XI. “THE VERY DEVIL INCARNATION.”

“Enter Launcelot Gobbo!” So begins Scene ii. of Act II. in the Merchant of Venice. Or as the original stage-direction ran, “Enter the Clown!” His very name suggests the glutton and knave, yet it seems to be from him some Shakspearian guides derive their chief light on the great poet’s picture of Shylock!

Gobbo does indeed cast light upon the Jew, but it comes from the mob which he represented. To say “my master is a very Jew,” and “the Jew ... is the devil himself,” are equivalent phrases in the capacious mouth of Gobbo. He speaks for his gaping herd, and their breed is not unknown. Judenhetze is able to turn out such men in the latter days of the nineteenth century.

Bochart, in his Hierozoicon (seventeenth century), says there was a Sea-monster called “The Old Jew;” with the white-bearded face of a man he had the hairy body of an ox, otherwise calf-shaped. This monster always appeared the night before Saturday on the surface of the sea, and one could see him until sunset next day leaping and diving like a frog, and following ships. This monster, no doubt a variety of Al-Sâmeri, elsewhere considered, is a fair type of what every Jew was, for many centuries, in the eyes of the multitudinous Gobbites. What stood for religion in them was the vulgar ribaldry of the Miracle Plays, under which those holy farces presently perished. In them Judas, still the buffeted Wanderer, was the one figure-head of the Jewish race, with the devil for his familiar.

In ancient Persian pictures Ahriman and his host have flame for hair. After the introduction of Christianity the deities of Europe, which it degraded to devils, were described and painted with fiery hair and beard; as it stands in the German saying, “Roter Bart, Teufelsart.” In the early Miracle Plays Judas was made up with red hair and beard to show the fiery abode to which he belonged. This feature survived also in the “yellow bonnet” which the Jews were compelled to wear, which replaced the scarlet or red bonnets which the “Scarlet Woman” found too like her own.⁠[28] The significant costume, and the ideas it expressed, passed to the conventional stage-Jew. Barabas, in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, and after him, Shylock, were represented with the “orange-tawny bonnet,” and fiery red hair and beard.

In keeping with this the crimes popularly ascribed to the Jews, for which they suffered so terribly, were not human crimes. They were utterly without motive—such as no man, however vile, could have committed. For one example out of many, the Jews of Lincoln were charged with having fattened a Christian child of eight years on white bread and milk, then scourged him, crowned him with thorns, crucified him, giving him gall. For that impossible crime 112 eminent Jews were tortured and slain. It was rumoured that the earth would not receive the body of that child, yet for years Christian pilgrims visited its grave.

Such wild, popular notions were faithfully reflected in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. “Barabas,” says Charles Lamb, “is a mere monster, brought in with a large painted nose, to please the rabble. He kills in sport—poisons whole nunneries—invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as, a century or two earlier, might have been played before the Londoners, by the Royal command, when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews had been previously resolved on in the cabinet.”

It will be now apparent to those who have followed the travels of this Jew-myth that it had carried about in its endless wanderings the belief in which it originated, and of whose development it was a type—the infranatural, finally the infernal, nature of the Jewish race. It inevitably blended with all the superstitions about uncanny phantoms, bringing the most evil and ominous shapes haunting the popular imagination in every locality into connection with the detested race. Demons from the air, goblins from their caves, birds of ill-omen, fearful gales, betokening the proximity of the Wandering Phantom, brought an ever-accumulating mass of fear, suspicion and hatred upon the race of which its supposed doom was a too faithful emblem. This vast cesspool of vulgar superstition mirrored the dogmas of a theology ever developing downward. It was not permitted the masses to look upon the alleged offences of Judas or Ahasuerus in comparison with offences familiar to them. As we have seen, the offence thought of was the wrong and insult done to a God; it was an intensification of the same feeling that regarded theft from a church as worse than theft from the poorest widow, or a slight untruth under oath as more wicked than the most malicious lie not sworn to. Out of such a principle of unreason naturally came the doom of a race through many centuries to realise every ingenuity of torture fabled in the Greek Hades, with Gehenna added. Every revolving century was their Ixion-wheel, and every stream their Phlegethon.