Usurers and Usurpers: Race, Nation, and the Performance of Jewish Mercantilism in Ulysses

In the opening scene of Ulysses, Buck Mulligan marvels sar donically at Stephen's epigrammatic statement that the cracked lookingglass of a servant is a symbol of Irish art. Mulligan's sug gestion that Stephen play up his Irish wit and exchange the quip for a tip from the Britisher Haines reinforces Stephen's lowly position as an impoverished Irishman. Haines's wealth "stinks" because it has been acquired by exploitive means, through selling the medicinal root "jalap" to Zulus. Mulligan implicitly Hebraizes the Britisher's patrimony by associating Haines's father's trade with a parasitic "bloody swindle/' He suggests, in contrast, that the two young men "Hellenise'' Ireland by laboring together to heal their people's ills through the honest means of Stephen's art and Mulligan's medicine. Mulligan describes the awful characteristics of the British as Jewish ones. The British, in his idiom, are rich Jewish swindlers and money lenders who symbolically hold Ireland in hock (in "a pawnshop" as Stephen later muses?U 2.47). Race is the primary means of categorizing and criminalizing peo ple in this passage?differentiating Irish servant from British master Zulu native from British swindler, and Jew from Greek (or Hebraize* Briton from Helleni^ed Irishman), Demonstrating another dimension of Vincent Cheng's work on the Irish displacement of Britain's racial ized depictions of Irish inferiority,1 this essay locates shifting racial and national identities in the satirical performance of intertwined economic and racial stereotypes of Jews and Britons. Joyce's Irishmen displace accusations of their racial difference from the British onto depictions of a racialized Jewish difference, which, in turn, come to represent the greed, dishonesty, and ruthlessness of the British colo