Notably, the language of disease mediates all three texts’ production of usury as a species of transnationality. Yet in each case the pathologies identified with usury invoke not specific foreign bodies, as was often the case with syphilis, but states of contamination (“colour,” “gangrene,” “infection,” “taint”). Such pathologies work to fashion the foreign less as a determinate thing than as a corrupted site of “Judaized” hybridity or indeterminacy by means of which the nation’s wealth is covertly expropriated. Importantly, these Jewish hybrids (whether Dutch or Iberian, Catholic or Turkish) work to displace the reader’s attention from both the textual and the historical hybridization of the non-Jewish and/or English subject. In a time of unprecedented transnational fluidity of goods, coin, and people, however, early mercantilist discourse subjected to immense pressure even as it helped generate the myth of a pure national identity. Critical attention to the mercantilist recoding of usury permits a new reading of The Merchant of Venice—a reading in which neither “usury” nor the “Jew” seems quite as fixed or as transparent as earlier criticism of the play has often assumed both of them to be.
Color: Saint George for England Allegorically Described
The importance of usury in the mercantilist lexicon is, at first glance, somewhat surprising. One of the standard views of mercantilism is that it eclipsed medieval understandings of moral economy with far more amoral conceptions of commerce. As a consequence, this view maintains, the oldest economic sin became defensible; Thomas Wilson may have published his well-known critique of usury in 1572, but early modern English state policy and literature increasingly supported the charging of interest, even if rates of more than 10 percent were frowned upon.4 In his essay “On Usurie,” for example, Francis Bacon enumerates its “discommodities,” but he counters these with its many advantages, recommending that interest rates be set at 5 percent. “Few have spoken of usury usefully,” he asserts in a telling pun, for it is precisely usury’s commercial usefulness that mitigates it: “there [should] bee left open a meanes to invite moneyed men to lend to merchants for the continuing and quickning of Trade.”5 Despite such mercantile recuperations of usury, however, the so-called mercantilist writers themselves—with the notable exception of Thomas Mun6—condemned the practice fiercely. And although the mercantilists’ condemnations differed from those of medieval theologians, “the Jew” remained symbolically central to their imagining of usury as a crime.
As any student of The Merchant of Venice knows, the enduring association of Jews with usury stemmed from their temporary “welcome” into medieval European cities to practice a trade that Christians regarded as sinful. For Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, the biblical proscription against charging interest on loans to “brothers” (Deuteronomy 23: 20–21) meant that, thanks to the Christian ideal of universal brotherhood, no true believer could practice usury. But in the later Middle Ages, Europe’s merchants increasingly needed ready sources of credit for capitalist ventures at home and abroad; to accommodate them, scholastics identified in the Deuteronomic proscription an ingenious, if xenophobic, loophole—Christians could not recoup interest on loans, but Jews could do so when lending to Christians, because Jews sinfully yet conveniently regarded gentiles as “others” rather than “brothers.”7 This loophole was put into practice in England for only a relatively short time. But for centuries after the expulsion of Jews in 1290, English writers continued to regard “usurer” as a synonym for “Jew.” The association is especially noteworthy in early modern drama. In addition to Shylock, we find a Jewish usurer, Gerontus, in Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (c. 1584); Barabas admits to a past career in usury in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c. 1588); and the Jew Zariph lends to Sir Anthony Shirley in Wilkins, Rowley, and Day’s Travels of Three English Gentlemen (c. 1608).8
Critical discussions of these plays and of The Merchant of Venice tend to reference the conventional moral arguments against usury. Hence analyses of Shylock’s first scene frequently note the Deuteronomic proscriptions against charging interest on loans to “brothers.” These references are sometimes accompanied by citation of Francis Bacon’s essay on usury and, in particular, one of the several “discommodities” that Bacon identifies with the practice: “They say … that it is against nature for money to beget money; and the like” (133). Bacon glances here at another customary condemnation of usury. In his influential treatise “De Moneta,” the fourteenth-century French theologian Nicholas Oresme had argued that “it is monstrous and unnatural that an unfruitful thing should bear, that a thing specifically sterile, such as money, should bear fruit and multiply of itself.”9 This argument about unnatural reproduction was arguably the dominant discourse about usury in the Reformation. Luther was particularly pithy on the matter: “Money is sterile.”10
Yet as Marc Shell and other readers have noted, such theological arguments about money’s sterility do not provide the only framework for understanding Jewish usury in The Merchant of Venice.11 On the contrary, Shylock forcefully asserts his “thrifty” ability to make money breed as fast as did the biblical Jacob’s “rams and ewes” (1.3.88). According to Shylock, Jacob’s skillful manipulation of Laban’s sheep and their “work of generation” was an exemplary act of usury, yielding him interest in the form of a flock of “parti-coloured” (spotted) lambs (1.3.74, 80). Antonio, however, focuses instead on the criminality of charging interest to friends:
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends, for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy … (1.3.124–27)
Antonio here invokes both the familiar Lutheran image of money as a “barren metal” and the Deuteronomic opposition between lending to “friends” and lending to “enemies,” each of which conforms more straightforwardly to the customary Christian discourses of usury than does Shylock’s prolix parable about the breeding of “parti-coloured” eanlings. In attempting to make sense of The Merchant of Venice’s discourse of usury, readers have tended to focus their attention solely on Antonio’s Christian-inflected denunciation of Shylock’s moneylending practices. Hence in his influential study The Idea of Usury, for example, Benjamin Nelson interpreted the play’s presentation of usury within an exclusively moral framework, as inimical to a fading Christian ideal of friendship.12 By contrast, I will argue that when read together with Shylock’s parable of Jacob and his “parti-coloured” lambs, Antonio’s speech drives to the heart of an anxiety that loomed large not just in rearguard defenses of moral economy but also in the emergent mercantilist discourse of national wealth.
Of particular importance here is the “brothers and others” typology of Deuteronomy, though I shall argue that its relevance to mercantilist discourse has to do less with Christian than with economic nationalist ideals of brotherhood.13 Inasmuch as the Deuteronomic proscriptions against usury prohibit the charging of interest to “brothers” from one’s own tribe, the activity definitionally entails a contract across national boundaries, however these may be defined (religiously, politically, economically). The Anglican divine Henry Smith, in a sermon delivered in the late sixteenth century, argued: “of a stranger, saith God thou mayest take usury, but thou takest usury of thy brother; therefore this condemneth thee, BECAUSE THOU USETH THY BROTHER LIKE A STRANGER.”14 Smith believed usury to entail a confusion or contamination