Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation, Zuleika Rodgers and Natalie Wynn (eds), Peter Lang, 298 pp, €49.40, ISBN: 978-1800790834
The publication of this volume could hardly have come at a worse time for its reception by a world outraged by the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government on innocent Palestinian civilians, and acts of aggression against international aid workers, journalists and others in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East. However, to blame ordinary Irish Jews, past and present, for the acts of their co-religionists would be as wrongheaded as blaming all Muslims around the world for the 9/11 attacks. This collection enables us to deepen our understanding of a community which, if small and somewhat marginal, served as a touchstone in a country which had, until recently, very few religious or ethnic minorities. The book is a collection of ten essays ranging chronologically from the eighteenth century to the present but linked by the themes of the subtitle: historiography, identity and representation. The chapters are based on a selection of the papers presented at a workshop held at Trinity College Dublin in 2017.
The importance of this book is that it presents work by a group of historians who have been recently challenging received wisdom about Irish Jews held both within and without the community. Bryan Chayette, in a thoughtful afterword, refers to them as ‘Young Turks’, drawing parallels between their approach and that of the generation of historians and cultural theorists, of which he is one, who have challenged the way British Jews understood their own history. Their methodology is set out in a compelling first chapter that outlines the shortcomings of much of the work to date, scant as it is given that the Irish Jewish community has been viewed as peripheral and as a result relatively little systematic research has been devoted to it. This, it is contended, left the way open to ‘unconscious caricature, stereotyping and substandard, often lazy scholarship’, frequently anecdotal and based on the stories communities told themselves.
Most of the essays here can be divided into two broad themes: questioning popular myths about the Irish Jewish community, and testing the assertion that there has been little antisemitism in Ireland. Every society tells myths about itself that perform one or another function. Only recently have those from within the community been examined critically. In ‘They thought it was New York: deconstructing the communal narrative of the Cork Jewish community’, Peter Garry investigates the narrative of persecution, escape and accidental arrival in Cork that has been frequently used to explain the appearance of a small number of Jews in Cork in the late nineteenth century. The explanation given is that the immigrants, having had to leave Eastern Europe because they were under attack, and being sold tickets for the United States, were told they had arrived when they reached Cork or for some other reason, perhaps misunderstanding the language, thought they were in America. Garry argues that this is an oversimplification. Jews travelling to the US did not generally make the journey directly. The structure of shipping fares and the extension of railways meant that it was far more likely to be undertaken piecemeal, in stages, allowing the migrants to work and save before moving further. Therefore, much of the Jewish population in Cork was transient in nature, gathering their resources before travelling on. Cork wasn’t an accident so much as a stepping-stone, and the point of the myth was to deflect anti-immigrant feeling – if it was not their choice to settle in Cork, then they couldn’t be blamed for being there.
There were also myths about Jews in traditional Irish society which Barbara Lisa Hillers examines in ‘Portrayals of Jews in Irish folk narrative’. Folklore is a useful way of revealing the attitudes of the ordinary people, including their prejudices. Ireland has a wonderful resource in the Folklore Commission’s archives, and Hillers uses both its major collections – material gathered in the field by its own collectors plus the 1,128 volumes that make up the Schools’ Collection provided by schoolchildren between 1937 and 1939. She separates out the evidence found into ‘real-life encounters with Jews’, which for the rural population were the rare Jewish peddlers who sold fabric and clothing, and ‘narrative encounters with fictional Jews’, which subdivide into religious stories, anecdotes and jokes. Religious stories about Jews, fostered by church doctrine throughout Europe, were deeply antisemitic, portraying them as responsible for persecuting and murdering Christ. I’ve sometimes wondered what religion they thought Jesus was. Hiller found that these apocryphal stories were popular in Ireland but interestingly, the most virulent of them, the ‘blood libel’ accusation that Jews ritually murdered Christian children and charges about their poisoning wells or desecrating the Host, which triggered atrocities against Jews across Europe since medieval times, do not seem to have been favoured in Ireland, although other tales validating prejudices against Jews and jokes with Jews as the butt of the story were. Therefore, while it is wrong to say that traditional Irish society was without antisemitism, the level of it, as compared with other parts of Europe, was relatively muted.
