Ulysses Essay 15 (31:19)

Chapter 2 (Nestor) Note 2

“England is in the hands of the jews"

Stephen is in the office of Mr. Deasy, the headmaster. Two practical matters are at hand: First, Deasy pays Stephen his wage, three pounds and twelve shillings, which he slowly and irritatingly counts out note by note, coin by coin, all the while moralizing to the well-nigh penniless Stephen on the virtues of never being in debt and of keeping one’s money safely hidden. Secondly, Deasy requests a favour: aware of Stephen’s literary and journalistic connections, he asks the young teacher to use his influence with the editors of two Dublin daily newspapers to persuade them to publish a letter that he has just typed up regarding steps that the government should take to prevent the spread of foot and mouth disease in Irish cattle, especially in view of the fact that recent Austrian scientific progress on curing the disease has not been sufficiently appreciated in the British Isles.

The headmaster, seeing Stephen eyeing an outdated portrait of Crown Prince Albert Edward (but in 1904 now King Edward VII, having ascended to the British throne on the death of his eighty-three year old mother, Queen Victoria in 1901, after her sixty-four year long reign), embarks on a defence of the benefits accruing to Ireland from remaining united to Britain, and disdains attempts at rebellion to re-establish Irish Home Rule, although he proudly (and typically) does not for get to mention that he himself has famous ancestors who were on both sides of the eternal Irish-English squabble. Stephen, brought up in a fiercely patriotic pro-Parnell and anti-English home, attempts to remain neutral.

At this point Deasy explains to Stephen why England is in a precipitous decline. He has no doubt as to the etiology of this phenomenon:

“Mark my words, Mr Dedalus,” he said, “England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finances, her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is dying.”

Before Stephen can reply, Deasy again repeats that England is “Dying, if not dead by now.”

Stephen now uses understated but rapier sharp sarcasm to murmur an objection to Deasy’s torrent of anti-Semitism:

“A merchant,” Stephen said, “Is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?”

Deasy ignores the substance of Stephen’s universalistic remark, and explains why the Jews are condemned to suffering and exile:

“They sinned against the light,” Mr Deasy said gravely, “And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.”

Stephen has an uncomfortable flash of memory of Jewish life from his days in Paris. “On the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabbles of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew the years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.”

But to Deasy’s last remark about the Jews (that they “sinned against the light”), Stephen gives yet another sarcastic response, embellished with a modicum of anti-Catholic heresy:

“Who has not?” Stephen said.

Deasy asks, “What do you mean?”

And here Stephen makes his most iconic statement, summing up the antagonisms between the Irish and the English and between the Jews and the Gentiles with characteristically anguished neutrality:

“History” Stephen said, “Is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.”

 Deasy tries to assure Stephen that God’s will is behind history. A shout from the hockey field impels Stephen to openly declare his agnosticism: “That is God….A shout in the street.”

The headmaster, a misogynist no less than an anti-Semite, now tries to persuade Stephen that women are at the root of men’s failures, citing instances ranging from Eve’s temptation of Adam through incidents in Greek mythology and up to Parnell’s downfall, occasioned by the revealing of his adulterous relationship with a married woman and his subsequent outlawing by the Irish Catholic church, to the consternation of many Irish nationalists, among them Stephen’s father (as related by Joyce in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”). But before Stephen can object to this new train of thought, Deasy moves the conversation back to the practicalities of getting his letter published. Stephen promises that he will try to facilitate the matter and putting the letter in his jacket pocket he takes his leave courteously. However, as he walks on the gravel path leading out of the school he becomes aware that Deasy is running after him. As Deasy catches up with him, Stephen mutters to himself, “No more letters, I hope,” but in fact Deasy only wants to tell him something more about the Jews:

“I just wanted to say,” he said, “Ireland, they say, is the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why not?”

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

“Why, sir?” Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

“Because she never let them in,” Mr Deasy said solemnly.

He coughs and laughs, and then repeats his witticism:

“She never let them in,” he cried again through his laughter as he stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel on the path. “That’s why.”

