Jews and the Irish nationalist imagination: between philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism

This article focuses on three of the most canonical Irish nationalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), Michael Davitt (1846-1906) and Eamon de Valera (1882--1975) -- and the various claims they made that the Irish nation was analogous to the Jewish nat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Jewish studies
Main Author: Beatty, Aidan (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: [2017]
In: Journal of Jewish studies
Further subjects:B Jews
B Imagination
B Semantics
B Judaism
B Capitalism
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
Description
Summary:This article focuses on three of the most canonical Irish nationalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), Michael Davitt (1846-1906) and Eamon de Valera (1882--1975) -- and the various claims they made that the Irish nation was analogous to the Jewish nation. In his recent work on Anti-Judaism David Nirenberg has shown how abstract 'figures of Judaism' have been used in large swathes of European political thought. Such abstract 'Jewish' figures, Nirenberg argues, have been utilized in debates over secular authority, the perils o f capitalism, even modernity itself. Following Nirenberg, this article argues that O'Connell, Davitt and de Valera engaged in a comparable Irish nationalist 'thinking with Judaism'; this was a means of thinking about Irish statelessness and about where Ireland fits into a broader white, European world, whilst simultaneously attacking British rule as analogous to the worst excesses of violent anti-Semitism.
ISSN:2056-6689
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of Jewish studies
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.18647/3304/JJS-2017