All four gospels tell the story of Pontius Pilate offering
the Jews a choice to save either Jesus of Nazareth, a man he
regards as innocent of any real crime, or Barabbas, a thief
who committed murder during a seditious uprising. The Jews
choose Barabbas, prompting Pilate to say of Jesus, "Why, what
evil hath he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly,
Crucify him" (Mark 15:14). Pilate releases Barabbas and hands
Jesus over to be crucified. For Christians, Barabbas is a man
who deserved to die but was reprieved because of the Jews'
implacable hatred of the Savior.
That background is probably sufficient to explain how
Barabbas became an antisemitic catchword, and why people might
think such a person deserves to die, but even better material
can be found in Marlowe's play, written in 1589 or 1590. The
protagonist, a murderous Jewish merchant named Barabas, tricks
two young men into dueling to the death, poisons his daughter
and the other nuns in her convent, strangles a friar and
frames another one for the crime, poisons three more people,
and betrays his country to the invading Turks. At the end of
the play he double-crosses the Turks who have made him
governor, slaughters some of them, and prepares a hidden
cauldron in which to boil the Turkish prince and his
entourage. But Barabas too is double-crossed and falls into
the cauldron. As he boils to death he hurls curses at
Christians and infidels alike.
The watery death may be a tip-off to Joyce's allusive intent
in the Hades reference. If he was thinking of The
Jew of Malta, then ambiguous implications come into
play. As in Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine,
which make morally dubious men into heroes, Marlowe keeps his
authorial intention obscure while playing some audience
responses off against others. Like Shylock's bloodthirsty turn
in The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare no doubt had
Marlowe's protagonist in mind), Barabas's career of crime
begins with his experience of antisemitic prejudice, To
finance his war against the Turks, Malta's Christian governor
confiscates half the wealth of the island's Jews, and only the
Jews. (When Barabas objects, the governor seizes all
his goods.) The governor, Ferneze, acts in decidedly
un-Christian ways throughout the play, and indeed nearly all
the characters are unscrupulous, untrustworthy, hypocritical,
and vicious. If the play arouses anti-Jewish passions,
Christianity and Islam do not come off much better.
In Hades the cruelty is all on the Christian side, as
Martin Cunningham rudely snatches the telling of the story
from Bloom and Simon Dedalus tosses out an antisemitic slur in
the presence of this decidedly unmurderous Jew. For all but
the most bigoted readers, "Drown Barabbas!" will recoil
on its utterer as surely as the trap set by Marlowe's
anti-hero rounds on him. Wishing "to Christ" for the
Jew's death hardly makes Simon's passion more attractive.
Things are much the same in Wandering Rocks. Simon
and Ben Dollard learn that Dodd has sent men to Father
Cowley's place to extract repayment of a loan, and Dollard
assures him that his landlord, who is pressing a similar
demand for unpaid rent, has the prior claim: "— You
can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put
that writ where Jacko put the nuts." Dollard's view,
which seems to be widely held among Dublin's Catholics, is
that no Christian should be forced to pay for goods or
services received from a Jew. Earlier in the same section of Wandering
Rocks he recounts the history of his trousers:
"— Bad luck to the jewman that made them, Ben Dollard
said. Thanks be to God he's not paid yet."
