SOURCE: “Shylock and the Struggle for Closure,” in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1994, pp. 173-89.
In the essay below, Picker describes Elizabethan England's creation of and discrimination against the “other,” or outsider, in order to preserve its own sense of a closed society. Picker observes that this “ghettoizing” is reflected in The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock is consistently excluded from communal life simply because he is a Jew.
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