Ireland was ‘not exempt’ from anti-Jewish prejudice, President says

The Jewish people's experience of dispersion and exile finds deep resonance with the Irish, President Michael D Higgins has said.

However, Mr Higgins also noted that Irish history was not “exempt from some of the darkest features that have characterised the attitude of other nations towards their Jewish citizens”.

The President was speaking at a reception in Áras an Uachtaráin for delegates of the World Jewish Congress, who are holding their third annual conference in Dublin.

The congress represents Jewish communities in 100 countries.

At the reception, Mr Higgins recalled the story of former lord mayor of Cork Gerald Goldberg, who was the son of Jewish Lithuanian refugees who fled the pogroms of Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th-century.

"In Ireland, the Goldberg family then found themselves caught in the 1904 Limerick riots and boycott [targeting the Jewish community], created by a clericalist abuse of irrational fears whipped up to mob violence.

“Those events ruined Limerick’s Jewish tradesmen and led a majority of them to depart for Cork, a city of which Gerald Goldberg was elected lord mayor in 1977,” Mr Higgins said.

He recalled how, in his later life, Gerald Goldberg was asked if he had encountered much anti-Jewish prejudice during his lengthy public career.

“Goldberg replied: ‘Oh yes. Yes, indeed.’ And then, after a pause: ‘In Dublin, they always have the knife out for the Cork man.’”

Mr Higgins said the event was a “testament to the commitment and dynamism of Ireland’s small Jewish community, a community that has made, and continues to make, such a rich contribution to the life of this island – to Irish arts, professions and politics”.

Anti-Semitism

He congratulated the congress for being “particularly wary of not letting the poison of anti-Semitism spread again.

“No, it is not acceptable to see armed police outside synagogues and Jewish schools across European cities,” he said.

He said that such vigilance “is one in which we must all share, and it is also one that must enable us to better detect and combat all forms of discriminations and exclusions, wherever they arise, and whether they are based on race, religion, sexual preference, gender, cultural history, physical appearance, or mental abilities.

“In sustaining our vigilance against racism, we can, I believe, find great inspiration in the Jewish tradition of universalism, as an outlook which values humankind as a whole, above any single one of its components.”

This also holds true where the state of Israel was concerned, he said.

“While the fundamental right of Jewish people to the shelter of a state in which their culture can flourish is a principle that should never be questioned, we must never lose sight of the concurrent obligation for that state, like any other state, to respect universal norms and the rights of fellow human beings with valid claims, also, to land, and to life, memory, cultural flourishing and security in that land of their ancestors,” he said.

The President said it was “not useful to dismiss, or even suspect of insensitivity to Jewish life, culture and security, those of us who seek to vindicate these values without borders, and who derive from our own experience of conflict and exclusion a willingness to bring those values and that experience to the shared conversation we need to sustain in order to build peace and mutual respect in the Middle East region”.