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.



Keywords:
James Joyce, Ulysses, Anti-Semitism, Zionism, 
           
Otto Weininger,   Maurice Fishberg, Theodor Herzl

  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


Introduction

     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?

     The prominent Jewish American biographer Richard Ellmann offers only the minimal evidence that Joyce had read Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) and Maurice Fishberg's The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (1911).1  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 in creating 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 (Davison 147).  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.2  Some connections between race and sex that Weininger makes appear conclusively in gCirce.h   In this paper the references to anti-Semitism in Ulysses will be explored.





I. Joyce and Jews 

     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:

 

Bloom Jewish?  Yes because only a foreigner would do.  The Jews were foreigners at that time in Dublin.  There was no hostility toward them, but contempt, yes the contempt people always show for the unknown. (Mercanton 208)

 

     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:

              JEW ¨ West
              East ©
Zion (UN 128)

 Zionism suggests the Jewish Reconquista in Palestine.  Judaism greatly influenced Europe and many Jews have lived in Europe for nearly two thousand years after the Roman Diaspora beginning in AD 132-35.  Judaism or Hebraism of the (Middle) East is one of the two cultural roots of the West.  The Greek Odysseus belongs to the other root called Hellenism.  So it is significant that Bloom the Jew mythically corresponds with Odysseus the Greek: gJewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meeth (U 15.2097-98).  Bloom considers his Jewishness:

 

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).

 

12.1414.      Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited
12.1415.  with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling
12.1416.  about.
12.1417.  --Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating
12.1418.  national hatred among nations.
12.1419.  --But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
12.1420.  --Yes, says Bloom.
12.1421.  --What is it? says John Wyse.
12.1422.  --A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same
12.1423.  place.
12.1424.  --By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm living
12.1425.  in the same place for the past five years.
12.1426.      So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to
12.1427.  muck out of it:
12.1428.  --Or also living in different places.
12.1429.  --That covers my case, says Joe.
12.1430.  --What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.
12.1431.  --Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
12.1432.      The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and,
12.1433.  gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.
-     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -
12.1467.  --And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also
12.1468.  now. This very moment. This very instant.
12.1469.      Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.
12.1470.  --Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs
12.1471.  to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by
12.1472.  auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.
12.1473.  --Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.
12.1474.  --I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom.
12.1475.  --Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men. (Underlining mine.)

 

     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.

 

II.Otto Weininger (1880-1903) and Joyce

     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  

 

     That these researches should be included in a work devoted to the
characterology of the sexes may seem an undue extension of my subject. 
But some reflection will lead to the surprising result that Judaism is
saturated with femininity, with precisely those qualities the essence of
which I have shown to be in the strongest opposition to the male nature. 
It would not be difficult to make a case for the view that the Jew is
more saturated with femininity than the Aryan, to such an extent that
the most manly Jew is more feminine than the least manly Aryan.
    This interpretation would be erroneous.  It is most important to lay
stress on the agreements and differences simply because so many points

that become obvious in dissecting woman reappear in the Jew.
(Weininger 306)
                                                                 (Underlining mine.)

                                      
 

     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:

 
12.1628.  --And after all, says John Wyse, why can't a jew love his country like 
12.1629.  the next fellow?
12.1630.  --Why not? says J. J., when he's quite sure which country it is. (Underlining mine.)

 

     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.



Conclusion

     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.


Notes 

  *This is a revised version of the paper presented at XX International James Joyce
   Symposium: "Joycean Unions," Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, June 13,
   2006.
**This research is granted Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (No. 18520223) by the
   Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under the title of gJames Joyce and
   Orientalism.h


