James joyce, p.99
James Joyce, page 99
Yet Joyce’s observation of the practices and thinking of observant members of the Triestine Jewish community was limited. His Triestine Jewish friends were highly assimilated, and often irredentist. Livia Schmitz’s father came from a Jewish family in Ferrara but had turned Catholic, unlike his cousin Felice Venezian, the leader of the Italian nationalist party in Trieste who kept his name and religious identity unchanged. Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo) was a non-observant Jew who had, after his marriage to the Catholic Livia in a civil marriage, agreed to convert to Catholicism and underwent a second marriage in the church of San Giacomo.87 Schmitz had been in the 1890s, in the words of his biographer, ‘a curious Schopenhauerian Socialist’, the qualification reflecting Schmitz’s sceptical pessimism.88 His socialist leanings tempered his irridentist sympathies. To Schmitz was ascribed the remark, ‘It isn’t race that makes a Jew, it’s life.’89 While some doubt has been cast on whether Schmitz actually said this, it seems perfectly to convey his assessment of his own Jewishness, and something of his phlegmatic temperament. Stanislaus recalled an occasion where, because his brother was having eye trouble, he himself went out to Servola to give the English lesson to Schmitz. Schmitz asked him wryly, ‘Tell me something about Irishmen—something intimate, something not generally known. You know your brother has been asking me so many questions about Jews that I want to get even with him.’90 Richard Ellmann believed that the ‘prototype’ (as if there had to be one) for Leopold Bloom was ‘almost certainly Ettore Schmitz, whose grandfather came from Hungary’.91 This is overconfident, but it seems unquestionable that the character of Schmitz did contribute to the making of Bloom, while a sketch done by Joyce suggests that in his physical aspect, Bloom was modelled on Schmitz.
Joyce’s relationship with Schmitz was unique, and each influenced the other’s writing. It is at the same time representative of how Joyce’s understanding of the Jews of Trieste was achieved principally through his relations with assimilated Jewish bourgeois whom he met primarily through his professional role as the prestigious teacher of English in Trieste that he became. To that has to be added what he gleaned from his scanning of Triestine newspapers, which is untraceable but certainly significant: he was, quite apart from his voracious appetite for newsprint, a contributor to Il Piccolo della Sera, and many of his Triestine friends had journalistic involvements.92 Some of the Jews of Trieste he knew were observant, such as Moses Dlugacz. There is a fleeting glimpse of Joyce’s engagement with the community of observant Jews, from an anonymous source which there is no particular reason to discount. Louis Hyman relayed to Richard Ellmann an interview he had conducted in Haifa with a woman who had been a former student of Joyce in Trieste and who did not wish to be named. She told Hyman, ‘Joyce seemed to like the company of Jews and often frequented their parties at homes and the Hanukkah and Purim parties at the Zionist society of Trieste and danced once or twice upright as a rod in perfect rhythm.’93
FIGURE 17.2. James Joyce’s sketch of Leopold Bloom, Paris, ca. 1923 (Wikimedia).
‘Jewgreek is Greekjew’: Archetypes and Stereotypes
While Joyce’s interest in Jews, Jewishness, and the political predicament of Jews in Europe derives from his life in Trieste, his thinking was informed by what he read before and after his Triestine exile. The discrimination with which he drew on what he read, and how he refined his conception of what he was writing against, reveals much about his fastidious political judgement and imaginative discernment.
