Revisionist Zionists compared Jews to Ireland as Mediterranean peoples crushed by barbaric northern Europe

Evidence

An interesting application of the Revisionist sense of a historical tension between the Atlantic North and the Mediterranean South, was an article in the Revisionist daily Mishmar ha-Yarden that drew an analogy between the fate of the Jewish people and the Irish. According to the article, Ireland became part of the Roman cultural world in the first century, and was the only European country not affected by the Barbarian migration that swept the continent after the decline of the Roman Empire. At a period when Europe sank into ignorance, Ireland, much like the Jewish culture of the time, maintained its Mediterranean heritage and served as the continent’s only cultural center. Nonetheless, this golden age came to an end when Ireland was attacked from northern Europe, first by the Normans, and later by the English who brought Irish independence to an end and all but destroyed the authentic Irish character. The North, with its barbaric (Germanic) heritage, crushed the heroic Latin spirit. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 564

Categorization

• XREF: The Ireland-as-Mediterranean-culture-preserver claim echoes the ‘island of saints and scholars’ narrative, and anticipates reading Irish history through a colonial North-South lens similar to later postcolonial framings.
• SEED: Angle: how a non-European nationalist movement appropriated Ireland’s history as a usable analogy — the ‘parallel peoples’ rhetorical tradition from Jabotinsky’s Revisionism forward.