On the other hand, one myth promoted by both external commentators and Jewish communities themselves was that there was no antisemitism in Ireland. Michael Davitt boasted in 1893 that ‘Our country has this proud distinction – freely acknowledged by Jewish writers – of never having resorted to this un-Christian and barbarous treatment of an unfortunate people’; other individuals, then and since, have made similar claims. This was never the case, although compared with Russia in the nineteenth century or Germany and Austria in the 1930s and ’40s antisemitism was relatively limited, though it was always present as an undertone, an implicit threat towards, and othering of the Jewish population in Ireland. This issue is ably explored in RM Douglas’s essay ‘“Not so different after all”: Irish and Continental European antisemitism in comparative perspective’ in another collection of essays edited by Aiden Beatty and Dan O’Brien, Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture (2018). One reason that outsiders (including historians) failed to appreciate the level of antisemitism is that Jewish leaders themselves consistently downplayed it. Douglas cites the example of Rabbi Herzog, who in 1946 denied that he had found any antisemitism either in Ireland or Britain, whereas his own son, the future president of Israel, Chaim Herzog, recalled of his Dublin childhood: ‘Many times we [Jewish children] were stoned in the streets by urchins, many times. This was quite normal at the time.’
I recall an example of this effort to downplay antagonism in 1970 when in an article about the right-wing Labour Party mayor of Limerick, Stephen Coughlan, published in the magazine Nusight, Vincent Browne suggested that he was veering towards fascism, and mentioned Limerick’s 1904 boycott of its Jewish population and attacks on Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1950s. Coughlan responded in a speech where he declared that he was proud that the people of Limerick, his own parents included, had declared war on the Jews of Collooney Street seventy years earlier and denounced them as ‘warble fly bloodsuckers and extortionists’. My mother, who was Jewish, promptly resigned from the Labour Party, which attracted some publicity because my father was a Labour TD at the time. But what is interesting is the response of the Jewish community. A few people who had barely spoken to her since she ‘married out’, urged her ‘not to rock the boat’, and she was exasperated when the Fianna Fáil TD Ben Briscoe dismissed the charge that Coughlan was antisemitic. Natalie Wynn recounts a similar response in 2016, when the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland sprang to the defence of the journalist Kevin Myers, who in an article in the Sunday Times had managed to combine misogyny and antisemitism, the council claiming that he had ‘inadvertently stumbled into an anti-Semitic trope’. I can recall witnessing several instances of antisemitism in Dublin, low level, certainly nowhere near the same scale as loading people onto trains to extermination camps, but undeniable nevertheless. The refusal by the community to acknowledge its existence is undoubtedly a self-protection mechanism honed over generations, and it’s unlikely to be a purely Jewish phenomenon. But historians and other commentators should be aware of it when taking at face value assertions about the absence of prejudice. I’ve also observed anti-Islamic aggression in Ireland and we’ve all witnessed the recent attacks on refugees and asylum seekers. My point is that it’s necessary to acknowledge that this hostility exists before we can hope to confront it.
One relatively benign, if patronising, approach to the Jews was encapsulated in a set of ideas called Christian Restorationism, examined here by Philip Alexander. These ideas circulated among a group of Protestant scholars based around Trinity College Dublin during the century 1750-1850, though they were based on views that emerged in late sixteenth century England associated with a greater emphasis on a literal reading of the Bible. The basic idea is that biblical prophecy foretells the return of the Jewish people to Israel, either following or prior to their conversion to Christianity, and that this will eventually usher in the millennium. Alexander outlines the theories of three exponents of Restorationism: Robert Clayton, Richard Graves and John Nelson Darby. The last of these, Darby, was the father of both Dispensationalism, which still has a following in parts of the United States and the Plymouth Brethren, now concentrated in Northern Ireland. All this had little effect on attitudes to the few Jews in Ireland during this period, but it had an important influence on the development of Christian Zionism in the US, which colours American politics to this day.
