Jeremiah 8:22 asks, "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no
physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of
my people recovered?" Jeremiah 46:11 similarly associates the
substance with healing: "Go up into Gilead, and take balm, o
virgin, the daughter of Egypt: in vain shalt thou use many
medicines; for thou shalt not be cured." Genesis 37:25
mentions the trafficking of "spicery and balm and myrrh" from
Gilead to Egypt, suggesting that it was a precious substance
on the trade routes, and Ezekiel 27:17 too refers to the trade
in balm. Gifford comments that trees in the mountainous Gilead
region produced "a liquid resinous substance worth twice its
weight in silver that was prized for its fragrance and for its
medicinal virtues as a 'heal-all.'" Thornton, Johnson, and
Slote all agree with this attribution.
But the relevant sentence in Oxen of the Sun sounds
less suited to precious biblical essences than to an age of
crass mass-marketing: "If he must dispense his balm of
Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste to restore
to health a generation of unfledged profligates let his
practice better consist with the doctrines that now engross
him." It seems odd that the surpassingly rare product of
ancient Jordanian trees—reportedly given to King Solomon by
the Queen of Sheba, and to the Pharaoh by Jacob, to win
influence—should be "dispensed" to cure an entire
"generation." A "nostrum" usually denotes a patent medicine or
quack remedy peddled by a healer of dubious credentials. And
while the dubious "taste" of Bloom's advice perhaps applies in
an abstract metaphorical sense to his "apothegms," it is just
as reasonable to hear the sentence suggesting that his
nostrums, far from possessing the exquisite fragrance of
ancient balm, have the unpalatable flavor of snake oil.
So it is satisfying to discover (as I did thanks to a
personal communication from Vincent Altman O'Connor following
a conversation with Cork historian Ronnie Herlihy) that
"Cordial Balm of Gilead" was in fact an Enlightenment-era
quasi-medical nostrum manufactured in Liverpool and sold for
very high prices all around the world (the U.K., Europe,
America, India). Although by some accounts it contained spices
from the Holy Land and even dissolved gold, it was almost
certainly compounded of much less expensive ingredients. The
purveyor, a doctor named Samuel Solomon, grew up in Cork,
opened a shop of medical remedies in Dublin around 1768, and
in 1789 moved his operation to Liverpool, where he wrote a
book that was re-issued many times. Dr. Solomon became quite
wealthy from sales of his bottled elixir.
A scholarly article by Gabriel Sivan, "Samuel Solomon
(1745-1819): quack or entrepreneur?," Jewish Historical
Studies 42 (2009): 23-51, gives a balanced account of
Dr. Solomon's life, his medical credentials, his business
ventures, and his shameless marketing. Near the end of the
article Sivan cites Louis Hyman's The Jews of Ireland
to support his belief that Joyce "knew all about" Solomon, and
he quotes from Oxen of the Sun, but he offers no
thoughts about how or why Joyce may have made use of this
historical material.
There is a good deal more to say. The sentence quoted above
does not just vaguely evoke the language of patent medicine
dealers. It exactly reproduces the name of Dr. Solomon's
cure-all, and virtually quotes from one of his advertisements,
reproduced in the second image here. Joyce's sentence says
that Bloom dispenses his nostrums and apothegms "to restore
to health a generation of unfledged profligates."
Solomon's ad promises to help both the young and those
suffering the lasting ill effects of their youth: "Those who
in an advanced life feel the consequences of youthful excess,
or unfortunate youth who have brought on themselves a
numerous train of evils, will, by the use of this, find
themselves restored to health and strength, and all the
melancholy symptoms removed, which are the general effects of
such causes."
Both sentences sound as if they are euphemistically referring
to harms incurred by the raging hormones of youth. Solomon did
indeed target people who engaged in the compensatory sexual
pleasures available to "unfledged profligates," Joyce's sly
term for people with more desires than opportunities for
performance. Sivan observes that, along with sufferers of
other ailments, the elixir "was also 'recommended to boys,
young men and those who in the prime of life feel the
consequences of a secret vice [i.e. masturbation], too
frequent among youth, especially in the great Schools.'...
Solomon knew how to play on the sexual fears of young men and
women and conceived a devastating sales pitch" (35).
With his usual uncanny genius, Joyce appears to have found a
small detail that ties together numerous threads in this
section of Oxen of the Sun. Solomon's balm hails from
a time roughly contemporary with the satiric style being
employed in the chapter. (If Gifford is correct in associating
the voice with that of the pseudonymous "Junius," then we are
in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Dr. Solomon began selling
medical remedies in the late 1760s and launched the Cordial
Balm of Gilead in 1796.) The balm purported to cure evils
arising from ungratified sexual desire—a perfect metaphor for
Bloom's criticism of the young men's rowdy talk. And the
dispenser of the nostrum was Jewish.
Of all the stylistic experiments in Oxen, the Junius
section is the only one to indulge anti-Semitic sentiments. It
begins by asking, "But with what fitness, let it be asked of
the noble lord, his patron, has this alien, whom the
concession of a gracious prince has admitted to civic rights,
constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal
polity?" One can hear in this sentence the same considerations
that lead Mr. Deasy in Nestor to claim that Ireland
has never persecuted the Jews "because she never let them in" (a claim
belied by the fact that in 1174 King Henry II assigned
possession and protection of the Jews in Ireland to one of his
Anglo-Norman lords), and that lead Bloom in Eumaeus to
observe that "Spain decayed when the inquisition hounded the
jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an uncommonly
able ruffian who in other respects has much to answer for,
imported them."
The use of the word "stranger"
at several points in Oxen suggests that Mulligan and
perhaps others in the hospital lounge, rather than viewing
Bloom as an outwardly successful middle-aged man from whom
they might learn something, regard his ethnicity with
suspicion. What better way for a savage satirist of the late
18th century to convey this distrust than to characterize
Bloom as a rich physician who peddles fraudulent medicines
because he is, after all, only "a dirty jew"? (The words
appear in Bloom's thoughts about Reuben J. Dodd in Lestrygonians.)
The Oxen passage brings balm back from Liverpool to
ancient Palestine with a second mention one sentence later by
remarking that Bloom, "this new exponent of morals and healer
of ills," is "at his best an exotic tree which, when rooted
in its native orient, throve and flourished and was abundant
in balm but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its
roots have lost their quondam vigour while the stuff that
comes away from it is stagnant, acid, and inoperative."
Jews, in other words, should stay in their own country. And
while Jewish balm may have been quite the thing in its time,
the adulterated European version is a poor substitute.
