Davison (2002) - Why Bloom Is Not 'Frum', or Jewishness and Postcolonialism in 'Ulysses

Why Bloom Is Not "Frum", or Jewishness and Postcolonialism in "Ulysses"
Author(s): Neil R. Davison

Source: James Joyce Quarterly , Summer, 2002, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Summer, 2002), pp. 679-
716
Published by: University of Tulsa
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25477926
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Why Bloom Is Not Frum, or Jewishness
and Postcolonialism in Ulysses
Neil R. Davison
Oregon State University
I n his r.eview o~ my bo~k, James !oyce, "Ulysses," and the Construction

of Jewish Identity, Erwm R. Sternberg asks a pertinent, concluding
question about the controversy over Bloom's Jewishness: "why
did not Joyce present a Jew who was sturdily Jewish, an unequivo-
cally self-affirming Jew, the way Sir Walter Scott did in Ivanhoe?" 1 If,
for a moment, we address the question's demonstrative example, it
would have to be pointed out that, unlike Scott, Joyce was not an
early-nineteenth-century Romantic novelist whose characters were
most often ideologically based, idealized versions of the complexity
of self and self-making. Nor was Joyce in any of his works depicting
an era in which British Jews were predominately unassimilated,
orthodox, and ghettoed. Such flippancy toward Steinberg's earnest
question, however, is unwarranted, especially given the seriousness
with which he has been arguing against Bloom's Jewishness for some
sixteen years.2 His question, in fact, must be expanded to include the
larger question of Bloom's ambiguous Jewish identity as a pivotal
aspect of current reevaluations of Joyce's modernism regarding his
era's colonial controversies surrounding race, gender, nationalism,
and imperialism. Like all important modernists whose work address-
es postcolonial questions, Joyce was critical of the constraining,
oppressive constructs of selfhood that arose from both colonial subju-
gation and the ethnoracial-nationalist programs that reacted against it
(the latter including such bulwarks of modernity as linguistic recla-
mation, neo-pagan blood-consciousness, nationalized religion, and
the martyrdom of violent republicanism). In confronting this binary,
Joyce became interested in the interstices of racial, ethnic, gender,
socioeconomics, and nationalist identity he discovered through the
deconstructive play of his innovations with language and narrative.
Through his textual criticism of British imperialism, of Yeatsean/
Cuhulainoid Irishness, of Douglas Hyde's linguistic Gaelicism, of
Arnoldian Celticism, and of Sinn Fein racism, he believed he was lib -
erating the possibilities of Irish self-making while simultaneously sat-
irizing cultural nationalism, doctrinal religiosity, English liberalism,
and broader, imperialist-based, hypermasculine, patriarchal honor
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codes.
When Joyce expatriated himself from the ascendancy-based Celtic
myths of W. B. Yeats and T. W. Rolleston, from the Catholic chauvin-
ism of D. P. Moran (editor of The Leader) and the influential Jesuit
senior Father Tom Finlay, from the xenophobic nationalism of Arthur
Griffith and Oliver Gogarty, and even from the ineffectual parliamen-
tarianism of John Redmond, he began a psychosocial journey through
both nationalist and cosmopolitan identity that led him indirectly-
or perhaps directly-to friendships with assimilated, marginal
Continental Jews. Many of those individuals were themselves locked
in identity crises within the religious, ethnic, nationalist, and liberal
humanist discourses of their cultures and social-psyches. It was these
acquaintances, living in multiethnic cities with influential Jewish
intelligentsia, that afforded Joyce a provocative vehicle through
which to re-think his own ethnicity, apostasy, nationalism, and
racism. In his choice of the marginal, ambiguously gendered Jew as a
trope for the doubly-colonized subject, Joyce fictively preempted
arguments about European Jewry as a psychologically colonized yet
unterritoried people, as well as those surrounding the popular proto-
nationalist Zionist reaction to this, which remain at the center of cur-
rent postcolonial anti-Zionist arguments.
One merely has to consider how even Eric Hobsbawm, in a work
such as Nations and Nationalism since 1780,3 protests a bit too much
about Jewish nationalism to reopen the seams Joyce weaves and
unweaves through Bloom. One of the more crucial exchanges over
such questions in terms of its impact on Jewish cultural studies
occurred between John Murray Cuddihy, in his The Ordeal of Civility:
Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity,4 and
Daniel Boyarin. Although Boyarin describes Cuddihy' s now-dated
conclusions about the civil inferiority of unassimilated Jewry as "the
most malodorous opinions about Jews and other colonized peoples,"
he nonetheless grants that Cuddihy remains one of the first scholars
to "demonstrate-in spite of his being on some profound level [senti-
mentally] philo-Semitic-how intimately related the discourse of
anti-Semitism is to other discourses of colonialism."5 To begin to dis-
cuss Bloom's Jewishness then, we have first to confront the notion
that Joyce appears to have understood Jewishness in this manner to
be an example of the colonized psyche. But we must also-along with
Joyce himself-particularize Jewishness as differentiated from other
colonial identities by reemphasizing how multivalent racialized
Jewishness was across the political spectrum, as well as how anom-
alous Jewish nationalism was in 1904, based as it was on a nation
without a native language, territory, or popular, hegemonizing move-
ment.6 As Zygmunt Bauman has argued, comparative uses of
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Jewishness to other racial alterities are problematic insofar as Jews
were perceived as neither a valid nation nor a conquerable people nor
a culturally transformable identity:
The Jews were not just like any other nation; th!!}/ were also unlike any other
foreigners. In short, they undermined the very difference between hosts
and guests, the native and the foreign. And as nationhood became the
paramount basis of group self-constitution, they came to undermine the
most basic of differences: the difference between "us" and "them." Jews
were flexible and adaptable; an empty vehicle, ready to be filled with
whatever despicable load "them" were charged with carrying. 7
Refuting "the Jew" as a case of "heterophobia-the resentment of the

different" -Bauman rather suggests that it was a "protopheobia, the
apprehension ... related not to something or someone disquieting
through otherness and unfamiliarity but to something or someone
that does not fit the structure of the orderly world, does not fall easi-
ly into any established categories"8-a different difference.
Such a Jewish position thus dictates that we read Ulysses not only
within imperial or nationalist discourse but through the impact of lib-
eral culture on several levels of modem Jewish experience. While this
certainly includes nationalist and racist xenophobia, the failures of
liberalism, myths of a Jewish world-conspiracy, the racially feminized
Jew, and the Zionist reaction, it also highlights shifts in religious and
cultural identities produced by both the Haskalah and social assimila-
tion. Before completing Ulysses, Joyce indeed read an overview of the
changes that modernity brought to Judaic sensibility and practice in
Harry Sacher's "A Century of Jewish History." 9 Most postcolonial
discussions of Zionism in Ulysses, however, tend to disregard how
much both racialized and religious-based versions of Jewishness
shadowed the modern movement, especially in terms of the gender
controversies built into "the Jew" of the fin de siecle. Since Boyarin's
most recent challenge to the assumption of a culturally constructed,
effeminized Jewish racial nature is applicable to Joyce's own con-
structions of Jewishness, I will return to his work in my closing argu-
ments.
It remains a disturbing irony of the postcolonial portrait of Joyce,
"the non-Irish Irishman" (as in Isaac Deutscher's "non-Jewish
Jew" 10), that, while his negotiations of Irish nationalist identities are
examined as liberating, critics remain much less interested in his use
of Bloom's Jewishness to suggest the same undiscovered spaces with-
in the parameters of Jewish identity and Zionism. And yet, consider-
ing the germs of racial genocide built into the anti-Semitism Joyce
confronts in Ulysses, scholars of one of the twentieth-century's most
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significant works of fictive social commentary would not want to
stand accused of what Bauman has also shown to be a "systematic
marginalization and belittlement of the Holocaust in relation to social
theories of modern civilization" (lvlodernity viii-x). It often appears,
however, that just such a de-emphasis has occurred in terms of the
most general recognition of the postmodern and postcolonial urgency
of Joyce's unarguable interest not only in Zionism but in Jews,
Jewishness, and "the Jew."
One notable exception to this is Vincent Cheng's Joyce, Race, and
Empire.11 Cheng asserts that Bloom is "historically situated in an anti-
Semitic Ireland, itself politically impotent through its colonization by
the English empire" and that consequently he "is an Irishman partic-
ularly conscious of his own doubly marginalized status as a Jew with-
in his country's marginalized status as a victim of English imperial-
ism" (6). Cheng argues in his early chapters that "the Jew" was essen-
tial to the Darwinian racism underlying both the nationalist and
imperialist discourse of the era, yet he only positions Bloom's
Jewishness as a social construct foisted on a character that ultimately
bears no markings of Jewish identity other than a generic victimiza-
tion of the socially marginal and a subsequent sensitivity to
Otherness. Bloom is perhaps particularized as a Jew here through his
erroneous memories of Jewish ritual and the immediate social mean-
ings he ascribes to them but only in his attempt to confront the racist
discourse of Dublin; since he is predominately the target of the hyper-
masculinity built into Irish nationalism, does this sense of Jewishness
have any more relevance to Bloom's identity crisis than the Citizen's
accusations of other less manly identities or racial designations (such
as the "effeminate" betrayal of the French, that "[s]et of dancing mas-
ters" who were "never worth a roasted fart to Ireland"-U 12.1385,
1386)? Cheng concludes that the novel asserts a "solidarity of shared
similarities-in-difference-between Irish, Jewish, black, Oriental,
Indian, English, Boer, paleface, redskin ... within a multivalent, inter-
nationalist perspective" (248). For anyone who has researched the
context of race and gender through which Cheng reads Joyce, it
becomes evident that Bloom is indeed a key representation of "the
Jew" infin-de-siecle Europe. But if Bloom is to be fully particularized
as a Jew (even considering his lack of Halachic qualifications), his
Jewishness must not only be historicized in this manner but also
become a crux of his own identity crisis-a dynamic subjectivity made
palpable only through details discoverable in Joyce's stream-of-con-
sciousness technique. Nonetheless, Cheng has an essential fact correct
that Steinberg and those who would agree with him need to confront:
Bloom is neither Jewish nor unJewish in terms of an extrinsic, defini-
tive set of identity markers drawn from racial or religious discourse;
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rather, Bloom is a textual construct of Joyce's political unconscious
and conscious design, which includes, among other key sources, both
acknowledgments and subversions of key aspects of racialized
Jewishness.
A noteworthy addition to the racial and gender assumptions sur-
rounding "the Jew" in Joyce is Robert Bymes's 1997 JJQ piece on the
comical use in Ulysses of Otto Weininger's gender theories developed
in Sex and Character. 12 Updating earlier work on the Weininger-Joyce
connection by Ralph Robert Joly and Marilyn Reizbaum,13 Byrnes
argues that Weininger's theories about "the feminized Jewish male,"
"the Jewish femme-fatale," and the reproductive success of sexual
types all formed a template for Joyce to shape Bloom, Molly, and
Rudy as a "low-key comedy of sexual types at a time of gender crisis,
supplying [him] with vivid 'decadent' specimens that he could play
off against Homer" ("Comedy" 279).14 Precisely how much credence
Joyce placed in "the feminized Jew," however, remains arguable.
Even if Bloom, as Byrnes suggests, is a racial representation best
understood as a Joycean version of the liberal-cosmopolitan, anti-
Semitic casual humor of the pre-Holocaust period, like all profound
comics, Joyce's dirty jokes are simultaneously bitter social commen-
tary.
Byrnes opens his discussion by revisiting the only recorded (by
Richard Ellmann) comment on Zionism that Joyce made ("Comedy"
267): "That's all very well, but believe me, a warship with a captain
named Kanalgitter and his aides named Captain Afterduft would be
the funniest thing the old Mediterranean has ever seen" (JJII 396).15
He notes this as a "vulgar and anti-Semitic remark," made-even
more curiously-to Joyce's Jewish friend, Ottocaro Weiss, in response
to the latter's praise of Zionism ("Comedy" 267). Translations of both
names suggest "dirty Ostjuden" who go around farting, and Byrnes
concludes that Joyce was participating in an ethnic stereotype that
could pass in casual conversation (even with a Jewish audience) in
1915. Byrnes certainly has the correct context for Jewish jokes of the
era, but there are other, just as plausible, possibilities regarding the
intent of Joyce's humor. Indeed, until their falling out around 1920,
Weiss was a close friend of Joyce's, as well as a mutual acquaintance
of Italo Svevo (whose ironic humor was a self-perceived element of
his ownJewishness).Joyce may well have known of Sigmund Freud's
argument in Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious that the psy-
chological condition of European Jewry produced a self-deprecating
kind of joke that he labeled "Jewish humor"f 6 while such jokes often
acknowledge an anti-Semitic stereotype, they also suggest irony, in
that, between themselves, Jews recognize that they are more complex
than the stereotype. These jokes were also often "blue" in references
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to bodily functions. As an Irishman whose cultural inheritance also
included standard jokes about Irish betrayal and self-hatred, Joyce's
comment may rather suggest his intimacy with both Jews and Jewish
perceptions of Jewishness-especially given that he made a comment
like this to a Jewish friend who was the relative of a Jewish friend.
Indeed, when Weiss once asserted the validity of Freud's theory on
humor and repression, Joyce responded that such a connection was
not always true with every joke (JJII 398). Joyce's stereotyping here
could well be a product of his insider status in the presence of a Jew
who recognized his friend's ability to ironize the stereotype itself and
not necessarily the plight of the colonized people. When a colonized
subject makes a joke about his or her own supposed inferiority, it is
quite easy for a reader of a texhmlized version of the comment to miss
the ironic tone. Joyce makes a joke about the highly controversial con-
cept of modern political Zionism that relies on both stereotype and
the era's German-language model for the Jewish joke, and so Byrnes
positions Joyce's work as humorously supportive of the most noxious
ends of "the Jew" as degenerate and feminized. Given the complexi-
ty with which Joyce plays with both stereotype and its social uses,
perhaps Byrnes does not get the joke either. While he, like Cheng, has
certainly reemphasized the historicity of representations of gendered
Jewishness in Ulysses, he also disregards the ways in which Joyce
manipulates both Bloom's psychosexual and ethnic revelations in the
final episodes of Ulysses.
Certainly, however, broader gender issues of the fin de siecle became
central to the racist cultural dynamic of "the Jew" in h1rn-of-the-cen-
tury Europe. George Mosse, Sander Gilman, and, more recently,
Jacques Le Rider have all explained "the Jew" in these terms as essen-
tial not only to modern liberal Viennese culture but to the entire late-
century Continental sensibility surrounding gender:
In the Kulturkritik debates of the first years of the twentieth-century [sic]

