Education was highly prized, and many Jewish students distinguished themselves in the Irish school system. This history discusses characteristics common to all Diaspora Jews, such as lower infant mortality rate, higher literacy among their male population and superior cleanliness as a result of the kashrut laws. Furthermore, according to the 1911 census, Dublin’s Jews were more prosperous than their London counterparts. ![]() Chaim Herzog, the sixth president of Israel, was born in Belfast his father, Yitzhak Halevy Herzog, was Ireland’s chief rabbi and later Israel’s. In the 1980s there was a Jewish minister of parliament in every one of Ireland’s three major political parties. Dublin had two Jewish mayors - Robert Briscoe and his son Benjamin. Such patriots as Jacob Elyan, Michael Noyk and Estelle Soloman fought for Ireland’s freedom from British rule. Novelist David Marcus was an editor and advocate for fiction written in Irish Gaelic. The Irish Jews were prominent both in cultural and political life. The community supported dozens of different groups, ranging from the Montefiore Musical and Dramatic Club to the Dublin Jewish Athletic Association. By 1901, one in two Jewish households employed a domestic servant. The Irish moneylender Avrom Behr Appel had two sons and 11 grandsons, all doctors. The children of peddlers, moneylenders and tailors became dentists, doctors and lawyers. Although there were Jewish communities in Cork, Limerick and Belfast, more than half of Ireland’s Jews lived in Dublin.Īn upwardly mobile community, its members moved within a decade to middle-class housing from tenements. The Hebrew Philanthropic Loan Society provided startup capital to the Jewish emigrants who arrived in Ireland penniless, something no Irish bank would do for its Irish counterparts. “It was the very poverty of the so many Irish families that created a market for the trades in which the immigrant Litvaks specialized,” Gráda writes. Known as shilling-a-week men, they sold on credit, visiting households weekly to collect payment. ![]() The peddlers sold holy pictures of Jesus and Mary, as well as sewing supplies and tea. The first generation of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants were peddlers and moneylenders. ![]() The Jews were the biggest group of nonimmigrants from the United Kingdom in Ireland. Nevertheless, its Jewish population climbed to 5,148 in 1911 from 285 in 1871. 22% of Ireland’s population was foreign born more people were emigrating from Ireland than from any other country in Europe. ![]() While much has been written about the Jewishness of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, one of the most famous characters in all of literature, few know anything about the remarkable community in Ireland that inspired Joyce to create him.Īccording to the author, Jews from Kovno, Lithuania, began arriving in Ireland in the early 1870s, quickly dwarfing any previous Jewish population. The book’s main focus is the Jewish community from the 1870s through the 1940s, roughly during the “Ulysses” author’s lifetime. Gráda’s new economic chronicle, “Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce,” traces the history of the Jews in Ireland from 1079, when they first arrived, up until the present day. Before going to Israel she had never met a Jew, and she did not know that there was a small but vibrant community in her own backyard.Ĭormac Ó. Wandering around the Old City of Jerusalem, she walked into a shop and was amazed when the Orthodox Jew at the counter began speaking to her in Gaelic. My Irish Catholic grandmother fulfilled a life-long goal in her 80s when she traveled to the Holy Land however, the story she told on her return was not of the sights she’d seen. Princeton University Press, 320 pages, $35. Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History
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