Yes, there were lots of Fascists almost everywhere during the first 40 years of the 20th century. Hitler played into the whole thing. I am going to post this very long tract about the history of Judiasm in Ireland. You might find it interesting if you haven't read it already.
I didn't know that the poet Yeats was a Fascist, or that Ireland had a Fascist political party, the Blue Shirts. You probably did, however.
De Valera seems to have been really sincere about staying neutral, because Ireland could not survive being on either side. Even his condolences on Hitler's suicide seem to be in that spirit, though widely criticized at the time. I also think Catholic Ireland in World War II did reflect ambiguity (at the least) in Catholicism in general, with the historic resentment of Jews.
Twenty years ago most Irish had never seen any foreigners. They have started traveling more, and are opening up a bit, but they treat the Travellers, their own cultural minority, ruthlessly. Now there are Muslims moving in, and there is enormous racial friction. Racism/bigotry in Ireland is a very serious problem. At the same time, the Irish are a very generous people who give more of their wealth to charity, per capita, than any other nation.
Anyway, here is that long tract about the Jews and Ireland:
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The Jews of Ireland
Robert Tracy
WHEN WE SPENT A YEAR IN DUBLIN IN THE 1980s, A neighbor worried that we were so far from home, friends, and relations. She was glad to hear that American friends were to pay us a brief visit and asked their name. "Bloom," I told her. "Bloom," she repeated, "Bloom. Would that be an Irish name, now?" "None more so," I assured her. "The most Irish name there is."
Leopold Bloom of James Joyce's Ulysses answers the same question in Barney Kiernan's pub, when the rabidly nationalistic Citizen asks him, "What is your nation?" and Bloom replies, "Ireland... I was born here. Ireland." The answer, and indeed Bloom's very presence, enrages the Citizen; Bloom is hurried away by friends, as the Citizen threatens to "brain that jewman."
Bloom's exclusion from the Citizen's notion of Ireland and Irishness is one of the many exclusions he suffers as he wanders through Dublin on l6 June 1904, at once wandering Ulysses and Wandering Jew. Bloom is excluded by one group after another because he is perceived as different, other. Asked why Bloom is Jewish, Joyce said, ".... because only a foreigner would do. The Jews were foreigners at that time in Dublin. There was no hostility towards them, but contempt, yes the contempt people always show for the unknown." In Ulysses Joyce parallels Bloom with Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's own self-portrait, excluded because he is an artist, until the two briefly come together in a meeting of outcasts.
Dermot Keogh's welcome and carefully researched account of Ireland's Jews, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, is in one sense an extended commentary on Leopold Bloom and his uneasy position in Dublin life, placing him in context as an Irishman who is also a Jew-though strictly speaking, as the son of a non-Jewish mother, Bloom's Jewish identity is arguable. Keogh's book supersedes earlier works by Bernard Shillman(1945) and Louis Hyman (1972). His subtitle reminds us that, while Ireland's Jews were not direct victims of the Holocaust, they did experience antisemitism. They also prospered and contributed to Ireland in significant ways, especially in medicine, law, and politics. Keogh reminds us that they would not have long survived a Nazi invasion or a Nazi victory in World War II-their number and names had been tabulated at the Wannsee Conference.
By focusing on the small Jewish community of a small country--Ireland is about the size of West Virginia--Keogh offers us a case study of both Jewish exclusion and Jewish assimilation. His work will be the definitive account of Ireland's Jewish community for the foreseeable future, and is also, alas, a kind of elegy for that rapidly disappearing community. Indeed, since Professor Keogh's book went to press, Cork's last synagogue has closed, unable to achieve a minyan. The new Herzog Center for Jewish Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, is admirable, but no substitute for a living Jewish community.
By making Bloom one of his two protagonists, Joyce affirmed Jewish membership in the Irish polity, and at the same time recognized the prevalence and nature of anti-Jewish prejudice in Ireland. He slyly made Bloom a friend of Arthur Griffith, at once a notorious antisemite and the editor of The United Irishman, then the most radical of nationalist newspapers. Deploring the inequities of British rule over Ireland, Griffith was simultaneously hostile to Ireland's smallest and most vulnerable minority.
