‘What is your nation if I may ask?’

Colm Tóibín

  • Jews in 20th-century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust by Dermot Keogh
    Cork, 336 pp, £45.00, March 1998, ISBN 1 85918 149 X

In 1965, when Eamon de Valera was President of Ireland, the Irish Jewish community decided to honour him. They chose a site near Nazareth and planted a forest of ten thousand trees named after him. They also commissioned a book of Celtic symbols. They made effusive speeches in his praise in both Ireland and Israel. Jacob Herzog, the political director in the Prime Minister’s office, whose father had been Chief Rabbi in Ireland, wrote that

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