Less than a decade later, I was a novice teacher myself, charged with the same task: to deliver the same pizza to a class of 15-year-old girls in a Catholic school. Nonetheless, without skillful teaching, the play lends itself to an anti-Semitic uptake. His Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech is arguably an unrivalled theatrical moment that simply couldn't have been written by an anti-Semite. I'm not saying Shakespeare was anti-Semitic. Teaching of this type has been likened to pizza delivery: pick it up in a box, take it to the consumer, hand it over.ĭon't get me wrong. The teacher, as I recall from the wisdom of maturity, had no idea what he was doing, other than delivering the prescribed curriculum of the day, in a here-it-is, don't-question-it kind of way. Look at the durability of the "pound of flesh".Īt the time, I was a closet Jew in a class of non-Jews in a country school. It would have taken a critically astute teacher, skilled in teaching "resistant reading", for their students not to emerge with a negative perception of Jews - as evil and hate-driven at worst as ugly and contemptible at best. On my peers, too, as it was their first conscious exposure to a Jew. Now this can't be because it is deemed easy or accessible or age-appropriate.Īs my first Shakespeare - age 14, I think - The Merchant made a powerful impact. For instance, it was long the practice, if tacit and unarticulated, in British-derived education departments around the world to teach The Merchant of Venice as one of the earliest Shakespearean texts to which a secondary school child was exposed. Today, seven is probably modest in terms of the duration with which the adult world can exert its influence on the malleable minds of the young. Remember the Jesuit dictum: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man." And at an age before awareness, prejudice can slide into a receptive mind, finding a home for life before any critical resistance is developed. What's particularly nefarious about the "eeny, meeny" scenario is that, typically, it's a childhood thing. Multiple alternatives, all perfectly effective for selecting an "it". Today, it's a "tiddler" or a "tiger" you're catching and it might "holler" or "wiggle". Should he ignore what he heard or should he interrupt the game to gently bring his mother-in-law into the 21st century, to have her know that these days, for this particular rhyme, there's strong discouragement against the use of "nigger". Some adults, including me, still use a shorthand version, albeit sub voce, when they're ostensibly making a choice and can't decide: mud cake or pavlova? Being so traditional, the words of the ditty reflect its own zeitgeist, which, at least in this one regard, is stridently at odds with ours. This children's rhyme, of disputed origin, has been known for about 150 years and is typically used in games when a person is needed to be selected as "it". From a few metres away, where he was engaged in something else, he overheard her saying: "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a nigger by the toe, when he squeals let him go, eeny, meeny, miny, moe." He'd taken his young family with him and the children were playing with their doting grandmother.
A friend was over at his mother-in-law's at the weekend.
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