master of the Jewish escape, lord of trade, patriarch of Jewish learning and literature; and without anachronism he might even be called, with Gracia, the first of the Zionists. But where he had blundered he had blundered calamitously, and a counter-biography persisted in the Gentile mind: the presumptuous, hard-hearted, imperiously mercenary Jew. Christopher Marlowe, someone drawn to outlandish daring, would in due course take the history of Don Joseph and turn him into a demonic figure – Barabas, the Jew of Malta. It was Joseph’s life as caricature: the jumped-up Hebrew, provoked by scorn
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