there is another figure as omnipresent as the categories of masculine
and feminine: the Jew .... [T]he anti-feminism of certain critics of mod-
ernism is expressed through a logic analogous to that of anti-Semitism .
. . . The redistribution of the cultural roles of masculinity and feminini-
ty triggered individual crises of disturbed, and subsequently redefined,
sexual identity, while literature and Kulturkritik contrasted anti-femi-
nism terrors with utopias of feminism, homosexuality and androgyny.
The challenge presented by anti-Semitism to the assimilation of Jews
into German culture shattered Jewish identity into an astonishing vart-
ety of individual self-identifications with myths and role models both
personal and collective.17
Bloom associates his passivity, humanism, sexual ambiguity, grief
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over his father's suicide, and overall social alienation to cultural
assumptions surrounding a racialized Jewishness that he has appar-
ently internalized; he also perceives himself as "Jewish" on certain
levels that stem from his intellectual, moral, and paternal inheri-
tance.18 Joyce obviously borrowed the first version of the identitv in
part from Weininger, in part from his sensitivity to popular-culhtral
discourse about "the Jew," and in part from his perceptions of Jewish
friends. Weininger's scientized re-delivery of the racially feminized
Jewish male represents a culmination of anti-Semitism and anti-fem-
inism that had been building throughout the century.
It remains debatable, however, whether Joyce either uncritically
believed such racism or, in fact, recognized the centrality of that dis-
course to the injustices of patriarchal culture of the West.19 In tracing
a line through Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Baudelaire, and
Weininger as examples of the modern collusion of gender and
Jewishness, Le Rider indeed asserts that, to these major influences on
the philosophy, poetry, and psychobiology of liberal European cul-
ture, "the woman and the Jew were tv,ro faces of the same temptation,
the temptation to 'resign oneself to exile, take root in a shamefaced
soil, connive at a down-fallen nature, make do with a belittled des-
tiny'" (167). He concludes in terms that help us grasp Bloom's identi-
ty as a Jew, as well as the position of the hypermasculine nationalist
who attacks him:
Just as anti-feminism was symptomatic of a profound crisis of individ-

ual masculine identity in revolt against the female within itself, and this
individual crisis turns out to be linked to a general crisis of culture, sim-
ilarly anti-Semitism was symptomatic of a crisis of individual social
identities under the effects of modernization.... It might be said that
anti-Semitism was the protest of a society against a liberalism with
which it had first appeared to identify, but has then denied. (179)
Liberalism's demise teetered on the fulcrums of gender and race; anti-

feminism, anti-Semitism, and the Zionist reaction were all by-prod-
ucts of this. Joyce himself turned on English liberalism as early as his
university years, and by the time of the composition of Ulysses, he had
extended his criticism of liberal culture in general into his play with
representations of "the Jew."
The farcical allusions in Ulysses to Matthew Arnold's liberal notion
of Hebraism and Hellenism (U 1.172-75, U 15.2512-14), as well as the
text's portrayal of anti-Semitic, Irish nationalism, assume their most
trenchant significance only when viewed through the Citizen's and
Stephen's dismay over Bloom's identity as a "perverted Jew" (!.1
12.1635). Bloom's ambiguous sexual identity is suspect, not only
because he is a reputed cuckold and a timid, compassionate man but
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because he is also believed to be a racially feminized Jew. Bloom's
Jewishness in the gaze of the male non-Jew thus acquires the threat-
ening, decentering effects more often discussed in terms of the male
gaze at the female object.20 Thus, in locating Bloom's Otherness at the
Weiningerian nexus of liberal discontent, Joyce identifies the same
precise symptoms of the modem identity crisis as Le Rider does.
But the more difficult psychosocial question arises not from how
fellow Dubliners perceive Bloom but how he has been constructed to
perceive himself. For example, does Joyce imply Bloom's atypical dis-
tance, as an Irishman, from the role of a heterosexist, strong-willed,
potentially violent, aggressive, republican male produced by (a) his
biologically determined, Weiningerian Jewish temperament; (b) his
internalization of the discourse that assumes and disseminates these
same myths; or (c) his interest in what he believes to be more pro-
found roles for the patriarchal male than those presented by nation-
alistic, imperial, racialist, or consumer-capitalist culture? If we enter-
tain the theory that Joyce disguised (b) and (c) as the answer under
the cover of (a), then postcolonial critics of Ulysses must begin to re-
read Bloom's discoveries about his timidity and Jewishness from
"Cyclops" to "Ithaca" and should also continue to question from
where the models for these other roles in Bloom's thoughts issue. An
answer to the last question-which has been foreseen by both Morton
Levitt and Shari Benstock-is that Bloom possesses a competing set of
markers of Jewishness to those that stem from the racial discourse
discoverable in his memories of his father's admonitions and expla-
nations about the historic plight of Jews, Judaism, and Judaic cultur-
al traditions; these markers become especially significant as they are
projected onto his dashed hopes for the Judaic imperative of nurtur-
ing father-son relations, as well as onto the vision of his own dead son
in "Circe."21 Another aspect of this sense of his Jewishness, of course,
is his musing about the nature and viability of Zionism as a solution
to Jewish persecution.
Moving from Cheng's generic alterity and Byrnes's laughing

Weininger to Irish postcolonialism, we discover a Joyce whose nation-
alist identity is particularized as an Irishness that can only be defined
through his deconstruction of nearly all readily available paradigms.
In a brief, early essay on the subject, Seamus Deane argues that Joyce
believed in a nationalist destiny by referring to his 1903 statement
about "the central belief of Ireland ... a belief in the incurable igno-
bility of the forces that have overcome her" (CW 105). 22 Deane also
claims that, following the rhetoric of Padraic Pearse, Joyce put this
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"belief into service" (105) by choosing deconstructive language as his
nationalist weapon, his ammunition forged in the smithy of a soul
scrupulously opposed to the dictates of the most influential national-
ist programs:
Joyce was always to be the writer who refused the limitations of

being Irish; the writer of English who refused the limitation of being an
English writer; the priest who refused the limitations of conventional
priesthood. With self-righteous indignation as his guide, Joyce ulti-
mately "discovered the fictive nature of politics," but in doing so "did
not repudiate Irish nationalism .... " Instead he understood it as a potent
example of a rhetoric which imagined as true structures that did not and
were never to exist outside of language. (105-07)
If Joyce believed this and inscribed it in Ulysses, does it mean that he

believed a modern nation (and thus nationalist-based identity) also
only exists-as Benedict Anderson has argued-in the mentality,
language, and rhetoric that creates and disseminates it? 23 Certainly by
1907, Joyce confirmed a nationalist sympathy while criticizing Celtic
racialism; in "Ireland, Isle of Saints and Sages," he argues, on the one
hand, that "[w]hen a victorious country tyrannizes over another, it
cannot logically be considered wrong for that other to rebel" and, on
the other hand, that the Irish civilization
is a vast fabric, ... in which nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the
new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are rec-
onciled. In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have
remained pure and virgin .... What race, or what language ... can boast
of being pure today? And no race has less right to utter such a boast
than the race now living in Ireland. Nationality (if it really is not a con-
venient fiction like so many others to which the scalpels of present-day
scientists have given the coup de grace) must find its reason for being
rooted in something that surpasses and transcends and informs chang-
ing things like blood and the human word. (CW 163, 165-66)
If Joyce attempted to disrupt the notions of racial purity or racial

identity, his final phrase here must imply "the word" of ideological
demagoguery and not the dynamism of his own fiction. 24 Did Joyce
believe in something called "racial families" but not in racial purity?
Did he believe in biological racial nature or at least in cultural tem-
perament? On one occasion, he described Ulysses as "the epic of two
races" ( SL 270); when asked by Arthur Power how he felt about being
Irish, he responded, "I regret it for the temperament it has given me"
(JJII 505); and during his struggle over being denied entry into
Switzerland in 1940 on the grounds that he was a Jew, he groused to
Louis Gillet that "que je ne suis pas juif de Judee mais aryen d'Erin"
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(Letters! 424). While Joyce was punning his way through another dif-
ficult situation, it seems nonetheless valid that he was at times
untroubled by racial designations, even if he felt that these were no
grounds upon which to build modern nations or identities.
Using Deane as a backboard, Declan Kiberd argues that Joyce's
rejection of limiting, binary definitions of Irishness should also not be
used to force Joyce back into worn-out humanist roles. If not a racial
nationalist, and no longer a liberal parliamentarian, Joyce was,
nonetheless, haunted by the awareness that "the writing of a post-
colonial exile is a satanic pact, a guilty compromise, a refusal of a
more direct engagement." 25 Thus, through the mythic realism of
Ulysses, Joyce hoped to open new interpretations of Irishness, while
pointing up the reaction-formation binarism of Celtic nationalism
and British imperialism. Kiberd claims that, in portraying Joyce as "a
cosmopolitan humanist with an aversion to militant Irish national-
ism," Ellmann and his generation failed to see that Ulysses suggests
that "if the constitutional nationalist were in danger of being coopted
by the empire, the militants were at grave risk of embracing the impe-
rial psychology in a reworked form .... Joyce heaped repeated mock-
ery on the imitations of English models by Irish revivalists" (335).
For Joyce to remain his own kind of nationalist without a preestab-
lished program, Kiberd postulates that he needed to create Bloom as
an "open space," whose "Jewishness, like his Irishness and his femi-
ninity, resides in the experience of being perpetually defined and
described by others, as whatever at any given moment they wish him
to be" (347). Within a postcolonial consciousness, where a gamut of
nationalist programs ultimately serves to oppress the contingencies of
the postmodern fluidity of self-(re)construction, Bloom and Stephen,
Kiberd concludes, cannot find the key to psychologically empower-
ing selves; when they finally converse in "Eumaeus," "they feel less
in direct relation to one another than they feel toward the force which
oppresses them and prevents them from becoming themselves" (347).
Although precisely which self in "themselves" Kiberd refers to here
remains unclear, he nonetheless concludes that the final take in
Ulysses on ethnic self-construction in Ireland (and Europe?) in 1904 is
to be discovered in Joyce's implied assertion that "there can be no
freedom for his characters within that society: they exist in their inte-
rior monologues with a kind of spacious amplitude which proves
impossible in the community itself. So his refusal to provide a 'satis-
factory' climax in their final meeting is his rejection of the obligation
of the realists to present a coherent, stable, socialized self" (354).
While this conclusion seems correct as regards Stephen's plight, such
a nexus of inconclusiveness does not exactly fit Bloom's ability to con -
struct a liberating self from his marginal Jewishness. Indeed, Kiberd's
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statement about Bloom as an "open space" neatly glosses over how
his stream-of-consciousness thinking continually deflects, absorbs,
reveals, evaluates, and negotiates those selves that are foisted on him
from social sources as well as those that he has inherited from the
familial, ethnic, and even religious antecedents of his character. Thus,
while the portrait of Joyce's Irishness gains a great deal from both
Deane's and Kiberd's readings, differing and complex versions of
Bloom's Jewishness continue in both works to be given short shrift.
A more radical analysis of the Irish postcolonial Joyce is Enda
Duffy's The Subaltern Ulysses. 26 Drawing on Walter Benjamin and the
post-Marxist line running from Louis Althusser to Michel Foucault to
Fredric Jameson, Duffy positions Ulysses as "the moment at which the
formal bravura of Eurocentric high modernism is redeployed so that
a postcolonial literary praxis can be ushered onto the stage of a new
and varied geo-literature" (4). In this manner, Duffy notes, the "shock
tactics" of Joyce's formalism and characterizations of the Irish colo-
nized psyche reveal the force of imperial hegemony, the "fragility of
the counterhegemonic 'native' rebellion," and the "haphazard possi-
bilities of national independence itself" (4). The novel accomplishes
this panorama of postcolonial analysis, according to Duffy, by
relentlessly pinpoint[ing] the mechanisms of the colonial regimes of sur-

