What Is Really English? : The debate continues over how and why Shakespeare created Shylock : SHAKESPEARE AND THE JEWS,<i> By James Shapiro (Columbia University Press: $29.50; 320 pp.)</i>

Before the English had spies, counterspies and moles to obsess about, they had the Jews. James Shapiro’s new book traces British cultural anxieties about the Jews in the period from the 16th to the 18th centuries and is filled with scenarios that only a Borscht Belt Le Carre could come up with.

According to popular opinion of the time, England was crowded with false Jews, counterfeit Christians, Jesuit “handlers” and statesmen “turned Jews.” The problem for the English--as it has been for many before and after, as well as for many Jews themselves--was whether the Jews were a religion or a race. In any case, they were always alien. Not “us.” Not English.

Shapiro writes that although historians have shown little interest in the presence of Jews in early modern England, literary historians have continued to address the question, largely because Christopher Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta” and Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” are still taught and staged. Combing through a mass of past and present texts, Shapiro leads us into a subject that shows no signs of losing its immediacy. The opinions range from Victorian Anglo-Jewish apologists who “strained to find in Shakespeare a plea for religious and national toleration” to the views of a British academic who sees a modern Jewish threat in the form of a bunch of American Shakespeareans with Jewish names advancing along the banks of the Avon--all the way to Jewish conspirators who would have Shakespeare himself be a “secret Jew.” Get me Smiley!

John Donne sermonized that since the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews “have been a whole nation of Cains, fugitives and vagabonds.” They might be passing through your country but, be warned, your allegiances were not theirs. (Some men, apparently, were islands.) This was the reasoning that was first used to solve “the Jewish question,” and in 1290, King Edward I expelled the Jews from England. In 1656, Oliver Cromwell--not usually remembered for his inclusive vision--readmitted them. Shapiro points out that, though they numbered only about 20,000, it is doubtful that Jews simply disappeared and reappeared in everyday English life. What is important is that the period in which Jews were supposedly absent was the period known as Elizabethan England, the most glorious age in English history. The age of Shakespeare.

Our understanding of “Englishness” is so established by now that it is necessary to read a fine cultural historian like Shapiro to understand how fluid it once was. For example, in the 1530s, Henry VIII was troubled by how to make Catherine of Aragon his ex-missus. Not one for half measures, he decided to replace papal authority with his own. Twenty years later, Mary I reinstated it. Finally, when Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne a few years later, she abolished the Catholic Mass again. (Poor pope! One day infallible, antichrist the next.) By my count that’s changing the state religion three times in three decades.

What do you do when you no longer know who you are? You demonize who you’re not. Even those who don’t know what “The Merchant of Venice” is about know who it’s about. It’s about Shylock.

If received history is correct, and England during this period was as pure as the English thought it was, then Shakespeare could never have actually met a Jew. Fortunately, Shapiro’s research shows that Elizabethan England was not in fact as free of Jews as history would have us believe. The astonishing realization when following Shapiro’s tapestry of history, culture and popular culture is that it doesn’t matter whether Shakespeare did or did not ever meet a Jew. He was the national poet and his quill wrote the dramatic character who, centuries later, still represents the whole group.

Just about every character--Jewish or non-Jewish--in the hit movie “Get Shorty” uses the word Shylock to refer to a loan shark. Why not? It has a stronger effect. Loan-sharking is a profession; Shylock embodies the word. Let’s cut to the chase: Loan sharks are not always Shylocks but Shylocks are always Jews. It fairly takes one’s breath away, when reading Shapiro, to find out that Shakespeare’s father was twice accused of violating usury laws. Shapiro uses all his academic self-restraint not to pounce on this meaty bone, though I wish he had.

So, the obvious question: Was Shakespeare an anti-Semite? Shapiro argues that it is impossible to apply 19th century terminology to a 16th century person. He also argues that it doesn’t matter whether he was or not. Anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism are not points of literary critique. Primo Levi was a great writer, not because he was a Holocaust survivor but because he was brilliant.

And Shylock is a brilliant character, his image seared into the popular consciousness. The old Jew and his pound of flesh. Curious as to what exact pound the bard might have wanted you to infer? Shapiro gives you the answer and then takes you point by point through the major hits of anti-Semitic paranoia. It starts with circumcision and ends--where else?--with child abduction and ritual murder.

That is the cultural baggage that several centuries of English audiences brought to the play. The 20th century has not exactly compensated with its Jewish characters. Hemingway gives us Robert Cohn, a study in the Jewish prince. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom daydreams through all his sub-textual otherness. Proust has fashionable Charles Swann simply avoid social situations where anti-Dreyfuss sentiments might be expressed in his presence. Not that writers have any obligation to do otherwise. But it is ironic that only Shakespeare, the embodiment of English culture, as Shapiro shows, put words of self-affirmation in the mouth of a Jew. “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?” Shylock says, finally taking on all comers.