Rewriting the merchant’s tale

Howard Jacobson’s novelistic riff on The Merchant of Venice for the Hogarth Shakespeare project turns, unsurprisingly, on what makes some people (in Jonathan Miller’s memorable self-describing formulation) Jew-ish. Is it the gentile’s anti-Semitism, with its manifestations varying from relatively polite social snubs to persecutions down the centuries, culminating in the Holocaust, that defines Jew-ishness? Or is it the self-identifying Jew’s own attitude or beliefs that make him part of a clan? (The idea that Jews are a ‘race’ is too silly to consider. My own DNA profile shows that 97 per cent of my genes were probably shared by Jews of Biblical times, though my family has been blond and blue-eyed for at least the five generations I’ve met.)

The winner of the Man Booker prize for The Finkler Question pulls off a neat trick in this almost perversely serious comic novel, creating a parallel world to Shakespeare’s Venice in the wealthy, cultured Golden Triangle of Cheshire, and peopling it with parallel-ish characters.