed himself the “son of man” he was really saying, claimed the Nazi theologians, “I am not a Jew.”¹⁷ The underlying assumption is that Christianity, too, was Gentile in its origins but was inflected and altered by the Jewishness of the apostles and Jewish Christians and requires a thorough purging.

The rise of racial theory in the nineteenth century no doubt influenced shifts in theological scholarship. For instance, the historiographical model of the Tübingen School (1830s–1850s), which saw the first two centuries guided by a conflict between Jewish Christianity and Pauline Christianity, was overtaken in the 1860s by Albrecht Ritschl's model, which saw Christianity achieved through a process of emergence in which a religious purification during the first two centuries rid the Jewish from the Christian. Jewishness, neither wholly carnal nor spiritual, remained an undefined, vague threat that could purge either body or soul and enter the one through the other. It could pollute the body of Christendom with Jewish converts or through a corruption of the mind with Jewish theological formulations.¹⁸

Purity of the self could be achieved through a christianization of the self, a removal of the Jewish, just as purification from the Jewish marked the creation of the Christian. Thus the emergence in the early decades of the twentieth century of a racialized Protestant theology should be viewed not only as a response to political developments in Germany but also as a recognition of the aporia of Jesus the Jew as the first Christian.

The problem of Jesus' Jewishness was notlimited to esoteric theological debates but was reinforced by nineteenth-century debates over Jewish emancipation. Added pressure came from the identification of Germans with Christ. Theodore Ziolkowski has argued that Goethe's Werther was a Christ figure and notes Goethe's own distinction between the Jesus of history and the dogma of Christianity.¹⁹

German political disloyalty could be represented through the historicization of Jesus as well. When Karl Gutzkow was put on trial for treason in 1835 for his notorious novel about religious doubt, Wally die Zweiflerin, among the damning passages read aloud at the court trial in Mainz was a long description of Jesus as a Jew.²⁰ The German nation could not be represented through a Jewish Jesus, who was also mortal, but only through a historically transcendent, unique Christ. The representation by German nationalists of Germany in terms of the Christ story grew stronger in the twentieth century. Some divorced Christ from the Jesus of the Bible and made him instead an “eternal idea” not limited by biblical history, just as they presented the German nation as a transcendent idea unbounded by political conventions. Germany was identified in the Nazi era as Christ: crucified during World War I and resurrected by Adolf Hitler. Theologians and church leaders described Hitler in messianic terms as the second coming: “In the Person of the Führer we see the One sent by God, who places Germany before the Lord of history … we believe he is come for us as Christ.”²¹

Christian anxieties over the presence of Judaism at the very heart of its religion and the implications of that presence for an utter dissolution of Christianity's existence as the religion of Jesus, were goaded by Jewish historians, who appeared eager to dismantle Christian hegemony over European culture and to emancipate themselves from the position of the politically and culturally colonized. The process of gaining emancipation was not simply a matter of attaining political rights for Jews but also an emancipation of the Jewish presence within the Christian. That emancipation functioned in Jewish theological literature as a kind of revolt of the colonized and marks the first generation in mid-nineteenth-century Germany of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Jewish Studies), which continued to some degree in subsequent generations of historians well into the Weimar era.²²

It also explains the politics behind the excessive focus of attention on Jesus by modern Jewish historians, whoinclude the following: Isaac Jost, Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, Levi Herzfeld, Joseph Derenbourg, Daniel Chwolsohn, Leo Baeck, Joseph Eschelbacher, Felix Perles, among others. In language typical of Jewish scholars, the Jewish historian Leopold Dukes wrote, “To the question, ‘What did Christianity take from Judaism,’ we answer in one word: everything.”²³ Christian historians, by contrast, would typically argue, in the words of Augustus Neander, “In the outset, how unlike Christ was the legal spirit of Pharisaism, with its soul-crushing statutes, its dead theology of the letter, and its barren subtleties!”²⁴

