Shylock is not a Jewish name; there was never a Jew named Shylock that anyone has heard of; the name is an invention of Shakespeare's which has entered the common language (because of the power of the characterization of the man) to represent any grasping, greedy, hard-hearted creditor. I have heard Jews themselves use the word with exactly this meaning, referring back to Shakespeare's character.
Where did Shakespeare get the name? There is a Hebrew word shalakh, which appears twice in the Bible (Leviticus 11:17 and Deuteronomy 14:17). In both places, birds of prey are being listed as unfit articles of diet for Jews. No one knows exactly what bird is meant by shalakh, but the usual translation into English gives it as "cormorant."
The cormorant is a sea bird which eats fish so voraciously that the word has come to mean personified greed and voraciousness. Shakespeare apparently is using a form of the Hebrew word both as name and characterization of the Jewish moneylender.
Shylock hesitates. The loan is a large one but Antonio, who is being offered as surety, has a good reputation for honest business dealing and is known to be wealthy enough to cover the sum. And still Shylock hesitates, for Antonio's ventures are thinly spread and he is at the moment in a period of unusual risk. Shylock says of Antonio:
—Act I, scene iii, lines 17-21
Of the places listed by Shylock, the least familiar is Tripolis. This word means "three cities" in Greek and any city built up out of the union of three towns is liable to be given that name. As an example there is one in northern Africa, which is better known to us by the Italian version of the name, Tripoli. It is the capital of the modern kingdom of Libya.
There is also a second Tripolis on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, in what is now Lebanon. It is the second largest city of that nation nowadays, and is better known to the west as Tripoli. Its Arabic name is Tarabulus.
Which Tripoli Antonio's argosy was bound for, whether the one on the southern or the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, we have no way of telling.
Shylock heard his news "upon the Rialto," a phrase that needed no explanation for the audience of the play.
In 1590, some seven years before The Merchant of Venice was written, the Venetians built a magnificent marble bridge across the Grand Canal, their chief waterway. The Latin rivus altus means "deep stream," and a bridge crossing the stream would very likely adopt its name. The Italian version of the phrase is "Rialto."
The Rialto bridge was lined with a row of shops on either side and with a broad footpath between. It became a busy commercial center and Venetian merchants and traders would gather there to exchange news and gossip.
Despite his misgivings, Shylock thinks Antonio is good surety for the loan. Bassanio, eager to help Shylock come to a favorable decision, invites him to dinner, and Shylock draws back at once:
—Act I, scene iii, lines 31-33
So far the exchange between Bassanio and Shylock has indicated nothing of the religious difference; it might have been any two men discussing a business deal. But now, with the mention of eating, comes the first clear stamp of Jewishness upon Shylock. He won't eat pork!
The Jewish abhorrence of pork is based on biblical statutes. The eleventh chapter of the Book of Leviticus states that only those beasts that have a cloven hoof and that chew the cud are ritually clean and may be eaten and sacrificed. As one example of a beast that is not ritually clean, the seventh and eighth verses say: "And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you. Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch."
Many other creatures are listed as unclean in the chapter; such as the camel, the hare, the owl, the cormorant, the shellfish, and so on.
It is the pig, though, that stands out. Most of the other creatures forbidden to Jews were not a customary part of the diet of Gentiles either. Pork, on the other hand, was a favored dish of Gentiles, and for Jews to have so extreme an abhorrence of it seemed most peculiar.
It became a hallmark of the difference between Jew and Gentile. When Antiochus IV of the Seleucid Empire tried to eradicate Judaism in the second century b.c., he insisted that Jews eat pork as the best way of indicating they had abandoned their religion (and a number of Jews suffered martyrdom rather than comply). In medieval Europe too the value of a conversion from Judaism was judged by the eagerness with which the erstwhile Jew ate pork.
Shylock, in his comment on pork, does not, however, refer to the Old Testament prohibition. The Elizabethan audience would not have been familiar with that. The dietary laws of the Mosaic Code had, in the Christian view, been superseded through a vision St. Peter had had (as is described in Chapter 10 of the Book of Acts) and the Leviticus chapter was therefore a dead letter.
Instead, Shylock is made to express his disgust by means of a reference to the New Testament. The reference is to a wonder tale concerning Jesus which describes how at one time he evicted many devils from a man possessed and sent them into a herd of swine. The version in Matthew states (8:32) that the devils "went into the herd of swine and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters."
Presumably, Shylock scorns pork as evil-haunted, and feels swine to be a fit habitation for demons and therefore most unfit food for men. And, of course, we might also view the passage as a mocking reference by Shy-lock to the kind of childish and superstitious tales (in his view) that made up the Christian religion.
In actual fact, a Jew of the time would have been careful to avoid mocking at Christianity or to refer sneeringly to "your prophet the Nazarite," out of consideration for his own safety in a hostile world. Shakespeare, however, was intent on constructing a villain, and how better to do so than to have him sneer at what the audience held sacred.
It is also important to remember that neither Shakespeare nor his audience had any firsthand knowledge of how Jews talked or acted anyway. The Jews had been driven out of England by Edward I in 1290, and save for a few special exceptions, they were still absent from the land in Shakespeare's time. They were not allowed to return, in fact, until the time of Oliver Cromwell, forty years after Shakespeare's death.
Now Antonio enters and Shylock views him with instant hate. He says, aside: