Ireland’s Complex Jewish History

According to a medieval Irish chronicle, the first Jews to come to the island arrived in 1079 but were promptly turned away. Only in the 19th century did Ireland gain a significant, if always small, Jewish population. Aidan Beatty and Dan O’Brien write:

At its demographic height, [just after World War II], the Irish Jewish community numbered about 4,000; one tenth of 1 per cent of the total population of Ireland (north and south). Hardly a major aggregate. And yet, at that time, Jews were the only sector of the populace whose origins lay outside of Britain and Ireland; the community had long been a noticeable presence in Dublin. In 1908, for instance, the charter meeting of a Judeo-Irish Home Rule Association . . . was the cause of noticeable controversy in Ireland and within the British Jewish community; should Irish Jews remain a loyal subset of their co-religionists on the other side of the Irish Sea or should they throw their lot in with nationalists [in Ireland]?

A desire to prove their nationalist bona fides and thus to prove that they are “real” Irish would endure within the Irish Jewish community. And the community’s official narratives have often downplayed the existence of anti-Semitism among Irish Gentiles.. . .

Some of the most central figures of 20th-century Irish life have been overt anti-Semites. . . . Anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery regularly surfaced in the nationalist press before and after 1922. The IRA-backed campaign against usury in the late 1920s targeted Jewish moneylenders far more than their Gentile counterparts. Jewish industrialists who fled the Nazis and established factories in the west of Ireland in the 1930s and 40s often had to negotiate a matrix of stereotypes and negative perceptions. The sizeable numbers of Irish men who served in the Palestine Police in the same period regularly interpreted what they saw in Jaffa, Jerusalem, or Bethlehem in terms of the anti-Jewish animosities traditional to Catholicism.

Read more at Irish Times

More about: Anti-Semitism, History & Ideas, Ireland, Terrorism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society