The "Antisemitism" of Ulysses

James Joyce's Monumental Effort to Understand

Photo by Elly Ch. on Unsplash

[To see all my articles on Ulysses, use the following link.]

James Joyce's Jerusalem

James Joyce did not hide his interest in Jews while writing Ulysses. Ettore Schmitz once said to Joyce’s brother Stanislaus: “Tell me some secrets about Irishmen. You know your brother has been asking me so many questions about Jews that I want to get even with him.”¹ Joyce remarked on the similarity between the Jews and the Irish. “They were alike, he declared, in being impulsive, given to fantasy, addicted to associative thinking, wanting in rational discipline.” (JJ 395) He insisted to Wyndham Lewis that the destinies of the Irish and the Jews were alike (JJ 515). It is understandable then, that when Joyce sent his Odyssey-based schemata of Ulysses to Carlo Linati, a move that led, along with his similar presentation of a skeleton key to Stuart Gilbert, to generations of criticism that was based upon the exploration of modern Irish parallels with the Greek classic, he could at the same time claim that Ulysses was “an epic of two races (Israel-Ireland)” (JJ 521 n.). There were two traits thought by Joyce to be characteristic of Jews that interested him, “their chosen isolation, and the close family ties which were perhaps the result of it” (JJ 373).

In suggesting that Joyce superimposed the vision of Ulysses itself onto the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy, the Amida (or shemone-esre, the “eighteen”) I will be offering in a future piece a new schema, and in doing so I hope to open a window for serious students and academics to reveal to us new layers of understanding of the book.

The blessings in the Amida are arranged in a 3—12(1)—3 format. The first three blessings are glorifications of God. The last three are praises of thanksgiving. The thirteen middle blessings consist of basic petitions for the well-being of the petitioner, and, since the blessings are in the plural, for the entire Jewish people. This 3—12—3 format is mirrored in the structure of Ulysses, with the first three chapters, the middle twelve chapters, and the final three forming distinct units. In this installment, we will examine the twelfth blessing.

The twelfth blessing reflects the anguish and sorrow which led to its incorporation into the Amida later than the original eighteen blessings.

For informers let there be no hope and may all wickedness instantly perish may all Your enemies be swiftly cut off, and the insolent may You quickly uproot, crush, rout, disgrace and humbled and subdue speedily in our days. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Crusher of enemies and Subduer of the insolent.

This blessing was added to the Amida during the rabbinical leadership of Rabban Gamliel at Yavne, according to the version drafted by Shmuel Ha-Katan (“the small,” or “the younger”). Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook (1865-1935), the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, said that precisely because of the outstanding nature of this blessing, in that hate and enmity comprise its essence, its formulation had to be the work of an extremely holy man, and that Shmuel Ha-Katan was the proper choice because he always said:

Do not rejoice when thy enemy falls, and do not let thy heart be glad when he stumbles: (Prov. 24:17)

Near the end of the twelfth chapter of Ulysses (Cyclops) is the confrontation between the Citizen and Bloom. This is the most grating and personal expression of Antisemitism in Ulysses. The fact that it is directed against Bloom, at most a “quasi-Jew,” reveals a revolutionary approach by Joyce to an age-old predicament that is still relevant. This will be dealt with in the concluding article of this series. For Bloom’s Jewish status, please read my entry:

Leopold Bloom, Jew or Not

The precise definition of a Jew is irrelevant in the face of virulent Antisemitism. Bloom knows that in the minds of the pub-dwellers he is a Jew—as Joyce knew he would be in the minds of the readers of Ulysses—so that his championing of the Jews in Cyclops may have been unavoidable for him but still it is heroic in that at the very least, he has a good case for an honorable retreat. His behavior may stem from a basic respect for the memory of his father, or it may be an expression of an innate sense of social justice, or a mix of the two, or something else altogether. Regardless of motive, it is his tenacity in defending his view of what is right in a threatening environment that marks his personal bravery. It is not negligible. Later in the evening, when unthreatened, Bloom is “smiling, a jew,” when Stephen sings for him the first part of an Antisemitic song. When he sings the last part, in which the gentile boy is killed by the Jew’s daughter, Bloom is “unsmiling,” and there is no mention of him being a Jew. ² The blood libel is no laughing matter.³ Stephen understands Bloom’s predicament: Jew or Gentile, he is perceived as a Jew, a target for Antisemitism. However, Bloom’s method is foreign to Stephen; to defend the Jews one does not have to pretend to be a Jew.

