Throughout July 1921 Rely George Noble Plunkett, Dáil minister for international affairs, wrote a protracted letter to Éamon de Valera. In it Plunkett warned the Sinn Féin chief that republicans must be cautious of too shut a relationship with ‘the Jews’.
Throughout Europe, Plunkett asserted, Jews had been a unfavorable affect, as a result of (1) they’re, and can stay, aliens, in most nations; (2) their codes of honour and morals should not Christian; (3) that in enterprise and in any other case, they act collectively, all through a rustic (and even from one nation to a different, at instances) like Freemasons; (4) {that a} benefactor to their poor can affect their votes, by their Rabbi; (5) that, as an Orangeman’s faith is usually hatred of the Pope, so the Debased Jews, once they lose their religion, retain a racial antagonism to Christians.
He went on to say that Jews and Freemasons collectively had been liable for the Nice Struggle, that each now dominated France and had been in search of to destroy the papacy. In Britain, Plunkett claimed, the press was ‘largely owned and managed by Jews’ therefore its ‘coping with Irish affairs is abominable. It’s corrupt by need of precept, a minimum of from an nervousness for revenue.’
Plunkett asserted that the ‘Jewish curiosity in England is capitalist, the Jews are the “sweaters”.’ He additionally recommended that Italy ‘has been a software of their arms. They publish pornographic journals, for a nasty Jew exhibits his racial hatred of Christians by corrupting them.’ In Austria too ‘the Jews obtained a very good grip on the press’. The Romanian historian and nationalist activist Nicolae Iorga had given Plunkett a ‘painful account … of the state of slavery to which the Jews had introduced his countrymen.’
Nonetheless Plunkett nonetheless claimed to have Jewish pals and acknowledged that ‘their greatest males present nice distinction in music, are high quality linguists, Cosmopolitan, delicate, obsessed with artwork, genial, charitable, clear dwelling (and) usually large-minded and good employers of Christians’. He felt that Jewish ‘small store keepers are often first rate and regular: these from Germany are principally naturalised’. However he additionally harassed that ‘lots of their capitalists and public males have accomplished infinite hurt on the planet; so have their “sweaters” and employees within the “shady” trades, and the soiled and ignorant victims from Russia and the Balcaus [sic] make very troublesome immigrants’.
Plunkett was influenced by non secular anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories relating to Jewish energy and anti-immigrant sentiment. However does his letter inform us something about republican attitudes extra broadly? Anti-Semitism in Eire stays a controversial topic. In a single narrative, the 1904 Limerick ‘pogrom’ looms massive, whereas the anti-Semitism of Sinn Féin’s founder Arthur Griffith and the IRA’s dealings with Nazi Germany are linked to modern-day republican hostility to Israel.
However Natalie Wynn has additionally criticised what she calls a ‘feel-good issue’ in widespread historiography, which overstates Jewish involvement in republicanism and underplays Irish anti-Semitism. Wynn has argued that when it comes to Jewish involvement in separatism ‘concrete info is skinny on the bottom, and vulnerable to exaggeration and embellishment’.
Certainly some accounts declare widespread Jewish participation in IRA actions between 1919-21. Dermot Keogh recommended that ‘particular person Jews could have opted for the reason for radical Irish nationalism to a higher extent than is realised’, asserting that – ‘within the absence of documentary proof’ – the novel A Land Not Theirs by David Marcus ‘supplies a sensible portrayal of the expertise of Cork’s Jewish group within the Struggle of Independence’. Comparable narratives invariably invoke Robert Briscoe, IRA gunrunner; Michael Noyk, a buddy of Michael Collins and different republicans; and Cumann na mBan member Estella Solomons.
The declare that anti-Semitism was unknown in Eire was aired in the course of the revolutionary interval itself. Throughout April 1920 de Valera instructed an Atlanta viewers that ‘one of many Chief Rabbis of the Jews was in Dublin a number of years in the past, and, when he got here there, he mentioned “I’m delighted to be right here as a result of that is the capitol of the one nation on the planet that didn’t persecute my brethren”’. Equally the Irish World, printed in New York, even asserted that not solely was Eire ‘the one Christian nation in Europe that by no means persecuted the Jews’ however there have been ‘10,000 Jews in Eire at current [and] almost all of them are Sinn Feiners which suggests Irish Republicans.’
However proof of unionist sentiment amongst Irish Jews, in addition to examples of republican hostility in the direction of them, was largely ignored.
Anti-Semitism in Eire in the course of the revolutionary interval can’t be divorced from its transnational context. The modern Irish press publicised the murderous oppression of Jews in japanese Europe, whereas additionally noting the affiliation of Jews with Bolshevism. From 1919 onwards press experiences described ‘Pogroms in south Russia’ with ‘many Jews massacred’. Information of ‘unexampled massacres of Jews’ within the Ukraine, ‘extraordinarily merciless’ pogroms in Hungary and the way ‘the Poles have organised pogroms akin to have by no means been recognized even within the darkest instances of the Center Ages’ all featured within the Irish press (as they’d accomplished when Michael Davitt uncovered related massacres over a decade earlier).
