gAnd I belong
to a race that is hated and persecuted":
Anti-Semitism
in Ulysses
Eishiro Ito
Abstract
When
Theodor Herzl, father of modern Zionism, was born in
Budapest in 1860,
anti-Semitism was not severe in Europe. James
Joyce's Ulysses (1922) can be read as a document of
anti- Semitism: Leopold
Bloom says, "And I belong to a race, c, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very
moment. This very instanth (U
12.1467-68). How seriously
does Bloom mean this statement? This paper
aims to explore the references to anti-Semitism
in Ulysses.
The prominent Jewish American biographer Richard Ellmann offers only the minimal evidence that Joyce had read Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) or Maurice Fishberg's The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (1911). However, it seems that Weininger's theories of "Jews as womanly men" and "Self-hating Jews" and Fishberg's assertions about Jewish cultural diversity influenced Joyce to create Bloom's complex character. As Neil R. Davison argues, Bloom has "intermarried," converted, and possesses little precise knowledge about his Hungarian Jewish background or religion. Still, as a descendent of Jews, it is inevitable that he is abused by Irish nationalists and anti-Semites. Fishberg asserts that the Jews are not a race and that religion should not be the basis for any nationalism. Some connections between race and sex that Weininger makes appear conclusively in gCirce.h In this paper the two books' possible influences on Ulysses are reexamined.
Joyce created
Leopold Bloom, a non-Jewish Jew, who has a Hungarian Jewish background. Bloom is an assimilated Irish Jew but people
try to discriminate against him and hold him in contempt.
This is probably a situation most descendants
of Jews faced at that time. Nationalists
in European countries needed Jews as martyrs, just as the ancient
Jewish people
had needed Jesus Christ.
|
The
full version is available in The Journal
of Policy Studies, Vol.9, No.2 (Policy Studies Association Iwate Prefectural University), March 2008, 127-140. Copyright 2008
Eishiro Ito
|
When Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism,
was born in Budapest in 1860, anti-Semitism was not severe in Europe. Reportedly he first encountered anti-Semitism
when he studied law at the University of Vienna in 1882.
The term ganti-Semitismh was created by the
German agitator Wilhelm Marr in 1879 when he founded the
Antisemiten-Liga [League of
Anti-Semites], the first German organization committed specifically to
combating the alleged threat to Germany indicated by the Jews and
advocating to
expel them from the country. The choice of
the word gSemitismh rather than
gJudaismh emphasized that the gtheory of raceh had become the new
ideological
basis of Jewish antipathy, as Ira B. Nadel notes (Nadel 58).
James Joyce's Ulysses
(1922) can be read as a document
of anti- Semitism: Leopold Bloom says, "And I belong to a race, c, that
is
hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instanth (U 12.1467-68). How seriously
does Bloom mean this statement?
Joyce
described Ulysses
as gÈ lfepopea di due razze (Islaele-Irlanda)h [the epic of two races
(Israel
and Ireland)] in his Italian letter dated September 21, 1920 to Carlo
Linati (SL 270).
He also wrote in the same letter: gLa mia intenzione è di
rendere il
mito sub specie temporis nostri ch
[My intention is not only to render the myth
under the view of our timec] (SL
270). So Joyce intended to write Ulysses as a novel in the early
twentieth century reflecting both the Jews and the Irish at that time.
At the end of gNestor,h
running after Stephen Dedalus, the headmaster Garret Deasy says
breathing hard,
gIreland, they say, has the honor of being the only country which never
persecuted the Jews,h gbecause she never let them inh (U
2.437-47). According to
the scheme Joyce sent to Linati in 1920, Deasy/Nestor supports gThe
wisdom of
the old world.h3 However,
Dublin, with possessing a three-century-old Jewish community,
experienced the largest
Jewish incursion at that time.
In fact, the
increase of Jews in European cities between 1880 and 1900 was dramatic. In 1871 the Jewish population in
all of Ireland
was 258, and in 1881, 453, mostly of English and German extraction. Moreover, by the year 1901, the estimate was
3,771, most of them (2,200) residing in Dublin, and in 1904, the
estimate was
nearly 4,800 (Hühner 208). Fishberg in The Jew cites an estimate at the turn of the century that
listed
6,100 Jews in Ireland, although Europe accommodated approximately three
quarters of all the Jews in the world at that time, roughly 9 million
(Fishberg
6). The sudden influx at the turn
of the century resulted from a wave of immigration, primarily from
Russia,
where Jewish persecution had become acute.
