“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.
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