It begins with Matthew Arnold, whom Joyce read in Dublin. Arnold’s younger brother Thomas, a convert to Catholicism, taught English in University College, Dublin until his death in 1900.94 Joyce was highly sceptical of Matthew Arnold’s conception of Celticism, but Arnold is important for Joyce also in his promulgation of the highly influential idea of the conflict in British culture between the rigidity of Hebraism (by which Arnold meant Judeo-Christianity) and the spontaneity and crystalline purity of Hellenism, which he believed had to be reconciled. It was the idea of a contest between Judaism and Hellenism, rather than its fatuous elaboration by Arnold, that caught Joyce’s attention. More important for Joyce was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings attracted considerable interest in Dublin.95 Among Joyce’s contemporaries, Thomas Michael Kettle was an admirer but ceased to be at the outbreak of the First World War. Joyce began to read Nietzsche from around 1903 while still in Dublin,96 and Mr Duffy in ‘A Painful Case’, which Joyce wrote in Trieste in 1905, is a portrait of a thwarted and unreflective aspirant Nietzschean.97 The Promethean will to power of the Greeks had been corrupted by Judeo-Christianity, originating weirdly enough in Nietzsche’s argument of the ‘slave mentality’ of the Jews in their revolt against the Egyptians, in Nietzschean ressentiment, the merging of resentment against the ruler with the self-hatred engendered by subjugation. Nietzsche was, however, admiring of the ‘resourcefulness in soul and intellect of our modern Jews’, and his rendering of the Jews of modernity informed or was at least a stage in Joyce’s own thinking and distantly contributed to the formation of Leopold Bloom, as Davison has convincingly argued.98 While Joyce played endlessly with and subverted the idea of the polarity of Hellenism and Hebraism, Greek and Jew, it retained at least a superficial valency for him in his sense of contemporary ethnicities. While he was walking with his Jewish friend Ottocaro Weiss in Zurich, they met and conversed a long while with a Greek acquaintance. Joyce remarked afterwards, ‘It’s strange—you spoke like a Greek and he spoke like a Jew.’99
Joyce’s reading on the Jews continued in a less abstract vein. The treatment by the then highly influential Guglielmo Ferrero in L’Europa giovane (1897) of the ‘Messianic conscience’ of the Jews, of which he cited Karl Marx as a modern exponent, had a significant if transient effect on Joyce when he read it in November 1906.100 If this was in part because it helped him break free of the impasse of his espousal of Italian revolutionary syndicalism, it also prompted him to begin to conceptualise the intellectual role of the Jews in the modern era, starting with Cesare Lombroso, Ferrero’s father-in-law.101 He also discovered an affinity: Ferrero characterised German Jews such as Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx as ‘esuli voluntari’;102 Joyce had the previous year described his situation to Stanislaus as that of ‘a voluntary exile’.103 Joyce read also an 1836 tract of Carlo Cattaneo, a Milanese liberal economist, which pointed to the effect the curtailment of the economic activities of Jews had in retarding the economic and cultural development of the countries which imposed them.104
Joyce’s reading carried him further, into psychological works on real or supposed Jewish character traits. He acquired some familiarity with the works of Otto Weininger, though when and by what means is uncertain. Weininger (1880–1903) was a precocious philosopher who achieved fame after his suicide in the house in Vienna where Beethoven had died. He wrote that ‘by Judaism I mean neither a race nor a people nor a recognised creed. I think of it as a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is possible for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion only amongst the Jews. Antisemitism itself will confirm my point of view.’ This explained the fact that ‘the bitterest Antisemites are to be found amongst the Jews themselves’.105 This was an instance of the circularity in treatments of Jewish traits (not only among anti-Semites, which objectively Weininger, a Jewish convert, was) which Joyce seems to have come to find exasperating. Weininger believed that there were transitional states between male and female. More misogynistic than anti-Semitic, Weininger saw the Jew or the Jewish type (whatever that might have been) as sharing what were for him the negative attributes of the feminine. It seems likely that Weininger is a principal source for the idea of Bloom as ‘a finished example of the new womanly man’,106 as Dr Punch Costello, in the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses, characterises him.107 The ‘Subject Notebook’ now in the National Library of Ireland which Joyce began compiling in October 1917 establishes definitively that Joyce read Weininger—the notes relate to Über die letzten Dinge, a collection of aphorisms and essays published not long after Weininger’s death—but suggests that at least by that stage Joyce’s interest in Weininger’s work ranged beyond his treatment of the Jews.108
