Shakespeare and Modern Culture by Marjorie Garber

Author:Marjorie Garber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307377951
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

BUT IT IS OFTEN OUTSIDE the theater that the most virulent use of the play, and of Shylock, is made. And not only in Nazi Germany and Austria. An example is available in the writings of an American who was not a sophisticated thinker, though he was an immensely powerful cultural presence—Henry Ford.

Ford was a car manufacturer, an innovator, and a classic American industrialist. But he also had some xenophobic ideas. He published in the 1920s a series of articles about Jews in the Dearborn Independent, a Michigan newspaper which, despite its name, was “published by the Ford Motor Company,” and he was the author of several highly negative books on the topic, including one called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.45 A version of this book was published in German in 1921. it was edited and reissued, with a defiant preface by an admirer, in 1947, the year of Henry Ford’s death. The International Jew includes chapters on “How the Jews Use Power,” on “Jewish Supremacy in the Theatre and Cinema,” on “The Battle for Press Control,” and on how “Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music.” Unsurprisingly, it also fixated on The Merchant of Venice.

Henry Ford was an enthusiast of the American schoolbook called McGuffey’s Reader, the anthology that was the main textbook in American schools from 1836 through the 1920s. The readers went through six editions. As a child, Ford read and memorized them; as an adult, he could quote them from memory. He paid to have the entire series reprinted and distributed to schools across the United States.

One of the stories Ford had studied in the Fifth Eclectic Reader was called “Shylock, or the Pound of Flesh.” “Why did Shylock choose the pound of flesh rather than the payment of his debt?” was one of the study questions, and another was, “How is Shylock punished? Is his punishment just? And why?” In 1914, the Detroit branch of the B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation League sought to have The Merchant of Venice removed from the public schools because it “maliciously and scurrilously traduce[d] the character of the Jew.” Shylock, they wrote, “has become an unhappy symbol of Jewish vindictiveness, malice, and hatred.” Henry Ford indicated that he took this as an affront to McGuffey, and his Reader.

In his chapter on “The Jews and Power” in The International Jew, Ford had noted a similar effort, on the part of “the Jews,” that “force[d] The Merchant of Venice to be dropped from public schools in Texas, [and] Ohio” in 1906–7, and observed that “Rabbis force[d] [the] Hartford, Connecticut, school board to drop The Merchant of Venice from the reading list.”46

This is not an uncomplicated issue, since it involves censorship. It might be argued that such efforts are especially shortsighted when what is censored is a play by Shakespeare—a play that can and has been read in many ways, not all of them, by any means, traducing the character of Shylock. But the incidents are indicative, if not of “modern culture,” then of a kind of crisis of modernity-in-the-making.

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