The choleric Citizen carries copies of The United Irishman, which, as Joyce well knew, contained Griffith's approving reports of Ireland's only pogrom, which took place in and around the small city of Limerick. The pogrom was instigated by a Redemptorist priest, Father John Creagh, in January 1904. A strident and dramatic orator, Creagh attacked Limerick's tiny Jewish community with the cliches of antisemitism: the Jews rejected Christ, they were usurers sucking the blood of the poor, they were in league with the Freemasons then persecuting the Church in France, they were taking over the local economy, they sold shoddy goods at inflated prices, to be paid for in installments. He absolved them of only one traditional crime: "Nowadays, they dare not kidnap and slay Christian children, but they will not hesitate to expose them to a longer and even more cruel martyrdom by taking the clothes off their backs and the bit out of their mouths." Creagh was particularly outraged at a recent Jewish wedding, contrasting the "silks and satin" of the wedding party with the rags of Irish onlookers. Though Michael Davitt and other revered political leaders immediately denounced Creagh's inflammatory sermon, and especially the old charge of ritual murder, Creagh's followers-6000 Limerick men belonged to the Arch-confraternity of the Holy Family, which he directed--quickly heeded his call for a boycott against Jews and a refusal to pay money owing to them. A series of antisemitic riots in the city followed.
In a second sermon, Creagh insisted that he deplored violence. He objected to jewish business methods, not to Jews. But his denunciations continued to sustain the boycott, and Jews were assaulted in the streets, despite police protection. Police authorities considered charging him with incitement to violence, but the Royal Irish Constabulary were widely resented as an agent of British rule, and they feared that to do so would make Creagh at once a Catholic and a nationalist martyr.
The Protestant bishop of Limerick condemned the pogrom, as did several prominent Catholic priests. The Catholic bishop made no public protest, but Creagh was sent to Belfast for a time. When he returned, he said no more about Jews, railing instead against intemperance and "indecent literature." Bishops tend to handle problems quietly: in 1906, Creagh was sent to the Philippines, never to return.
Apart from revealing that Irish "contempt" for Jews could easily be transformed into violent hostility, the Limerick affair ruined the city's Jewish tradesmen, since they were unable to collect money owed to them and many local suppliers declined to do business with them. Most of the Limerick Jewish community departed, some to other countries, the majority to Cork, where they prospered. Gerald Goldberg, a son of this migration, became Lord Mayor of Cork in 1977.
Antisemitism in Ireland never again took to violence. But the episode indicates how the close connection between Irish nationalism and Catholicism could breed the dangerous chauvinism Joyce's Citizen represents.
In contemporary France, Catholic resentment against the Republic and its anti-clerical policies found a scapegoat in Captain Dreyfus. In 1904 Ireland, nationalists saw British rule as Protestant, and resented Protestant domination over Irish banking, medicine, and other professions, as well as Protestant ownership of estates long ago confiscated from Catholic owners. Creagh's evil genius was able to channel this resentment against a weaker minority by portraying them as rich and exploitive, as Hitler was later to channel German resentment against defeat in World War I and the post-war depression.
In Ulysses, Bloom is shunned as a Freemason as well as for his Jewishness. As other, he becomes a substitute for popular resentment against the less vulnerable Protestant minority. Religious, economic, and social anger fueled extreme Irish nationalism at the time, visible in attacks on the Abbey Theatre as a subtle Protestant plot to ridicule and subvert the true Irish, in the widespread burning of Protestant "Big Houses" in 1919-21, in the Catholic Bulletin's dismissal of Yeats's 1924 Nobel Prize as an award "to a member of the English colony in Ireland." By the standards of Joyce's Citizen, Wolfe Tone, Parnell, Synge, Douglas Hyde and Erskine Childers (both Presidents of Ireland), Lady Gregory, and Samuel Beckett would have no right to call themselves Irish.
Joyce's mischievous irony is doubly at work in the Citizen episode. The Citizen's armload of The United Irishman contains, along with reports of the Limerick pogrom, a series of articles suggesting that Irish candidates for Parliament promise that, if elected, they will refuse to go to London, but will instead gather in Dublin and sit as the legally elected Parliament of Ireland. The articles were by Griffith himself, but, as a conversation in Ulysses assures us, it was Bloom who gave Griffith this idea and who invented Sinn Fein, the Irish separatist movement. The "Hungarian plan" for parliamentary candidates was successfully followed in 1918 by Sinn Fein candidates, leading to the independence of Ireland from British rule. Joyce makes the despised and repudiated Bloom the strategist responsible for Irish independence.