Joyce owned in Trieste Maurice Fishberg’s The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (1911).109 Fishberg, an American sociologist, noted that there was no book in English treating of ‘the race traits of the Jews.… It appears that the prevailing opinion is that the Jews, alleged to have maintained themselves in absolute racial purity for three or four thousand years, may prove hard to assimilate.’ Fishberg’s lengthy treatise is an essay on assimilation: ‘The fact that the differences between Jews and Christians are not everywhere racial, due to anatomical or physiological peculiarities, but are solely the result of the social and political environment, explains our optimism as regards the ultimate obliteration of all distinctions between Jews and Christians in Europe and America.’110 That was a bit too positivistic for Joyce, even if he agreed with the discounting of the idea of racial purity. Fishberg did discuss the supposed Jewish proclivity to suicide, concluding after somewhat exhaustive analysis that ‘the rates of self-destruction among the Jews are not at all influenced by ethnic factors’.111 In Ulysses, Bloom’s father, Rudolph Bloom, formerly Rudolf Virag, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, ends his own life in a hotel in Ennis. Ettore Schmitz died on 13 September 1928 from injuries sustained the previous day when the car in which he was a passenger slid off the bridge over the Livenza River outside Treviso and collided with a tree.112 Awaiting further intelligence, Joyce relayed his ‘bad news’ to Harriet Shaw Weaver, to whom he avowed, ‘Somehow in the case of Jews I always suspect suicide though there was no reason in his case especially since he came into fame, unless his health had taken a very bad turn.’113
It is futile to try to capture the range of Joyce’s reading on the subject of the Jews. In Trieste, he purchased in the year of its publication and read at least in part Henry Wickham Steed’s The Habsburg Monarchy, published in 1913.114 Joyce was certainly aware of the author before making his purchase. Henry Wickham Steed (1872–1956) joined The Times in 1895 and was successively its correspondent in Berlin, Rome, and Vienna from 1902 to 1913. He was considered the pre-eminent English authority on the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was also an expert on Italian affairs. Suspicious of the intentions of Austria-Hungary (which banned his book) and Germany, he was correctly to predict the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the attack on Serbia, and was principally responsible for the editorial policy of The Times in the prelude to the First World War and was the paper’s editor from 1919 to 1922.115 His considerable expertise and astuteness were marred by a gross vein of anti-Semitism to which his Habsburg Monarchy amply attested. He was obsessed by the twin influences in Austria of ‘Jesuitism and Clericalism’ and of ‘anti-Clerical Liberalism’ in which he discerned, as in the press (which he characterised as ‘almost entirely Jewish’), the preponderant influence of ‘the “Liberal” Jew’. Jews were also behind ‘ “Revolutionary” Socialism and Social Democracy’.116 This was explicable by the ‘distinguishing characteristic’ of the Jew: ‘This characteristic is superabundant intellectualism or power of abstract ratiocination. His faculty of concentration, his intense inner life, his freedom from the trammels of place and country, his practical rationalism and workaday purposefulness would fit him in a peculiar degree to rule a world organised on some intellectual, symmetrical plan.’117 He proclaimed ‘the superiority of the Sephardim type’ over ‘the degraded, bow-legged repulsive type often to be found among the Ashkenism’, whose influx he considered to be at the root of anti-Semitism in the empire. He was sympathetic to and acutely prophetic on the subject of Zionism.118 Steed provided a reminder to Joyce of English imperial anti-Semitism, and may have contributed something to the anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by the Irish Unionist Garrett Deasy in Ulysses: ‘England is in the hands of the Jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay.’119
Joyce in Trieste also encountered members of the Greek minority which played a significant role in the city’s mercantile economy. Baron Ambrogio di Stefano Ralli, whose great wealth derived from his family’s trans-European insurance interests centred on Trieste, and Count Francesco Sordina, whose lineage was Corfiot and whose wealth also derived from insurance, were among his most illustrious students.120 Joyce never studied ancient Greek, a fact of which he was faintly self-conscious, and which Oliver St John Gogarty overtly sought to exploit in their contest of wits. Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver in mid-1921 in a carefully crafted confessional letter, ‘I don’t even know Greek though I am spoken of as erudite’: ‘I spoke or used to speak modern Greek not too badly (I speak four or five languages fluently enough) and have spent a great deal of time with Greeks of all kinds from noblemen down to onionsellers, chiefly the latter. I am superstitious about them. They bring me luck.’121
He was intrigued by the rites of the Greek Orthodox Church. He reported to Stanislaus in April 1905, ‘The Greek mass is strange. The altar is not visible but at times the priest opens the gates and shows himself.’ He concluded, ‘Damn droll! The Greek priest has been taking a great eyeful out of me: Two haruspices.’122 That informed his revision of his story ‘The Sisters’,123 and Bloom’s bemused perspective on the Catholic mass when he strays into St Andrew’s Church (then All Hallows) in Westland Row: ‘Queer the whole atmosphere’, and ‘more interesting if you understood what it was all about’.124
