Was Shakespeare Jewish? And is there proof in Pirkei Avot?

“Was Shakespeare a Believing Jew?” That is the title of a fascinating and provocative piece by Yehezkel Laing on the Aish website. You can read it in full here. The author, a journalist, actor and filmmaker living in Jerusalem, has gone to considerable effort to research not only the Bard’s plays but also his background—what little is known of it—in order to state his case.

Laing writes:

Shakespeare's plays draw upon over 2,000 references to the Bible. While Shakespeare could be expected to know the Bible, the world's most popular book, it is evident from his writing that he was familiar with its Hebrew version and with the Hebrew language in general. He also had knowledge of the Mishnah and the Talmud, including Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, a Mishnaic compilation of ethical teachings and maxims [my emphases].

The Pirkei Avot evidence reads like this:

Mishnaic quotes appear in some easily identified lines, such as "What's mine is yours and what is yours is mine," in Measure for Measure (5:1) and "Sin will pluck on sin," in Richard III (4:2). While both lines are drawn from Ethics of the Fathers, their simplicity suggests that it might just have been a coincidence. But the line "Sin leads to sin" continues in in the Mishna with "the reward for a mitzvah is a mitzvah" (4:2). This too appears in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in the praise of Marcius, a man who "rewards his deeds with doing them,"(2:2). It then becomes evident that Shakespeare has fully rendered this Mishna.

The following words of Marcius: “You cry against the noble senate, who, under the gods, keep you in awe, which else would feed on one another?” (Coriolanus, Act 1, Sc. 1) bear a close resemblance to Rabbi Chanina's words in Ethics of the Fathers “Pray for the welfare of the government – for if people did not fear it, a person would swallow his fellow alive” (3:2).

Both Rabbi Hillel and Hamlet comment in a similar manner when they see a human skull. Hamlet muses that perhaps it was the skull of a politician who thought he could "circumvent God" but is now being overruled by a lowly gravedigger. This is the same moral of "measure for measure" drawn by Rabbi Hillel when he sees a skull floating in a river. “Because you caused the heads of others to float, others caused your head to float.” (Ethics, 2:6)

Citing material from the other sources he mentions above, Yehezkel Laing references earlier literature on the Shakespeare-is-a-Jew hypothesis, including Was Shakespeare Jewish by Ghislain Muller, John Hudson’s Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and several books by David Basch. He concludes:

Was Shakespeare a Jew? The jury is still out. But if his writing is any indication, it came from deep within a Jewish soul, yearning to be free.

I know little of Shakespeare’s origins and religious inclinations—if any—but I believe that even the inclusion of Jewish ethical material in his plays and sonnets is hardly convincing evidence of his knowledge of Judaism, let alone membership of the Jewish people. As the Bartenura indicates in his commentary to Avot 1:1, many of the moral principles adduced in Avot are not exclusively Jewish. We share them with the other nations of the world. The difference between our moral code and theirs, at least as reflected in Pirkei Avot, is that other cultures have derived their moral axioms from the exercise of their reason, while ours have been gifted to us by God on Mount Sinai.

I would only add two further points. The first is that, if there was even a small suspicion on the part of anyone that William Shakespeare was Jewish, it is improbable that he would have been baptised, married and buried in local churches. And, from the perspective of halachah, there is no evidence to suggest that his mother, Mary Arden, was Jewish. If he was born a non-Jew, his subsequent conversion was unlikely in a country where Jews were banned from residing.

Secondly, there is quite an entertaining sequence of “Was Shakespeare a…?” investigations. Even apart from the thesis that Shakespeare was Jewish, a ten-minute trawl of the internet revealed theories that the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon was (in no particular order) an antisemite, gay, bisexual, not the author of his plays or a team of authors, a woman, a Muslim (‘Sheikh Pir’), a Buddhist, a closet Jesuit, a government spy, Scottish, on the ADHD and Asperger’s spectrum, a psychopath, an international socialist, a conservative, and an alien from outer space.  My feeling is that, if one looks hard enough through his prolific writings, one can find spurious evidence that Shakespeare was anything you want him/her to be.