Ulysses Essay 11 (20:18)

Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 11

“Into the hands of German Jews”

Haines replies to Stephen’s musings about English domination of Ireland with a non sequitur: “Of course I’m a Britisher,” Haines’s voice said, “And I don’t want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That’s our national problem, I’m afraid, just now.”

Stephen had made no reference to the Jews, and neither does he attempt to reply to Haines’s blatantly anti-Semitic remark, to be echoed time and time again by many of the characters in Ulysses. (And in passing, the fact that Joyce does not capitalize “jews” throughout Ulysses speaks for his conceptualization of the exiled and persecuted Jewish people as a special case among the nations, in many ways analogous in his mind to the Irish, dominated and deculturalized for nearly a millennium by their English colonizers).

But why does Haines refer specifically to German Jews? The simplest answer might relate to recent immigration to Britain of German Jews, but at the fin de siècle most of the Jews entering Britain and populating the East End of London came from Eastern Europe, especially Poland and Russia, where a surge of anti-Semitic pogroms caused mass migration of Jews to the U.S. and to a lesser extent to England. German Jewry, emancipated, sophisticated and acculturalized, refused to believe they could become the victims of the violent anti-Semitism that was rife to their east. They ignored publications such as “The Victory of Judaism over Germanism” put out by the pamphleteer Wilhelm Marr in 1879 (see Gifford and Seidman, page 4), although only a few decades later the Hitlerian holocaust would make the Czarist pogroms pale into insignificance. Apparently Haines, a well-read Oxonian, was referring to literature of this kind, as hinted to by his statement that he didn’t want England (a la Germany) to “fall into the hands of German Jews either.” An English translation of Marr’s text can be found at the following site: http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Marr-Text-English.pdf.

In the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism, a fair number of German Jews who eventually saw what was coming migrated to British Mandatory Palestine where they became known as “Yekkes”. The etymology of the term is uncertain but it expresses a type of derogatory admiration (something like the attitude to WASPs in the U.S.) and mainly concerns the Yekkes’ penchant for politeness, punctuality and attention to detail, in strong contrast to the rough and carefree behavior of the Zionist pioneers from Eastern Europe, and to the lifestyle of the later oriental immigrants to Israel from the mellahs of the Middle East. Arriving as professors, physicians, musicians, architects and lawyers, many of the Yekkes at first had to make do with menial jobs, and a standard joke tells that when two Yekkes at a construction site were part of a line passing bricks, the thrower would say “Bitte schön” and his compatriot would reply “Danke schön” as each brick was transferred.

However the well-educated and diligent Yekkes soon became prominent in the economic and professional life of the yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine prior to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948). They settled along Tel Aviv’s Ben-Yehuda Street, a long north-south thoroughfare just one block from the Mediterranean coastline (perhaps keeping an eye on a hope for an eventual return to their beloved mother country) and on the green upper slopes of the Carmel in Haifa, where the scenery was somewhat reminiscent of the European countryside. Ben Yehuda Street became known as “Ben Yehuda Strasse” where you could get the best apple strudel in the country. This was ironic because the street was named for Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the reviver of modern Hebrew, whereas for decades many of the older Yekkes insisted on not learning Hebrew, preferring to live in a cultural Germanic enclave where Goethe and Heine ruled supreme along with Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Mahler.