Mick Hartley

If you re interested in why Ireland is so weirdly, unreasonably antisemitic and antiIsrael, here is some of the answer….
In 1997, I made a tv series @Channel4 about Ireland, Irish nationalism and antisemitism. It happened that my own family were Jewish immigrants to…

— S Sebag Montefiore (@simonmontefiore) December 16, 2024

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"If you re interested in why Ireland is so weirdly, unreasonably antisemitic and anti-Israel, here is some of the answer…. In 1997, I made a tv series @Channel4 about Ireland, Irish nationalism and antisemitism. It happened that my own family were Jewish immigrants to Ireland in 1904, fleeing the pogroms in the Russian empire who settled in Limerick and were then driven out in the Limerick Pogrom…. I went to Limerick and found the house where my grandfather Henry Jaffe lived. For a short time. Before a mob attacked their community. During the research, I interviewed the chilling and sinister character Francis Stuart who during WW2 broadcast for the Nazis to Ireland but was later garlanded with praise as a great Irish novelist. In the interview he came out with some extraordinary reflections on the nature of Jews…."

Sebag Montefiore wrote about the Limerick Pogrom in the Spectator, October 1997 – archived here.

There is a myth that the last anti- Semitic pogrom in the British Isles was in mediaeval York. It was far more recent than that: the long-forgotten Limerick pogrom happened in 1904. It began with a sermon given by a priest and gathered momentum because it was backed by Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, friend of Michael Collins and first president of the Irish Free State.  […]

However hard it was to do business in Limerick, it seemed a safer sanctuary than Russia. But three years after the census, when my grandfather was six, hatred of this tiny Jewish community reached fever pitch amongst the very poor Irish to whom they sold their wares. They often sold on credit, and this caused savage resentment. Sometimes when a Jew went to the surrounding countryside to collect a debt, peasant women would pull out their breasts, shout 'Rape!' and then the men would beat up the Jew. An ostentatious Jewish wedding apparently caused jealousy. The pogrom was the result of the increasingly vicious agitation of the spiritual director of Limerick's Redemptionist Order, Father John Creagh, whose church overshadowed Little Jerusalem. The climax came when Creagh, 'a speaker of fervid eloquence', gave his sermon entitled 'How the Israelites trade', on Monday 11 January 1904. It reads like a grotesque parody of anti-Semitism:

The Jews rejected Jesus, they crucified Him and called down the curse of His precious blood on their own heads… they did not hesitate to shed Christian blood. Nowadays they dare not kidnap and slay Christian chil- dren, but they will not hesitate to expose them to a longer and more cruel martyrdom by taking the clothes off their backs and the bit out of their mouths.

Then Creagh came to the Jews of Limerick:

Twenty years ago and less, Jews were known only by name and evil repute in Limerick. They were sucking the blood of other nations but those nations turned them out. And they come to our land to fasten themselves like leeches. Their rags have been exchanged for silk. They have wormed themselves into every business…the furniture trade, the milk trade, the drapery trade — and they have even traded under Irish names… The vic- tims of the Jews are mostly women… the Jew has a sweet tongue when he wishes… If you want an example, look to France. What is at present going on in that land?

The reference to the Dreyfus scandal is significant.

The injustice of it was little consolation to the Jews of Calooney Street when the thousand or so worshippers of Creagh's church poured out, as they were to do daily for a month. A huge drunken mob gathered, wielding burning torches. They worked their way down Calooney Street smashing windows and front doors, and forcing their way into the houses which they then looted. For more than a month the Jews of Limerick waited, terrified in their own homes, almost starving, for Father Creagh had urged the people not to pay their debts. No one would do business with them. If they walked in the streets they were beaten. The only miracle was that no one lost his life, but for the Jews who had just escaped the Cossacks it was terrifying….

See also, Terry Glavin last year.

But there’s something else in the Irish psyche that’s impolite to mention in the comfy Dublin pubs and bistros of Portobello, Ranelagh and Rathmines. Not a few of Ireland’s gallant and celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar antisemites and Nazi collaborators….

Just one awkward thing buried in the Irish psyche is the Limerick Pogrom of 1904, a series of incitements led by a renegade Redemptorist priest that resulted in mob assaults on Jewish businesses and the beatings of several Limerick Jews. The republican pamphleteer Arthur Griffith approved, calling Jews “usurers and parasites.” Griffiths was one of the founders of Sinn Féin, in 1905, and he served as Sinn Féin’s president in 1911….