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{"id":18475,"date":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=219"},"modified":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","slug":"leaving-the-house-of-judaism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/10\/leaving-the-house-of-judaism\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaving the House of Judaism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

J<\/span>anet Adelman (Blood Relations<\/em><\/a>) devotes an interesting chapter to analyzing Lancelot\u2019s departure from Shylock\u2019s house, and his strange reunion with his father Gobbo, in Merchant of Venice<\/em>. Lancelot has been Shylock\u2019s servant, but he has had enough and, like Shylock\u2019s daughter Jessica, he leaves for the home of a Christian. Shakespeare devotes what seems to be inordinate space to this odd, comic side plot. Adelman thinks, as usual, there\u2019s method.<\/p>\n

For starters, Lancelot\u2019s departure is a virtual conversion: \u201csince Lancelot tells us that he is \u2018a Jew\u2019 if he serves the Jew any longer (2.2.99\u2013100), his leaving Shylock\u2019s service is itself a kind of mock conversion from Jew to Christian, as though he were parodying Jessica\u2019s conversion before the fact.\u201d His \u201cconversion\u201d also anticipates Shylock\u2019s forced conversion at the end of the play. <\/p>\n

Lancelot engages in a debate between his conscience and the fiend, the former arguing that he stay and the latter urging him to leave. Why should leaving be so difficult, more difficult, apparently, than for Jessica? Adelman notes that \u201call Christians can in effect be read as converts from an originary Judaism they must disavow, figured as a father they must deceive in order to secure a blessing they do not deserve.\u201d His departure is fraught with guilt because \u201cit reiterates in miniature the originary scene of conversion from Judaism to Christianity\u2014and because guilt toward the father and anxiety about his lineage crucially frame that larger scene of conversion. . . . Lorenzo\u2019s apparently throwaway characterization of Shylock as \u2018my father Jew\u2019 is resonant in part because Judaism is commonly figured as the father to Christianity.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fitting, then, that in leaving his \u201cfather\u201d Shylock the Jew, Lancelot should encounter his actual father, Gobbo (Italian name for Job), blinded (like Isaac) and carrying a basket of doves (!!).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"