The Jews of Ireland

Joyce's residence in Trieste made him well aware of the corrosive effects of narrow-minded nationalism, and the way it can be used to threaten and destroy. His positive portrayal of Bloom makes him an honorable exception among his contemporaries, many of whom shared that casual disdain for Jews that we find, for example, in the novels of John Buchan, or in certain poems by T. S. Eliot. Griffith's antisemitism was shared by Oliver St. John Gogarty--Buck Mulligan in Ulysses--who viciously attacked Jews in Griffith's newspaper Sinn Fein (1906) and was found guilty of libeling several Jewish businessmen in Dublin as late as 1937. Maud Gonne was an anti-Dreyfusard. In Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (1899), the evil merchants who go about the famine-stricken countryside offer to purchase souls with gold. They are based on the reviled "soupers," Protestant zealots who fed the hungry if they would leave the Catholic Church during the Great Famine. But their "Eastern" garb and manner suggest that they are also Jewis h--the same rural peddlers who would infuriate Father Creagh. In the 1930s, Yeats was briefly an admirer of General O'Duffy, who led the Blueshirts, Ireland's short-lived fascist movement, and held complicated ideas about racial purity.

In Lebor Gabala Erenn (the Book of the Takings of Ireland), the account of Irish history that the medieval Irish told themselves, the first settlers in Ireland were Noah's disreputable niece, Cessair, and forty companions; all were promptly drowned in the Flood. The Irish or Gaels arrived much later and are descended from one Nel through his son Gaedel. Nel learned all the languages that came into being at Babel, borrowing the best features from each to inventfrish. Settling beside the Red Sea, he entertained Moses and his people the night before they crossed. Moses invited Nel and his family to come with them to the Promised Land. When Nel declined, Moses assured him that his descendants would one day reach their own promised land in the western ocean; it would be free of snakes.

Professor Keogh does not begin his account of the Jews in Ireland quite so far back. There appear to have been very few, if anyjews in Ireland until the late eighteenth century. Since Ireland was never conquered by the Romans, it is unlikely thatJews settled there under the Empire. Later the unsettled conditions of Irish life, with a number of petty kingdoms frequently at war with one another, made the country inhospitable and travel difficult. Eventually there was a small Sephardic community. Until about 1880, there were no more than about 35OJews in Dublin, and perhaps a few more elsewhere in the country. The Irish Jewish community essentially came into existence between 1880 and 1901 with the arrival of Ashkenazim from a single Lithuanian village, Akmene, fleeing Tsarist pogroms. Dublin legend asserts that many of them had booked passage to America, and were landed in Dublin by unscrupulous ship captains who assured them they had reached New York.