Elizabethan Authors Treated Jews Badly, Says Gov. Cross

Governor Wilbur L. Cross, former dean of the Graduate School at Yale University, scored the treatment of the Jews in the literature of the middle ages and Elizabethan era in an address before the Literary Society of Emanuel Synagogue.

Connecticut’s scholar – governor referred with special scorn to Marlowe’s handling of the Jew in his “The Jew of Malta” and said Shakespeare outdid other Elizabethan playwrights in championing the Jew.

Governor Cross recalled a paper which he wrote fifty years ago, as a student, in which he declared:

“The only gentleman in “The Merchant of Venice’ is Shylock, and in the end Shylock is the only real character.”

The speaker said Disraeli might have been as great a figure in literature as Thackeray or Dickens if the Victorian Prime Minister “hadn gone into politics.”

“Politics are always fatal to literature,” the governor asserted.

He credited George Eliot with writing the most sympathetic book by a Gentile about the Jews in “Daniel Deronda.”

Reference to a recent meeting with Professor Albert Einstein, Governor Cross said the scientist has the “modesty of the truly great.”