The Merchant of Venice - The Injustice Jews had to Face
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| Shylock from The Merchant of Venice, 2004 |
The Jews facing injustice and discrimination has been around for a long time and this issue is very prominent in this movie. Right from the beginning of the movie the tension between Christians and Jews are already shown. The first scene is very chaotic with a lot of yelling and hate against the Jews. (Spoiler alert) There was even a man who was pushed off a bridge because he was a Jew! And that happened within the first 5 minutes of the movie! That’s crazy.
This got me thinking, where else have I seen extreme discrimination of Jews before? WWII and from the Nazi’s, otherwise known as the Holocaust. I’d consider myself to have very little education and background facts about this issue and why Jews were so often targeted for discrimination back then during WWII. But now that I think about it, The Merchant of Venice was made a long time ago, it was written back then between 1596 and 1599, which was long before the Holocaust. So, discrimination against Jews has been around for CENTURIES. Was discrimination against the Jews always been a social norm?
Another thing that I noticed was that in the movie The Merchant of Venice, Jews had to wear a red hat so that everyone would know they were Jewish and they had to live in “Ghetto’s” which were locked up and guarded by Christians at night. During WWII, Jewish people also had to wear a symbol that let everyone know they were Jews, which was the yellow badge or the “Jewish badge”. Also, Jewish people had to live in slums or ghetto’s when the Nazi’s caught them and they were only allowed to live there.
From the movie, we can tell that Jews were given little mercy, and Shylock was a prime example for that. From the play and in the movie, he had lost all of his money because his daughter, Jessica, has stolen it. But, in the last scene where he was accused of attempting to murder Antonio, he had lost even more. I was very unsure of how to feel about Shylock, was he the villain or the victim in the movie? I often felt sympathetic for him and he was viewed as a money-hungry Jew.
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