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, Jews also politicized the figure of Jesus and claimed him as a Jew as a means to justify their own emancipation in German society. In the 1860s, Abraham Geiger, one of the founders of the field of Wissenschaft des Judentums as well as of Reform Judaism, wrote a passage that became notorious among Protestant theologians: “He [Jesus] was a Jew, a Pharisaic Jew with Galilean coloring—a man who shared the hopes of his time and who believed that these hopes were fulfilled in him. He did not utter a new thought, nor did he break down the barriers of nationality…. He did not abolish any part of Judaism; he was a Pharisee who walked in the way of Hillel.”²⁵

Liberal Pharisaism, Geiger argued, had deteriorated into rigid rabbinic legalism as a consequence of Christian anti-Jewish persecution but was being revived by Reform Jews. Christians wishing to follow the faith of Jesus, Geiger implied, ought to convert to liberal Pharisaism—namely, Reform Judaism.

Christian reactions were swift and outraged. Franz Delitzsch wrote that Geiger had elevated Hillel “in order to rank Jesus below him…. Hillel, however, left everything as he found it…. All history, on the other hand, proclaims what Jesus has become.”²⁶

Geiger's comparison of Jesus with the Pharisees would endanger the position of Jews in Germany, Delitzsch warned. “Your words,” Delitzsch warned Geiger, “sound to me ten times more horrific than the crucifixion.”²⁷ Delitzsch's reply to Geiger remained vivid in the German Protestant imagination, and in the early twentieth century, Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, professor of New Testament at the University of Strassbourg, described Geiger as an example of “Jewish arrogance.”²⁸

Christianity, at its heart a conversionary religion, bases itself on the particular conversion of one Jewish man to Christianity and of Judaism into Christianity. Ernest Renan presented Jesus as gradually emerging from Judaism to become an Aryan and was most responsible for introducing race into New Testament studies. In his 1863 monograph Life of Jesus, which sets the framework for the construction of the Aryan Jesus, Renan presents a geographical racism, which Halvor Moxnes identifies as follows: Galilee is the unJewish site of Jesus' preaching and is spiritually attuned to his message, whereas Jerusalem is the Jewish site of his death.²⁹

The question was whether Jesus was transformed from Jew to Christian, as Renan argued, or was simply born an Aryan, so that Christianity is an essentially Aryan religion, as the Nazi-era racial theologians argued. For Renan, the accomplishment of Jesus was to overcome his Jewishness: after visiting Jerusalem, Jesus “appears no more as a Jewish reformer, but as a destroyer of Judaism…. Jesus was no longer a Jew.”³⁰

Christianity, for Renan, begins with Jesus' destruction of Judaism: “Originally Jewish to the core, Christianity over time rid itself of nearly everything it took from the race, so that those who consider Christianity to be the Aryan religion par excellence are in many respects correct.”³¹ For Renan, one was not necessarily born an Aryan but became an Aryan through conquest of the Jewish by following the example of Jesus. Race, despite assumptions to the contrary, was not inevitably fixed but mutable. As Ann Stoler has noted, “the force of racial discourse is precisely in the double-vision it allows, in the fact that it combines notions of fixity and fluidity in ways that are basic to its dynamic.”³² The instability of race, not its immutability, lies at the heart of its invention. Thus, whatever similarities could be demonstrated between Judaism and the written gospels were either accidental or were encrustations upon Christianity that could be purged. Renan thereby transformed the discomfort over Jesus' Jewishness into a further indication of the Aryan genius, which knew how to transform an odious Hebrew monotheism into a glorious Christianity.³³ The cleverness of Renan's argument was that it made room for viewing monotheism as a divine gift and Christianity as the successful human activity of transforming it. In his interpretation elements of the supernatural, racial, and historical could go hand in hand.

Heinrich von Treitschke, in an essay that launched the anti-Semitic outbreak of the late 1870s, wrote that the writings of Jewish historians constituted “a dangerous spirit of arrogance” and “a fanatical fury” against the Christianity that constituted the backbone of German nationhood.³⁴

Their claim of Jesus' lack of theological originality and his immersion in the cultural and religious world of Judaism, which had been uncovered in the quest for the historical Jesus, stimulated a Christian backlash in the form of an effort to repudiate and eradicate all traces of Judaism from Christianity. This was not undertaken as a liberation of the colonized Judaism, however, but as a purging of the Jewish from within Christian theological teachings.