Let me start from the end: Mr Deasy’s “joke” is patently absurd as the fact that Ireland had a sizeable and quite prominent Jewish community in 1904 (numbering about 4,800) cannot have been unknown to Deasy. Why Joyce felt it important to make Mr Deasy articulate such an insupportable bon mot remains a mystery. Although it is not clear whether Ireland’s Jews were expelled in 1290 (when England expelled its Jews), Catholic Ireland was relatively tolerant of Jews ever since they first landed there in 1079 (and in this sense Deasy is not too far off the mark in his prior assertion that “Ireland is the only country which never persecuted the jews”). Indeed, following the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal in 1497, some of these Sephardic Jews settled in Ireland and two of them (William Annyas and Francis Annyas) became mayors of Youghal in County Cork during the sixteenth century. The first synagogue in Ireland was established in Dublin in 1660 near Dublin Castle, and Joyce himself (in the Circe episode of Ulysses) describes Bloom imagining a procession of Dublin’s civil and religious high and mighty in which, along with bishops and noblemen, the “chief rabbi” participates, although actually no such post existed in Ireland until 1919 when Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, who was close to Sinn Fein and spoke Gaelic, became Ireland’s first Chief Rabbi. (Rabbi Herzog later became the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel; his son Haim “Vivian” Herzog became the head of the Israeli Intelligence Corps and subsequently the fifth president of Israel; and his grandson, Yitzhak “Bujie” Herzog, is at the time of writing head of the Israel Labor party and Leader of the Opposition). Also, to reiterate the presence of Jews in Dublin, Molly Bloom mentions in the “Penelope” episode that she might do well to change the marital bed that the Blooms had bought from Cohen’s Dublin furniture store when they first set up their home together.

However, there was occasional overt, even violent, religious anti-Semitism in Ireland,  In 1904, the year of “Ulysses”, a fundamentalist priest in Limerick, Father John Creagh, incited his flock to boycott Jewish businesses (because “they fasten themselves on us like leeches and draw our blood”) and repeated in a sermon the ancient libel that Jews committed ritual murder. After this sermon some Jewish shops were attacked and many Jewish families thereafter left Limerick. Nonetheless, Jews later became prominent in Irish political, legal and cultural life: for instance, Gerald Goldberg, a son of the Limerick migration, became Lord Mayor of Cork in 1977; and David and Louis Marcus, grandchildren of the boycott, became highly influential in Irish literature and film respectively. Jews were also prominent in the Irish struggle for independence from England, recalling Joyce’s statement that Ulysses is essentially about the parallel sufferings of two oppressed nations – the Irish and the Hebrews. But when Jews tried to escape the Nazi onslaught, the gates of official (and neutral) Ireland were closed to them, and only thirty Jewish refugees were accepted before and during World War II, while Catholic refugees were welcomed. In this sense Joyce, in attributing to Deasy the punchline that “she never let them in,” turns out to have been more prophetic than he apparently intended to be, just as Stephen’s ruminations about the black-garbed Orthodox Jews on the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange seem to contain an eerie premonition of the Holocaust to come (and indeed in the “Ithaca” chapter, Joyce, recapitulating the day’s events by analogizing each episode to a Jewish liturgical or philosophical concept, defines the other major anti-Semitic event of the day – Bloom’s vociferous encounter with the Citizen in Bernard Kiernan’s bar – as a “holocaust”).

Why does Joyce, throughout “Ulysses”, always spell the word “Jew” with a small “j”? (And note that he uses the same convention in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”). The one source that I found on this subject is in a 1968 Master’s thesis by Phyllis Joyce Levi (“The Image of the Jew in James Joyce’s Ulysses” – University of Richmond). Levi avers that the small “j” indicates “the distasteful and unacceptable position in which the citizens hold Jews.” But this seems an unlikely theory – after all, Shakespeare’s Shylock is a “Jew” with a capital “J”, and the hatred which was showered on Shylock outstrips by far the mainly implicit and generally unspoken prejudice that Leonard Bloom encounters on that fateful Thursday in June 1904.  

