The narrator of Cyclops imparts visceral ugliness
to "jewy" when he says, "Jesus, I had to laugh at the
little jewy getting his shirt out," and "I'm told those
jewies does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them."
Buck Mulligan's description of Bloom as "The sheeny!"
in Scylla and Charybdis is not much better, and
Stephen's willingness to incorporate such language into his
Shakespeare talk shortly afterward—"Shylock chimes with the
jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the
queen's leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked forth while
the sheeny was yet alive"—is one measure of
just how indiscriminately he gathers material for his thesis
and how eagerly he seeks to be included in the Dublin literary
community.
Mulligan follows this slur with another: "He jumped up and
snatched the card. / —What's his name? Ikey Moses?
Bloom." This phrase, which is heard again in Circe
as "Ikey Mo," combines the names Isaac and
Moses. It may have originated with, and at a minimum was
popularized by, the Ally Sloper cartoon series that began
running in Judy magazine (the counterpart to Punch)
in August 1867, and later in its own magazine called Ally
Sloper's Half Holiday. The name of Ally Sloper, the
main character, derived from the fact that he was often to be
seen sloping off up some alley to avoid a landlord or
creditor. He was the first recurring comic strip character,
and inspired a host of imitators from Charlie Chaplin's tramp
to W. C. Fields' lush. Later in Circe a "hobgoblin
in the image of Punch Costello" is given an "Ally
Sloper nose."
Ally's Jewish pal Ikey Mo was similarly disreputable, drawing
on ancient stereotypes
of Jews as money-grubbing. Gifford notes that he "is portrayed
as an unctuous pickpocket and small-time con man; he even
picks his hostess's pocket during a Christmas party." Despite
the derogatory nature of the representation, these two
characters, Gentile and Jew, were presented on an equal
footing, and their occasionally successful scheming invited
affection as much as disdain. It seems that "Ikey" could, as
Gifford notes, mean not only "Jew or Jewish," but also "smart,
alert, artful, clever." Bloom uses it in this sense in Calypso
when he admires Arthur Griffith's witty remark: "He prolonged
his pleased smile. Ikey touch that: homerule
sun rising up in the northwest."
But "Ikey Moses" certainly did carry strains of anti-Semitic
contempt. Versions of an Irish and Scottish music hall song
sometimes called My Old Cloth Shop present a tailor
of that name who is eagerly concerned with making money,
sometimes against the wishes of the Gentile customers who
would like to take their new clothes without paying the dirty
Jew who made them.
Alan Collins, the Australian Jewish author of Alva's
Boy: An Unsentimental Memoir (2009), records that he
would often join in his gentile companions' singing of another
song that used the name, simply because he liked the tune:
Ikey Moses King of the Jews
Sold his wife for a pair of shoes,
When the shoes began to wear
Ikey Moses began to swear. (159)
A version of this song appears in Circe:
Moses, Moses, king of the jews,
Wiped his arse in the Daily News.
Racial hatred is despicable, but today's climate of
ultra-solemn multi-cultural political correctness can make it
impossible to appreciate the not-always-hateful vitality of
late 19th and early 20th century cities lit up by the
antagonisms, stereotypes, and mocking jokes of rival ethnic
communities. "Ikey Moses" seems to fall more in the category
of insensitive ribbing than in the realm of violent bigotry
occupied by men who say that jewies have a queer odor coming
off them.
