Reflections by Manus O’Riordan on some aspects of Irish Jewish history in the age of Joyce

Ever since James Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann put it about half a century ago that the character of the ‘Citizen’ in Joyce’s novel Ulysses had been modelled on the Gaelic Athletic Association’s founder Michael Cusack, the label of “anti-Semite” is one that has been left to tarnish Cusack’s reputation. Quite apart from the novel itself, and various radio and stage adaptations, two screen depictions of the ‘Citizen’ have been noteworthy – a particularly powerful performance by Geoffrey Golden in Joseph Strick’s pioneering 1967 black-and-white film, Ulysses, and the more recent performance by Patrick Bergin in Seán Walsh’s full-colour 2003 version, with the more gimmicky title of Bl,.m (Bloom). It is, however, most unfortunate that, because of the ill-informed “conventional wisdom” that continues to prevail regarding Cusack, far too many viewers will have responded to such portrayals of the ‘Citizen’ with an unthinking reflex that says “GAA bigot!”

The publication of a new book by Dr. Cormac Ó Gráda of the Economics Department of University College Dublin, entitled Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, should therefore serve as the catalyst for reassessing the truth or falsehood of this image of the GAA’s founder. All the more so, since among all of what we may designate as the “blooming conundrums” of Joycean explorations in Irish Jewish history, the question of Michael Cusack is one that Ó Gráda’s book does not examine at all! There is, however, so much more in Ó Gráda’s stimulating treatment of his subject matter that it prompts not only a detailed review of that book in its own right, but also a comprehensive essay-in-review in respect of the whole approach that other writers have adopted to date in respect of Irish Jewish history, within which context the character of the GAA’s founder will also be revisited.

Is Cormac Ó Gráda a pogrom-denier and, if so, does it matter? This new history of Ireland’s Jewish community is so challenging of fixed positions that it also invites some further challenges to stereotypes and misconceptions, some of which are, while others aren’t, touched on in this book. Take, for example, the following set of circumstances that have not otherwise been brought together and properly chronicled, either in this or any other previous history. In the turbulent early years of the Irish Free State, 1922-23, two people who had been listed as residents of Dublin’s Lennox Street on the occasion of the 1911 census would find themselves murdered by Free State army officers: one victim a Catholic and the other a Jew; one a civil servant and the other a tailor. Confounding the stereotypes, it was the Irish Republican leader Harry Boland - War of Independence comrade and friend [but Civil War enemy] of Michael Collins – who was both a Catholic and tailor; while the Jewish victim - Ernest Kahan - earned his living as a civil servant in Ireland’s Department of Agriculture.

Or take the following narrative, every single word of which is true, and all of which can indeed be confirmed in Ó Gráda’s book. In the early decades of the 20th century, there was a sustained three-pronged campaign against Jewish moneylenders in Ireland – cultural, political and paramilitary. The Kulturkampf [cultural struggle] took the form of a novel, with a title - The Moneylender - that went straight to the heart of its subject matter. This book was to go through as many as five editions between 1908 and 1931. What first arrested the eye of the reader, however, was the fact that it was adorned with a cover that would not have been out of place among the racist stereotypes that peopled the cartoons of Nazi Germany’s chief organ of anti-Semitism, Der Stürmer. That cover of The Moneylender graphically portrayed a very dark, bearded and hook-nosed Jew, surrounded by a shower of cascading coinage. In the meantime, one particular Irish politician, later to be twice chosen as Lord Mayor of Dublin, was waging his own campaign in the Dáil to stamp out what he called “this rotten trade”. But he also invited and relied upon paramilitary back up for his crusade that, over the course of the summer of 1926, took the form of IRA armed raids on the offices of moneylenders, most of the targets being Jewish. Proof, then, of Catholic Ireland’s endemic anti-Semitism? The only problem with any such conclusion is that both the crusading novelist and the politician in question were themselves Jewish!

Cormac Ó Gráda’s latest work is a refreshing break with the media-driven slant that infects so much of the present-day writing of Irish history. It represents scholarship of the highest integrity, and follows in both the spirit and footsteps of his latest book on the Irish Famine, of which he has long been an outstanding expert. (1). Ó Gráda’s work constitutes a healthy antidote to the political spin that resulted in an appalling depiction by novelist Roddy Doyle of the War of Independence, in which its IRA leadership was portrayed as a proto-Nazi junta bent on ordering the murder of an elderly Jewish gentlemen, for no reason other than anti-Semitic hatred at its most vile. (2). The actual historical fact is that there was not even a single, solitary Jewish victim who was killed either deliberately or accidentally by the IRA during the War of Independence. In the meantime all the published historians, novelists and journalists have left it to myself to research the one actual Jewish victim of that War, an immigrant from Tsarist Russia who was to meet her death in December 1920 as a result of the opening phase of a British pogrom against the whole citizenry of Cork. So let us do her the honour of memorialising her name. She was Sarah Medalie – a Russian-born, Cork Jewish victim of the Black-and-Tans. (3).

There had, of course, been Catholic acts of violence against the Jewish community in Limerick in 1904. This was an issue considered to be still so sensitive at the end of the Second World War by the Irish Jewish community’s own first historian, Bernard Shillman, that he completely sidestepped it and made no mention of it whatsoever in his book. (4). But that same issue was to be gone into in quite some detail in the far more substantial work of that community’s next historian, Louis Hyman. (5). Moreover, it was Hyman’s pioneering research that had also gone on to fill in the biographical details of the Jewish names that were mentioned by James Joyce throughout the text of Ulysses. (6).

While Hyman referred in passing to a protest against anti-Semitism by the protagonist of Joyce’s novel, Leopold Bloom, he did not otherwise go into any deeper examination of the character of the ‘Citizen’, whose intensely bigoted anti-Semitic outbursts Bloom has been forced to endure. Indeed, Hyman’s chapters on Limerick and Joyce largely inhabit parallel universes. Beyond a passing reference, Hyman did not explore in any detail if there was something more than coincidence involved in chronicling that racist outburst in Dublin on a date in 1904 when the Limerick boycott of its Jewish community still remained a current and burning issue. This was the connection to be addressed by myself two years later in an article written to mark the 70th anniversary of what had become known as “Bloomsday”. (7).

In this 1974 article I reproduced at length Leopold Bloom’s discussion of nationality that elicits such contempt and fury on the part of the ‘Citizen’.

“Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.
- Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations.
- But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
- Yes, says Bloom.
- What it is? says John Wyse.
- A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people liv