The Deep Roots of Irish Antisemitism

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

 

On Monday, the Israeli government announced that it was making the “tough decision” to close its embassy in Ireland. Explaining the move, Israel’s ambassador to the country, Dana Erlich said Ireland has taken “a more extreme stance than any other country” against Israel. Ireland has recognized a Palestinian state and recently backed South Africa’s action against Israel at the International Court of Justice, asking the court to “broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a state.” In other words, it is looking to redefine genocide itself in order to condemn Israel.

 

Where does all of this come from? The best explanation we’ve read comes from historian and Free Press contributor Simon Sebag Montefiore, in a story that originally ran in The Spectator in 1997.

 

Here, with a new prologue to his original article, he introduces a much-neglected episode of Irish history—and his own family story.

 

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When I was young, my Irish aunt used to talk about a long-distant childhood trauma in Ireland. I never quite understood what she was talking about—but when she was happy, she had quite a strong Irish accent.

 

Much later, I started to research the story of my family: the escape of my great-grandparents and their children from Vilna, in what is now Lithuania and was then a province of Tsar Nicholas II’s Romanov Empire. From there, their short stay in Limerick, where they were attacked and forced to leave for England, and what it all meant.

 

Now, more than 25 years after I researched this history—which is also my own—the Irish government has become the most active and noisy critic of the Jewish state in the entire Western world. It is much more hostile than much of the Arab world itself.

 

During World War II, Irish nationalists cooperated against Britain with the Nazis. Irish writers like the much-garlanded novelist Francis Stuart broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin. (As late as 2000, Stuart was lauded as a national treasure, and elected a Saoi—Wise One—of Aosdána, the state-sponsored association of Irish artists. During my interview with Stuart in 1997, he showed no regret for backing Adolf Hitler and reveled in quoting chilling outrageous reflections on the toxic nature of Jews.) Most notoriously, on May 2, 1945, the Irish premier Éamon de Valera and his foreign minister visited the Nazi minister in Dublin “to offer condolences” for the death of Hitler—an astonishing gesture.

 

In the decades since, Ireland has sometimes shown hostility to the idea of Jewish self-determination and the existence of the Jewish republic, Israel, which Ireland only extended de jure recognition of in 1963, and established diplomatic relations in 1975, among the last countries in the Western world to do so (though it preceded the Vatican by more than a decade).

 

Since October 7, 2023, including in the immediate aftermath of the attacks by Hamas from Gaza and then Hezbollah in the north, the Irish government, backed by many activists in media and academia, has shown deepening hostility to Israel. No doubt there is a great deal of humanitarian anguish at the loss of civilian lives, both Israeli and Palestinian, in the war that began last year, and a belief in Palestinian self-determination and the creation of Two States, Jewish and Palestinian, alongside each other. It is true that some of the Irish hostility to Israel derives from the anti-British, anti-imperialist perspective of Irish history; the misguided idea that the Palestinian experience at the hands of Israel is similar to that of the Irish with the British; and the simplistic, ahistorical ideology of decolonialization, in which the Palestinians are virtuous oppressed and the Israelis are iniquitous oppressors.

 

But Ireland’s animosity has also been marked by visceral hostility from the government and activists to the very existence of Israel, by a lack of proportion and perspective in policy toward the Jewish state, by the deployment of medieval antisemitic tropes, harassment of Jewish students, and the inversion of Jewish history against Jews and Israelis, and by the blind acceptance of the often mendacious Hamas terrorist narrative. On the ground, the Irish contingent in the UNIFIL peacekeeping force in Lebanon, appointed to enforce the disarmament of Hezbollah, turned a blind eye to the terrorist group as they attacked Israel. This did not appear out of thin air; it has a background and this story is a small part of it.

 

My family, the Jaffes, were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Ireland, arriving there in 1904 after fleeing the 1903 pogroms in the Russian empire. They settled in Limerick, only to be driven out in the all-but-forgotten Limerick Pogrom. My article recounts an experience suffered by my own family over a century ago; it does not reflect on all Irish people then or now. Indeed, at the same time as the pogrom in Limerick in 1904, an Irish Jew, Otto Jaffe (no relation) was elected Lord Mayor of Belfast for the second time. So this must always be a nuanced picture.

