James joyce, p.97
James Joyce, page 97
The highly respected Jesuit and University College professor Fr. T. A. Finlay published in 1893 three successive editorials in the monthly Lyceum, which he had founded and edited, the first entitled ‘The Jew in Ireland’ and the second and third ‘The Jew amongst Us’. These articles are a response to the establishment of the Lithuanian Jews. Finlay registers some of the shock to Catholic nationalist conceptions of homogeneity by the establishment of their community. In Dublin, ‘where they are settling in ever-increasing numbers’, they did not gravitate to the working-class areas of the Coombe or the Liberties:
They possess themselves rather of the quarter traversed by the South Circular Road. In this thoroughfare itself and in the streets opening off they have established a flourishing colony—so flourishing that for their religious needs a spacious synagogue has lately been built close by. In some of the streets that open off the South Circular Road one may walk along the pavement from end to end and hardly hear a word of English spoken by the children who are at play on the footpath. We are in as completely a Jewish quarter, as if we were wandering through some city of Poland or Southern Russia.31
Finlay posed the question, ‘Should the Jew be made welcome in Ireland?’ which he then answered in the negative. This was to protect the Irish poor from Jewish hawkers, ‘weekly men’, and moneylenders, and by implication to prevent the emergence of an anti-Semitic party in Ireland. If the Jew ‘comes merely as a parasite … then let him not be more welcome here than he is among the peasants of Germany or among the labourers of France’. Disclaiming ‘all hostility to the Jew on the score of race, religion or nationality’, Finlay’s intellectually dire articles were a compendium of objectively anti-Semitic received ideas. He did contrive to add one slur that was original, deriving from Irish land legislation: ‘It is significant that the appearance of the Jew in Ireland as trader and money-lender on a large scale, coincides with the change in the law which gave the Irish tenant a saleable interest in his farm. We trust it is no more than a coincidence. But we fancy we see reason to doubt it.’32
The Jew, ‘as he appears in modern European society, is, to a certain extent, an alien’. Finlay did not consider that the Jew could be a patriotic Irishman, a point rendered in the high elliptical Jesuit manner: ‘We have no right to rebuke the Jew as a stranger or an alien amongst us, to make it a reproach that he does not share our national life or enter into sympathy with our national ambitions.’33 The third article was the most intellectually incoherent. Having, as he wrote, ‘already disclaimed all hostility to the Jew on the score of race, religion, or nationality’, Finlay imperturbably pronounced, ‘We find in the Jewish habit of mind, in the Jewish character, as it exhibits itself in the social life of other people, sufficient to make their presence in Ireland on any large scale obnoxious’. The flaccidity of Finlay’s reasoning was disclosed in what he considered his clinching argument, that ‘one of the most remarkable features of the Jewish character is its consistency under diverse circumstances and even widely separated intervals of time. What the Jews have been in the thirteenth century they are found to have been in the nineteenth; what they have shown themselves to be in the Ukraine, they may be expected to be in Ireland.’34 The constancy of prejudice was self-validating. Finlay is not to be taken as a spokesman for the Catholic Church, though his articles refracted aspects of the views of Irish bishops and priests, as well as of the ‘informed’ Catholic professional laity.
