The Struggle for Law
by bitter scorn, bowed, broken, tottering on his way, who can help feeling that in him the law of Venice is humbled; that it is not the Jew, Shylock, who moves painfully away, but the typical figure of the Jew in the middle ages, that pariah of society who cried in vain for justice? His fate is eminently tragic, not because his rights are denied him, but because he, a Jew of the middle ages, has faith in the law—we might say just as if he were a Christian—a faith in the law firm as a rock which nothing can shake, and which the judge himself feeds until the catastrophe breaks upon him like a thunder clap, dispels the illusion and teaches him that he is only the despised medieval Jew to whom justice is done by defrauding him.
88
