Embedded in such a global network, they dramatize the question: Can a Christian society sustain ethnic and religious diversity? The pound of flesh he exacts, the 3,000 ducats he loans, the revenge he hankers for — Shylock embodies the most entrenched anti-Semitic clichés: The Jews pursue vengeance over mercy; the Jews are inextricably linked to money. To add insult to injury, he is beaten at the most Jewish game, textual interpretation, and has to convert.

Othello is a more enigmatic figure: a Christian convert, a dark-skinned military hero, a Moor — a vague term that catalyzes fantasies and anxieties about Islam and Arabs, Africa and blackness, courage and lust. Shylock refuses to assimilate; Othello is eager to belong and show his loyalty. Venice uses the former for economic reasons, the latter for military ones, and then ultimately discards them. As long as Othello and Shylock are needed, they are called by their names. When they are rejected, they become, simply, “Jew” and “Moor.” One gives up his religion; the other gives up his life. Then, as now, the foreigner is exploitable and disposable.

One morning I received a call from an amiable person who had invited me to speak at a school on Holocaust Remembrance Day about my family’s surviving the deportations. He thanked me. Then he added that he wanted my advice: “A friend needs to buy a big quantity of gold. Since you are Jewish, you should be able to help.”

I was dumbfounded: This was not an anti-Semite; he had performed his civic duty of commemorating the Shoah. The long shadow of Shylock still shrouds the history of the real Venetian Jews, those who were bound to provide loans of 3 ducats or less and were forced to pay a rent higher by one-third than the Christians.

“The Merchant of Venice” and “Othello” continue to be relevant also because they are not contemporary, showing us where we come from as much as where we are. They remind us that racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are distinct but interlaced forms of intolerance and they have a history. They caution us against our temptation to cancel these texts from our canon, curriculums and stages. They may hurt and unsettle, but every time we may feel tempted to put our civilization on a higher moral pedestal, they evoke a past where being Jewish, “Turk” or black was an official stigma.