However accusations that ‘the Jews had been and are on the prime and backside of the bloody uprisings in Russia’ would even be aired in newspapers such because the Tuam Herald throughout 1920. That paper, influenced by the broadly propagated views of industrialist Henry Ford, would declare that ‘the Jews … are striving to break Poland as a result of she is Catholic’. An Irish Instances function on what it referred to as ‘one of many worst of the Bolshevik tribe … Moses Solomonovitch Uritsky’ described him as having ‘a really eager pair of intelligent Jewish eyes’ and asserted that he was ‘above all, that the majority important factor for a Russian revolutionary … a Jew’.
However separatists additionally encountered Jews of their each day lives. Jews had been probably the most seen immigrant group in Eire and its solely sizeable non-Christian minority. Eire’s Jewish inhabitants had elevated from solely 285 in 1871 to five,148 in 1911, 2,665 of whom lived in Dublin. These immigrants, who regarded and sounded completely different, arrived in a rustic that was experiencing inhabitants decline. By the Eighteen Nineties discourses about illness, immorality, peddling and moneylending had been all linked with Jews within the widespread thoughts. Jewish immigrants additionally competed for jobs and enterprise with the native-born Irish, significantly within the furnishings and tailoring trades, and had been topic to hostility because of this. The anti-Jewish boycott in Limerick, broadly dubbed a ‘pogrom’, was mentioned at Westminster.
These points shaped a backdrop to day-to-day interactions. Throughout August 1919 there have been clashes at Little Bray between ‘juveniles, Christian and Jewish’ although the native press was fast to emphasize that ‘the scene was caused by irresponsible individuals, and was not attributable to any race hatred of the Jews’.
In November 1919 at a gathering of the Limerick Board of Guardians Councillor P. Bourke alleged that ‘the milk provide of town was passing into the arms of Polish Jews, who had been exploiting the poor to an outrageous extent’. A decision protesting the ‘exploitation of the working lessons by Polish Jews’ was handed unanimously. (Native Jewish milk provider WA Newman contested these claims.) The regional newspoapers carried experiences regarding these like Louis Smith ‘alias Schleifer’, a ‘Younger Jew in Hassle’, who was accused of stealing from the purchasers of a small jewellers’ store in Bridge St, Cavan. ‘Jokes’ about ‘Jewmen’ and their alleged habits typically featured within the native press.
An additional complication for nationalist Eire was that lots of Dublin’s Jews had been ‘very firmly unionist to start with’. Numerous profitable Irish Jews had been Freemasons and blended socially with Protestant unionists. Whereas early Twentieth-century Irish nationalists recognized with the Boers, Dublin’s Jews had been seen as pro-British on this interval, resulting in some inter-communal pressure. Certainly previous to the Nice Struggle many Jews regarded the UK as a haven from persecution. As Bethel Solomons, a medical scholar in Dublin in the course of the revolutionary interval defined, although he ‘cherished Eire … Nice Britain tries to be a simply and tolerant nation and is the most secure place on the planet for many who are more likely to be victims of intolerance … particularly folks of my very own Jewish race’.
There have been additionally Jewish members of the British administration and its armed companies in Eire. The under-secretary for Eire in 1914, Sir Matthew Nathan, was of Jewish descent, a truth famous by his critics. Therefore commerce unionist (and republican) William P Partridge complained in Tralee throughout October 1915 that he as an ‘Irishman’ resented having to attraction to ‘a Jewman for permission to carry a public assembly within the nation he was born in’. Nathan’s namesake, Auxiliary officer George Nathan, was additionally Jewish, and believed to be liable for the murders of Limerick Sinn Féin politicians George Clancy and Michael O’Callaghan throughout March 1921.
The eccentric Joseph Edelstein, creator of controversial novel The Moneylender, was described by one republican publication as a ‘infamous Jew spy’. Edelstein was broadly believed to have betrayed Francis Sheehy Skeffington to the army in 1916 and was later accused of working as a Free State agent. Through the revolution Jews had been encountered as members of the British army, as suspected spies, raided for firearms and topic to occasional harassment.
Like many radicals on the flip of the century Arthur Griffith blamed Jews for the struggle in South Africa. He additionally asserted: ‘no considerate Irishman or Irishwoman can view with out apprehension the continual inflow of Jews into Eire … what is called Anti-Semitism on the Continent had its origin … in a really pure detestation of enterprise knavery, and a really pure need to defend the weak towards the unscrupulous’.
There was a latest debate on Griffith’s attitudes in the direction of Jews, by which Colum Kenny has argued that the Sinn Féin founder was ‘extra Zionist than anti-Semite’. Peter Hession has extra precisely defined that Griffith was in the end influenced by ‘revivalists akin to Aodh De Blacam, who thought-about Zionism as a “Jewish nationalism” worthy of imitation’. Nonetheless, as Hession notes, this doesn’t absolve him of anti-Semitism as Griffith nonetheless couched his help for Zionism in language of hostility to Jews, seeing Zionists as a ‘patriotic minority’ who he contrasted with these engaged in a ‘sordid pursuit of gold’.