In 1873, when Buda and Pest merged into the new city Budapest,
about 45,000
Jews lived in this city, and by 1930, the figure became as large as
204,371. Before World War II, there were
125
synagogues in Budapest.4
Although an ironic comment tells that gwhile most Jews were in
cities,
most city dwellers were not Jewishh (Nadel 182), the
sudden increase of Jews naturally annoyed
the Gentiles and caused anti-Semitism.
It is widely
believed that Herzl was shocked and stimulated by the Alfred Dreyfus
Affair
(1894-1906), a notorious anti-Semitic incident in which a promising
gassimilatedh
French Jewish captain was unjustifiably convicted of spying for Germany. As a correspondent of an Austro-Hungarian
newspaper, Herzl had been witnessing the trial of Dreyfus and the
subsequent
anti-Semitic movement in Paris chanting gMort aux Juifs!h [Death to
Jews!]. Herzl reportedly comprehended
the limitation of the Jewish assimilation and the necessity of founding
a
country for Jews. Then he started to
write about Zionism and founded Die Welt
in Vienna and planned the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.
In 1898, Joyce
had been reading of the Dreyfus Affair in some Dublin periodicals, like
his
familyfs favorite morning daily, the Freemanfs
Journal and in Arthur Griffithfs United
Irishman in which Griffith used anti-Dreyfusard arguments to
further his
nationalistic agenda.5 Joyce
would directly experience the Affair during his stay in Paris in 1902
when the
Dreyfus uproar reached one of the crises.6
Richard Ellmann notes that Anatole France, a
writer Joyce respected, admired Émile Zola as gun
moment de la conscience humaineh in an impressive oration at
his funeral in Paris on
October 5, 1902. Zolafs Jfaccuse,
first appeared on the French
newspaper LfAurore dated January 13,
1898, was still stirring up Europe then (JJ
373). In gProteush Stephen remembers two
French anti-Semites: M. Drumont (U
3.230-31) [Édouard Adolphe
Drumont, 1844-1917], who launched La Ligue
antisémitique de France in 1889 and also started the
anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole in 1892, and Félix Faure (U 3.233-34) [Félix François Faure, 1841-1899;
president of France from 1895 until his sudden death in 1899], whose
presidency
was embittered
by the Dreyfus Affair, which he was determined to regard as chose
jugé, which caused pro-Dreyfus
intellectualsf criticism against him.
An Israeli
writer fabricated a visit by Joyce to Palestine between March 23 and
April 2,
1920 (Nadel 4).7 In September
1940, the Swiss Eidgenossiche Fremdenpolizei [Federal Aliensf Police]
refused
Joyce and his family permission to enter the country on the grounds
that they
were Jewish (JJ 736-37).8
These two anecdotes indicate how Joyce was
successful for describing the Jews in his works, especially in Ulysses.
Joyce once
mentioned establishing a Jewish man as the protagonist:
Employing
the
Irish-Hungarian-Jewish (Ashkenazi) man Leopold Bloom and the plausible
Gibraltar
Jewish (Sephardi) woman Molly as the main characters, Ulysses gained an
immortal fame in the history of literature,
because Jewish people were cosmopolitans who resided throughout the
world and
at the same time, were hated and sometimes persecuted by other peoples.
The stereotyped gcraftyh Jew is mythically
parallel to the cunning Odysseus.
gJews &
Irish remember pasth Joyce wrote in a notesheet entry for gCyclopsh (UN 82).
Another entry-diagram from the notesheets illustrates the modern
Odysseus is a western wandering Jew, and Zion means a return to the
East, to
Israel, and to Jerusalem:
17.530. He
thought that
he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he
17.531. knew that he
was not.
The complex
syntax of Bloomfs thought indicates his uncertain Jewish identity at the same time as it reveals an ineluctable
anxiety over his Jewishness. Despite his
Protestant past and Catholic present, he is a Jew forever.
Bloomfs complex racial background was derived
from a Hungarian Jewish father Rudolf Virag, who had been converted to
Protestantism by the Society of Promoting Christianity among the Jews
in 1865, and
half-Jewish Irish mother Ellen Higgins.
In gCyclops,h the citizen
asks Bloom his
nation in Barney Kiernanfs pub. The citizenfs reaction implies his
silent disapproval of Bloomfs affirmation.
Even
after Bloom affirms his Irish nationality, Irish people around him do
not
regard him as Irish because they know that he has a Hungarian Jewish
background
(U 12.1635-37).
