Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice

In Blood Relations, Janet Adelman confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With her distinctive psychological acumen, she argues that Shakespeare’s play frames the uneasy relationship between Christian and Jew specifically in familial terms in order to recapitulate the vexed familial relationship between Christianity and Judaism.

Adelman locates the promise—or threat—of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play. Drawing on a variet...