German Jews

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In 1879 Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) published a pamphlet which Jacob Katz has called, in From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (1980), the "first anti-Semitic best-seller." The work was titled Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism). The essence of Marr's argument, Gifford observes, was that "Jews in Germany had already taken over the press, they had become 'dictators of the financial system,' and they were on the verge of taking over the legislature and the judiciary." Marr did not invent these charges: they were already current in the turbulent, disunified Germany of his day. Nor was he a racial bigot in any simple sense: three of his four marriages were to women who were at least partly Jewish, and he renounced antisemitism and German nationalism toward the end of his life. But by depicting two peoples (one native, the other a foreign invader) locked in irreconcilable struggle, and by describing a massive conspiracy to infiltrate and take over the vital systems of one society, he provided an ideological justification for bigotry.

A quarter century later, in 1905, Russian secret police seeking to justify pogroms in the Pale of Settlement produced the notorious forgery called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which gave evidence that Jews were planning a takeover of the entire civilized world. The Protocols did not circulate in western Europe until the end of the Great War, but Joyce anachronistically alludes to them in Circe when Bloom's father "appears garbed in the long caftan of an elder in Zion." A less anachronistic inspiration for Haines's reference to "our national problem," and for Deasy's picture of Jews so dominating England's "finance, her press" that they "eat up the nation's vital strength," may have announced itself to the writer in 1905, when the British Parliament passed the Aliens Act. This legislation, the first to impose controls on immigration into the UK, appears to have been aimed particularly at the multitudes of Jews who were fleeing Russian pogroms. Large waves of Jewish immigration into England in the 1890s spurred passage of the law.

A comparably notorious expression of antisemitism had roiled France in the 1890s when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew serving in the French army, was convicted in 1894 on exceedingly flimsy grounds of giving secret military documents to the Germans. Many Frenchmen assumed that Jews felt more loyal to their own international ethnic cabal than to the nation that had given them citizenship. When new evidence emerged in 1896 implicating a different officer, the military command suppressed the evidence, effected a hasty acquittal of the non-Jewish officer, and brought new charges against Dreyfus based on fabricated documents. Émile Zola published a fiery letter titled J'accuse in a prominent newspaper, stirring public pressure for Dreyfus to be acquitted in a new trial. When the trial was held in 1899, a battle for public opinion raged, led on the anti-Dreyfus side by Édouard Drumont, publisher of an antisemitic newspaper called La Libre Parole that had been slandering Jews since 1892.

This reactionary response to the Dreyfus trials briefly surfaces in Proteus when Stephen recalls Kevin Egan talking about "Monsieur Drumont." No mention is made of Drumont's views, but by dropping the name into the chapter Joyce imports a French context for European antisemitism into this novel. Haines, who has voiced suspicion of "German Jews" in the previous chapter and whose name means hate in French, probably represents another indirect evocation of the Dreyfus affair, in which French bigots defended their nation from a traitor who was ostensibly working for the Germans. (Dreyfus was convicted once again in the 1899 trial, but subsequently pardoned. In 1906, after years of tireless labor by his brother and his wife, the falsity of the charges against him was at last proved. He was reinstated in the French army at the rank of major, and after serving throughout the Great War retired as a lieutenant colonel.)

When Haines voices antisemitic views in the first chapter, it may seem that Joyce is characterizing them as a new import from England, a parasite clinging to a "stranger." Deasy's more detailed exposition of the ideology in the second chapter puts an end to that slight comfort. Antisemitism is already well established in Ireland and will surface many more times in the book. The men in the funeral carriage in Hades, Nosey Flynn in Lestrygonians, Buck Mulligan in Scylla and Charybdis, Lenehan in Wandering Rocks, and Bloom himself in Ithaca all indulge invidious stereotypes about Jews, but it falls to the novel's outstanding antisemite, the Citizen, to voice the suspicion that Jews feel no loyalty to the nations that admit them, unless perchance that country is "the new Jerusalem." The Citizen insinuates that the many Jews trekking across European borders are internationalist provocateurs: "What is your nation, if I may ask?" Bloom, of course, answers that his nation is Ireland: "I was born here. Ireland."

Antisemitism was certainly the strongest current in fin de siècle suspicions that internationalist provocateurs were undermining European nations, but other kinds of bigotry played a part. Catholic countries like France and Ireland regarded the international order of Freemasons, whose members were mostly Protestant and whose beliefs inhabited a hazy middle ground between religious mystery and secularism, as threats more pernicious than any form of atheism. In a personal communication, Vincent Van Wyk points out that Jews were sometimes associated with Freemasonry, as in the second cartoon featured here. Joyce happily added this second locus of suspicion to his protagonist, making Bloom not only (ambiguously) a Jew but also (far less ambiguously) a Mason. When Nosey Flynn says that Bloom will never sign his name ("Nothing in black and white"), he may be trotting out a stereotype about Jews, Freemasons, or both groups.