Three is a rather false notion current about this film that it is anti-semitic, rather forgetting that Stiller was himself of Ashkenazi stock. Yet the character of the usurious Jew that Jakob Kahn becomes in the course of the film is an exploration, rather like the character of Shakespeare's Shylock, of hos that caricature and the reality behind that caricature comes to be. His actions are driven by his desire to revenge the woman he loved, Ester, abandoned, although pregnant by her Christian lover George and subsequently evicted by her father and dtiying in childbirth. He is not, as is sometimes suggested, indisriminately prejudiced against all Christians. He is, just as in the Shakespeare play, using one to get at the other, so he gains power over the family that George Vide was to have married into (although George, guilt-stricken, has renounced the marriage to become a priest) in order to have his revenge on George. There is, as in the Skakespeare play, a criticism of what might called "the eye for an eye" ethic associate in both cases with Jewry (as opposed to Christianity) but it is a much more complex and ambiguous picture, as in the Shakespeare play, rather than any simple anti-Jewish trope and the son - like Stiller himself, part Jew part gentile, who provides what is seen as a solution (a blending of the two cultures that had been rejected - on both sides - at the beginning of the film).
