SOURCE: Rosenshield, Gary. “Deconstructing the Christian Merchant: Antonio and The Merchant of Venice.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 20, no. 2 (2002): 28-51.

In the following essay, Rosenshield examines Antonio's role as an economic ideal—a Christian merchant—in The Merchant of Venice.

For several millennia conservative writers have seen their times as corrupted by a lust for material gain and thus inherently destructive of the moral, spiritual, and religious values of an idealized older order. This attitude frequently manifests itself in quixotic nostalgia, but just as often it elicits a rancorous response. One need only recall Dostoevksy's diatribe against the Jewish idea in The Diary of a Writer (March 1877), which he associates with the modern world dominated by finance and the stock market, in short, by a materialistic idea that signals the death knell of the old world of Christian love and fellowship.

Thus, it is not for...