Irish-Israelism: Reconsidering the Politics of Race and Belonging in “Cyclops”

This article re-considers the language of racial stereotype that is at the forefront of the “Cyclops” episode in Ulysses. Critics have long characterized the conflict between Leopold Bloom and the Citizen in terms of how each character defines the Irish nation. According to these readings, Bloom’s cosmopolitanism stands against the Citizen’s xenophobic nationalism. But the latter’s reliance on the language of racial stereotype—most evident in the anti-Semitic insults he hurls at Bloom—betrays the decidedly non-local basis of his rhetoric. Indeed, this essay reveals the extent to which the Citizen’s conceptualization of the Irish nation actually appropriates the language of Jewish nationalism, a discourse that circulated throughout Britain during the turn of the twentieth century.