I can’t deny that the small “j” convention irritates me, so I’ve constructed my own theory to put myself more at ease. My take on the matter is that Joyce is using ironic understatement to affectionately highlight the “jews” (in contrast to conventionally capitalizing the terms “Irish”, “English” and so forth). Euphemistic use of a salutary but opposite term to refer to something ostensibly disagreeable is actually a well-entrenched Jewish tradition. For instance a cemetery is called "Beit Ha’Haim” (“The House of the Living”), while a toilet is designated in rabbinical writing as “Beit Ha’Kavod” (“The Place of Dignity”). Interestingly in another of Joyce’s Jewish liturgical analogies in his recap of the day’s events in the “Ithaca” chapter, Bloom’s “premeditative defecation” is coupled to the no less than the “holy of holies”, the inner sanctum of the Temple, making me wonder whether Joyce was aware of the “Beit Ha’Kavod” terminology. And it works the other way round too: Isaiah (41:14), seeking to encourage his people, tells them trenchantly “Al tira, tola’at Ya’akov” (“Fear not, O worm Jacob”).

Reading Mr. Deasy’s comments on the Jews, I begin to think back to my schooldays in South Africa. I have a vague memory (I think in second grade) of standing near some Gentile boys during first break and hearing one of them saying, “The Jews killed Christ.” I don’t think I had any idea at that stage who Christ was, but obviously it stirred up unpleasant feelings, as here I am, seventy years later, recalling the incident. Other than that I cannot remember any overt or covert anti-Semitism through my school and university days. My 1964 medical class at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (“Wits”) was more than fifty percent Jewish. Of course, by that time, under the rigid apartheid administration of the Nationalist Party, blacks were no longer accepted into white universities, although just over two decades earlier Nelson Mandela had studied law at Wits before going on to do his internship in 1941 at a Johannesburg Jewish law firm. And indeed on the Shabbat that followed his swearing in as president of South Africa in 1993, Mandela spoke at Cape Town’s Sea Point Synagogue – where I had my Bar Mitzvah in 1954 – and related that his clerkship at Witkin, Sidelsky and Edelman, constituted the first time in his life that he ever experienced the feeling of being treated as an equal and not as a despised inferior. Still, our medical class did have eight students of Asian ethnicity (four Chinese and four Indian) whose I.D. cards officially classified them racially as “non-European”, the unsubtle governmental euphemism for “non-White”, although the parallel Afrikaans equivalent (“nie blankie”) was at least unambiguous in unabashedly declaring the racial nature of the system. (I still recall that most of the benches on the Sea Point beachfront had on them signs announcing that they were for the sole use of “Europeans/Blankes”, as opposed to the few with “Non-Europeans/Nie Blankes” signs on them.  The Indian students in our medical class were scions of families who were brought to South Africa by the British administration at the end of the nineteenth century to work in the sugar plantations in the Natal colony, and it was on their behalf that Mahatma Gandhi as a young lawyer in South Africa, made his first non-violent protest for equal rights at the end of the nineteenth century). In 1962, with the outbreak of the Sino-Indian War during our fourth year at medical school (our first clinical year), the four Indian students stopped talking to the four Chinese students. Luckily, the war lasted only a month and by fifth year normal relations had been resumed. Less amusingly, when in third year as part of our pathology course we were expected to attend post-mortems two or three times a week, the eight Asian students were prohibited from attending if the deceased was white; they could only be present if the body to be dissected was of a black or mulatto individual (not to speak of the absolute taboo that forbade non-white medical students or physicians from enjoying the “privilege” of examining white patients). The surrealistic post-mortem rule has always remained with me as the most Orwellian manifestation of South Africa’s inhuman racial laws. Yet the head of the university’s Students Representative Council, Richard Goldstone, was a liberal Jewish law student who campaigned vigorously but unsuccessfully for the readmission of black students to Wits. In years to come Goldstone was appointed to the South African Supreme Court by the Nationalist government (which tended to appoint liberals to demonstrate to the world that its system was ostensibly judicially justifiable), and he then faced the moral dilemma of having to rule according to the precepts of apartheid. While making often remarkably successful efforts to humanize the patent injustices of the system, Goldstone, like other liberal judges, found himself in the end having to kowtow to the government. Eventually, with the collapse of apartheid, he played a dominant role in the transition to the new South Africa. Later he became internationally important as the chief prosecutor in the two International Courts that sat on the Yugoslav and Rwanda war crimes. His last crisis of conscience came when as a Jew (with family in Israel) he led the UN Fact-Finding Commission on the “Cast Lead” Israeli operation against Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. The commission’s report was overwhelmingly anti-Israel, ignoring the use of “human shields” by the Gazans and the firing of rockets at Israeli civilian towns. However, in 2011, in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post he recanted somewhat, and the influential  leftwing Tel Aviv daily, Ha’aretz, reported that he had told associates that he had been “in great distress and under duress” ever since the publication of the Commission’s findings. As the Yiddish saying goes, “Schwer zu sein a yid.” (“It’s hard to be a Jew”).

