Ulysses Essay 45 (84:1)

Chapter 6 (Hades) No. 1

“Of the tribe of Reuben, he said”

Bloom and three other mourners are ensconced in a horse-drawn jarvey, one of the vehicles in Paddy Dignam’s funeral procession. The jarvey is slowly making its way from Dignam’s home in Irishtown in southeast Dublin through the center of the city towards the Glasnevin cemetery on its northwestern outskirts. The journey takes them past the city’s important business establishments and over the main bridges on the Grand Canal and River Liffey. Although it is now beginning to rain, passersby respectfully doff their caps and hats as the procession goes by, eliciting a word of praise from Stephen Dedalus’s father, Simon Dedalus, who is especially gratified  that the procession is not taking the quicker circuit road, but passing instead through the traffic-jammed city center. Simon Dedalus is Joyce’s fictional reconstruction of his own father, John Stanislav Joyce, just as Stephen is Joyce’s own alter ego, and now from his side of the jarvey, Bloom espies Stephen, “a little young man clad in mourning, a wide hat” on the sidewalk, and with a faint attempt at humor informs Simon, “There’s a friend of yours gone by, Dedalus.” “Who is that?” asks Simon,” and Bloom replies, “Your son and heir.” Simon expresses the hope that Stephen is alone and not with that “Mulligan ‘cad” (whom he ironically dismisses as his son‘s “fidus Achates” [the faithful follower of the exiled Aeneas in Greek and Roman mythology]), and Bloom reassures him, “No. He was alone.” Simon then rants that most probably Stephen is on his way to the despised Gouldings, Stephen’s maternal aunt and her alcoholic accountant husband. Indeed, as we know from the Proteus episode, that after getting out early from his teaching job, Stephen had originally intended to visit his aunt and uncle (where he feels very much at home), but had eventually decided to takes his ruminative walk on Sandymount Beach, near Irishtown.

Besides Simon Dedalus, who has come down in the world, Bloom’s other companions in the jarvey are two pen-pushing officers of the law: Martin Cunningham, chief clerk of the Crown Solicitor’s Office (the local D.A.) and Jack Power, a functionary of the Royal Irish- Constabulary whose HQ is at Dublin Castle. Dedalus, Cunningham and Power are all dyed in the wool Irish Catholics who nonchalantly display unvarnished and even self-righteous antisemitism without any consideration for the presence in the jarvey of the (uncircumcised) Bloom who is regarded by Dublin’s all and sundry as the prototypical wandering and hated Jew, although he has not only converted to his wife’s Catholicism from his Jewish father’s late Protestantism, and is – no less than his companions in the jarvey - a native Irishman, born, bred and schooled in Dublin and vociferously proud of his Irish heritage, and is in fact barely half-Jewish by patrilineal descent and thus would not even be considered Jewish by rabbinical criteria (and would have been required to convert to Judaism if he had ever wished to marry a Jewish woman in an orthodox synagogue).

The jarvey crosses the O’Connell bridge over the Liffey River on its way northwards towards the Prospect cemetery, and as it passes the “Liberator’s form”, the statue of the great early nineteenth century Irish politician and Catholic emancipator, Daniel O’Connell  (1776-1847), overlooking the bridge from the north, truth, fiction and antisemitism collide in a deeply emotive incident, harking back to James Joyce’s complex relationship with his father, John Stanislaus Joyce:

Martin Cunningham nudged Mr. Power. “Of the tribe of Reuben,” he said.

A tall blackbearded fellow, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner of Elvery’s elephant house showed them a curved hand open on his spine.

“In all his pristine beauty,” Mr. Power said.

Mr. Dedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:

“The devil break the hasp of your back!”

Mr. Power, collapsing in laughter, shaded his face from the window as the carriage passed Gray’s statue.

“We have all been there,” Martin Cunningham said broadly.

His eyes met Mr. Bloom’s eyes. He caressed his beard, adding:

“Well, nearly all of us.”

Mr. Bloom began to speak with sudden eagerness to his companions’ faces.

“There’s an awfully good one going the rounds about Reuben J. and the son.”

