In the Venice that Shakespeare portrays, Jews have no choice but to bear Christian insults “with a patient shrug” (1.3.107).¹ Although Antonio calls Shylock “misbeliever, cut-throat dog, / And spit[s] upon his Jewish gabardine,” Antonio enjoys an impeccable reputation (1.3.109-10). Amid such indiscriminate hostility targeting Jews, Shylock’s daughter Jessica deserts her aged father to marry a Christian and convert. Although Jessica is a relatively minor character, a performance’s treatment of Jewishness hinges upon her presentation, as revealed in Irene Middleton’s account of the post-Holocaust performance history of The Merchant of Venice. Because any negative portrayal of Jessica “might be regarded as anti-Semitic,” productions strove to find a way to “reconcile Jessica as a sympathetic Jewish character with her betrayals” (Middleton 294, 296).² Rather than judging Jessica for her “betrayals,” I listen to her afflictions as a female character from a religiously persecuted ethnic minority before and after her conversion. I investigate how Jessica seeks to refashion herself to survive in mainstream society and evaluate the success, or failure, of her assimilation based on the play’s use of contemporary political, religious, and medical discourses.

Jessica’s elopement with Lorenzo is carried out as originally planned, yet The Merchant of Venice is fraught with insinuations that render the success of Jessica’s assimilation strategy questionable. As a Jewess, Jessica is triply vulnerable as a woman with a racial and religious minority background. The new convert still faces a similar predicament as before her conversion because her hopes of shaking off her Jewishness are cut short by suspicious, wary looks from Christians, both servants and gentlemen, male and female alike. Moreover, as Mary Metzger notes, the fact that Jessica’s conversion is the outcome of betraying her father, a Jewish patriarch but a patriarch nonetheless, undermines her future credibility as a faithful wife and Christian (56). “Jessica’s conversion,” Efraim Sicher argues, “is a key to a preoccupation with gender, race, and color” in the play (271). With Sicher, this essay engages the play’s apprehension over “changing and unstable identities” as its principal subject of investigation (274). Through Jessica’s liminality and vulnerability as a female convert, I examine the complex interrelation of race, religion, and gender in The Merchant of Venice. In doing so, I center my analysis on contemporary medical discourses around gender in reproduction and the textual references to blood, including the idiosyncratic analogy between wine and blood.

Perhaps the most famous lines on blood in The Merchant of Venice are uttered by the Christian heiress Portia when, disguised as a young judge, she delivers her interpretations of the bond between Antonio and Shylock:

This bond doth give thee [Shylock] here no jot of blood.

The words expressly are “A pound of flesh.”

Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;

But in the cutting it, if thou dost shed

One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods

Are by the laws of Venice confiscate

Unto the state of Venice. (4.1.314-19).

Her impressive insistence on not shedding “[o]ne drop of Christian blood” propels commentators such as Gil Anidjar to conclude that Shylock “the economic enemy” loses claim to Antonio’s blood and money by coveting Christian blood (152-53). Anidjar’s analysis is insightful in illuminating the centrality of the link between blood and money in The Merchant of Venice’s interracial, or interreligious, economy. While Anidjar states that the play’s primary interest lies in Christian blood (151), I argue that Jewish blood is just as important in the play’s construction of the multiracial economy where blood and money circulate the society both together and separately.

Just before her elopement, Jessica tries to distance herself from her father, hoping to redeem her Jewishness through uniting with Lorenzo:

Alack, what heinous sin is it in me

To be ashamed to be my father’s child!

