William Shakespeare

Thirty-seven plays and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets; baptised 26 April 1564, died 23 April 1616. The Merchant of Venice, about 1598, was written in a country where there had been no Jews by law for three hundred years: they were expelled in 1290 and permitted to return only in 1656, forty years after the author's death. Shylock, that is, was composed by a man who most likely never saw a living Jew, and is moulded out of a literary image. And he became for four centuries the image through which the English reader looked at Jews—including the famous speech "hath not a Jew eyes?", which is quoted as a defence and which in the play ends in a demand for revenge.

The play was staged in Nazi Germany too—more than fifty productions in twelve years.