Ulysses Essay 34 (52:13)

Chapter 4 (Calypso) No. 5

“Moses Montefiore. I thought he was.”

Bloom’s continues to ruminate about the Kinneret farm: “Can become ideal winter sanatorium.” It’s possible that this line was part of the advertisement about the Kinneret Farm inserted in order to attract western investment, and Bloom is correct in mentioning the rehabilitative attributes of the below sea level Kinneret basin which is favored with year round warm weather and thermal sulphuric springs near Tiberias whose waters, praised by Flavius Josephus and Pliny, have been used for medicinal purposes for at least three millennia.

The revitalization of the Holy Land, exemplified by the young pioneers at Kinneret, reminds Bloom of the eminent deceased British-Jewish-Italian proto-Zionist and philanthropist, Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), whose triple ethnicity, reminiscent of Bloom’s own confused identity, might explain Bloom’s enigmatic qualification “I thought he was” (Jewish?). Montefiore was born into a British Sephardic Jewish family with Italian roots, and although his grandfather immigrated to England in the 1740s and the family had their permanent home in the southern London suburb of Kennington, Moses Montefiore was born in Leghorn (Livorno) Italy while his parents were on a business trip there.

Montefiore’s doings are legion, and the stories of his numerous mid-nineteenth century trips to Ottoman Palestine well before the first Zionist agricultural pioneers set foot in the country, and his financial assistance to the indigent orthodox Jews of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safad and Hebron are an integral part of Israeli history. His farsighted building project to settle the Jews of Jerusalem outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem and thus lay the foundations of modern Western Jerusalem is attested to by the landmark Montefiore windmill which still stands in Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the terraced garden suburb that he built outside the Old City walls and which is now a gentrified center of art and culture just to the south of the imposing King David Hotel.

In the medical context, there has been renewed interest in Montefiore’s association with Dr. Thomas Hodgkin, the describer of Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Montefiore’s personal physician. Dr. Hodgkin accompanied Montefiore on many of the philanthropist’s trips to the Orient (including a journey to Morocco where Montefiore interceded with the Sultan on behalf of the local Jews and Christians who were suffering from persecution by the Moslems). Hodgkin himself unfortunately fell ill with dysentery (possibly cholera) in Jaffa in 1866 on one of these trips, and died there on April 4, 1866 at the age of 68. He was buried in the English Cemetery in Jaffa, where a granite memorial pillar was erected at his grave by Montefiore, bearing the following inscription:

“Here rests the body of Thomas Hodgkin, M.D., of Bedford Square, London, a man distinguished alike for scientific attainment, medical skill and self-sacrificing philanthropy. He died in Jaffa, the 4^th of April, 1866, in the faith and hope of the Gospel.

HUMANI NIHIL A SE ALIENUM PUTABAT [Terence: ‘Nothing human is foreign to me’]. The epitaph is inscribed by his deeply sorrowing widow and brother to record their irreparable loss.”

But in the context of Ulysses, Bloom’s mention of Moses Montefiore arouses a more sinister association. In the Ithaca episode Bloom for some unexplained reason asks Stephen Dedalus – who has accompanied Bloom home in the dead of night and is drinking Epss’s cocoa with him in the Blooms’ kitchen - to “chant” an old anti-Semitic nursery rhyme. The somewhat tipsy Stephen, who earlier in the day had made a decided if rather meek attempt to counter the anti-Semitic diatribes of Mr. Deasy, is happy to fulfil Bloom’s request, and obligingly sings the first stanza (Joyce provides the musical notation):

            “Little Harry Hughes and his schoolfellows all

            Went out to play ball.

            And the very first ball that Harry Hughes played

            He drove it o’er the jew’s wall.

            And the very second ball that Harry Hughes played

            He broke the jew’s windows all.”

Bloom tolerates and even rather enjoys this verse “with unmixed feeling. Smiling, a jew, he heard with pleasure and saw the unbroken kitchen window.” He asks Stephen to recite the rest of the ballad:

            “Then out came the jew’s daughter

And she all dressed in green.