Finlay’s mistake was that, as a result of his confident sense of the benign regard in which he was held as an intellectual and generally public-spirited Jesuit, he decided to write at considerable length on a subject that most Irish people—Jews and non-Jews—fastidiously avoided, and thereby revealed the depth of his ignorance and prejudice. Moneylending and the sale of goods on credit were matters of public concern, and not all condemnations of practices deemed to be usurious were anti-Semitic in nature. This was a distinction of which Joyce was conscious. In Ulysses he took his family’s revenge on the non-Jewish but faintly Jewish-sounding possessor of the name Reuben J. Dodd, a moneylender from whom John Stanislaus Joyce had borrowed. John Stanislaus Joyce was unable to raise the money to pay back the loan, resulting in the sale of his remaining houses in Cork in 1893, which ended his connection to the city.35 Dodd was never forgiven by Joyce, father or son; but Joyce was prepared, in a daringly black joke, to render him the object of the obloquy a Jewish moneylender might have attracted under the guise of demonstrating the arbitrariness and plain error of anti-Semitic prejudice. In Ulysses Dodd is twinned with Sir Frederick Falkiner, his judicial near nemesis. Finlay, attesting to Jesuit familiarity with the professional life of the city, in the third of his articles on the Jews, wrote, ‘Not many of us realise that we have in our midst in Dublin a civil court whose chief function is to arrange disputes between Jewish creditors and the debtors who have been tempted into fatal bargains by their wily offers, a court where the part of Shylock is often rehearsed, and the pound of flesh not seldom paid.’36
This was the court where Falkiner presided as the Recorder of Dublin from 1876 to 1905, a high municipal functionary rather than a judge proper. Two outbursts of judicial spleen towards the Jews marred his career in office. In the first, in October 1892, trying a case of debt against a Jew, he declared, ‘These fellows would swear to anything. The Jews are here in this city and are evidently going to stay, but if they are they will have to obey the laws of this Court.’ His remarks caused controversy, and he offered a convincing apology in open court. The second was worse. After sentencing a Jewish defendant to a year’s imprisonment for window-breaking, an offence that had become gallingly frequent, he burst out, ‘You are a specimen of your race and nation that cause you to be hunted out of every country.’ This was too much, and elicited an immediate protest from Ernest Wormser Harris, president of the Dublin Hebrew Congregation, ‘against anyone occupying a judicial position making use of the words that level the grossest insult upon every member of the Jewish Community in Dublin and throughout the United Kingdom’. Harris also had T. M. Healy and Stuart Samuel raise the comments in the House of Commons. Falkiner apologised in a letter to Sir Joseph Sebag Montefiore, president of the London Committee of Deputies of British Jews, and in open court in Dublin.37
In Dublin Falkiner had a popular renown as a compassionate ‘poor man’s judge’.38 Falkiner characteristically sought to find ways to grind down the law’s angularity. The anonymous Dublin barrister who wrote an astute weekly column titled ‘Our Judges’ in 1890 intriguingly invoked Bassanio, the suitor of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, whose loan his friend Antonio guarantees to Shylock with his own flesh as surety: ‘I do think that Mr. Falkiner has some sympathy with Bassanio’s view of the equitable duty of a court. “To do a great right do a little wrong”. Certain it is that he has recourse to every kind of device in order to bring about what he conceives to be the fair and reasonable settlement of a dispute. He assumes, to begin with, in litigation one side is only a little better than the other, and he endeavours to strike an even balance between them.’39 This pretty much corresponds to what Bloom muses: ‘Has his own ideas of justice in the recorder’s court. Well-meaning old man.’40 In Ulysses Joyce’s principal purpose is to render how Falkiner is perceived from the Dublin street. What is striking is that Bloom aligns himself with the generally favourable view of Falkiner. Bloom observes Falkiner in ‘Lestrygonians’ entering the Freemason’s Hall in Molesworth Street for, he surmises, postprandial wine and judicial bavardage: ‘Old legal cronies cracking a magnum.’41 Bloom then elaborates: ‘The devil on moneylenders. Gave Reuben J. a great strawcalling. Now he’s really what they call a dirty jew. Power those judges have. Crusty old topers in wigs. Bear with a sore paw. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.’42
This is magnificently done. The moneylender and the high judicial functionary are each assigned their place in the commedia dell’arte of Dublin litigation. There is a suggestion of the arbitrariness of legal authority; and Bloom is allowed to call Reuben Dodd, who isn’t Jewish, ‘a dirty jew’. As Robert Boyle S.J. noted, ‘Bloom is adopting the phrase used by the anti-Semites, but he is using it to condemn a Catholic’ and the anti-Semites who use the phrase.43 It is the most prominent instance of Joyce enlarging the category of Jews to include those perceived as or accused of being Jewish, his complex and sophisticated retorsion on anti-Semites of the subjectivity and insubstantiality of their categorisations.44
Talk of Falkiner recurs in the ‘Cyclops’ episode. As they discuss the case of a Jewish swindler who offered cheap passages to Canada, Alf Bergan’s observations (‘Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes’) and Ned Lambert’s comment that ‘you can cod him up to the two eyes’ relate to Falkiner’s likely sympathy for a Jewish victim of the swindle who attracts little fellow feeling in Barney Kiernan’s.45 Part of Joyce’s point is that it is naïve to believe that the threads of commercial as of civic life can be separated out, and it is senseless to dwell on one single moment of a sequential transaction considered apart from its socio-economic setting. It transpires that the anti-Semitic narrator of ‘Cyclops’ has himself been reduced to the role of a collector of bad debts (‘How are the mighty fallen!’) and is retained by Moses Herzog of St Kevin’s Parade (whom he refers to as ‘the little jewy’) to pursue monies owed to Herzog by a Stoneybatter plumber called Geraghty, whom, as the episode opens, he has called on. Geraghty insouciantly threatens to have Herzog prosecuted for trading without a moneylender’s licence.46 All are caught in the coils of the immiserated commerce and limited employments of Dublin, calling to mind the setting of ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, where Joe Hynes makes his first entrance in Joyce’s fiction.
