Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History
James Joyce's Leopold Bloom—the atheistic Everyman of Ulysses, son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother—may have turned the world's literary eyes on Dublin, but those who look to him for history should think again. He could hardly have been a product of the city's bona fide Jewish community, where intermarriage with outsiders was rare and piety was pronounced. In Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, a leading economic historian tells the real story of how Jewish Ireland—and Dublin's Little Jerusalem in particular—made ends meet from the 1870s, when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants landed in Dublin, to the late 1940s, just before the community began its dramatic decline.


In 1866—the year Bloom was born—Dublin's Jewish population hardly existed, and on the eve of World War I it numbered barely three thousand. But this small group of people quickly found an economic niche in an era of depression, and developed a surprisingly vibrant web of institutions.


In a richly detailed, elegantly written blend of historical, economic, and demographic analysis, Cormac Ó Gráda examines the challenges this community faced. He asks how its patterns of child rearing, schooling, and cultural and religious behavior influenced its marital, fertility, and infant-mortality rates. He argues that the community's small size shaped its occupational profile and influenced its acculturation; it also compromised its viability in the long run.



Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce presents a fascinating portrait of a group of people in an unlikely location who, though small in number, comprised Ireland's most resilient immigrant community until the Celtic Tiger's immigration surge of the 1990s.

"1129969973"
Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History
James Joyce's Leopold Bloom—the atheistic Everyman of Ulysses, son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother—may have turned the world's literary eyes on Dublin, but those who look to him for history should think again. He could hardly have been a product of the city's bona fide Jewish community, where intermarriage with outsiders was rare and piety was pronounced. In Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, a leading economic historian tells the real story of how Jewish Ireland—and Dublin's Little Jerusalem in particular—made ends meet from the 1870s, when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants landed in Dublin, to the late 1940s, just before the community began its dramatic decline.


In 1866—the year Bloom was born—Dublin's Jewish population hardly existed, and on the eve of World War I it numbered barely three thousand. But this small group of people quickly found an economic niche in an era of depression, and developed a surprisingly vibrant web of institutions.


In a richly detailed, elegantly written blend of historical, economic, and demographic analysis, Cormac Ó Gráda examines the challenges this community faced. He asks how its patterns of child rearing, schooling, and cultural and religious behavior influenced its marital, fertility, and infant-mortality rates. He argues that the community's small size shaped its occupational profile and influenced its acculturation; it also compromised its viability in the long run.



Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce presents a fascinating portrait of a group of people in an unlikely location who, though small in number, comprised Ireland's most resilient immigrant community until the Celtic Tiger's immigration surge of the 1990s.

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Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History

Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History

by Cormac Ó Gráda
Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History

Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History

by Cormac Ó Gráda

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Overview

James Joyce's Leopold Bloom—the atheistic Everyman of Ulysses, son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother—may have turned the world's literary eyes on Dublin, but those who look to him for history should think again. He could hardly have been a product of the city's bona fide Jewish community, where intermarriage with outsiders was rare and piety was pronounced. In Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, a leading economic historian tells the real story of how Jewish Ireland—and Dublin's Little Jerusalem in particular—made ends meet from the 1870s, when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants landed in Dublin, to the late 1940s, just before the community began its dramatic decline.


In 1866—the year Bloom was born—Dublin's Jewish population hardly existed, and on the eve of World War I it numbered barely three thousand. But this small group of people quickly found an economic niche in an era of depression, and developed a surprisingly vibrant web of institutions.


In a richly detailed, elegantly written blend of historical, economic, and demographic analysis, Cormac Ó Gráda examines the challenges this community faced. He asks how its patterns of child rearing, schooling, and cultural and religious behavior influenced its marital, fertility, and infant-mortality rates. He argues that the community's small size shaped its occupational profile and influenced its acculturation; it also compromised its viability in the long run.



Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce presents a fascinating portrait of a group of people in an unlikely location who, though small in number, comprised Ireland's most resilient immigrant community until the Celtic Tiger's immigration surge of the 1990s.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691171050
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 06/28/2016
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor of Economics at University College Dublin. His seven previous books include Black '47 and Beyond (Princeton), which won the 2000 James J. Donnelly, Sr., Prize for Best Book on Irish History or Social Studies and was one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Books of 1999.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables ix

Acknowledgments xi





INTRODUCTION 1





CHAPTER 1: Arrival and Context 9

Leaving Home: History and Memory 12

The Migration in Context 21





CHAPTER 2: "England-Ireland" and Dear Dirty Dublin 30

Mortality 33

Living Standards 40

Interwar Dublin 41

Water and Sanitation 42

The Jewish Community in Context 43





CHAPTER 3: "They Knew No Trade But Peddling" 45

The Weekly Men 47

The Old and the New Peddling 56

"The Jewman Moneylender" 61





CHAPTER 4: Self-Employment, Social Mobility 72

Artisans 72

Occupational Mobility 73

Immigrants as Entrepreneurs and Workers 84

Technical Appendix: More on Age and Occupational Choice in the United States 92





CHAPTER 5: Settling In 94

Housing and Settlement 94

Six Streets in Little Jerusalem 105

Within-Street Clustering 108

Cork and Belfast Jewries 115





CHAPTER 6: Schooling and Literacy 122





CHAPTER 7: The Demography of Irish Jewry 129

The 1911 Population Census 131

The Fertility Transition 134

Jewish and Gentile Fertility 136

Infant and Child Mortality 143

Mortality in Jewish Ireland 147

Culture Mattered 152

Technical Appendix: Accounting for the Variation in Fertility and Infant/Child Mortality 154





CHAPTER 8: Culture, Family, Health 160

Litvak Culture 164

Food, Drink, and Health 171

CHAPTER 9: Newcomer to Neighbor 178

In the Beginning 179

Remembering Limerick 191

Autobiographical Memory 194

Social Learning across Communities? 200

A Note on Litigation between Jews 202





CHAPTER 10: Ich Geh Fun "Ire"land 204

Religion 205

From Little Jerusalem to Rathgar and Beyond 206

Decline 209





APPENDIX 1: Letters to One of the Last "Weekly Men" 217

APPENDIX 2: Mr. Parnell Remembers 221

APPENDIX 3: Louis Hyman, Jessie Bloom, and The Jews of Ireland 224





Notes 229

Bibliography 271

Index 295


What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Written with quiet assurance and understated authority, Cormac Ó Gráda's richly detailed look at a small group of people tells us something very important about the economic history of Ireland and about the gaps in that society that Jews could fill. It also shows how Jews in general made ends meet in the merciless economics of Diaspora. But, most importantly, this book tells us how even a small ethnic community can embody a powerful economic principle; how culture, religion, tradition, and investment in different kinds of human capital play roles in the formation and operation of economic institutions."—Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University, author of Gifts of Athena

"Cormac Ó Gráda has written a fascinating economic and demographic history of Irish Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He tracks the emergence and subsequent shrinkage of this Ashkenazic Jewish community. This is an outstanding addition to the growing literature on the history of very small Diaspora communities. The writing style will attract both scholars and history buffs of Ireland and of Diaspora Jewry."—Barry R. Chiswick, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of The Economics of Immigration

"Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce compels a reconsideration of innumerable assumptions about Joyce's picture of Dublin, and this landmark work should spark off a fundamental debate about the relationship between imaginative literature and history. Sure to be pored over by specialists in a wide range of fields, this is one of the most exciting examples of scholarly enquiry I have read in many years."—J. J. Lee, New York University and University College, Cork, author of Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society

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