veillance and the panoptic gaze, as well as the secrecy they generate; it
exposes nationalism and other chauvinist ideologemes of "imagined
communities" chiefly as inheritors of the colonist regimes of power-
knowledge they condemn; and it mocks imperial stereotypes of the
native while it delineates their insidious interpellative power. (3)
Ulysses thus becomes, for Duffy, "a covert, cautious 'guerrilla text,"'
in which "the discourses and regimes of colonial power [are} being
attacked by counterhegemonic strategies that were either molded on
the oppressor's discourses or were only beginning to be annunciated
in other forms" (21).
In this reading, Bloom works as both a model of Benjamin's flaneur
and an Irishman who is simultaneously a Jewish petit bourgeois-and
thus a promising multiracial representation.27 Duffy notes that, as a
ftaneur, Bloom's wandering, free-floating subjectivity becomes a
"mechanism of escape from the persuasion of the advertisements and
the panoptic surveillance of the colony as a police state" (20).
Subjugated to his petit-bourgeois beliefs and social status, Bloom's
Jewishness, especially in "Cyclops," becomes a pivotal element of the
textual tension developed between the "imperialist" realist narrative
and its "defamilarizing," postcolonial techniques of discontinuity and
interruption, in Duffy's terms (20).
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Bloom's role in this manner is based in two premises, according to
Duffy: "colonial discourse takes race as the first signifier of differ-
ence," and "for a writer, the first racial characteristic is linguistic"
(110). Thus, the two "races" examined in "Cyclops" are throughout
represented as parodies of colonial stereotypes of Irish and Jewish
speech patterns, as in the opening vignette about Moses Herzog and
Michael E. Geraghty. But this is not the episode's only radical juxta-
position of its two opposing styles. If the rhetoric of the Citizen's
gigantic heroism, Duffy argues, represents "the wild Irish peasant" or
"the savage" aspect of the savage/ civilized binary colonial construct,
then Bloom is not only a Jew but a representation of the "colonized
'civilian' bourgeois" (98, 112). This, Duffy adds, is revealed by the fact
that Bloom "believes in reasonableness, sobriety, respectability ... in
science rather than myth ... [and] advocates reasonable love rather
than 'force, hatred, history, all that'; he is a genteel Arnoldian liberal"
(112). Thus, Duffy writes that Joyce is not only parodying racist, Celtic
nationalism as a form of colonial mimicry but also the opposite kind
of capitulation to the colonizer's implied civil superiority: "With his
constructive spirit, adamant sincerity, and antipathy to all
Pyrrhonism, one feels [Bloom] would have done better with the
English than at home" (112). Duffy believes that this, in turn, makes
"visible in the form as well as the narrative" the two nativist reac-
tionary identities toward "representational strategies through which
subjectivity may be constituted anew" (98, 115). Such a new possibil-
ity for a liberating identity is to be found, according to Duffy, only in
Bloom's hybridity as both an Irishman and a Jew: "his status as a sub-
ject on both planes signifies racial diversity (as opposed to the colo-
nial split subjectivity) ... [and] recognizing this is key to the episode's
project of imagining a postcolonial subject" (111). When Bloom
declares himself to be a member of a persecuted and hated race (Jl
12.1467), Duffy assumes his avowal to be significant only in a nation-
alist or postcolonial context; he reminds his reader that Bloom's
emphatic modifying second statement (" Also now. This very
moment. This very instant"-U 12.1467-68) recalls that, in 1904,
Zionism was "still in its infancy," but by 1918, the year of Joyce's com-
position of the episodes, "the British, colonists in both territories
[Ireland and Palestine], had agreed to the wisdom of a Jewish home-
land [via the Balfour Declaration] but were still recalcitrant on the
need for an Irish one" (127).
While Duffy's explanation of the colonial carnival of "Cyclops" is
intriguing, he seems unwilling or unprepared to confront just how
complex Bloom's Jewishness becomes before, during, and after the
events in Kiernan's. If Bloom is the civilized native sell-out, how does
his Jewishness become dissolved in this subject-position to the point
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where protestant unionists such as Haines or Mr. Deasy might affirm
this British civility? As a racially degenerate Jew conspiring to ruin
the empire, Bloom is hardly a candidate for a representation of what
Duffy calls "the would-be Victorian gentleman" (98). Although he
may appear to be a polite, reasonable liberal, Bloom's subject position
as a racial Jew predetermines his failure fully to assimilate or be
accepted through liberalism; indeed, he alternately considers Zionist
and leftist possibilities for a Jewish future (JI 4.152-229, 16.1119-40),
since Joyce recognized that, for the assimilated Jew of the era, this
political binary represented the most common avenues of genera -
tional rebellion against their fathers' liberalism.28 Moreover, if Bloom
represents the possibility of a "liberating racial diversity," why does
he himself believe that he is racially a Jew and yet not a Jew "in real-
ity" (U 11.1066, 12.1467, 16.1085)? If the significance of Bloom's pub-
lic declaration of his racial Jewishness is most poignantly relevant to
Irish nationalism (by way of analogy to Jewish nationalism), then
how is modern, political Zionism a postcolonial strategy that liberat-
ed the Jewish self from colonial mimicry?
Duffy too not only appears uninterested in the questions about
Jewishness that the text itself raises but at times is even inaccurate
about the details of Jewishness that construct Bloom. In suggesting
that the episode's close confirms a Jewish \Celtic difference that "begs
to be transgressed," he asserts that we discover this possibility in the
profusion of language seeping into both stylistic arenas: "the Citizen
contributes Irish.... Bloom is bid farewell in Hebrew-'Visszontlatas-
ra111 (116-U 12.1841). The Hungarian term here (misspelled by Joyce),
with which the giganticist, parodic "arranger" voice bids Bloom
farewell, indeed looks and sounds nothing like Hebrew, nor would a
Hebrew term work well to signify Bloom's middle-European
Jewishness in 1904, since it was predominately a liturgical language
until much later in the century. Although Duffy wants to make
Ulysses into a textual analogue for an Irish Republican Army bomb,
one may well ask whether, in his superficial treatment of Bloom's
Jewishness, he himself has not become inadvertently guilty of silenc-
ing the colonized Jewish subject? Despite his use of Bloom's purport-
ed racial Jewishness as one half of a liberating, postcolonial hybrid,
Duffy consigns the complexity of the text's wider investigations of
Jewishness to the status of the very interpellated subaltern he is
defending: "the ideal the colonist demands of [the subaltern writer] is
silence, and if she does speak she will in all likelihood be considered
merely a colorful curiosity within the discourses that the ruler con-
trols" (6). Like many Irish postcolonial critics, Duffy positions
Bloom's Jewishness as only a necessary racial side-show and little
more.
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In James Joyce and Nationalism, Erner Nolan conducts a similar, iJ
somewhat more balanced, discussion of how Ulysses deconstructs
both cosmopolitan modernism and parochial-nativist nationalism
and ultimately comes to rest uncomfortably in its own postmodern
pastiche.29 In Nolan's analysis of the book's political tensions and
again especially in "Cyclops," Bloom's "multivocal, playful, and dia-
logic" presence, as well as the "racial difference and discursive inven-
tiveness'' at its source, embodies the text's structural cosmopoli-
tanism only because nationalism is Joyce's primary focus (118). That
is, Nolan notes, Bloom's Jewish hybridity does not "bring multivo-
cality to the scene," because it is "already there, produced by the colo-
nial situation itself; the liberation it signifies in terms of language
could only ever enter into material existence if the other, significantly
related, language it produces-that of nationalism-were to be promot-
ed and its project successfully carried through" (119). According to
Nolan, poststructural criticism has continued to apologize for this
problematic conclusion by promoting the division in Joyce's nation-
alism between "the extremist and radical 'physical force' tradition
and the reasonable, constitutional one" (21). In other words, if Ulysses
makes a tentative, modernist stretch at being a nationalist text, then it
is only through its suggestion of an Irishness circumscribed by
Bloom's pacifist-cosmopolitanism. The Citizen's republicanism can
thus only be vilified or degraded. To expose this limited reading,
Nolan does an admirable job of clarifying how "Cyclops" and much
of "Nostos" work diligently to parody, contradict, and deconstruct
both Bloom's kinder, gentler, cosmo-Irishness and its supposed polit-
ical opposite. For Nolan, both positions "bare the mark of colonial
experiences" and ground Joyce's "modernist textual experiments in a
specific and brutal material history" (119).
How the material history of anti-Semitism and the impact of his
father's Judaism on his own psyche also figure into Bloom's position,
however, again goes mostly unexamined. One notable exception is
Nolan's discussion of Bloom's stream-like allusion to his father's hag-
gadah in "Aeolus," after Bloom notices the backward typesetting in
the composing room of the Freeman's Journal (U 7.203-16). Here Bloom
misinterprets for himselfthe Passover song Chad Gadya not as a hymn
to divine justice but as the "Lex talionis" or eye-for-any-eye reality of
the political world and describes the exodus from Egypt as one that
leads, ironically, "into the house of bondage" (U 14.1029-30, 13.1158-
59). Nolan takes these verbal slips as evidence that Bloom negates
"the promise of liberation" found not only in the messianic aspect of
Judaic thought but in the more ideological programs of Irish nation-
alism:
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To the extent, then, that Bloom's flawed and homogenizing historical
memory eradicates from the history of the Jewish people the promise of
a better future, it also proves insensitive to the similar messianic hopes
of the Irish in the aftermath of Parnell. In this Joyce is attentive to the
loss of aura or charisma in both the modern world in general, and early
twentieth century Ireland in particular; but the fact that this seculariza-
tion is largely registered through Bloom highlights its source in a partic-
ular history, and dramatizes its link with that uncritical acceptance of the
discourse of modernity which he represents. (84, my italics)
Nolan thus positions Bloom's politico-textual function as, in part, a