‘Come back, come back, you pretty little boy,

And play your ball again.’

‘I can’t come back and I won’t come back

Without my schoolfellows all

For if my master did hear

He’d make it a sorry ball.’

She took him by the lilywhite hand

And led him along the hall

Until she led him to a room

Where none could hear him call.

She took a penknife out of her pocket

And cut off his little head,

And now he’ll play ball no more

For he lies among the dead.”

The crude and violent (and patently anti-Semitic) ending upsets Bloom who thinks of his teenage daughter Milly, whom we understand to be Jewish by maternal descent. As Joyce puts it: “How did the father of Millicent receive this second part?

Unsmiling, he heard and saw with wonder a jew’s daughter, all dressed in green.”

As in the above quotation, the “Ithaca” episode takes the form of a catechism-like Q and A exercise. Following the recital of the ballad, two of the subsequent questions and answers are relevant:

“Why was the host [i.e., Bloom] (victim predestined) sad?

He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him should by him not be told.”

“Why was the host (secret infidel) silent?

He weighed the possible evidences for and against ritual murder: the incitation of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism.”

“Hughes”, the surname of the little Christian boy in the poem, is resonant with English anti-Semitic history. On 31 July, 1255, a nine-year-old Christian boy from Lincoln named Hugh (his surname is unknown) disappeared. His mother was told by neighbors that her had been seen playing with some Jewish boys and going into a house of a Jew. Six weeks later (on August 27, 1255) Hugh’s body was found in a well on the property of a Jew named Copin.

Copin was seized by the authorities and, under a false promise of immunity from torture and execution, was forced to admit that Hugh had been humiliated, tortured and eventually crucified in the presence of Jewish leaders from all over England. The idea that Jews needed the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes and especially as a necessary ingredient for baking matzot for the Passover (the notorious  “blood libel”) was widely accepted in the Christian world from medieval times down to the twentieth century (as evidenced by the 1913 Beilis trial in Kiev in Czarist Russia). The fact that little Hugh was murdered (or fell into the well) in midsummer, long after Passover, did not seem to bother the authorities.

(My father, who grew up in a small town in Lithuania before the First World War, would tell us on Seder night in Cape Town, how as a little boy he once saw some blood – of an animal, so it turned out – behind the town’s matzo bakery just before Passover. He never forgot the shattering fear that overtook him at the sight of the blood).

At the time of Hugh’s death many prominent Jewish families had indeed congregated in Lincoln to celebrate the marriage of the Bellaset, the daughter of a leading Lincoln Jew, Berachiah de Nicole. Ninety of the celebrants were arrested along with Copin, and imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of ritual murder. The monarch, King Henry III, took a pecuniary interest in the trial as by law he stood to gain the property of any Jew implicated in such a crime. Eventually Copin and eighteen Jewish leaders were hanged. The other seventy-two Jews (including the unfortunate Berachiah) were freed after paying a ransom.to the king.

Hugh was buried in Lincoln Cathedral and a shrine was erected in in the cathedral in memory of “Little St. Hugh” (although to its credit the Vatican never formally canonized him). Over the centuries the shrine was a popular pilgrimage site, and miracles were attributed to it. Only in 1955, probably in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, was a sign put up next to the shrine debunking Hugh’s ostensible “ritual murder”. It reads:

“By the remains of the shrine of ‘Little St. Hugh’.

Trumped up stories of ‘ritual murders’ of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later.

These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives. Lincoln had its own legend and the alleged victim was buried in the Cathedral in the year 1255.

Such stories do not rebound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray:

Lord, forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be.”

