Thesis (M.A.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

The depiction of Jews in literature has always been controversial. In most of the literary texts they are depicted as a powerful minority, ready to destroy the Other, whom they perceive as hostile or inferior. It is, therefore, important to examine certain literary texts to trace how the Jewish minority groups in different societies and along different periods of time have reflected the same intrinsic traits. The plays selected for this study bear the mark of the deeply seated characteristics of the typical Jew who is portrayed as the malevolent offender in three different texts: Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1589), Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1600) and Rainer Fassbinder's Garbage, the City and Death (1975). The study will make use of Al Missiri's model of the ''functional groups'' to account for the behavior of the three Jewish characters in the three different texts. Semiotics will be adopted as a methodology to explore the different sign systems in the three texts

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