The Irish Echo: ‘Ulysses’ revives Exodus for Irish story

Charles Stewart Parnell said in Committee Room 15 at Westminster as he was being toppled as the leader of Irish nationalism in December 1890 that he had “come within sight of the Promised Land.”

This wasn’t some grand rhetorical flourish. As Abby Bender, author of “Israelites in Erin: Exodus, Revolution, and the Irish Revival,” told us this week, the “biblical story of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt—liberation from oppression and the journey to a Promised Land—has been present in Ireland’s political and literary imagination. The Irish-Jewish analogy was once ubiquitous in Ireland; it grew to prominence by the 17th century, and it remained a staple of proto-nationalist and nationalist thinking into the first decade of the 20th century.”

Bender, who teaches in the Languages and Literature department at Sacred Heart University, and is involved in the Irish Studies minor and the SHU campus in Dingle, told the Echo, “Joyce described ‘Ulysses’ as an ‘epic of two races: Israel-Ireland,’ and his protagonist is both Irish and Jewish. Joyce highlighted the ironies and limits of comparing Jewish and Irish suffering, but he was also in earnest about exposing xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism.

To read the full story, visit The Irish Echo website.