Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce

A Socioeconomic History

Cormac Ó Gráda

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780691171050, 9780691127194
• eBook ISBN: 9781400880218
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

James Joyce's Leopold Bloom--the atheistic Everyman of Ulysses, son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother--may have turned the world's literary eyes on Dublin, but those who look to him for history should think again. He could hardly have been a product of the city's bona fide Jewish community, where intermarriage with outsiders was rare and piety was pronounced. In Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, a leading economic historian tells the real story of how Jewish Ireland--and Dublin's Little Jerusalem in particular--made ends meet from the 1870s, when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants landed in Dublin, to the late 1940s, just before the community began its dramatic decline.


In 1866--the year Bloom was born--Dublin's Jewish population hardly existed, and on the eve of World War I it numbered barely three thousand. But this small group of people quickly found an economic niche in an era of depression, and developed a surprisingly vibrant web of institutions.


In a richly detailed, elegantly written blend of historical, economic, and demographic analysis, Cormac Ó Gráda examines the challenges this community faced. He asks how its patterns of child rearing, schooling, and cultural and religious behavior influenced its marital, fertility, and infant-mortality rates. He argues that the community's small size shaped its occupational profile and influenced its acculturation; it also compromised its viability in the long run.



Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce presents a fascinating portrait of a group of people in an unlikely location who, though small in number, comprised Ireland's most resilient immigrant community until the Celtic Tiger's immigration surge of the 1990s.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Arrival and Context
• Chapter 2: “England-Ireland” and Dear Dirty Dublin
• Chapter 3: “They Knew No Trade But Peddling”
• Chapter 4: Self-Employment, Social Mobility
• Chapter 5: Settling In
• Chapter 6: Schooling and Literacy
• Chapter 7: The Demography of Irish Jewry
• Chapter 8: Culture, Family, Health
• Chapter 9: Newcomer to Neighbor
• Chapter 10: Ich Geh Fun “Ire”land
• Appendix 1: Letters to One of the Last “Weekly Men”
• Appendix 2: Mr. Parnell Remembers
• Appendix 3: Louis Hyman, Jessie Bloom, and The Jews of Ireland
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index