Bloomfs Jewishness is more
important to
Irish people around him than to himself.
However, he never forgets his Jewishness even after he insists
that he
was born in Ireland, while he remains uncircumcised,
failing to enact the Jewish covenant as well as disregarding Jewish
dietary
rules.9 He had
been baptized as a Protestant twice, and then converted to Catholicism
to marry
Molly. However, in the hallucination of
gCirce,h
Bloom becomes the gemperor-president and king-chairmanh Leopold the
First (U 15.1471-73) and establishes gthe new
Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the futureh (U
15.1542-45). This may
suggest Bloomfs unconscious ambition of establishing the gJewsf Stateh
reflecting Herzlfs Zionist movement at the turn of the century.
The
Limerick boycott or pogrom occurred in
January 1904. A possible reference
to
the Limerick boycott is in gPenelopeh: "he [Arthur Griffith] knew there
was a boycott" (U 18.387). It
may refer to the threatened boycott
against Jews in Limerick and a press-boycott involving Griffith's paper
United Irishman in 1904, although the
context also suggests a boycott related to the two Boers Wars.
The
anti-Semitic behavior of the judicial officer Sir Frederick Falkiner
(1831-1908), the 1904 outbursts in Limerick against the Jews and
attacks like
that published in the Lyceum of 1893
represented a different attitude (Nadel 190).
Joyce satirizes Falkiner in gCirceh: As he orders Bloom to jail,
ironic gMosaic
ramshornsh rise out of Sir Frederickfs forehead (U
15.1164-65). The word gMosaich connects
with
J.J. O'Molloy's description of Michelangelo's statue of Moses, with its
curious
set of horns (U 7.755-57) while the gramshornsh
indicate shofars or shofroth, trumpets made of ram's horn, blown by the
ancient
Hebrews during religious ceremonies or as a signal in battle, and it
also suggests
Judaism itself. Later Bloom possibly
refers to the Limerick sermons by
Father John Creagh, when he tells Stephen in a aside that accusations
against
the Jews are gthe juggle on which the p.pfs [parish priests] raise the
wind on
false pretencesh (U 16.1130-31).10
Bloomfs
ambiguous self-hatred is on the horns of dilemma.
Otto Weininger's Geschlect und Charakter seems to
have more
or less inspired James Joyce to write Ulysses. Weininger's view is summarized by Marilyn
Reizbaum: "Just as the woman is the negative force in every human
being,
so too, according to Weininger, is the Jew."11
Otto Weininger was born in
Vienna on 3 April,
1880 as the second child and oldest son of a skilled Jewish goldsmith
Leopold
Weininger and his wife Adelheid Frey.
Leopold was a devotee of the anti-Semite Richard Wagnerfs music
and
deeply ambivalent in Judaism (Sengoopta 13).
As his daughter Rose recalled that he was ghighly anti-Semitic,
but he
thought as a Jew and was angry when Otto wrote against Judaismh
(Sengoopta
13). At the age of 18, Weininger entered
the University of Vienna and mainly studied philosophy and psychology,
ignoring
his fatherfs wish that he should study languages, although he was
fluent in
many languages. In autumn 1901,
Weininger met the famed Jewish psychologist Sigmund Freud and showed
his paper gEros
und Psyche: Eine biologisch-psychologische Studieh which later became a
partial
draft of his doctoral thesis. Although
Weininger expected Freud to recommend this article to a publisher,
Freud was
not so impressed with it and refused to write a recommendation. Weininger converted to Christianity
(Protestantism) on July 21, 1902, the
day he became a doctor of philosophy. He
improved his dissertation under the title Geschlecht und
Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung,
which was first published by the Vienna publisher Wilhelm Braumüller in
May
1903. Soon after the publication, he went
to Italy and returned even more deeply depressed. The
book was not received so negatively but was not accepted so favorably
as
Weininger hoped. On October 3, he took a
room in the house at Schwarzspanierstraße 15 where Ludwig von Beethoven
died. The next morning he shot himself in
the chest
at the age of twenty-three and six months. He
was buried following the Christian custom
in a Protestant cemetery under the supervision of his father Leopold
(Sengoopta
20).