It was only with the influx of Jewish migrants from Russia in the late nineteenth century and the simultaneous rise of a nationalism which defined out minority groups, that we see a significant resurgence of antisemitism in Western Europe, and this was evident in Ireland too. However, I have to take issue with Colm Kenny’s chapter comparing the views of Michael Davitt and Arthur Griffith, ‘Two Irish Zionists and their antisemitism’, in which he challenges the opinion that they were ‘radically different in their attitudes towards Jews in general or Zionism in particular’. It is too glib to argue that because both said antisemitic things and supported Zionism therefore their views converged. I would suggest that an examination of their records as a whole tells a different story.
Davitt said antisemitic things; there is no question of that. He took the anti-Dreyfus side during the Dreyfus case and made what can only be described as antisemitic pronouncements against what he saw as pernicious Jewish capitalism, grossly exaggerating, for example, the influence of some Jewish mine owners in the Boer War. But while not to excuse any of this, there are different forms of antisemitism, just as there are different forms of nationalism. Eugenio Biagini has identified a view common among the liberal left at this time that distinguished between rich and poor Jews, directing their hostility toward the former and while not practising the traditional religious-based antisemitism, focused their attacks on what they saw as rich capitalist Jews. This is the pattern Davitt followed, one that was increasingly evident in his and Griffith’s day. On the other hand, rather than just comparing quotations, one might well consider their actions, and Davitt’s record in defence of Jewish communities contrasts radically with Griffith and explains why the Irish-Jewish community sent a wreath to his funeral in 1906.
In 1890, along with some socialist friends, including Eleanor Marx-Aveling, William Morris and others, Davitt addressed a mass meeting at Mile End in London to protest against the persecution of Russian Jews. Three years later, when Con Crowley from Bandon told a meeting of the Cork Labour Federation that ‘the Jews ought to be kept out of Ireland’, he described this privately as ‘a damned stupid attack on the Jews’ and responded in a lengthy letter to the Freeman’s Journal, provoking a series of three antisemitic articles in The Lyceum by the Jesuit academic Father Thomas Finlay.
But his most important contribution in this respect was as an investigator of the Kishinev (now Chișinǎu) pogrom of Easter Sunday 1903, during which fifty-one people were killed, 424 injured and hundreds of houses and shops damaged. Davitt, appointed by Randolph Hearst to enquire into the atrocity and report to his newspaper chain, spent eight days in the city, interviewing individuals on both sides, visiting wounded survivors in the hospital, talking to rape victims, photographing graves and people and visiting the sites of violence. He dispatched telegrams and articles reporting on his findings, naming instigators and others responsible and disproving the official account of the event. His articles, photographs and appeal for urgent relief for the sufferers were published across Europe and America and elicited a significant response, including demonstrations and petitions, including one of 12,000 signatures which President Theodore Roosevelt undertook to deliver to the Tsar. There is no mistaking the sense of shock and indignation in his reportage of the Kishinev pogrom. Following his return home, he wrote to his friend Alfred Webb: ‘what I learned and saw in that city will haunt me to my dying day’. Those don’t sound like the words of an antisemite. He followed this up with a book, Within the Pale: the True Story of anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia (1903), detailing his findings, making recommendations and in particular denouncing the ‘blood libel’, the myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make the Passover matzo, a version of which had been a factor in triggering events in Kishinev.
In contrast with Griffith, who supported the attacks on the Jewish community in Limerick in 1904, Davitt denounced them in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal, suggesting that the Limerick Jews should approach the bishop of Limerick, Dr Thomas Edward O’Dwyer, to intervene. However, when they sent a deputation to the bishop’s palace, he refused to meet them.
It’s good to know that Griffith’s antisemitism mellowed once he moved away from the virulent opinions of Frank Hugh O’Donnell, Maud Gonne and Lucien Millevoye, and his own writing may have been less extreme than theirs. Nevertheless, as an editor he bore some responsibility in publishing their rantings and it is simply inaccurate to describe his and Davitt’s ideas as ‘not dissimilar’. Their differences, it might be argued, can be traced back to their divergent approaches to Irish nationalism. In the end, all that is proved here is that both men were inconsistent in their views about Jews.
