The canard goes back at least as far as the 16th century. In
an article titled "Grease and Sweat: Race and Smell in
Eighteenth-Century English Culture," Cultural and Social
History 13 (2016): 307-22, William Tullett notes that
early versions of the idea held that the Jewish smell was
innate, an "inherited mark" bestowed on the race as "a curse
from God"; but starting in the second half of the 17th century
opinion shifted to the view that only some Jews stank (309).
Poor Jews, Jews with bad diets and bad hygiene, Jews who had
not converted to Christianity, Jews who tramped around selling
used clothing—those sorts of Jews smelled bad, but more
respectable members of the race did not. This ideological
shift can perhaps be explained sociologically: "The move to
more material, less theological, causes of Jewish odour
occurred at the same time as Jews, particularly often-poorer
Ashkenazi, started to settle in England in ever-greater
numbers. It was the physical presence of Jews in London, often
in poorer run down areas and engaged in trades associated with
foul odour, that enabled a distinction between ostensibly poor
and foul smelling Jews and the more hygienic and wealthy sort
and thus an association of Jewish stink with poverty rather
than divine wrath" (314-15).
This economic distinction is tailor-made for Bloom, whose
father was one of those poor European Jews who emigrated to
London, and then to Ireland. He started out as a traveling
salesman, as did Bloom when he came
of age. Even after his marriage Bloom and his wife sold old
clothes during a time of financial hardship, but he
escaped that stigmatizing mark of racial inferiority, and for
some time now he has been socializing with middle-class
Gentiles rather than poor Jews. Costello may wish to believe
that "The fetor judaicus is most
perceptible" in him, but Bloom's own self-image is bound
up with cleansing, fresh-scented lemon soap. The Pears' Soap
whose jingle he recalls in Lotus Eaters promised to
make dusky bodies whiter and to lift grimy laborers into the
non-sweating class. Ads for Pears and other soaps have
shaped Bloom's consciousness, helping him to distinguish
himself from men like Reuben J. Dodd: "Now he's really
what they call a dirty jew."
Two more aspects of the antisemitic belief bear mentioning
given their clear relevance to details in Joyce's fiction.
First is the supposition that Jewish men may give off a foul
odor because they menstruate. Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner
cite one study of the bizarre belief, Irven Resnick's
"Medieval Roots of the Myth of the Jewish Male Menses," The
Harvard Theological Review 93 (2000), p. 244. More to
the point, in "Shylock's Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in
Early Modern England," The Review of English Studies
50 (1999): 440-62, David Katz notes that Havelock Ellis,
Sigmund Freud, and other late 19th century
"sexologists"—writers who profoundly influenced Joyce's
writing of Circe—believed the phenomenon to be real.
(Freud claimed to have experienced it himself. Possession of a
uterus or vagina was not supposed necessary.)
Joyce must have been aware of this explanation of the foetor
judaicus, because Costello delivers his finding as one
in a series of observations about Bloom's suspiciously
indeterminate gender. Mulligan declares him to be virgo
intacta (at which "Bloom holds his high grade hat
over his genital organs"), Madden diagnoses a case of "hypsospadia"
(a birth defect in which the urethra exits from the underside
of the penis), Crotthers reports on the albuminous state of
his urine, and Dixon declares him to be "a finished example of
the new womanly man.... He is about to have a baby." If
Costello's report of an odor associates Bloom with
menstruation, it is only one example of his defective
manliness in this catalogue of medical judgments, and only one
of many passages in Ulysses that address his interest
in menstruation.
A second notion associated with the olfactory racial
stereotype appears in Cyclops when the narrator sees
Garryowen sniffing at Bloom: "the old dog smelling him all
the time I'm told those jewies does have a sort of a queer
odour coming off them for dogs." Citing Edward Long's History
of Jamaica (1774), Tullett mentions the belief that
Africans and native Americans were better than white Europeans
at detecting the scents that they bore: "A similar erasure of
the European nose was demonstrated in the use of dogs to
detect racial odour. This practice has resonances with the
later use of dogs in nineteenth-century America to track
runaway slaves and by the Nazis to detect the ‘odour of
dissent’.... Long believed that dogs could trace black scent,
noting how canines lost none of their natural sagacity when
transplanted to Jamaica. He argued that slaves dreaded dogs
because they were used to hunt them down, as they had been by
the Spaniards when hunting American Indians. Dogs operated for
Long, as the noses of Native Americans and Africans had done,
as sensory prostheses that mediated and therefore obscured the
role of the European nose in detecting the odour of the racial
other" (312-13).
Bloom may fool some dull Catholic noses, then, but the
snarling mongrel who charges after him at the end of Cyclops
knows better. He does not attack simply because the Citizen
yells, "After him, Garry! After him, boy!" The dog's nose has
already told him just what sort of mongrel human has wormed
his way into Barney Kiernan's.
