Ulysses Essay 8 (19:15)

Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 8

“Free thought”

Haines, trying to draw out Stephen’s views on God and religion, challenges him:

 “Either you believe or you don’t, isn’t it? Personally I couldn’t stomach that idea of a personal God. You don’t stand for that, I suppose?

“You behold in me,” Stephen said with great displeasure, “A horrible example of free thought.”

The concept of holding ideas which are “free” of the constraints of religion was first propounded in 1713 by the theologian philosopher Anthony Collins in his Discourse of Freethinking. It is interesting that the early twentieth century socialistic Zionist immigrants from Russia who established the first kibbutzim in Palestine, and who were fiercely anti-religious, were termed disparagingly “ha’chofshi’im” (“the free”) by the small but vociferous and long-established ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Palestine (who for sure had never heard of Anthony Collins). This appellation, intended to be highly derogatory, was adopted with pride by the young pioneers who were eager to throw off the burdens of their parents’ orthodox existence in the shtetel communities of Eastern Europe from which they sprang, and which they saw as epitomizing the two millennia of servile Jewish exilic existence. However, the term is not in common use now, and most modern Jewish Israelis who do not observe orthodox practice prefer the more neutral designations  “lo dati” (“not religious”) or “chiloni” (“secular”).

But nonetheless “chofshi” has found its way into Israel’s national consciousness. In 1882 an indigent and alcoholic poet named Naphtali Herz Imber emigrated from a small town in Poland to Ottoman Palestine. For a time, before being overtaken by alcoholism, Imber lived with the South African non-Jewish early Zionist, Sir Laurence Oliphant in the Druze village of Daliyat-El-Carmel near Haifa, while serving as Oliphant’s secretary. He brought with him to Palestine a book of Hebrew poems which he had composed while still living in Poland. One of these was titled “Ha’Tikvah” (“The Hope”) expressing the two thousand year old yearning of the exiled Jewish people to return to the land of Israel. In time the first verse of this eight-stanza poem became the national anthem of the reborn State of Israel (with music strongly reminiscent of Smetana’s “Moldau” symphonic poem).  The last two lines of the anthem read in the original:

“Li’h’yot am chofshi be’artzeinu,

Eretz Tsion Vi’rushalayim.”

(“To be a free people in our land,

The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”)

“Chofshi” (“free”) in this context obviously refers to political freedom, but it has always carried the subtext of freedom from the bonds of Jewish religious law. Going back to “Ulysses”, we learn that after Stephen has told Haines that he is “a horrible example of free thought”, Stephen realizes that Haines’s gaze “was not all unkind”, and indeed we next read that Haines says to him encouragingly:

“After all I think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.”

“I am the servant of two masters,” Stephen said “An English and an Italian.” [An obvious reference to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – that man cannot serve two masters, God and Mammon, as well as to Goldoni’s well-known farce].

 “Italian?” Haines said.

[Stephen thinks] “A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.”

“And a third,” Stephen said, “There is who wants me for odd jobs.”

[In the last two lines Stephen is apparently referring to the Irish nationalist movement which is often personified as a woman and clearly not to Queen Victoria who had died in 1901].

“Italian?” Haines said again, “What do you mean?”

“The imperial British state,” Stephen answered, his colour rising, “and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.”

So there you have it: political and religious emancipation run hand in hand in both the Irish republican movement and in the Zionist Jewish renewal.

Indeed, the early twentieth century Zionist campaign for a Jewish homeland (which Joyce/Bloom seems to identify with throughout Ulysses) saw a close parallel exemplar in the militant Irish struggle for independence from England. Yitzhak Shamir, the hardline right wing Lehi (“Stern Gang”) underground revolutionary against British rule in Palestine (and who was to be Israel’s Prime Minister during 1983-84 and 1986-1992) was born in Belarus as Yitzhak Yezernitsky. Like many prominent Zionists he Hebraized his surname, choosing to call himself “Shamir”. He adopted this name – which to modern Israelis is most familiar as the Hebrew term for the dill herb – from the name of the legendary shamir worm that, according to the Talmud, King Solomon employed to magically hew the stones for building the Temple, the use of iron being prohibited by God for this purpose because of its association with the implements of war (Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Sotah 48b). But it is less well known that Yitzhak Shamir had a third name: his secret underground alias was “Michael”, borrowed from the Irish Republican leader, Michael Collins, who was shot and killed by extremist anti-Treaty forces in August 1922 in an ambush on the outskirts of Cork during the Irish Civil War.