Chapter 8 - Flesh and Blood

Summary

The Merchant of Venice establishes a connection between racial and religious identity, between outside (body features) and inside (blood and faith), through examining Jessica’s relationship to her father Shylock; the play interrogates the extent to which father and daughter share the same flesh and blood. Two distinct but interrelated understandings of race in the early modern period emerge in the play: race as marked by bodily features and behaviors, and race as defined through the blood that connects individuals to a line of descent. Through alluding to religious teachings and discourses that pointed to bodily and genealogical differences between Jews (and black Africans) and white Christians, The Merchant of Venice racializes religious identity, asserting that both racial and religious identity are inherited from one’s ancestors, passed from parents to children through sexual reproduction, and express themselves on the body and through the body’s behaviors.