Approaching Shylock’s ‘Merciless’ Justice in Jewish Argentine Essays

Abstract

Shylock, Shakespeare’s controversial character in The Merchant of Venice, has been the object of numerous re-appropriations in Argentine literature throughout the first half of the 20th century. This re-territorialization of Shylock in the Río de la Plata has allowed Argentine authors to localize and reposition this well-known literary figure with respect to intercultural relations, manifestations of Antisemitism, and the question of revenge as an ethical problem within the context of Argentine social and cultural history. In this article, I examine essays from three Jewish Argentine authors —Lázaro Liacho, Salomón Resnick, and Aarón Spivak —who, from the end of the 1930s to the beginning of the 1950s, returned to the character of Shylock and his “pound of flesh” as a way to debate and reflect on the ethical and rational dimensions of Shylock’s notion of justice.