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April 9, 2004/Nisan 18 5764, Vol. 56, No. 29
A personal odyssey of Jewish life in Dublin
NORMAN LEVINE
Special to Jewish News
Raphael Sieb, curator of the Irish Jewish Museum in Dublin, lectures in the former Walworth Road Synagogue to a class of Catholic high school students. The museum contains a collection of memorabilia relating to the Irish Jewish communities and the various associations and contributions they made to present-day Ireland.
Photo by Norman Levine
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Dublin has a love affair with Jews. The greatest novel of the 20th Century, "Ulysses," was written by an Irishman, James Joyce, and the main character is a Dublin Jew named Leopold Bloom, who spends June 16, 1904, on his own odyssey of the city.
Today both Joyce and Bloom are dead, but a small Jewish presence survives in Dublin, and the Irish Jewish Museum is a memorial to the history of the Jewish Diaspora in Ireland.
The Irish Jewish Museum is located at 3-4 Walworth Road in the Portobello section of Dublin, the old Jewish Quarter of the city. A modest museum, the first floor is devoted to a pictorial and literary accounting of the Irish Jewish community, while the second floor is occupied by the Old Synagogue, which is no longer in use. When the Old Synagogue functioned, it accommodated approximately 160 men and women.
The Jewish settlement in Ireland essentially began in 1496 with the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal. This original Sephardic immigration was matched 400 years later by the arrival of Ashkenazic Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. Between 1880 and 1910, approximately 2,000 Ashkenazic Jews entered Ireland, settling not only in Dublin, but in Belfast and Cork. At the present time, there are Orthodox Synagogues in Belfast and Cork, while Dublin has two functioning synagogues, one Orthodox and the other Progressive.
The Jewish population peaked at 5,500 in the late 1940s, but since then the majority of Irish Jews emigrated out of the country. There are currently 1,790 Jews in the Irish Republic (Southern Ireland), and 365 Jews in Northern Ireland (Belfast and its surrounding counties). A Jewish day school operates in Dublin at Stratford College, which is located in the prosperous suburban area of Rathgar, the neighborhood in which James Joyce was born, and in which Jews established residence after they migrated from Portobello.
In February, when I visited the Irish Jewish Museum, the curator, Raphael Sieb, was lecturing in the second floor synagogue to a class of high school students who attended a Catholic high school. The high school class was co-ed, but following the Orthodox tradition of the synagogue, Sieb divided the boys and girls into two separate sections. It was a rare moment to observe what these Catholic students wanted to know about the Jewish religion, and to hear the answers supplied to them by Sieb as he stood in front of the Torah.
"What is a bar mitzvah?" a student asked.
"Are there women rabbis?" another student questioned.
"What are the religious duties of a Jew?" a third queried.
"Where does the Star of David come from?"
"Do the Jews believe in a messiah?"
"What do the Jewish people think about Jesus?"
"Does Jesus hold a special place in the Jewish religion?"
The dialogue between Sieb and the students was a case study of interfaith education, and an in-dication that religious tolerance exists between Catholics in this land of St. Patrick, and the Jews. Religious toleration and social nondiscrimination exists in the Irish Republic and Jews have prospered by the absence of barriers. The following Jews held high office in the Irish Republic: in 1977 Gerald Goldberg was Lord Mayor of Cork, in 1988 Ben Briscoe was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, while Henry Barron was selected to sit as a judge in the Supreme Court from 1997 to 2002.
The symbiosis between Irish Catholics and Irish Jews is represented by Leopold Bloom, and James Joyce fills Bloom's head with internal soliloquies as he perambulates through the metropolis. For Joyce, the Jews and the Irish were drawn together by a shared identity, for just as the Jews were wanderers through European history, so the Irish were the lost people of the 20th century. Joyce looked upon the Irish as exiled from greatness, and so drew a parallel between Jewish and Irish exclusion from the main currents of European life.
As Bloom walks along Dorset Street, around the corner from his flat at 7-Eccles Street, his imagi-nation lifts him out of Dublin and transfers him to Israel, and his stream of consciousness laments the land:
"A barren land, bare waste, Vulcanic lake, the dead sea; no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edon. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, gray and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race ... The oldest people. Wondered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere."
Norman Levine is an author and free-lance writer living in Phoenix.
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