‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ (The Merchant of Venice) is one of Shylock’s most important and memorable speeches in the play (Act 3 Scene 1). The play revolves in part around the debt Antonio (the actual merchant of Venice) owes to Shylock; since Antonio has failed to pay up, Shylock argues that, in accordance with their agreement, he is entitled to a pound of the merchant’s flesh. It’s not just that Antonio has cost Shylock a considerable sum of money (half a million ducats) in failing to repay his monetary debt. He’s insulted him, too. He’s laughed at the losses Shylock has incurred, made fun of how much he’s otherwise earned, sneered at Shylock for belonging to the Jewish race, thwarted his business deals, turned his friends against him, and angered his enemies. And why has Antonio done all of this? Because he, Shylock, is a Jew.
This is a famous moment in the play, not least because Shakespeare turns the focus away from Shylock the moneylender (who, elsewhere in the play, is marked by his financial greed) and onto Shylock the oppressed but dignified ethnic minority in Christian-dominated Venice. He has suffered on account of his Jewishness. At the time, the moneylending and the anti-Semitism were often linked: because it was forbidden for Christians to lend money, but not for Jews, Christians like Antonio who had to stoop to borrowing money from Jewish moneylenders came to resent them, for making money out of their financial need.
Shylock’s points out, using rhetorical questions to persuade his listeners, that Jewish people, like everyone else, have eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, the five traditional senses, as well as emotions and passions. Jews eat the same food as their Christian neighbours, are capable of being harmed by the same weapons, are afflicted with the same diseases, healed by the same medicine, and are affected by the weather in the same way that a Christian is. This part of Shylock’s impassioned speech (if we assume that it is impassioned and not just a masterly piece of grandstanding) asserts the common humanity between Jewish and Christian people. There is far more that they share in common than the things which divide them.
But this appeal to the sympathies of his audience soon takes a dark turn again, reminding us that revenge, too, is a common human motive and impulse: if you wrong a Jew, just as if you wrong a Christian, he will seek to avenge the wrong done to him. It’s just the same as if a Jew wrongs a Christian: the Christian would want revenge. hylock concludes his speech by pointing out that, thus, it is the same for a Jewish person when they are wronged by a Christian: they are merely following the example set by Christians. So as a Jew, Shylock will practise the same villainous revenge which Christians have taught him to expect; indeed, the pupil has been taught so well that he will outdo his teachers.
This ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech has divided critics. It is world-famous as an example of an oppressed racial minority appealing to the common humanity shared between him and his oppressors, although sadly the seeking of vengeance cannot be justified. The play has anti-semitic sections, and this is difficult for us to hear, being as we are post-holocaust, but to focus too much on the Jewishness of Shylock is to miss the universal nature of his character. He is an outsider not just because he is a Jew but also because he is a necessary alien (money lending). This makes him a scapegoat for the ills of a society who despises having to rely on his services. This is not unlike the modern loathing for those who come to this country to pick our fruit, wait on tables and clean our houses and yet are despised for their necessity. The recent, ‘I have a dream’ speech by Suella Braverman about flights to Rwanda just shows that this venial mentality lives on.