De Blacam, a major separatist mental, argued that ‘the Jews have given us the best Nationalist literature on the planet: they’ve additionally set the best Nationalist instance’ and claimed that ‘Israel represents the triumph of Sinn Fein.’ He too repeated the story of ‘the Chief Rabbi, who, when in Dublin, expressed his pleasure at visiting Eire “the one land by which his race had not been persecuted.” A number of articles suggesting that Irish language revivalists ought to emulate Jews appeared within the Gaelic League’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis.
Some republican anti-Semitism mirrored taking sides in worldwide disputes. Anglo-French pressure within the Eighteen Nineties led to separatist help for France. The early Sinn Féin organiser Seamus MacManus would complain of American newspapers that ‘all of the editors [were] pro-British and anti-French largely due to the Dreyfus affair … A number of of those editors had been Jews … Most of the papers had been below the thumbs of the Jews financially. Certainly one of them referred to as Ochs, a Jew, proprietor and editor of the New York Instances, gave me a bitter harangue in regards to the French.’ Maud Gonne’s politics had been additionally influenced by her immersion on the planet of the French proper by her first husband Lucien Millevoye, and she or he retained a suspicion of Jews (and Freemasons) all through her profession.
The editor of the Catholic Bulletin, JJ O’Kelly (Sceilg), was a Sinn Féin member who would develop into TD for Louth and vice-chairman of Dáil Éireann in the course of the revolution. Within the aftermath of the Rising, the Catholic Bulletin performed an essential position in popularising the reminiscence of the martyrs of Easter week. These identical points carried a collection of articles by Fr Thomas H Burbage entitled ‘Ritual Homicide among the many Jews.’ Burbage claimed that:
for hundreds of years previous and at frequent intervals Christians all through the world have been shocked and alarmed by the invention of murders that clearly belong to a particular class … the opposition to a judicial trial on the a part of Jews all through the world, often exercised by the use of the press they management, and their nice wealth, is often of such a personality as to stop any likelihood of an neutral investigation.
Burbage himself joined Sinn Féin and have become a member of the occasion’s govt in 1917. Commandant William J Brennan-Whitmore, who fought below James Connolly in 1916, denounced Jews and Freemasons within the separatist press previous to the Rising. (Brennan-Whitmore would adhere to conspiratorial politics all through a protracted profession on the Irish far-right). Talking at a commemoration for Roger Casement in Co Kerry throughout August 1917, Easter week veteran and IRB president Thomas Ashe described how Casement had labored in order that ‘Eire may be perserved from the tyranny of the Jews and moneylenders of London who’re at current operating the World Struggle.’ When Ashe died whereas on starvation strike shortly afterwards, his speech was broadly distributed in pamphlet type.
After 1919 republican diplomats typically expressed hostility in the direction of Jews or sensed hostility from Jews to the Irish trigger. Reporting on Spain throughout September 1921 Robert Brennan described how the ‘Liberal and Jewish papers appear to be pro-British.’ Working for the Dáil in Germany, Nancy de Paor claimed that ‘the majority of the middle-class Berlin papers on the time was within the arms of Jews who wouldn’t carry a finger for us … the Jews in Germany all the time supported Britain’.
De Paor additionally famous how one other diplomat, Irish consul for commerce, Charles Bewley, was ‘bitterly anti-Semitic’. Bewley’s politics led to an embarrassing incident when he clashed with Robert Briscoe who was in Germany working for the IRA. Whereas Dáil diplomats realised that Bewley’s attitudes had been inappropriate, it was mainly as a result of they felt that such an ‘outburst by an Irish official in a rustic the place Jews are very quite a few and really influential was a unprecedented indiscretion from the perspective of Irish materials pursuits’ reasonably than anger at his anti-Semitism.
Sinn Féin TD George Gavan Duffy instructed Ernest Blythe in early 1922 that there was a ‘nice objection’ to appointing Bewley to a put up in Germany, due to what they referred to as ‘his semitic convictions’ being ‘so pronounced that it might be very tough for him to deal correctly with all of the individuals and questions throughout the scope of an Envoy to Berlin, the place the Jewish factor could be very sturdy’. As an alternative Gavan Duffy felt that Bewley may (be) appropriate for a place in Munich or Vienna. Certainly Duffy himself expressed anti-Jewish opinions, telling the below secretary of state on the Vatican that ‘all over the place Jews and Masons had been united towards us in international press on the aspect of England’.
Michael Keogh, a member of Roger Casement’s Brigade, was in Munich throughout 1918. He described Kurt Eisner, the Jewish head of the Bavarian revolutionary authorities as being ‘of the Shylock breed’ and claimed that Eisner had refused to help veterans of the Casement Brigade as a result of they’d been ‘dupes’ of the Kaiser. (Keogh additionally claimed to have served with the Freikorps and to have saved the life of 1 Adolf Hitler throughout a riot).
Anti-Jewish rhetoric additionally discovered expression within the Irish-American press. In March 1919 the Gaelic American complained that ‘now that the traditional house of the Jews, occupied by them after their flight out of Egypt and their wandering within the desert, has been regained for them, they steadfastly refuse to avail themselves of it, and are demanding group autonomy and particular privileges in each nation by which they’re discovered as a substitute’. This mirrored the prejudices of that paper’s editor, veteran Fenian John Devoy.
