Were Elizabethans of Shakespeare's time anti-Semitic?

Answer 1

By our standards, yes. For one thing, they were not free to practise their religion, but of course nobody was. Everybody had to belong to the Church of England and go to Church of England services. If you wanted to be a Jew or a Catholic or a Muslim in your spare time, you had better not let anyone know about it.

For another thing, there weren't actually very many Jews in England (and those who were were not very up front about it) so most English people had no real Jewish people to find out what Jews were like from. Instead, they had to rely on legends, traditions and stereotypes, many of which were derived from earlier periods of virulent anti-Semitism and were thus very hostile or were simply inaccurate. This would apply also to any other group of people who the Elizabethans knew very little about, like the Turks or the Chinese.

So, the Elizabethans were not particularly hostile to Jews but they did carry around some strange prejudices and stereotypes with little opportunity to have them contradicted.