matter of "the Jew's" supposed racial difference and thus a mod-
ernist-hybrid foil to Celtic nationalism. Yet he simultaneously does
not particularize Bloom's Jewishness along the lines of its own histo-
ry, ideology, or nationalist tensions. While the "particular history" in
question suggests a Jewishness that is built from a definitively mod-
ern sense of inconclusiveness, hybridity, and miscegenation, Bloom's
dyslexic Haggadic slip does not necessarily represent his rejection of
Judaic messianism but can rather be read as a self-reflexive statement
about his own sense of himself as a Jew. Moreover, Bloom's ongoing,
internal discussion surrounding the origins and possibilities of
Zionism play into this cosmopolitan/nationalist binarism at least as
much, if not perhaps more, than the question of why a liberal, ratio-
nalist Jew like himself might suggest that the Biblical Jewish exodus
led not to freedom but to diaspora and persecution. Both these con-
flicts represent materialist questions that Bloom attempts to answer
through his own struggle with a Jewish identity that is not only rep-
resentative of a "flawed and homogenizing" modern existence but
nativist in its attempt to recover from the memories of his father's
Judaism his own reconciliation with the traditional past he continues
to believe relevant, and perhaps even ameliorating, to the disordered,
demythologizing modern world.
*
This bracketing of the complexities of Bloom's self-perceived
Jewishness as opposed to the textual functions of his racialized
Jewishness is not only evident in postcolonial Joyce criticism but also
in Steinberg's question about Bloom's Jewish identity or lack thereof.
Aside from historical racial parameters, Jewishness can also be seen
as an ethnic or religious label containing a myriad of elements from
which to begin to make a claim to Jewish identity-Steinberg himself
has twice exhaustively catalogued these in the textual facts of Bloom's
existence and inner monologue. 30 The most pertinent question, how-
ever, is not how Bloom can or cannot be considered a Jew but how
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Joyce perceived racial, religious, and perhaps even intellectual
aspects of Jewish identity and how and why he built these into
Bloom. Despite the best efforts of postcolonial critics, we ultimately
confront an inability to comprehend fully Joyce's sense of Irishness
without grasping his more detailed sense of Jewishness. Indeed, if
Irishness in Ulysses can only be understood through imperialist and
nationalist definitions inscribed into the subaltern subject, how much
more can be discovered through incorporating into this Bloom's sense
of himself as a Jew, a nationallst Irishman, and a crestfallen Zionist?
This question is further sharpened when we recall that in nearly all
western nationalisms, with the notable exception of pre-Holocaust
Jewry, an established, state-empowered territory is at the center of the
identity-politics involved.
Hobsbawm argues that while economically based territorialism is
one of the cruxes of modern, state-driven nationalist programs, nine-
teenth-century "popular proto-nationali sms" had "no necessary rela-
tion with the unit of territorial political organization" but drew on
more amorphous phenomena like "supra-local forms of popular
identification [and] ... the political bonds and vocabularies of select
groups" (46-47). In Hobsbawm's view, "there is no historical continu-
ity whatever between Jewish proto-national ism and Modern
Zionism" (76), because
while the Jews, scattered throughout the world for some millennia,
never ceased to identify themselves ... as members of a special people
... at no stage, at least since the return from the Babylonian captivity,
does this seem to have implied a serious desire for a Jewish political
state, let alone a territorial one, until a Jewish nationalism was invented
at the very end of the nineteenth century by analogy with the newfan-
gled western nationalism. It is entirely illegitimate to identify the Jewish
links with an ancestral land of Israel, the merit deriving from pilgrim-
ages there, or the hope of return when the Messiah came-as he so obvi-
ously had not come in the view of the Jews-with a desire to gather all
Jews into a modern territorial state situated on the ancient Holy Land.
(48)
Whether these conspicuously emphatic statements rely on a misread-

ing or ignorance of both Aggadic and Midrashic discussions of ancient
Jewish nationhood's economic and civil principles in its theocratic
state is perhaps too large a question to answer here. Certainly, the
return from Babylonian exile suggests that some key aspect of
Jewishness was inextricable at that point of Jewish history from a
Jewish presence in the territory in question-which is also generically
true of modern Zionism; the difference is the kind of statehood imag-
ined (theocratic-political versus utopian-liberal) and not in the com-
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mon assumption of the Jewish return. Neither did Theodor Herzl
ever claim that his modern state would involve the in-gathering of
"all Jews." While Hobsbawm nevertheless crystallizes a central anti-
Zionist foundation, how and why Joyce might disagree with the
assertion by way of comparing territorial Irish nationalism with
Bloom's Zionist musings as an Irish Jew remains to be thoroughly
explored.
Indeed, the primary (as well as literal) ground of a modern Irish
identity struggle that Joyce and other Irish nationalists never had to
go beyond was a territory called Ireland that had been colonized-or
at least politically constrained, culturally oppressed, and economical-
ly exploited-by a more powerful place called England. No matter
how colonized, fractured, subjugated, victimized, and exploited this
very unimagined island was over its long history, it remained the
established locale of a population, the members of which called them -
selves Irish. Despite his dynamic sense of postcolonial Irishness,
Joyce was no exception to this; his own ethnic certainty and national-
ist interest was, in part, built on the simple fact of his being born and
raised in Ireland. Recognizing this, Joyce very consciously created
Bloom as a character who could make the same basic claim but who
must also contend with a Jewishness that disrupts, complicates, and
ultimately deconstructs in a manner even Stephen Dedalus has diffi-
culty imagining (U 17.530-31, 731-840). Since Bloom is to himself, in
part, a Jew, and since the Jews have no Jewish territory to match to
either their religious or modern political sense of nationhood, he con-
tinues to view himself as an Irishman by way of his impeachable cre-
dentials as a British citizen of Unionized Ireland. Citizenship alone
may seem a frail foundation on which to erect one's ethnic or nation-
alist identity, but it is nonetheless one in which Bloom takes a logical
refuge when asked his own nationality by a group of Irishmen whose
ethnicity is based on the kind of politically imagined Irishness that
Joyce goes to great lengths to critique (U 12.1431). Perhaps Bloom is
an Irish nationalist of a kind but not a full-fledged Zionist because
Joyce-along with the vast majority of assimilated Jews of the era-
could not take seriously a nationalism that could sustain itself with-
out a representative cultural hegemony or any actual territory. To lib-
erals of Joyce's era, the Enlightenment supposition that Jewishness
was solely a religious designation (and thus "solved" by conversion)
had crumbled in the face of racial anti-Semitism; Bloom, of course,
lives this failure but for various reasons cannot fully validate a Jewish
nationalism either based in religious principles or expressed through
modern nation-state politics.
Noting Anderson's work on modern nationalism, James Fairhall
has recently attempted to clarify this issue:
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Legally, in 1904, Leopold Bloom is every bit as Irish as the Citizen or any
other Dubliner in Wysses .... [H]e lives in the United Kingdom, has the
right to vote for a Member of Parliament [and has numerous privileges].
In other words, his Irishness does not receive recognition as an attribute
of citizenship in an Irish nation-state .... Citizenship in this sense, for a
subjugated group that would like to make its territory into a separate
nation-state, is what Stephen suggests paternity may be-"a legal fic-
tion" (U 9.844). On a practical level, everyone sees through the fiction. 31
Fairhall defers to Anderson's "imagined communities" to argue that

