ABSTRACT
The most significant issue in The Merchant of Venice is of course the fate of Shylock. But this concern has assumed the proportions it has during the past fifty years on account of the Holocaust, the culminating horror in the long history of the persecution of the Jewish race in Europe. Shakespeare, ahead of his times, adumbrated in the play a racial conflict that in the twentieth century displayed in full measure what was still embryonic when the play was written at the close of the sixteenth century. History has unlocked the play’s secret. Hitherto, understandably, the bulk of criticism has concentrated on this aspect, almost to the exclusion of the strands that the title of my essay indicates. 1
