The Jews of Ireland

The 1891 census lists nearly 2000 Jews in Ireland; a decade later there were almost 4000. AJewish neighborhood developed in Dublin, with smaller communities in Cork, Belfast, and Limerick. The Dublin community settled around Clanbrassil Street, where until a few years ago two or three long-abandoned shops with Hebrew lettering could still be seen. Joyce, usually so accurate about Dublin history and topography, makes 52 Clanbrassil Bloom's birthplace around 1864, too early for any marked Jewish association with the neighborhood.

Professor Keogh reminds us that Irish Catholics, like IrishJews, were long excluded from the British Parliament. When Daniel O'Connell, Ireland's "Liberator," won Catholic Emancipation and the right to sit in Parliament for Catholics in 1829, he was quick to support a bill extending the same rights toJews (1831), and another abolishing requirements that Jews wear a distinctive costume (1846); the first of these, however, was rejected by the House of Lords, and Jews were not admitted to Parliament until 1858. O'Counell rightly proclaimed Ireland "the only Christian country that I know of unsullied by any act of persecution against the Jews," a claim that only the Limerick pogrom was to spoil.

Apart from the pogrom, the most troubling episode Keogh records is the conduct of the Irish government before and during the Second World War in regard to Nazi persecution of the Jews. Inevitably this involves examining the behavior and motives of Eamon de Valera, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and Minister of External (Foreign) Affairs from 1932 until 1948. De Valera was a secretive and devious man, passionately committed to freeing Ireland from any last vestiges of British rule. He had survived the 1916 Rising, though sentenced to death. When Ireland gained a kind of quasi-independence as a dominion in 1922, he led an armed rebellion against the new Free State government, and later refused to take the oath to the British sovereign required to sit in the new Dublin Parliament. In 1927 he did take the oath "with scruples," then worked to subvert it in various ingenious ways, and re-wrote the Irish Constitution in 1937 to remove any role for the British Crown. His determined policy of neutrality in World War II w as a further declaration of independence from Britain.

In his 1937 Constitution, de Valera described the "special position" of the Catholic Church as the church of the great majority of Irish men and women (that "special position" was removed by an overwhelming majority in a 1972 referendum). He then went on to list the other denominations then functioning in Ireland as entitled to recognition, legitimacy, and protection, among them "the Jewish Congregations." I have been reliably informed that de Valera was determined to assert Jewish civil rights in the Constitution so that no succeeding government could easily abolish them, as the Nazis had done in Germany. To single out the Jews would be controversial. The solution was to name all Ireland's religious groups. Jewish rights were not, of course, de Valera's chief or only purpose in listing these groups. He continued to hope for a reunion with Northern Ireland, with its Protestant majority. But in the atmosphere of 1930s Europe he was making an important statement.