Following the bitter break up between Devoy and de Valera, full rein was given to accusations that the Sinn Féin chief was himself Jewish. In January 1921 Devoy wrote that de Valera was a ‘half breed Jew … his temperament just isn’t Irish’. Over the subsequent three years the Gaelic American commonly referred to de Valera as a ‘half-breed Spanish-American Jew’ or the ‘half-breed Jew from Bruree’. (Paradoxically this echoed some British and loyalist propaganda.) Clearly, nationalist anti-Semitism was an actual phenomenon, influenced variously by non secular, social and political traits.
However there have been additionally examples of Jewish co-operation with separatists. Maureen McGavock, a Cumann na mBan nurse in the course of the flu epidemic in Dublin recalled that ‘amongst these we helped to nurse had been many Jewish households who afterwards confirmed their gratitude by subscribing to our funds and voting for our candidates on the election’. Among the many teams in her constituency whom Countess Markievicz consulted as to coverage had been the ‘Trades Union and Labour organisations … the clergy (and) the Jews’.
IRA activist George White was concerned in manufacturing arms in a home on Dublin’s quays; ‘a Jew named Max Cohen was a tenant on this home; he knew all in regards to the dump however mentioned nothing about it. His brother, Abraham, had an vintage store at 20 Ormond Quay and he instructed Mick [Collins] and me that any time it was obligatory we might use his home as a method of escape.’
Having evaded arrest after a gun battle in Dublin throughout late 1920 Dan Breen had ‘wandered spherical on the lookout for refuge and finally discovered it in the home of a Jew who supplied him with dry clothes’. Sinn Féin TD Kevin O’Shiel recalled understanding little about Jews and ‘what little I knew was, in lots of respects, inaccurate’. Although he didn’t take into account himself anti-Semitic, he believed Jews to be one way or the other concerned within the crucifixion of Christ. Nonetheless, at college he turned pals with ‘two Jews, Michael Noyk and Eddie Lipman’ and located them ‘singularly human, very goodhearted and very smart’ with Noyk particularly turning into an in depth buddy.
There have been additionally Irish Jews with hyperlinks to separatism. Albert Altman, a outstanding Dublin businessman, was referred to as a ‘Jewish Fenian’ and a supporter of the unconventional wing of the Parnellite motion. Councillor Mendel Altman co-operated carefully with Sinn Féin on Dublin Company, becoming a member of protests towards the go to of George V to town and supporting the formation of a Judeo-Irish House Rule Affiliation throughout 1908.
Artist Estella Solomons, although from an Anglo-Jewish household, joined Cumann na mBan throughout 1919 and helped cover arms and males on the run in her artist’s studio in Dublin. There may be additionally some proof of Cumann na mBan in Cork having Jewish members. The solicitor Michael Noyk (as famous above, a university buddy of Kevin O’Sheil) was a confidant of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith. He was described by Piaras Béaslaí as central to the acquisition of homes and workplaces for Dáil and IRA actions. In 1918 Noyk took authorized motion towards the police for seizing Sinn Féin election literature and was agent for each Seán T O’Kelly and Countess Markievicz in that yr’s basic election.
Noyk unsuccessfully defended IRA volunteer Paddy Moran towards a homicide cost, whereas the Jewish businessman Joseph Mirrelson was additionally a defence witness on Moran’s behalf. Noyk represented senior IRA chief Seán MacEoin in courtroom and was aware about the IRA’s plans to rescue him from Mountjoy.
The one most outstanding Jewish republican was Robert Emmet Briscoe, whose father, a Lithuanian immigrant to Dublin, was a Parnellite. Barney Mellows recalled that when Briscoe joined the Fianna ‘he was the primary Jew we had’. (Certainly one of Briscoe’s brothers, Michael, additionally joined the republican scouts.) Briscoe bought arms in Germany throughout 1920-1 and took half in anti-Treaty actions in america. His later profession as a long-serving Fianna Fáil TD (1927-65) and as lord mayor of Dublin on two events, in addition to a number of high-profile US excursions, made Briscoe by far the best-known Jewish Irishman, not to mention Jewish republican.
Although Briscoe often referred to anti-Semitism, he tended to downplay its significance. A lot of his work in the course of the revolution remains to be shrouded in thriller. Nonetheless it’s clear that Briscoe’s Jewishness was a consider each how he was obtained and perceived by his friends. Ernest Blythe, for one, appears to have accepted strategies from Gavan Duffy and others that Briscoe was a ‘shady character’ who was ‘out on the make’ although these impressions had been in all probability additionally colored by Briscoe’s opposition to the Treaty.
There was appreciable paranoia in Free State circles about Briscoe’s actions in america, the belief being that he was working with communists. As late as 1930 Garda intelligence would assert of ‘Briscoe the Jew’ that ‘it’s typically recommended that the Irish was not his first enterprise in revolutionary actions’. His presence inside Fianna Fáil excited the creativeness of the occasion’s enemies all through the Nineteen Thirties.
