Shakespeare’s Moor and Jew characters encoded pre-modern racialized difference.
Evidence
In different ways both Nabil Matar (1999) and James Shapiro (1996) have provided a rich discussion of how ideas of the Moor and Jew featured in Elizabethan England, and in the period’s most celebrated author we find illustrative depictions of each. Namely, Shakespeare’s characterization of the tragically violent Othello and the shrewd and sinister Shylock. While each are replete with redeeming qualities, and even by today’s standards imbued with striking degrees of ambiguity, they nonetheless make sense as racialized affectations of their time. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion, 27
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay’s interest in how material culture and embodiment carry coded meaning across eras; here the ‘corporeal shorthand’ of racialized characters plays a similar structural role.
- XREF: connects to: Crusade rhetoric racialized Muslims as a vile and accursed race. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 12; Parallel racialization logics target Jews and Muslims across eras. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 40; Shakespeare framed the theological and political enemy as Jew and Moor — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 555 (+13 more)
Related
- Shakespeare framed the theological and political enemy as Jew and Moor (similarity 0.80)
- Europe’s racial anxieties about blackness paired the Muslim with the Jew (similarity 0.80)
- Religion served as the primary vehicle for racial difference in early modern Europe (similarity 0.79)
- Saracen, Turk, and Moor were interchangeable fluid signifiers, like the modern catchall Arab (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Shakespeare framed the theological and political enemy as Jew and Moor
#corroborates(0.95) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 555 - Europe read colonial others through its binary of Jew and Moor
#corroborates(0.90) - Theological assumptions about Jews, Turks, and Moors controlled Shakespeare’s imagery
#corroborates(0.90) - Jews and Moors served as Europe’s archetypal others for expressing strangeness
#corroborates(0.90) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 952 - Saracen, Turk, and Moor were interchangeable fluid signifiers, like the modern catchall Arab
#corroborates(0.90) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 323 - Saracen, Turk, and Moor were interchangeable signifiers for the Muslim enemy.
#corroborates(0.90) - The Jew-Moor split in Shakespeare precedes and enables the theology-politics separation
#expands(0.85) - European colonial discourse imposed invented Jew and Moor identities on peoples globally
#corroborates(0.85) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 340 - Religion served as the primary vehicle for racial difference in early modern Europe
#expands(0.85) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 187 - Pre-modern racialization of Muslims was protoracism in religious idiom, not modern racism
#qualifies(0.85) - Europe’s racial anxieties about blackness paired the Muslim with the Jew
#corroborates(0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 859 - White identity was partly constructed through contrast with the imagined Black other
#expands(0.80) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3408 - Shop signs fixed the Moor as a standing symbol of darkness and evil
#corroborates(0.80) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 325 - Maternal imagination was believed capable of birthing black, Moor-like infants.
#corroborates(0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 311