But though I am a daughter to his blood

I am not to his manners. O Lorenzo,

If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife—

Become a Christian and thy loving wife. (2.3.15-20)

According to Sharon Hamilton, Jessica is the “mastermind” of the elopement plan, and her choice of a Christian husband is in all likelihood a deliberate one: Jessica “values Lorenzo not despite but because of his religious affiliation” (44). Though Jessica denies any connection between her father and herself in terms of manners, she grudgingly recognizes their biological consanguinity. In her eyes, being a descendant of a Jew is a defect, but a defect that can be cured by the acts of conversion and marriage. Once cured, it should no longer be a barrier to full integration into Christian society. In other words, blood does not hinder the recuperative power of Christian manners and baptism. As Carole Levin notes, however, Jessica’s fiancé deems “misfortune” could fall on her if “under this excuse: / That she is issue to a faithless Jew” (2.4.38-40), Launcelot taunts her saying that her conversion merely “raise[s] the price of hogs” (3.5.19), Gratiano still calls her an “infidel” after her marriage (3.2.221) and Portia barely notices her in a conversation (Levin 97-100).

Where does this suspicion originate from? Despite Jessica’s, and a few Christians’ (those who benefit from her marriage) wish for her full assimilation into the mainstream Venetian society, the transformative power of conversion is subject to skepticism in contemporary religious discourse. This skepticism is directed at not only the transforming capacity of conversion but the sincerity of it, as will be discussed shortly.

Distrust against Jewish converts has a long history, but The Merchant of Venice is a product of an age markedly influenced by the antisemitic campaign of the Spanish Inquisition. In his influential Shakespeare and the Jews (1996), James Shapiro introduces the Spanish Inquisition as an event which had a fundamental impact on the early modern Jewish identity. Its aim, according to Shapiro, was not in persecution; rather, it sought to “discover the few apostates among the many Jews who had undergone baptism” (14). Jerome Friedman argues that although forced conversion was a reality for many, Spanish Jews’ conversion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was often characterized by its voluntary nature and relative tolerance of those who refused to convert (7, 14). As indiscriminate, haphazard use of contemporary appellations “Conversos, Confesos, Marranos [literally, ‘pigs’], Christians, and New Christians” illustrates, however, “Christian authorities were at a loss” regarding how to deal with converts (Friedman 5). Nevertheless, against the backdrop of generations of extensive and successful assimilation and intermarriages, not spiteful or willing isolation, the sixteenth-century Spanish pure-blood laws declared that, no matter the distance, having one Jewish ancestor was enough to make someone a Jew and that “degenerate Jewish blood was impervious to baptism and grace” (Friedman 16).³

Although written in the early seventeenth century and set in Venice, the English play reflects the continuing impact of the Spanish Inquisition in that blood lies at the center of Jessica’s not-quite-hidden anxiety over her Jewish ancestry. If Jessica’s claim that she does not resemble her father in “manners” is taken at face value, the blame rests upon the “blood” she inherited from Shylock.⁴ Yet blood flows underneath one’s skin and it is skin that people can see. As if to dissipate their doubts about her physiognomy, several Venetian characters stress the fairness of Jessica’s skin as opposing the darkness of Shylock’s. Lorenzo calls her hand “whiter than the paper” (2.4.14) and Salerio is confident that “[t]here is more difference between [Shylock’s] flesh and hers than between jet and ivory” (3.1.32-33). According to Janet Adelman, such differentiation and hyperbole are indeed a Christian strategy to make her “marriageable,” “distinguish[ing] between father and daughter” by turning “the difference between Jew and Christian into a difference between Jew and Jew” (14).

If outward similarity that could disintegrate the racial boundary was the essence of what mainstream Christians perceived as a threat, women presented a more serious menace.⁵ Contrary to their male counterparts who had the Jewish mark of circumcision inscribed on their bodies, Jewish women had “no such obvious sign” (Levin 89).⁶ As a female convert married to a Christian man, Jessica will infuse Jewish blood into a Christian lineage, thereby endangering the purity of the Christian blood. Tracing the medieval and early modern medical discussion on the female’s role in reproduction, Lindsay Kaplan argues that Aristotle, the era’s major medical influence, lends Jessica a hand in escaping the quagmire. In Aristotle’s binary model in which men provide formative “seed” and women impressionable “matter,” the subordinate female role, along with another neo-Aristotelian idea that “a daughter is only an imperfect version” “of the father’s form” saves a Jewish woman from leaving a Jewish imprint on the offspring of a Christian-Jewish intermarriage (Kaplan 15-16). Female inferiority, in turn, facilitates their conversion.

