I remember a comics series from back when I was a child still living in Korea. It was called 'The Money Bug (돈벌레)' and it was both a monster fantasy and a morality play. The titular character was a mean old miser who loved money so much that after he died he came back reincarnated as a giant centipede-like monster that ate money (coins, that is; the story was set centuries in the past). I reminisced about this while eating some of the chocolate coins that somebody brought to work today for Hanukkah.
It should be remembered that centuries ago in Europe, Jews were a "despised race" and consequently were shut out of many occupations open to everyone else (Christians that is, since pretty much everybody in Europe at that time was at least nominally Christian) with the result that one of the few occupations left for Jews was moneylending. It was mostly forced on them, not by choice but by outside pressure, but by association through the generations it has become inextricably entwined with the image of the money-grubbing Jew. The negative stereotype of the Jewish moneylender has been indelibly etched onto literary history by the character of Shylock, the ruthlessly vengeful creditor to whom the "good" Antonio is owed a pound of flesh in the play The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare.
It seems though, that Shakespeare, maybe feeling the honest weight of his conscience, or maybe because he just couldn't help but be brilliant as a playwright (was he sympathetic to the plight of the Jews or not? -- he lived after the expulsion of Jews from England) and wrote the character of Shylock from his own empathetic POV, voicing through an antagonist the injustice and suffering endured by one of the most famous characters of his creation, and indeed in all of literature.
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