Sir, - Kevin Myers refers to the "obscene racist gibberings" of Arthur Griffith (Irishman's Diary, October 22nd) in relation to the anti-Jewish boycott in Limerick in 1904. If such language is a measure of how balanced Mr Myers is prepared to be about this issue, one wonders is there any point at all in trying to debate with so closed, so convinced a mindset.
In the Spectator (October 11th), Simon Sebag Montefiore asserted that Griffith described the Jews of Limerick as "hideous . . . wild savage, filthy forms". I have no idea where Mr Montefiore got these words, but Arthur Griffith never wrote them, and it is completely false and misleading to ascribe them to him. Griffith rationalised his anti-Jewish stance in 1904 in various ways, which cannot be gone into in a short letter and I explore in full the question of his attitude to Jews in my shortly-to-be published biography of the man.
However, at the time of the unfortunate Limerick incident, he did describe Jewish immigrants to Ireland as alien to the native population in thought and observed how they did not try to integrate but kept themselves apart. (This was in the context of a discussion about the alarming rates of emigration of the native Irish.)
He could write thus in 1904, but that is not the whole story. By 1912 he was writing very differently. In September of that year he referred to a recent congress which considered Ireland as a country suitable for the permanent settlement of Jewish people. He explained that an ancient Irish source, quoted by Gaelic analysts, showed that the Gaelic Irish could trace some Hebrew ancestry. This must show that whatever earlier antipathy he had felt to the idea of Jews making Ireland their home had by this time completely disappeared.
In the final analysis, it is difficult to be categorical about whether Arthur Griffith was anti-semitic. If the view that policies and persons should be judged in relation to the times and circumstances of their time, and not ours, is accepted, then Griffith can hardly be judged an anti-semite. But when the horror of what centuries of anti-semitism led to is considered, it must be deeply regretted that Griffith, at one stage in his life believed some of the things that he seemed to about the Jews. - Yours, etc.,
Ranelagh, Dublin 6.