“not a propagandist for the better treatment of minorities”: The Richard Ellmann-Louis Hyman Correspondence

This article introduces and analyzes a series of now archived letters exchanged between Richard Ellmann and Louis Hyman, an Irish-born educator, private scholar, and author of The Jews of Ireland: From Earliest Times to the Year 1910. Having first contacted Ellmann in 1961 to inquire about the biographer’s sources for Dublin models for Bloom, Hyman later became more animated in a series of exchanges in 1966 after discovering Joyce’s friendship in Trieste with Moses Dlugacz, the model for the eponymous Zionist pork butcher in Ulysses. The letters relate Hyman’s enthusiasm toward this figure as a source for the novel’s thematic use of Zionism in Bloom’s Jewish consciousness, as well as Ellmann’s cautionary hesitancy toward the same. The piece argues that, on a broad level, the letters represent two opposing sensibilities within the Jewish intellectual world of the mid-century, and so form a prime example of how readers of Ulysses often project personal politics onto their interpretations of controversial Jewish issues in the novel. The essay asserts that Ellmann’s adult Jewish identity played into how he shaped these concerns in the original and revised editions of the biography and demonstrates how his conclusions were influenced in the revision by his dialogue with Hyman. To aid in this argument, the article offers biographical research on both figures’ Jewish backgrounds and careers as scholars and also reviews Ellmann’s sources in his quest to learn about Joyce’s contact with Jews in Dublin, Trieste, and Zurich. Exploring what the letters imply about the ethno-religious identities of their authors allows an entrance into how Ellmann’s Joyce both expanded, yet limited, our grasp of Ulysses as a historically significant Irish-Jewish novel.