James Joyce's Judaic Other (review)

James Joyce's Judaic Other by Marilyn Reizbaum. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. 246. $51.00 cloth; $16.95 paper.

In James Joyce's Judaic Other, Marilyn Reizbaum has written a lively, if often quirky account of Joyce's engagement with images of Jewishness in Ulysses—what she refers to as his "poetics of Jewishness." It is an important project, and marks a propitious start to a more sophisticated analysis, of either Bloom's character or the complexities of Joyce's philosemitism, than we have seen until now. As Reizbaum herself points out in her Introduction, Bloom's Jewishness was traditionally overlooked or treated with painful literalism—"Is he or isn't he?"—in Joyce criticism. The query was usually answered in the negative, so that scholars such as Ellmann felt it unnecessary to dwell on those questions and configurations now understood precisely to define both modern Jewish consciousness and the diverse shapes of antisemitism (itself a phenomenon of modernity). To Reizbaum's credit, she engages fully with the current understanding—propounded by the new Jewish cultural studies—of Jewishness as construct rather than given. But she neglects to specify that this idea of constructedness—what Reizbaum calls "impossibility"—does not necessarily speak to either the central concepts of Judaism or to the self-definition of large numbers of Jews. That is, her book—which is part of Stanford's "Contraversions" series subtitled "Jews and Other Differences"—rests firmly (or wobbles deliberately) on the "difference" side of perspectives on Jewish history and consciousness; there is no Jewish "same" in Reizbaum's poetic or cultural view. It should be acknowledged here, however, that Reizbaum is not interested in "Judaism" but in "Jewishness"—or, as she provocatively calls it at one or two points, "Jew-ishness."

So central is Reizbaum's notion of the "impossibility" of the modern Jew, and of Joyce's Bloom in particular, that her book might—and perhaps should—have been entitled "James Joyce's Impossible Jew." The motif is unquestioningly compelling, and Reizbaum's delineation of Joyce's fascination with antisemitic stereotypes as well as with the tortured self-image of modern, assimilated, Jewish intellectuals is a true contribution to Joyce studies as well as to Jewish cultural studies. In a clever, surprising sleight of counterintuitive thinking, Reizbaum argues that Leopold Bloom is believable and memorable precisely because he represents a compound of preconceptions and familiar images of the European Jew—the "stage Jew," as it were. He is also "impossible" in that he is not permitted to exist. While Reizbaum does not say so outright, the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century corpus of antisemitic writings did lead, diabolically, to this very conclusion: the Jew is not a true human, and must therefore be eradicated. Far from endorsing this view, however, Joyce, as Reizbaum indicates, continually, concertedly, and creatively inverted the negative definition of impossibility and made it the emblem of endless possibility: inconclusiveness, restlessness, the erasure of damning delineations. Thus antisemitism is employed against itself, and modern, secular Jewishness becomes an emblem of modernist writing par excellence: elusive, disruptive, uncategorizable.

Again, both Joyce's inversions and Reizbaum's attention to them are imaginative and admirable. But is it altogether fair to attribute Bloom's credibility—the way Joyce makes him live in the minds of readers—to his "impossibility," his construction from a conglomeration of notions about Jews, whether spawned by antisemites or by Jews themselves? What about those readers who know nothing of such notions; why is Bloom so palpable and human to them? And why not pay attention precisely to those factors (dismissed, as Reizbaum argues, by the critics who have used them to discount Bloom's Jewishness) that make Bloom both "impossible"—unacknowledged as subject by either the culture he inhabits or by strict definitions of Jewishness—and fascinating: his uncircumcised condition, his non-Jewish mother, his Hungarian father, his baptism, his self-conscious ruminations about all of these as well as about Zionism, Jewish liturgy, Catholic liturgy...