The Limerick Boycott, 1904
An aggressively assertive young Limerick-born Redemptorist priest named John Creagh, who was the director of the Archconfraternity of the Holy Family, established by the Redemptorists in Limerick, preached on 11 January and 18 January 1904 viciously and inflammatory anti-Semitic sermons. His first sermon exemplified the transcontinental contagion of anti-Semitism reaching even into a highly insular culture with little sense of European politics, to which Joyce was acutely alert. Proceeding from the blood libel (‘Nowadays they dare not kidnap and slay Christian children’), Creagh declaimed, ‘They were sucking the blood of other nations, but those nations rose up and turned them out and they came to our land to fasten themselves on us like leeches, and to draw our blood when they had been forced away from other countries.’ There were moreover ‘no greater enemies of the Catholic church than the Jews’.47 Creagh urged his congregation to have no commercial dealings with Jews. His sermons gave rise to manifestations of anti-Semitism in the city, causing great terror in the small Jewish community, and to a boycotting of the city’s Jewish traders, leading not only to a loss of new business but opportunistic defaulting on existing debts, which in turn led to several households leaving the city over the months that followed.48 The attack on the Jews of Limerick was condemned by Michael Davitt and deprecated by John Redmond.49 The Bishop of Limerick, whose intervention was solicited, did not disavow Creagh’s sermons, of which he is unlikely to have approved.50 Creagh’s views, so far as they related to the exploitation of the poor of Limerick, continued to be defended in a characteristic tone of defiance by Arthur Griffith in the United Irishman: ‘We are glad Fr. Creagh has given the advice he did. We trust he will continue to give it. We have no quarrel with the Jews’ religion, but all the howling of journalistic hacks and the balderdash of uninformed sentimentalists will not make us, nor should it make any honest man, cease to expose knavery, because the knavery is carried on by Jews.’51 Creagh continued to fulminate against the perils of alcohol, evil literature, and obscenity in the theatre. When the thrusting young populist was appointed to the Redemptorists’ new mission in the Philippines, there was a large crowd to see him off when he left the railway station in Limerick in May 1906.52
The Limerick boycott, while far short of a pogrom, was disquieting. It is duly noted, though a little perfunctorily, in the ‘Eumaeus’ episode of Ulysses, as Bloom, having escaped Barney Kiernan’s in the ‘Cyclops’ episode, talks to Stephen about the Jews and says, referring to the invocation of prejudice by Irish parish priests, ‘That’s the juggle on which the p.p.’s raise the wind on false pretences’.53
Intercommunal occasions were sparse. One such was when, on 13 February 1909, John Wyse Power lectured on ‘the Jews in Ireland in the Middle Ages’ to the Jewish Literary and Social Club at 57 Lombard Street West, chaired by Maurice Solomons, honorary consul for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.54 Power (1859–1926) was a journalist and a Parnellite who, when the Freeman’s Journal forsook Parnell, left its employment for the Irish Independent. He thereafter edited the Evening Herald for several years,55 and Joyce knew him. The 1909 lecture, of which Joyce must have somehow become aware, is likely to have inspired the fact that in ‘Cyclops’ it is John Wyse Nolan, who is inspired by Power, who patiently advises the Citizen that it was said that Bloom had given Griffith the idea for many of the issues for which Sinn Féin agitated.56 ‘And after all, says John Wyse, why can’t a Jew love his country like the next fellow?’57
Joyce did not carry with him from Dublin in 1904 any strongly marked sense of the Jews of Dublin. There is a period of overlap between Dublin and Trieste that is a prelude to Joyce’s active curiosity about Jews. Some of the Dubliners stories showed an orientalising sense of Eastern exoticism. From Rome in September 1906 he wrote to Stanislaus, ‘I have a new story for Dubliners in my head. It deals with Mr. Hunter’.58 Since he did not describe who Alfred H. Hunter was to Stanislaus, they must have discussed him previously. Joyce may at some point have thought, as Stanislaus told Richard Ellmann for the first edition of the biography,59 that Hunter was Jewish; he may have had an unfaithful wife, and he seems to have extricated Joyce from an altercation in Dublin in 1904.60 Though it would not have prevented him from being an inspiration for Leopold Bloom, Hunter was not in fact Jewish.61
‘Kicking Up a Bloody Murder about Bloody Nothing’
What is striking is the rarity of public expression of anti-Semitic sentiments in Ireland. These relatively meagre episodes are rehearsed in all the treatments of Joyce and the Jews, and in the history of Irish Jewry in which they merge. But they are various and disparate and do not cohere in the expression of a continuous anti-Semitic theme in Irish public life. It is open to debate what that owes in nationalist Ireland to the thin if much-vaunted Irish immunity to sectarian prejudice, to the extent to which English parliamentary norms—however formalistic—informed Irish political discourse, or to pure demographics: the fact that the size of the Jewish population prevented it becoming a political issue. European Jews were, for very good reason, highly sensitive to manifestations of anti-Semitism, which were capable of having a sharply dissuasive effect on Jewish immigration to Ireland. The socio-political reception of Jews in Ireland, as well as economic prospects, constrained the size of the Jewish population.