Joyce's residence in Trieste made him well aware of the corrosive effects of narrow-minded nationalism, and the way it can be used to threaten and destroy. His positive portrayal of Bloom makes him an honorable exception among his contemporaries, many of whom shared that casual disdain for Jews that we find, for example, in the novels of John Buchan, or in certain poems by T. S. Eliot. Griffith's antisemitism was shared by Oliver St. John Gogarty--Buck Mulligan in Ulysses--who viciously attacked Jews in Griffith's newspaper Sinn Fein (1906) and was found guilty of libeling several Jewish businessmen in Dublin as late as 1937. Maud Gonne was an anti-Dreyfusard. In Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (1899), the evil merchants who go about the famine-stricken countryside offer to purchase souls with gold. They are based on the reviled "soupers," Protestant zealots who fed the hungry if they would leave the Catholic Church during the Great Famine. But their "Eastern" garb and manner suggest that they are also Jewis h--the same rural peddlers who would infuriate Father Creagh. In the 1930s, Yeats was briefly an admirer of General O'Duffy, who led the Blueshirts, Ireland's short-lived fascist movement, and held complicated ideas about racial purity.
In Lebor Gabala Erenn (the Book of the Takings of Ireland), the account of Irish history that the medieval Irish told themselves, the first settlers in Ireland were Noah's disreputable niece, Cessair, and forty companions; all were promptly drowned in the Flood. The Irish or Gaels arrived much later and are descended from one Nel through his son Gaedel. Nel learned all the languages that came into being at Babel, borrowing the best features from each to inventfrish. Settling beside the Red Sea, he entertained Moses and his people the night before they crossed. Moses invited Nel and his family to come with them to the Promised Land. When Nel declined, Moses assured him that his descendants would one day reach their own promised land in the western ocean; it would be free of snakes.
Professor Keogh does not begin his account of the Jews in Ireland quite so far back. There appear to have been very few, if anyjews in Ireland until the late eighteenth century. Since Ireland was never conquered by the Romans, it is unlikely thatJews settled there under the Empire. Later the unsettled conditions of Irish life, with a number of petty kingdoms frequently at war with one another, made the country inhospitable and travel difficult. Eventually there was a small Sephardic community. Until about 1880, there were no more than about 35OJews in Dublin, and perhaps a few more elsewhere in the country. The Irish Jewish community essentially came into existence between 1880 and 1901 with the arrival of Ashkenazim from a single Lithuanian village, Akmene, fleeing Tsarist pogroms. Dublin legend asserts that many of them had booked passage to America, and were landed in Dublin by unscrupulous ship captains who assured them they had reached New York.
The 1891 census lists nearly 2000 Jews in Ireland; a decade later there were almost 4000. AJewish neighborhood developed in Dublin, with smaller communities in Cork, Belfast, and Limerick. The Dublin community settled around Clanbrassil Street, where until a few years ago two or three long-abandoned shops with Hebrew lettering could still be seen. Joyce, usually so accurate about Dublin history and topography, makes 52 Clanbrassil Bloom's birthplace around 1864, too early for any marked Jewish association with the neighborhood.
Professor Keogh reminds us that Irish Catholics, like IrishJews, were long excluded from the British Parliament. When Daniel O'Connell, Ireland's "Liberator," won Catholic Emancipation and the right to sit in Parliament for Catholics in 1829, he was quick to support a bill extending the same rights toJews (1831), and another abolishing requirements that Jews wear a distinctive costume (1846); the first of these, however, was rejected by the House of Lords, and Jews were not admitted to Parliament until 1858. O'Counell rightly proclaimed Ireland "the only Christian country that I know of unsullied by any act of persecution against the Jews," a claim that only the Limerick pogrom was to spoil.
Apart from the pogrom, the most troubling episode Keogh records is the conduct of the Irish government before and during the Second World War in regard to Nazi persecution of the Jews. Inevitably this involves examining the behavior and motives of Eamon de Valera, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and Minister of External (Foreign) Affairs from 1932 until 1948. De Valera was a secretive and devious man, passionately committed to freeing Ireland from any last vestiges of British rule. He had survived the 1916 Rising, though sentenced to death. When Ireland gained a kind of quasi-independence as a dominion in 1922, he led an armed rebellion against the new Free State government, and later refused to take the oath to the British sovereign required to sit in the new Dublin Parliament. In 1927 he did take the oath "with scruples," then worked to subvert it in various ingenious ways, and re-wrote the Irish Constitution in 1937 to remove any role for the British Crown. His determined policy of neutrality in World War II w as a further declaration of independence from Britain.
