Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism.” Critical Inquiry. 5.2 (1978): 291-307.

The Jew of Malta opens with an apparent gesture toward the same principle of differentiation that governs The Merchant of Venice. Marlowe’s Jew is introduced in the prologue by Macheuill as one “Who smiles to see how full his bags are cramb’d”; he enters, then, already trailing clouds of ignominy, already a “marked case.” But while never relinquishing the anti-Semitic stereotype, Marlowe quickly suggests that the Jew is not the exception to but rather the true representative of his society. Though he beings with a paean to liquid assets, Barabas is not primarily a usurer, set off by his hated occupation from the rest of the community, but a great merchant, sending his argosies around the world exactly as Shakespeare’s much-loved Antonio does. 296

Barabas’ own desire of gold, so eloquently voiced at the start and vividly enacted in the scene in which he hugs his money bags, is the glowing core of that passion which fires all the characters. To be sure, other values are expressed—love, faith, and honor—but as private values, these are revealed to be hopelessly fragile, while as public values, they are revealed to be mere screens for powerful economic forces. 296

…this ideology is clearly subordinated to considerations of profit. 297

[quoting Marx]: The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money, but also because money had become, through him and also apart from him, a world power, while the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews. [P. 35]

Barabas’ avarice, egotism, duplicity, and murderous cunning do not signal his exclusion from the world of Malta but rather his central place within it. His “Judaism” is, again, in Marx’s words, “a universal antisocial element of the present time” (p. 34). 297

For neither Marlowe nor Marx does this recognition signal a turning away from Jew-baiting; if anything, Jew-baiting is intensified even as the hostility it excites is directed as well against Christian society. Thus Marlowe never discredits anti-Semitism, but he does discredit early in the play a “Christian” social concern that might otherwise have been used to counter a specifically Jewish antisocial element. 297

Barabas’ frequent asides assure us that he is feeling contempt even when he is not openly expressing it, and the reiteration of the derogatory epithet ‘slaue’ firmly anchors this contempt in the structure of relations that governs the play. 298

Barabas express in extreme, unmediated form the motives that have been partially disguised by the spiritual humbug of Christianity. 299

…his actions are always responses to the initiatives of others. 299

Nevertheless, Barabas’ sense of himself, his characteristic response to the world, and his self-presentation are very largely constructed out of the materials of the dominant, Christian culture. 300

…a society whose speech is a tissue of aphorisms. Whole speeches are little more than strings of sayings: maxims are exchanged, inverted, employed as weapons; the character enact and even deliberately ‘stage’ proverbs. 300

Proverbs in The Jew of Malta are a kind of currency, the compressed ideological wealth of the society. Their terseness corresponds to that concentration of material wealth that Barabas celebrates. 300

This is not the exotic language of the Jews but the product of the whole society, indeed its most familiar and ordinary face. 301

Most dramatic characters—Shylock is the appropriate example—accumulate identity in the course of their play; Barabas loses it. He is never again as distinct and unique an individual as he is in the first moments. 301

But Barabas does seem set apart from everyone in the play, especially in his cold clarity of vision, his apparent freedom from all ideology. “A counterfet profession is better / Then vnseene hypocrisie” (1.531-32), he tells his daughter. In the long run, the play challenges this conviction, at least from the point of view of survival; the governor, who is the very embodiment of “vnseene hypocrisie,” eventually triumphs over the Jew’s “counterfet profession.” But Marlowe uses the distinction to direct the audience’s allegiance toward Barabas; to lie and to know that one is lying seems more attractive, more moral even, than to lie and believe that one is telling the truth. 302

To be sure, Barabas does speak to the end of a turning a profit, but wealth is gradually displaced as the exclusive object of his concern; his main object through the latter half of the play seems to be revenge, at any cost, upon the Christians. Then, with his attempt to destroy the Turks and restore the Christians to power, it becomes evident that even revenge is not Barabas’ exclusive object. At the end he seems to be pursuing deception virtually for its own sake. 303

And, as I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely this dark vision, this denial of Being, that haunts all of Marlowe’s plays. 304

Barabas devises falsehoods so eagerly because he is himself a false-hood, a fiction composed of the sleaziest materials in his culture. 304

In celebrating deception, he is celebrating himself—not simply his cunning, his power to impose himself on others, his inventiveness, but his very distance from ontological fullness. Barabas is the Jewish Knight of Non-Being. From this perspective, the language shift, to which I alluded earlier, is a deliberate assault upon that immediacy, that sense of presence, evoked at the beginning in Barabas’ rich poetry with its confident sense of realized identity. 304

Marlowe’s hero is not defined finally by the particular object he pursues but by the eerie playfulness with which he pursues it. 305

The will to play flaunts society’s cherished orthodoxies, embraces what the culture finds loathsome or frightening, transforms the serious into the joke and then unsettles the category of the joke by taking it seriously. For Barabas, as for Marlowe himself, this is play on the brink of an abyss, absolute play. 305

…and with a character who manifests as little interiority as Barabas…306

That he dies in his own trap is no accident, nor is it solely the result of the governor’s superior cunning: his career is in its very essence suicidal. He proclaims that he always wants to serve his own self-interest: “Ego mihimet sun simper proximus” (1.2228); but where exactly is the self whose interests he serves? Even the Latin tag betrays an ominous self-distance: “I am always my own neighbor,” or even, “I am always next to myself.” Beneath the noisy protestations of self-interest, his career is a steady, stealthy dispossession of himself, an extended vanishing, an assault upon the subject. 307