Jew merchants
Jew merchants
In Brief
"England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's vital strength": Deasy repeats the same late 19th century theories about an international Jewish conspiracy that Haines attempted to share with Stephen in Telemachus. But when he goes on to condemn "jew merchants" and say that "They sinned against the light," he reverts to Christian ways of hating Jews much older than Wilhelm Marr's newfangled "antisemitism."
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The first charge stems ultimately from medieval Christianity's prohibition on lending out money at interest, which created a vacuum that Jews were happy to fill. The second is that the Jews killed Christ, by handing him over to Pontius Pilate and demanding his execution. Both charges are idiotic. To say that the Jews killed Christ overlooks the fact that Christ was a Jew—a fact which Bloom will point out to an enraged Citizen in Cyclops and to Stephen in Eumaeus. And hating others for supplying an economically essential service that one's own ethnic group has chosen not to practice makes no sense except as an expression of naked financial envy. Mr. Deasy mentions only merchants, not lending money at interest (which became legal in England in 1545), but Stephen answers him with a kind of simple, irrefutable logic that could as easily be applied to the other question: "A merchant . . . is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?"
Stephen stands up to Deasy here in much the same way that
Bloom stands up to the Citizen, and he does so again a moment
later on the matter of killing Christ. To Deasy's theological
statement that the Jews sinned against "the light" (which
John's gospel identifies with the
Word, God's begotten Son), he responds with the doctrine
of original sin: "Who has not?" In a
roundabout way, Oxen of the Sun reinforces Stephen's
point. In its final paragraph, when someone asks about Bloom's
identity, someone else says, "Hush! Sinned against the
light." But earlier in the chapter the narrative
has charged all of Ireland with this crime: "Therefore
hast thou sinned against the light and hast made me, thy
lord, to be the slave of servants."
[2024] Circe will show Stephen sinning against the
light in a quite specific and overtly sacrilegious way. When
he smashes the purple lampshade in the brothel with his
ashplant, he is attempting to banish the incarnate Christ
whose eucharistic body is reserved in every Catholic church
next to a "perpetual lamp."
Joyce had already wickedly associated this lamp with the red
light of a whorehouse, in the story "Grace." In Ulysses
he undertakes to destroy the whole notion of a divine light
before which human beings must bow down. Stephen's defense of
Jews goes beyond mere sympathy for unjustly persecuted human
beings. It ties into his revolt against an entire theological
order of subjugation.
