Jewish identity can be defined in many different ways,
crossing boundaries of race, religion, nationality, family,
and culture. The most emotionally compelling of those
categories is the first. Seen by some as a constitutive
biological condition imparting important physical and
psychological characteristics to individuals, race is
dismissed by others as an invidious abstraction. Certainly the
ability of all human beings to procreate with others of their
species, and the rapidly dilutive effects of intermarriage,
suggest that races (i.e., distinct subspecies of Homo
sapiens) are at most temporary states in an
evolutionary continuum, maintained only by physical isolation
or by ideals and taboos promoting cultural exclusivity. But
some racial differences can hardly be denied.
Joyce's thoughts reflect these ambiguities. Although he was
well aware of the many successive waves of invasion and
intermarriage that had produced his own people, and thus
skeptical of all claims of ethnic purity, he did not hesitate
to use the word "race" to name the Irish—as for example at the
end of A Portrait of the Artist, when Stephen
famously declares his intention to "forge in the smithy of my
soul the uncreated conscience of my race." In Aeolus
Professor MacHugh uses the same terminology to demean the
English: "I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose
mentality is the maxim: time is money." And Ithaca
describes the Jews as "a selected or rejected race,"
pairing their divine nomination and their diasporic suffering.
Joyce uses such language loosely—Ulysses frequently
refers to the entire human "race"—but he seems to have placed
some credence in racial characteristics. Turn-of-the-century
theories about Jewish capacities and proclivities do show up
in the novel.
Bloom himself does not hesitate to invoke race in
identifying himself as Jewish. In Cyclops he
compares the Irish and the Jews: "And I belong to a
race too...that is hated and persecuted."
But his family tree offers contradictory evidence for whether
or not he in fact belongs to that race, and raises questions
(familiar to Americans from discourses about Blacks and
Indians) about how great a blood quantum may be necessary to
warrant a label. On his father's side he is descended from
three generations (and probably many more) of central European
Jews, but the hypothesis offered in Ithaca for
Milly's blond hair raises questions of intermarriage all the
way down the line: "blond, born of two dark, she had
blond ancestry, remote, a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau,
Austrian army." And, more importantly, Bloom is at
most half Jewish, because his mother, Ellen Higgins, was an
Irish Catholic.
Indeed, by one traditional definition he is not Jewish at
all. That definition is matriarchal: the son or daughter of a
Jewish woman is a Jew. In Eumaeus, Bloom tells
Stephen that the Citizen "called me a jew, and in a
heated fashion, offensively. So I, without
deviating from plain facts in the least, told him his God, I
mean Christ, was a jew too, and all his family, like me, though
in reality I'm not." Bloom is "in reality" not a
Jew because Ellen was a Gentile. But the contradictory way in
which he asserts this categorization (Christ was a jew, like
me) indicates that he nevertheless thinks of himself as
Jewish.
Why should he do so? One obvious answer is that the Gentile
culture of Dublin, which carries strong strains of
antisemitism, tells him every day that he is a Jew. Nor does
this acculturation depend solely on overt and hostile messages
like those of the Citizen. For every aggressive bigot there
are more than a few Dubliners who quietly accept Bloom into
their society, allowing him to pass as one of them, while
indicating in subtle but unmistakable ways that he is racially
Other. Reuben J. Dodd comes in for verbal abuse in Hades
while Bloom does not, but everyone in the carriage, Bloom
included, knows what links the two men. (Except that, in real
life, Dodd probably was not Jewish at all....) Lenehan's
ellipsis in Wandering Rocks, refusing to attach the
ugly name of Jew to Bloom, says it all: "He's not one
of your common or garden... you know..."
But Bloom has also been acculturated to think of himself as
Jewish in a more loving way, by the father whom he thinks
about far more often than he thinks of his mother. Rudolph
himself sought to pass in Irish society, legally changing his
name from Virag to Bloom and converting to Catholicism when he
married Ellen. He had his son Leopold baptized in the
Christian faith, and Nausicaa reveals that he did
not have him circumcised: "This wet is very
unpleasant. Stuck. Well the foreskin is not back. Better
detach." But at home Rudolph instructed his son in
Jewish religious traditions, taught him some Hebrew, and
clearly raised him to think of himself as a Jew. When Bloom
reached young manhood he rebelled against his father's
religious teachings, dismissing them as irrational and
backward. But in middle age he regrets the uncompromising zeal
of that rebellion, and is eager to teach Stephen some of the
wealth of his cultural inheritance.
Calypso wastes no time in demonstrating Bloom's lack
of interest in orthodox observance. Deciding against a mutton
kidney, he thinks, "Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz's."
His thoughts about his cat later in the chapter confirm that
he is perfectly well aware of his transgression: "Give her too
much meat she won't mouse. Say they won't eat pork.
Kosher." But the secularist implications of eating
non-kosher food, bought from a Jewish
butcher no less, are somewhat muted when Bloom leaves
the house several paragraphs later and assures himself "On the
doorstep" that he has his potato with him, practicing an
improvised version of the talismanic touching of a mezuzah that
he learned from his father. He rejects the Citizen's
simpleminded conflation of ethnic and national identity (he
sees no contradiction between being Jewish and being Irish),
but he energetically defends international Jewry and shows
some interest in the Zionist program of building
a Jewish proto-state in Palestine.
Perhaps the lesson to draw from such antitheses is that all
of us are mongrels, defined by a host of biological and
cultural conditions that do not cohere in an essential
Jewishness, Irishness, or any other Whatness. Dublin's
provincial and xenophobic culture clings to such
anti-cosmopolitan essentialism. By making his protagonist
ambiguously "Jewish" Joyce did not simply offer resistance to
the ideology of antisemitism
that was gaining strength in the early 20th century. He
created someone who is simultaneously inside Dublin and
outside it. Bloom's exotic provenance and his experiences of
prejudice help him to see through the myths of belonging that
are a poor substitute for true individuality.