the Irishness the Citizen desires is "limited and sovereign . . . not
coterminous with mankind" and, like all nationalisms, "is always
conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship" (173). Once again,
Bloom's multifaceted Otherness (his pacifism, humanism, and ethnic
and gender ambiguity) stands as a problematic foil to the imagined
community of racial-Celtic lrishness. While this is a common asser-
tion, it is again important to recognize that without any substantive
sense of himself as a Jew, Bloom's potential to disclose the fictiveness
of the nationalism he confronts becomes much more tenuous than
Joyce most likely wanted. Bloom merely has to dispel the rumor of his
racial Jewishness (and his mother's Irish lineage from Hegarty should
do the trick), stand some drinks, praise political violence, and per-
haps talk about his sexual conquests, and he will become as accept-
able a Kieman's patron as the next inebriated jingoist. But Bloom is
not a drunk, nor does he believe in the inflated rhetoric of hypermas-
culine nationalism that tests "force against force" to sanction itself (U
12.1364). He neither denigrates the role of woman into the binarism of
madonna/whore nor represses his own fears of powerlessness, oth-
erness, desire to nurture, or sexual ambiguity (U 12.1361). Yet, he him-
self suggests that he "belong[s] to a race ... that is hated and perse-
cuted" ( U 12.1467). Finally, to many of his fellow Irish citizens, he also
apparently possesses enough degenerately effeminate Jewish blood
to be tainted as both an Irishman and a man.
The point of these observations is that Bloom most often links
many of the un-Irish traits and behaviors listed above to his father's
influence on both his social and psychological selves-an influence
that came directly from what we can assume was the orthodox
Judaism he and his family once practiced in Szombathely, Hungary.
In his own self-perception, then, Bloom considers himself legally Irish
and racially Jewish-but also connected to a Jewishness beyond the
discourse of race through his paternal intellectual heritage. Although
his confusion or inaccuracy about much of this knowledge suggests
just how marginally Joyce has positioned him from even a typical
assimilated Jewish identity, the continual occurrence of ritual and lore
in Bloom's thoughts (and even actions-Molly recalls him "kiss[ing]
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our halldoor yes"-U 18.1406) represents an attempt on his part to
use aspects of Judaic culture to reorient himself, confront modern
anti-Semitism as well as the disordering modern, and ultimately
judge his own beliefs and behaviors from "Circe" to "Ithaca." One
might ask how many of the other Dublin-born Irishmen Joyce offers
us are quietly doing the same on 16 June. According to Steinberg,
however, the question here is not what Bloom believes about himself
nor what Joyce built into him to complete the deconstruction of the
parameters of nationalist or ethnic identity in Ulysses but hnw a read-
er who is fully cognizant of the most categorical ways in which one
can be considered a Jew would come to judge Bloom.
Jewishness as a marker of an identity or a cultural sensibility locat-
ed outside of those racist or gendered discourses that constructed "the
Jew" in Europe can be made initially less complicated by acquiescing
to the authority of the Talmud and Rabbinic Judaism. 32 These inter-
pretations of and commentary on Torah and Judaic law (along with
the Shulhan Aruch's codification of Halachic laws in 1565) have stood
for the final word on all controversies of orthodox Judaism from that
time until the present, revised to fit changing eras only through vari-
ous responsa additions. This is, of course, where Judaism derives its
definitions of Jewishness based first on maternal lineage, second on
the Brit Milah (ritual circumcision for male Jews), and finally on the
imperative of the mitzvot. But this is also the source of Halachah con-
cerning conversion, in which it is decreed that any person (despite his
or her ethnicity, race, nationality, maternal lineage, or prior beliefs)
after conversion becomes Rabbinically Jewish without any mitigating
factors. 33 It is this final aspect of Halachic Jewish identity that negates
Judaism's view of Jewishness as a racial designation in any definition
of the term.34 Sometime around 1916, Joyce read a discussion of this
non-racial, religious inclusiveness in Rabbi Moses Gaster's essay
"Judaism-A National Religion" in the Sacher text on Zionism.35
Within this doctrinal definition of Jewishness, Bloom, of course,
cannot be considered a Jew: although his maternal grandfather may
have been a Hungarian Jew ("born Karoly"), his maternal grand-
mother was apparently an Irish gentile ("born Hegarty"-Catholic or
Protestant?); he is not circumcised; and he in no way observes mitzvot
with any regularity or with a belief in such as his duty to God (U
17.536-37, 537, 13.979). Steinberg reminds us that Bloom has even pur-
chased a plot for himself in Glasnevin Cemetery and so appears to
have no interest in being buried as a Jew ( U 6.862). Given Joyce's dis-
cussions about Judaism with Jewish friends, the texts he read during
the composition of Ulysses, and his obsession with both naturalistic
detail and thoroughness of characterization, it is obvious that he con-
sciously created Bloom as one who is not Halachically Jewish.36
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Readers of Ulysses, however, are still left with questions about
Bloom's Jewishness that might be posed in racial, cultural, or even
philosophical terms. One conclusion seems clear: while Joyce con-
sciously plays with definitions of Jewishness from racial and nation-
alistic discourse, he also obviously did not want the other parameters
of Bloom's Jewishness to be those set by Rabbinic orthodoxy. 37
Bloom's memories and musings about Judaic lore, Jewish history, and
indeed even about Zionism continually acknowledge, however, his
own inclusion as a Jew in the controversies all of these suggest and so
further imply that he has what might be deemed a Jewish conscious-
ness, despite his lack of a Halachically valid Jewishness.
It thus appears that Joyce sees Bloom as Jewish but not through lib-
eral-racist lenses and not through Rabbinic ones either. Regarding the
first set of assumptions, it seems clear that Joyce views them as per-
nicious products of a broader imperial and national racism that had
already devastated his Irishness. But there is also good reason for the
religious hybridity of the second set; if Joyce had indeed made Bloom
unequivocally Frum, 38 Ulysses could not have conducted a dissection
of modernist struggles over racial, gender, nationalist, and ethnic
identities. If Bloom was an orthodox Jew, he would be a transparent-
ly un-modem, segregated victim of the West, rather than the black
hole of such bulwarks of colonialism and modernity. If Bloom was
Frum, he would not be married to Molly, would not work at the
Freeman's Journal, would not have eaten lunch at Davy Byrnes, and
would not have been in Kiernan's discussing Sinn Fein politics. He
would not consider himself an Irishman per se; he would live a life
apart from mainstream Dublin activities and would thus not be a sub-
ject through which Joyce could confront racist nationalism on a diur-
nal basis when "he's at home" (U 4.340). If Bloom were a normative
practicing Jew with even orthodox leanings, he would have his own
insular community from which to draw an affirmed social self, and
his marginality would be only singular in relation to the empowered
hegemony of Dublin, rather than the double-bind represented in his
marginality to both Irish nationalist culture and Halachic Jewishness.
The point of Bloom's putative social and racial Jewishness is not sim-
ply that gentiles are ready to persecute "the Jew" even when the sub-
ject in question is not categorically Jewish, but that Ulysses is an explo-
ration of the parameters of the modern identity crises of race, gender,
ethnicity and imperial politics-both within the nationalist culture of
Dublin and within the interiority of Bloom's subject-position in the
larger struggle of Jewish modernity. Joyce's textualization of such
issues was provoked as much by his recognition of the Jewish identi-
ty-struggle as an epicenter of the modern shift of paradigms of self-
hood as it was by his own Irish background. Living in Austro-
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Hungarian Trieste, Joyce was befriended not by Halachicall11 affirmed,
practicing Jews but by assimilated, marginal, and e\·en self-abnegat-
ing Jews, whose gender, racial, and religious identities were in cul-
tural flux. Through these individuals and the Je,•vish literati of the
cities in which he made his homes, Joyce became aware of the unique,
problematizing role "the Jew" played in the rationalist liberal strug-
gle to contain and fix identity along gender and racial lines against
the growing sense of modern dissolution.39
Without the doctrinal limits set by Rabbinic authority, Jewishness
indeed can become a morass of nationalist, cultural, racial, familial,
ethnic, religious, philosophical, and even idiosyncratic issues. Many
of the Jewish acquaintances Joyce made over his thirty-seven years on
the Continent practiced Judaism about as much as Bloom does in
Ulysses and yet nonetheless considered themselws Jewish on some
level; moreover, not all of these figures internalized racist assump-
tions on such an unconscious level that they remained unaware of
their self-perceived Jewishness as also being built from something
more than this. Still, it was not uncommon to have both sets of
assumptions playing into Jewish self-making simultaneously. For
example, while Svevo was, in fact, born to a Jewish mother, circum-
cised, and practiced an orthodox form of the religion in his boyhood
home, he too appears to have placed at least some credence in certain
aspects of Weininger's rhetoric about Jewish biological male nature.40
He viewed himself as remaining Jewish in some manner even after
his conversion to Catholicism to marry and seems never to have had
an abiding interest in Zionism, although when young he was a com -
mitted Irredentist. 41 Thus, whatever sense of his own Jewishness
Svevo retained, it appears not to have been based on a nationalist
identity other than his desire to be an Italian Triestino. Indeed, central
to my concerns here about Jewishness and postcolonial questions in
Ulysses is the apathy toward or conflicts over Zionism that Joyce
encountered not only in Svevo but also in the overwhelming majori-
ty of his Jewish acquaintances in Trieste and Zurich. Just how distant
a pre-Holocaust, liberal, bourgeois Jew could be from any religious or
nationalist sense of Jewishness is nicely illustrated in the figure of the
pre-Zionist Herzl, whose radically assimilated, Viennese identity
included the conscious choice not to have his own son circumcised.42
Yet, if the Jewishness on which Joyce came to model Bloom was, in
part, that of the colonized psyche, then a central subset of that identi-
ty would be its reaction-formation to its own ethnicity's discussion of
nationalism; discourse on Jewish nationalism during the era was
almost entirely subsumed, of course, under the controversies of mod-
ern political Zionism.
Herzlian Zionism has often been positioned as a nationalist reac-
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tion to-or colonial mimicry of-the racist, gendered nationalist and
imperialist culture of fin-de-siecle Europe. 43 Zionism as a late-century
ethno-political movement can perhaps be characterized in these
terms alongside Hobsbawm's model, especially regarding the Zionist
recognition of the failure of European liberal humanism to achieve an
unalloyed social acceptance of Jews, experienced most acutely for
Herzl and his generation in the Dreyfus Affair. Yet modern Zionism,
both before and during Herzl's influence, was conceived as neither a
colonial venture nor an imperial acquisition but as a liberation move-
ment that envisioned a universal unification of a diasporic people
based on their common experience of anti-Semitism.44 Herzl repeat-
edly defined a nation as predominately a historically recognizable
group united or "driven together" by a common enemy. 45 In line with
so many of the urban, wealthy, assimilated Jews Joyce came to know
in Trieste, Bloom is constructed to be less than enthusiastic about
Zionism, although a reader would be hard-pressed to call him an anti-
Zionist (U 4.154-239, 17.1324, 1699-1708). 46 Having read Herzl's The
Jewish State, Sacher' s Zionism and the Jewish Future, and quite possibly
the Triestine Jewish weekly, Il Corriere Israelitico, as well as Herzl's
own Die Welt, Joyce too understood Zionism on one level as a mod-
em Jewish nationalism provoked through a binary reaction to anti-
Semitic nationalism/imperialism, as well as to the hypermasculine
honor code of Viennese culture and its reciprocal image of the weak,
feminized Jew; thus, he must have perceived parallels between
Zionism's basic shape and the Celticism he so ardently rejected. From
reading The Jewish State, however, Joyce also grasped the way that
Herzl believed Zionism was a secular expression of Judaic principles
restructured into a highly progressive society; Herzl's 1902 novel Old
New Land (Altneuland) implies that this liberal utopia was also a ful-
fillment of the erstwhile messianic hope that liberalism once held for
Jews and other disenfranchised groups, such as women.47 In The
Jewish State, he asserts that Judaic tradition secures Zionist unity: "We
feel our historic affinity only through the faith of our fathers as we
have long ago absorbed the language of different nations to an
ineradicable degree" (126). Simultaneously, Joyce read in the Gaster
essay that a Jewish commonwealth would "give the world a lead ...
in the practical application of ancient laws toward the solution of
many of the social problems ... of Europe and America" (97). In much
of Bloom's stream of consciousness, Joyce thus does not seem to sup-
port the idea that modern Zionism can be wholly separated from
modern Judaic culture and history.
Nonetheless, we lack much documented evidence about Joyce's
precise attitude toward Herzlian Zionism. We know Joyce owned and
read Herzl, Sacher, and George Foot Moore's critical study of the Old
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Testament sometime between 1916-1920, 48 and then there is, as well,
the famous and seemingly literal derogation of Zionism in the
response Joyce gave to Ottocaro Weiss. Ira Nadel informs us that
Joyce "most likely" discussed Zionism with his Triestine student, Ciro
Glass, who was an orthodox Jew and locally prominent advocate of
Herzl's ideas; he also reminds us that Ellmann (who took it on
account from Louis Hyman's The Jews of Ireland 49) records Joyce
engaging in conversations on the subject with Moses Dlugacz, anoth-
er Triestine Berlitz student and the model for the eponymous Zionist
pork-butcher in Ulysses (70). Finally, there are the discussions about
Zionism Joyce encountered in the weekly Trieste journal II Corriere
Israelitico. 50 But even with all of these putative conversations and
actual texts, we nonetheless remain uncertain about Joyce's precise
attitude toward Zionism-his belief in its viability, potential for liber-
ation, and judiciousness.
Given the Revival's reliance on the mytho-historic heroism and
righteousness of the ancient Celt, Zionism in Joyce's mind must have
been an even more useful parallel than has yet been imagined. From
his childhood study of the Old Testament, Joyce was well aware that
Jewishness (or, in this case, perhaps "Hebraism") from the Biblical
chapter Exodus onward is not solely a religious designation but a
nationalist one as well. 51 The idea of the nation of Israel, the chosen of
God whose earthly mission is to be an example of the human possi-
bility of holiness, was expressed primarily through the relationship
between the law, the commonwealth, and its polity. Although ancient
Hebraic nationhood was not based on the Enlightenment notion of
racial nature or twentieth-century arguments over ethnic identities or
modern capitalist state control, it nonetheless stands as one of the
West's earliest and most influential doctrines of a national identity
tied to a territory endowed with a universalizing spiritual purpose.
Following the work of Anthony Smith, Michael Stanislawski has
recently argued-in opposition to Anderson-that terms such as
"nation" or "folk" had "ethnic valence in previous centuries, mean-
ings in some ways similar to and connected with their later national-
ist meanings, albeit in complex and non-linear ways."52 It was indeed
a similar recognition in the Irish nationalist culture of Joyce's day that
prompted the demagogic trope of the Irish as metaphorically ancient
Hebrews, Charles Stewart Parnell as Moses, and the English as
Egyptians. "The People of Israel" in its ancient form might seem a
kind of pre-print-media, proto-example of Anderson's "imagined
communities," and yet, unlike the nation-state he so carefully ana-
lyzes, this ancient nationalism originated in a way quite doctrinally
coterminus with mankind in that the very raison d'etre of ancient
Israel was tied to a theological imperative about the conduct of
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humanity as well that of the Jews.
Given the religious training of his youth, Joyce's perception of
modern Zionism may have always been weighed against the ancient
religious concept. Moreover, Joyce found similar connections in
Benedict de Spinoza's rationalism, in which the latter argues that the
ancient nation's election could only be based in its "successful con-
duct in matters relating to government" and that, in the modern
world, the hatred produced by Jewish insularity could only be
reversed by reestablishing their natural vocation for self-govern-
ment. 53 If, in his critical prose, Joyce acknowledged the primacy of the
Celtic race in Ireland, why, I believe we must ask, would his abiding
interest in creating a parallactic view of ancient and modern not
include the recognition of Zionism as a concept older than and very
different from Herzl's project? The probable answer is that Joyce saw
the modem incarnation of Jewish nationalism through the lens of the
ancient one, and it is thus through that lens that Bloom's defeatist or
parodic attitude toward Zionism should be reevaluated. This wide-
angle approach is especially crucial because Bloom is a representation
of a religio-cultural Jewishness that is marginal, assimilated and riven
with self-doubt; he is thus confused over his internalized racial
stereotypes as much as he also holds his father's erstwhile Judaism in
thoughtful, if only secular, regard.
Ignoring the complexities surrounding Zionism in Joyce's life and
work has severely limited the arguments of the few extant critical
pieces we have on the subject. In his earliest diatribe against Bloom's
Jewishness, Steinberg alludes to Bloom's reflection on the Agendath
Netaim pamphlet in "Calypso" and asserts that "whatever interest
Bloom may show as he reads about the settlement, he clearly has no
interest in it for himself and sees no hope in Palestine as a homeland
for the Jews-or any one else" ("Critics" 42). He further reminds us
that Bloom only appears to know the "first two lines" of the Hatikvah
("Critics" 42). Steinberg also notes that Bloom's final, "superficial"
examination of the Agendath pamphlet in "Ithaca" ends with his sub-
sequent burning of it ("Critics" 43-U 17.1324-29). He speculates that
if Bloom had had a substantial, abiding interest in Zionism, he could
have become a member of either the Chovevi Zion or the Brotherhood
of Israel Association, both of which had active chapters in Dublin in
1904. But Steinberg here misses the obvious. Rather than Bloom's
reaction to the flyer being akin to a gentile Irishman's-who would
never have thought of the pamphlet as anything more than a paper
wrapper-Bloom's contemplation of the idea of modem Zionism and
his melancholy visions of "[a] dead sea in a dead land" that "bore the
oldest, first race" are much more parallel to the attitude of most
assimilated, liberal Jews in the major cities of western Europe µ
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4.222-23, 223-24).
We must recall that Herzl's ideas in 1904 were still considered to be,
by and large, crackpot or even dangerous by the average bourgeois
Jew in places such as Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, New York, or-as
has been more recently demonstrated-e,·en Rome and Trieste.54 The
majority of urban Jews more often maintained a belief that the social
justice of liberal humanism would eventually remake Europe into a
place in which Jews had no need of nationalist identity other than that
of the country in which their fathers or grandfath~rs had settled.
Joyce gained this precise sense of an assimilative Jewish destiny from
his acquaintances and later from his reading of Maurice Fishberg's
The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment .55 Moreover, Bloom's final
characterization of the land, "[d]ead: an old woman's: the grey
sunken cunt of the world" (U 4.227-28), conflates his fears that, as a
racial Jew, he is, by nature, effeminate with his disbelief in even the
possibility of a masculinized Jewish nationalism that could mount the
independence, unity, money, and force-of-will needed to establish a
Jewish state in Palestine through nonviolent measures.
In a much more ingenious attempt to understand both Bloom's and
Joyce's attitude toward modem Zionism, Byrnes has also argued that
"what Bloom reads [in "Calypso"] is not a prospectus for Zionist pro-
jects, but rather a parody of one.',s6 Byrnes believes that Joyce subtly
manipulates the information he took from Samuel Tolkowsky's arti-
cle "The Jews and the Economic Development of Palestine" to bur-
lesque the practicalities of such Zionist projects. 57 Although Byrnes
acknowledges that in the scene "[w]e have encountered the assimi-
lated Bloom at the figural nadir of his Jewish self-alienation, what the
Linati schema calls 'Israel in Bondage,"' his reasoning seems tenuous:
though the specifics are right {from the original article] the tone is
wrong. Joyce lifted facts and phrases from Tolkowsky, then troped them
lightly, making them mildly ridiculous. Tolkowsky's "farm of Kinnereth
on the shores of Lake Tiberias" (Sacher 142), for example, becomes, in
Joyce's subtle subversion, "the model farm at Kinnereth on the
lakeshore of Tiberias" (U 4.154-55); and with the fantastical "lakeshore"
the whole project loses its presumptive gravity and ascends, de-materi-
alized, from the realm of fact to that of romance. Lakeshores, like Yeats's
"Lake Isle of Innisfree," are literary, not !Heral. You invest money in a
resort on the shore of a lake; into a "lakeshore" you do not even invest
belief. (" Agendath" 835)
Based on the single, altered term, along with what Byrnes deems the
absurdity of Joyce's come-on about the planting of eucalyptus trees
that are "[e]xcellent for shade, fuel and construction" qJ 4.193-94),
Byrnes concludes that "[t]he parody in the ad suggests Joyce found
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Zionism, at least, entirely incredible" (" Agendath" 834).
Joyce may have found the notion of modern political Zionism more
preposterous than even Bloom's pessimistic speculations reveal, but
one cannot be certain of this. Joyce's supposed subversive play on
words with "lakeshore" must also contend with the fact that, as
Charles Parish first noticed, the pamphlet's title itself is in erroneous
Hebrew.ss There is no such term as Agendath" in the modern lan-
II
guage; Joyce must have misunderstood or misspelled the term

