The word
"usurer" refers to someone who lends money to others and charges unreasonably high interest rates, which may put the borrower in a difficult situation.
Full definition
Shakespeare not only provides the
Jewish usurer with a name, but also with a daughter who elopes with a Christian, as well as with a history of hostility and abuse from the Christian merchant Antonio.
As Wendell Berry says, «Lovers must not,
like usurers, live for themselves alone.
The one conditions the other, just
as usurer and squanderer condition each other.29
Kirsten Gillibrand's bill establishing a public option for banking would help the poor, bolster the post office, and
devastate usurers.
A young Alec Guinness did a remarkable job of playing the grasping East End criminal and
usurer Fagin, who assembles a small army of child pickpockets.
In fact, the Christian merchant is more of a Pharisee in his self - assured moral and spiritual superiority than is the
Jewish usurer, and this ironic tension adds bite to the gaiety of this romantic comedy.
The Lord himself comes forward (in the form of the poor person) to ask you for a loan, he who forbade you to be
a usurer.
One day
the usurer proposed a vile bargain: he would cancel the debt if the merchant gave him his young and beautiful daughter instead.
Tell that to
the usurers he beat into the streets with a bull whip.
While real sinners, especially if they were the great of this earth, «big Johns», were not touched, in spite of being fornicators, slanderers,
usurers and the like.
These are they who are ineligible (as witnesses): a dice - player,
a usurer, pigeon - flyers, traffickers in Seventh Year produce, and slaves.