Ulysses Essay 35 (53:10)

Chapter 4 (Calypso) No. 6

“Agendath Netaim: planter’s company”

Bloom puts the wrapped pork kidney into a sidepocket of his jacket, and as he walks back home along Dorset Street he continue to read the flyer that he took from the butcher’s counter. He becomes especially interested in another and more detailed Zionist advertisement inserted by the Agendath Netaim Company offering for sale farmland in Palestine situated north of Jaffa in the Sharon coastal plain. Bloom muses about the practicalities of the offer:

“To purchase vast sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay eight[y] marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered for life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the balance in yearly instalments. Bliebtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15.

Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.”

“Agendath Netaim” is a mis-transliteration of the Hebrew name of the Zionist agricultural colonization company. The correct transliteration is “Agudat Netaim” (“The Planters’ Association”) which was an actual organization founded in 1905 (another of the Joycean anachronisms in Ulysses) but indeed situated exactly at the address specified in the offer that Bloom is reading (Bliebtreustrasse 34, just off West Berlin’s fashionable Kufürstendamm – or Kudamm – boulevard).  The aim of the association was to raise money from world Jewry to establish agricultural settlements in Ottoman Palestine (and after 1917 in British Mandatory Palestine).

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Theories abound as to whether the erroneous “Agendath Netaim” was an intentional mis-transliteration on Joyce’s part. One of the more outlandish suggestions is that the term conjures up Herzl’s support at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903 – immediately after the pogroms against the Jews in Tsarist Kishinev made the need for a political solution to the “Jewish problem” suddenly vitally urgent – for a semi-official British proposal to establish a Jewish state in Uganda (then a British colony) rather than in Ottoman Palestine, an idea which was roundly and vigorously rejected at the Congress, causing Herzl to retreat into a deep depression which may have contributed to his early demise the following year when he was only forty-four years old. While there is some homophonic similarity between “Uganda” and “Agendath”, the content of the flyer makes it clear that the company intended to buy land in Palestine and not in British East Africa. (Geographically, the region under discussion in the “Uganda proposal” actually fell within the borders of Kenya, following a land transfer implemented by the British to facilitate the building of the “lunatic” Uganda Railway linking Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa).

My own theory is that “Agendath” is just that, i.e., the English word “agenda” (which is itself a direct import from the Latin term denoting “things to be done”), coupled with the “th” suffix which represents the Hebrew female possessive form, and thus “Agendath Netaim” would simply connote “the agenda of the planters”. Modern Hebrew has also adopted the term “agenda”, although purists prefer “seder yom” (literally: “order of the day”), partly recognizable to non-Hebraists in the term for the Passover festive home ritual (the “Seder”). Getting back to “Agendath Netaim” it makes perfect sense (to me anyway) that Joyce was outlining the Zionist agenda for Palestine, namely, to buy up as much arable land as possible, mirrored in the first line of the Zionist children’s song that we would sing while putting out weekly coin into the Jewish National Fund “Blue Box” at Hebrew school: “Dunam po ve’dunam sham” (“A dunam here and a dunam there”), and as Bloom’s flyer informs us “they plant a dunam of land for you”. (The Ottoman dunam, measuring one thousand square meters – about one quarter of an acre – is still the standard land measure in modern Israel).

As far as the “eucalyptus trees” are concerned, Bloom mulls over their being “excellent for shade, fuel and construction”. Here it seems that  Bloom’s recurrent tendency to dwell on scientific trivia  )often quaint but sometimes imprecise, as in his earlier erroneous reiteration of the old wives’ tale that if a cat has its whiskers cut off, it can no longer mouse( is in this instance most unlikely to have been based on the content of the flyer, since one can be sure that if the advertisement had specified the rationale for the early Zionist enthusiasm for importing eucalyptus saplings from Australia into Palestine and planting them in the marshlands around Hadera in the northern Sharon plain or in the upper Jordan valley, it would have stated plainly that the object was to utilize the known ability of the swift-growing eucalyptus trees to absorb copious amounts of water from the low-lying marshlands and thus contribute to the eradication of malaria which had decimated so many of the early Zionist settlers in Palestine (the local Palestinian Arabs as a rule built their villages on the uplands, so as avoid being bitten by the swamp-loving malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes). Using the eucalyptus trees for “shade, fuel and construction” was not a Zionist priority at the time.

