Thomas Southerne is a fairly well-known character if you know anything about the arts during the English Restoration Period. He was an Irish lawyer in London, but despite this – and at least one major failure – he produced some of the best known theatrical hits of the epoch. Most notably his 1688 play ‘Oroonoko’ and his 1694 tragedy ‘The Fatal Marriage’.
However, what isn’t talked about is that like his dramatic mentor John Dryden; Southerne had a rather dim view of the jews.
In his 1691 comedy ‘The Wives Excuse’; he has his characters talk about the impossibility of a jew being in any way moral even when they convert to be a Protestant Christian with the necessary implication that it is something fundamental within the nature of the jews themselves that prevents.
He doesn’t explain this other than to treat it as something either appointed by God or as an unexplained mystery of birth, which – combined with his statement in his 1688 play ‘Oroonoko’ that the behaving like a jew is a very bad thing indeed as well as his suggestion in his 1694 tragedy ‘The Fatal Marriage’ that jews are in love with jewels – suggests that Southerne can be seen as a proto-anti-Semite in the correct, modern sense of the term. Since he both regarded jews as bad people and did so regardless of their professed religion, which suggests that he held to a biological definition of Jewishness that is the defining element of anti-Semitism.