Discussing his most recent novel, an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice set in modern Britain, Howard Jacobson comments on the character of Shylock and the question of Shakespeare’s anti-Semitism. (Interview by Liam Hoare.)

Shylock . . . remains part of English culture as both noun and adjective. . . . Shylock does not die in the play; he is very much still among us.

Although Shylock comes from the mind of someone who isn’t Jewish, he has entered the Jewish imagination. He’s entered the literature, not just about Jews, but also of Jews. He is one of the ways that we see ourselves. He won’t go away—he’s always there. . . .

[In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock comes across as] so much more sympathetic than the other characters. At once, immediately, he plays with them: he’s funny; he’s quick on his feet; he plays the Jew and then doesn’t play the Jew; he plays them at their own game; he’s saucy; he’s rude. . . .

Did Shakespeare hate Jews? Clearly he didn’t, because there was so much amusement and vitality and pity to Shylock, including the famous, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” That’s standard for Shakespeare—you humanize the foreign, you humanize the alien.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.