Jewish Temporal Consciousness in Howard Jacobson's Shylock is My Name Employing Foucault's Concepts of ‘Heterotopia’ and ‘Heterochrony’

Howard Jacobson's Shylock is My Name: The Merchant of Venice Retold (2016), a part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project, reimagines the Shakespearean play The Merchant of Venice where Shylock is resurrected in present day England. This research paper aims to trace the nature of Jewish temporal consciousness in the novel. The term ‘Jewish temporal consciousness’ means, in a Jewish view, a distinct way of experiencing and structuring time in which Jewishness shapes how past, present, and future relate to one another. Applying Foucault's ‘heterotopia’ and ‘heterochrony’, this paper argues that the heterotopic cemetery embodies Jewish temporal consciousness, where past traumas refuse chronological closure. Father-daughter pairs in the novel reveal recursive patriarchal possession as identity formation where the daughters are spiritually "buried" to preserve continuity in Jewish tradition.