The personal element in Weiningerfs work,
that is, the relationship between his life and work, may have
contributed more
to Joycefs text than the work itself sharing the same first name
Leopold
between Weiningerfs father and Bloom (JJJO
28). His sudden suicide after conversion
reminds the Joycean reader of the suicide of Leopold Bloomfs father
Rudolph
Bloom (formerly called Rudolf Virag) at his own Queenfs Hotel, Ennis,
County
Clare on June 27, 1886 (U
17.622-32). After Weiningerfs death,
however, Geschlecht
und Charakter ironically received a favorable reaction from
numerous
(especially Gentile) readers and it has been re-published many times in
a
number of European languages.
The book contains spurious
comparisons
between races, for instance, Chinese and Jewish. Weiningerfs
theories about Jews, which grew
out of his theories about women, were popular in the early twentieth
century:
Jewishness was a state of mind, inferior to that of the Gentiles and
the same
was true of women in relation to men, thereby aligning what is Jewish
with
feminine or womanly qualities.12
Bloomfs character, a womanly Jewish man,
applies to Weiningerfs theories, particularly in the hallucination of
gCirceh
where the (possibly Jewish) whore-mistress Bella Cohen, who corresponds
to the
witch Circe in the Odyssey, becomes
defeminized gBelloh and turns Bloom both into a passive woman and into
a pet as
he longed for (U 15.2964-65).
As
some researchers
have pointed out,
Sacher-Masochfs Venus in
Furs is another important source of this masochistic scene. Joyce not only made Bloom a reader of
Sacher-Masoch, but Venus and Furs
appears to have suggested to Joyce the gfeminized Jewfsh masochism as
partially
homoerotic (Davison 179). Joyce indeed
suggested to Frank Budgen that a reader should ultimately recognize gan
undercurrent of homosexuality in Bloom as well as his loneliness as a
Jewh
(Budgen 315).13 Joyce would
have largely agreed
with Weiningerfs view and probably initially applied it to
characterization of
Bloom.
In
the conversation between
John Wyse Nolan and J.J. OfMolloy in Ulysses, OfMolloy
ironically
implies how the Jewish people think of a country. His
opinion has an overtone of a self-hating
Jew:
The Jews had
often been called ga nation without a countryh before the foundation of
the
State of Israel in 1948. In the early
twentieth century, the Jewish people lived throughout the world. Weininger was negative to the Zionist
movement that arose in Europe in the late nineteenth century with the
aim of
reconstructing a Jewish state in Palestine. Weininger
asserted that gZionism must remain an impracticable ideal,
notwithstanding the
fashion in which it has brought together some of the noblest qualities
of the
Jewsh because gZionism is the negation of Judaism, for the conception
of
Judaism involves a world-wide distribution of the Jewsh (Weininger 307). He also believed that gLike women, Jews tend
to adhere together, but they do not associate as free independent
individuals
mutually respecting each otherfs individualityh (Weininger 308). For Weininger, the Jews is a feminine race
and both the Jews and women are the negative forces in the world.
14 He adored the Aryan and
Christianity,
although he knew that he was Jewish after all.
He could not admit Herzl and Zionism, and he
committed suicide after vacillating between Semitism and anti-Semitism. Joyce presumably used this for Rudolph Viragfs
suicide and Bloomfs ambivalent character in his novel.
III.Maurice
Fishberg (1872-1934)
and Joyce
Joyce
had much more chances to contact Jewish people in his days in Trieste
between
1904-1914 than before his voluntary exile in 1904 in Dublin. As John McCourt
notes, Trieste had 5,495 Jews according to the 1910 census, of whom
2,209 spoke
a language (other than Italian) not pertaining to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire
(McCourt 222). This suggests that
Trieste also received many Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern
Europe as
well as other Western European cities at the turn of the century. Joyce would have met varieties of Jewish
people of different cultural and racial backgrounds.
He read Maurice
Fishbergfs The Jews: A Study of Race and
Environment (1912), which was timely published and provided him
much
information of variations of Jews and Judaism when starting writing Ulysses in 1914 in Trieste.
In contrast to Weininger,
Maurice Fishberg believed that the Jews
could only be considered a gnationh before emancipation, because their
doctrines, religious practices, dress, and eating habits were mostly
identical:
gTo the Zionists the Jews are a distinct, non-European race which has
preserved
itself in its original purity in spite of the Jewsf wanderings all over
the
globeh (Fishberg 470). As Davison points
out, Fishberg believed emancipation and assimilation to have
unequivocally
nullified this status (Fishberg 471; Davison 148).