Nonetheless, as Kaplan acknowledges, early modern people were also familiar with the “Galenic reproductive model, in which both female and male contribute seed to an offspring” (24). Indeed, Lorenzo’s response to Launcelot’s taunt regarding Jessica’s Jewishness suggests that the Aristotelian model is not the single dominating model of reproduction in this play. When Jessica tells Lorenzo that his servant considers him “no good member of the commonwealth” because marrying her may “raise the price of pork” (3.5.28-30), Lorenzo snaps back, “I shall answer that better to the commonwealth than you can the getting up of the negro’s belly: the Moor is with child by you, Launcelot!” (3.5.31-33). As Lisa Lambert notes, underlying Lorenzo’s response is the awareness of the perception that Jessica and Launcelot’s mistress are “potential sources” of racial-mixing; Lorenzo “points to the lesser value” of the woman with darker skin rather than praising Jessica (163). If the Aristotelian model—where the female parent plays only a minimal role—were the overarching medical idea of the play, Lorenzo would not react to Launcelot’s taunts this way. It is within the framework of the Galenic model that Launcelot and Lorenzo, as white, Christian fathers, need to answer to the commonwealth concerning an identical issue: racial-mixing resulting from an interracial relationship.⁷ In order for Lorenzo to win the commonwealth’s approval under the Galenic model where the mother does have an influence over the child, Jessica’s skin should be as light-colored as possible. Therefore, Lorenzo and his friends emphasize the contrast between Jessica’s light skin and Shylock’s dark skin.

Lorenzo believes the commonwealth would decide that marrying fair, wealthy Jessica is “better” than having a child with a black woman. However, Elizabethans often thought converted Jews could not overcome their physical and psychological differences “simply because of baptism” (Levin 93). Yet, in Lorenzo’s wishful imagination, as Metzger explains, Jessica’s “whiteness,” along with her “femaleness,” paves the way for “her reproduction as a Christian in the eyes of the ‘commonwealth,’” because both secular and religious Christian authorities confirm that Jessica will eventually be “incorporated into the body of her husband in marriage, becoming both one with and subject to him” (57). Regarding Jewish women’s conversion in the thirteenth-century exempla (“short moral narrative[s] usually included in a sermon” which were influential during the medieval period) and later, Kaplan observes that a Jewish woman comes close to having “no racial difference from Christians” (16n39; 18). Given the anxious eagerness some characters exhibit to distinguish Jessica from Shylock, Kaplan’s contention may be an overstatement in the context of The Merchant of Venice. Yet there is some truth in it—Jessica is granted entrance into Portia’s mansion nonetheless.

Examining the use of ‘blood’ in the play helps unravel the motives and ideas underlying characters’ conflicting attitudes toward Jessica. The wine-blood analogy employed in Salerio’s remonstration against Shylock should be scrutinized in relation to earlier scenes involving Portia. On finding Shylock bewailing Jessica’s elopement, calling her “my flesh and my blood” (3.1.31), Salerio thus jeers at the devastated father: “There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish” (3.1.32-34). In Belmont, pale and red liquids are mentioned in relation to two of Portia’s suitors, the Duke of Saxony’s nephew and the Prince of Morocco, respectively. Her father’s will mandated that the suitor who discerns which casket has Portia’s portrait inside will marry her. Portia tells Nerissa to “set a deep glass of Rhenish wine on the contrary casket” when it is the drunkard German suitor’s turn to choose a casket and thus declares: “if the devil be within and that temptation without, I know he will choose it” (1.2.82-85). Morocco, beseeching Portia to see beneath his dark skin, challenges rivals with a light complexion and makes a boast to “prove whose blood is reddest” (2.1.7).

