Shakespeare and the Jews Book

A more accurate title would have been "Jews and Jewish Identity in England, 1290-1833," but that wouldn't have attracted as many readers (including me) as Shakespeare and the Jews, and we would have missed an interesting book. Quite a small proportion of the book is about Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, even about its influence: I'm not entirely convinced about the connections between the play and the "Jew Bill" providing for naturalization of Jews in 1753, especially after reading quoted passages from many antisemitic polemics that make no reference to the play at all. In a section called "Shakespeare, Englishness, and the Jews," Shapiro does provide a fascinating look at various scholarly (and not so scholarly) attempts to absolve the quintessential English poet of either hatred of or sympathy for Jews. For him, controversies about the play bring out the prevalence of myth in conceptions of national identity, so that "censoring the play is always more dangerous than staging it." Productions would do well to consider this book.