11Agudat," which, in translation, would indeed make the name of the
farm "Plantation Company" or "Plantation Group" (Joyce also failed
to transliterate the second term correctly by omitting an apostrophe:
"neta'im"). Was Joyce also parodying Hebrew? Perhaps he makes
Bloom mispronounce the word to follow his other errors about
Hebrew and Hebraic ritual. Bloom continues to use the erroneous
term later in the episode while at stool, as well as in "Sirens" ( U 4.492,
11.884) and several other moments in his stream-of-consciousness
thinking throughout the day. But the final references to the name in
"Ithaca" are not in Bloom's voice or mind but in the voice of the
"questioner" and so confirm Joyce's error (U 17.1325, 1700).
There is also the matter of the address on the pamphlet and the
probable source from which Joyce drew it, along with Bloom's men-
tion of "[f]armhouse, wall round it, blurred cattle cropping" ( U 4.156-
57). Byrnes agrees with David Bell's earlier discovery that both the
address and description derive from advertisements for the
"Palestine Land Development Company" that appeared in Herzl's
Die Welt (2 and 6 October 1909 issues).59 Emphasizing the source,
Joyce's back-dating, and the fact that Kinnereth was the first area the
World Zionist Organization hoped to settle as far back as 1897, Byrnes
concludes that "it is Herzl's project Joyce burlesques, Herzl's colony
Bloom dismisses" (" Agenda th" 837). The many inconsistencies
between Joyce's pamphlet and these ads, however, suggest that Joyce
more likely created a pastiche from both memory and other sources
he may have seen in the homes of Dlugacz, Glass, or Weiss. As Joly
first noted, the translation of "Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15" is, lit-
erally, "Stay True Street"; Joyce may have thus selected the name
because of its implications for Bloom's self-doubt as a Jew, whose
marginality, timidity, and masochism make him less inclined to
believe in a nationalist sense of "Jewishness. 1160 Joyce seems to be con-
flating for Bloom-just as Herzl often did-the ancient imperative of
"the people and the land" with modern political Zionism. Finally, if
Bloom perceives Dlugacz as a "[d]eep voice[d] . . . [e]nthusiast"
whose assimilation has apparently not squelched his masculine pride
and, thus, belief in Zionist nationalism, why is his pamphlet to be
found among a "pile of cut sheets" in his butcher shop (U 4.492-93,
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154)?
Perhaps even more significant than these yet unanswered ques-
tions, however, is a problematic contradiction within Bymes's argu-
ment that goes toward my concerns with postcolonialism, Zionism,
and Jewishness. If Joyce wanted us to perceive Bloom, and indeed
have Bloom perceive himself, "at the figural nadir of his Jewish self-
alienation," then the text would also seem to imply the opposite
regarding a Zionist commitment: that is, a confident, self-affirming
Jew, whether marginal or normative to traditional Judaism, would
have demonstrated a more concerted and perhaps more optimistic
interest in Zionism than Bloom does. This would, in tum, imply that
Bloom's doubts about Zionism or later parody of it in "Circe" stem
from his frustration, ambivalence, and confusion as a Jew and an
Irishman who is marginal to both Rabbinic Judaism and racist Irish
nationalist culture. Bloom's Jewishness, as an outgrowth of both his
paternal past and social present, thus becomes the central conundrum
of his identity crisis, and so Joyce has him quite willfully confront this
through several key contexts: his cultural pariahism ("Cyclops"), his
psychosexual confusion ("Circe"), and his need for paternal reconcil-
iation ("Eumaeus" and "Ithaca"). With such progressive detail paid to
this end of Bloom's Jewishness, what would Joyce gain by parodying
Zionism in any manner extrinsic to Bloom's own thoughts on the sub-
ject? Would Byrnes have us believe that Joyce constructed the elabo-
rate minutia of Bloom's Jewish identity crisis only to allow Joyce him-
self, as an invisible, yet imposing, authorial presence, to lampoon one
of the central tenets of ancient and modern Jewish identity? If Irish
postcolonial critics make valid claims for Joyce's textual, postmodern
Irishness, then are we also to conclude that Joyce was so anti-Semitic
as to believe that the Irish had the right to rebel against a victorious
country tyrannizing over them but that the Jews in 1904 did not, pri-
marily because they were a weak, cowardly, feminized, exiled race? If
Joyce indeed put little credence in Herzl's program, this suggests that
he was at least not as in control of, and perhaps much more ambiva-
lent about, his supposed parody of Zionist agricultural settlements
than Byrnes suggests.
In "Machines, Empires, and the Wise Virgins: Cultural Revolution
in 'Aeolus,"' Patrick McGee attempts to address this ambivalence
toward Zionism as it relates to Irish nationalism; in acknowledging
and qualifying Duffy's position (and relying heavily on Frantz Fanon
and Edward W. Said), McGee argues that "'Aeolus' dramatizes the
materialist production of subaltemity in the culture of colonialism
and postulates several necessary conditions for its transformation." 61
Since industrial-machine and commodity culture play key roles in
imperial interpellation of the colonized subject, McGee stresses that
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the printing offices of the Freeman's Journal act as both a site of mech-
anistic exploitation of the subaltern and that of his or her own partic-
ipation in "the framework of a machinal system ... itself engineered,
hailed, or interpellated by the social machine as a determinate func-
tion within its overall operation" (90). Within this structure, national-
ism again becomes a product that does not dismantle but merely
reproduces imperialist sensibilities. McGee argues that while com-
modity culture does not fulfill nationalist desire, it does awaken that
desire and produces what he calls "phantasms as the object of the
desire's realization" (92).
In "Aeolus," three moments of untenable nationalist implication
within the episode's discussion of rhetorical style become, for McGee,
examples of these kinds of phantasms: first, Dan Dawson's "ERIN,
GREEN GEM OF THE SILVER SEA" (f.1 7.236) represents an Irish
internalization of "British stereotypes of Ireland as a scenic paradise
full of ineffectual natives," which ultimately causes the Irish "to iden-
tify with the agency of their own domination" (92); second, the pas-
sage about Seymour Bushe's legal-defense style (U 7.741-59), while
not strictly nationalist, suggests the barrister's artistry, as well as
Joyce's Blakean and Pateresque revisions of the speech-as the next
"phantasm that captures and derails subaltern desire ... art itself, or
at least the aesthetic effect of language" (93); and finally Professor
MacHugh's introduction of John F. Taylor's Hebraic metaphor
"equates liberation with nationhood" but also implies that Joyce
understood how "the language of the outlaw becomes the language
of the law" (94). McGee supports this subversion of the speech with
the observations that "Moses was not only a revolutionary but a patri-
arch-perhaps, after God himself, the supreme patriarch" (94), and-
as J. J. O'Molloy reminds the group-Moses died regretting his inabil-
ity to enter the promised land (f.1 7.872-73). McGee concludes that
while "Joyce [who finished the episode in 1921] may have appreciat-
ed the tactical victory of Irish nationalism, [he] continued to distrust
visions of the promised land that appeal to hero worship and patriar-
chal authority" (94-95). The Hebraic allusion of the speech, along with
the fact that Joyce wrote the first draft of the episode about one year
after the Balfour Declaration, prompts McGee to turn his argument
briefly toward Zionism.
McGee reminds us that Joyce probably read any number of head-
lines about the Declaration in 1918 (the articles actually ran in
November 1917) and that he could only have had an ironic reaction to
"Bloody Balfour'"s name on the document. Although Joyce may
never have read the Declaration, McGee nonetheless quotes its argu-
ment that the Zionist cause is "'far profounder than the desire and
prejudices of the 700,000 arabs who now inhabit the ancient landm
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(95). He concludes that "Joyce probably surmised the imperialist and
Zionist view of Palestine as 'an empty territory paradoxically "filled"
with ignoble or perhaps even dispensable natives and further that111
"Bloom more or less endorses this view" in his baJ.Ten land \old
woman metaphor in "Calypso" (95). 62 McGee also suggests that the
episode's use of Taylor's speech should ultimately be understood to
mean that "the Zionist view of the Palestinians repeats the Egyptian
high priest's view of the Hebrews"-an ironic reversal of the trope of
the Irish as Hebrews in that it transforms Zionist Jews into Egyptians
(95). McGee is uninterested in the irony and instead follows Deane's
argument that Irish nationalism (and, by implication, Zionism) was
not a liberation movement because it was merely a "mutatis mutandis,
a copy of the imperialism that oppressed it" (95). To McGee, howev-
er, this does not mean that Joyce saw no value in the nationalist strug-
gle in Ireland or, for that matter, in "the Jewish quest for a homeland"
(95); it is only that "any state that would seek social justice and free-
dom as the desire of the other ... must disrupt the binary categories
I refer to [in effect, imperialism/nationalism]" (99).
Although McGee's arguments about the binary nature of Irish
nationalism and British imperialism are impressive, his speculations
about Joyce's implicit "anti-Zionism'' remain questionable; at the
least, they are used in the service of his notion of a liberating Irish
postcolonialism without consideration of Jewishness in the text of the
entire novel. Most egregious here, I think, is the major and minor
premise that Joyce "probably surmised" Zionism as a racialist colo-
nialism or extension of British imperialism that elided the existence of
Arabic presence in Palestine in 1904 and that Bloom "more or less
endorses this view." This is not only reductive for the differing types
of Jewishness that Joyce builds into Bloom's psyche, especially as
these relate to the latter's lament over Zionism, but it disregards key
statements in Herzl's text itself, one of the only documents on
Zionism we can be certain Joyce did, in fact, read. In 1896, the year
Der Judenstaat was published, Herzl was not necessarily inclined to
regard Palestine as the only option for a safe haven from anti-
Semitism for European Jewry. 63 Nor was he proposing a colonial infil-
tration of native lands and peoples, as had been in process in
Argentina and Palestine and funded by Maurice de Hirsch and Moses
Montefiore. Contrary to this, Herzl wrote that "experiments in colo-
nization ... end badly ... [because they] continue till the inevitable
moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces
the government to stop a further influx of Jews" (State 95). He also
suggested-perhaps naively-that Zionists "could offer the present
possessors of the land enormous advantages, assume part of the pub-
lic debt, build new roads for traffic ... and do many other things"
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(State 95). Instead of colonial saturation or violent overthrow, Herzl
proposed that an official and independent Zionist corporation, "The
Jewish Company," purchase the land from the larger imperial pow-
ers; while such a program, of course, participates in the wider capi-
talist, patriarchal processes that underwrote imperialism, it is a far cry
from nationalist mimicry of the oppressor's violence. In the case of
Ottoman Palestine in 1896, that meant facilitating a monetary trans-
action with the Turkish Sultan, who was the acknowledged (albeit
grudgingly by pan-Arabists) Muslim royal authority and thus the
proper racial, as well as religious, representative of the present
indigenous peoples. 64
None of these assertions imply an "empty territory ... 'filled' with
... dispensable natives." Like so many Irish postcolonialists, McGee's
uninformed positioning of Zionism in Ulysses appears to draw on
definitions of the phenomenon perhaps more akin to Ze'ev
Jabotinsky's revisionist Zionism, David Ben-Gurion's war-era poli-
cies, or revisions of Zionist history through the lens of Palestinian
nationalism and not on those earlier, nonviolent, and socially liberat-
ing definitions of the movement Joyce encountered in Trieste and
Zurich prior to and during World War I. Neither does McGee's
manipulation of Zionism as an analogue for Irish nationalism's mim-
icry of British imperialism ever attempt to confront the layering in
Ulysses of so many discourses surrounding Jewishness during the era
as they relate to colonial, postcolonial, religious, and gender issues.
*
Postcolonial re-readings of Bloom's Jewish identity must be vigi-
lant in delineating exactly how Ulysses defines and positions
Jewishness in relation to the multiple historical contexts of the novel.
We should not readily accept the conclusion that Joyce was an anti-
Semite of at least the casual-liberal kind or that he was a prescient
advocate of a New-Left anti-Zionism. Rather, Joyce had his own cul-
turally conditioned theories about non-Halachic Jewishness and its
subcategory of Zionism that, although grounded in softer racialist
assumptions, nonetheless went beyond both the venomous self-
hatred of theories such as those of Weininger or the contemporary
oversights of many postcolonial critics. Tracing Bloom's stream of
consciousness about his own and his father's Jewish identity
throughout Ulysses, we discover a Joyce who valorizes a Jewishness
built from perceiving oneself first and foremost as intimately attached
to the historic plight of the Jews as well as from what I have previ-
ously suggested is a king of distilled Judaic world-view. 65 More
specifically, this identity appears to include, for Joyce, a historically
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minded pragmatism about social acceptance and economic survival;
a passive colonial resistance and empathy toward difference; a psy-
chosexual courage and recognition of androgynous impulses; a sensi-
tivity to the mind's associative powers, yet a concentration on physi-
cal reality; a respect for all sentient life based in what appears for
Bloom to be a quasi-mystical sense of interconnection; a messianic
hope for social liberation; and an insistence on the role of a nurturing,
gender-mediating paternalism beyond the hypermasculinity of
nationalist-imperialist Europe. This list now also warrants the adden-
dum that this modern, pre-Holocaust, assimilated-to-marginal
Jewishness also holds one solution to that historical plight-albeit an
improbable one during its era-to be a moden, constitutional Jewish
state that functions as a sovereign territory for the protection and
preservation of Jews and Judaism. This list may well appear to some
as nothing more then a kind of liberal humanism with a yarmulke, but,
if so, it nevertheless bears repeating that Ulysses obviously privileges
Bloom's Jewish utopian liberalism over both the English liberal poli-
tics Joyce rejected as an Irish nationalist and the broader European
liberalism that attempted but failed to make Jews acceptable as citi-
zens-or even as human beings. Indeed, if Bloom associates his cuck-
oldry, timidity, self-doubt, loss of a son, and sexual masochism with
what he fears is his "feminized Jewish racial-nature," it is just these
aspects of his character he appears to revalorize in his kindness to
Stephen and devotion to Molly. Joyce implies in this manner that, as
Bloom (re)negotiates those behaviors that racist culture deems femi-
ninely degenerative with those of the legacy of his father's Judaic rec-
onciliations and insights and his need to befriend and influence a
younger man, he liberates himself from the limits of ideological false
consciousness of his racist culture; ironically enough, in this manner,
he enacts a postmodern or even postcolonial (re)construction of self
that demonstrates not only the perpetually open dynamism of this
process but the spuriousness of imperialist, nationalist, and even
Judaic-based essentialist parameters of Jewishness.
In his provocative study, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of
Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, Daniel Boyarin
indeed asserts that the myth of the feminized Jew was not only an
anti-Semitic vehicle but a result of Jewish emancipation's fostering of
a clash between the cultural valorization of manliness in the Rabbinic
ideal and the hypermasculinity of nineteenth-century Europe. He
argues that the idea of "the Jewish man as sort of a woman ... [is]
more than just an anti-Semitic stereotype[;] the Jewish ideal male as
countertype to 'manliness' is an assertive historical product of Jewish
culture," and that, by making this claim, he is not suggesting "a set of
characteristics, traits, behaviors that are essentially female, but a set of
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performances that are read as nonmale within a given historical cul-
ture" (3, 5). While he conducts a balanced study of Rabbinic Judaism's
male as pacifist and studious alongside the religion's own version of
patriarchal dominance and constraint, Boyarin nonetheless believes
that while Talmudic culture does indeed "provide an array of male
ideals and modalities, it fell to Ashkenazic Judaism to furnish
European culture with the possibility of a male who is sexually and
procreationally functioning but otherwise gendered as if 'female'
within the European economy of gender" (26). Such a theory relies on
the assumption that Rabbinic culture idealized a type of masculinity
that was in such opposition to that of nineteenth-century liberal
humanism that the latter-out of cultural ignorance and historical
hatred-could only revert to the vagaries of pseudo-scientific racism
to position "the Jew" as biologically degenerate.
Such hair-splitting difference between Judaic tradition, cultural
constructions, and racist essentialism in turn suggests the sensitivity
needed to discern exactly what Joyce is doing with Bloom's
Jewishness in Ulysses. As an Irishman who, while witnessing the
Dreyfus era of anti-Semitism, was already ambivalent about a host of
racialized versions of Irishness, Joyce appears to have been acutely
aware of the psychological or temperamental impact of Judaic culture
on Jewishness-even on Jews who were assimilated, marginal, or,
indeed, apostates or converts. Moreover, Joyce's awareness of the
Jews as a colonized people and the resultant confusion of identity that
comes with that position inform the whole of Ulysses, not only
through Bloom but through the text's unambiguous castigation of the
anti-Semitic culture of its day. Joyce's construction of Bloom's
enabling difference-drawn from his muddled attachment to tenets
of Judaic thought and antithetical to the hypermasculine, racist, and
Catholic culture that surrounds him-suggests a very similar sense of
Jewishness to that described by Boyarin, an identity that is beyond
racism, the modern nation-state/imperialist binarism, gender essen-
tialism, and even Halachic rigidity.
NOTES
1 See Erwin R. Steinberg, review of James Joyce, "Ulysses," and the Construc-
tion of Jewish Identity, JJQ, 35 (Winter-Spring 1998), 503, and Neil R. Davison,
James Joyce, "Ulysses," and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography,
and "the Jew" in Modernist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
2 See Steinberg, "James Joyce and the Critics Notwithstanding,
Leopold
Bloom I~, Not Jewish," Journal of Modem Literature, 9 (Winter 1981-1982), 27-
49, and Reading Leopold Bloom/1904 in 1989," JJQ, 26 (Spring 1989), 397-
416._Further refere:7-ces t? "James Joyce and the Critics Notwithstanding" will
be cited parenthetically m the text as "Critics."
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3 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,
Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). Further references will be

