A Very Jewish Villain?

Is the Merchant of Venice anti semitic, it's an old debate that has been revived with the release of a new movie of Shakespeare's famous play, directed by Michal Radford. The Guardian has an excellent article.

The debate is so old it should have its own place in the Shakespearean canon. Is Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who demands a "pound of flesh" from a debtor, a villain or a victim? Every time The Merchant of Venice is staged, the debate is restaged along with it. Does Shakespeare's play merely depict anti-semitism, or does it reek of it? Is the Bard describing, even condemning, the prevalent anti-Jewish attitudes of his time - or gleefully giving them an outlet? The papers of a million A-level students are marked forever with such questions.
Yet now they have a new force. Because the Merchant is playing in a new medium, making its debut as a full-length, big-budget feature film - complete with a top-drawer Hollywood star, Al Pacino, in the de facto lead. The film declares its own intentions early. The pre-credit sequence, complete with Star Wars-style scrolling text, seeks to contextualise. The opening image is of a crucifix, rapidly juxtaposed with the sight of Hebrew texts put to the flame. The words on the screen tell us that "intolerance of the Jews was a fact of 16th-century life". To prove it we see a mini-pogrom, with a Jew hurled from the Rialto Bridge