Series: Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought

History:

10 - 15th Centuries CE 

Machshava:

Women 

Parsha:

Vayeitzei 

Collections: Twice Blest: Exploring Shakespeare and the Hebrew Bible

Description

Few literary characters have loomed as large and felt as "real" as Shakespeare’s Shylock. Though, as early 20th-century British Jewish historian Cecil Roth reminds us, he is a "sheer figment of Shakespeare’s imagination." Or was he? In this episode, Dr. Chaya Sima Koenigsberg illuminates Shakespeare’s (in)famous portrait of Shylock with her research on medieval Ashkenaz Jewry and the lives of the Rokeach and his wife, Dulce. She also sheds new light on the presence of Hebrew bible figures Jacob and Leah and the underexamined presence of prayer in the play.