Two factors drove the antisemitism of independent Ireland in the twentieth century: the Catholic hierarchy, who layered onto pre-existing antipathy the idea of the Jews as agents of ‘Bolshevism’; and politicians of the right, notably in Fine Gael, the Blueshirts and other, smaller organisations who resisted the social changes brought about by modernisation. These two forces often functioned in tandem. Far from simply reflecting the conservative mores of their society, it is clear that the Irish Catholic hierarchy led the charge against the small Jewish presence in Ireland. In a striking chapter “‘The old sinister enemies have found a new ally”: the Judeo-Bolshevik myth in mid-twentieth-century Ireland’, Sean William Gannon traces how the myth of the equation of Bolsheviks and Jews, so dear to the Nazis and other right-wing forces on the Continent, was enthusiastically adopted by the Catholic church in Ireland. Among its leading proponents were Edward Cahill, professor of ecclesiastical history at the Irish Jesuit provincialate, who formed An Ríogacht, a conservative organisation aimed at promoting social Catholicism, and Denis Fahey, professor of philosophy and church history with the Holy Ghost Fathers, who formed the Maria Duce organisation, and whose extreme Judeophobia was shared by the Knights of Columbanus and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The theme of a supposed Judeo-Bolshevik threat was voiced also in the national and regional newspapers and by clergy throughout the country, including by the president of Blackrock College and later archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid, who in a Passion Sunday lecture in 1932 blamed the Great Depression on ‘the deliberate work of Jew financiers’, referred to the ‘Jew-controlled League of Nations’ and claimed that communist revolutions were ‘the deliberate work of [these] enemies of Christ’ to destroy Christian civilisation ‘in order to set up their own world State in which Satan will be master’. As Bryan Chayette notes, there were ways in which Catholic religious teaching and modern race-thinking reinforced each other in this period.
To think that the Irish Jewish community, at its height numbering around 5,000 people in the entire country, mostly made up of small businessmen and craftspeople, employees and a few professionals, were agents of communism would be simply laughable if this belief didn’t have serious consequences. Unfortunately, it was espoused by far-right groups such as the Irish Christian Front, the Catholic Young Men’s Society, the St Patrick’s Anti-Communist League and Aontas Gaedheal. The latter urged the exclusion of Jews from Ireland’s commercial life and threatened to publish in its newspaper the names and addresses of Christian girls who associated with Jewish men. At times, their members attacked people on the street, beat up supposedly communist speakers at public meetings and laid siege to what they characterised as communist premises.
Bizarrely, the same people who condemned the Jews as ‘communist’ also sought to characterise them as exploitative capitalists, apparently seeing no contradiction in these charges. Economic antisemitism saw its first significant manifestation in Limerick in 1904, when the Redemptorist priest Fr Creagh accused Jews of being economic parasites, though as Cormac Ó Gráda points out, this was the culmination of sporadic attacks on Jewish traders dating back to the mid-1880s (Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: a socioeconomic history, 2006). As a result, Jews were beaten up and a protracted boycott of Jewish businesses initiated that resulted in the departure of up to fifty Jews (of a total population of 170 in 1901) from the city. This antipathy to Jewish businesses continued into independent Ireland and sharpened in the 1930s, partly mirroring the climate in Europe. It also resulted from tensions between Cumann na nGaedheal, which sought to preserve the country as a land of conservative values and Fianna Fáil, whose leaders, while also traditionalist in many respects, were trying to develop native industries to strengthen the economy. Trisha Oakley Kessler, in ‘Jews as the “economic other”: negotiating modernity, identity and industrial change in the Irish Free State Commission on Vocational Organisation, 1939-1944’, examines how the hostility to Jewish businesses played out in the workings of the Commission. Chaired by Dr Thomas Browne, bishop of Galway, it was set up as a response to pressure from the Catholic hierarchy to shape economic development along the lines of Catholic social teaching. Cumann na nGaedheal leaders, especially Richard Mulcahy and Patrick McGilligan, charged Fianna Fáil with encouraging large numbers of Jews to enter the Irish economy, even portraying de Valera as Jewish, owing to his Spanish name, and therefore, by implication, unfit to govern a Catholic country. The Commission, in line with moves towards vocational policies on the Continent where Jews were being expelled from economic activities, questioned their role in the Irish economy and several business representatives, in their evidence, accused them of being responsible for bad working conditions. However, when the allegations were investigated, they were generally found to be groundless and, on occasion, made by trade competitors. A tragic result of all the antipathy aroused against Jews in the Thirties was the determined refusal of the state to admit Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.
