A poet, a journalist and the first president of Ireland once set out on a journey to the Hill of Tara to obstruct the excavation of the ‘Ark of the Covenant’ by a group of British Israelites. While the exploits of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Griffith and Douglas Hyde during June 1902 may appear farcical, their motivations shed light on Ireland's relationship with Jews, both actual and metaphorical. Abbey Bender's account of the Hill of Tara expedition is one of the highlights of a compelling and wide-ranging collection of twelve essays exploring intersections of Irish and Jewish culture edited by Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien. Irish questions and Jewish questions: crossovers in culture is testimony to the slow yet steady stream of academic examinations of Irish-Jewish relations published in the last decade. Prior to the publication of Dermot Keogh's Jews in twentieth century Ireland: refugees, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in 1998, studies of Jewish Ireland had been largely confined to outdated communal histories. Cormac Ó Gráda's Jewish Ireland in the age of Joyce: a socio-economic history followed eight years later (2006), and what Ó Gráda began in his deeply detailed demographic survey of Jews across the island has been expanded by a new generation of scholars unearthing a rich and complex narrative of Jews, communal and individual.
Beatty and O'Brien consider the Irish and the Jews as ‘two of the classic outliers of modern Europe’, simultaneously European and not European, both portrayed as racially inferior, and both with rapidly growing national movements. These links and parallels form the central theme of the collection, which is structured around an examination of representations, realities, migrations and promised lands. A particular strength of this collection is the consideration of the popularity of the Exodus, or Hebrew, analogy as a metaphor for the Irish national struggle. Abbey Bender traces the almost ubiquitous use of the motif; so common as to be seen as a banal cliché by the Dubliners of Ulysses by the turn of the century. From its invocation by the United Irishmen, to its use in political persuasion by Daniel O'Connell and Michael Davitt, its popularity amongst Anglo-Irish writers (Yeats and Hyde in particular), to Charles Stewart Parnell's embodiment of Moses leading Ireland to freedom, the metaphor was regularly pressed into political service.
By the 1880s cultural and political shifts in Ireland were undermining the usefulness of the Exodus analogy, and even before the 1916 Rising the motif was disowned by republicans in favour of a more indigenous national aesthetic. Crucially, Bender also insists that Jewish immigration to Ireland contributed to the decline of the Israelite analogy: ‘living Jews presented different challenges from ancient and metaphoric ones’. The same suggestion is made by Seán William Gannon in his examination of disbanded members of the Royal Irish Constabulary serving in the British section of the Palestine police in the final three years of the mandate. For the majority of these Irishmen, their posting was their first encounter with Jews. ‘Occasionally friendly, but more frequently fraught’, Gannon explores how these encounters defined servicemen's views of Jews, Israel and Zionism for the rest of their lives. In Ireland and in mandatory Palestine, real life encounters with Jews aroused feelings of anti-Jewish prejudice, although George Bornstein's account of a Jewish literary editor's brush with a member of Cumann na mBan would indicate such prejudices existed even when the encounter went undetected.
The question of whether Jewish immigration was itself a factor in Irish antisemitism is taken up by R. M. Douglas in his comparative examination of Irish and continental European anti-Semitism. Douglas argues that excessive attention paid to the Blueshirts overshadows a ‘galaxy of right wing leagues’ in existence in 1930s Ireland, with open expressions of anti-Semitism found across Ireland's mainstream political spectrum. In keeping with other European counties with small Jewish populations, anti-Jewish sentiments and incidents of anti-Semitism remained prevalent in Ireland. The claim of Ireland's unique tolerance (purported by Mr Deasy, the Orangeman and Christian of Ulysses) is shown to be incorrect by Douglas. Natalie Wynn expands on the issue of anti-Semitism in her study of representations of Jews and, quite rightly, cautions scholars of the need for greater accuracy when invoking the term.
A particular challenge when examining anti-Semitism is the desire of Jewish leaders to present an image of perpetual ‘cordial relations’ with non-Jewish neighbours. Integration was the watchword of all British and Irish fledgling Jewish communities, and Irish Jewry is no exception in underplaying anti-Semitic attacks, both verbal and physical, not least because of concerns for safety. Deviations from the Jewish communal narrative have been ignored by historians, allowing elite voices to dominate. Irish Jewish studies will, as Wynn remarks, remain ‘mired’ in nostalgia, without a bold robust examination of wide-ranging resources reflecting the fragmented and dynamic nature of Ireland's Jewish communities.
Two rigorous accounts of outlying Jewish experience can be found in studies of home rule agitation and 1930s Irish economic protectionism. Heather Miller Rubens's examination of the Judaeo-Irish Home Rule Association provides an insight into deviant Jewish political voices, in which the attempts of individual Jews to engage with the Irish nationalist movement compete with a wider national Jewish narrative concerning political identity and insularity. Trisha Oakley Kessler's account of Fianna Fáil's protectionist policies demonstrates how, in the new Irish state, Jews were both obscured from the narrative (omitted from official promotional photographs of new factories), and singled out for criticism (there were no fewer than eleven lists of foreign, often Jewish, surnames, read by T.D.s in Dáil debates between July 1933 and May 1934).
While the field of Irish Jewish studies remains relatively small, it has travelled a long way in the last decade. This collection highlights the breadth of academic study dealing with Irish-Jewish relations, and the rewards of grappling with challenging sources and peripheral narratives. In time, perhaps, Ireland's best-known Jew will no longer be a work of Joycean fiction.
