Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables ix Acknowledgments xi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Arrival and Context 9 Leaving Home: History and Memory 12 The Migration in Context 21 CHAPTER 2: "England-Ireland" and Dear Dirty Dublin 30 Mortality 33 Living Standards 40 Interwar Dublin 41 Water and Sanitation 42 The Jewish Community in Context 43 CHAPTER 3: "They Knew No Trade But Peddling" 45 The Weekly Men 47 The Old and the New Peddling 56 "The Jewman Moneylender" 61 CHAPTER 4: Self-Employment, Social Mobility 72 Artisans 72 Occupational Mobility 73 Immigrants as Entrepreneurs and Workers 84 Technical Appendix: More on Age and Occupational Choice in the United States 92 CHAPTER 5: Settling In 94 Housing and Settlement 94 Six Streets in Little Jerusalem 105 Within-Street Clustering 108 Cork and Belfast Jewries 115 CHAPTER 6: Schooling and Literacy 122 CHAPTER 7: The Demography of Irish Jewry 129 The 1911 Population Census 131 The Fertility Transition 134 Jewish and Gentile Fertility 136 Infant and Child Mortality 143 Mortality in Jewish Ireland 147 Culture Mattered 152 Technical Appendix: Accounting for the Variation in Fertility and Infant/Child Mortality 154 CHAPTER 8: Culture, Family, Health 160 Litvak Culture 164 Food, Drink, and Health 171 CHAPTER 9: Newcomer to Neighbor 178 In the Beginning 179 Remembering Limerick 191 Autobiographical Memory 194 Social Learning across Communities? 200 A Note on Litigation between Jews 202 CHAPTER 10: Ich Geh Fun "Ire"land 204 Religion 205 From Little Jerusalem to Rathgar and Beyond 206 Decline 209 APPENDIX 1: Letters to One of the Last "Weekly Men" 217 APPENDIX 2: Mr. Parnell Remembers 221 APPENDIX 3: Louis Hyman, Jessie Bloom, and The Jews of Ireland 224 Notes 229 Bibliography 271 Index 295

Promotional Information

Written with quiet assurance and understated authority, Cormac O Grada's richly detailed look at a small group of people tells us something very important about the economic history of Ireland and about the gaps in that society that Jews could fill. It also shows how Jews in general made ends meet in the merciless economics of Diaspora. But, most importantly, this book tells us how even a small ethnic community can embody a powerful economic principle; how culture, religion, tradition, and investment in different kinds of human capital play roles in the formation and operation of economic institutions. -- Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University, author of" Gifts of Athena" Cormac O Grada has written a fascinating economic and demographic history of Irish Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He tracks the emergence and subsequent shrinkage of this Ashkenazic Jewish community. This is an outstanding addition to the growing literature on the history of very small Diaspora communities. The writing style will attract both scholars and history buffs of Ireland and of Diaspora Jewry. -- Barry R. Chiswick, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of "The Economics of Immigration" Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce compels a reconsideration of innumerable assumptions about Joyce's picture of Dublin, and this landmark work should spark off a fundamental debate about the relationship between imaginative literature and history. Sure to be pored over by specialists in a wide range of fields, this is one of the most exciting examples of scholarly enquiry I have read in many years. -- J. J. Lee, New York University and University College, Cork, author of "Ireland, 1912-1985: Politics and Society"

About the Author

Cormac O Grada is Professor of Economics at University College Dublin. His seven previous books include "Black '47 and Beyond" (Princeton), which won the 2000 James J. Donnelly, Sr., Prize for Best Book on Irish History or Social Studies and was one of "Choice"'s Outstanding Academic Books of 1999.

Reviews

Co-Winner of the 2006 James S. Donnelly, Sr. Prize, American Conference for Irish Studies "While much has been written about the Jewishness of James Joyce's Leopold Bloom ... few know anything about the remarkable community in Ireland that inspired Joyce to create him ... This work is extremely detailed, describing the Jewish communities down to the streets they lived on and what they ate... Grada's Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce is a scholarly comprehensive tome full of hard facts and anecdotal tidbits on this little-known chapter in the story of the Ashkenazic Diaspora that will appeal to history buffs and literary fanatics alike."--Caraid O'Brien, Forward "This remarkable book traces the social, economic and demographic history of the Irish Jewish community between, roughly, 1870 and 1976... The book traces the educational and economic rise of the community... A wonderful feature of this book is its superb library of quotations, which appear in twos and threes at the head of each chapter and throughout the text. These extracts from the literature and sayings of the Irish Jews would make a short book in themselves."--Adrian Hardiman, Irish Times "This is a scholarly work, but the non-academic reader should not be put off by the scholarship. In-between the tables and graphs, there is a wonderfully curious, endlessly entertaining, and deeply humane book. Joyce would have loved it."--Brian Lynch, Irish Independent "O Grada provides a definitive socio-economic study ... covering everything from the occupational profile and literacy levels of this community to the density of Jewish settlement in particular Dublin neighborhoods. But he has also produced a moving tribute to (what he terms) this 'small Irish tributary' of the mass Jewish exodus from Eastern Europe, which ... overcame most of the challenges and limited opportunities it faced in establishing a new life in Ireland."--Rory Miller, Journal of Jewish Studies "For both Joyce scholars and historians of immigrant groups in Britain, this study is a fascinating piece of research that, much to its credit, relates a host of interview testimony to fill out the flavor and nuance of the Irish-Jewish community during what would prove to be its heyday."--Neil R. Davison, The Historian