History:Ireland's most famous Jew, the modest hero of Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, never really lived and in any event was not in confessional terms a Jew at all.
These inconveniences have not prevented the publication of a substantial biography of him or the affixing by Dublin and East Tourism of a plaque on his imputed birth place on Upper Clanbrassil Street. Indeed, as Prof Ó Gráda points out, Joyce's choice of hero has ensured Dublin - a city with a Jewish population of perhaps 200 at the time of Bloom's "birth" - an enduring role in Jewish studies. It is difficult to say if these ironies are more Irish than Jewish.
This remarkable book traces the social, economic and demographic history of the Irish Jewish community between, roughly, 1870 and 1946. The title notwithstanding, it is not particularly focused on Joyce's Jews but rather on the Irish Jewish community in a period roughly coinciding with Joyce's lifetime. This is as well: the Jews in Joyce's work owe as much - or more - to those he met during his long (1904-1915) sojourn in Trieste as to the Dublin community. The Jewish Triestini were more settled, more middle class, less religious and more intermarried with their Christian neighbours than their Dublin contemporaries. Joyce's interaction with the Jews of Trieste is brilliantly described in John McCourt's The Years of Bloom(2000).
Ireland received only a tiny number - 0.15 per cent - of the historic displacement of several million Jews from eastern Europe in the four decades preceding the first World War. The Jewish population of the whole island peaked at just over 5,000 in the 1940s, immediately before the foundation of the State of Israel. The overwhelming concentration of this study is on the Irish experience of eastern European (mainly Lithuanian) Jews, the Litvaks.
PROF Ó GRÁDA is an economic historian and the influence of this specialty is evident in various aspects of the book - its frequent statistical analyses, and its many graphs and tables on topics as varied as wage rates, the density of Jewish settlement on individual streets, and the movement of the Dublin community over time from the city centre "over the bridge" to the leafy areas of Rathgar and Terenure. This may, at times, seem overdone, especially in view of the very small absolute numbers involved. But the book is, after all, an exercise in applied demography and the detail, once mastered, is fascinating. Over and above this, the author's empathy with his subject is manifest and the apparatus of the economic historian never obscures his feeling for the individuals who composed the Jewish community, and indeed their gentile neighbours. The book as a whole is immensely vivid and at times, in view of the decline of the original community in recent years, elegiac.
The origin of the main Jewish immigration is traced to Lithuania (an area broader than the present state of that name, including parts of Belarus and Poland), and in most cases to a small cluster of villages. The author impartially discusses the controversial question of whether the migration to Ireland was mainly an escape from persecution or an economic migration. But the centre of the book is the study of the Dublin community of "Little Jerusalem", an area stretching along the South Circular Road from Dufferin Avenue in the west to Harcourt Street in the east, and centred in the little network of streets between Longwood Avenue and Lennox Street, in what is now Dublin 8. Every conceivable form of source is used and particularly thorough use is made of the successive census enumerations, and especially that of 1911. Apt comparisons are made with Christians living in the same immediate area and some startling conclusions, such as lower Jewish mortality rates, by age, are drawn. Equally thought-provoking, though Jewish teetotallers were very rare, Jewish alcoholics were all but unknown.
THE BOOK TRACES the educational and economic rise of the community, from an economy largely based on peddling to quite rapid penetration by the next generation of the legal and medical professions and the world of commerce. Many of the names now or recently associated with the Jewish community appear here, attached to an older generation: Abrahamson, Barron, Bloom, Briscoe, Leventhal, Mirrelson, Noyek, Solomons, Wigoder, Zlotover. The very marked tendency for the rising generation of the community to opt for careers in the professions or as entrepreneurs, rather than waged or salaried occupations, is fully discussed and compared with other immigrant Jewish groups in Britain and the US. Their remarkable interest in, not to say obsession with, education is fully credited. The much-maligned Christian Brothers are acknowledged for their impartial education of Jewish boys (quoted here as old men) in Synge Street and Westland Row schools.
A WONDERFUL FEATURE of this book is its superb library of quotations, which appear in twos and threes at the head of each chapter and throughout the text. These extracts from the literature and sayings of the Irish Jews would make a short book in themselves. Something in the wry humour of these aperçus reminded me of the first Irish Jew I ever met, the late District Justice Herman Good. Good, who had a large and varied practice as a solicitor and dabbled in Labour politics, was offered appointment to the District Court during the first (1948-1951) Coalition. He accepted, though the financial loss would have been huge, only to be asked to withdraw his application: Archbishop McQuaid had vetoed it on religious grounds. Good told me this on the day he retired, not to protest the personal injustice but as a pungent reflection on politics and changing times. The injustice was rectified by his appointment many years later, after a chance lunchtime meeting at the Russell hotel with the late TD Brian Lenihan. The irony was, Herman reflected, that if he'd joined the judiciary on the first occasion, he couldn't have afforded that lunch at the Russell.
Adrian Hardiman, a history graduate of UCD, is a judge of the Supreme Court
Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History By Cormac Ó Gráda Princeton University Press, 320pp. €26.30