How Joyce’s Ulysses bloomed out of Austro-Hungary’s Jews - The Jewish Chronicle

Among the consequences of World War I was the collapse of the pre-war European social and political order and the unleashing of unprecedented antisemitism throughout the continent. Many leading writers of the time, including T.S. Eliot in England and Céline in France, wrote of Jews in an insulting, derogatory way.

In the chaotic postwar years, Franz Kafka began his novel, The Castle, on one level an allegory of the Jewish condition in Europe: a man with a document giving him the right to work in an unnamed village arrives there only to find that his document is invalid, and his right to remain is in question. And indeed, by the end of the interwar period, racial laws invalidated emancipation — even in so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ countries such as France and Germany.

An outstanding exception to the Jew-hatred of the time was James Joyce, whose modernist novel, Ulysses, had for its leading character an Irish Jew, Leopold Bloom, a betrayed lover, untrusted nationalist and victim of nationalism, isolated and, at moments, subjected to Irish antisemitism.

As Joyce’s eminent biographer, Richard Ellmann, observed, Joyce strongly identified with the Jews, unusually so among early twentieth-century writers, and was fond of discussing alleged similarities between the Jews and the Irish. Though Ulysses is set in Dublin on 16 June 1904, the character of Leopold Bloom is based mainly on Jews whom Joyce knew in Trieste, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the book germinated (1905–1915). Joyce worked as an English language teacher, and many of his pupils were Trieste Jews.

Joyce was acutely aware of the explosive nature of national conflict and the effects of antisemitism. Three quarters of Trieste’s population was Italian and its language was an Italian dialect. In reaction against Austrian antisemitism, Trieste’s Jews sought union with Italy, which was relatively free of antisemitism. The leader of the Italian nationalists was Teodoro Mayer, a Hungarian Jew who founded Il Piccolo della Sera, the main newspaper in Trieste, whose editor, Roberto Presioso, was a pupil of Joyce’s.

Another pupil was the then-neglected Italian Jewish novelist Italo Svevo, pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz (1861–1928), whose writings struck a chord with Joyce, an Irish exile in a foreign land — terra di nessuna, as the Trieste Jewish poet, Umberto Saba (1883–1957), describes it in the poem Ulisse.

Svevo’s novels Una Vita (1892) and Senilità (1898), with their failures in love, involving seduction, betrayal, and suicide but with sympathy for his characters and the complexities of their relations, greatly impressed Joyce. Joyce knew by heart the end of Senilità, the transformation of female betrayal into universal epiphany, and might have drawn on it for the portrayal of Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses:

“Her figure even became a symbol. It was always looking in the same direction, towards the horizon, the future from which came those glowing rays, reflected in rose and amber and white upon her face. She was waiting!”

Svevo was Joyce’s chief model for Leopold Bloom (both converts, Hungarian in origin, and with non-Jewish wives) and one of his main sources for the Jewish lore in Ulysses, and for Zionism, Trieste being a port of departure for Jews going to the Land of Israel.

Svevo’s writings give little sign of his Jewish origin and education. His pseudonym declares his wish to assimilate and to be seen as a European writer; indeed, by 1910, about a fifth of the Trieste Jews had renounced their faith. Svevo evidently transferred both his learning and sympathy for Judaism to Joyce. For the assimilated Svevo to introduce Jewish motifs into his writing might have seemed like special pleading, detracting from his universalist aims.

Joyce had no such inhibitions. Svevo might have given Joyce the talmudic comparison (applicable also to the Irish) between the Jews and olives (Menahot 53b): like olives, the Jews gave their best when crushed. Joyce created Bloom as both quintessentially Jewish and Irish (‘jewgreek’), and neither, a no-man (‘nemo’ in the ‘Cyclops’ episode), a modern Ulysses with no country: “my Ulysses born anew/In Dublin as an Irish jew”.

Though comic, Bloom in his marital disappointments — the death of his son, Rudy, in 1894 soon after birth ended his sex life with Molly, who has taken a lover — mirrors broader alienation within an antisemitic society, both in Dublin and in Europe generally. Joyce sets Bloom’s Zionist interest in land reclamation against his own infertility and impotence, his son’s death, and his wife’s infidelity. His musings on the Dead Sea in the ‘Calypso’ episode have bearing on his own sense of deadness and distance — as a Jew and a modern Ulysses — from home:

“A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters… the grey sunken c**t of the world.”

A self-exile, Joyce observed with empathy as Europe betrayed its Jews, even in Ireland, an island off an island, with practically no visible Jews. In the ‘Nestor’ section of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s self-portrait as a young man, encounters antisemitism as part of what is wrong with Ireland. Mr Deasy, head of the school where Stephen has taught, claims that Ireland never persecuted the Jews as Jews were never allowed in, yet is himself gripped by antisemitic prejudice: “England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay.”

Bloom’s assimilation in Irish society is undermined doubly, by being Jew and cuckold. The confusion in Bloom’s identity — his desire to belong among those who betray him — emerges particularly in the ‘Cyclops’ episode in Ulysses, set in a pub in which he is surrounded by a group of antisemites who (in a scene reminiscent of the solitary Bloch set upon by antisemitic Parisian aristocrats in Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu) insult him and challenge his nationality: “Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland. [ … ] And after all, says John Wyse, 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.”

The generally even-tempered Bloom is provoked into a remarkable outburst against national hatred and persecution in which the bitterness of the failure of his love-life is also apparent, for he, a man devoted to family, seems fated to be reminded constantly, at times comically, of his wife’s infidelity: “Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations. [ … ] And I belong to a race too, says Bloom that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant … Robbed, says he, Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. [ … ] That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that’s the very opposite of that that is really life. [ … ] Love, says Bloom, I mean the opposite of hatred …”

Despite its Dublin setting, Ulysses was a creation of the hothouse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, its surface tolerance hiding deep-rooted national and racial conflicts; and Bloom’s marriage on one level reflects these conflicts, particularly the broader failure of Jews to find secure mooring in the cultures they espoused and the societies where they sought acceptance. Ulysses is one of many interwar literary works by and about Jews depicting unrequited love.

In a world in which national barriers were going up and passports, especially for Jews, increasingly hard to get, it is in the unbordered realm of the imagination — described by Schnitzler as der Weg ins Freie and by Proust as la patrie inconnue — that Bloom, through Molly’s rich unfading memory of his courtship, secures his “passport to eternity”.

David Aberbach is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Studies at McGill University, Montreal. He is author of The European Jews, Patriotism and the Liberal State 1789-1939.

Topics:

Books