In Ireland anti-Semitism, or the potential for it, lay for the most part submerged beneath the surface of formal public discourse. Part of the political conception of Ulysses was the universality of arbitrary prejudices in Europe against Jews, even in a country where the Jewish population was slight. This is a rich and challenging theme, which involved addressing demotic prejudices that had scant political articulation and proportionately sparse political rebuttal. It became a critical point of entry into Joyce’s critique of nationalist chauvinism and insularity, but one that necessitated discerning measure.
In relation to anti-Semitism in Ireland, what Joyce does with consummate brilliance is to abrogate the protocols of discourse which avoided the subject, and to render prejudice against Jews in the Dublin middle class or lower-middle class foregathered in a public house in a commercial part of the north city. The continuities with ‘Ivy Day’ are strong. Joyce has a certain human tolerance of Dublin people of the lower-middle-class living in perpetual financial insecurity, watching the fortunes of their urban neighbours with desperate covetousness. Elsewhere in the novel, Joyce deals with Protestant prejudice against Jews, and what Joyce correctly discerns as the peculiar proclivity of the professional classes to anti-Semitism, rendered in the figure of Buck Mulligan.
In renderings of anti-Semitism, Joyce is a pivotal figure in European literature and culture. Ulysses is a strategically conceived indictment of anti-Semitism that did much at a crucial time to make anti-Semitism unacceptable, and to render the opinions of anti-Semites on non-Jewish issues inherently suspect and at odds with the modern. It could be said that in this aspect Joyce maximised what could be achieved politically by a novel. In Ulysses, at the same moment at which he fixes anti-Semitism as a pernicious political and intellectual evil, he recognises that not every anti-Semitic comment establishes that its maker is to be considered an anti-Semite, and perhaps that there are gradations as well as types of anti-Semitism. These, of course, are propositions that could now, in the rigid identitarian usages of the twenty-first century, in which any manifestation of prejudice is equated with an anti-‘ism’, be considered highly objectionable. But identitarian categorisations, insofar as they may be valid—and it is hard to forget that Joyce has always managed to outlive ideological and quasi-ideological fashions—cannot usefully be applied to Joyce’s writings, even in their relation to anti-Semitism. It is not simply that they are anachronistic, that Joyce, for all his modernism, is a child of the nineteenth century and its (not universally) less constrained protocols of discourse, but he is a writer, a weigher of words and of what prompts their expression, and of the people by whom and of the settings in which they are uttered.
There is an ambivalence in the Citizen as a figure of anti-Semitism. He is a developed character of some complexity with a genuine if splenetic sense of humour that is not always thuggishly applied, rather than a flat archetype of anti-Semitism.62 His anti-Semitism is an aspect of a larger xenophobic racism. He is a thoroughly, it might be said extravagantly, bigoted Irish nationalist. The Citizen certainly does not like Jews, but his antipathy to Bloom is a corollary of his blind nationalism rather than the expression of a free-standing anti-Semitism. His race hatred is securely fixed on the English; the Jews are marginal to the binarism that characterises the politics of the Citizen. That does not render the Citizen not an anti-Semite, but it is relevant to characterising his anti-Semitism. It could hardly be said that the political worldview of the Citizen was significantly informed by a prejudice against Jews: he is not that type of anti-Semite. It is more that his anti-Semitism is a marker of the fallacy of his rabidly anti-modern Irish nationalism. Bloom has interposed what is to the Citizen his extremely irritating presence in the Citizen’s obsessional quarrel with the English. When Bloom defies him, which is to say when he refuses to efface himself, the Citizen explodes.
