James Joyce brings the Irish and the Jews together
By: Brendan Patrick Keane | Published Thursday, June 17, 2010, 6:56 PM | Updated Friday, September 9, 2011, 9:43 PM
Bloomsday got my summer
mapped out. I perambulated
New York, as though it were
Dublin, reading bits of Ulysses aloud in
Manhattan like Walt Whitman spouting poetry through
Brooklyn, compacting the universe into one good day, like yesterday.
Leopold Bloom walks through Dublin seeing-through grand mythologies and exalting contemporary details mythologically. He stops in church and admires the spiel and razzle dazzle techniques of the priest, comfortably subsuming Catholic enormity into the integrity of his own honestly un-awed interpretation. And he finds madonnas for worship and wonders worthy of the saints that causes him to burst with the holy spirit on a Dublin beach.
The debasement of sacred things is redeemed by the exaltation of common wonders. The two meet in the paragraphs of Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus walks along Sandymount strand, blind, beholding immortal signs all about him;
Leopold Bloom is walking towards him, admiring shop signs and newspaper headlines in words that will echo for all time from the 20th century to the future. When they collide everything collapses, before it is put back together.
The putting back together happens at the end of the book. Stephen Dedalus is drunk, and is helped to recover in the kitchen of his fatherly friend Leopold Bloom. In Bloom's kitchen, with Leopold's wife upstairs in the bed, thinking and touching herself, building up, yes, her ecstatic finish in the last chapter.
Before this, Leopold and Stephen must put the world back together, and make sense from the mad hatter they just unleashed upon civilization in the chapter before in Nighttown, an area of Dublin ruled by the Greek goddess Circe who turns men into pigs.
The world Leopold and Stephen reconstruct resolves civilization from Irish and Jewish perspectives that are grounded in old learning traditions that Joyce teaches us to respect together.
Leopold plays the Jewish rabbi, Stephen the Irish
culdee. The form of this dialogue is on one level a conversation between father and son after a late night of drinking, it is between Jew and Gael and it is written in the structure of the Catholic Catechism. The chapter is called
Ithaca, and
Hilary Mhic Suibhne has found the perfect excerpt to summarize the overarching affinity from ancient literature between these two figures who are intimate human beings to us, and who are representatives, on a very big level, of their peoples.
From
James Joyce's Ulysses, Ithaca episode, speaking of the Jews and the Irish across a time-span from the ancient to the modern, from the fall of Babel, to the aspirations of each people to attain the protections of nationhood in the new age:
What points of contact existed between these languages and between the peoples who spoke them?
The presence of guttural sounds, diadritic aspirations,epenthetic and servile letters in both languages: their antiquity, both having been taught on the plain of Sinar 242 years after the deluge in the seminary instituted by Fenius Farsaigh, descendant of Noah, progenitor of Ireland: their archaeological, genealogical, hagiographical, exegetical, homiletic, toponomastic, historical and religious literatures comprising the works of rabbis and culdees, Torah, Talmud ( Mischna and Ghemara), Massor, Pentateuch, Book of the Dun Cow, Book of Ballymote, Garland of Howth, Book of Kells: their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival: the isolation of their synagogical and ecclesiastical rites in ghetto (S. Mary’s Abbey) and masshouse( Adam and Eve’s tavern) the proscription of their national costumes in penal laws and Jewish dress acts: the restoration in Chanah David of Zion and the possibility of Irish political autonomy or devolution.
Irish and Hebrew are guttural languages. They are old. The Gaelic Irish have a story from the Tower of Babel. Fenius Farsaigh, the poet who is Ireland's progenitor, crafted Gaelic from the languages of the conflation, as a Hebrew poet once so did also. Both Irish and Jews were oppressed, and their wish to restore
Israel and Ireland as homelands of the Irish and Jewish people respectively, is based on something Leopold and Stephen discussed in Dublin on June 16th 1904, very late at night, a little drunkenly, in Bloom's kitchen, but with utmost mutual respect, while Molly waited upstairs, thinking, and reaching the bliss points of yes.
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Leopold Bloom walks through Dublin seeing-through grand mythologies and exalting contemporary details mythologically. He stops in church and admires the spiel and razzle dazzle techniques of the priest, comfortably subsuming Catholic enormity into the integrity of his own honestly un-awed interpretation. And he finds madonnas for worship and wonders worthy of the saints that causes him to burst with the holy spirit on a Dublin beach.
The debasement of sacred things is redeemed by the exaltation of common wonders. The two meet in the paragraphs of Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus walks along Sandymount strand, blind, beholding immortal signs all about him; Leopold Bloom is walking towards him, admiring shop signs and newspaper headlines in words that will echo for all time from the 20th century to the future. When they collide everything collapses, before it is put back together. 