 1. See Ellmann, James Joyce, 463-64, 395 and 779.  Hereafter referred to as JJ. 
    Cf. Daniel Mark Fogel, gJames Joyce, the Jews, and Ulysses.h  James Joyce Quarterly,
    vol. 16, no. 4, 498.
 2. See Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment, 553, etc.
 3. See Ellmann, gUlyssesh on the Liffey, Appendix.
 4. See gThe Virtual Jewish History Tour Budapest:  
   <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Budapest.html> Accessed: November 30,
    2007.
 5. Cf. Davison, 65-66.  The Freemanfs Journal devoted only a small amount of space to
    international news.  The most significant publication for Joycefs reading of detailed  
    accounts of the Affair in Dublin was The London Times (Davison 66).
 6. Cf. Finnegans Wake, 78.20-22: gwhen portrifaction, dreyfussed as ever, began to ramp,
    ramp, ramp, the boys are parching.h
 7. Cf. Mendel Kohansky, gNot a Friend to Talk about Bloom,h Midstream (March 1981), 36-40.
 8. Cf. Nadel, 4 and Letters, III, 492.
 9. See gCalypsoh: In the morning of June 16, 1904 Bloom bought a pork kidney at Dlugacz's
    (possibly a Polish-Jewish butcher) and ate it, although Jewish dietary laws forbid the eating 
    of pork (Gifford 70). 
10. Cf. Marvin Magalaner, gThe Anti-Semitic Limerick Incidents and Joycefs gBloomsday,h
     PMLA, LXVIII (1953), 1222.
11. Marilyn Reizbaum, "The Jewish Connection, Cont'd," The Seventh of Joyce, 231.
12. Cf. Reizbaum, James Joyce's Judaic Other, 27-28.  Hereafter referred to as JJJO.
13. Cf. Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality, 86-87 and 110-11.  As for Bloomfs
     reference to Sacher-Masoch, see U 10.591-93. 
14. See Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier. 1941-1944, [ed. Werner Lochmann]
     (Hamburg: A Knaus, 1980), 148.  Hitler reportedly mentioned Weininger favorably: geinen
     anständigen Juden... den Otto Weininger, der sich das Leben genommen hat, als er 
     erkannte, daß der Jude von der Zersetzung anderen Volkstums lebt.h  However, there is no
     explicit evidence whether it was really told by Hitler.  In addition, Weiningerfs books were
     denounced by the Nazis after all.
15. Cf. Davison, 148.
16. Cf. Fishberg, 172-74.  Fishberg refers to Nicholas McLeodfs Epitome of the Ancient
     History of Japan [cover title: Japan and the Lost Tribes of Israel] (Tokio, 1879).  He also
     shows a picture titled gJAPANESE WITH JEWISH PHYSIOGNOMYh (Fig. 123).  Judging
     from the picture, Fishberg assumes that it is considerable truth that there is the gJewishh
     type in Japan (Fishberg 174).
17. Cf. Fishberg, Chapter XXIII (504-56).  Cf. also Davison, 147.
18. Italo Svevo, pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz (1861-1928) was born between Allegra Moravia
     from an Italian Jewish family of Trieste and Francesco Schmitz whose father Adolfo
     Schmitz was a German speaking Jew and Austrian government employee.  Cf. John
     Gatt-Rutter, Italo Svevo: A Double Life, 16-19.  It is highly likely that Svevo introduced
     Weininger to Joyce.  See Eishiro Ito, gAnti-Semitism/ Anti-feminism in Giacomo Joyce.h
19. For instance, Molly remembers knitting in the garden of Adelaide Road Synagogue (U
     18.90-93) which was built in 1892 with 5,000 pounds.  Cf. U 10.411-413: Ned Lambertfs
     reference to St. Maryfs Abbey Synagogue (functioned between 1836-1892) and Adelaide
     Road Synagogue (functioned between 1892-1999).  Molly also remembers that she
     pretended to read Hebrew letters on the graves at a Jewsf burial place in Gibraltar (U
     18.834).
20. Cf. Fishberg, 67: gFig.20. Jewess, Tangier, Morocco.h
21. Cf. gJames Connolly: Ireland Sober is Ireland Free? (1900).h  The phrase is originally
     said by George Leahy, President of the Irish Trades Union Congress.
22. See Letters, II, 239.
23. See Letters, II, 255. 
 

Selected References

Brown, Richard.  James Joyce and Sexuality.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses" and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford
  University Press, 1989 (1st ed. 1934).

