A Short Note On Whether The Merchant Of Venice Is Anti Semitic

My note to a few guys on the question of whether The Merchant Of Venice is an anti Semitic play:

....My view of this play is that Shakespeare meant to create Shylock as the times' stock figure of the reviled Jew, avaricious, a character of ridicule, even Satanic in his way, but his great dramatic instincts would not let him simply settle on such a character. 

So as is his wont, he created complexity in Shylock, gave him instances of profound and powerful moral bearing and righteousness, and showed him as terribly prevailed upon. But Shylock, a brilliantly created character who dominates the play even though he only appears occasionally, got away from Shakespeare, which results, finally, in a flawed play. 

The ending in which Shylock is reduced to a pathetic, abject, clown of a figure, to be sneered at and mocked is at flawed, friction-laden odds with the previous Shylock. And the final scenes of romantic comic resolution fall terribly flat and are completely unmoving, almost as if created by Shakespeare merely going through dramatic motions. 

This falling flat accords with the big dramatic let down at the end of the play with Shylock, and which itself results, as noted, from the dignity and profundity Shakespeare invests in his earlier Shylock.