Abstract
Shaun’s description of his twin brother Shem in Book iii.i of Finnegans Wake resonates with biographical detail about Joyce. His departure from Ireland with Nora, his exodus for thirty-seven years in Europe, his evolving but complex literary style (comically expressed as ‘throwing dust in the eyes of the Hooley Fermers!’ [424.4–5]), are among the many references in the passage. But no allusion is more direct than the quotation at the head of this paragraph which summarises Joyce’s longstanding and continual involvement with Jews. Moreover, the specific reference to Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, in which Herzl proposes a ‘Society of Jews’ to organise the political policies of the Jewish state, reveals the deeply rooted sympathy of Joyce with the Jewish condition. Removed from Ireland and situated in an unstable social, cultural and linguistic world that contrasted European traditions with Mediterranean spirit, the formidable Austro-Hungarian Empire with the dynamic Triestines, the stability of Switzerland with the destruction of the First World War, the comfort of Paris with increasing political dangers, Joyce could identify with only one group entrapped by similar contradictions: Jews. The reasons for this correspondence make up the content of this study; the impact on Joyce’s life and art is its theme.
‘Then he caught the europicolas and went into the society of jewses.’—Finnegans Wake (423.35–6)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Joyce owned a copy of Culture and Anarchy (London: Thomas Nelson, n.d.), as well as Arnold’s Selected Poems, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1905) in Trieste, and made several references to Arnold in his ‘Pola Notebook’. Joyce studied with Matthew Arnold’s brother Thomas, who was Professor of English at University College Dublin from 1882–1900. On Joyce and the Sinclair twins see Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (London: Gollancz, 1959), p. 56. Joyce first met the Sinclairs to discuss financing a daily paper called The Goblin in 1903; Harry Sinclair visited Joyce in Paris in 1926 (JJ 579); also see JI, 148–9, 181 and U, 8:522–3.
Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (1974; New York: New American Library, 1978), p. 337. Before the Kabbalah, the role of the Gematria was as a mnemonic for passing on the Oral Law. At 104.2 of the Wake Anna Livia is called ‘Bringer of Plurabilities’.
Joyce, ‘Pola Notebook’, The Workshop of Dedalus, ed. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1965), p. 91. Mulligan, citing Arnold again, speaks of Hellenising Ireland, using a phrase Arnold coined (1.158). On the usage of ‘Greek’ and ’Jew’ as slang terms c. 1900, see GandS 8.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, ed. Richard Eilmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 120, 53. For references to Abraham in Joyce’s work see U, 5.201, 12.1736, 15.248–51, 15.262 and FW, passim. On the two modes of thought, Greek and Jewish, see Ellmann, JJ, 395.
On the Fremdenpolizei see JJ 736–7; for Joyce visiting Palestine, see Mendel Kohansky, ‘Not a Friend to Talk About Bloom’, Midstream (March 1981), 36–40. Such fabrications have not prevented Israelis from appreciating Joyce; the first of a two-volume Hebrew translation of Ulysses appeared in 1985 translated by Yael Renan (Tel Aviv: Machbarot Lesifrut Publishers and Sifriat Poalim, 1985). The 435-page volume contains episodes 1–13, from ‘Telemachus’ to the end of ‘Nausicaa’.
George Steiner, ‘Our Homeland, The Text’, Salmagundi, No. 66 (Winter-Spring 1985), 5.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’, Writing and Difference, tr. Allan Bass (1967; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 64–7. Heinrich Heine in Encyclopedia Judaica 8: col. 274. Hereafter identified in text as EJ.
On the Torah as a jumble of letters see Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1973), p. 74. The Kabbalistic Rabbi Eliyahu Kohen Ittamari in the early eighteenth century argued that ‘the Torah … originally formed a heap of unarranged letters’ and that God ‘had before Him numerous letters that were not joined into words as is the case today, because the actual arrangement of the words would depend on the way in which this lower world conducted itself’, ibid., p. 74.
On the textual practice of Jews and the method of inner-exegesis see José Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986)
Michael Fishbane, Text and Texture, Close Readings of Selected Biblical Texts (New York: Schocken, 1979).
Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1982), p. 189.
Edmond Jabès, ‘The Key’, tr. Rosmarie Waldrop, Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), p. 352.
Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, tr. Rosmarie Waldrop (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1976), p. 122
Jabès, ‘There is such a thing as Jewish writing …,’ tr. Rosmarie Waldrop in The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès, ed. Eric Gould (Lincoln, Nebraska: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 27.
Elie Wiesel, Harry J. Cargas in Conversation with Elie Wiesel (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), p. 91.
Eugene Jolas, ‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929; New York: New Directions, 1972), p. 86.
Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 42.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1989 Ira B. Nadel
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nadel, I.B. (1989). Introduction: ‘Aleph, Alpha’. In: Joyce and the Jews. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07652-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07652-9_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-07654-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-07652-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)