Better "A Well-Trained Werewolf" Than "A Jewish Wolf in Philosophical Sheep's Clothing"?: Heine and Litter-ary Jews.

In the Jessica chapter of his 1838 Shakespeare's Maidens and Women , Heinrich Heine provocatively identified Shylock as a "well-trained werewolf." Was Heine also alluding to the characterization of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's eponymous protagonist Nathan the Wise as a "Jewish wolf in philosophical sheep's clothing" that would ironize the seemingly self-evident coupling of the two foremost Jewish characters to appear on German stages in the correlation Nathan:Shylock::good Jew:bad Jew? This article investigates that possibility first by situating each lupine image within its respective text (as well as noting Shakespeare's use of canid aspersions of Shylock in Merchant of Venice). It then examines the German and English critical reception of Shylock and other Jewish stage characters (e.g., Richard Cumberland's The Jew) to which Heine would have had access, after which it directs attention to the deployment of "Shylock" as an epithet, the references to Lessing and Nathan, and the use of lupine and canine figures in Heine's letters and writings. In addition, the article charts the history of the specifically German-Jewish reception of Nathan /Nathan and indicates their late, post-"Jessica" coining as the opposed faces of the Jewish ducat exchanged in the German imaginary. It concludes by discussing Ernst Simon's invocation, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Nathan 's publication, of Heine's characterization of Shylock in order to turn the by-then-commonplace polarity on its head. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]