The Secret Jewish History of William Shakespeare

450 Years Later, Bard Remains a Man of Infinite Jewishness

By Seth Rogovoy for The Jewish Daily Forward

Had William Shakespeare never died, he would be turning 450 years old this month, which would put him in biblical territory for longevity. As it turns out, that’s not necessarily such an unusual place for him to be. While little is known about the historical Shakespeare, there is much to suggest in his work and in what we know of his life and times that he just may well have been familiar with the Torah — and perhaps even engaged with Jewish thought.

The search for Shakespeare’s true identity has long fueled a cottage industry of books, doctoral theses and crazy theories. Wikipedia lists no fewer than 84 possible “Shakespeare authorship candidates” — historical figures whom scholars have proposed are the actual authors of the Bard’s plays and poetry. Among the better-known candidates, including Francis Bacon and playwright Christopher Marlowe, is Amelia Bassano Lanier, a crypto-Jew born in 1569 into a family of Venetian Jews who were court musicians to Queen Elizabeth I. A creative and independent figure on the cultural scene who had an affair with Marlowe, Lanier was the first woman to publish a book of original poetry. In his new book, “Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier — The Woman Behind Shakespeare’s Plays?” author John Hudson proposed that it was Lanier herself who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. Hudson points to Lanier’s cosmopolitan upbringing and familiarity with the many literary, geographic, religious and factual touchstones in Shakespeare’s work, to which a country bumpkin from Stratford-on-Avon would presumably not have had access. (In fact, an entire theater company in Manhattan called The Dark Lady Players is devoted to performing Shakespeare’s works as the biblical allegories its members believe Lanier embedded in them, as religious parodies that were then brought to the public by a theater owner and impresario named William Shakespeare.)

It doesn’t end there. Author Ghislain Muller has suggested that Shakespeare himself was a crypto-Jew with a grandfather named Shapiro in “Was Shakespeare a Jew?: Uncovering the Marrano Influences in His Life and Writing.” And in “Shylock Is Shakespeare,” author Kenneth Gross argues that the key to understanding the character of Shakespeare’s most notorious Jewish character is to view him as the voice of the playwright himself.

One of the key characters in Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” is named Ariel, a spirit rescued, controlled and eventually freed by the play’s hero, the magician Prospero. Ariel serves as Prospero’s eyes and ears throughout the play, using his own supernatural powers to cause the tempest of the title and to fend off plots to bring down Prospero. Ariel, of course, is a Hebrew name meaning lion of God, which poetically suggests that Ariel was a defender of righteousness.

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Hollywood’s Greatest Masterpieces Get Religion, Unlike Schlocky Biblical Dramas

Forget ‘Noah’ or ‘Son of God’; to engage religious viewers, Hollywood should make more films like ‘Groundhog Day’ or ’2001′

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine

Although it doesn’t open for another month, you can already tell that Noah, Darren Aronofsky’s action-packed account of the Bible’s original beastmaster, is going to be harrowing, and not only because it features an 11-foot wingless fallen angel voiced by Nick Nolte: Without a single screening the film has unleashed a small torrent of articles asking the inevitable question, namely whether God could make it in Hollywood.

The Heavenly Father will certainly have his fair share of screen time this year, with Son of God, a biopic about you-know-who, opening this week, and Exodus, a Ridley Scott extravaganza with Christian Bale as Charlton Heston as Moses, coming in December. But, our pundits have already taken to asking, is Hollywood capable of spinning a good religious yarn? Or is it too greedy, too shallow, and too impious to make anything that appeals to the faithful?

As is often the case when we strive to talk seriously about popular entertainment, we’re asking all the wrong questions. Rather than fretting about whether Hollywood gets religion—it does, gloriously so, and to great effect—we should wonder why, given its stratospheric success with religious-themed films, is Hollywood so reluctant to give its audiences what they so clearly desire.

This, first and foremost, is a question of definitions. Who’s a religious person? And what kind of film might he like? To hear marketers, in Hollywood and beyond, tell it, a religious person is someone whose cultural horizon begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation, some sort of sniggering simpleton who grows suspicious unless his entertainment features swords, sandals, and the heroes he’d read about in Sunday School. This lazy and skewed approach is no less offensive than the efforts to market products to women simply by slapping on pink packaging, and no less ineffective: Women, like religious people and members of minority groups and the young and the old and people with terrible nut allergies and anyone else who was blessed with the breath of life, are complex and nuanced people whose tastes and predilections run far deeper than a single, simple note.

