Making the Desert Bloom

Making the Desert Bloom

by Eliezer Segal

Perhaps some of my readers will be observing “Bloomsday” on June 16. This is the date on which the events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses take place. The book recounts the banal doings of its hero, Mr. Leopold Bloom, as he goes about his business and diversions in various locations in Dublin on that day in the year 1904. 

As his name might suggest, Bloom was of Jewish lineage, though he had converted to Christianity no fewer than three times. Nevertheless, his acquaintances all regarded him as a Jew, for better or for worse, as did he himself. At any rate, the novel is packed with references to Jewish culture and history, much of it mashed up and tossed about in the author’s experimental stream-of-consciousness style. The Judaic references in Ulysses are not confined to the Bible or ancient Hebrew texts. For example, it occasionally alludes to links between biblical Moses and his later namesakes Maimonides, Mendelssohn and Montefiore. 

I find it remarkable that Ulysses contains several mentions of the Zionist movement which was still in its infancy in 1904, barely seven years after the first Zionist Congress in Basel. One particular instance took the form of a leaflet that Bloom picked up early in the narrative. It promoted a project called “Agendath Netaim,” which offered an opportunity to invest in a model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias.” He begins reading the advertisement in a very non-kosher butcher shop run by one Dlugacz, presumably a Jew, as he is awaiting his breakfast order of pork kidney; and he retains it throughout the day. The newspaper cutting is mentioned more than a dozen times in the novel. 

Anybody familiar with Hebrew will recognize “Agendath” as a corruption of “agudath,” = “association.” Although it can be easily explained as a copyist’s error, the sort we would now blame on a computer’s auto-correct function, Joyce scholars devoted much energy and erudition to determining whether to ascribe it to Joyce himself—either as a mistake or as an intentional pun of the kind that permeates his writing—or to the typesetters.

In the advertisement, the contact address was given as “Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin.” In reality, however, that enterprise was established in 1905 (a year later than the date of the story), and the office at that address would not exist until 1907 or 1908 at the earliest. In 1910, the company was officially registered with the Turkish authorities, and its mandate was outlined in a Hebrew pamphlet published in Constantinople in 1910. 

By 1912 the newly erected building in Berlin housed several offices devoted to selling real estate in Palestine, including the “Tiberias Land and Plantation Corporation, Ltd.” The various enterprises promoted by these corporations, whether marketed as financial investments or as opportunities for personal fulfilment, strove to persuade potential investors to purchase lands from the Turkish government with prospects of lush farms, sanatoriums (presumably built upon the famous hot springs of Tiberias) and orchards brimming with olives, oranges, almonds and citrons. The mission of Agudat Netaim was to lay the groundwork for economically viable agricultural settlements that would then be sold at a profit to potential immigrants. Several prominent Zionist leaders were counted among the directors and investors in Agudat Netaim, which continued to function for several decades. Joyce would have known something about projects of that sort from a collection of essays on Zionist theory and practice published in 1916, of which he owned a copy. 

As a sensitive and knowledgeable intellectual living amidst the complexities of modern European society, we hardly need to seek special justifications for Joyce’s choice of a “wandering Jew’ in Dublin as a contemporary exemplar of the Ulysses of classical myth. His fascination with the Jewish question was cultivated during the central period of his life that he spent teaching English in Trieste. Trieste then belonged to the Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian) empire, and was a major cultural hub with a cosmopolitan Jewish populace. Joyce’s social circle included several close Jewish friends and students. 

Nonetheless, it is widely held that there was another, more immediate motive underlying his decision to focus his story on a Jewish hero. Ireland at the time was, after all, undergoing tensions that were very similar to those of the Jews. Although—in contrast to the Jews—most Irish folk were dwelling on their native soil, they also experienced a history of religious and cultural persecution. 

In one of his associative rants, Bloom fantasized about the interwoven histories of the two peoples, their languages and literatures, a theme that he traced back to the division into languages as described in the biblical myth of the tower of Babel. In this extraordinary passage, he made reference to “the presence of guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and servile letters in both languages.” He surveyed the kindred literatures of the two peoples, “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.” Each nation dreamed of ultimate “restoration in Chanah David of Zion and the possibility of Irish political autonomy or devolution.”

Joyce went on to declare: 

What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple, ethnically irreducible consummation?

Kolod balejwaw pnimah

Nefesch, jehudi, homijah.

The familiar  Zionist anthem “HaTikvah [=the hope]”, which had been composed in 1878 and officially adopted in 1903, was thus known in June 1904 to Leopold Bloom (at least its opening lines), and to Joyce by 1920. It speaks of the dispersed nation’s enduring hope 

to be a free nation in our land, 
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

As it happened, the song that would be adopted in 1926 as the anthem of free Ireland expresses uncannily similar sentiments, proclaiming that 

Some have come from a land beyond the wave, 
Sworn to be free, no more our ancient sireland,
Shall shelter the despot or the slave.

  • First Publication:
    • The Alberta Jewish News, Edmonton and Calgary, March 22, 2023, p. 38.
  • For further reading:
    • Bell, M. David. “The Seach for Agendath Netaim: Some Progress, but No Solution.” James Joyce Quarterly 12, no. 3 (1975): 251–58.
    • Bulhof, Francis. “Agendath Again.” James Joyce Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1970): 326–32.
    • Byrnes, Robert. “Agendath Netaim Discovered: Why Bloom Isn’t a Zionist.” James Joyce Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1992): 833–38.
    • Davison, Neil R. James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and “the Jew” in Modernist Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
    • Emanuel, Noga. “‘What Is Your Nation, If I May Ask?’: Antisemitism and Zionism in James Joyce’s Ulysses.” Fathom, June 2022.
    • Hyman, Louis. “Letters to the Editor.” James Joyce Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1976): 486–88.
    • Katz, Yossi. “An Internal Zionist Dispute on Jewish Settlement Outside the Land of Israel: The Case of Turkey (1911—1912).” Zion 49, no. 3 (1984): 265–88. 
    • Nadel, Ira Bruce. Joyce and the Jews: Culture and Texts. Florida James Joyce Series. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.
    • Parish, Charles. “Agenbite of Agendath Netaim.” James Joyce Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1969): 237–41.
    • Reizbaum, Marilyn. James Joyce’s Judaic Other. Contraversions : Jews and Other Differences. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999.
    • Wicht, Wolfgang. “Another Side-Street Off ‘Bleibtreustrasse 34.’” James Joyce Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2010): 154–56.
    • ———. “‘Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15.’ (U 4.199), Once Again.” James Joyce Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2003): 797–810.
    • Williams, Edwin W. “Agendath Netaim: Promised Land or Waste Land.” Modern Fiction Studies 32, no. 2 (1986): 228–35.

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