Barabbas

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All four gospels tell the story of Pontius Pilate offering the Jews a choice to save either Jesus of Nazareth, a man he regards as innocent of any real crime, or Barabbas, a thief who committed murder during a seditious uprising. The Jews choose Barabbas, prompting Pilate to say of Jesus, "Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him" (Mark 15:14). Pilate releases Barabbas and hands Jesus over to be crucified. For Christians, Barabbas is a man who deserved to die but was reprieved because of the Jews' implacable hatred of the Savior.

That background is probably sufficient to explain how Barabbas became an antisemitic catchword, and why people might think such a person deserves to die, but even better material can be found in Marlowe's play, written in 1589 or 1590. The protagonist, a murderous Jewish merchant named Barabas, tricks two young men into dueling to the death, poisons his daughter and the other nuns in her convent, strangles a friar and frames another one for the crime, poisons three more people, and betrays his country to the invading Turks. At the end of the play he double-crosses the Turks who have made him governor, slaughters some of them, and prepares a hidden cauldron in which to boil the Turkish prince and his entourage. But Barabas too is double-crossed and falls into the cauldron. As he boils to death he hurls curses at Christians and infidels alike.

The watery death may be a tip-off to Joyce's allusive intent in the Hades reference. If he was thinking of The Jew of Malta, then ambiguous implications come into play. As in Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, which make morally dubious men into heroes, Marlowe keeps his authorial intention obscure while playing some audience responses off against others. Like Shylock's bloodthirsty turn in The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare no doubt had Marlowe's protagonist in mind), Barabas's career of crime begins with his experience of antisemitic prejudice, To finance his war against the Turks, Malta's Christian governor confiscates half the wealth of the island's Jews, and only the Jews. (When Barabas objects, the governor seizes all his goods.) The governor, Ferneze, acts in decidedly un-Christian ways throughout the play, and indeed nearly all the characters are unscrupulous, untrustworthy, hypocritical, and vicious. If the play arouses anti-Jewish passions, Christianity and Islam do not come off much better.

In Hades the cruelty is all on the Christian side, as Martin Cunningham rudely snatches the telling of the story from Bloom and Simon Dedalus tosses out an antisemitic slur in the presence of this decidedly unmurderous Jew. For all but the most bigoted readers, "Drown Barabbas!" will recoil on its utterer as surely as the trap set by Marlowe's anti-hero rounds on him. Wishing "to Christ" for the Jew's death hardly makes Simon's passion more attractive.

Things are much the same in Wandering Rocks. Simon and Ben Dollard learn that Dodd has sent men to Father Cowley's place to extract repayment of a loan, and Dollard assures him that his landlord, who is pressing a similar demand for unpaid rent, has the prior claim: "— You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that writ where Jacko put the nuts." Dollard's view, which seems to be widely held among Dublin's Catholics, is that no Christian should be forced to pay for goods or services received from a Jew. Earlier in the same section of Wandering Rocks he recounts the history of his trousers: "— Bad luck to the jewman that made them, Ben Dollard said. Thanks be to God he's not paid yet."