> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Antisemitism and Belonging in Ulysses: Whose Country Is It? - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/antisemitism-belonging-ulysses/ - Published: 2026-07-28T22:09:15.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-04T17:27:47.000Z - Description: Kitcher names the antisemitism around Bloom and its engine, 'Boys' Club Morality': Dublin excludes its most decent man for the very virtues it lacks. - Author: John Kaag - Tags: Philip Kitcher on James Joyce's Ulysses, #essay James Joyce's *Ulysses* is, among many other things, a book about exclusion, and it is honest enough to name the form that exclusion takes. In his Rebind Classics reading, [Philip Kitcher refuses to smooth over](https://www.rebindclassics.com/why-ulysses-so-difficult-kitcher/) the antisemitism that surrounds Leopold Bloom all day. The ugliness is there, in the funeral carriage and the newspaper office and the pub, and the book, Kitcher insists, names it for what it is while asking a question that runs underneath the whole day: whose country is Ireland, and is Bloom allowed to belong to it? The machinery of exclusion runs on what Kitcher calls "[Boys' Club Morality](https://www.rebindclassics.com/boys-club-morality/)," the ethical code of male Dublin. Its central principle is "generosity to friends": members of the club are supported even when they break the rules, while "Outsiders" get no such treatment, and "even when members of the anointed cluster trample on the rights of outsiders, their transgressive behavior is to be forgiven or even applauded." Bloom is not a member. He is held outside the circle of automatic loyalty, and the novel registers his exclusion in a hundred small signals, beginning with the fact that no one will use his first name. ## **Marked as a Jew, Denied a Country** The antisemitism is not subtle, and Kitcher tracks it across the book. He notes "the same knee-jerk anti-semitism we have encountered in Mr Deasy and Simon Dedalus," surfacing in one character's anger at "the 'jewman' who made his clothes," and [reaching "full display"](https://www.rebindclassics.com/ulysses-proliferation-of-perspectives/) in the [Cyclops episode](https://www.rebindclassics.com/who-is-leopold-bloom/). There, the narrator regards Bloom as "a completely alien form of humanity, an outsider who arouses suspicion even in dogs." Kitcher shows how the suspicion of Bloom's supposed dishonesty "seems to stem from a general view of the business practices of any 'israelite,'" a prejudice masquerading as a specific charge. But the deepest question, for Kitcher, is national rather than only religious: the question of belonging. In the newspaper office, Bloom reflects on Nannetti, an Italian-born Dubliner who will claim Ireland as his country "even though it is not his real country." This, Kitcher notes, "corresponds to Bloom's own self-conception," and the novel will show "how other Dubliners are unwilling to accord Bloom this status." The word "country" gets accented in the text, Kitcher observes, "because the question is in the air": whether Ireland belongs to those who immigrated, or to their children born there. Some Dubliners plainly think it does not. ## **The Ceiling on Bloom's Allies** What makes Kitcher's reading unsparing is that he extends the critique even to Bloom's defenders. When Martin Cunningham defends Bloom in the pub, the defense is "odd," gratuitously mentioning Bloom's father's suicide and describing Bloom as a "perverted jew." Cunningham, Kitcher argues, "knows what he is doing." He "can't swim too hard against the current," and so offers "no plea for full acceptance of Bloom." Cunningham is a man "whose heart is in the right place but also knows how to make good use of a variety of people." That, Kitcher suggests, is the ceiling on Bloom's allies: a qualified sympathy that never quite grants him full belonging. The exclusion is sharpened by its irony, which Kitcher relishes. When the men suspect Bloom of fraud over a lottery win, the charge is false by their own standards, "yet, ironically, it is in the vicinity of the truth," because Bloom is in fact reluctantly helping a scheme to secure money for the Dignam family by deceiving an insurer. The irony deepens, Kitcher notes, when we learn the insurer's name: the Scottish Widows. The men condemn Bloom for an imagined crime while missing the real, well-meant transgression, and the whole structure of their suspicion rests on prejudice rather than evidence. Free account Read more with a free account. - The opening films of every book, with its guide - More essays open to you on the site - Listen In: minutes from every audio series - The Rebind newsletter, every couple of weeks Join free → Check your inbox for a sign-in link. Something went wrong. Please try again. Want everything? [Subscribe for every episode, film and essay →](#/portal/signup) ## **Excluded for His Best Qualities** Against all of this, Kitcher sets what Bloom keeps doing that no one else in Dublin does. The novel, in its medieval-romance parody, credits Bloom with virtues, but "not the ones most closely associated with knighthood." He is praised not for valor or strength but for "qualities Dublin males typically associate with sissies": empathy, patience, humane treatment of animals. The book quietly insists that these are the real virtues, and that the men who exclude Bloom for lacking manliness have mistaken the nature of courage. [The last word on belonging, Kitcher notes, goes to Molly](https://www.rebindclassics.com/ulysses-interior-monologue-kitcher/). She understands that "some of her husband's difficulties stem from qualities she admires in him," that his troubles are "generated by a limited and hostile environment." The people who once predicted a bright future for the young Bloom "underestimated the prejudice against a perceived outsider, identified as a Jew, with the effrontery to propose modifications" of existing practice. That, in Kitcher's reading, is the book's verdict: a decent, inventive man excluded not despite his best qualities but because of them, in a city that could not see whose country it actually was.