The quasi-historical text quoted above is rife with allusion, inversion and anachronism. The “blackbearded fellow” that Cunningham espies (and derisively characterizes as being “of the tribe of Reuben”) is Reuben J. Dodd, a real-life tight-fisted and unyielding Dublin solicitor and moneylender, while Bloom’s eager recalling of a story about “the son” relates to Dodd’s son, a junior partner in his father’s law firm who somewhat confusingly also bears the name of Reuben J. Dodd; Simon Dedalus, as noted above, is Joyce’s fictional reconstruction of his own father, John Stanislaus Joyce. The Joyces had a bitter and longstanding grievance against the elder Dodd, who had relentlessly called in mortgage loans taken by John Joyce, and when the latter had been unable to pay up, had repossessed his home, eventually driving the previously well-off Joyce family into a series of never-ending house-movings, each time into a more deteriorated area of Dublin, and transforming the cultured, pro-Parnell and politically active John Joyce into an angry alcoholic depressive, who abused his family with frequent episodes of near domestic violence directed mainly against his long suffering (and ever understanding) wife and often involving their five children. Yet James, who himself had the embarrassment of having been a classmate of the younger Reuben Dodd at Belvedere College, stood loyally by his father despite his often frightening  conduct at home, and made no secret of his loathing of the miserly and uncompassionate Reuben Dodd senior.

Thus it is obvious why Simon curses the solicitor (“The devil break the hasp of your back!”), but Cunningham’s depiction of the elder Dodd as being “of the tribe of Reuben” is more problematic, since it is universally agreed that the Dodds were Catholics, and it is highly unlikely that the solicitor’s son would have been admitted to the then fanatically Jesuit Belvedere College (as described so tellingly by Joyce in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man) if the Dodds had been of Jewish extraction (I note from its website that Belvedere now seems to have a more liberal and egalitarian admission policy, although the school is still restricted to boys only). While it is true that Dodd’s first name is indeed “Reuben,” Cunningham’s remark sounds like a fairly vicious anti-Semitic diatribe, especially given the fact that Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus, was considered in Catholic medieval legend to belong to the Reubenite tribe (conveniently ignoring the fact that the Reubenites, who had settled far to the east of the Jordan, were among the first of the “ten lost tribes” to be exiled to the remote Khabur River region of Mesopotamia by the Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser III in 732 B.C.E, a decade prior to his final conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel and more than seven centuries before the crucifixion).

Thus since all four of the jarvey riders were obviously aware that Reuben Dodd was not Jewish, one must assume that Cunningham has chosen to “Judaize” the Christian solicitor as a latter day  Shylock, the despised prototypical Jewish loan-shark. Cunningham’s characterization is supported by his sympathetic statement to Simon Dedalus, “We have all been there” (i.e., all the riders had at one  time or another had been forced to borrow money from Dodd), but then recalling Bloom’s Jewish origins, he adds, while eyeing Bloom: “Well, nearly all of us,” implying that Jewish usury is practiced only vis-a-vis gentiles, and not when one Jew lends money to another coreligionist.

Bloom responds to this uncomfortable sequence “with sudden eagerness” by hastily attempting to prove that he too is an undiluted member of the group of Irish Catholics by retelling “an awfully good one that is going the rounds about Reuben J. and the son.” The episode that Bloom begins to relate at length, until Cunningham rudely cuts him off so as to tell the rest of the story himself, relates to a true incident that that occurred in 1911, seven and a half years after the fictional events of Bloomsday. The junior Reuben Dodd had gotten involved with a woman not to his parents’ liking, and his father had decided to exile him to the Isle of Man, a stop on the daily boat to Liverpool. As the two Dodds were making their way to the boat, the son either fell into the River Liffey or jumped in suicidally (here the details are a bit fuzzy), but he was saved by a dockworker named Moses Goldin (a real-life character, and almost certainly a Jew) who went into the water after him and fished him out. Goldin became seriously ill as a result of the episode, losing wages due to his illness. His wife consequently approached the Dodds to ask for some monetary compensation. She was told that “her husband should have minded his own business” and then sent on her way with a miserly half-crown (two shillings and sixpence). The Irish Worker of 2 December 1911 told the story under the telling headline “Half-a-Crown for Saving a Life.”

