Ulysses Essay 21 (40:3)

Chapter 3 (Proteus) Note 7

“M. Drumont, famous journalist”

Stephen, still thinking about Keith Egan, his Irish expatriate friend during his Paris days, recalls Egan mentioning a French journalist named Edouard Adolphe Drumont (1844-1917) who labelled Queen Victoria as “the old hag with yellow teeth.” While these anti-English sentiments no doubt were favorably received by Egan, who was an uncompromising supporter of Irish independence, it seems evident that Joyce introduces Drumont’s name to mark him as the arch protagonist of French anti-Semitism during the period of the Dreyfus trials (1894-1906) which tore France apart into pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish camps. Drumont’s paper, La Libre Parole (“Free Speech”) had been slandering Jews from 1892 onwards, and created the seedbed for the unjustified accusation that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a traitor who had handed secret documents to the Germans. Some twenty years ago I bought from one of the old newspaper sellers on the banks of the Seine an original print of the famous January 13 1895 issue of Le Petit Journal, the illustrated Parisian news weekly, with its cover depiction of the degradation of Captain Dreyfus, epitomized by a no holds barred painting of a senior officer humiliating Dreyfus as he strips “the traitor” of his medals and breaks his sword over his knee, while an approving crowd applauds in the background.

While Joyce does not mention the Dreyfus trial, he must have been aware of its significance in early Zionist history, which is to play such a prominent part in Bloom’s thoughts throughout the day. From childhood I was taught in my pro-Zionist home in South Africa, as every Israeli kid is taught according to the official policy of the Israeli Ministry of Education, that what made Theodor Herzl, the great Zionist visionary, conceive the idea of a Jewish state as the only answer to anti-Semitism, was his journalistic experience when covering the Dreyfus trial for the Viennese Neue Freie Presse. The Hungarian born Herzl, urbane, sophisticated and well-nigh assimilated into Viennese gentile society, grew up next door to a synagogue and even attended a Jewish elementary school, but his family decided against a Bar Mitzvah in the synagogue, and when he was called up to the Torah on the Shabbat of the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, he had to read the blessings recited before and after Torah reading – texts which are familiar to virtually every Jewish boy from his Bar Mitzvah – from a transliterated manuscript, as he lacked even the most basic knowledge of Hebrew.

While Herzl did mention later that the Dreyfus trial influenced his thinking that the Jews would never be welcome in Europe, his reports to the Neue Freie Presse did not stress the Jewish aspect of the Dreyfus affair. For instance in contrast to the teaching of the Israeli school history syllabus, Herzl reported that the French masses outside the courthouse cried, “Death to traitors” and not “Death to the Jews”. Nevertheless, something definitely moved within him, because later in the same year (1895) he wrote his groundbreaking book Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) in which he argued that the only answer to anti-Semitism was for the Jews to have a state of their own. The location of this proposed state was not ideologically important for him and he mentioned Argentina or (preferably) Palestine as possible alternatives (and later, when the British Government proposed granting the Zionist movement its East African colony of Uganda as a possible location for a Jewish homeland, Herzl supported the idea, to the deep antagonism of most of the other leaders of the Zionist movement, a quarrel which may have contributed to his premature death in 1904 at the age of forty-four).

Be that as it may, in 1897, only two years after the Dreyfus trial which he had attended, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, which he diarized in the following words: “At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today I would be greeted by universal laughter, In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.” And indeed on November 29, 1947, exactly fifty years later, the General Assembly of the United Nations at Lake Success in New York voted to end the British Mandate in Palestine, and to partition the country into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, effective from  May 14, 1948. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Today the downtown of every Israeli city has its Herzl Street and Herzl’s bearded likeness is the only image in the Israel Knesset. And Basel Street in the Tel Aviv’s “Old North” quarter is now the center of the city’s most upscale and vibrant yuppie neighborhood, testimony to Herzl’s vision of a normative Jewish society in which he envisioned (but not as prophetically) that the Jewish state would “keep the rabbis in their synagogues and the generals in their barracks.” As a postscript, in 1993, Assi Dayan – the thrice-married, drug-addicted and anti-establishment movie director son of Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan – made “Life According to Agfa”, a film about the denizens of a Tel Aviv bar, in which the protagonist, eyeing the décolleté of the woman sitting beside him, propositions her by suggesting that they hold a “Congress in Basel”.