Oberon’s Jewish Pedigree

To speak of Shakespeare’s Jewish characters is to conjure up The Merchant of Venice and his anti-Semitic creation of the Jew Shylock. But another of his characters bears a more impressive Jewish pedigree. That character is Oberon, the king of the fairies, best known to us from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania”). And the best time to invoke Oberon’s name is on the festival of Hanukkah.

How so? Because Oberon, it turns out, is the direct descendant of none other than Judah Maccabee.

To explain this strange assertion, a bit of literary history is in order.