ake away a man's livelihood, as the usurer in the play is trying
to take away a man's life. And if anybody thinks that usury can
never go to lengths wicked enough to be worthy of so wild an image,
then that person either knows nothing about it or knows too much.
He is either one of the innocent rich who have never been the victims
of money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influential
rich who are money-lenders themselves.

All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side
to the case, and it is this that the genius of Shakespeare discovered.
What he did do, and what the medieval satirist did not do, was to attempt
to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock
the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer.
It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assert
that the usurer was a man. And the Elizabethan dramatist does
make him a man, where the medieval satirist made him a monster.
Shakespeare not only makes him a man but a perfectly
sincere and self-respecting man. But the point is this:
that he is a sincere man who sincerely believes in usury.
He is a self-respecting man who does not despise himself
for being a usurer. In one word, he regards usury as normal.
In that word is the whole problem of the popular impression of the Jews.
What Shakespeare suggested about the Jew in a subtle and sympathetic way,
millions of plain men everywhere would suggest about him in a
rough and ready way. Regarding the Jew in relation to his ideas
about interest, they think either that he is simply immoral;
or that if he is moral, then he has a different morality.
There is a great deal more to be said about how far this is true,
and about what are its causes and excuses if it is true.
But it is an old story, surely, that the worst of all cures is
to deny the disease.

To recognise the reality of the Jewish problem is very vital for
everybody and especially vital for Jews. To pretend that there is no
problem is to precipitate the expression of a rational impatience,
which unfortunately can only express itself in the rather irrational
form of Anti-Semitism. In the controversies of Palestine and Syria,
for instance, it is very common to hear the answer that the Jew is no
worse than the Armenian. The Armenian also is said to be unpopular
as a money-lender and a mercantile upstart; yet the Armenian figures
as a martyr for the Christian faith and a victim