The US Capitol Building. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The GOP minority on the House Judiciary Committee recently decided to call a witness during a hearing on white nationalism and hate crimes who defended Hitler.

Candace Owens, a young conservative, set the Internet afire by tweeting: “Whenever we say ‘nationalism’, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine.”

In the 21st century, social media is the supreme purveyor of antisemitism. Before that, though, theater sometimes played a role.

Today, when discussing The Merchant of Venice, many people ask whether Shakespeare’s creation, Shylock, was the quintessence of Jew-hatred on the stage — or actually Shakespeare’s plea for tolerance.

In his famous soliloquy, Shylock asks for the audience’s understanding: “I am a 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, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? … And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?”

The trouble is that this sympathetic pose is not really Shakespeare’s villain. Shylock ultimately places bloody revenge above either his daughter’s well-being or the 3,000 ducats that she stole from him. Shylock was Shakespeare’s personification of the murderous Jew of antisemitic tradition. He starkly differs from the Bible’s Abraham, who does anything to avert murder and violence, and seeks to help others — even of different faiths.

Ian McDiarmid, an actor who played Shylock in a recent London production, claimed that Shakespeare was not maligning Judaism, just trying to explain the psychology of a Jew gone crazy: “When the opportunity arises to become ‘the vengeful Jew,’ he [Shylock] seizes it. He puts all the trappings of society, all the tenets and complications of Judaism to one side, for a single notion: that he might achieve purification for his soul through a vengeful act. … He does a popular thing: he hijacks his religion for his own purpose. He becomes a jihadi for his race.”

Apparently, the Nazis — who mounted 50 productions of The Merchant of Venice between 1933 and 1939 — didn’t think that portraying Shylock would create sympathy for Jews or Judaism!

Shakespeare’s malignant stereotype conveys a contagious prejudice that still lives on.

Historian Harold Brackman is coauthor with Ephraim Isaac of From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans (Africa World Press, 2015).