"I don't want to see my country fall into the hands
of German jews either. That's our national problem, I'm
afraid, just now": Haines justifies his name in Telemachus
by spouting the theory of an international Jewish conspiracy.
Near the end of Nestor, the proudly Unionist Mr.
Deasy subjects Stephen to more of the same: "England
is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her
finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation's
decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's vital
strength." Anti-Semitism was powerful not only in
England but also in Germany, France, and other nations. In
Proteus it surfaces briefly in Kevin Egan's mention of
"M. Drumont, famous journalist." These three
passages alluding to European nations being undermined or
overtaken by treacherous Jews set the stage for Joyce's
introduction of a Jewish protagonist in the fourth chapter,
and for the prejudice exhibited by various Dubliners later in
the book.
Although distrust of Jews reaches
far back into the medieval origins of Christian Europe,
it took new, virulently ideological forms in the late 19th
century, starting in Germany and spreading to Russia, France,
and the Austro-Hungarian and British empires. The term
"anti-Semite" was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904),
in a pamphlet titled Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums
über das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of Germanism
over Judaism). Marr's work became what Jacob
Katz, in From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism,
1700-1933 (Harvard UP, 1980), has called the "first
anti-Semitic best-seller."
Marr was a student of German cultural identity whose ideas
grew out of the romantic 19th century struggle to create a
nation out of the disparate lands occupied by Germanic
peoples. The essence of his argument, Gifford observes, was
that "Jews in Germany had already taken over the press, they
had become 'dictators of the financial system,' and they were
on the verge of taking over the legislature and the
judiciary." Marr did not invent these charges: they were
already current in his culture. And he was not a racial bigot
in any simple sense: three of his four marriages were to women
who were at least partly Jewish, and he renounced
anti-Semitism and German nationalism toward the end of his
life. But by depicting two races (one native, the other a
foreign invader) locked in an irreconcilable struggle, and by
describing a massive conspiracy to infiltrate and take over
the vital systems of his society, he did more than any other
individual of his time to create an ideological justification
for this species of hatred.
French society was polarized two decades later by the case of
Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish soldier convicted in 1894 on
exceedingly flimsy grounds of giving secret military documents
to the Germans. Again the assumption was that Jews would prove
more loyal to their own international ethnic cabal than to the
nation that had given them citizenship. When new evidence
emerged in 1896 implicating a different officer, the military
command suppressed the evidence, effected a hasty acquittal of
the non-Jewish officer, and brought new charges against
Dreyfus based on fabricated documents.
Émile Zola published a
fiery letter titled J'accuse in a prominent
newspaper, stirring public pressure for Dreyfus to be
acquitted in a new trial. When the trial was held in 1899, a
battle for public opinion raged, led on the anti-Dreyfus side
by Édouard Drumont, publisher of an anti-Semitic newspaper
called La Libre Parole that had been slandering Jews
since 1892. Kevin Egan does not mention Drumont's views in Proteus,
but his insistence on dropping his name into his conversation
with Stephen imports a French context for European
anti-Semitism into the novel. Haines, who has voiced suspicion
of "German Jews" in the previous chapter and whose name means
"hate" in French, probably represents another indirect
evocation of the Dreyfus affair, in which French bigots
defended their nation from a traitor who was ostensibly
working for the Germans. (Dreyfus was again convicted in the
1899 trial, but subsequently pardoned. In 1906, after years of
tireless labor by his brother and his wife, the falsity of the
charges against him was at last proved. He was reinstated in
the French army at the rank of major, and after serving
throughout World War I retired as a lieutenant colonel.)
When Haines voices anti-Semitic views in the first chapter,
it may seem that Joyce is characterizing them as a new import
from England, a parasite clinging to a "stranger." Deasy's more
detailed exposition of the ideology in the second chapter puts
an end to that slight comfort. Anti-Semitism is already well
established in Ireland, and will surface many more times in
the book. The men in the funeral carriage in Hades,
Nosey Flynn in Lestrygonians, Buck Mulligan in Scylla
and Charybdis, Lenehan in Wandering Rocks,
the Citizen in Cyclops, and Bloom himself in Ithaca
will all indulge invidious stereotypes about Jews. The novel's
outstanding anti-Semite, the Citizen, specifically articulates
the view that Jews are internationalist provocateurs who feel
no loyalty to their European homes: "What is your nation,
if I may ask?" Bloom, of course, answers that his nation
is Ireland: "I was born here. Ireland."
Marr’s was not the only pamphlet fanning the flames of
anti-Semitic hatred in early twentieth-century Europe. Circe
alludes to the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
a 1905 document forged by Russian secret police to justify
pogroms by making it appear that Jews were planning a takeover
of the entire civilized world. Gifford notes that the Protocols
“did not turn up in western Europe until 1918-19,” but Joyce
made sure that they appeared in his book, even at the price of
anachronism. In a personal communication, Vincent Van Wyk
notes that in Catholic countries like France and Ireland Jews
were also sometimes associated with the international
Protestant order of Freemasons, whose highly secret rites
invited suspicions of the sort that Nosey Flynn articulates.
Joyce acknowledges this association by making his Jewish
protagonist a Freemason, and when Flynn says that Bloom will
never sign his name ("Nothing
in black and white"), he may be a trotting out a
stereotype about Jews, Freemasons, or both groups.