In the context of rescuing Jesus' difference from Judaism, Protestants turned to racial theory in the hope that even if Jesus' teachings were the same as those of his fellow rabbis, in his person or his race, he was unique. By time of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's notorious 1899 monograph, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Galilee and Jesus became for Protestants not only Gentile but Aryan.³⁵

By the years of World War I, theological debates were underway about whether Christianity, a Jewish religion imposed on Germany, had any place in German society, whether Jesus was an Aryan, and whether the Old Testament should be eliminated from the Christian Bible. In opposition to those who advocated a revival of Teutonic myths and rituals, Protestants offered a dejudaized version of Christianity.

Marcia Klotz describes Germany in fear of reverse colonization and relates these anxieties to Nazism's mass appeal.³⁶

Hitler did not simply portray Jews as Untermenschen but also as colonizers who had entered Germany to judaize it and were now pitting European nations against one another in a deliberate strategy to undermine European strength. Through a cultural miscegenation brought about by a supposed Jewish colonization of Germany, Germany was degenerating. Such anxieties, anticipated by Christian theologians, spurred an effort to dejudaize the religion, not in order to end Christianity's occupation of Judaism but rather to end what they considered Judaism's occupation of Christianity—an inversion of traditional supersessionism. By eradicating the Judaism within Christianity—which meant eliminating the Old Testament from the canon, purging the New Testament of all Jewish references, and declaring Jesus to have been an Aryan—they believed that they were purifying Christianity and making it acceptable on nationalist and Nazi terms. The genocide of the Jews represented a Christian expurgation and a cleansing; the colonizers' longing for virgin theological territory represented a metaphorical “theological bulimia.”³⁷ In colonialist terms it meant eliminating the savage for the sake of civilization and making room for civilization to spread itself. It was not an effort at acquiring new colonial territory (such as securing converts to Christianity through missionary effort) but an expulsion and extermination based on an axis of theological morality versus degeneracy, which appeared parallel to the colonial civilized versus savage axis.

What was declared theologically was intended politically and socially as well. These church figures did not simply respond to anti-Semitic measures decreed by the Nazi government; they proposed them. In 1932, for example, the pro-Nazi German Christian movement called for a ban on marriages between Germans and Jews and anticipated by three years the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that outlawed such relationships.³⁸

In another example of theological anticipation of Nazi measures against the Jews, the concept of eradication became theologically concretized long before plans for the Final Solution as genocide were developed. At a small meeting of theologiansin February, 1936, the pastor Julius Leffler, one of the founders of the German Christian movement, called for murdering Jews in the name of Christ.

Most remarkably, none of the theologians present at the meeting, including the ethicist Paul Althaus, professor of theology at the University of Erlangen, protested Leffler's statements. The dejudaization of Christianity was institutionalized three years later, in 1939, anticipating by over two years Hitler's formal plans for annihilating all Jews, finalized in October 1941. On 6 May 1939, several hundred Protestant theologians—professors, bishops, pastors, all sympathetic to the German Christians (Deutsche Christen)—gathered at the Wartburg castle, with its strong Lutheran and German nationalist heritage, to inaugurate the Institute for Research and Eradication of Jewish Influence in German Church Life (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben).⁴⁰

Proposals to create a dejudaization institute had circulated in 1938 by leaders of the German Christian movement, and its establishment six months after the Kristallnacht pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, was an expression of approval of that pogrom and an effort to carry out its goals within the church as well in order to produce a Judenrein Christianity. Even as Institute leaders sought to justify the Kristallnacht pogrom by reference to Christian theology, Nazi propagandists broadcast The Merchant of Venice on German radio to bolster support for their actions against the Jews.