In Zurich in 1917 Joyce read Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée. In Bérard’s scholarly analysis, the Odyssey is an account by a Greek narrator of the journeying of a Phoenician merchant-adventurer; and the Phoenicians were a Semitic people. The importance of the discovery of Bérard for Joyce can scarcely be overstated. In his 1907 lecture ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, Joyce had already asserted that the Irish language had been identified by philologists with the ancient language of the Phoenicians, and that the Phoenicians had established a colony in Ireland ‘which was in decline and had almost disappeared before the first Greek historian took up his quill’.125 Joyce was drawing on the eccentric works of the English eighteenth-century antiquarian and military engineer Charles Vallencey, who lived in Ireland from the mid-eighteenth century and whose tendentious arguments on the Phoenician-Irish nexus were based largely on the Irish Book of Invasions.126 With Bérard, he could now add a Phoenician-Jewish nexus to the Odyssey. Bérard was a means of achieving two purposes that were close to Joyce’s heart: the imaginative reintegration of the world of the eastern Mediterranean, always for Joyce the originary site of Europe, and the connecting of Ireland to that world. Joyce in Zurich enthusiastically discussed the Greek-Hebrew cognates strewn through Bérard’s work with Dr Isaiah Sonne, a rabbi.127
If Joyce’s often-cited phrase ‘Jewgreek is Greekjew’ derives from Bérard, it brings together many of the themes of Joyce’s life and work. The phrase occurs in the ‘Circe’ episode, as part of a parodic retort by Lynch’s cap to some highfalutin and obscure utterances of the drunken Stephen: ‘Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is Greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Ba!’128
Bérard’s work also assisted Joyce in escaping from what had become something of an impasse. He had read all he needed, or perhaps could take, on the subject of supposed Jewish racial traits (the common topic of much of the philo-semitic and anti-Semitic tracts of the era) and of disquisitions on the ‘Jewish question’ as then understood. He had not read so intensively on any contemporary political subject since his self-induction into the principles of Italian revolutionary syndicalism. He was moreover wary of exceptionalism. There is a trace in Ulysses of Joyce’s sense of the exhaustion for his own fictional purposes of his reading, and of a certain weariness, in a passage in the ‘Eumaeus’ episode of consummate subtlety. Bloom is striving to impart to Stephen the standard Jewish and liberal historical arguments in relation to the economic contribution of the Jews in Europe that he assumes, probably correctly, are unknown to Stephen: Spain decayed with the expulsion of the Jews, and England flourished in the wake of the fostering of Jewish immigration by Oliver Cromwell, whom he characterises as ‘an uncommonly able ruffian who in other respects has much to answer for’.129 The condemnation ‘in other respects’ of Cromwell, an execrated figure in Ireland, is precautionary. It is made not to vaunt his own Irishness but for fear of offending Stephen, the possibility of whose ardent nationalism he is habituated by painful experience to allow for: he does not really know Stephen, whom he has only met that day. It is a perfect exemplification of the exigent prudence that Bloom as an Irish Jew had learned the necessity of observing. He strives also to avoid being heavy-handedly pedagogical. He adds that ‘you know the standard works on the subject,’130 which, if true, would render the argument he has just imparted altogether unnecessary. This is hardly a typical ‘Bloomism’; the doubly jarring reference to ‘the standard works on the subject’ in such an elaborately literary novel is a sigh of authorial weariness of ‘the standard works on the subject’ that is carefully pitched to be only faintly audible. It shows Joyce’s moving beyond ‘the standard works’ and political arguments to render imaginatively the position and predicament of the Jewish people in Europe and in Ireland. That strikingly attests to Joyce’s innate sense of what could be achieved politically by his art that could not be attained by engaging directly in political or intellectual controversy.
By the time he read Victor Bérard in 1917, Joyce was turning to the writing of Ulysses. There was an asymmetry. He was left knowing a great deal about anti-Semitism as a prejudice and as a quasi-ideology, its inexhaustible tropes, and the political proclivities which engendered it. His acquired knowledge of Judaism and Jewish culture was imperfect, though much greater than that of most non-Jews. His deployment of what he had read in the characterisation of Leopold Bloom was extraordinarily assured. Born in Ireland, severed from his father’s past as a Jew in Hungary,131 the assimilated Bloom was at once alive to his Jewishness and daily forced to negotiate or confront the suspicious or overtly hostile characterisation to which he was subject as a Jew in Ireland. Joyce’s admiration for and sense of personal affinity with the Jews, born in Trieste and affirmed in Zurich, stayed with him.
