Jews and the Irish Nationalist Imagination: Between Philosemitism and Antisemitism. Journal of Jewish Studies. Vol. 68, No. 1 (2017) (original) (raw)
This paper 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 utilised in debates over secular authority, the perils of capitalism, even modernity itself. Following Nirenberg, this paper 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 fit into a broader white, European world, whilst simultaneously attacking British rule as analogous to the worst excesses of violent anti-Semitism.