 

My 1997 article was written alongside a documentary I presented on British Channel 4 that I made about Ireland, Irish nationalism, and its neglected connection to antisemitism. This is that family story.

 

***

 

There is a myth that the last antisemitic pogrom in the British Isles was in medieval York. It was far more recent than that: The long-forgotten Limerick pogrom happened in 1904. It began with a sermon given by a priest and gathered momentum because it was backed by Arthur Griffith, the founder of the original Sinn Féin and friend of Michael Collins.

 

The story of the Limerick pogrom (or “boycott,” as it is also known) has a special resonance for me because my grandfather and his family, the Jaffes, lived in Limerick then—though they never mentioned it. Indeed, Irish Jewry, including its most famous son, Chaim Herzog, late president of Israel, had protested that Ireland was the most tolerant land in Europe. Now it appears that they protested too much. The strangest thing of all is that the Jews of today’s Ireland are still frightened of telling this story. When I made a television film about the pogrom, most Irish Jews were too scared of “making trouble, attracting attention” to take part in it.

 

I had always been proud of my Irish roots. My late grandfather, Henry Jaffe, who lost his Irish accent but kept his debonair Irish charm, used to say that he had seen mermaids at Ballybunion, and Aunt Rose used to reminisce in an Irish brogue about the Limerick Races. While talking to a distinguished Irish political writer, I mentioned that I was descended from Limerick Jews. He told me the story that became the basis of my film about the origins of Sinn Féin.

 

Virtually the whole Jewish community in Limerick, numbering about 170, were from the village of Akmenė in the Tsar’s Baltic territories, which are now Lithuania—part of the Pale of Settlement, the only area where Jews were allowed to live. When in the 1880s Nicholas II stepped up his anti-Jewish legislation, my great-great-grandfather Benjamin Jaffe and most of Akmenė decided to leave before the Cossacks returned. Benjamin bought a ticket for New York, but when he arrived at the picturesque imperial British port of Queenstown in southern Ireland (now called Cobh, whence the Titanic departed on its final voyage), he was told that he had arrived in the New World. “But that doesn’t look like New York,” the Jews protested as they disembarked. “New York’s the next parish,” they were told. When they discovered this was not the case, they settled in Limerick.

 

They lived together in considerable poverty on Colooney Street, which soon became known as Little Jerusalem. In the 1901 census, four years before the pogrom, my maternal family were registered as peddlers. The patriarch, Benjamin, a magnificent man with a long white beard, was a peddler, though really he was the chazan (singer) and mohel (circumciser) of the little community. He lived at 64 Colooney Street and his son Max, aged 26, lived at Number 31 with his own family, which included my grandfather Henry, aged 3, and my great-aunt Rose, aged 1.

 

The family has always been proud that Max was a dentist, but I soon discovered that he was not technically qualified; the census called him, alarmingly, “dental mechanic.” It comments dryly that the family could read and write. They must have been the most erudite peddlers who ever existed, for they were as scholarly as they were poor. My grandfather’s bar mitzvah speech is written in both English and in fluent ancient Hebrew, and filled with biblical references.

 

However hard it was to do business in Limerick, it seemed a safer sanctuary than Russia. But three years after the census, when my grandfather was 6, hatred of this tiny Jewish community reached fever pitch among the very poor Irish to whom they sold their wares. They often sold on credit, and this caused savage resentment. Sometimes when a Jew went to the surrounding countryside to collect a debt, peasant women would pull out their breasts, shout “Rape!,” and then the men would beat up the Jew. An ostentatious Jewish wedding apparently caused jealousy. The pogrom was the result of the increasingly vicious agitation of the spiritual director of Limerick’s Redemptorist Order, Father John Creagh, whose church overshadowed Little Jerusalem. The climax came when Creagh, “a speaker of fervid eloquence,” gave his sermon entitled “How the Israelites trade,” on Monday, January 11, 1904. It reads like a grotesque parody of antisemitism:

 

The Jews rejected Jesus, they crucified Him and called down the curse of His precious blood on their own heads. . . they did not hesitate to shed Christian blood. Nowadays they dare not kidnap and slay Christian children, but they will not hesitate to expose them to a longer and more cruel martyrdom by taking the clothes off their backs and the bit out of their mouths.