To achieve a thorough dejudaization (Entjudung) of Christianity, Institute members published a dejudaized hymnal and New Testament, a catechism proclaiming Jesus the messiah of Aryans, and a slew of theological materials detailing the violent degeneracy of Judaism. “We know that the Jews want the destruction of Germany,”⁴¹

proclaimed Walter Grundmann in 1938, professor of New Testament at the University of Jena and academic director of the Institute. Like other anti-Semites Grundmann explained his assault on Judaism as self-defense: “To this day the Jews persecute Jesus and all who follow him with irreconcilable hatred.”⁴²

The Institute's dejudaized New Testament, Die Botschaft Gottes, expunged gospel passages describing Jesus' genealogical descent from Old Testament figures(the Old Testament, in turn, had already been eliminated from the Bible). In militarized, Nazified language, Die Botschaft Gottes retold Jesus' life with an emphasis on his triumph rather than defeat through death. References to Jewish names or places, as well as citations from the Old Testament were retained only aslong as they expressed a negative view of some aspect of Judaism. If not, they were eliminated. Deleted, too, was any fulfillment in Jesus of an Old Testament prophecy, although the fact that Jesus knew of Jewish ways was preserved. For example, when Jesus taught in the Temple and asked the people why the scribes believed that the messiah had to be the son of David, the text continued, “The Volk listened to him gladly, as he hit the Scribes with their own weapons.”⁴³

The Institute published its hymnal in 1941 under the title Grosser Gott Wir Loben Dich! The book contained 339 hymns, all of which were purged of references to the Old Testament or Judaism and presented a militarized tone in several hymns. Hymns authored by non-Aryan Christians were eliminated.⁴⁴ Words such as Halleluja, Zion, Jerusalem, Psalm, Jehova, Jahwe, and Immanuel were removed, as were evocations of Old Testament terms such as “psalters and harps.”⁴⁵ Included were household prayers and hymns used in life cycle events that gave direct support to the Nazi regime. For example, a baptismal hymn composed for Grosser Gott was “Tender child of German blood.” Christ's blood and his resurrection were de-emphasized, as in the baptismal formula, “We baptize you that you may be consecrated and brave in life, faithfully committed to the Volk [German people] in a new time in truth.”⁴⁶

The dejudaization of Christianity was not simply a theological project but had intended social consequences that were made explicit. In 1942, the year during which most European Jews were murdered, Grundmann wrote,

Ridding the Jewish elements from the Christian religion proved not a simple task. Indeed, in the obsessive effort to dejudaize Christianity, members of the Institute—mostly professors of theology and pastors—found themselves immersed in the study of Judaism and trying to determineits nature and influence on Christianity. Nearly every declaration of Christian theology—messianism, election, kingdom of God, redemption—and in every citation of the Old Testament, Judaism was being affirmed. Indeed, Institute members were well aware that while they could declare Jesus to have been an Aryan, Paul, the apostles, and the authors of the gospels remained Jews. Trying to dejudaize Christianity ultimately became a kind of theological bulimia in the sense of a constant, repetitive devouring of the Jewish elements and regurgitation of them in the hopeless effort to purge Christianity of all Jewish traces. In the case of Christianity, however, the child (Christianity) devours and vomits the parent (Judaism) in order to purge itself of the Jewish mother, whose presence can never be fully eradicated from Christian theology. The bulimia metaphor captures the deeper conflict within Christian theology, which derives religious identity from the mother and yet needs to differentiate from the mother in order to achieve a separate, independent identity.⁴⁸

The Jew as the haunt of the European Christian imagination has become a common theme in contemporary theory. Jean Francois Lyotard, for example, distinguishes between Jews and “jews,” the latter referring to the imagined figure that is often evasive, fluctuating, and enigmatic.⁴⁹ For Slavoj Zizek, Jews are a “symptom” of society, representing a fantasized barrier to an ultimate apotheosis.⁵⁰ As such, the Jew is a hermeneutical device central to Christian theology, which also insists that Jews possess a unique, carnal hermeneutics considered different and inferior to the spiritual hermeneutics of Christians. In the figures of Jesus and Shylock, two specters are evoked: the one symbolizes Christianity's traditional hope of what a Jew might become—meaning Jesus, or a Christian—and the other symbolizes what happens when the Jew remains a Jew as symbolized in the bitter and usurious Shylock. The horror underlying The Merchant of Venice is the church's failure to have converted the Jews, but that horror is also fed by a belief that conversion will not eradicate what is repellent about Jews and will open Christian society to them. Race remains ineradicable even in the presence of the baptismal sacrament.

