Jews in Ireland to the 1960s

Two facts about Jewish Ireland, both true, and they do not sit together.

The Constitution that de Valera wrote named the Jewish Congregations in its article on religion, alongside the Protestant churches. In the Europe of its day that was not nothing.

And the state that adopted it let in, by the best count, no more than a hundred Jewish refugees in the whole of the Nazi period.

The community was never large. It came late and it came poor, most of it from Lithuania. In the South it peaked at just under four thousand people. This series follows it from one line in the annals to the years after the war, and it keeps the story and the record apart.

1079. Five men and one line

The Annals of Inisfallen, under 1079, say that five Jews came from over the sea with gifts for Tairdelbach Ua Briain, King of Munster, and that they were sent back over the sea.

That is the whole entry. It does not say who they were, why they came, or why they were refused. Everything else written about them is guesswork.

1232. A keeper of the king's Jews

The next records are English, and they are about money.

In 1170 Henry II fined Josce, a Jew of Gloucester, for lending money to men who had gone over to Ireland against the king's ban. Over time that line has grown into the claim that a Jew paid for the invasion. Cecil Roth, writing the standard history of the Jews in England, said the evidence hardly justifies it. The record is a fine for a loan, and the story should go no further than the record.

In 1232 Henry III granted Peter de Rivaux, among a great many other offices, the custody of the king's Judaism in Ireland. Anna Matheson reads the grant as evidence that a small Jewish community existed in Ireland by then. It is the strongest evidence there is, and it is indirect.

A Dublin land grant of 1241 forbids the land to be pledged to Jews. That was standard wording in grants of the time. It tells us about the habits of clerks, not about Dublin's Jews.

Edward I expelled the Jews from England in 1290. After that the Irish record is silent for more than two centuries.

1660. The community that stayed

The silence breaks with a few families of Spanish and Portuguese origin in the port towns in the sixteenth century. The Annyas family of Youghal was the best known, and at least two of its men were mayors of the town.

A permanent community came shortly after the Restoration. A handful of merchant families settled in Dublin and kept a synagogue in Crane Lane, near Dublin Castle. In 1714 the Irish writer John Toland published Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland.

The community bought ground for a cemetery at Ballybough. The date usually given is 1718. The genealogist Fiona Fitzsimons gives 1728. By the middle of the eighteenth century there were about forty families in Dublin, some two hundred people, and a smaller group in Cork. After that the numbers stood still for a hundred years.

1880s. From Lithuania

Then the numbers changed. From the 1880s Jews left the Russian Empire in large numbers, and a few thousand of them came to Ireland, most to Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Limerick. By the early twentieth century there were probably about four thousand eight hundred Jews on the island, the most there have ever been.

Most of Limerick's Jews came from a single village, Akmijan, in the province of Kovno.

Most of the new arrivals were poor. Many of the men became pedlars and credit traders, selling goods door to door and collecting payment by the week. It was a trade built on debt, and in Limerick that was where the trouble began.

1899. A Lord Mayor from Hamburg

Otto Jaffe was born in Hamburg in 1846 and came to Belfast with the family's linen business. He was elected to the city council in 1894. In 1899 he became Lord Mayor, the first and so far the only Jewish Lord Mayor of Belfast. He was knighted and made High Sheriff soon afterwards, and he served a second term as Lord Mayor five years later.

In the middle of the Great War, with feeling against anything German running high, he was forced out of the city and went to England. He died there in 1929. Belfast put up a blue plaque to him more than eighty years later.

1904. Limerick

In January 1904 Father John Creagh, a Redemptorist, preached to the Arch Confraternity of the Holy Family in Limerick, a sodality of several thousand men. His subject was the city's Jews, between thirty and thirty five families by different counts. He called them leeches, Christ killers and allies of the Freemasons, and he told his men to stop dealing with them. A week later he preached again and raised the old charge of ritual murder.

There was violence. Forty to fifty incidents were reported between February and July, most of them stones, mud and jostling. The rabbi, Elias Levin, was stoned. Nobody was killed.

