Trump's Shylock: The Illiterate Meets the Caricature

Is Trump anti-Judaic or just a historical illiterate? John Podhoretz has the answer

Copyright ©2025 by Independent History and Research. RevisionistHistory.org

Thomas Rowlandson’s depiction of the Prince of Wales negotiating a loan with two non-Christian lenders. Money Lenders, London, Nov. 8, 1784.

“Think of that: No death tax. No estate tax. No going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker — and in some cases, Shylocks and bad people.” —The President of the United States, Iowa State Fairgrounds, Des Moines, July 3.

“Trump criticized for using antisemitic slurs in Iowa speech.” — ABC News, July 4.

“Jewish Leaders Denounce Trump’s Use of Centuries-Old Trope.” — New York Times, July 4.

‘Troubling, irresponsible’: Trump criticized for talk of banker ‘Shylocks.”—Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), July 4.

Representative Jerry Nadler said the word was “one of the most recognizable antisemitic slurs in the English language.”

Representative Dan Goldman stated,“This is blatant and vile antisemitism, and Trump knows exactly what he’s doing.”

The Anti‑Defamation League (ADL) termed Trump’s statement “very troubling and irresponsible,” noting the term is a “centuries‑old antisemitic trope,” while the Jewish Council for Public Affairs said the use of Shylock “is not an accident” and “deeply dangerous.”

Republican Idaho is a usurer’s utopia and it has nothing to do with the Judaic Shylock character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Idaho does not cap interest rates on most loans. It allows payday lenders and title lenders to charge triple-digit annual percentage rates (APRs). According to recent data from the state itself and watchdog reports, APRs on small-dollar loans in Idaho exceed 500%, with an ungodly Mafia-rate of predation of 652% reported in some cases! Bulletin: both the Mafia and the Idaho legislature are majority gentile.

In the early modern era “Jews” were largely absent from the big usury deals. The key players in the rise of usury banking were the Catholic financial houses of Fugger and Medici in conspiracy with Medici Pope Leo X.

Decades later, Protestant founder John Calvin endorsed the swindle, predicated on the “equity” he learned as a Catholic youth in the University of Orleans, a papally-chartered French law school of significant repute, from which he graduated in 1531.

After he became a Protestant, Calvin wrote that it is the law of equity (lex aequitatis) that best describes “how far it may be lawful to receive interest upon loans.”

Calvin, the supposed supreme Biblicist, wrote:

“…if we would form an equitable judgment, reason does not suffer us to admit that all usury is to be condemned without exception…only those unjust exactions are condemned whereby the creditor, losing' sight of equity, burdens and oppresses his debtor….It is abundantly clear that the ancient people were prohibited from usury, but we must needs confess that this was a part of their political constitution. Hence it follows, that usury is not now unlawful, except in so far as it contravenes equity…” (cf. Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses, Arranged in the form of a Harmony [1554]; and Guenther H. Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics [1997, pp. 119-121).

One of the principal elements of stage magic is distraction. Renting money at any rate of interest was a shameful thing in the eyes of the majority of Catholics and many Protestants in the 16th century. Therefore the non-Jewish banking cartel staged a distraction early in that time, producing a play in Italy, Il Pecorone (“The Simpleton”), in which money is borrowed from a Judaic banker enforced with the threat of a pound of flesh to be cut out of the debtor were he to fail to meet his obligation to the Judaic banker.

Financiers of Judaic background were few and far between in that era; they were minor players compared with the Vatican’s inaugural bankers. Shakespeare appears to have learned of Il Pecorone as it circulated in translation in manuscript form, and plagiarized it in his own “Merchant of Venice.”

William Shakespeare was a propagandist for Christendom’s bankers, absolving them of the stigma of usury by scapegoating a Judean. He did something similar in “Richard III” when he acted as a Tudor propagandist to curry favor with Tudor Queen Elizabeth I by portraying the last Plantagenet Catholic monarch in England as a vile fiend, when he was no such thing.

Don’t misunderstand me. As a work of art without reference to history, “The Merchant of Venice,” like so much of the playwright’s canon, is a soaring prose poem of wisdom and insight. The confrontation between Shylock and Portia is universal in the sense that it reframes the eternal struggle between avarice and charity, and the tension between calls for justice and demands for mercy. When the audience sees in the person of Shylock every usury banker of any ethnicity—and any or no religion—a universal lesson for the ages is conveyed.

The Shylock caricature had a different function however, adhering to papal propaganda in obliterating the origins of the revival of usury in the banking houses of the Church of Rome, and substituting “the Jews” as the origin story’s bad guys. The scam has had firm purchase among the intelligentsia of the West, among whom the current occupant of the White House cannot be said to be numbered.

The word Shylock long ago moved from a specific reference to a Judaic character in the Shakespeare play to generic jargon contemptuous of all loan sharks. Trump in his intellectual laziness and infantile naiveté thoughtlessly spouted the street lingo of his New York upbringing. He doesn’t know Shakespeare from Jackie Mason. The resulting tempest in a teacup which Trump’s remark brewed is tedious and largely pro forma.

Like Harry Truman, the president who was known to grumble in private, making disparaging anti-Judaic remarks on occasion, and Richard Nixon, who did the same in conversations with Billy Graham, The Donald, not withstanding his Shylock outburst, is an outstanding servant of Zionism, witness his bombing of the sovereign nation of Iran at the behest of his heralded mensch, “Bibi” Netanyahu.

Insults from gentiles do not surprise Talmudists. In the Talmudic tradition all gentiles are suspected of being “Esau” (Jew haters), according to the formula, “Halacha hi beyoduah she’Eisav sone l’Yaakov.” As long as they obey, who cares what cavils they spout to fellow golem?

Writing on X on July 4, John Podhoretz, a former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan, stated the truth with aplomb: “Trump bombed Iran. He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever as far as I’m concerned.”

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Michael Hoffman

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Revisionist historian Michael Hoffman explores the ascendance of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic mind virus in his book The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome. He explicates the alchemical processing of humanity in Twilight Language. He is the author of eight other volumes of history and literature including Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, as well as Usury in Christendom, Judaism Discovered, and Adolf Hitler: Enemy of the German People.

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