And now to Sir Moses Montefiore and the blood libel of 1840. What was unusual about this episode is that it took place not in Christian Europe but in Damascus, ruled at the time by the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I. Although blood libel accusations against the Jews had never been part of Islamic ideology, in February 1840 thirteen leaders of the Damascene Jewish community, including their rabbi (Jacob Antebi), were arrested and charged with the murder of Father Thomas, a French Franciscan monk of Sardinian extraction who served at a convent in Damascus.  The background to the arrests was the activity of the French consul at Damascus, Ulysee de Ratti-Menton, whose policy was to assist Damascene Christian merchants gain ascendancy over the economically powerful Jewish Farhi family (one of whose members was among the detainees). De Ratti-Menton had initiated investigations in the Jewish quarter and had suggested to the local authorities that the Jews had murdered Father Thomas for ritual purposes. Although, relations between the Islamic rulers and the Jewish community were generally good – and often better than the relations between the Moslems and their minority Christian communities – the Egyptian pasha Muhammad Ali under whose suzerainty Syria came – was interested at the time in courting relations with France, and consequently allowed the blood libel charges to take root, and did nothing to prevent a mob in Damascus from pillaging a local synagogue and destroying the Torah scrolls.

Under torture, confession were extracted from eight of the arrested Jews, four of whom – including the old and feeble Joseph Laniado - died under this treatment. All the nine other Jews were sentenced to judicial execution.

The affair drew wide international attention, not all favorable to the Jews (The London Times, for instance, credited the accusations as being consistent with medieval polemics suggesting that the Talmud prescribed the sacrifice of Gentiles, and stated that if the accusations against the thirteen Damascene Jews would be proved, “…then the Jewish religion must at once disappear from the face of the earth…We shall await the issue as the whole of Europe and the civilized world will do with intense interest.”) But the bulk of enlightened public opinion swung the other way, and in August 1840 Sir Moses Montefiore, backed by (among others) Britain’s Lord Palmerston, the French lawyer Adolphe Crémieux and the Danish missionary John Nicolayson, led a delegation to the court of Muhammad Ali in Alexandria. The negotiations went on for four weeks, and secured the unconditional release of the nine prisoners. Not content with this remarkable achievement, the indefatigable Montefiore journeyed to Constantinople where he persuaded Sultan Abdülmecid to issue a firman, outlawing blood libel accusations in the Ottoman Empire. It read in part as follows:

“… and for the love we bear to our subjects, we cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence for the crime alleged against them is evident, to be worried and tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least foundation in truth…”

Nonetheless, neo-Arab anti-Semitism, catalyzed by hatred of the State of Israel, periodically revives the episode, suggesting that the Damascus blood libel charges were not unfounded. In 1984 the former Syrian Foreign Minister, Mustafa Tlass, wrote a detailed book about the incident, quoting the documents written by the French diplomats at the time. And in 2007 the Lebanese poet, Marwan Chamoun, referring to the episode and to Tlass’s book in an interview on TeleLiban television, termed it “…the slaughter of the priest Tomaso de Campanian who was a Sicilian [sic] with French citizenship, in the days of Muhammad Ali Pasha, in 1840…”

Further on in the interview he furnished more ostensible details: “…A priest was slaughtered in the presence of two rabbis in the heart of Damascus, in the home of a close friend of the priest, Daud Al-Harari, the head of the Jewish community of Damascus. After he was slaughtered, his blood was collected, and the two rabbis took it. Why? So they could worship their god, because by drinking human blood, they can get closer to God…”  

The Damascus blood libel had other historical consequences. In its wake the American Jewish community came together politically for the first time, with 15,000 Jews in six U.S. cities protesting the persecution of the Syrian Jews. The American Jewish community also succeeded in persuading President Van Buren to issue an official U.S. protest which was expressed in a statement by the American consul in Egypt.

But most significantly, and analogous to the influence of the Dreyfus affair on the embryonic Zionist thinking of Theodor Herzl a half century later, the Damascus blood libel must have convinced Moses Montefiore that the solution to the “Jewish problem” could only be achieved in the ancient Jewish homeland, and although he never expressly spoke about the possibility of Jewish independence in Palestine, his actions were foundational for the subsequent rise of Herzlian Zionism and for the establishment of the State of Israel.