In the fictional retelling in Ulysses, Simon Dedalus, on hearing the story and mistakenly thinking at first that it was the older Dodd – his nemesis – who had nearly drowned, is overjoyed: ”’Drown Barabbas!’ Mr. Dedalus cried ‘I wish to Christ he did’ thus embellishing Dodd with a double theological anti-Semitic identity – he is both “of the tribe of Reuben,” i.e., a personification of the perfidious Judas Iscariot; and “Barabbas,”  – the Jewish rebel leader who was also due to be crucified on the eve of Passover, and who was saved when in accord with custom Pontius Pilate signaled his intent to pardon one of the condemned men in honor of the festival, as related in the Gospel of Matthew “But the chief priest and the elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask for  Barabbas and destroy Jesus” (Matthew 27:20).

Later in  Ulysses, Bloom himself goes even further’ in displaying   uncharacteristic Jewish self-hatred by typifying Dodd as the ultimate replicate Shylock. In Lestrygonians, when praising the real-life Dublin judge Frederick Falkiner for being harsh on  unscrupulous moneylenders, Bloom uses abusive anti-Semitic terminology to typify Dodd as the archetypal Jewish loan shark: “Sends then to the rightabout. The devil on moneylenders. Gave Reuben J. a great strawcalling. Now he’s really what they call a dirty jew.”  And in the dreamlike Circe sequence in which Reuben J. Dodd appears twice in the company of Mastiansky and Citron, Bloom’s erstwhile Jewish neighbors, he is first described as the “black-bearded Iscariot, bad shepherd,” and later  as “Reuben J antichrist…Across his loins is slung a pilgrims wallet from which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills.”

All these patently anti-Semitic references to the (non-Jewish!) Reuben J. Dodd in Ulysses are so out of keeping with the openly pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist tenor of Ulysses that one must conclude that the root of Joyce’s Shylockian portrayal of Dodd lies in the author’s bitter hatred of Dodd because of the solicitor’s  precipitation of his father’s downfall and his own resultant endless and  traumatic childhood and adolescent house-movings. But as is always the case with Joyce, the substance is to be found sub-textually. And indeed when it turns out later (in the Wandering Rocks episode) that Bloom has made a generous contribution of five shillings (twice Dodd’s payment to the Jew who saved his son) to Paddy Dignam’s widow’s fund (Dignam was another victim of Dodd), Bloom’s Christian co-mourners make a show of being amazed at Bloom’s generosity, and one of them even goes  so far as to disingenuously (and ungraciously) quote Antonio’s reaction to Shylock’s surrealistic loan terms  in The Merchant of Venice (Act 1, Scene 3):

 “’Look here Martin,’ John Wyse Nolan said….’I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings.’

‘Quite right,’ Martin Cunningham said, taking the list. And put down five shillings too.

‘Without a second word either,’ Mr. Power said

‘Strange but true,’ Martin Cunningham added.

John Wyse Nolan opened wide eyes.

‘I’ll say there is much kindness in the jew,’ he quoted elegantly.”

But back to the biblical Reuben. Here I am not objective, because at my Brit Milah, at the Inverugie Private Nursing Home in Rochester Road, Sea Point, Cape Town, just four days before Pearl Harbor, I was given the Hebrew names of my paternal and maternal great grandfathers: Re’uven  (anglicized in the King James translation of the bible to “Reuben”)

and Yosef (anglicized to “Joseph”). However, as in most South African Jewish families, I was also given an acceptably non-ethnically identifiable first name, so that my official birth certificate issued by the Union of South Africa, then a British Dominion, lists me as “Raymond Joseph Aronson.” And in fact the only time I ever hear the name “Re’uven” is when I am  called up the Torah, as I was just two months ago at the Bar-Mitzvah of my grandson Yair (meaning “he will illuminate”, a very popular Israeli first name, drawn from the name of one of the judges who ruled the Israelites before the establishment of the united monarchy) in a small synagogue in Shikun Dan, an upscale northern suburb of Tel Aviv.

In Genesis, Reuben is the first of Jacob’s twelve sons, born to him by Leah, the senior of his four womenfolk. Although the Torah suggests different etymologies for his name, most simply the Hebrew Re’uven means “Behold, a son!” and is made up of “re’u” – behold; and  “ven” – a son” (“ven” and not “ben” because Hebrew grammar demands that when the letter “bet” closely follows a long vowel it is unaccentuated and is therefore articulated like the English letter “v”). I myself was a first boy after two girls and maybe that too had something to do with my name.  

