It is the fate of Marlowe's Jew of Malta to find himself forever lurking a few steps behind Shakespeare's Shylock. Barabas is Shylock's evil twin and nasty precursor - a rougher, meaner, and more starkly stereotypical stage Jew whose exorbitant antics bring into relief that glimmer of humanity that partly illuminates Shakespeare's achievement. Yet it is the task of criticism to try to encounter the play on its own terms, though ever attuned to the sequence of literary events that the play will set into motion. Readings of The Jew have approached the work from three basic angles: in relation to the formal development of English theatre and poetry (Eliot, Bevington, Cheney); as a key contribution to European representations of the Jews (Hunter, Greenblatt, Shapiro); and as an exploration of the larger Mediterranean cultural and political landscape in the English imagination (Bartels, Cartelli). This chapter takes the Jewish question as its central focus, but with an eye to the theatrical medium that displays that world for us. The play, I argue, stages different forms of fellowship - of social, religious, and economic association - that configure and reconfigure the different characters of the play in tendentious and fragile alliances.