Stranger to Profit: Waste, Loss, and Sacrifice in The Jew of Malta

Abstract

The central character in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta is not the embodiment of mercantile or proto-capitalist values that many readers have taken him for, and in fact repudiates those values. In a real sense, he is not a merchant at all. Barabas is never interested in profit or in money as it is commonly understood; he is spectacularly economically irrational from the first scene to the last. His famous celebration of “infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37) is profoundly hostile to the very idea of money. Barabas defies economic logic, whether mercantile or Marxist, because he does not seek gain. He can best be understood through Georges Bataille’s concept of pure expenditure, the drive toward loss and waste as ends in themselves. Barabas is an enemy to profit, the scourge of Malta’s marketplace. He represents an archaic anti-Semitic fantasy that tropes Jews as economically irrational, and promotes a set of xenophobic nationalist fantasies that reject bargaining or trade. [J.M.]