Shalom Ireland: A Social History of Jews in Modern Ireland.
Author: RIVLIN, Ray.
Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2003. x, 302 pages. Illustrated. Hardback.
Shalom Ireland is a popular account of the social life of Irish Jews from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Most of the story is concentrated in Dublin where almost 90 per cent of the entire Irish Jewish community settled. Until the late nineteenth century, there were only a small number of Jews in Ireland, but then came a great influx from Tsarist Russia.
Ray Rivlin follows the fortunes of Irish Jews from their arrival as immigrants in the 1880s with no English, no money and no means of livelihood, through their establishment as a thriving community, to their present decline. As the colourful panorama of Clanbrassil Street, Dublin’s kosher shopping area, unfolds, the reader learns something of Jewish customs and practice before embarking on a light-hearted but detailed account of almost every aspect of Jewish life.
The reception the newcomers received from the ‘anglicised’ Jewish community already established in Ireland as well as the reaction of the wider community to a growing Jewish presence; their initiative in earning a living in the face of unpopularity in the workplace; their attempts to establish Jewish schools; their disproportionate influence in the fields of Medicine, Law and Politics; their contribution towards Irish culture; even the internal disputes that arguably aided their own decline: all are recorded to provide a lively account of a way of life that has all but disappeared.
Ray Rivlin draws on three years’ intensive research of archival and library material, unpublished family histories, personal memories and oral testimony to create this informative and entertaining account of a talented, hard-working and profoundly civic-minded people, whose contribution to Irish life has been out of all proportion to its numbers. The Jewish community in Ireland, now sadly in decline, is chronicled and celebrated in this delightful book.
ISBN: 0717136345
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