The Jews of Ireland have received considerable academic attention over the years, especially given the small size of the community. The expansion of Ireland's Jewry from a tiny group of migrants from England occurred with the arrival of Litvak migrants from the 1870s. Population then peaked just after the Second World War at around 5,000: a small minority indeed. However, the latest contribution to their historiography has much to add to their story. Based on various sources, including the records of the Irish Folklore Commission, interviews and especially the data of the various census returns, this book dispels some myths and offers probably the most nuanced and insightful study of Ireland's Jewry to date.

While concentrating on the Dublin Jewish community, some work is also carried out on migrants to Belfast, Cork, and Limerick, and mention is made of Jews who settled in such provincial towns as Lurgan and Athlone. A grinding adherence to formulae and arithmetic calculation are effectively balanced by a lucid and deceptively simple prose style that allows the reader to understand some complex and sometimes surprising findings. The Jews of Ireland are revealed here in great detail, and their various trajectories can, in many cases, be minutely traced.

Ireland's Jews married younger and had larger, healthier families than their gentile neighbors in the late nineteenth century. By the 1940s the situation regarding family size had been reversed, largely through choice. What did not change was Jewish longevity. From often illiterate parents descended sons and grandsons who achieved university qualifications and professional status. Generally speaking, the Dublin Jewish community shifted from being predominantly an urban, middleman, commercial subclass to being dominated by suburban proprietors and entrepreneurs. In the capital, the settlement of the newer migrants established a “Little Jerusalem” in the south of the city. Similar clustering occurred in Belfast and Cork by the early twentieth century. However to label these areas “ghettoes” belies the fact that they were generally comfortable and prosperous artisan or middle-class housing areas, and that gentiles lived alongside. As the size of the community declined, suburbanization grew. Acculturation, however, was slow and incomplete. This was not just due to patterns of settlement, but also due to the fact that the Jewish community established its own extensive network of social and welfare support organizations. Schools and tennis clubs backed up the separation that the synagogue and neighborhood established. However the anti-Semitism of gentiles also played a part. It is perhaps in dealing with this issue that this book has its greatest failing. Cormac Grda repeatedly claims that the anti-Semitism experienced in Ireland was “relatively mild” (pp. 191 and 210). At one level this is true. The fistfights, name-calling, and social shunning that the Jews received was probably no more than the Christian sects of Ireland inflicted on each other. However there seems to be a casual discrimination and gentile distaste for the Jews of Ireland that went well beyond that simple prejudice. The need to found a Jewish golf club in 1944 (p. 215) shows that discrimination was not bound by class. The reluctance of Grda to acknowledge the depth of Irish distaste for their Jewish minority is most apparent in his treatment of the Limerick disturbances of 1904. Agitation against, and a boycott of Jewish traders were supplemented by attacks on property and some persons. Various causes lay at the bottom of these events, though the preachings of a young Redemptorist missionary certainly played their part. Grda is right to dismiss the use of the phrase “pogrom” but he surely underplays the impact of the episode. In the years immediately after the events, the Limerick Jewish population fell by a third at a time when the Jewish population of Ireland as a whole was steadily increasing. A very small number of other issues raised would have benefited by greater exploration. The small size of the immigrant group is put down to the “sluggish economic growth and relative poverty” of Ireland (p. 209), but this does not explain the very small Jewish population in Ulster, where booming engineering and textile industries prior to the Great War pulled in many migrants from England and Scotland, and even a very small Italian minority. The rapid postwar decline in Jewish numbers is seen as the product of Irish economic stagnation rather than any great Zionist enthusiasm, but some exploration of attitudes to the establishment of a Jewish state would have been welcome. Finally the politics of the Jewish community might have been expanded upon, notably the apparent shift from unionism to nationalism, and the fact that for a small community, the Jews have provided a notably large number of political activists and representatives.

In truth, these are very minor matters though. They should not detract from the many virtues of this study. Here is a very fine empirical study, qualified by a skilled and thoughtful analysis of the wider evidence. At last Leopold Bloom the cosmopolitan, secular, rather louche Dublin Jew at the center of Joyce's Ulysses can finally be laid to rest, in his true grave in Trieste.