The structure of Salerio’s line, with the jet-ivory contrast, prompts a strange interpretation that Shylock’s blood is red and Jessica’s is pale. Arguing that Shakespeare’s contemporaries valued red wine more for its strength (47) and that Salerio, as a “a gay young blade,” is unlikely to consider weak Rhenish wine superior (49), Daniel C. Boughner proposes that Salerio’s line demonstrates a chiastic structure—in this interpretation, Jessica’s blood is red and Shylock’s is pale (49-50). On the other hand, M. M. Mahood’s footnote for the Cambridge edition dispenses with Boughner’s antithetical reading and persuasively explains this incongruity by interpreting “red wine” and “Rhenish” as “[a] contrast between crudeness and refinement,” adding that such interpretation—where Jessica’s blood is pale as Rhenish wine—corresponds with Portia’s earlier description of Rhenish “as a temptation” (121n).⁸ When read together with Salerio’s line, Portia’s remark confirms her wariness of Jessica. As a beautiful heiress, Jessica is a “temptation” that may harbor the devil inside; Portia, who never conceals her xenophobia, would rather give such temptation away to other foreigners.

Expanding upon Mahood’s interpretation, I suggest that Jessica’s unrealistic white blood serves a double function. First, it betrays the jet-ivory contrast as a hyperbole; maybe Shylock is not that dark and Jessica not that fair. Indeed, as Adelman notes, Portia would not ask “which is the merchant and which the Jew” if “his skin was reliably jet” (14). On the other hand, it lets slip the thinness, thus pliability, of Jessica’s blood as imagined by Salerio, a Christian man.⁹ In emphasizing its paleness, Salerio exposes his hope that the influence of her blood should merely dilute Christian heritage, but not contaminate it. These two readings do not contradict each other, but reveal the different, partially conflicting ideas and interests that Lorenzo’s friends and Portia have regarding female converts. Lorenzo’s group, being the beneficiary of Jessica’s conversion, is willing to overlook the influx of Jewish blood and soothe their scruples by focusing on her white appearance.¹⁰ According to Lampert, the human “influx” accompanying Venice’s commercial activities compels white Christians to “reinterpret their identities and their world” (142). While Lampert sees “dilution” as a “threat” to their Christian “essence” (166), I suggest that Venetians represented by Salerio overlook the dilution for financial gain. On the contrary, at this point in the play Portia, as an heiress, has no personal interest to feel enthusiastic about accepting any diluting influence on the bloodline of her community.

Morocco’s bravado boasting the redness of his blood, however, opens up another controversial dimension unfavorable to Jessica’s assimilation prospects. Elizabeth Spiller notes that “both dark skin and warm climates were associated with what were thought to be less fully concocted and thus physiologically weaker forms of blood” while red blood could be “a mark of reproductive potency” (152). Morocco does not actually shed his blood to prove its color. Yet, he is sworn to celibacy after his faulty choice of casket, which amounts to proving the exact opposite of his pretention. His dark skin and claim to red blood, put together, evoke the contrast Salerio draws between Shylock and Jessica. The facts that Shylock is left without an heir after Jessica’s elopement and that Morocco cannot produce legitimate progeny links them together as failures in reproduction. Their initial association with strong, red blood thus inverts to one of weak, diluted blood.

This thin blood finally extends the link to Jessica. Adelman, interpreting Salerio’s line on blood and wine antithetically (and thus considering red wine and Rhenish as describing Jessica’s and Shylock’s blood, respectively), observes that redness connects Morocco’s blood to Jessica’s “red wine,” which culminates in a “universalizing strain of Christianity played out in the possibility of her conversion,” but that Morocco’s dark skin “stabilizes the difference” (16). I believe, on the contrary, that Jessica’s reputed Rhenish, white wine-like blood dismantles visible racial differences between non-Christians because of its unseen similarity to the Moor’s and Shylock’s. When we take into account how, for example during the Spanish Inquisition, blood was viewed as the indicator of racial differences among people who had no distinguishable outward marker (Spiller 153), Jessica’s pale blood ties her to non-Christians but sets her apart from Christians with whom she shares the physical characteristic of light-colored skin. Christian men opt not to recognize the subversive possibility of such association; Portia senses, but refrains from interfering with it.