So I did not personally experience anti-Semitism in South Africa (except for that vaguely recalled incident in second grade). But in 1937, four years prior to my birth, with Hitler in power in Germany, the all-white South Africa parliament, decided (like the Irish Republic) to bar Jewish refugees from Europe from entering South Africa. I have my father’s copy of the “Hansard” verbatim transcripts of the parliamentary debate on the issue. They are chilling to read. Here is the Afrikaner leader and future Prime Minister, Dr. Daniel Francois Malan, speaking against Jewish immigration: “The fact is that the Jews are getting all the commerce into their hands…They are unassimilable… In any country where the Jews form more than 4 per cent of the population, you will find strong anti-Semitism…What is Zionism but an admission on their own part that they are unassimilable by the different countries of the world?...South Africa has a Jewish problem, and that appears clearly from the anti-Semitism which exists in the country,” and so on and so on for hours on end. It is ironic that in reiterating Mr. Deasy’s charges against the Jews, Dr. Malan, whose own Huguenot forefathers came to the Dutch Cape of Good Hope to escape religious persecution in Catholic France, assumed it to be self-evident that his reference to the Jews as constituting four percent of South Africa’s population (at that time there were 90,000 Jews in South Africa) denoted only their representation in the white population (then just over two million). In his speech, he completely ignores the fact that the Jews in fact constituted less than one percent of South Africa’s total all-race population, at that time numbering some ten million. Apparently the Afrikaner leader regarded the historically disenfranchised eight million blacks and mulattoes as transparent non-persons, even before his party came into power in 1948. And I find it curiously coincidental that Stephen (at the start of the Proteus” episode), having left the school and now killing time by walking and ruminating on Sandymount Beach, thinks about his encounter with Mr. Deasy and terms the anti-Semitic headmaster “dominie Deasy”. “Dominie” is a Scots word for an educator (historically of the Church of Scotland, but later generalized to  refer to any type of pedagogue), but in South Africa, the Afrikaans term “dominie” typically and specifically refers to a pastor of the rigid Dutch Reformed Church – such as was the Deasy’s fellow anti-Semite, Dr. Daniel Francois Malan.

Arguing strenuously but unsuccessfully in parliament against Dr. Malan were two courageous and outspoken Jewish M.P.’s - Morris Alexander and Morris Kentridge, both successful lawyers. Alexander reminded Dr. Malan that Yiddish, the lingua franca of many Eastern European Jews (which was classified in South African law as a “non-European” language, so as to deliberately exclude Jewish immigrants) was written in the Hebrew characters that Malan had studied during his theology courses. But most tellingly, in the 1937 parliamentary debate, the urbane and sophisticated (and “unassimilable”) Lithuanian-born Morris Kentridge stood up in parliament and spoke feelingly about his having changed his name: “I changed my name many years ago…I felt that having the name of Kantorowich, which is a Polish name, would not help me in assimilating with the people, and that the best course, the best step, was to assume a name more in consonance with the ideas of the country.” In time, Kentridge’s son, Sydney, became a prominent anti-apartheid lawyer, who along with another Jewish lawyer, Issy Maisels, defended Nelson Mandela in the infamous 1956-1960 “Treason” trial (truth to tell, the tendentious right-wing prosecutor, Oswald Prow, was Jewish as well). Sydney Kentridge also represented the family of Stephen Biko, the black activist who died in police custody in 1977, and his son (Morris Kentridge’s grandson) is the universally renowned super-egalitarian multimedia artist William Kentridge. In short, a South African history lesson for the Trumpists of America and also, I regret to write, for some of those who now hold power here in Israel.