Yet Christianity, too, created its own ineradicable theological trap: the religion of mercy and forgiveness came into being through a sin that Christian culture considered unforgivable, the Jews' act of deicide. No repentance is possible, since the Jews cannot acknowledge the act of deicide without acknowledging Jesus as Christ, itself an act of conversion, not atonement. To explain the Jews' sinfulness, Christians have to define them as degenerate by nature. However, their degeneracy means they have acted not in sin but in accordance with their nature—hardly satisfying to a Christian theology of sinful deed. It is a terrible dilemma, almost comic, had not the historic punishments of the Jews for that sin been so harsh. On the other hand, what sort of mercy does the Christian court offer Shylock? As punishment for his refusal to convert his alleged vengeance into forgiveness, his property is confiscated and he is offered the alternative of death or conversion, itself the death of his identity and spirit. Conversion comes to him as the climax of a scene of protracted, verbal sadism on the part of Portia, who clearly knows the trap she is setting as she presents her prosecution, always addressing him as “Jew,” not “Shylock.” Even when he finally agrees to accept the money instead of Antonio's flesh, Portia continues:

For the court of Venice getting rid of Shylock(metaphorically excising Judaism) was not so simple. Converting and accepting him into Christian society would violate the long-standing Christian wish to eradicate the Jewish influence from within. The dilemma points to the desire that can never come to fruition without destroying the foundations of Christianity's legitimacy as fulfilling the divine promises of the Old Testament. While the courtroom scene on one level concerns the Venetians' dislike of Jews, on another level, it is also an intra theological Christian conundrum. Shylock, after all, is reenacting the Christian story of Jesus' sacrifice of his flesh as an act of atonement for the world.

Interpretations of the play are manifold, even as its own configurations of the Jew-Christian relationship are diverse and complex. Jacques Derrida proclaimed that the play “perhaps recapitulates the entire history of forgiveness, the entire history between the Jew and the Christian” in the court's declaration, “Then must the Jew be merciful.”⁵¹

Derrida claims that Shylock “represents every Jew, the Jew in general in his differend with his Christian counterpart.”⁵² Yet the logic of the play's plot does not simply recapitulate the Christian defamation of Judaism, but calls our attention to the hypocrisy of Christian declamations through its literal and theologically figural transvestism. Shakespeare's magnificent rendition of a courtroom scene pits Portia, disguised as a man and speaking the logic of the male world of Talmudic casuistry disguised as Christian mercy, against Shylock, whose Jewishness she feigns at first not to recognize. “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?” she asks in entering the courtroom (4.1.171). She conceals not only her gender but her motives: she has come not to defend but to defeat Antonio (and Venice) along with Shylock to become the real merchant of the play and to gain control of the wealth and its dispersion. While pretending to demand Shylock's forgiveness of the debt, Portia “is already attempting to convert him to Christianity,” as Derrida points out.⁵³ Shylock, the male Jew who is about to be emasculated by the court, ostensibly symbolizes the old law, Judaism, while Portia, the female disguised as a male, speaking of mercy and enacting harsh punishment, represents the young dispensation, Christianity. The benevolence that Portia invokes—“The quality of mercy is not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven” (4.1.181–182)—is juxtaposed to Shylock's insistence on the legality of his bond, and yet ironically Portia's hairsplitting legalism, not mercy, triumphs over Shylock and defeats him, at least according to the plot of the play, which abandons Shylock with the end of act 4. Indeed, Christian Portia's insistence on vengeance brings about the Jew Shylock's ruin for the sake of protecting Christian blood. The female Christian “out-legalizes” the male Jew in the rabbinic pilpul that he has developed and decircumcizes him in forcing his baptism. Her words evoke those of Jesus and the New Dispensation and yet rest on the literal-mindedness that Christians claim characterizes Jewish hermeneutics:

Shakespeare is not being theologically didactic but uses irony to call the categories of Christian theology into question. Portia, the advocate of mercy, is the figure who becomes the clever, legalistic Jew—but only transvestially dressed as a man. Jesus, too, by analogy can only become the one who dispenses with the law if his teachings are read through a Christian lens; the Jewish reading of his teachings places him squarely within Pharisaic hermeneutical tradition. Shylock's Jewishness is signified in the play not through his faith or practice, but as constructed by a Christian theological narrative that is dedicated to its eradication—and he knows it well: “You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,” he says to Antonio (1.3.102–3). In the Christian mirror, Shylock recognizes, the Jew is not an unbeliever but far worse, a misbeliever, a misreader of the Scriptures that prefigure Christ, and a dog who, in Christian exegesis, is the figure of the Jew, who is not to receive “that which is holy” (Matthew 7:6).⁵⁴

