Bloom is the son of a European Jewish father and a local Irish Catholic woman, a union almost as improbable then as it is now in a country of five million souls where the sprinkling of Jews has never numbered more than 6,000 since at least the 1890s.
Relations between the two groups have at times been rocky, most infamously in the seldom-discussed anti-Jewish riots in Limerick in 1904. During the Second World War either by a remarkable coincidence or because somebody high up in the government thoughtfully supplied the required coordinates, the only major bombing raid conducted by the Germans against the ostensibly neutral Free State saw them taking out the synagogue in Donore.
In our own time, in the wake of Hamas’s declaration of war in 2023, the Jewish state has replaced the colonial English despoilers of yore as a political bogeyman. Cheered on by the “anti-Zionism” of a gnomic president, Michael Higgins, this widespread political sentiment led to the shuttering of the Israeli embassy in Dublin late last year.
Yet Bloom’s beloved status prevails, as much so as the character’s own love for Dublin never falters in the face of the antisemitism of his own time, theologically packaged in his era by hardline Catholicism.
In Ulysses, he shepherds us through ancient streets dappled with seaborne clouds and scented with bad cooking. There we encounter robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, a flower-of-the-mountain wife, Molly, who cuckolds him, widows, and the kind of Jewish escort from south Dublin that Joyce himself once found sexual solace with as a younger artist.
The tranquil inscrutability of the physical setting only bewitches Bloom further, “the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence”.
But Bloom’s love affair with his land is also caveated with his deep feeling for the contours of another emerging country. As morning breaks over the River Liffey, he’s lost in reveries of the old Ottoman Empire dreaming of the “orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa”. And his soul begins to ache.
Do I need to show up at an annual festival to be reminded of any of this? Probably not. You see, I am Leopold Bloom.
***
Every now and then, driving out of Dublin, I find myself neurotically pondering the familiar words of the Irish novelist Brendan Behan. “Others have a nationality,” he famously offered.” The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.”
My destination is rural Carlow, Ireland’s second-smallest county, located about 90 kilometres south-east of the capital. It’s where my mother, Mary, was born and raised in less-than-glittering circumstances. Her family had lived in or around Carlow for ever, and a squadron of relatives remain there to this day.
Like many of her materially impoverished generation, Mary saw little future in the economically benighted island, picking up shticks as soon as she was able. She lit out from Dublin to North America and later the South Seas. En route she met a British Jew and bore him a son, later adding my sister to the vine.
On an earlier road trip down the same curvy highway, I drove with one of my first cousins, marvelling as I did at the number of Palestinian flags draped across so many of the overpasses along the way.
The writer's mother in her native Carlow, in 1959[Missing Credit]
Cohen in Carlow, Ireland's second-smallest county, last month[Missing Credit]
“Ireland’s not anti-Jewish,” he murmurs from behind the wheel. “Ireland is anti-genocide.” Mentally, I tick off the reasons why the first part of the declaration makes sense. As the Irish writer Rory Fitzgerald notes, the Irish and the Jews share the historical experience of suffering death and cruelty at the hands of their respective satellitic overlords.
Both of them maintain intense homelands while the greater portion of both tribes remain scattered. They share a love of written language in general, too, a preference for fizzing conversation specifically, and the tenets of Jewish law especially, which both groups preserved during the centuries most of Europe pulsed in the darkness.
Pressing me on whether I had encountered any personally directed antisemitism in the contemporary cultural setting, I had to admit to my relative that the opposite was true.
A tour operator I had interviewed in Dublin on local cuisine trends, for example, abruptly swerved from the subject mid-flight, leant forward in her chair and said unbidden, “You have to know that most of us don’t agree with what the politicians are saying about Israel.”
And yet.
***
The night before I flew out of London to Dublin, I caught up for drinks with the journalist Brendan O’Neill, scourge of the Right-Ons and the author of the recently published After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.
We met at the kind of pub that might have found favour with Joyce during the brief time he lived in exile in the city. Coincidentally, perhaps, O’Neill happened to be decked out in a green shirt.
Raised in the British capital by Irish-born parents, he describes himself a lifelong Irish nationalist and philosemite, both having to do with coming of age in the working-class north London suburb of Burnt Oak and fancying some of the local Jewish girls living nearby. He has since journalistically filled out some of the more complex details, most recently with a swingeing piece in The Spectator sorrowing over what has politically become of Ireland’s collective attitude toward Jews.
The Irish novelist and poet James Joyce (1882-1941)Getty Images
Catholicism, he argues, has been supplanted as a national majority religion by a far more cultish creed whose “doctrines are declared with great fervour,” he wrote, “its icons scar every town and village. You will struggle to find one person who has not converted to this strange and all-consuming faith. Its name? Israelophobia.”
Actually, he tells me with a bright smile, if the fiercely pro-Israel blowback he received from many Irish readers is anything to go by, one might not struggle as much as what he suggested to find dissenters. Still, the essential point remains.
“Irish people have forgotten aspects of their history,” O’Neill says, rattling off various cases in point.
“They forget the Jewish revolutionaries who liberated Palestine from the British were admired by the Irish. People forget that one of the key revolutionaries in the liberation of Israel was codenamed ‘Michael’ — after the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. They forget that some of the leading Jews in Dublin in the 1910s smuggled guns for the revolutionaries who were planning to liberate Ireland from the British. People forget that until the mid-1990s, when there was a great kinship between the Irish and Jews.
This is real history, as O’Neill sees it, whereas the newly adopted kinship between the Irish and Hamas is based on “a phoney history” of shared suffering that’s also insulting to Ireland.
“What’s currently going on in Palestine is this obscurantist murderous religious movement called Hamas which exists merely to kill Jews. And to offer support for that is a betrayal of everything Ireland once stood for.”
That’s not to say Ireland was ever a hugely pro-Jewish enclave, O’Neill adds hastily, quoting the zinger of a line in Ulysses memorably offered by a Jew-baiting Mr Deasy: “Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why? She never let them in.”
In O’Neill’s view, the Ireland of the past century has only ever been beholden to two creeds – Catholicism and wokeness – and it went from one to the other extremely fast.
“Ireland is the most woke country in western Europe. And both of those religions have antisemitic undertones and sometimes overtones, and I say that as a former Roman Catholic.” Why, even members of his own family, he says pulling a face, “have fallen under the spell”.
Ah, Eire. We order up yet another round of drinks and toast the better visages of our mothers’ land. The admonition of her craters. Her arid seas. Her silence.
David Cohen is a New Zealand-based author and journalist who writes frequently for British publications
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