Michelle Duffy

Here is the story of the Limerick Pogrom @theFP. It is a small story about a minor event experienced by my family a hundred years ago that reflects on a certain strain of Irish blood-and-soil nationalism in a small section of Irish discourse that runs through the twentieth century and sadly into our own time. And it certainly is not meant to imply that all Irish people are or were either antisemitic or antiIsrael. Far from it. I just wanted to thank many Irish friends for your kind words and those of you who wrote courteously to criticise my post and I agree I should have been more balanced. Like many of us, I sometimes I post things too fast & too broadly and then they go viral... Some replies do that strange thing of criticising a historian for citing history they do not like! On the other hand, take a look down the replies and you will see many that illustrate perfectly the repellent slurry of antiIsrael and antiJewish racism to which I refer… First one has to say: nothing that happened in Ireland ever even came close to the massacres of medieval Britain and Europe nor those of the Islamic world nor the genocidal slaughter of 20th century Europe. On the other hand there were never many Jews in Ireland - 5500 Jews in the fifties; now less than 2000. Then: some Irish Jews have thrived. At the same time as the pogrom in Limerick, an Irish Jew, Otto Jaffe (no relation) was elected Lord Mayor of Belfast twice and later the Briscoes, father and son, were Lord Mayors of Dublin. Some of my family, the Jaffes, left for Manchester but one or two stayed in Ireland. My own family recalled the trauma yet also loved Ireland and Irishness as I do. And it’s the very fact that we love the place and the people that makes this a surprising and sorry conversation. This must always be a nuanced picture – but sadly there is another side to this… There has always been a strain of antisemitism within a section of blood-and-soil Irish nationalism – Griffith advocated it yes but many great Irish people denounced it too. James Joyce exposed it in Ulysses with the ghastly Mr Dreasy (‘England is in the hands of the Jews… They have sinned against the light and you can see the darkness in their eyes…’) In his masterpiece, Joyce is sympathetic to the creation of a Jewish homeland in the Holy Land and the book is in some ways a plea for tolerance. Yet characters like Francis Stuart broadcast from Nazi Berlin during WW2 (and received the highest honours as recently as 2000 and when I interviewed him he spouted chilling rants on the toxicity of Jews – such as I have never heard in person ever!) And of course Prime Minister deValera’s visit to pay condolences on Hitler’s death is indefensible. But that was all long ago… Starting on the very day of October 7, something changed: a weird, unreasonable flaring of a visceral hostility from a section of the elite - government, journalists, academia and activists - to the very existence of Israel has been accompanied by a lack of proportion and perspective, bias against the Jewish state, the deployment of medieval and antisemitic tropes particularly a new version of the blood libel, the inversion of Jewish history against Jews and Israelis, the blind acceptance of mendacious terrorist narratives, erasure of Jewish history, approval of terror against Israeli civilians, and harassment of Jewish students. I wonder: would Robert Briscoe, Irish nationalist but also passionate believer in Jewish self-determination and creation of Israel, be elected now? It is not antisemitic to criticise this Israeli government; I do so frequently and in the heartbreaking loss of Palestinian and Israeli civilian lives, the taking of hostages, the unbearable suffering in the ferocious Hamas-Israel hellish war there is much to be enraged about. But also I have to say that the irresponsible, inaccurate and hyperbolic statements of the Irish president and premier just during this Israeli Embassy row confirm that a section of the Irish elite – not the Irish people – are in thrall to a fabulistic, conspiracy-laden, afactual, ahistorical narrative that often skids into antisemitic rhetoric: is Mr Dreasy really back? My point about recounting the Limerick Pogrom is limited and simple: all this did not appear out of thin air; it has a background and this small, forgotten family story is a small part of it. Here it is....