Was Shakespeare Anti-Semitic?

But a pro-Jew play wouldn't have put bums in the seats.

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Seeing the state had kicked Jews out of England and only a few were sticking around because they were so crucially needed or perhaps because they were pretending to be Catholic, antisemitism was set deep in the culture. 

Anti-semitism was rife in Shakespeare’s time, but at least there wasn’t any hairsplitting between anti-zionism and anti-semitism. And Shakespeare was like the modern university administrator; his focus was giving the people what they wanted so he could get more bums in seats.  

As to his personal opinion on Jewish people, we don’t know; we just have his plays. 

In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, most of us remember our high school English class and the famous line, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” (Act 3, Scene 1), spoken by the Jewish moneylender Shylock. 

 In “Look at How Woke Shakespeare Was”, folks would suggest the Bard is touching on the humanity of Jews and the discrimination they faced. 

But no, the Bard was still a man of his age.