The Merchant of Venice

[selenak]

A friend lend me The Merchant of Venice on DVD - the most recent version of Al Pacino as Shylock and Jeremy Irons as Antonio. Which was interesting to watch, and, as all versions of the play, frustrating at the same time. Because it's impossible to stage or film. After the holocaust, but I wonder about the before as well, because the tradition of a

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[pargoletta]

Dr. Lopez, Elizabeth's physician who was almost certainly framed due to an intrigue by the Earl of Essex.

From his name, he was probably Sephardic, and probably foreign-born as well, since the Jews were still banished from England at the time. I wonder how much of that jeering had to do with "he's still a faithless Jew under all the Christian trappings" and how much had to do with "he's still a faithless foreigner under all the English trappings." Either way, his name probably didn't help him any, in Protestant Elizabethan England.

(where there was a case of a Jewish child not returned to his parents post-baptism by Christian kidnappers that made headlines)

Edgardo Mortara, yes. And that sort of thing continued well into the 1940s, when Pope Pius XII issued orders for Catholics to keep Jewish children who had been entrusted to them during the Holocaust, some of them baptized. One of those children was Abe Foxman, who is the current head of the Anti-Defamation League, which probably explains a lot about Abe Foxman.

Felix Mendelsohn-Batholdy, the composer, is a case in point; it was his father who had converted, Felix and his sister were born as Christians, so to speak

Almost. Abraham Mendelssohn didn't consider himself Jewish at the time that Fanny and Felix were born, and he raised them without religion at first. He didn't convert the kids until 1816, when Fanny was 11, Felix was 7, Rebekah was 5, and Paul was 4. (Abraham and his wife Lea converted in 1822, which must have made for some . . . interesting family gatherings.) From what I've read of Abraham Mendelssohn, his primary claims to fame seem to have been being a) "the son of a famous father and the father of a famous son," as he complained, and b) kind of a douchebag.