The mid-twentieth century was a period of vigorous intellectual activity among Jewish communities in Europe and the United States, particularly on the left. This was far more muted in Ireland, perhaps because the community lacked critical scale, and also owing to the atmosphere of the new state, anxious to assert the dominance of Catholic culture. Nevertheless, a handful of left-wing intellectuals emerged, including the artists Harry Kernoff and Estella Solomons and the subjects of Katrina Goldstone’s essay, Leslie Daikin and Michael Sayers. In ‘“Where are the Radical Irish Jews?”: Leslie Daikin and Michael Sayers, negotiating Irish Jewish Leftist identities in the 1930s and 1940s’, she traces the careers of these two poets, playwrights and journalists, continuing the task of rediscovery of these largely forgotten figures begun with her study Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art, Exile and War (2020). Both Daikin and Sayers studied in Trinity College Dublin but emigrated in their youth to London, where they mixed with many of the pre-eminent writers of their day, Sayers later settling in New York, where he worked in left-wing journalism, wrote film and TV scripts and taught screenwriting. Daiken was mainly based in London, where he wrote short stories, poems, radio plays and journalism and edited the Irish Front magazine. They each tapped into their Irish background in some of their writing, most notably Daiken in his collection of rebel songs and working-class ballads, entitled Goodbye Twilight: Songs of the Struggle in Ireland (1936) and his autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works based on his Dublin Jewish childhood. Both were part of a broad anti-fascist movement and Sayers was eventually blacklisted in the US. Far from Bolshevism gaining any kind of foothold among Irish Jews, these secular, left-wing intellectuals were regarded with suspicion by their community, finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of being a tiny minority within a tiny minority. Neither made their life in Ireland, though they retained some lifelong connections with the country.
‘Othering’ is a subtle form of prejudice of which we have become more conscious now that minority groups in society are finding their own voices and describing their own experiences. In ‘Nine Folds Make a paper Jew: the representation, identity and legacy of Irish Jews as reflected in the popular media’, Natalie Wynn examines this phenomenon in relation to Irish Jews. She focuses on the year 2016-17, turning her attention to three quite disparate issues: the publication of two fictional works based on Jewish communities of the past: Simon Lewis’s Jewtown (2016) and Ruth Gilligan’s Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan (2016), which Wynn criticises on the basis of their shaky accuracy as cultural history and their role in perpetuating stereotypes. Secondly, she examines the controversy over Kevin Myers’s typically unpleasant opinion piece in the Sunday Times commenting on the BBC’s gender pay gap, where he had remarked on the pay packets of two Jewish journalists, Vanessa Feltz and Claudia Winkleman, two of the BBC’s best-paid female presenters, adding: ‘Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price.’ Wynn notes the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland’s reflexive springing to Myers’s defence in what she characterises as ‘the perceived necessity of representing Jews to Ireland’s non-Jewish majority as harmless, unthreatening, loyal to its established allies and supportive of the status quo’. Thirdly, she addresses the issues around the unexpected growth of the Jewish population in Ireland by approximately 500 people between 2011 and 2016, analysing the response this received. The community had long been viewed, by itself as well as others, as in inexorable decline so this small increase has raised new questions about a future for the community.
There is very little in this collection about the Jewish community itself. Rather, it focuses on the interactions between it and the rest of Irish society and says more about non-Jewish Ireland – its attitudes and the functioning of conservatism and exclusion. There are lessons to be learned here, and not only about the experience of Irish Jews but also, more generally, questions about how we treat the increasing numbers of ethnic and religious minorities joining us on this island, how we are to allow them to flourish and contribute to the tapestry of Irish culture and society.
1/2/2025