 

Then Creagh came to the Jews of Limerick:

 

Twenty years ago and less, Jews were known only by name and evil repute in Limerick. They were sucking the blood of other nations, but those nations turned them out. And they come to our land to fasten themselves like leeches. Their rags have been exchanged for silk. They have wormed themselves into every business. . . the furniture trade, the milk trade, the drapery trade—and they have even traded under Irish names. . . . The victims of the Jews are mostly women. . . .The Jew has a sweet tongue when he wishes. . . . If you want an example, look to France. What is at present going on in that land?

 

The reference to the Dreyfus scandal is significant.

 

The injustice of it was little consolation to the Jews of Colooney Street when the thousand or so worshippers of Creagh’s church poured out, as they were to do daily for a month. A huge drunken mob gathered, wielding burning torches. They worked their way down Colooney Street smashing windows and front doors, and forcing their way into the houses which they then looted. For more than a month the Jews of Limerick waited, terrified in their own homes, almost starving, for Creagh had urged the people not to pay their debts. No one would do business with them. If they walked in the streets, they were beaten. The only miracle was that no one lost his life, but for the Jews who had just escaped the Cossacks, it was terrifying.

 

The police did very little at first. Only 14-year-old John Raleigh was arrested for stoning Rabbi Elias Levin. But Raleigh was greeted after his one-month sentence by a mob that carried him on their shoulders. And the mayor and corporation of Limerick shamefully met to support Raleigh and Creagh.

 

The reaction in Dublin and London was confused. Michael Davitt, who represented the liberal and tolerant Irish tradition that is more familiar to us, wrote at once a letter of powerful outrage, attacking Creagh. But Creagh replied with sermons of hysterical antisemitism. John Redmond, the Irish leader in the House of Commons, weakly criticized the pogrom. The beleaguered Rabbi Levin bravely defied the mob. Soon the disturbances were raised in Parliament, where the chief secretary of Ireland, George Wyndham, languidly promised to protect the Limerick Jews. The Board of Deputies of British Jews managed to get the lay leader of British Catholics, the Duke of Norfolk, to intervene.

 

Bishop Edward O’Dwyer of Limerick clearly supported Creagh, but an important journalist in Dublin encouraged Creagh’s mob from the beginning, giving it intellectual and political legitimacy. Griffith claimed the boycott was only directed against the trading methods of the Jews, that the reference to ritual murder was taken out of context, and that Creagh’s object was noble. He described the Jews as “hideous. . . wild, savage, filthy forms. . . strange people, alien to us in thought.” Griffith linked Limerick, Dreyfus, and the South African Jews together to show that internationally, they were evil. It was Griffith who propagated a racial blood-and-soil nationalism, the vision of a pure Catholic Gaelic Irish race that could not include Jewish aliens—nor, by implication, Protestants, many of whom were indeed driven out of southern Ireland on independence. This was what Ourselves Alone (the translation of Sinn Féin) meant to its founder. This was the ideology he brought to Sinn Féin, the original nationalist party that after independence split into the two major political parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael that still run the Irish Republic today. (In 1970, in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a new Sinn Féin was founded that was associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army: Sinn Féin’s then-president, Gerry Adams, refused to discuss the founder of Sinn Féin with me, and Sinn Fein is now the largest political party in British Northern Ireland with its leader serving as first minister.)

 

Creagh left in honor in 1906 with his confraternity still acclaiming “his indomitable efforts to rescue the working classes of Limerick from the grasp of foreigners.” In his next mission, to the South Seas, he notoriously ill-treated native populations. But 60 years later, after the whole story was suddenly told in an angry controversy in Limerick, the City of Limerick and the Redemptorist Order made peace with their history, Limerick City agreeing to maintain the small Jewish cemetery in atonement.

 

The story has a melancholy end—Limerick’s Jewish community was broken. The families sent their children to England or moved to Dublin. My grandfather went to live in Manchester. Now there is only one Jew in Limerick—and when Stuart Klein moved there in 1957, his Dublin friends were afraid for his life.

 

When my great-great-grandfather, old chazan Benjamin Jaffe, died in 1915, his Jewish Chronicle obituary said bittersweetly that, during Creagh’s pogrom, “It was heard on all sides that if all the Jews in Ireland were of the type of Benjamin Jaffe, nothing but respect would be felt for them.”