Bloomsday And Irish Antisemitism
Across Dublin and in various outposts of Joycean devotion around the world, people are reading aloud from his masterpiece, eating kidneys and raising a glass to Leopold Bloom, the amiable hero of Ulysses. Bloom is Jewish. Not emphatically Jewish, perhaps, but definitely so.
Dublin delights in Bloom. Yet one of the key episodes of Ulysses turns on the insistence by the voice of nationalist Ireland that this Jewish Dubliner cannot really belong to the true Irish nation.
It happens in the “Cyclops” episode, in which an unnamed narrator and his companion, “the citizen”, a belligerent nationalist caricature (is he really that?) hold court in Barney Kiernan’s pub. The citizen turns on Bloom with notable ferocity. When Bloom replies that his nation is Ireland, that he was born there, the answer does not satisfy him. The citizen threatens to kill him and hurls a biscuit tin after him as he leaves.
Joyce set this scene in 1904 and wrote it between 1914 and 1922, long before the state of Israel existed and long before the politics of the Middle East became the dominant prism through which European antisemitism often expresses itself. Yet Joyce saw clearly that there was a streak of it a mile wide running through Irish nationalism. The Citizen is not a fringe figure in the novel. He represents the “true Ireland” from which Joyce fled and never returned.
I wrote about Ireland and antisemitism a while back and, at the time, I leaned towards the view that what presents as antisemitism in Ireland is better understood as a form of moral narcissism: a self-regarding performance of righteousness rather than a genuine hatred of Jews. I am no longer so sure. I think there are strong elements of both, and that I was giving too much credit to the narcissism as an explanation and not enough to what lies beneath it.
The failed attempt to rename Herzog Park in Dublin is instructive here. The park is named after Chaim Herzog, born in Dublin, who served as President of Israel from 1983 to 1993. The campaign to strip his name from it was driven by his association with Israel and, less explicitly but unmistakeably, by a desire to remove a marker of Jewishness from the city’s landscape.
It did not succeed, but the fact that it was attempted at all, and attracted serious support is noteworthy . Whatever one thinks of Israel, Herzog’s place in Dublin’s history is undeniable. This was not simply a dispute about foreign policy. It raised the question of whether Jewishness itself has a legitimate place in Ireland’s civic memory.
Moral narcissism plays a supporting role. Ireland sees itself as an exemplary post-colonial democracy, and having largely outgrown its own nationalism, or at least grown embarrassed by it, has found in the Palestinian cause a respectable place on which to project
Moral narcissism explains the certainty of Ireland’s judgments and the confidence with which they are delivered. It explains the tone. It does not entirely explain the target.
False equivalence between the Irish national story and the Palestinian one adds further fuel. The mapping has emotional force, even where it is historically dishonest, and emotional force is what moves crowds. But neither this nor moral narcissism, separately or together, accounts for the intensity of what we are seeing.
Moral narcissism does not explain Herzog Park. False equivalence does not explain the readiness to locate Jewish malevolence behind every event, or the enthusiasm with which the worst interpretations are reached for and held.
Antisemitism in Ireland, and probably in much of Europe, is a subterranean river. It runs just beneath the surface of public life, emerging in moments of stress or permission. The Hamas-Hezbollah-Israel war did not create the river, it just allowed it to burst to the surface. The passion and intensity of Irish reactions to the war, reactions that have been, to put it gently, selective in their moral application, suggest that the river has been flowing strongly all along.
Joyce noticed our national allergy to Jews and rejected our nationalism.
The citizen is still in the pub, now draped in a keffiyeh and blathering about the Zionist danger And on Bloomsday, in a city that celebrates its Jewish hero with great affection and no self-examination, it is worth thinking about what Joyce wrote and asking what, in a hundred years, has changed.