As long as Jessica’s Jewish blood remains Jewish, the problem of racial mixing renders the feasibility of her long-term assimilation strategy—that is, giving birth to a Christian child as a measure of securing her position in Venice as the child’s mother—equally uncertain. Lorenzo and Jessica never talk of future offspring whereas Gratiano suggests a wager to the Bassanio-Portia couple regarding which of them, Gratiano-Nerissa or Bassanio-Portia, will produce “the first boy” (3.2.217). When Lorenzo and Jessica enter the stage in the middle of this playful speech, Gratiano recognizes them with the famous line “But who comes here? Lorenzo and his infidel?” (3.2.221). Such timing and appellation turn the couple into unexpected and even unwelcome intruders whom Gratiano is hesitant to invite to join the bet on Christian reproduction, and highlight Jessica’s Jewishness as unchanging.

Yet Lorenzo and his friends do dwell upon Jessica’s physical difference from Shylock—up until their marriage. Since “Jessica’s fairness is partly compromised by the loss of her virginity” (Bovilsky 58) and her blood flows hidden under her pale skin, she has to endure more rigorous scrutiny to prove her Christian “manners” befitting a Christian wife. Blood remains unseen, unlike the visible difference in skin color; thus, the fear of such an invisible, undetectable difference between Conversos and Old Christians on the one hand and their similarity to Jews or Moors on the other constituted the grounds for Christian apprehension against New Christians. In the sixteenth century, not only Christians but also Jewish authorities “found themselves at a loss . . . whether Conversos were Jews or not” (Shapiro 16). New Christians’ successful assimilation, which went on to erase any imagined or real racial difference and raised Old Christians’ alarm regarding Christian purity in Spain, ironically resulted in growing uneasiness around the sincerity of the Jews’ conversion. As noted earlier, the Spanish inquisition was aimed at sorting out false converts from earnest ones. While English writers around the turn of the seventeenth century, such as Edward Grimestone and Thomas Browne, display active interest in the Marranos’ threat to the Spaniards, their dread boils down to racial mixing and a Jew passing as a Christian, the flip side of which is a Christian passing as, or acting like, a Jew (Shapiro 17-18). Since “[f]aith was disguisable, religious identity a role one could assume or discard if one had sufficient improvisational skill” (Shapiro 17), Jessica stands susceptible to the accusation of dissembling.

As Jessica leaves Shylock’s home, she gives utterance to her apprehension as a converted woman and disloyal daughter in the following words:

Here—catch this casket. It is worth the pains.

I am glad ’tis night—you do not look on me—

For I am much ashamed of my exchange.

But love is blind, and lovers cannot see

The pretty follies that themselves commit.

For if they could, Cupid himself would blush

To see me thus transformed to a boy. (2.6.34-40)

Her confession “I am much ashamed of my exchange” (2.6.36) may refer to her status as a Converso. Through conversion she escapes the Jewish group emasculated by contemporary political and religious discourse to join the masculine Christian group as its subordinate member; indeed, she is dressed as a boy, not a man. Her temporary disguise reminds beholders that she may assume false appearances at will, just as her counterpart in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c. 1590), Abigail, fakes conversion at first, though her next conversion is genuine.¹¹

This interpretation gains in persuasiveness when coupled with the usual reading that Jessica feels humiliation at being seen in male guise. For example, Kaplan questions whether Jessica is an accomplice in Portia’s challenging of gender hierarchy through cross-dressing and concludes that Jessica’s shame is the result of the possibility of “negat[ing] the subordination upon which her successful conversion rests” (28-29). Jessica’s shame at being disguised as a boy, therefore, exposes her anxiety at showing herself in any kind of disruptive camouflage and associating herself with such acts (Kaplan 29). Although Portia’s “subversiveness,” in Kim Hall’s words, “is severely limited” for she endeavors to maintain “a status quo which mandates the repulsion of aliens and outsiders” (104), she does cause disruption in the gender hierarchy of the Venetian nobility; Jessica has no option but to try to dissociate herself from any behavior that may elicit a charge of sedition. Once stigmatized as deceptive, she is destined to lose claim to the Christian “manners” that she counts on to set herself apart from Shylock.