The boycott did the real damage. Customers stopped paying their weekly instalments, and the traders had nothing else to live on. The police counted thirty two Jewish families in January 1904. By March 1905 eight had gone, five of them because of the boycott. Thirteen of the rest were still there in 1911.

Michael Davitt and John Redmond condemned it. Arthur Griffith backed it in his paper. The Church of Ireland bishop of Limerick, Thomas Bunbury, condemned it, and the corporation rebuked him for doing so.

Whether to call it a pogrom is still argued. Dermot Keogh, who used the word, now prefers boycott. The article on Father Creagh has the rest.

1919. Herzog in Dublin

Isaac Herzog moved from Belfast to Dublin in 1919 as rabbi of the city's community. He spoke Irish, backed the national movement and became a friend of de Valera. He was the first Chief Rabbi of the Free State. The article on Herzog sorts out the dates.

Jews were in the revolution too. Robert Briscoe ran guns for the republicans, sat in the Dáil for thirty eight years and became the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin. Michael Noyk, a solicitor, acted for Arthur Griffith, who had backed the Limerick boycott fifteen years before.

The census of 1926 counted 3,686 Jews in the Free State. Most of them lived in Dublin.

1937. Named in the Constitution

Article 44 of the new Constitution gave the Catholic Church a special position. The clause after it recognised the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Quakers and the Jewish Congregations, together with the other denominations then in the country.

When the Constitution came into force, a senior rabbi in Ireland, Dr A. Gudansky, said that not a drop of innocent Jewish blood had ever been shed on Irish soil. How the clause was written is in the article on de Valera and the Constitution.

1938. A lost chance

The Constitution named the community. The state did little to let it grow.

Éire's refugee policy was restrictive, and it was meant to be. The Department of Justice under Patrick Ruttledge set it, with support from Seán Lemass's Department of Industry and Commerce. De Valera and External Affairs took a more liberal line, and de Valera rebuked Justice for its attitude. He did not overrule it.

Dermot Keogh calls the years from 1938 to 1941 a lost chance. At most a hundred Jewish refugees were admitted in the whole Nazi period. The Free State's minister in Berlin, Charles Bewley, sent home reports that were openly antisemitic and pro Nazi, and he defended Kristallnacht. The Celtic scholar Julius Pokorny, driven from his chair in Berlin, got an Irish visa only after Bewley was replaced in 1939.

North of the border, a refugee farm at Millisle in County Down took in Kindertransport children and young Jewish refugees from 1938 until May 1948. Well over three hundred people passed through it.

1943. A speech and a story

In July 1943 a new deputy, Oliver J. Flanagan, told the Dáil that the Jews should be routed out of the country. Four years later he was still asking for protection from aliens and Jews.

The story says that in the same year de Valera tried to bring five hundred Jewish children to Ireland. No source for that has been found, and the story is not repeated here as fact.

1945. Condolences

When Hitler died, de Valera called on the German envoy in Dublin to offer his condolences. It was diplomatic protocol, rigidly applied. Irish Jews were puzzled by it. Keogh finds that it did not, in the long run, damage the high regard in which the community held him.

1946. Which children

In July 1946 the first German children arrived at Dún Laoghaire under a scheme to take children from postwar Germany into Irish homes. The Save the German Children Society, which had campaigned for it, stipulated that no Jewish children were to be taken.

In the same year Robert Collis, a Dublin doctor who had worked at Belsen after its liberation, brought five child survivors of the camp to Ireland. Herzog, visiting Dublin that September, voiced his concern at the country's refugee policy.

In the middle of the 1940s there were 3,907 Jews in the South. The growth since 1926 came mostly from births, not from immigration.

1953. Justice loses

The Department of Justice held its line after the war, through a change of government. It was beaten in 1953, after de Valera returned to power.

By then the community was already shrinking. Young people emigrated, many of them to Israel after 1948. That decline belongs to a later story.