It’s vital that Briscoe confronted substantial issues in claiming a army service pension. Throughout 1935 he confronted recurring questions in regards to the lack of hundreds of kilos in Germany (the topic of long-running IRA inquiries), and his account of occasions was questioned on a number of events. In 1938 Briscoe made clear that he was ‘fairly conscious that many individuals wish to show I made no contribution to the Nationwide trigger’. Certainly his comrade Seamus Robinson had earlier expressed the view that the ‘incredulity expressed by some members of the (Pensions) Board of the bona fides of Briscoe’s case makes the delay tackle a color not too nice to these of us who know the marvelous work accomplished by Briscoe … I do know for sure Mr. Briscoe made nothing out of the motion.’
There have been no different Irish Jews who occupied as outstanding a place as Briscoe, although proof is rising of involvement at different ranges. In March 1922 an article within the Jewish Chronicle claimed that ‘it’s pointless, after all, to level out that the Jews of Dublin and different centres below the brand new regime have all the time been in hearty sympathy with Younger Eire in its wrestle for political and nationwide emancipation … their hearts had been ever with those that aspired to revive and resurrect Irish nationhood’.
It additionally claimed {that a} Jewish scholar had fought in 1916, and that ‘it was frequent information in Dublin that one other Jew in a passive method has contributed materially to the bringing about of Irish self-government, and that he’s nonetheless a outstanding determine behind the scenes, and within the confidence of the leaders of the current Provisional Authorities’. Regardless of his personal prejudices, even Rely Plunkett conceded to de Valera that ‘in Dublin the Jews are pleasant, certainly sympathetic with us’.
Contact between republicans and Jews was typically extra more likely to happen outdoors Eire, inside societies the place each had been a part of diasporas. Some co-operation was subterranean in nature. London IRA man James Delaney labored with ‘a Jewman named Ginger Barnett in Petticoat Lane within the East Finish and a half-caste named Darby the C**n’ (in all probability ‘Darkie the C**n’ a Jewish gang chief whose actual title was Isaac Bogarde). Each males accompanied Delaney when he bought arms from Chinese language and African sailors in Limehouse and Cable Avenue.
Cork IRA gunrunner Denis Kelleher additionally handled a ‘Jew named “Ginger”’ from the East Finish who was his ‘most important supply of provide’. One other Jewish gunsmith primarily based on the Hackney Street offered Kelleher ‘any quantity of stuff- – Webleys … rifles and any quantity of .303 and 45 ammunition. Most of our stuff got here from these two sources.’ In Glasgow Seamus Reader ‘was in contact with Mr. Keisler … a Russian Jew’ who facilitated arms purchases. In June 1921 British intelligence reported that ‘struggle materials reaches Eire from Manchester in appreciable portions and Jews are mentioned to be lively in sending these consignments’.
Different contacts concerned sympathetic radicals. Hostile commentators famous that when Hannah Sheehy Skeffington spoke ‘below the Sinn Fein flag’ to the Staff’ Socialist Federation in London, her viewers was ‘largely composed of Russian Jews’. Certainly the labour motion was one other channel for connections. Jewish commerce unionist Simon Greenspon had been a key determine within the 1919 engineering strike in Belfast. By late 1920 he was touring England in help of the employees expelled from the shipyards in Belfast. Glaswegian commerce unionist Emmanuel (‘Manny’) Shinwell, a Jewish tailor, was a fraternal delegate to the Irish Commerce Union Congress in Cork throughout August 1920.
This co-operation was much more evident in america the place many Jewish socialists expressed sympathy with the Irish trigger. In 1917 Sheehy-Skeffington instructed a gathering in New York that ‘the Irish, the Russians and the Jews’ had been the ‘three parts which are going to smash English imperialism and all other forms of imperialism.’ She asserted that ‘there’s something in persecution, which retains the soul free. That’s the reason the Russian, the Jew and the Irishman love freedom so.’
Maurice Feinstone of the United Hebrew Trades was one of many audio system at an Irish solidarity rally in New York in Could 1919. The viewers was ‘composed largely of laboring women and men not solely of Irish descent, however of each race. The boys, largely within the majority, got here dressed of their working garments. Italians, Irish, Jews, Individuals and a sprinkling of Hindus made up the viewers.’
Jewish socialist chief Morris Hillquit believed there can be ‘no problem in any respect in acquiring quite a few and substantial contributions’ for the Irish trigger from ‘representatives of labor and Jewish organisations if the matter is correctly offered to them’.
Harry Boland and Liam Mellows had been among the many sponsors of the League of Oppressed Peoples, which was established in 1919 to ‘battle for freedom and justice in India, Egypt, Persia, Korea, Russia and China, and (to) protest towards the failure of the Powers to guard the Jewish inhabitants in components of Japanese Europe’.
American Zionists additionally ‘present in Irish historical past and Irish nationalist aspirations a story of statelessness, exile, and liberation that resonated deeply with their very own conceptions of the previous and hopes for the longer term’. Therefore on the Irish Race Conference in Philadelphia throughout February 1919 Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf asserted that there was ‘by no means within the historical past of each the Irish and the Jew a time once they have been nearer the conclusion of their desires than now. Eire shall be free, and shall be dominated by the Irish at the same time as Palestine shall be free and dominated by the Jewish folks’.