The language of economics and commerce offers another, but related, way to understand her use of the expression “exchange.” Jessica utters the word “exchange” immediately after she passes the casket filled with valuables she stole from her father to the Christians waiting outside. In exchange for the jewels and ducats, she is buying a place in the Christian community, which, in Bovilsky’s words, amounts to “literally mak[ing] a bid for acceptance by Christians whose open-mindedness is proportional to the extent of their prospect of gain” (48). Drawing from Gayle Rubin, Hall argues regarding the early modern concern for racial mixing that the “exchange of goods . . . across cultural borders” is likely to bring about “other forms of exchange between different cultures,” and that “commercial interaction” advances “social and sexual contact” (88). Jessica’s conversion thus becomes an act of commercial exchange, and racial mixing the unwelcome price or byproduct that Christians waiting outside her window are striving to make the least of by insisting that she has fair skin.

Interestingly, Jessica’s outspoken filial desertion is overturned in the next scene by Lorenzo’s avowal of the opposite. No sooner than Jessica says “Farewell, and if my fortune be not crossed, / I have a father, and you a daughter, lost” (2.5.56-57), Lorenzo’s line “Here dwells my father Jew” (2.6.26) follows. By acknowledging their relation by marriage, as soon as his future wife denies the tie, Lorenzo deftly secures for himself the empty position of Shylock’s heir. He is already appropriating a part of Shylock’s wealth and will become his legitimate heir at the end of the play. Shylock’s forced conversion further complicates the issue.¹² Lorenzo first gives voice to a dubious praise: “never dare misfortune cross [Jessica’s] foot / Unless she do it under this excuse: / That she is issue to a faithless Jew” (2.4.38-40). Then, Jessica says later on she will lose a father unless her fortune is “crossed.” Shylock’s conversion and absorption into the Christian community nominally reinstate their father-daughter relationship; and this, in Jessica’s logic, is a work of misfortune, which reaffirms that “she is issue to a faithless Jew.”

Here arises the question: What exactly is her misfortune? In contrast to Abigail who is poisoned by Barabas, she marries a man she wants, and Shylock is not as evil as Barabas whose character evokes the 1594 Dr. Roderigo Lopez scandal where a Portuguese Jewish physician was executed after being charged of an attempted poisoning of Queen Elizabeth (Hamilton 43). Yet somehow, the man Jessica depends on to refashion herself into a Christian calls Shylock father, in a manner strangely evocative of Marlowe’s Moor slave, Ithamore. When Abigail converts of her own initiative, infuriated Barabas goes as far as to tell Ithamore “I here adopt thee for mine only heir” ( The Jew of Malta 3.4.43). By installing himself as Shylock’s heir driven by financial as well as amorous motivations, Lorenzo allows himself to smack of covetousness and licentiousness, which characterize Ithamore as a racial and religious other. That brings us back to the problem of “counterfeit Christians” that haunted early modern people, that is, “the fear that some Christians were not really Christians” (Shapiro 17). As Lorenzo acts in an un-Christian manner, calling Shylock “my father,” Jessica’s assimilative aspiration comes to an impasse.¹³ Indeed, it would be less alarming for Jessica to assume “vows of faith” concerns their love rather than his religious attitude when she accuses Lorenzo of “Stealing her soul with many vows of faith , / And ne’er a true one” (5.1.24-25, my emphasis).¹⁴

Furthermore, she could land in a much worse predicament. In the days of the Inquisition, Christian authorities in Spain labeled any reformative move as “Jewish,” and afterwards Protestants took their cue from the Catholics, defining “all Protestant religious deviation as ‘Jewish’” (Friedman 21, 25). Tudor and Stuart England, amid its religious altercations, witnessed an identical phenomenon: “Catholic propagandists . . . seize[d] upon the Judaizing propensities of the English Reformation as early as the 1550s” and Protestants paid them back in kind (Shapiro 21). In both Spain and England, associating an adversary with Jewish habits or inclinations was a highly effective accusation.

