Shakespeare’s Jewish connection

Montague is a Jewish name, and Verona was under the control of Venice, a place to which many Sephardi Jews fled during the Spanish Inquisition and after the expulsion.

By MARION FISCHEL
William Shakespeare (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
William Shakespeare
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Juliet is a Capulet and Romeo is a Montague, two of the most important families of Verona, constantly at odds.
Montague is a Jewish name, and Verona was under the control of Venice, a place to which many Sephardi Jews fled during the Spanish Inquisition and after the expulsion. In fact, Venice was where many talmudic texts were printed.
England too, although apparently Judenrein since the 1290 expulsion, and not officially open to Jews until the 1650s, appears to have harbored many Jews in the guise of Catholics.
Members of the latter faith were also forced – as was the case with Shakespeare’s family – to convert to Protestantism.
Romeo and Juliet, most often considered one of the Bard’s tragedies, is brimful of comic action and diction. Contrast this with The Merchant of Venice, a comedy that nevertheless has at its core a tragic issue, that of anti-Semitism. Juliet tells Romeo that he should change his name, as “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” suggesting perhaps, that conversion to Christianity would not lessen him in any way; and in the Merchant, Shakespeare presents a strong defense of the Jew. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?” Gene Gordon, president of the Rossmoor Shakespeare Society in California, suggests that the Bard was indeed a Jew.
He says that “William’s grandfather, whose real name was Jaco [Jacob] Spiro, [was] a Marrano Jew, living in the London area,” and that his name was changed from “Jakospiro” to Shakespeare by local pronunciation. The playwright’s parents, says Gordon, were “John [Jochanan] and Maria [Miriam], his father a wool dealer and money lender.” Maria Arden was therefore Miriam Ardon, “a rich secret Jewish family, which in order to safeguard their religion changed their name” and had adopted the similar surname of “a very prominent and branched-out aristocratic British family,” with the added twist that “Ardon means fugitive.”