Was Shakespeare Jewish? At least one of the participants in a Ra'anana reading group that met last week to discuss the Bard's attitude to the Jews thinks there's a good chance he was. Niel Hirschson believes that Shakespeare was Jewish, while the coordinator for the mini-series, Dr. Pamela Peled, is more skeptical.

"Although there seems to be plenty of circumstantial evidence that Shakespeare had a Jewish mistress, Emilia del Bassano, who was also known as Emilia Lanier, I think it's stretching credibility a little to hope that he was Jewish himself," she says.

'I am a Jew'

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Peled, a lecturer in Shakespearean studies, sees an eerie connection between the Elizabethan poet, who died in 1616, and recent world events. She says she found this connection in Daniel Pearl's reported last words ("I am a Jew"), uttered seconds before he was killed by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan five years ago.

"It resonated in my mind from Shylock's speech in 'The Merchant of Venice,'" Peled said, in which the Jewish moneylender rails against the non-Jewish world. About Antonio, a merchant, he says, "He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million... and what's his reason? I am a Jew."

Peled has taught the relevance of these lines for years, but they have never seemed more appropriate, she says, in the face of "the terrible times we are going through, and the awful resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world."

Despite Shakespeare's unflattering portrayal of Shylock, Peled thinks the English poet was not anti-Semitic. "In Shakespeare's days, ten generations of Englishmen had never seen or talked to a Jew since the Edict of York kicked them out 300 years earlier. But that didn't stop them from thinking Jews were evil."

Shakespeare was a man of the theater who gave his audience what they expected - disgusting Jews who get their comeuppance, Peled argues. But "The Merchant of Venice" also contains hidden ideas.

For example, Peled notes that Antonio remains scornful of Shylock from start to finish, giving Shylock reason for his anger and for his stubborn demand to receive a "pound of flesh" from Antonio as payment for a debt.

The Marrano option

"This is the first time in Elizabethan literature that the Jew is given a voice - a voice which clearly states that even if Jews are bad, Christians are equally so. In fact, a voice that says all people are the same, Jews and Christians alike," Peled says.

Hirschon has a different perspective. "People have to realize that only by reading Shakespeare's work as a text written by a Jew is one suddenly capable of fully understanding this master innovator and linguist," Hirschon says.

"We know very little of Shakespeare's lineage, which only goes back to his grandparents, Hirschon said. "For all we know, he may well have been descended from Marrano Jews who had been forced, in accordance with English law, to convert to Christianity."

Hirschon, a self-taught Shakespeare enthusiast who immigrated from South Africa, admits that he has little evidence to support his theory but says that once readers take a leap of faith they can expect a totally new perspective on Shakespeare's body of work.

"People are very hesitant about exploring the option that Shakespeare was Jewish, so you find very few publications about the subject, and even then they are underground," Hirschon says. "I don't know what they're so worried about. Hollywood is all Jewish and nobody has a problem with that."

And it is Peled who recalls an incident that gives weight to that hesitance. "I once made the mistake, while lecturing to a group of British women abroad, of jokingly saying that in Israel we are trying to prove Shakespeare was Jewish. They were not amused," Peled said.

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