During Shakespeare's time , few Jewish people liven in London , and the majority of theatregoers would not have known any one from the Jewish faith. Write an essay of two pages about how Shylock's character embodies the sterotype of a Jewish person.
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Few people in Shakespeare’s England would ever have met a practicing Jew. The kingdom’s Jewish population had been expelled in 1290, more than two hundred years before Shakespeare’s birth, and practicing Jews would not be permitted to enter the country until after Shakespeare’s death, in 1660. Despite the expulsion of the Jews in the Middle Ages, a small group of Portuguese Jews, comprised of just under one hundred people, survived in London by living quiet lives, and mostly avoided trouble with authorities. Elizabethan London was also home to a small number of Jewish converts to Christianity. In spite of their conversion, however, these Jewish people remained subject to anti-Semitic prejudice. In 1594 the royal physician Roderigo Lopez, a Spanish Christian of Jewish ancestry, was found guilty of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth. When he spoke to the crowd who had gathered to watch his execution, Lopez insisted that he “loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ.”