« Being Jewish and Irish in Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan by Ruth Gilligan »

Résumé En

Irish Jewish questions have long stood in the margins of scholarly work, and in fact Irish Jewish literature as a whole has been marginal within Irish literature. While the first Jewish people setting foot in Ireland were depicted in the Annals of Inisfallen, a medieval chronicle, as arriving in 1079, the most famous, however complex, representation of a Jewish character in fiction is James Joyce's Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Paradoxically enough, interest in Irish Jewish history has increased since the 1990s, at the same time as the community itself declined. Irish Jewish studies are therefore only beginning. 1 In 2016, the same year as the Cork synagogue closed its doors, after more than a hundred years, a collection of poems by Simon Lewis, Jewtown, 2 and a novel by Ruth Gilligan Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan, 3 were published, both 'artistically resurrect[ing] the now disappeared Cork Jewish community'. 4 Also in 2016, an exhibition entitled Representations of Jews in Irish Literature 5 was launched in Belfast, part of a wider, long-term project set up by researchers from the Arts Department of the University of Ulster, whose aim is to 'analyze the representations of Jews from the earliest times to the present', as well as 'investigate references to Jews in Irish literature, whether in Irish or English, and collect more substantial references into an anthology of such writing'. 6