The denigration results not in Shylock's self-contempt but in his contempt for the Christian Antonio, who knows to spit on a Jew but not how to receive the kiss of divine revelation and to suckle the breast of Torah, as do Jews. “I hate him for he is a Christian,” (1.3.32) Shylock says and thus fulfills the old Christian assumption of Jewish hatred, a helpful justification for Christian persecution of Jews, exploited by Grundmann and his theological colleagues in declaring that Germany was fighting a defensive war against the Jews. The presence of Jews within the Christian realm of Venice evokes an anxiety with a long heritage in Christian self-consciousness. Will the Jews be converted to Christianity, or willthe Christian become judaized? Launcelot expresses that fear when he tells his blind father, “I am a Jew if I serve the Jew any longer” (2.2.106–7). If converted, will Jews become authentic Christians, and if judaized, will Christians lose their morals and their families? Antonio comments sarcastically, “The Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind,” (1.3.175). The implication becomes clear: however kind Shylock may appear, he can never be a real Christian. The gnosis of the play is that its Christians are hardly kind.

The threat of Shylock to the Venetians is eliminated by Portia, who enters the old, male, Jewish order of law and courtroom to transform Shylock, putatively, into a Christian and to make him the generous father of the newly baptized Jessica, whom he had renounced as his heir. Portia forces Shylock to become the father of the emergent Christian and to turn over his heritage to his daughter, who has become what Jews should be, a Christian. The punitive conversion of Shylock demanded at the end of act 4 is an eradication of his very existence, which takes away his livelihood, his home, his property, and his ability to earn an income. His disappearance from the play undergirds the anxiety: Can the Jew in fact become a Christian? Shylock's emasculation and dejudaization occurs in collusion between Portia, who takes his money, and Jessica, who steals his lineage: “two stones, two rich and precious stones, Stol'n by my daughter” cries Shylock, according to Solanio, in bemoaning his lost progeny (2.8.20–21). Jessica, in turn, has been the erotic Jewess, who takes the family jewels when she leaves her father's home and then discovers that she is isolated and unwanted as Lorenzo's new bride in act 5.

The impossibility of converting a Jew into a Christian not only throws open the question of Jesus' own identity but also of key doctrines of the church. Within the play, a central question is transubstantiation: If Protestants have rejected the literal transubstantiation of wine and wafer into blood and flesh, can the Jew truly be transformed into a Christian? Is it possible for Christianity to emerge from Judaism? The play raises the question of what constitutes the authentic patrimony or bloodline of Christianity. Can Shylock or Jessica become a true Christian? What of the Jewish blood that she will bring to the offspring of Lorenzo? Christianity itself begins its conversion from Judaism with the shedding of Jewish blood, the blood of Jesus, which indicates a conversion through crucifixion and the destruction of the Jewish body to become the spiritual Christian. When Shylock is said to want to carve a pound of flesh from Antonio, it is from his breast. The play enacts the Christian projective fantasy of the Jew stabbing Christ in the heart rather than sucking from his breast and wanting his blood rather than his milk.⁵⁵

As the Old Testament takes its place as the basis for Christian identification of Jesus the Jew as the promised messiah, and as moneylending becomes the basis for capitalism, so Shylock lives as a usurer within Venice. The play conflates money, blood, and faith, as Shylock's conversionis not the transubstantiation of his Judaism into Christian faith, but the liquidation of his business and its transfer to Portia's Christian realm, the island of Belmont, along with his daughter, Jessica, and his bloodline. Portia, who acquires and showers wealth where she pleases, demonstrates that “money … is the true spirit of capitalism made flesh, the incarnation and liquefaction of flesh and blood,” as Gil Adnijar has written.⁵⁶

Faith is translated into money, not for the Jew Shylock but for the Christian Portia.

