Ulysses Essay 20 (38:28)

Chapter 3 (Proteus) Note 6

“Fleshpots of Egypt”

Stephen espies the Pigeon House, which in 1904 was Dublin’s main electric power station. (Currently the power station is in an adjacent facility). This impressive brick building on the seafront started out around 1760 as “the Pidgeon Storehouse” run by one John Pidgeon (and hence the name – the “d” was subsequently dropped: there was no connection to pigeons) who turned it into a refreshment station for boat passengers arriving from and leaving for Wales. Thereafter it became a hotel, but not long after with the rising threat of French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars the edifice was requisitioned by the British Government and turned into a defensive military fort, eventually becoming Dublin’s first power station at the end of the nineteenth century.

The “Pigeon” reminds Stephen of a mocking retelling of the Virgin Birth narrative by a French iconoclastic atheist named Leo Taxil. According to Taxil, on finding Mary pregnant, the suspicions of her husband Joseph are aroused, and he tries to find out who impregnated her. Mary replies “C’est le pigeon, Joseph!” (“It was the pigeon, Joseph!”)

Stephen recalls that the Taxil book (La Vie de Jésus – Paris 1884) was lent to him in Paris by a fellow Irish expatriate, Kevin Egan, when Stephen was pursuing premedical studies (which were never continued further). He thinks of Paris semi-nostalgically, using the ironic biblical idiom “fleshpots of Egypt” to characterize his self-imposed French exile.

The biblical context referred to is as follows: Scarcely out of Egyptian slavery, and after having been saved from the pursuing Egyptians by being granted a miraculous dry land crossing of the Red Sea, the people of Israel experience thirst and hunger in the desert. After their thirst is assuaged (an oasis of bitter water is sweetened when on God’s command Moses throws a tree into the water) the people complain to Moses and Aaron about their hunger: “It would have better for us to die by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, where we sat by the fleshpot and ate bread to contentment; for you have brought us into this desert to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (Exodus 16:3). While annoyed by the Israelites’ short memory and their overall ungratefulness, God solves the immediate problem by causing a host of exhausted quails to land near the Israelites, affording them meat in quantity, and on a daily basis they find manna from heaven strewn every morning outside their camp.

Although the term “fleshpots of Egypt” has entered English parlance (and has a derived meaning of sexual excess), the original isolated Hebrew term (“sir ha’basar”) is in the singular and simply means a cooking-pot of meat. And indeed in colloquial Israeli speech “sir ha’basar” is used – whether enviously or censoriously or both – to denote “the good life” generally enjoyed by contemporary Diasporic Jews, especially in Europe and the Americas, as compared to the rather spartan (and often more dangerous) life lived by Israelis, especially during the first years of the existence of the State of Israel.

The “Israel vs Diaspora” conflict is a central theme in contemporary Jewish existence. Jewish immigration to Israel is both colloquially and officially termed “aliyah” (literally “going up”” or “ascending”) and the ministry dealing with new (Jewish) immigrants is called Misrad Ha’Aliyah Ve’ha’Klitah (“Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption”), a new immigrant being an “oleh” (“one who ascends”). Conversely, an Israeli who moves to the “sir ha’basar” in the US or Europe (especially Germany – currently a popular relocation site for young Israelis) has the bitingly critical term “yored” (“one who goes down”) applied to him or her. During his 1974-77 first term as Prime Minister, and soon after the initially disastrous Yom Kippur War, Yitzhak Rabin (assassinated in 1995 during his second term for his efforts at making peace with the Palestinians including long term proposals for the surrender of the West Bank) famously labeled “yordim” (the plural of “yored”)  as participating in a “fallout of weaklings.” However, this patently negative value judgment on emigration from Israel has mellowed somewhat in the new millennium, especially with Israel’s increasing involvement in the globalization phenomenon and its leading role in the information revolution.

Still although the Diaspora Jews are happy in their belief that, unlike in the Nazi period,  a welcoming Jewish homeland awaits them in time of trouble (a phenomenon that is especially noticeable in France with the upsurge in Islamic violence on the one hand, and the gathering force of rightwing ant-Semitism on the other), they sometimes feel inwardly that Israel’s existence causes them more trouble than they like to admit, especially because they are unfairly made to bear the brunt of the unremitting charge that Israel, and by derivation all Jews, are to blame for the plight of the Palestinians. Leftwing intellectuals, many of them Jewish, certainly hold a jaundiced view of current Israeli government policy, and while nationalistic Israelis term these critics “self-hating Jews”, these charges hurt, and indeed may be eventually be the most effective means of influencing Israeli policy. It is of interest that the “yordim” are often more extreme that the Israel electorate in supporting right-wing pro-settlement Israeli government policy, which is one of the reasons that the right-wing parties in Israel are somewhat in favor of giving the vote to overseas Israeli expatriates – a privilege that has historically been withheld by all Israeli governments, both left-wing and right-wing, on the basis that if you don’t carry out your citizenly military duty (especially serving  in the reserves) and you avoid the hardships of life in Israel while enjoying “the fleshpot”, then you don’t deserve the vote.