Shylock embodies theological enmity while Othello embodies political enmity

Evidence

Shylock is a theological enemy. He is “the Jew Shylock,” the “mere enemy” (MV, 3.2.260), that is to say, the absolute enemy, who hates and is hated on the explicit basis of his religion. And if he does lend the money, as Antonio calls on him to do, it is not “as to thy friends,” but rather “as to thine enemy” (MV, 1.3.129-31). Othello, on the other hand, “horribly stuffed with epithets of war” ( 0, I.I.1J), bears all the mark of a political and military enemy. Othello, whom Iago-that is, “I hate the Moor” Iago-and others call “the general” (2.3.310) is employed against the “general enemy Ottoman” ( 0, 1.3.49-50). Othello fights the Turk, and as the final scene suggests, he himself may very well be the “malignant” and “turbaned Turk” (5.2.351). As John Gillies writes, “his symbolic association with the Turks is a critical commonplace.” Othello is a Moor, and “the Moors were popularly considered barbarous, heathens naturally at war with Christians and Europeans.” And though he himself wonders “Are we turned Turks?” ( 0, 2.3.166), his conversion, and more generally his religious status, remains mysterious. As Julia Lupton puts it, “the play never decisively determines whether he was converted from a pagan religion or from Islam.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 538

Categorization

• DEFINE: The Jew/Arab bridge staged concretely: Shylock as theological enemy, Othello/Moor as political-military enemy — the precise pairing the whole book argues over.
• SEED: The two-bodies-of-the-enemy frame maps perfectly onto a reading of the contemporary Jew/Arab double figure in U.S. political discourse — an essay worth writing.
• SHARE: The Othello ‘are we turned Turks?’ line plus Lupton’s reading — for a Shakespeare scholar interested in the Islam question.