In his 1937 Constitution, de Valera described the "special position" of the Catholic Church as the church of the great majority of Irish men and women (that "special position" was removed by an overwhelming majority in a 1972 referendum). He then went on to list the other denominations then functioning in Ireland as entitled to recognition, legitimacy, and protection, among them "the Jewish Congregations." I have been reliably informed that de Valera was determined to assert Jewish civil rights in the Constitution so that no succeeding government could easily abolish them, as the Nazis had done in Germany. To single out the Jews would be controversial. The solution was to name all Ireland's religious groups. Jewish rights were not, of course, de Valera's chief or only purpose in listing these groups. He continued to hope for a reunion with Northern Ireland, with its Protestant majority. But in the atmosphere of 1930s Europe he was making an important statement.
Professor Keogh cites an oral source that attributes the inclusion of the Jewish Congregations to consultations with Isaac Herzog, then Chief Rabbi of Ireland, who became Chief Rabbi of Palestine in 1937, the father of Chaim Herzog (who contributes a preface to Keogh's book). Rabbi Herzog and de Valera were friends, so much so that the future Taoiseach had on occasion hidden in the Rabbi's house when a fugitive from British or Free State police. Both were eager to see the establishment of an independent Irish republic.
The Herzog-de Valera friendship continued until the Rabbi's death, but did not translate into practical measures to assist German Jews before the War, nor the many Jewish victims of Nazi cruelty later. Just before war broke out, de Valera declined to meet Herzog's request that he admit Christian Jewish doctors and dentists to Ireland and allow them to practice there; he also refused a request from the Vatican to admit a number of Jewish doctors temporarily. In the entire period of Nazi persecution, only 60 to 7O Jews were admitted to Ireland as refugees. The Irish Department of Justice continually recommended against such admissions, partly on the grounds that many Irish citizens were unemployed and would see the refugees as competitors for such jobs as there were, and partly out of fear that the result would be an antisemitic backlash. We should remember that similar arguments prevailed with President Roosevelt and the American authorities in 1937 when they refused sanctuary to German Jewish refugees on the St. Louis and sent them back to Germany to die.
Charles Bewley, the Irish Minister in Berlin, played a major role in thwarting refugees trying to reach Ireland. Bewley was enthusiastically pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish. His reports to Dublin consistently reiterate Nazi arguments that Jews considered themselves free of any moral obligations toward non-Jews, or toward the state of which they happened to be citizens, and so would subvert Christian citizens and Christian states. Jews ran "the "international white slave traffic," Bewley reported to Dublin, and promoted pornography and abortion. The Irish government recalled him in disgrace in August 1939, replacing him with a less hostile Minister, but from his arrival in 1933, Bewley had denied or delayed Irish visas for Jews; with the outbreak of war it was impossible even for Jews granted visas to reach Ireland.
In 1942 Rabbi Herzog warned de Valera that Jews were being systematically exterminated in German prison camps. The Taoiseach and his government made efforts to rescue various groups, especially groups including children, and bring them to Ireland. These included a large group of German Jews held at Vittel in Vichy France, who already possessed visas for various South American countries. De Valera, together with the Irish ministers in Berlin, Vichy, and at the Vatican worked to rescue the Vittel Jews, and later groups of Italian, Dutch, Hungarian, and Slovakian Jews, but without success. In no case were the Nazis willing to let such groups depart for Ireland or leave Europe under Irish auspices. There was also a mistaken belief that Jews with Irish visas might be imprisoned, but would not be sent to the death camps, a belief the Vittel episode destroyed.
De Valera himself responded willingly to appeals for help in these cases, but, as Keogh points out, he was always reactive rather than proactive. His efforts to assist Jewish refugees, and indeed refugee Catholics from Poland, France, and Hungary, were continually impeded by his own bureaucracy. As late as 1953, the Department of Justice trotted out Bewley's old arguments against Jewish immigration. The same Department, however, was eager to admit the Belgian Fascist leader Leon Degrelle in 1946, after the Belgians had condemned him to death as a war criminal, and several fugitive members of Pavlevic's brutal Croatian government seem to have entered postwar Ireland with ease and remained there.
Rabbi Herzog's departure for Palestine left the Irish Jewish community without a Chief Rabbi and unable to agree on a successor until 1949. During the War the jewish Representative Council approached the government from time to time on relevant issues, but its membership seems to have been too timid to act very forcibly, fearing to provoke antisemitism. The Council resented the personality of Harry Goodman, an Agudas representative from England. His aggressive efforts on behalf of refugees were seen as intrusive, while Goodman described the Irish Jews as selfish, indifferent, and parochial. Their inability to work together meant that Herzog's was the only jewish voice-from far away-appealing to de Valera and his government to assist European Jews.
