"Irish Heart - Jewish Soul - Favourite Irish and Jewish Songs"
"What is your nation, if I may ask?" says the citizen. "Ireland", says Bloom, "I was born here. Ireland" (James Joyce, Ulysses). Bloom (Blum) is not an unusual surname among Dublin's Jews. The first Jews dwelling in Ireland disappeared after their expulsion out of the English controlled territories in 1290. They re-appeared in the 17th century and immigrated in significant numbers from Tsarist Russia in the 1880s. The only religious group still under severe pressure, even after Catholic emancipation, there even was a pogrom in Limerick in 1904. Rather ironically, when the German air force bombarded Dublin and destroyed the synagogue, the German embassy apologized to the Jewish community for the arisen damage, being interested in the Irish neutrality in the war.
The Irish seemed to regard the hammered dulcimer as typically Jewish. An Dublin advertisment in 1738/9 announced, The Jews music is to be had at the Sign of the Fiddle and Dulcimer in Copper Alley by Archibald Williamson, who Gentlemen are pleased to called the Irish Jew. In 1769, a German-born Jew, Isaac Isaacs arrived in Dublin where he enjoyed a successful career playing Irish jigs and reels on his dulcimer in theatres and taverns. For several years he was under a retainer to play with a fiddler weekly for a well-known brothel-operator.