The conversion of Shylock and Jessica does not resolve the unease but points to the unresolved question: Is Jesus a Jew or a Christian? What marks his Christianness or does he, too, undergo the kind of conversion, a moment that marks his transubstantiation from Jew to Christian, that Renan describes? Yet would post-Reformation doctrine make Jesus' own conversion merely figural, as a “Jew who is but an allegory of the Christian”?⁵⁷

Not surprisingly, Shylock's demand of Antonio's Christian flesh arouses considerable anxiety: Will Shylock circumcise the breast or the foreskin as the two places on the body that signify the Christian and the Jew respectively? In some productions of the play, including Michael Radford's 2004 film, Shylock, played by Al Pacino, murmurs a Hebrew prayer as he takes up his knife, as if he were a mohel (ritual circumciser) about to circumcise Antonio and forcibly to judaize him by converting him into the covenant. Similarly, Anthony Sher's 1987 Shylock on the London stage, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, donned a talit to cut his pound of flesh in order to make certain that the audience understood that the Jew, whether engaging in circumcision or ritual murder, was performing a religious act.

In Shakespeare's time, as Lynda Boose has pointed out, nation and race were used interchangeably, but the latter was used to characterize not necessarily someone of “foreign” appearance but someone of a different nationality and religion.⁵⁸

The Marranos accomplished a shift in Christian identity from an acquisition through baptism to an acquisition through a performance dependent on proper hermeneutics, as Lampert writes.⁵⁹ To be a Christian meant the ability to interpret as a Christian, and the play emphasizes that only those of proper nationality and race possess such a talent; the Catholic Spaniard and Muslim Moroccan are unable to interpret the three caskets properly and thus lose the chance not only to win Portia but to marry at all. Christianness requires both nationality and race, which together create the peculiar combination of physical beauty and moral acuity demonstrated by Bassanio's correct interpretation of the caskets. Race is marked not only by distinctive physical appearance but by a concern with incarnation, which means seeing within the external physical to perceive the internal spiritual. If, as Carolyn Dinshaw has argued, proper Christian exegesis is linked to erotic desire,⁶⁰ then racialist thinking, too, acquires its appeal through its erotic wish to read the body and find the moral and spiritual potencies incarnate within it. Bassanio, like all the suitors, must divine the true, inner meanings of the caskets to win Portia, and Portia must see through the letter of the law and find its implied meaning in order to thwart Shylock; such talents are not given to the Spanish (Catholic) or Moroccan (Muslim) suitors nor to Shylock himself.

The figure of Jessica, as daughter and inheritor of the Jewish father, enacts the prophesied biblical supersession by Christianity of Judaism by attempting to escape an identity as Shylock's flesh and blood and spiritualizing herself as Lorenzo's idealized erotic desire, an effort that fails miserably; her marriage spells disaster for her father and also brings grave threat to Lorenzo. As an alluring, exotic beauty and a seduced seductress, her disconnection between outer appearance and inner essence threatens a nationality based on appearance and a theology based on faith. Jessica knows that her conversion to Christianity is motivated by eroticism, not faith, and this motivation reinforces the classic Christian aporia of Jewish conversion: with the Christian claim that no faith is possible in the heart of the Jew, the Jew's conversion would have to be unfaithful and simply a ticket of admission into European society, as Heinrich Heine once put it. The aporia mirrors the anxiety of Christian theological unfaithfulness toward its own Jewish patrimony, as expressed in a fecund statement by Gustav Volkmar, a prominent member of the Tübingen School, who writes, “The Judaism that formed the religious background to Jesus and Christianity was not the Pharisaic Judaism dominant during the Second Temple era, but “the ‘virgin womb of the God of Judaism.”⁶¹

Christianity, in other words, was derived from Judaism and superseded it, but Judaism was not the offspring of God, who remained a virgin until giving birth to his first child, Christianity. Christianity has no older sibling but is the first-born son of the virgin, Christ himself. Yet even in denying that Judaism is a divinely revealed religion, Volkmar is unable to remove it from Christian genealogy. Possessing a kind of family knowledge of Christianity's Old Testament ancestry, Judaism's archive forms the basis upon which Christian claims to fulfillment of divine promise rest. As archive, Judaism cannot be distanced or excised from Christian theology, but exists as the sign of covenant that must be at once upheld as genuine and yet repudiated as superseded. It is the archive as circumcision, in Derrida's term,⁶² Judaism leaving its indelible presence in the flesh of Christian theology.