Krauskopf had been launched by Decide Daniel Cohalan because the ‘consultant of an ideal folks, a individuals who have suffered even longer than the Irish’. The Irish World republished an article on Zionism by the Jesuit Henry E O’Keeffe which declared that the Jews and the Irish shared the ‘grim kinship of interminable struggling’ however that now the ‘two historical and honorable races ask for a boon which is the frequent heritage of each race and nation on the planet’.
As Irish exercise intensified throughout 1920 a major variety of American Jews related themselves with fund elevating, aid work and political help. Rabbi David Klein spoke on the launch of the Irish republican bond drive in New York, once more making hyperlinks between the Irish and Jewish causes. It turned obvious from an early stage that amongst non-Irish supporters of the bond drive, Jews had been among the many most outstanding. The Irish World reported how ‘a number of women and men within the Bronx who haven’t a drop of Irish blood in them have subscribed. Most of those are Jews. The Irish and the Jews have a very good deal in frequent. Each races have suffered a lot, and each races nonetheless possess many of the primitive virtues.’
A later report from the Bronx acknowledged that ‘numerous Jews have subscribed for bonds starting from $10 to $100’. At a bond rally in Philadelphia, Assistant District Legal professional Maurice J Speiser, himself Jewish, claimed that his ‘ward would oversubscribe its quota though it needed to be subscribed by Jews alone’. Speiser defined that he got here from ‘a so-called international a part of town … a piece peopled by Italians, Poles, Russians and Jews- principally Jews … from these Jews I obtained this very day over $750 for Irish Republican Bonds, and so they had no ulterior motive both, however only a plain love of human liberty’.
At a New Jersey occasion Decide William Newcorn declared that the ‘Irish race is typical of the Jewish race in that they’ve endured lengthy years of persecution and when given an opportunity by good governmental circumstances, they’ve thriven and grown in all traces of labor and endeavor, regardless of in what nation.’
When consideration shifted to Irish Aid funds throughout 1921, Jews had been once more notable for his or her involvement. Ladies gathering for Irish Aid in Manhattan recorded ‘the cordiality with which their attraction is obtained and the generosity of response famous amongst Larger New York Jews’. A report from the Irish White Cross once more drew consideration to the ‘Jewish group of New York Metropolis, which made a united effort by its golf equipment to provide beneficiant assist to the work of Irish aid’.
Amongst these associating themselves with the assorted aid actions had been Rabbi EE Hirsch, professor of rabbinical literature and philosophy on the College of Chicago, Rabbi Judah L Magnes, chairman of the Government Committee, Jewish Group (Kehillah) of NY city, Rabbi Martin A Meyer, California, Rabbi Sarachin, Maryland, Rabbi Maurice Thorner from New Jersey, Rabbi Samuel M. Gup, Windfall, Rhode Island, and Rabbi Samuel Hirshberg of Wisconsin. Even within the American south, there have been Jews who supported the Irish trigger. In Memphis Rabbi William Fineshriber was a member of the Associates of Irish Freedom, the Council of Jewish Ladies in Cell, Alabama had been concerned in welcoming de Valera to that metropolis, whereas Savannah Rabbi George Solomon (himself of Irish descent) was one other supporter of the Sinn Féin chief.
The most important public mobilisations across the Irish problem occurred within the winter of 1920 after the demise of Terence MacSwiney. The Irish World described how a New York gathering in protest was ‘non-partisan and non-religious, and the huge crowd forgot variations of creed and politics. A Jew presided over it – Decide Otto A Rosalsky. Protestant ministers and Hebrew rabbis, in addition to Catholic clergymen and Monsignori, addressed it.’ Rosalsky asserted that:
we’re right here to pay tribute to one of many noble martyrs within the age-long wrestle of Eire for liberty, a person who will rank within the reminiscence of mankind with Robert Emmet, Oliver Plunkett and Nathan Hale. So long as man shall love liberty and hate despotism and autocracy their names is not going to be forgotten … within the demise of Terence MacSwiney the world sees a hero, imbued with the indomitable spirit of the Irish folks.
Rabbis D Goldstein and Maurice Thorner additionally addressed the New York occasion, whereas Rabbi EE Hirsch spoke at a MacSwiney protest in Chicago.
These occasions had been happening in a postwar United States experiencing an anti-radical pink scare which was typically mixed with nativism. Jews and Catholics had been each targets of a revitalised Ku Klux Klan and anti-immigration campaigners. Thus some Irish activists sought frequent trigger with Jews. In December 1920 a Associates of Irish Freedom conference noticed a movement which condemned ‘with out reservation the nameless slanders now being circulated extensively in Europe and America towards our fellow residents the Jews – a protracted persecuted and struggling race which impugn their patriotism and loyalty to the U.S. We do that as a result of folks of our blood have for greater than seven centuries been fixed victims of the same marketing campaign.’