Fishberg argued that the idea of Jewish gnationhoodh
is only a tool of anti-Semites creating a myth of the Jews as ga
separate
nation living among other nationsh (Fishberg 574).15 Fishberg believed that
they are not a nation at all because they have scattered all over the
world
(Fishberg 480). He even argued that gThe
Jewish nationalists cannot conceive a country in Europe without
anti-Semitismh
(Fishberg 473n.).
Ellmannfs
statement that Joyce delighted in Fishbergfs discussion of Chinese Jews
(the
Jews of Kfai-Fung-Foo [ŠJ•••{], Henan [‰Í“ìÈ]) is the result of an interview
with Ottacaro Weiss (JJ 395;Fishberg 134-37). Fishbergfs study was attractive because his
statistical proof filled Joycefs craving for realistic detail. The exhaustive data of Fishbergfs The
Jews seems to have earned Joycefs
immediate respect (Davison 146). Based
on grand-scale research, Fishberg examines patterns of assimilation –
occupational inclinations, physiognomy, endemic diseases, demographics,
tendencies to intermarry – so as to explore the idea of a Jewish graceh
and
Jewish gracial traits.h As an
assimilated American Jew and fellow of the New York Academy of
Sciences,
Fishberg was interested in Jewish assimilation as a sociological
phenomenon
(Davison 146). Fishberg argued that the
Jews are no more a grace,h because Jewish communities around the world
show
different gracialh features, from Indian, Chinese, Sephardic,
Ashkenazi,
etc. He even introduced a theory at that
time that the Japanese are the true descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes
of
Israel as some similarity between Shintoism
and Judaism indicates.16 Through
its investigation of these
communities and their differences, Fishberg believed that his study
proves the
notion of a single Jewish race to be a myth (Davison 147).
He also asserted that intermarriage and
assimilation do not weaker Jewish identity.17
If
Jews could recognize such possibilities, he believed, anti-Semitism
would be
made ineffectual (Davison 147).
Fishbergfs
data seems a likely basis for Bloomfs personal traits as an Ashkenazi
Jew and
even some of Mollyfs as a Sephardi Jew.
Fishberg asserted that shortness of stature as a Jewish trait is
merely
another racial myth (Fishberg 31). Bloomfs
height, 5f9,f (U 17.2003) and gweight of eleven stone
and four poundsh [158 pounds] (U
17. 91) can be a proof of Joycefs disbelief in the stereotype of Jewish
shortness. In addition, Bloomfs
gMediterraneanh
features also may have been inspired by Fishbergfs study which lists
such
Sephardic features as glong black hair and beard, large almond-shaped
eyes, a
melancholy cast of countenance, an oval face and prominent nose – in
short the
type of Jews represented in the paintings of Rembrandth (Fishberg 106). Bloom is reported in gIthacah to have a gfull
build, olive complexion, may have since grown a beardh (U
17.2003), although another model of Bloom, of course, was Italo
Svevo, an Ashkenazi Jew, who converted to Catholicism and had similar
Sephardic
features, but not of a gfull buildh (Davison 148).18
Although Mollyfs
Jewish identity remains ambiguous, her mother Lunita Laredo, her
birthplace,
Gibraltar and several memories about visiting synagogues and Jewish
cemetery
suggests possible Jewish connections.19
Joyce
seems to have borrowed some features of her character from Fishberg
(Davison
149). Bloom remembers young Mollyfs
gMoorish
eyesh attracted him in 1887 (U
13.1114-15). Jewishness in her darkish
or Oriental features allured Bloom and other Dubliners.
These include Fishbergfs account of Sephardic
Jews of Spanish descent returning to Gibraltar after it passed under
English
rule; the popular notion that Sephardic women often have gbrilliant,
radiant
eyesh and gbewitching elegance and charmh; and gSpanish and Andalusian
women
are said by some to owe their charms to these beautiful eyes, which are
alleged
to have their origin in the small quantities of Semitic blood which
flows in
their veinsh (Fishberg 7 & 110).20 Bloom
remembers young Molly with her black hair and gplump bubsh in an
incoherent
sentence (U 13.1279-85). Fishbergfs
note about Sephardic Jewish women
is similar to Mollyfs gsouthern charms,h
gtwo glancing eyes a lattice hid,h and her reference to gthe
rose in my
hair like the Andalusian girls usedh (U
18.1338, 1595, 1603). Fishbergfs study
offered Joyce an abundant data on Jews over the world, theories of
Jewish
assimilation and demythologizing the Jewish race.