Davison, R. Neil.  James Joyce, gUlysses,h and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture,
Biography, and gThe Jewh in Modernist Europe.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
  1996.
Ellmann, Richard.  James Joyce.  New and Revised ed. Oxford and New York,etc.: Oxford
   University Press, 1982.                        
„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ.  gUlyssesh on the Liffey.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Fishberg, Maurice.  The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.  London: The Walter  
  Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 1911.

Fogel, Daniel Mark.  gJames Joyce, the Jews, and Ulysses.h  James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 16,
   no. 4 (Summer 1979), 498-501.
Gatt-Rutter, John.  Italo Svevo: A Double Life.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Gibson, Andrew.  Joycefs Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in gUlysses.h  Oxford: 
   Oxford University Press, 2002.
Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman.  gUlyssesh Annotated: Notes for James Joycefs 
  gUlysses.h  2nd ed. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988.
Harrowitz, Nancy A. and Barbara Hyams, eds.  Jews & Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger. 
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Herzl, Theodor.  Trans. Henk Overberg.  The Jewsf State.  Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1997.
Hitler, Adolf. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier. 1941-1944.  Ed. Werner Lochmann (Hamburg:
  A Knaus, 1980.
Hühner, Leon. "The Jews of Ireland: An Historical Sketch."  Transactions of the Jewish
   Historical Society of England, 5 (1902-5), 226-42.
Hyman, Louis.  The Jews of Ireland from Earliest Times to the Year 1910.  Shannon: Irish University
   Press, 1972.

Ito, Eishiro. gAnti-Semitism/ Anti-feminism in Giacomo Joyce.h  The Journal of Policy Studies,
   Vol.7, No.2 (Policy Studies Association, Iwate Prefectural University), February 2006.
gJames Connolly: Ireland Sober is Ireland Free? (1900)h:   
   <http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1900/07/sober.htm>  Accessed: November
   30, 2007.
Joyce, James.  Finnegans Wake.  New York: The Viking Press, 1939; repr, 1987.
„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Letters of James Joyce, II.  New York: The Viking Press, 1966.
„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Letters of James Joyce, III.  New York: The Viking Press, 1966.
„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Selected Letters of James Joyce.  London: Faber and Faber, 1975.
„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ. Ulysses.  Ed. Hans Walter Gabler.  London: The Bodley Head, 1986.  
   Referred to as U x.y (x= the episode number, y = the line number in each episode).
„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ. Ed. Phillip F. Herring, Joycefs gUlssesh Notesheets in the British Museum.  Charlottesville:
  The University Press of Virginia, 1972.

Klein, Viola.  The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology.  London: Routledge, 1946;
   1989.
Kohansky, Mendel.  gNot a Friend to Talk about Bloom,h Midstream (March 1981), 36-40.
Magalaner, Marvin. gThe Anti-Semitic Limerick Incidents and Joycefs gBloomsday,h PMLA,
   LXVIII (1953), 1219-23.
McCourt, John.  The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920.  Dublin: The Lilliput
   Press, 2000.
Mercanton, Jacques.  gThe Hours of James Joyce.h  Ed. Willard Potts. Portraits of the Artist in Exile.
  Sandiego, New York and London: A Harvest HBJ Book, 1986, 205-52.

Nadel, Ira B.  Joyce and the Jews: Culture and Texts.  Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989.
Reizbaum, Marilyn.  James Joycefs Judaic Other.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ„Ÿ. gThe Jewish Connection, Contfd.h  The Seventh of Joyce.  Benstock, Bernard, ed. 
 
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979, 229-37.

Sacher, H. ed.  Zionism and the Jewish Future.  London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, W., 1916.
Sengoopta, Chandak.  Otto Weininger: Sex, Science and Self in Imperial Vienna.  Chicago and
   London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Steinberg, Erwin R.  gThe Source(s) of Joycefs Anti-Semitism in Ulysses.h  Ed. Thomas F.  Staley. 
  Joyce Studies Annual 1999
.  Austin: University of Texas, 1999.

Weininger, Otto.  Sex and Character.  Authorised anonymous translation from the Sixth  
   German Edition.  London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnamfs Sons, 1906.




 



        


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