James Larkin and the Jew’s Shilling

The relationship of Irish radicals and socialists to Jews in the decades before Irish independence was an ambivalent one. Neither political activists nor trade union leaders were immune to infection by anti-Semitic tropes. An influx of poor Jewish immigrants to Ireland around the end of the nineteenth century threatened the identity of Irish nationalists and workers, at a time when many Irish were forced by economic circumstances to emigrate. The article concludes that statements by James Larkin and other Irish labour activists and reformers about Jews, expressed in print in the early twentieth century, reflected a mixture of attitudes.