The putting back together happens at the end of the book. Stephen Dedalus is drunk, and is helped to recover in the kitchen of his fatherly friend Leopold Bloom. In Bloom's kitchen, with Leopold's wife upstairs in the bed, thinking and touching herself, building up, yes, her ecstatic finish in the last chapter. 
Before this, Leopold and Stephen must put the world back together, and make sense from the mad hatter they just unleashed upon civilization in the chapter before in Nighttown, an area of Dublin ruled by the Greek goddess Circe who turns men into pigs. 
The world Leopold and Stephen reconstruct resolves civilization from Irish and Jewish perspectives that are grounded in old learning traditions that Joyce teaches us to respect together. 
From James Joyce's Ulysses, Ithaca episode, speaking of the Jews and the Irish across a time-span from the ancient to the modern, from the fall of Babel, to the aspirations of each people to attain the protections of nationhood in the new age: 
Irish and Hebrew are guttural languages. They are old. The Gaelic Irish have a story from the Tower of Babel. Fenius Farsaigh, the poet who is Ireland's progenitor, crafted Gaelic from the languages of the conflation, as a Hebrew poet once so did also. Both Irish and Jews were oppressed, and their wish to restore Israel and Ireland as homelands of the Irish and Jewish people respectively, is based on something Leopold and Stephen discussed in Dublin on June 16th 1904, very late at night, a little drunkenly, in Bloom's kitchen, but with utmost mutual respect, while Molly waited upstairs, thinking, and reaching the bliss points of yes.
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Switch to the desktop site to post a comment.HonestFeedback | Jun 25, 2010, 03:42 PM EDT
Ceart go leor. Tóg go bog é.
GeorgeDillon | Jun 22, 2010, 09:17 PM EDT
HonestFeed: Why don't you apologize for trying to pretend you know something about Irish? It certainly is not quibbling on my part to correct you when you're talking garbage. You think the Hebrew term is "handy for Irish" -- but you don't know any Irish! What kind of mindless pomposity is this? You probably don't know Hebrew either, but I'm not in a position to call your bluff on that language.
HonestFeedback | Jun 21, 2010, 09:13 PM EDT
You should check out Brendan O'hEhir's book A Gaelic lexicon for Finnegans wake, and glossary for Joyce's other works. You will be surprised how poorly Joyce scholars understand Joyce's Gaelic study. I think the Hebrew grammar term is handy, you don't, who cares. Apiration is about breath, and guttural is about the throat--they are related, but I don't want to get into the nuance of how that is. Irish grammar uses the term lenition not aspiration. This is stupid quibbling.
GeorgeDillon | Jun 21, 2010, 04:45 PM EDT
I don't think Joyce knew much Irish, so he was talking thru his hat. And aspiration is most certainly NOT well described as "guttural" as you erroneously claim. Aspiration of /b/ or /m/ gives you a /v/ sound (/w/ in come cases) -- how's that guttural? Aspiration of /f/ gives you zero -- how's that guttural? The article above by Keane brings in the term "servile", but it is an utterly worthless and irrelevant term is talking about the phonetics of Irish.
HonestFeedback | Jun 19, 2010, 04:58 PM EDT
"servile letters" is grammatical terminology from Hebrew applied to Gaelic by Joyce in the Ithaca excerpt. Aspiration is better described as guttural in an Irish context, though lots of Irish speakers have softened the ch or gh sound. "Servile" is not a grammatical term; it is a useful concept however rough.
GeorgeDavis | Jun 19, 2010, 01:49 PM EDT
What's the term for servile letters in Irish? I don't think I ever heard of that concept, and am dubious that it is has any validity. For example, give us an example of how /h/ aspirates. I suspect Wounded Knee's opinion might be spot on.
HonestFeedback | Jun 19, 2010, 12:44 AM EDT
Servile letters lengthen or aspirate other letters. The letters "i" and "h" often serve such a purpose in Irish. These are the letters that drive English readers crazy when reading Irish writing, because they work very differently in each language. Hebrew has servile letters too. You're right WoundedKnee, the differences between Irish nationalism and Zionism are important. Ireland was not "re-colonized" it was liberated. Israel was not liberated, it was colonized. I think reparations are the cornerstone of historical injustice and should be the basis of a new Palestinian state. That does not end the ancient spiritual connection between the Irish and Jews as often expressed in mutual longing for stolen rights and land. Palestinians are now the inheritors of the status of the disinherited of the earth. It's very pre-Israel to quote Joyce on this without considering Palestinian suffering.
WoundedKnee | Jun 18, 2010, 06:17 PM EDT
A Load of Garbage. There is no comparison. Ireland didn't take over a country already populated and expel its inhabitants. Israel did. ---- By the way, what are "servile letters"? Or is that just more drivel?