Ulysses Essay 30 (48:1)

Chapter 4 (Calypso) Note 1

“Mr Leopold Bloom”

We first meet 38-year-old Mr. Leopold Bloom in his home at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin at 8 a.m., just as Stephan Dedalus is breakfasting with Mulligan and Haines in the Martello tower a few miles away on the Dublin seacoast. Bloom too is thinking of food (especially the kidneys and other internal organs that he fancies) while giving his cat a saucer of milk.

Bloom, as we later learn, is the son of a Hungarian Jew (Rudolph Virag) and an Irish Protestant mother (Ellen Higgins). Rudolph, in an apparent attempt to conceal his Eastern  European origins, had changed his surname from “Virag” (“flower” in Hungarian) to the quasi-equivalent “Bloom” after immigrating to Ireland. (Bloom in fact gives himself the pseudonym “Flower” in his clandestine and sexually redolent correspondence with Martha Clifford, a woman some time back had responded to Bloom’s ad requesting a typist). Since orthodox Jewish law (“Halakha”) unequivocally specifies that Jewishness is a matter of matrilineal descent (i.e. the religion of one’s mother determines if one is Jewish or not), Leopold would not be considered Jewish by orthodox rabbis, and in fact would need to convert to Judaism if he wished, for instance, to undergo a Jewish religious marriage with a Jewish woman. Nonetheless his semi-Jewishness is central to his character, and it is obvious that to his Irish acquaintances he is as indubitably (and often as despicably) Jewish as Shylock; in fact to some of them he is not even really an Irishman, although he was born and bred in Ireland. Bloom himself was not circumcised, as becomes apparent in later episodes, and in fact reconverted from his father’s Protestant religion to Catholicism so as to be able to undergo a church marriage with his wife-to-be, Marion (Molly) Tweedy who was born in Gibraltar. Her father, Major Brian Tweedy, an Irish Army officer stationed in Gibraltar, married Lunita Laredo, a Spanish Gibraltarian, and there are some hints that Lunita may have been a Sephardic Jewess, in which case Molly Tweedy would have paradoxically have been considered Jewish by Halakha, as would have been her children Milly – the Blooms’ teenage daughter – and Rudy, their son who died at the age of eleven days, ten years prior to the action of Ulysses. Rudy’s death is described as having cast an impenetrable pall over Leopold’s and Molly’s relationship, to the extent that they never again consummated full sexual intercourse, although both Leopold and Molly are presented as being intensely libidinous in their thoughts and also – especially in Molly’s case – in their actions.

Rudolph Virag’s choice of the name “Bloom” to indicate non-foreignness, if not Irish indigenousness, is somewhat surprising. Joyce must have been aware that “Bloom” or “Blum” was a common Jewish surname in both western and central Europe and he surely knew that in 1914, eight years before the publication of “Ulysses”, the outspokenly Jewish Léon Blum had acceded to the leadership of the Socialist party in France (of which he was later to be three times Prime Minister). Still, where would twentieth century literature be if Mr. Virag had decided to confer on himself and his offspring a more unequivocally Irish name such as “O’Connor” rather than “Bloom”, and our protagonist would consequently have been called Leopold O’Connor? As they say in Yiddish “past nit” (“it wouldn’t do”).

But let my imagination wander. What if Leopold Bloom, mildly sympathetic with the Zionist cause – as becomes apparent a little later in this chapter – would sometime in the future have grown weary of the subliminal anti-Semitic atmosphere of Catholic Dublin and had decided to emigrate to Palestine to join the early Zionist pioneer farmers toiling to rejuvenate the arid landscape surrounding the Lake of Galilee, as described in a newspaper advertisement that he reads soon after breakfast? Having arrived in Ottoman Palestine, he might well have met David Ben-Gurion, later to be the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel, who himself had emigrated from Plonsk in Russian Poland to Palestine in 1906. One year later Ben-Gurion, the effete and well born son of a bourgeois lawyer, had moved from the central agricultural village of Petah Tikvah where he had been picking oranges for his livelihood to the nascent kibbutzim in the Galilee where he labored on road construction. Ben-Gurion was born David Grün (or Green), and on arriving in Palestine his first action was to Hebraize his name, thereby emulating the determination of many of the early Zionists to discard any semblance of the Yiddish culture that characterized Jewish exilic existence in Eastern European.  David Green became David Ben-Gurion, adopting the surname of a historical figure – a wealthy philanthropist named Nakdimon Ben-Gurion who had lived in Jerusalem in the period preceding the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. The Talmud relates that Nakdimon Ben-Gurion (in stark contrast to the sworn socialist David Ben-Gurion) was so rich that he gave his daughter a dowry of ten thousand golden dinars, and that he used his wealth to feed the starving citizens of Jerusalem when it was under siege by Titus’s Roman legions prior to the breach of its walls and its eventual total destruction (Babylonian Talmud Tractate Gittin 56a). The Talmud also notes that Nakdimon Ben-Gurion, together with some of his wealthy colleagues, was in favor of a compromise with the overwhelmingly more powerful Roman forces but that the Jewish extremists (sadly) won out in a vain messianic belief that God would not allow his Temple to be destroyed a second time. Perhaps David Ben-Gurion, when acceding to the proposals to partition Palestine  – both in 1937 when he accepted the Peel commission’s recommendation to give the Jews in Palestine a tiny state, and in 1948 when he declared the establishment of the State of Israel in accordance with the more generous November 1947 United Nations partition vote (in contrast to the “all or nothing” uncompromising stance of the anti-socialist and ultra-nationalist Jabotinski-Begin “Herut” faction) – looked to Nakdimon Ben-Gurion’s pragmatic attitude as his exemplar. In any event the name “Ben-Gurion” (“lion cub”) befitted his role as Israel’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense during the 1948-49 War of Independence and the 1956 Sinai Campaign. One of Ben-Gurion’s first actions on becoming Minister of Defense was to demand that all the generals of I.D.F. also Hebraize their names. Thus Yigael Sukeinik the Deputy Chief of Staff (and later eminent archeologist) became Yigael Yadin (“he will judge”), and Yigal Peikowitz, commander of the Southern Front, became Yigal Allon (“oak tree”). The famed Moshe Dayan was spared a name change because his father, Shmuel Dayan, like Ben-Gurion an early Zionist pioneer in the kibbutzim of the Galilee, had already changed his unpronounceable Ukrainian surname – Kitaygordosky – to the short and euphonious Dayan (the traditionmal term for a rabbinical judge, somewhat out of keeping with the hedonistic lifestyle of the thoroughly atheistic General Moshe Dayan).

So how would Bloom have Hebraized his name if after meeting Ben-Gurion in the first decade of the twentieth century he had been persuaded to do so by the Zionist leader? The Hebrew word for a bloom or a flower is “perach” but this not a popular surname in Israel perhaps because “frecha”, whose Hebrew spelling is close to that of “perach”, is a slang term for a woman who exhibits bad taste and boorish behavior. More likely Bloom would have chosen “Nitzan” (“a bud” or “a blossom”), taken from the description of spring in the biblical Song of Songs (2:12): “Ha’nitzanim nir’u ba’aretz” (“The first blossoms have appeared in the land”) – appropriate for the Jewish rebirth in the Land of Israel, and today a popular boy’s name in modern Israel, as well as a common surname adopted by many “Blums” and “Blooms”.