Primogeniture is not favored in the Tanach and following the fate of other biblical first born sons (examples are Cain, Ishmael, Esau and Eliav – King David’s oldest brother), Reuben and the Reubenites were outshone by two of Jacob’s more illustrious younger  sons, Judah and Joseph, and their descendants. Although Reuben is described in a highly uncomplimentary fashion as having slept with his father’s concubine Bilhah (Genesis 35:22) and thus implicitly exercising his rights of primogeniture,  he is also awarded kudos for having attempted to save the life of his young brother Joseph, when the other brothers, jealous of their father’s favoritism to the young Joseph, determine to kill him, but eventually assent to Reuben’s suggestion that they put him in an abandoned well. Reuben hopes to somehow later deliver him safely to their father but his plan is somewhat undone (although eventually for the good) when the brothers espy a passing spice-laden caravan of Ishmaelites on their way from Gilead to Egypt, and decide, on Judah’s suggestion, to sell Joseph to the traders, later showing their inconsolable father Joseph’s many-colored coat stained with animal blood as evidence of their spurious story that Joseph had been torn to death by a wild animal.

When blessing each of his sons on his deathbed in Egypt, Jacob poetically describes both their good and bad qualities. Reuben gets his comeuppance both for his night with Bilhah and also for his overall indecisiveness and lack of character (the following is my translation):

“Reuben, you are my firstborn,

My might  and the first of my potency;

You are great in dignity and great in strength.

But unstable as water, you cannot lead,

Because you went onto your father’s bed,

And you then defiled it by mounting my couch (Genesis 49:3-4).

And indeed, as I previously noted, when the time came for Joshua to divide up the land of Canaan among the twelve tribes of Israel, the tribes of Reuben and Gad, as well as half the tribe of Manasseh, reminded Joshua that Moses had previously agreed that they could settle in the previously conquered fertile regions east of the Jordan (Numbers 32), if they kept their promise to aid the other tribes in the conquest of Canaan. Over the centuries the connection of the two and a half eastern tribes with the main body of the Israelite nation became more and more tenuous (for example, they opted out of Deborah’s war against the Canaanites under Sisera) until they were eventually carried away into exile by the Assyrians a full decade before the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel, and thus finally lost to history.

So how did the legend arise that Judas Iscariot was of the tribe of Reuben?  Maybe the selling of Joseph to the Canaanites could provide a hint. According to the text in Genesis it was Judah who proposed selling Joseph to the traders, rather than leaving him in the pit to die. The transaction was apparently made in Reuben’s absence and on returning to the pit and finding that Joseph is no longer there, he reacts with extreme horror and shock: he rends his clothes as a sign  of mourning, and apprehending that as the eldest brother, he will be held responsible by his father for Joseph’s disappearance, he cries out in anguish, “The child is gone, and as for me, where can I go?” (Genesis 37:30). The story of Joseph is often read as a prefiguration of Jesus, especially because of his having been sold for twenty pieces of silver, reminiscent of the thirty pieces of silver for which Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus. The obvious problem that arises is that it was Judah, the forefather of David and of Jesus, and not the vacillatory Reuben, who executed the transaction. But Judah is “untouchable” in Christian messianic  theology, while Reuben who did not stand guard over Joseph to ensure that no harm came his way, was indeed somewhat responsible for the selling. Perhaps that is why Martin Cunningham, following Christian legend, epitomizes the hated Catholic moneylender, Reuben J. Dodd, as being “of the tribe of Reuben’ – converting him into a Jew, a Shylock and a Judas Iscariot, all rolled into one. And by interrupting Bloom – who is so pathetically eager to be accepted by his Catholic peers – and taking over from him the narration of the juicy story of the near-drowning of the younger Dodd, Cunningham implicitly informs Bloom that he should know his place and keep his place: forever that of  the despised wandering Jew. But Bloom will have his comeback in the Cyclops episode later in the day, when, in Barney Kiernan’s pub, he will throw caution to the winds, and apparently regretting his own undistinguished connivance with the antisemitism of the Dodd episode, he will subject Martin Cunningham and especially the (un-named) ultranationalist and rabidly antisemitic Citizen to a full blast of his real and unmitigated feelings:

.

“’Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercandante and Spinoza. And the Savior was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.’

‘He had no father,’ says Martin. ‘That’ll do now. Drive ahead.’

‘Whose God?’ says the citizen.’

‘Well, his uncle was a jew.’ says he. ‘Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.’

Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.

‘By Jesus,’ says he, ‘I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.’”

And the Citizen throws the biscuit box at Bloom’s head, just missing him.