New Jerusalem
New Jerusalem
In Brief
Amid all the talk about "nations," the Citizen implies that
Bloom, as the son of a Hungarian Jew, is not really Irish: "What is your nation if I may
ask." Bloom's reply is immediate and unambiguous: "Ireland...I
was born here. Ireland." Racial ancestry, even cultural and
religious affiliation are one thing; citizenship and national
loyalty are something else entirely. This distinction is lost
on the rabid barhound. When Bloom rises to his bait, asserting
that Jews have encountered as much persecution as the Irish
have, the Citizen strikes back with an assertion that Jews
have divided loyalties: "Are you talking about the new
Jerusalem?" The reference is to a recent development in
European political discourse: Zionism.
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The "new Jerusalem" has a long biblical history,
beginning in Jeremiah 31:38-40 with Yahweh's promise to
rebuilt the ancient capital destroyed by the Babylonians.
Revelation 21-22 uses the promise metaphorically as a figure
for the heavenly city, and Christians have long understood the
phrase in this way. But for Jews the idea of returning to the
holy city has always been quite literal, and in the last few
decades of the 19th century some central and eastern European
Jews began emigrating to Palestine, then a province of
Turkey's Ottoman empire. These early efforts were entirely
practical. Calypso has already glanced at one private venture
representative of a pattern of small agricultural settlements
that, beginning in 1909, produced the first kibbutzim.
But just before the turn of the century this movement also
received a strong intellectual foundation from a Hungarian
journalist named Theodor Herzl.
Herzl wrote at a time when the revival of old ethnic hatreds
under the new banner of "antisemitism"
was convincing many Jews that their millennial efforts to
assimilate into the Christian nations of Europe had failed and
could never succeed. In 1896, in a pamphlet titled The
Jewish State, he issued a rousing called for Jews to
found a new nation. Herzl was later cited in Israel's
Declaration of Independence and he is known today as "the
spiritual father of the Jewish State."
Making the same distinction as Bloom between ethnicity or religion on the one hand and nationhood on the other, Herzl comes to an opposite conclusion: "I think the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council. We are a people—one people. We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow-citizens; in vain do we strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers, and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already had experience of suffering" (Introduction, translated by Sylvie D'Avigdor, Jewishvirtuallibrary.org).
Herzl's energetic efforts to convince the great powers of Europe (the Ottoman Empire among them) to sponsor an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine did not succeed in his lifetime. He died in 1904, only 18 days after the day represented in Ulysses. The aggressive response that his proposal elicits from the Citizen confirms his contention that, in the eyes of European non-Jews, Jews can do no right: their desire for independence elicits just as much scorn as does their desire for assimilation. Bloom is no Zionist, but even his earnest efforts to be recognized as a true Irishman mark him as a subversive agitator for a foreign nation.