Professor William J. Maloney, a outstanding determine in Irish activism, took the Tuam Herald to job for its anti-Semitism. Maloney declared that:
the Jewish Herald, the organ of the oppressed Zionist and of the prescribed Jew, doesn’t take part within the baiting of the Irish right here. As an alternative, Decide Otto Rosalsky acts as Chairman of a MacSwiney memorial assembly at which President de Valera speaks; and main Rabbis of New York, Philadelphia and Chicago are among the many most lively protagonists of the Irish trigger. And the heavens don’t fall.
He declared that the anti-Jewish propaganda printed in newspapers owned by Henry Ford was ‘a revival, with appropriate modifications, of the testimony provided by Titus Oates on the Catholic peril. It’s as outdated and as false as sin.’ (Certainly in April 1921 Ford’s Dearborn Impartial would contend that Jewish Bolsheviks had been behind the IRA’s marketing campaign).
That Irish and Jewish Individuals may ally appeared pure to some observers. The Catholic Instances might declare that ‘no a part of the numerous inhabitants of america has proved itself extra pleasant to Eire than have Jews … It’s effectively so as to add that each time a fund was opened for Eire within the days when there was an actual want opening funds, the Jews, particularly of New York, got here ahead generously to its support.’
Certainly nationalist Shane Leslie would argue that ‘in America there has typically arisen a sound political entente between Jews and Irish, who agreed to vary antithetically in race and faith, however had been all the time prepared to assist one another to smash the Anglo-Saxon domination of the States.’ Nonetheless, there was additionally longstanding social, cultural and political rivalry between Irish Individuals and Jews, which might trigger pressure and disagreement.
Some Irish Individuals recommended that Jews had been typically pro-British, particularly after the Balfour Declaration. So in America, because the Irish Impartial famous in 1919, the ‘Jews and Irish (had been) on reverse sides’ as a result of ‘because the British declaration in favour of a Jewish Palestine, American Jewry has been solidly on the aspect of Nice Britain’. An Irish-American priest, John J Callaghan, whereas lamenting the ‘ever-increasing hostility in the direction of our Jewish fellow-citizens’, however thought it ‘very a lot to be deplored that the 2 chief organs of Anglo-Jew opinion – the New York Instances and the New York World – must be the chief apologists for British barbarity in Eire … Our Irish-American fellow-citizens ought to carefully watch the editorial coverage of those Anglo-Jew journals on worldwide questions. These newspapers are anti-American in spirit and are printed within the curiosity of the British Empire.’
Regardless of these tensions, in Eire itself anti-Semitic propaganda, akin to The Protocols of the elders of Zion (a up to date best-selling version of which was funded by Henry Ford), had little impression amongst nationalists. The Freeman’s Journal contended that the Protocols was a piece of ‘incredible fiction … invented by the Russian Reactionaries to incite widespread opinion towards the Jews and to supply the excuse for the pogroms of the Black Hundred’. Therefore the ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ trope held little attraction for Irish republicans, partly as a result of they had been typically included as brokers of those self same forces.
Throughout 1920 the Morning Put up printed The Reason behind World Unrest, a e-book influenced by the Protocols, which claimed ‘a direct hyperlink between the good Asiatic conspiracy and the Irish plot’. The Irish Impartial derided this ‘newest English Bogey’ and its competition that if ‘topic races just like the Irish, the Egyptians, and the peoples of India are in revolt’ this might solely be attributable to a ‘darkish and mysterious gang of Continental Jews’. Because the Freeman’s Journal famous, such theories had been used to say that ‘the boys who burnt Balbriggan and Mallow’ had been in reality ‘crusaders in the reason for civilisation and Christianity’. (Although within the post-Civil Struggle interval, parts on the pro-Treaty aspect adopted the ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ trope and used de Valera’s alleged Jewishness as a slur).
In distinction, the unionist Belfast Publication praised The Reason behind World Unrest for exposing how ‘worldwide Jews, akin to Lenin’ had been concerned in undermining the empire and recommended that the ‘British folks will do effectively to heed its warnings’. Components of the British proper sought to clarify the Irish revolution by reference to Jewish conspiracies. There was fertile floor for such views amongst sections of the army elite, British intelligence chief Basil Thompson believing it was ‘effectively established that Polish and Russian Jews are undesirable immigrants’ and that Jews had been controlling Bolshevism.
For some, hassle in Eire was the results of a ‘Yiddo-Sinn Fein alliance’ with the IRA ‘merely the Irish part of Lenin’s Jew authorities’. Cyril Bretherton, the Irish correspondent of the Morning Put up, asserted that it was the ‘worldwide Jew’ who ‘set the ball of revolt rolling in 1916’. For Joseph Banister, creator of Our Judeo-Irish Labour occasion, the Irish rebellion had emerged from a plot by ‘Jews, Irish and Irish-American politicians’. Following success in Eire these ‘two alien breeds’ now sought to ‘scale back Nice Britain to the situation to which the Jews and different alien revolutionaries have introduced the as soon as mighty Russian Empire’.