As Daniel Mark
Fogel points, there are two more resonances between Fishbergfs book and
Ulysses (Fogel 500). One
is Bloomfs moderate drinking habit. Bloom
keeps his slow pace of drinking among
other Irish people in the pub, probably because he is isolated to some
extent
due to his Jewishness. He may need to
stay sober all the time just in case.
Fishberg asserted: gIt is a well-known fact that a drunken Jew
is rarely
met with in any part of the worldh (Fishberg 273).
He continued: gIn England and the United
States the immigrant Jews are quite temperate, and a drunkard is rare
among
them. But among their descendants
drunkenness is becoming more and more commonh (Fishberg 275). The other is Bloomfs description of Palestine
as gA barren land, bare wasteh(U 4. 219) and skepticism
about agriculture there (U
4.219-28). Fishberg accused: gIt is to
this inhospitable soil that the Zionists intend to take the Jews and
make
farmers of them [those city dwellers]h (Fishberg 494).
Fishberg attacked Zionism because it is of
anti-assimilationists (Fogel 500). The
nameless I-narrator of gCyclopsh mentions the Irish socialist James
Connollyfs
famous writing gIreland Sober is Ireland Freeh (1900) (U
12.692).21 Bloomfs moderate
drinking habit could make a
variation, gThe Jewish sober is Jewish free.h
However, what would suggest in the phrase of gJewish freedomh: Emancipation from ghettoes and assimilation
in Europe, or Reconquista in
Palestine?
Ulysses even
contains the phrase gan
elder in Zionh (U 15.249), a
possible
allusion to The
Protocols of the Elders
of Zion (org.
Russia, 1905) in which a series of twenty-four lectures by
the elders of Zion provides their conspiracy of how to control the
whole world
as a Jewish state. The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion was
well-utilized for the Nazi
anti-Semitic campaigns in the 1930s and early 1940s. In the year
of 1904 when Dublin is described in Ulysses,
and also still in the year of 1922 when the novel was published in
Paris, both
the anti-Semitic movement and the Zionist movement were in progress,
although
either of them did not reach each climax yet.
As Ira B.
Nadel notes, the disdain and affection Joyce felt for Ireland is not
unlike
Jewish self-hatred (Nadel 153). gHow
sick, sick, sick I am of Dublin! It is
the city of failure, of rancour and of unhappiness. I long to be
out of it,h Joyce wrote to his
wife Nora in Trieste on August 22, 1909 during the first of two visits
to
Ireland that year.22 gI loathe Ireland and the Irish,h he wrote to
her during his second trip on October 27, 1909.23 As
late as the 1930s, Joyce still feared a return to Ireland thinking he
might be
shot, or, at the very least, persecuted (Nadel 153).
Another
Dublin-Jewish parallel that may have stimulated Joyce was the
similarity
between Arthur Griffith and Theodore Herzl (Nadel 191).
Both men led nationalist movements, were
originally journalists who had political aspirations, were authors of
political
tracts, and died young. Joyce read The Resurrection of Hungary (1904) by
Griffith, as well as Der Judenstaat [The
Jewsf State] (1896) by Herzl, both
of which caused nationalism. Griffith
died at 51 (on August 12, 1922) and Herzl at age 44 (on July 3, 1904). In Ulysses,
Joyce unites Bloom and Griffith through the rumor that Bloom ggave the
ideas
for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paperh (U
12.1574-75). Bloom often
remembers the advertisement of gAgendath [Agudath] Netaimh (Heb.
a company of planters) selling land
in Palestine in 1905, which is alluded to Herzlfs Zionist movement. Bloom also remembers the famous Jewish
phrase, gnext year in Jerusalemh [Heb.
gLe-shanah ha-ba-a b'Yerushalayimh] (U 7.207),
which has been said by Jews all over the world on Jewish feasts like
Pesach and
Hanukkah, and New Yearfs Holidays.
Erwin R. Steinberg presumed that Joyce was anti-Semitic, even though some of Joycefs best friends were gassimilatedh Jews (Steinberg 83). Most East European Jews including Hungarian Jews like Herzl would not be gassimilatedh: They were at least strange and often threatening. Thus Joyce created Leopold Bloom, a non-Jewish Jew, who has a Hungarian Jewish background. Bloom is an assimilated Irish Jew but people consciously or unconsciously try to discriminate against him and hold him in contempt. This is probably a situation most descendants of Jews faced at that time. Nationalists in European countries needed Jews as martyrs, just as the ancient Jewish people had needed Jesus Christ.