cited parenthetically in the text.
4 John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and
the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974).

5 Daniel Boyarin, "Epater L'Embourgeoisement: Freud, Gender, and the
(De)Colonized Psyche," Diacritics, 24 (Spring 1994), 20-21. Boyarin, on the

suggestion of Martin Jay, recognizes that Cuddihy, "as an Irish Catholic,
ought to have resented English colonial control and its civilizing mission" in
terms of his argument that assimilated Jews who aped the modem civility of
the polite Protestant cultures of their host nations were actually attempting a
positive conversion (p. 21).
6 In 1916, Joyce read a version of this argument, albeit one that asserts a
religio-nationalist sense of Jewishness, in Rabbi Moses Gaster's "Judaism-A

National Religion," in Zionism and the Jewish Future, ed. Harry Sacher (New
York: Macmillan Publishers, 1916), pp. 87-98. Gaster argues that the concept
of a Jewish nation cannot be based on the bulwarks of modem nationalism-
language, race, and territory. Instead, he suggests that Judaism itself is both a
religion and nationalism simultaneously. Further references will be cited par-
enthetically in the text.
7 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1989), p. 52. Further references will be cited parenthetically as

Modernity.
8 Bauman, "Allosemitism: Premodem, Modem, Postmodern," Modernity,
Culture, and the Jew, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998), p. 144.
9 See Sacher," A Century of Jewish History," Zionism and the Jewish Future
(pp. 12-58). Joyce appears to have purchased this collection the year it was
published.
10 See Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, ed. Tamra
Deutscher (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968).

11 Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1995). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
12 Robert Byrnes, "Weiningerian Sex Comedy: Jewish Sexual Types Behind
Molly and Leopold Bloom," JJQ, 34 (Spring 1997), 267-82. Further references
will be cited parenthetically in the text as "Comedy."
13 See Ralph Robert Joly, "Chauvinist Brew and Leopold Bloom: The
Weininger Legacy," JJQ, 19 (Winter 1982), 194-98, and Marilyn Reizbaum,
"Weininger and the Bloom of Jewish Self-Hatred in Joyce's Ulysses," Jews &
Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, ed. Nancy A Harrowitz and Barbara
Hyams (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 207-13.
14 Byrnes began making these types of arguments about Joyce's use of
Weininger for humorous effect in "Bloom's Sexual Tropes: Stigmata of the
'Degenerative' Jew," JJQ, 27 (Winter 1990), 303-23.
15 Richard Ellrnann does not indicate a source for this remark.
16 See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious, trans.
James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), pp.111-16. Itis interesting to
note that Freud acknowledges the irony of how Jewish jokes lampoon the
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parochialism of the Ostjude as a comic mirror of a larger Jewish pariahism
Most relevant to my argument is Freud's rejoinder:
They are stories created by Jews and are dir~cted against Jewish charac-
teristics. The jokes made about Jews by foreigners are for the most part
brutal comic stories in which the joke is made unnecessary by the fact
that Jews are regarded by foreigners as comic figures. The Jewish jokes
made by Jews admit this too; but they know their real faults as well as the
connection between them and their good qualities, and the share which the sub-
ject has in the person found fault with creates the subjective determinate (usu-
ally so hard to arrive at) of the joke-work Incidentally, I don't know
whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such
a degree of its own character. (pp. 111-12, my italics)
Sander Gilman reads Freud's theories as a self-hating participation in stereo-
types surrounding the unclean, backward, rube image of the Ostjude, espe-
cially in the lampooning of mauscheln German (improper German by way of
a Yiddish accent)-see Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the
Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), pp.
261-69.
17 See George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and
Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985), as
well as Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1993). The quotation is from Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and the Crisis of
Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris
(New York: Continuum Press, 1993), pp. 2-5. Further references to the Le
Rider work will be cited parenthetically in the text.
18 See the final chapter, "Ulysses" in my James Joyce, "Ulysses," and the
Construction offewish Identity (pp. 185-239).
19 For a discussion of the impact of Weininger's work on "the Jew," as well
as the modem culture of the West, see the collection Jews & Gender: Responses
to Otto Weininger.
20 I am thinking here of how the Lacanian concept is used by Mary Russo
in The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (London: Routledge
Publishers, 1994). In recalling that Jacques Lacan asserts male perceptions of
the female body as disturbingly fluid and amorphous, Russo further associ-
ates this with damaged maleness, disease, monstrosity, and bodily detritus.
Both the feminized Jew and the female grotesque can be defined through the
threat the male gaze locates in that which suggests the formlessness of male
corruption-an undefinable alterity suggesting the dissolution of hypermas-
culine identity in the subject viewer-see Russo (pp. 52-73).
21 Morton Levitt first made this argument in 1972-see "The Family of
Bloom," New Light on Joyce from the Dublin Symposium, ed. Fritz Senn
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 141-42, and see also Levitt, "A
Hero for Our Time: Leopold Bloom and the Myth of Ulysses," JJQ, 10 (Fall
1972), 132-46. Shari Benstock suggested similar arguments in a brief but
important piece entitled "Is He a Jew or Gentile or a Holy Roman?" JJQ, 16
(Summer 1979), 493-97.
22 See Seamus Deane, "Joyce and Nationalism.," Celtic Revivals: Essays in
Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 96.
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Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
23 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Orir5ins
and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1983). "

24 Racial identity? Joyce concludes this passage with the aside: "although
the present race in Ireland is backward and inferior, it is worth taking into
account the fact that it is the only race of the entire Celtic family that has not
been willing to sell its birthright for a mess of pottage" (CW 166).
25 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), p. 333. Further references will be

cited parenthetically in the text.
26 Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1994). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