De Valera's chief preoccupation was keeping Ireland neutral, both for practical reasons-the Irish armed forces were minuscule and their equipment obsolete-and as a way of asserting Ireland's independence from Great Britain. There were German, Japanese, and Italian legations in Dublin throughout the War, to the indignation of the British government, who suspected them of espionage. The Italian legation became irrelevant after Mussolini fell in July 1943, but the Germans had a radio transmitter with which they sent weather reports to the Luftwaffe until early 1942. In January 1944 they surrendered the transmitter to the Irish authorities. It was locked in a Dublin bank vault, presumably to prevent any reporting about the build-up of D-Day forces in Northern Ireland.
In his victory broadcast when the European War ended, Winston Churchill chose to include a condemnation of the Irish government for its neutral stance and for "frolic[ing] with the Germans and later with the Japanese representatives to their heart's content." Nevertheless, there was never any doubt where de Valera's sympathies lay. Though neutral, he assisted the Allied cause in various ways. Allied airmen who landed or crashed in Ireland were quietly returned to Britain; German airmen were interned for the duration. Militant IRA members who might have sabotaged the British war effort were imprisoned. Irish volunteers manned lookout stations all along the Irish coast and reported any sightings of U-boats or bombers to the British. Irish fire brigades were sent north when Belfast was bombed. The rural population in the West were eager to find German spies, and several who were landed from submarines were collared within a few days, one after ordering "a glass of stout and a pint of whiskey" in a Dingle pub.
De Valera knew that Irish public opinion was bitterly opposed to any alliance with Britain, 20 years after a desperate war to gain freedom from British rule. But he also had to maneuver between his political opposition in the Fine Gael party, who urged entering the War on the side of the Allies, and the Republican movement from which he himself had sprung, which was to some extent pro-German--or, more precisely, anti-British--if only because Germany was England's foe. Lord Haw Haw's mocking but sometimes accurate accounts of British setbacks were often relished in Ireland, even among those who feared a German victory, and there was a popular belief that in bombing Belfast the Germans had deliberately spared Catholic neighborhoods and concentrated on Orange (Protestant) areas. The German attack on Russia, described in German propaganda as a crusade against Communism, made the Germans seem the lesser evil and the British alliance with Stalin an alliance with the Antichrist.
De Valera's most controversial wartime action has been explained, but cannot easily be explained away. On 30 April 1945, when news of Hitler's suicide reached Dublin, he visited the German legation to offer his government's formal condolences on the death of Germany's head of state. Despite the opposition of most of his advisers, he insisted that protocol demanded no less from the government of a neutral nation (on the death of President Roosevelt, a few days earlier, the Irish Parliament adjourned in mourning for two days). He seems to have been motivated partly out of respect for the German Minister, Eduard Hempel, who was not a Nazi and had behaved correctly throughout the War, partly out of an unwillingness to seem to abandon respect for the German people in their defeat, and partly to make one final assertion of Irish independence and neutrality. De Valera acted on principle, that diplomatic courtesies must be observed and maintained, but his gesture remains a stumbling block for even his most loyal adm irers.
It is heartening to note de Valera's successful intervention to bring nearly 150 refugee Jewish children to Ireland in 1948, against the advice of the still uncooperative Department of Justice and with apparently muted support from the Jewish Representative Council. In 1952 he again overrode Justice to admit five Orthodox families who were fleeing the Communists. In 1966, the Dublin Jewish community arranged the planting and dedication of the Eamon de Valera Forest in Israel, near Nazareth, in recognition of his consistent support for Ireland's Jews. Speakers on that occasion said nothing about wartime refugees or the visit to Hempel.
In recent years the Irish government has officially acknowledged the inadequacy of Ireland's response to the Holocaust. Speaking at a 1995 ceremony commemorating the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Taoiseach John Bruton admitted that Ireland was "not freely open to those families and individuals fleeing from persecution and death.... We must acknowledge the consequences of this indifference. As a society we have become more willing to accept our responsibility to respond to events beyond our shores. Tonight, on behalf of the Irish government and people I honour the memory of those millions of European Jews who died in the Holocaust." Bruton added a warning that "intolerance, bigotry and a distorted concept of nationalism" were not dead in Europe. A more practical response to Ireland's wartime failure was the passage of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act (1989), and the Refugee Act (1997)
When a symposium on the 1904 pogrom was announced in Limerick in 1965, with Gerald Goldberg as a speaker, there was vociferous local opposition. There were efforts to intimidate the organizers and threats to disrupt the meeting. But when it began with a reading of Father Creagh's first sermon, there was an appalled silence, and the would-be disrupters slunk away quietly, one by one. In 1990, in a belated but welcome act of reparation, the Limerick County Council voted to clean and in future maintain the long-neglected Jewish cemetery. At a ceremony celebrating the restoration, speakers, including the Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Limerick's Catholic and Protestant bishops, and the Lord Mayor, remembered the past, but also stressed the now unchallenged inclusion of Jews in the Limerick and Irish communities.