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Four New Questions for Your Seder

Sparking discussion on some of Passover’s most important themes from aish.com

Jews love questions. So it’s no surprise that the Seder, commemorating the birth of our people, is structured in a question/answer format. Participants are meant to ask and to spark lively discussion and exploration.

In this spirit, let me add to the Seder’s four questions an additional four that pick up on some of the most important themes to contemplate at the Passover table.

1. A question on the main theme of the Seder

Why do we call it the Seder?

2. A question on the theme of family

If the Seder is so important, a student once asked me, how come it’s observed in the home and not in the synagogue?

3. A question on the theme of children

The Seder revolves almost entirely around the children. The reason is obvious.

4. A question on the theme of slaughtering the Paschal Lamb

The requirement for Jews being saved in the Passover story was to slaughter a lamb and to smear its blood on the doorpost so God would “pass over” that home and spare its inhabitants.

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For more information on Passover, come see Jvillage's Passover Spotlight Kit. 

Cult Kosher For Passover

The top 10 foods we love to eat during Pesach.

By Ronnie Fein for The Jewish Week

Passover’s almost here and supermarkets are starting to fill up with those kosher for Passover foods you can’t get, or wouldn’t care to eat, any other time of year. No, not matzah and potato starch: I mean the good stuff.

#10: Coca-Cola with the yellow top. The colored cap means the Coke is made with cane sugar, so it tastes the way it back in the day, before high fructose corn syrup took over the world. Corn, of course, is kitnyiot, that category of grains and legumes that are forbidden to Ashkenazi Jews during the holiday along with the more obvious foods like bread and pasta. Sarah Klinkowitz, author of the blog "Food, Words & Photos," says her family fights about which version actually tastes better. But taste aside, everyone knows that Coke made with sugar is healthier than that high fructose corn syrup kind, right? Ditto Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda, also made with sugar during Passover.

#9 Hashachar H’aole Special Cocoa Spread. Folks like Sina Miz at The Kosher Spoon like to wet their matzah just slightly under cold running water and then spread it with the chocolate. According to the scuttlebutt, this is an Israeli thing, and it means the holiday is coming. “ I’m getting excited for Pesach now!” Miz said.

#8 Manischewitz Coconut Patties. If you, like me, are always on a diet, you allow yourself to eat these candies—a cross between macaroons and Mound’s candy bars—only during Passover. My brother stocks them in his freezer and I actually could have them any old time. But I don’t. I really don’t.

#7 Tam Tams. Because they’re beyond crackers. “They make me want more of everything,” reflected Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me, who has found all sorts of interesting ways to use these savory old reliables: as soup croutons, for instance. Who knew?

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Uncovered in Jerusalem, 9 tiny unopened Dead Sea Scrolls

Researcher finds tantalizing tefillin parchments from Second Temple era, overlooked for decades and unread for 2,000 years

By Ilan Ben Zion for Mosaic Magazine

They’re not much larger than lentils, but size doesn’t minimize the potential significance of nine newfound Dead Sea Scrolls that have lain unopened for the better part of six decades

An Israeli scholar turned up the previously unexamined parchments, which had escaped the notice of academics and archaeologists as they focused on their other extraordinary finds in the 1950s. Once opened, the minuscule phylactery parchments from Qumran, while unlikely to yield any shattering historic, linguistic or religious breakthroughs, could shed new light on the religious practices of Second Temple Judaism.

The Israel Antiquities Authority has been tasked with unraveling and preserving the new discoveries — an acutely sensitive process and one which the IAA says it will conduct painstakingly, and only after conducting considerable preparatory research.

Phylacteries, known in Judaism by the Hebrew term tefillin, are pairs of leather cases containing biblical passages from the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. One case is bound by leather thongs to the head and one to the arm during morning prayers, as prescribed by rabbinic interpretation of the Bible. The case worn on the head contains four scrolls in individual compartments, while the arm phylactery holds one scroll.

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