27 On Walter Benjamin's jlfineur, see his "On Some Major Motifs in
Baudelaire," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and intro. Hannah

Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 155-200, and especially pp.
172-74.
28 See Arendt's introduction to Benjamin's book (p. 34)-here, she explains
that "[f]or the Jews of that generation ... the available forms of rebellion were
Zionism and Communism, and it is noteworthy that their fathers often con-
demned the Zionist rebellion more bitterly than the Communist."
29 Erner Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge Press,
1995), pp. 118-19. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
30 Steinberg's article "Reading Leopold Bloom/1904 in 1989" repeats many
of the ways in which Bloom appears to Steinberg to be "unequivocally" not

Jewish.
31 James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 170-71. Further references will be cited par-
enthetically in the text.
32 These constitute the body of oral-to-texh1al commentary that grew from
the Jerusalem academies of Hillel and Shumai in the last century B.C.E. and
were later redacted into the Mishnah around 220 C.E., the Gemara about 400
C.E., and the Midrash by 1200 C.E.
33 The exception to this is that conversion only confers the status of Israelite,
rather than either Levite or Kohen, which remain patrilineal designations.
34 In fact, one of the most gifted and renowned Talmudic scholars of the
first century C.E. and martyr of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, Joseph Ben Akiba, is
believed to have been the son of a convert-see Geoffrey Wigoder, ed., The
Dictionary of Jewish Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 21.
35 See Gaster, in Zionism and the Jewish Future (pp. 87-98). Gaster was a
prominent scholar, Zionist, and chief rabbi of the Sephardic community in

England. In attempting to argue that only Judaism can be seen as the foun-
dation of Jewish nationalism, he states, "No difference is made between a
proselyte and one born in the faith. The New Jew is a full-weight Jew....
Whatever may be his ethnical origin, he is made to trace his lineage through
the ages back to the starting point of the Jewish people. He becomes heir at
once to the whole historic development" (p. 91).
36 Joyce read Salomon Funk's Die Entstehung des Talmuds (The Origin of the
Talmud) (Leipzig: G. J. Gi:ischen, 1910) sometime during his residence in
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Trieste. Bloom owns a "sewn pamphlet" entitled Philosophy of the Talmud (U
17.1380). For a discussion of Funk's book, its author, and Joyce's reading of it,
see Ira Nadel, Joyce and the Jews (Iowa City: Univ. Press of Iowa, 1989), pp. 108,
119-20. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
37 This seems clear, even though Bloom, readjusting the role in the
"Eumaeus" episode, appears momentarily to acquiesce to this authority, at
the least to underscore the absurdity of the Citizen's former accusations: "He
called me a jew and in a heated fashion offensively.... though in reality I'm
not" (U 16.1082-85).
38 The Yiddish term Frum derives from the German Fromm or Frommer,
meaning "pious, devout, innocent, harmless, artless." In Yiddish, the term is
an abbreviation for the label "Frumah" or even the idiomatic "Frumah Yid,"
which is most often used to denote an orthodox Jew who practices as many
of Judaism's 613 mitwot as is humanly possible. It is, in other words, the term
Yiddish-speaking Jews (both assimilated or not) would use to describe those
Jews who are definitively pious and observant. In Europe, the phrase was
also often used in assimilated circles as a derogation to refer to the "antiquat-
ed" piety of the orthodox. Here, I use it simply as a common term to describe
the normative Halachic Jew.
39 He did this in a manner that postmodern theorists such as Bauman,
Gilman, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Franc;ois Lyotard have
been confronting over the last thirty years.
40 See my discussion of Italo Svevo's reading of Weininger in James Joyce,
"Ulysses," and the Construction of Jewish Identity (pp. 169-70).

41 For these and other revelations about Svevo's sense of himself as a Jew,
see P. N. Furbank, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (Berkeley; Univ. of
California Press, 1966), and see also John Gatt-Rutter, Italo Svevo: A Double Life
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
42 See Amos Elon, Hml (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), p.
93.
43 For the latter, more specific accusation of Zionism as an example of
Homi Bhabha's notion of colonial mimicry, see Boyarin's chapter entitled
"The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, and Mimicry," in Unheroic Conduct: The
Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1997), pp. 277-312. Further references will be cited paren-
thetically in the text.
44 See Jonathan Boyarin, "Palestine and Jewish History," Storm from Para-
dise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1992), pp. 116-29. Boyarin, who, in part, wrote this piece from conversations
with Edward W. Said, ably states the differences and ironies between
Theodor Herzl's vision and the realities of how a Jewish state ultimately came
into being:
The Zionist program was conceived around the tum of the twentieth
century, largely according to European ideologies of national liberation.
The Jewish state, however, was only founded after World War II. The
formation of Israel does not fit neatly into the idea of self-determination
that rationalized the creation of states during decolonization.... As
Lord Balfour's [1919] explicit denial of Palestinian self-determination
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confirms, it would better have fit the decolonizing model for Palestinian
Arabs to have been granted independence in the territory between the
Mediterranean and the Jordan. (p. 121)
The final comment indeed seems accurate in terms of the modem world of
colonial expansion but does not account for either the Roman or Ottoman
imperial acquisitions of the area, which would suggest that, despite Zionist
displacement of Palestinian Arabs, diasporic Jewry also "fits the decolonizing
model."
45 Herzl, "Jews as a Pioneer People," Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses
(New York: Herzl Press, 1973-1975), 2:6; Herzl used this definition often, even
during his deposition in front of the British Royal Commission on Alien
Immigration on 7 July 1902 (p. 200). Joyce would have read a similar defini-
tion: "We are one people-our enemies have made us one without our con-
sent, as repeatedly happens in history'' -see Herzl, The Jewish State (New
York: Dover Publications, 1988), p. 92. Further references to The J1?Wish State
will be cited parenthetically in the text as State.
46 See Reizbaum's discussion in her recent, provocative study, James Joyce's
Judaic Other (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999). Here she reads Bloom as
"rejecting" Zionism: "Ironically, when Bloom rejects Zionism for himself-
'nothing doing'-in favor of Irish nationality if not nationalism-'I was born
in Ireland'-he becomes a pariah in the eyes of those like Arthur Griffith, and
in any case doubted, as in Cyclops, where his Irishness is challenged, his
Jewishness confirmed" (pp. 42-43, my italics). It remains an open question as
to whether Bloom rejects the idea of Zionism on the grounds of it being an
unviable, tragic program or on the anti-imperialist or anti-Semitic grounds of
anti-Zionist politics. At the risk of being pedantic, "rejects" also seems an
imprecise verb to describe Bloom's attitude both in "Calypso" and through-
out the text.
47 See Herzl, Old New Land (Altneuland), trans. Lotta Levesohn (New York:
Herzl Press, 1987), pp. 74-75. Further references will be cited parenthetically
in the text.
48 See George Foot Moore, The Literature of the Old Testament (London:
Williams and Norgate, 1913).
49 Louis Hyman, The Jews of Ireland: From the Earliest Times to the Year 1910
(Shannon: Irish Univ. Press, 1972).
so See Davison, "'Still an idea behind it': Trieste, Jewishness, and Zionism
in Ulysses," ]JQ, 38 (Spring-Summer 2001), 373-94.
51 For documentation of Joyce's study of and examination on "Bible histo-
ry (Old Testament)" at Clongowes, see Kevin Sullivan, Joyce Among the Jesuits
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), p. 47. See also my chapter on Joyce's
Jesuit years, "Silence: Jesuit Years--Clongowes and Belvedere," in James Joyce,
"Ulysses," and the Construction of!ewish Identity (pp. 41-60).
52 Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siecle: Cosmopolitanism and
Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
2001), p. xviii. Stanislawski draws on Anthony Smith's National Identity
(London: Penguin Publishers, 1991), as well as his Nationalism and Modernism:
A Critical Survey of Recent Theories on Nation and Nationalism (New York
Routledge Press, 1998).
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53 Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and a Political Treatise,
trans. R.H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), p. 46. Joyce had
a high regard for Spinoza's thought-see Nadel (p. 192). Bloom defers to
Spinoza's rationalism on several occasions in Ulysses and has a work of the
philosopher's collected thoughts in his library (U 17.1372).
54 For a recent, detailed discussion of Jewish attitudes toward Zionism in
Trieste, see John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920
(Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), and see also my recent piece in the JJQ, '"Still
an idea behind it': Trieste, Jewishness, and Zionism in Ulysses."
3 5 Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment
(London:
Walter Scott, 1911).
5& Byrnes, "Agenda th N etaim Discovered: Why Bloom Isn't a Zionist," JJQ,
29 (Summer 1992), 833-38. Further references will be cited parenthetically in
the text as" Agenda th."
57 Samuel Tolkowsky, "The Jews and the Economic Development
of
Palestine," Zionism and the Jewish Future (pp. 138-70).
58 Charles Parish, "Agenbite of Agendath Netaim," ]JQ, 6
(Spring 1969),
237-41.
59 See David Bell, "The Search for Agendath Netaim: Some Progress,
but
No Solution," JJQ, 12 (Spring 1975), 251-58.
60 Joly, "TI1e Jewish Element in James Joyce's Ulysses"
(Ph.D. diss.,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1973), 86.
61 Patrick McGee, "Machines, Empires, and the Wise
Virgins: Cultural
Revolution in 'Aeolus,"' 'Ulysses": En-Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New
Essays on the Episodes, ed. Kimberly J. Devlin and Reizbaum (Columbia: Univ.
of South Carolina Press, 1999), p. 89. Further references will be cited paren-
thetical! y in the text.
62 The embedded quotation is from Said, The Question
of Palestine (New
York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 81.
63 In 1903, after the horror of the Kishinev Affair,
Herzl even put his own
leadership in jeopardy by reconsidering Neville Chamberlain 's offer of
Uganda as a Jewish homeland. I refer here to the terrible events of 19-20 April
1903, when a massacre of Jews occurred in the Russian city of Kishinev.
Undoubtedly incited, for racial reasons, by a Moldavian editor of the only
daily newspaper in the city, who circulated false reports of Jewish atrocities,
the riots were tacitly sanctioned by the local government.
64 In response to an 1899 letter from Yusaf
al-Khalidi, a scion of one of the
leading liberal families of Ottoman Jerusalem, Herzl wrote on 19 March 1899,
"Do you believe that an Arab who has a house or land in Palestine ... will
greatly regret seeing the price of his land rise five or tenfold? For that is nec-
essarily what will happen as the Jews come; and this is what must be
explained to the inhabitants of the country. They will acquire excellent broth-
ers, just as the Sultan will acquire loyal and good subjects, who will cause the
region, their historic motherland, to flourish" -he is quoted in Conor Cruise
O'Brien, The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1986), p. 112.
65 See my introduction and
final chapter on Ulysses in James Joyce,
"Ulysses," and Construction o!Jewish Identity (pp. 1-15, 185-239).
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Davison (2002) - Why Bloom Is Not 'Frum', or Jewishness and Postcolonialism in 'Ulysses

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Why Bloom Is Not "Frum", or Jewishness and Postcolonialism in "Ulysses"

Author(s): Neil R. Davison

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25477926

I n his r.eview o~ my bo~k, James !oyce, "Ulysses," and the Construction

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Refuting "the Jew" as a case of "heterophobia-the resentment of the

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In the Kulturkritik debates of the first years of the twentieth-century [sic]

Bloom associates his passivity, humanism, sexual ambiguity, grief

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Just as anti-feminism was symptomatic of a profound crisis of individ-

Liberalism's demise teetered on the fulcrums of gender and race; anti-

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Moving from Cheng's generic alterity and Byrnes's laughing

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Joyce was always to be the writer who refused the limitations of

If Joyce believed this and inscribed it in Ulysses, does it mean that he

If Joyce attempted to disrupt the notions of racial purity or racial

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relentlessly pinpoint[ing] the mechanisms of the colonial regimes of sur-

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Nolan thus positions Bloom's politico-textual function as, in part, a

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Whether these conspicuously emphatic statements rely on a misread-

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Fairhall defers to Anderson's "imagined communities" to argue that

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guage; Joyce must have misunderstood or misspelled the term

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Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). Further references will be

the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974).

(De)Colonized Psyche," Diacritics, 24 (Spring 1994), 20-21. Boyarin, on the

religio-nationalist sense of Jewishness, in Rabbi Moses Gaster's "Judaism-A

Press, 1989), p. 52. Further references will be cited parenthetically as

Deutscher (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968).

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and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1983). "

(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), p. 333. Further references will be

Press, 1994). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

Baudelaire," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and intro. Hannah