In February 1919 the Morning Put up recommended that the ‘the bell-weather within the Glasgow upheaval is a Jewish tailor referred to as Shinwell; within the Belfast strike Shinwell’s counterpart is one Simon Greenspon, a Jew of Russian descent. These two are the Trotskys of Belfast and Glasgow.’ Certainly unionist chief Richard Dawson Bates would describe Greenspon as ‘the Russian Jew … introduced from Dublin to show the Belfast males their enterprise’.
Nonetheless unlikely this evaluation, it appealed to British Conservative die-hards, particularly those that thought that the Irish couldn’t have conceived of the concept of revolt themselves. Nesta Webster, whose writings had been embraced by Winston Churchill amongst others, believed that solely the affect of Jewish revolutionaries might clarify how ‘homosexual, happy-go-lucky’ Irish peasants had develop into rebels.
Much less excessive variations had been additionally widespread, typically specializing in de Valera. The British commander in Eire Common Sir Nevil Macready described the Sinn Féin chief as a ‘Cuban Jew’. At an Orange parade in 1922 Col RPD Spencer Chichester declared that ‘it was an terrible factor that the Authorities would have something to do with the Spanish Jew and Michael Collins’ whereas de Valera was known as a ‘Roman Catholic Jew’ at one assembly on the Shankill. Anti-Semitism merged with anti-Irish prejudice when Dublin Fort’s Mark Sturgis complained ‘that these imply, dishonest, insufferably immodest Irishmen are an inferior race and are solely sufferable when they’re whipped – just like the Jews’. These attitudes too had a trans-Atlantic dimension. Sturgis met an American girl who instructed him that de Valera had encountered substantial opposition in america ‘besides after all in New York … however then New York isn’t American, we regard it as a international metropolis, totally run by Irish and Jews’.
The expertise of the broader Irish Jewish group between 1919-23 calls for additional detailed analysis as does the day-to-day lives of Irish Jews in that period. They too skilled the violence of the revolution. The IRA had been liable for killing one Jewish man, Israel Sagarsky, a travelling salesman from Manchester who was shot as a spy in complicated circumstances in Tyrone throughout Could 1922. Fifty-three year-old Sarah Medalie, a Russian-born draper dwelling in Cork’s Tuckey Avenue, died after a raid on her house by crown forces in the course of the burning of town by the Auxiliaries in December 1920.
In late 1923 two Jewish males had been murdered in Dublin. Bernard Goldberg (34), from Manchester, an agent for a German jewellery agency, was shot useless in October, whereas Ernest Kahn (24), a civil servant on the Division of Agriculture, was killed in early November. Certainly one of Kahn’s pals who, regardless of being wounded, escaped, recounted how they’d been requested ‘are you a Jew?’ by two armed males who then opened hearth on them.
The Dublin coroner acknowledged that it was ‘virtually unimaginable (in) this Twentieth century that an individual must be shot as a result of he belonged to the Jewish faith’. Nonetheless, the killers, a gaggle of Free State military officers who included Commandant James Conroy and Captain Fred Laffan, had been definitely motivated by anti-Semitism. Proof suggests regardless of the authorities being conscious of their culpability, these males had been allowed evade prosecution.
Katrina Goldstone has famous how whereas the Limerick boycott of 1904 has obtained a lot consideration, the murderous focusing on of Jews in 1923 has been largely forgotten. Even throughout the Jewish group the shootings had been recalled as tragic circumstances of mistaken id. Nonetheless, in an acrimonious debate in Dáil Éireann throughout 1934, the murders had been mentioned publicly. Throughout an try by the Fianna Fáil authorities to ban the carrying of political uniforms, Seán MacEntee claimed that ‘the person who murdered Kahn goes round in a blue shirt … the person who dedicated these crimes … is a member of the Blue Shirt organisation … He was allowed go free though these charged with the administration of regulation at the moment had been effectively conscious of the crimes he had dedicated.’
There was no response from Advantageous Gael deputies, however it might seem that information of each the crime and its culprits existed in political circles. Regardless of this it has been largely ignored by historians, although it’s attainable to surmise that had the killers been members of the anti-Treaty IRA, then their crimes might need been extra broadly mentioned. Nonetheless the murders illustrate how weak the Jewish group might have been to assault and the way, particularly circumstances, such violence might need been tolerated.
Though some Irish separatists had been influenced by anti-Jewish concepts, anti-Semitism had no place within the political programme, or exercise, of the republican motion. The accusation that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot was unlikely to attraction to republicans, as they too had been denounced as brokers of Moscow. As an alternative anti-Semitic conspiracy theories flourished amongst their British and unionist enemies. Particular person Irish Jews had been clearly sympathetic to separatism and concerned in republican actions. In each Britain and america it was attainable for Irish republicans to ally themselves with Jewish activists from numerous traditions in pursuit of frequent causes, regardless of different tensions. Although they hardly ever occupied centre stage, all the problems that accompanied the re-emergence of the ‘Jewish query’ in postwar Europe had been additionally current in revolutionary Eire.
A model of this text appeared in Irish Historic Research, Vol. 44, Issue 165, May 2020. I wish to thank Mary Elizabeth Lennon and Maurice Casey for offering me with info which I’ve utilised on this model of the article.
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