Bloom is nearer to the mark when he contemplates the planting of “orangegroves… north of Jaffa.” The famous Jaffa orange (known also by its Arab name “shamouti”) was developed by Palestinian Arab farmers in the mid nineteenth century and exported worldwide, and later farmed as well by the Zionist settlers. This agricultural sector was marked by a high degree of Jewish-Arab cooperation, boosted by Jewish agronomic research and development. But as urbanization overtakes central Israel, the citrus orchards are being pushed to the periphery and no longer do we everywhere inhale the intoxicating orange blossom fragrance of springtime that used to envelop the entire country.

However, the “immense melonfields” which Bloom anticipates being planted along with the “orangegroves” in the Plain of Sharon to the north of Jaffa are a less realistic prediction. The reference must be to watermelons which are known to have been cultivated in the ancient Middle East, and are among the goodies that the complaining Israelites in the desert remind Moses that in somewhat rosy retrospect they ate without restriction in Egypt, along with fish (gratis!) and cucumbers, leeks, onions and garlic (see Numbers 11:5). The Hebrew term here translated as “melons” in most (but not all) English versions of the bible is “avatichim” which in classical and modern Hebrew actually only denotes watermelons. The Palestinian Arabs have indeed cultivated watermelons for centuries and there is a 1926 iconic Nahum Gutman painting in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art called “Resting at Noon” which shows an Arab peasant couple in the field, the man sleeping, the woman sitting, while next to them a knife sticks out of a half-eaten watermelon. Watermelons remain an important crop in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, but “immense melonfields” seen to be a figment of Bloom’s imagination.

Still in one sense Joyce/Bloom is somewhat prophetic here. In 1973 Dr. Zvi Karchi, an Israeli agronomist, developed a new hybrid melon which he named the “Galia” melon after his daughter (her name “Galia” means “God’s wave”). The round sweet yellow- fleshed melon, grown mainly at Kibbutz Ha’Ogen in the central Sharon plain (“north of Jaffa”), is a major Israeli agricultural export, and being a favorite of Queen Elizabeth is said to grace the breakfast menu at Buckingham Palace. 

Bloom reads that “olives, oranges, almonds or citrons” will be cultivated in the farmland plots that are on offer in the flyer. These are indeed typical crops of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean basin, although only one of them (the olive) is included in the seven agricultural species that the Torah lists as being the special products of the Land of Israel: “A land of wheat and barley; of grapevines, fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive-oil and [date-]honey’ (Deuteronomy 8:8). Almond trees today cover Israel’s upcountry and their pink and white blossoms dotting the hills surrounding the Tel Aviv Jerusalem highway give notice of the coming spring as early as mid-February. Bloom ruminates botanically about these crops: “olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation.” This statement is correct, and while for millennia terraced farming to conserve water has been a hallmark of the relatively arid Palestinian landscape, the reference to systematic “artificial irrigation” is again somewhat prophetic: During the 1960s an Israeli water engineer named Simcha Blass invented a drip irrigation system that revolutionized agriculture in hot dry countries worldwide. The “Netafim” company (its name means “drops”) that was formed at Kibbutz Magal (also in the Sharon plain “north of Jaffa”) to manufacture and market the system is today not only an international industrial giant but also a major player in the increasingly important areas of eco-conservation and global sustainability.  

Eventually Bloom’s assessment of the offer is “Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.” This typically Bloomsian attitude of seeing both sides of an issue has a Talmudic precedent. Hillel and Shammai were the leaders of two schools of rabbinical thought in the years immediately following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. Typically the Hillelite school tended to compromise on halakhic issues and were generally politically more conciliatory while the Shammaian school tended to be much more rigid and nationalistic (a halakhic example: the Shammaians held that only worthy students should be admitted to study Torah; the Hillelites, more tolerant and democratic, felt that any prospective student should be welcome). Some centuries later, discussing the halakhic conflict between the two schools of thought, the Talmud summed up the issue as follows: “Rabbi Abba stated in the name of Rabbi Samuel: For three years there was a dispute between the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel. The former asserted: ‘The law is in agreement with our views’ while the latter contended, ‘The law is in agreement with our views.’ At this point a voice came forth out of Heaven and proclaimed: ‘These and these are the words of the living God. But the law is according to the House of Hillel” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Eruvin 13b).

And indeed Jewish law since then is (except for six out of nearly three hundred instances) in accord with rulings of the School of Hillel. But the democratic and tolerant idea that the minority or oppositional viewpoint has worth and validity even if it is ultimately rejected on the practical plane is characteristically Jewish.

However, to appropriately counter the last proposition, there is also of course the classic reply of the Jew who on being rescued after decades alone on a desert island and being asked by his saviors why he has built himself two synagogues, explains: “You see that synagogue over there? Never in my lifetime will I set foot in it!” So much for Bloomsian/Jewish tolerance of other people’s ideas.