His connection with Jessica and Shylock carries the possibility of exposing Lorenzo to the religious slander of Judaization; by exhibiting such symptoms, he imperils Jessica and himself. A well-known medieval English incident, of a deacon who converted to Judaism “for the love of a Jewess” and was burned to death, may serve an ominously admonitory function (Maitland 385). What happened to the woman is unclear, but some of the surviving versions of the scandal Maitland provides record that the Jewess either was imprisoned for life or ran away (397-400). Jessica never divulges any worries in that vein, but nonetheless feels unsafe in Belmont. In Act 5, Scene 1, Lorenzo and Jessica are intent on making a list of tragic lovers. Though the couple maintain a playful and merry tone, Jessica confesses in her final line that she is “never merry when [she] hear[s] sweet music” (5.1.76), echoing Shylock’s annoyed words just before her elopement not to let “the sound of shallow foppery enter / My sober house” (2.6.35-36) and revealing herself as “still an alien, still an outsider” (Levin 103).¹⁵

Despite her melancholy and limited agency, Jessica’s strategy achieves a certain degree of success. Portia never wholly excludes Jessica from conversation in a group setting. Several critics have commented on Portia’s indifference to Jessica in order to underscore the latter’s isolation. Adelman contends regarding Act 3, Scene 2 that Bassanio and Portia do not “register [Jessica’s] presence here or elsewhere in the play” and Portia “never addresses Jessica directly” (6); Levin endorses the argument (99). I agree with their emphasis on Jessica’s solitude in Belmont, but Jessica and Portia do exchange a few cordial words. Jessica takes the initiative with the words “I wish your ladyship all heart’s content,” for which Portia returns a hardly unfriendly answer: “I thank you for your wish, and am well pleased / To wish back on you. Fare you well. Jessica!” (3.4.43-45). Lorenzo offers his parting words just before Jessica, yet Portia names Jessica and Jessica only. Moreover, the “all heart’s content” that Portia wishes back to Jessica is evidently assimilation.

Perhaps an even more telling line uttered by Portia is her instatement of Lorenzo and Jessica as substitutes for Bassanio and herself by “acknowledg[ing]” them as caretakers of Belmont (3.4.39-40). Yet, as Spiller writes, their “alternative, happy ending” unlike that of other tragic lovers they invoke in Act 5, Scene 1 is realized “not by transcending racial difference and its threat of otherness but by domesticating it” (155). As discussed earlier, Portia is indeed xenophobic. Yet Portia does not dissociate herself from Jessica the way she rejected Morocco; if she did, she would not assign Jessica as her own proxy.

Portia is civil and obliging to Jessica, although not downright affable. Equipped with Shylock’s ducats and jewels, Jessica is a tolerable addition to the Christian community; indeed, “Lorenzo’s household and Launcelot’s bacon are entirely sustained on Jessica’s contributions” (Bovilsky 60). Jessica’s wealth extricates her from the mercantile intention that marks Morocco’s courtship. She adds wealth to Venice rather than drawing it from the city. Wise Portia shows that she knows what is advantageous for impoverished Christians with her approval of Jewish property although she harbors reluctance about letting Jewish blood in. Her subjugation of Shylock and extraction of his wealth stem from her insight into the logic of flesh and blood—based on which she saves Antonio’s life. Just as carving out a pound of flesh cannot be accomplished without shedding some blood, absorbing women and commodities of other races inevitably accompanies mixing of bloods. If the influx is unavoidable, let the blood be pale.