Jessica's seduction by Lorenzo represents a motif typical of colonialist fantasy; the seduction of the alien female joins the play's concerns with the alien Jew living in Christian Venice and the dangers of miscegenation. The Jewess, as a figure who stands literarily between Jew and Christian precisely because of her femaleness, represents a more specific problem to the Christian seducer. As Miri Rubin argues, the host desecration accusations require a male Jewish perpetrator because only male Jews, unlike women, could be seen as fully moral agents; females are pliant and lack reason and moral faculties.⁶³

The conversion of a Jewish woman thus carries a different resonance reinforced by the rabbinic anxiety that a man's maleness is fragile and easily lost if, for example, he walks between two women, and a woman's Jewishness is similarly fragile and easily robbed by a seductive Gentile. Similarly, while Shakespeare's Othello can imagine the marriage of a black man and a white woman, Othello and Desdemona, virility and beauty, The Merchant of Venice can imagine only a Christian man and Jewish woman; the gender politics of race are inverted with Jewishness. A Jewess may be easily divested of her Jewishness by marriage to a Christian man, whereas the marriage of a Jew to a Christian woman renders him emasculated without losing his racial markers. Jessica's flight from her father's home is invariably interpreted as further evidence of Shylock's degeneracy;Jessica herselfis traditionally held blameless in mostinterpretations and productions of the play, as a victim who flees her abusive father. Audience identification with her is taken as least problematic, given the unpleasant characters surrounding her in the play. By contrast, Jewish productions of the play signal Jessica as the villain. Her elopement is key to her father's misery and transformation into an angry, vengeful figure; in some Yiddish revisions of the play, Jessica realizes her wickedness and commits suicide. She thus gestures to Jewish audiences that she did not abandon her Judaism for another religion but rather abandoned her father for the sake of her eroticism; internally and spiritually, she remains a faithful Jew.⁶⁴

The Yiddish versions of the play use Jessica as a warning against the seductions of the Gentile world. If Shylock was forced to become a Christian against his will, much as Jesus was “converted” after his death from loyal Jew into the image of the perfect Christian, Jessica stands for Paul, who, despite his training as a Pharisee, was seduced by pagan ideas and abandoned his Jewish commitments, atleast according to the later Jewish imagination. Yet Paul's biography left some Christians anxious. Was Paul's seduction by Greco-Roman Hellenism sufficiently thorough to purge any remaining traces of his Pharisaic theology, or did he import his Pharisaism into the very bases of the Christian doctrine he established? For Protestants, Roman Catholicism was legalistic and carnal, much like Judaism—perhaps too much so. In the summer of 1944, Hugo Pich, a German Lutheran pastor who was one of the founders of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, wrote to Bishop Walther Schultz of Mecklenburg, urging a further dejudaization of the New Testament to rid it of Paul's epistles. Schultz replied, “How can you suggest that we have been duped for 2000 years by some stinking Jew?”⁶⁵

Even Paul, the foundational theologian of Christianity, had fallen under suspicion as a judaizer, and Pich was his disgusted Lorenzo.

Act 5, which has troubled Shakespeare scholars for a long time and at times has been eliminated from productions of the play, acts as a climax in capturing the discomfiture of Jewish presence within the Christian realm. The scene at Belmont forces us to face the play's failure to fulfill what Lynda Boose calls the “comedic contract” of a Shakespearean play;⁶⁶

The Merchant of Venice is, after all, called not a tragedy but a comedy. In act 5, Lorenzo is no longer interested in Jessica after acquiring her in marriage, and rather than being a mark of his triumphal conquest, her presence cannot be integrated into the Belmont celebrations but is disruptive and even threatening. Conversion does not overcome Jewishness because the Jewess cannot lose her race; she is going to bring Jewish blood to Lorenzo's Christian progeny through the offspring that she will produce and will thus judaize his Christian bloodlines.