Cyclops opens with a thematic declaration, one that historically demarcated the divide between Jew and Gentile. “Circumcised?” asks Joe Hynes. This circumscription of Jews by their circumcision describes the target of the ensuing Antisemitic invective. In the chapter a Jew becomes “a bloody big foxy thief,” and the familiar Antisemitic refrain—that Jews have a strange appearance and smell—can be heard in two representative examples: “Those Jewies does have a sort of queer odour,” and “One of the bottlenosed fraternity” Joyce had said of Antisemitism, that it was “one of the easiest and oldest of prejudices to ‘prove’” (JJ 709). The ultimate Antisemitic expression—calling for the extermination of a Jew because he is a Jew—is heard when the narrator of the chapter inwardly reflects upon the Citizen’s invective: “It’d be an act of God to take a hold of a fellow the like of that and throw him in the bloody sea. Justifiable homicide, so it would.”

Interwoven with this base impulse to eradicate the Jew is the thematic social isolation of the Jew. The Citizen, after having asked Bloom his nationality and hearing his answer of “Ireland…I was born here. Ireland,” “said nothing, only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, by gob, he spat a red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.” This action is repeated by the narrator as he relieves himself and reviews Bloom’s words up to that point: “hoik! phthook!” As a final strike, Jewish manhood is denied: “those bloody…Jerusalem…cuckoos.” Joyce may be observing that for Antisemitism to become inflamed, of necessity there must be a group dynamic in which (on its most basic and dangerous level) the blind fool encourages the coward, who in turn initiates Antisemitic action.

The denial of citizenship for Bloom is appealed by John Wyse, who asks: “why can’t a jew love his country like the next fellow? —Why not? says J.J., when he’s quite sure which country it is.” Wyse is stifled quickly, as was Stephen earlier in the day: “A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?” Deasy digs deep into the Antisemitic theme-book: “They sinned against the light, Mr. Deasy said gravely. And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.”

Richard Ellman observed that most of the redeeming qualities found in the character Bloom tend to be Christian in nature, and not Jewish⁴. In this sense, Bloom seen as a Jew is degrading to the Jewish people in that the measure of a Jew is not by how Christian he appears and acts. A young Harvard student pointed this out to Joyce, who replied that he had “written with the greatest sympathy about the Jews” (JJ 709). In Ulysses, Bloom hardly acts in a manner that should lead a reader who was acquainted with Jews—and who respects them—to believe that he has in Bloom an accurate and fair portrayal of a Jew. Is Bloom being a cuckold definitive of the Jew? Or if the pub dwellers have it right, does Bloom have “a queer sort of smell,” or a “bottlenose,” and are these definitive characteristics of a Jew? Was Joyce’s intention to put the lie to Antisemitism—to the Antisemitism of the characters in the book and the prejudices of the book’s readers and critics? Beyond the discussion of whether Bloom was by birth a Jew, considering Bloom’s voluntary baptism, Catholic and Protestant, why is the validity of those conversions denied to him? These questions point to a larger one: what was Joyce getting at with this character? That will be the subject of the last entry of this series.

Whereas Joyce may have intended to suggest a benign reassessment of an ancient prejudice, by the end of his life he learned that the subject was too volatile for literary treatment. According to Ellman, Joyce helped about twenty people escape the Nazis (JJ 709). Laughingly he was refused entry to neutral Switzerland by the Swiss authorities, who thought he was a Jew! (JJ 736) Obviously they had confused him with his most famous creation (Bloom, incidentally, would have been Jew enough for the Nazis). It took a legion of prominent Swiss to testify as to Joyce’s being a kosher gentile before the authorities begrudgingly relented and allowed him to enter (JJ 736-37)

Bloom, human and flawed like the rest of us, a humane and sensitive figure, a lovingly created character, celebrates with his presence on the page life itself. However, as Joyce must have known at the end, for the Jews, life could not be celebrated as their condition in Europe became tragic beyond all relief.

1. Richard Ellman, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, revised 1982; corr. paper 1983) p. 374. All further references in text as “(JJ pg.)”.

2. Joyce supplies the musical transcript, allowing the reader to participate in an Antisemitic sing-a-long!

3. Joyce attended a protest meeting against the revival of the blood libel with his friend Weis in 1919 (JJ 463).

4. Richard Ellman, Ulysses On The Liffey (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1972; rept. 1974) p. 114.