What of the Irish Jewish community at present? It is a shrinking community, down from a 1946 high of 5381 in the Republic and Northern Ireland combined, to a 1991 all-Ireland total of, as it happens, 1991: 1581 in the Republic, 410 in the North. It is also an aging community, a quarter of its members over 65.
Many people, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, have left Northern Ireland to avoid the violence that has destroyed so much since Protestant gangs, with the connivance of the police, attacked Catholic civil rights marchers in 1969. It is little comfort to know that the mutual hatreds of Catholics and Protestants leave no room for antisemitism, as a grim Belfast joke points out. Seized from behind in a dark Belfast street, a man is asked the life or death question: "Are ye a Catholic or a Protestant?" When he answers, "I'm a Jew," his assailant becomes specific: "Are ye a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?"
But why are there now only about l200 Jews in the peaceful Republic? The answer is partly economic. Until the 1 990s, in a tradition that goes back to the Great Famine, many young Irish men and women assumed that they would have to emigrate when they reached adulthood and did so. There were too few jobs and opportunities at home. Only in the 1990s, with Ireland prospering as part of the European Union, have jobs been readily available and the Irish diaspora staunched. Until then, young Irish Jews, like their fellow countrymen and women, were forced to seek employment abroad. But they also emigrated for religious reasons, some to settle in Israel, some because in a shrinking Jewish community there was little chance of finding a Jewish spouse. Intermarriage was and is common, and often leads to a loss of Jewish identity. In the Ireland of 1998, Moslems are the fastest growing religious minority. They already outnumber the Jews, and the new Dublin mosque is much larger and much busier than Dublin's four remaini ng synagogues combined. Its playground is full of children, whose Irish mothers have married Moslem students or businessmen and converted to Islam.
Anti-Jewish prejudice of the golf club/country club variety still exists among some Irish people in their 60s or 70s. But it is rare among the younger Irish, thanks to increasing ecumenism, prosperity, and better education--and perhaps in revulsion against the frequent images of religious rivalries in Northern Ireland that appear on the nightly news.
Ireland has been politically independent only since 1922, after some 700 years of English rule. Unlike many former colonies, it has maintained democracy and the rule of law. Ireland's independence was sparked by an intense nationalism, of the sort the later twentieth century has come to mistrust, especially after experiencing the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Ireland's re-emergence as a nation was one of the first such movements to succeed in modem Europe, sparked by Hungary's self-assertion as an equal partner in the Dual Monarchy (1867)--which Bloom described to Arthur Griffith.
As in other emergent nations, Irish nationalism was accompanied by chauvinism, by a tendency to exclude those who were nor in every way members of the national family as narrowly defined. Today the Irish Republic has no such scapegoats, and the rights of minorities are respected, apart perhaps from the "Traveling People" or Tinkers, who are widely perceived as dirty, unreliable, quarrelsome, and larcenous, but are also, as Stephen Dedalus would say, all too Irish. Ireland's transition from intense nationalism to political and religious ecumenism, especially noticeable in the Irish commitment to Europe, with a corresponding willingness to sacrifice some degree of sovereignty, reassures us that nationalism, once it has achieved the goal of political and cultural independence, can accommodate ethnic as well as religious differences--a hopeful portent for Bosnia, the Basque country, Kosovo.
Perhaps a final word is best left to a prominent Jew from Cork, a descendant of the Limerick diaspora, who was interviewed on Irish television in the 1970s as part of a series examining the treatment of minorities in the Republic. Asked if he had personally experienced prejudice, he replied, "Oh yes. Yes indeed," and then, after a pause, added, "In Dublin, you know, they always have the knife out for the Corkman."
ROBERT TRACY is Emeritus Professor of English and of Celtic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has translated poems by Osip Mandelstam in Stone (1991). His The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities appeared in 1998.
FROM ALL THEIR HABITATIONS takes its title from Ezekiel 37:23 and features reports of Jewish religious, intellectual, and communal life in various parts of the world.
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