2/3/07 - English Literature - Other Worlds: Jews, Turks and Moors

Encountering other worlds
In encountering other worlds, the other can be used as a means of bolstering our sense of ourselves – we shore up our own identity by defining it in opposition to that of the other. In encountering other worlds, and in registering the difference of others, we can become aware that to those others, we too are foreign: we are as strange and as foreign to them as they are to us. Other worlds are viewed as exotic: places of wonder, settings for romance and adventure.

The New World v Other Worlds
In its encounter with the New World, Europe struggled to absorb and assimilate the shock of the new. In different ways, Europe had been living alongside - and exposed to the influence of - Judaism and oriental cultures for centuries. There were thus long-standing traditions of representing Islam and Judaism:

Islam: the crusades
Judaism: profound cultural animosity

• The Old and New Testaments - There was an ambivalent conception of Jews because they were God's chosen people, yet they had been supplanted by Christians. This made it unclear how they were viewed by God and by Christians.
• Usury
• The expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 - They became present again in the 1700s.

Islam, Judaism, and the Renaissance
1452: the Turkish conquest of Constantinople.
1492: conquest of the Islamic kingdom of Granada by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. They expelled Moors into North Africa and forced the confessions of Jews in Spain, which indirectly led to the Spanish Inquisition.
1571: Battle of Lepanto.

In the Renaissance there was a developing academic interest in Judaism and in the Hebrew language. The Regius Chairs of Hebrew were established at Oxford and Cambridge in 1540. Also, Menassah ben Israel (1604-57) submitted a petition for the re-admission of the Jews to England.

Writers of the time demonstrate an interest in Judaism and Islam, and develop their own perceptions:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
[Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, lines 1-10. NEL1, p. 1690]

In this poem, there is a presupposition that the conversion of the Jews will not happen until near the end of time. However, Christian sympathy of Jews should be read sceptically.

Islam and the New World
"Why did the Mediterranean peoples cease to dominate Europe? What led Europeans subsequently to spread all over the globe in post-Renaissance times? The starting point for the European expansion out of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic continental shelf had nothing to do with, say religion or the rise of capitalism – but it had a great deal to do with pepper. In the Middle Ages pepper was essential to flavour otherwise insipid vegetables and to mask the taste of rotten meat and stinking fish . . . By the beginning of the sixteenth century Venice had begun rich and beautiful from the profits of the pepper trade, which was a Venetian monopoly; however, since about 1470 the Turks had been impeding the overland trade routes east from the Mediterranean, and by 1520 they had nearly brought the Venetian spice trade to a halt. As a result the great Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish explorers all sailed west or south to reach the Orient. The Americas were discovered as a by-product of the search for pepper."
[Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985, pp. vii-viii]

It should be remembered that Columbus' original motive for sailing to and conquering the new world was to fund the conquest of Jerusalem, not to prove that the world was round.

The Jew of Malta
There is a reproduction of Jews in Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, which has been seen as a response to The Jew of Malta.

Barabas
As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls;
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
. . .
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enrich’d the priests with burials,
And always kept the sextons arms in ure [use]
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells.
. . .
Then after that was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I fill’d the gaols with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals,
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Planting upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them:
I have as much coin as will buy the town.
[The Jew of Malta, Act 2, Scene 3, lines 176-78, 183-87, 192-202]

The name 'Barabas' comes from the Jewish murderer who was freed by the Jews. He is the stereotypical Renaissance Jew: a miser and murderer. In the above speech, Barabas celebrates his murderous self and makes a virtue of his wickedness. Marlowe seems to be racist, attacking Jews. However, there is a kind of sympathy for Barabas. He is also witty, enchanting and funny. The audience is placed in an ambivalent position. Marlowe responds positively to the sceptical view of Jews, and Barabas as murderer is justified by all the other characters being murderers also. Barabas stands out because he is refreshingly honest about his crimes, while everyone else keeps their own crimes a secret. Marlowe responds to the figure of the outsider, not particularly or simply the figure of Jews. Barabas is endorsed by Machevill and hence by Marlowe.

Machevill
Though some speak openly against my books,
Yet will they read me, and thereby attain
To Peter’s chair; and when they cast me off,
Are poison’d by my climbing followers.
I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
. . .
I come not, I
To read a lecture here in Britanie
But to pewsent the tragedy of a Jew
Who smiles to see how full his bags are cramm’d;
Which money which was not got without my means.
I crave but this: grace him as he deserves,
And let him not be entertain’d the worse
Because he favours me.
[Prologue, 10-15, 28-35]

The Merchant of Venice
In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare seems to use The Jew of Malta as a source book. He doesn't question Marlowe's Jewish stereotype. His Jew, Shylock, is vindictive and bloodthirsty. But again, he is represented as an outsider, not necessarily as a Jew.

Shylock
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gabardine
[Merchant of Venice. Act 1, Scene 3, lines 108-9]

The above quote demonstrates Christian contempt towards Jews. The audience are meant to sympathise with Shylock. Racial 'others' are treated the same in the theatre - Shylock and Caliban both wear gabardines.

Othello
Othello is the subject of racial abuse and stereotyping which his conduct seems both to resist and confirm. The language of racial difference is so deeply embedded in the play that Othello himself frequently has recourse to it.

Iago I hate the Moor
And ‘tis thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets
He’s done my office.
. . .
The Moor is of a free and open nature
That think men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose
As asses are.
[Othello. Act 1, Scene 3, lines 385-87, 398-401]

Othello
Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents of flood and field,
Of hair-breadth scapes i’th imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence
And portance in my travailous history
. . .
And the cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
. . .
She loved me for the dangers I have passed
And I loved her that she did pity them
This only is the witchcraft I have used.
[Act 1, Scene 3, lines 135-40, 144-46, 168-70]

Notice that Iago refers to Othello as "the Moor". And Othello's conduct both resists and confirms this racial stereotype.

Othello
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe
. . .
Set you down this,
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him – thus.
[Act 5, Scene 2, lines 340-46, 349-54]

Here, Othello identifies himself with an American-Indian and a Turk, a "circumcised dog."