easpageag:
hardcorefornerds:
[…]
“Enoch had been assured that Eamon de Valera’s newly self-governing Ireland was a welcome place for Jews and in some measure he had been well-informed. De Valera was very keen to attract commerce to the new Ireland; being a conventionally anti-Semite Irish Catholic, he naturally assumed that Jews were good at buying and selling and would be an asset to the economy. Accordingly, Jewish immigrants were welcome in Ireland with almost no restrictions, as long as they were willing to work or could find employment.”
[…]
That excuses his errors in dates, but still does little to soothe his cynical assertion that Ireland wasn’t as welcoing as his Grandfather remembered, or that Dev was Antisemitic. By virtually all accounts Ireland has always been at the very least entirely unfazed by Jewish communities, if not active and vocal supporters.
Pretty much every odd couple set up nowadays - one loud and boorish, the other wordy but neurotic - can be traced back to the classic Vaudeville “an Irishman and a Jew” act, which was born out of the close links between the two communities in America. Whitechapel, one Londons shittier ghettos until comparatively recently, has historically been a mixture of Irish and Jewish families (though it’s now mostly Muslim). The list of contemporary suspects in the Jack The Ripper case were all either exclusively Irish or Jewish, and the Battle Of Cable Street (and infamous anti-fascist riot) was noted for a notable Irish turnout.
Also, saying that Dev was cynically allowing Jewish refugees to enter Ireland to promote business is pretty damn unfair. Dev had a pretty long track record of supporting Jewish communities, and more or less stated that it was because they were so hated elsewhere.
Though Catholicism was the constitutionally recognised religion of the state (until the 70’s), Judaism was also specifically mentioned as a religion close to Irelands heart, at Devs insistence. He also personally over turned several court decisions to reject Jewish refugees following WWII. Even the Blueshirts, Irelands pseudo-fascists, were more concerned with beating up the IRA than picking on Jews, and Cosgrave quickly nixed all that when they teamed up to form Fine Gael.
By “virtually all accounts” I assume you’re excluding the Limerick Pogrom of 1904? To be fair, it was an isolated incident, but I think that there is a level of passive anti-Semitism in Irish history - something De Valera probably had a more reasonable and moderate perspective on, yet he is unlikely to have entirely escaped the Irish Catholic mould that he quite willingly saw himself as preserving.
The most reliable source I have to hand is Diarmuid Ferriter’s Judging Dev, which is generally seen as quite sympathetic to de Valera, and this is what it says about his attitude in the 1930s:
“De Valera had singled out the Jewish community for special mention in the 1937 Constitution at a time when there were up to 27 Jewish grocery, bakery and general stores on Clanbrassil Street on Dublin, a number of kosher butcher shops an more than a dozen synagogues dotted around the South Circular Road (the Jewish population in Dublin in the 1940s was nearly 6,000); they had ‘a vibrant and rich communal life’ and made a disproportionate contribution to the business and the social fabric of the capital.”
The last part of which isn’t too different from what Judt ‘cynically’ ascribes to De Valera; bear in mind that the chapter in Thinking the Twentieth Century covers the experience of Jews throughout Europe, from Vienna to Poland and the rest of provincial Eastern Europe, which were generally much worse. The point is that Ireland wasn’t bad in terms of anti-Semitism, in fact pretty good by comparison (postwar Britain doesn’t escape criticism either, which is where Judt himself grew up); but neither was it a shining beacon of tolerance, except by default. Honestly, I don’t think he’s trying to attack Ireland in any way (if anything, he does that for our contemporary neoliberal economics and hypocrisy towards EU funds), and seems to accept his father’s experience as pretty genuine - as I say, it would be contrasted with likely experiences in the rest of Europe in the 1930s - and it’s probably his grandfather’s footloose optimism that he’s cynically deflating as much as anything else.
As for the article in the Constitution (44.1.3, since deleted along with the preceding article, 44.1.2, which recognised the ‘special position’ of the Catholic Church) recognises the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterians, Methodists, Quakers, and “the Jewish Congregations” - progressive for the time, of course, but it basically put the faith on a par with the Protestants and Dissenters; hardly religions close to the heart of the traditional Irish Catholic.
(What the association of the Irish and Jews in the popular history of America and Britain has anything to with Irish domestic attitudes I don’t know; it seems rather like using the experiences of African-Americans and Irish-Americans to show that people in Dublin aren’t racist.)
I’m on shaky ground taking Joyce’s Ulysses as historical fact (even shakier not even having read Cormac Ó Gráda’s definitive study Jewish Ireland in the age of Joyce, which probably has something to say as to its accuracy), but the two key points relating to anti-Semitism in that book is that Leopold Bloom is accepted up until he’s not, specifically by a pre-independence nationalist, and the ‘joke’ of Stephen’s anti-Semitic schoolmaster that “Ireland has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted” the Jews “because she never let them in”. That was fiction set in 1904 - but this was the Irish Department of Justice actually said in 1948:
“It has always been the policy of the Minister for Justice to restrict the admission of Jewish aliens, for the reason that any substantial increase in our Jewish population might give rise to an anti-Semitic problem.”
Identical logic, made official (albeit technically under a Fine Gael minister, as of two months, in the First Inter-Party Government). If De Valera later (in the 1950s) overruled that policy, he is to be commended, but it mainly just shows his reasonableness prevailing over an established attitude within the Irish government. More or less the same reasoning is even repeated by Ferriter, after he quotes Ó Gráda as saying:
“‘Irish anti-Semitism existed and traces doubtless still persist, but it was of a relatively mild variety.’ The Irish-Jewish community was small, but well-integrated and many of its members thrived in business, arts and education. Had there been a more pronounced anti-Semitism, it is difficult to see how such integration could have happened.”
Essentially the Jewish community in Ireland was not (typically) persecuted because it was accepted as marginal, but although this is perhaps positive in the context of the rest of Europe, it also means that there is a passive anti-Semitism in Ireland based on relatively unfamiliarity with Jews (as has been the case with other communities of immigrants till more recently, to the extent that Ireland has become a slightly less homogeneous society). I have heard intellectual Catholics say quite idiotic things about Israel and Palestine, and while I’m no fan of the latter’s foreign policy and the more extremist Zionism, the uncritical support for pro-Palestinian groups in Ireland is not unrelated to a certain level of traditional Catholic anti-Semitism - or so it seems to me.
