An Irish-Jewish Politician, Joyce’s Dublin, and Ulysses: The Life and Times of Albert L. Altman, by Neil R Davison, University Press of Florida, 173 pp, $85, ISBN: 978-0813069555
Albert Altman (1853-1903) was born in what he called ‘Prussian Poland’ (probably the Duchy of Posen, which had a large Jewish population) and came to Ireland most likely the next year with his parents, Moritz and Deborah, and his sister, Sarah. Moritz quickly established himself in the Capel Street area of Dublin as a hatmaker and tailor, and possibly an unlicensed moneylender, and became quite prosperous. With the assistance of his son Albert, he later diversified into the salt business, which became the principal source of Albert’s fortunes and the main focus of his commercial concerns.
The Altman business came into conflict with Dublin City Council (the Corporation, as it was then known) over an investigation into allegations that the company, among other businesses, was falsifying weights of their products. One effect of this highly tangled affair was to turn Albert into a Home Rule politician: this shift was further enhanced by his apparent conversion to Catholicism in order to marry the Catholic Susan O’Reilly of Cork (by then the Altman business interests had spread to Cork).
However, as Neil R Davison, professor of modernism, Irish studies and Jewish cultural studies at Oregon State University and author of Ulysses and the Construction of Jewish Identity among other works, points out in this book, Altman was always regarded as Jewish by his commercial and political associates, just as Leopold Bloom was, despite his multiple conversions from the Jewish faith.
Altman was a founding member of the Irish Home Manufacturers Association, an organisation, as its name implies, with strong Home Rule links. Later, he was involved in both William O’Brien’s Plan of Campaign for agrarian reform and in the temperance movement that exerted a major influence at the time and to which he was very committed. Much controversy over O’Brien’s role included antisemitic slurs on his Jewish wife, Sophie, and this atmosphere must have affected Altman also.
After repeated attempts, Altman was finally elected to Dublin City Council for the Ushers Quay ward in 1901 and remained a councillor until his death in late 1903. Davison goes into great detail about the various strains and stresses in nationalist politics in the aftermath of the Parnell split, issues on which Altman took positions that, at least at this distance, do not always seem totally coherent, though always underpinned by a basic Home Rule allegiance. (The entire period is one of considerable confusion among nationalists as to the best way forward for the cause.)
One of the most interesting issues that arose during Altman’s tenure on the council was the impending official visit of King Edward VII to Dublin. This of course is at the centre of the Dubliners story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ – indeed it is surprising how often this crucial element is scanted or neglected in critical accounts of the story.
As Davison points out, underlying the council debates, just as it underlies the story, is the uneasy awareness that in preparing addresses of welcome and other dignities for the visiting monarch the council is honouring someone of notoriously loose sexual morals, the sort of activity for which Parnell had been repudiated just a few short years previously. The matter was highly contentious, not surprisingly: ‘Mob Law in the Council Chamber’ was the kind of headline which, not for the first or last time, the council debate generated.
The statement from a unionist member that his majesty deserved ‘a right hearty and true Irish welcome’ might have come straight out of ‘Ivy Day’, being exactly the kind of sentiment voiced by Mr Henchy in the story. On the other hand, the sentiment of Cllr Joseph Nannetti (who of course figures in his own right and name in Ulysses) that ‘no address should now be presented that did not express the inalienable right of the Irish people to national self-government’ could equally find its place in the story’s rhetoric.
Consistent with his general political positions, Altman voted against presenting an address of welcome: contrary to the impression given by the story, where the reservations about the proposed welcome are very muted and tentative, the nationalist side won on this occasion, and no address was presented.
It was an important moment for Irish nationalism, a prelude to later, more momentous upheavals, and Altman was to that extent in tune with the future. In municipal affairs generally, he appears to have been contentious by nature, often alienating his own allies by an excess of zeal or a sudden deviation from the agreed line. For instance, one of his main interests was in internal City Council reform; this involved querying such matters as the expenses claimed by some of his fellow councillors, and also challenging the bona fides of the official auditor of the council’s finances, an activity which, however commendable in itself, was unlikely to make him popular among his peers. What he might have become had he lived longer than his mere fifty years, how he might have reacted to later developments in Irish history – as indicated, his heart appeared to be in the right place as far as the nationalist cause goes – can unfortunately be only a matter of vain speculation.
Davison is to be commended for the thoroughness with he explores Altman’s public and private lives. He has delved into the archives of Dublin City Council in those years and found some very interesting materials illustrating the complexity and flux of a period when Irish history was in a kind of hiatus following the advances of the Parnell era and before the ultimate triumph of Irish nationalism in the second decade of the twentieth century.
It would be a pity if the book’s appearance as part of the Florida James Joyce Series was to lead to its being overlooked by historians of those years. It is to historians, I believe, that the book will be chiefly valuable.
Davison’s final chapter is devoted to the vexed issue of Joyce’s possible awareness of this person and of his possible influence on Ulysses, especially on the figure of Leopold Bloom. That Joyce may well have had a general awareness of this quite prominent Jewish figure is quite likely but in the absence of any precise allusion to him anywhere in Joyce’s work, other writings or recorded conversation this can only be speculative. Again, while some of Altman’s attitudes and those of Bloom do manifest parallels – and antisemitism is certainly a common feature of their joint experience – the matter cannot, I believe, be pushed beyond this into the realm of direct connections. It is also true that some of Bloom’s utopian political speeches in the Circe episode sound like a comic parody of Altman’s reforming zeal, but to suggest that one is the basis or inspiration for the other is a step too far.
The study of Altman is interesting as an exploration of a prominent Jewish figure contemporary with the world of Ulysses; I do not believe much more by way of a connection can be, or needs to be, established than this. Finally, while it is true that someone who in all likelihood was an actual basis for Bloom, namely Alfred Hunter, has been shown not to be Jewish, it is still quite possible that Joyce thought he was. So he cannot be excluded from the reckoning either.
1/7/2025
Terence Killeen is Research Scholar at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. He is the author of Ulysses Unbound: A Reader’s Companion to Ulysses, published by Penguin UK.
