The Real Zionist Planters’ Society in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”

In your preparations for Father’s Day on Sunday, June 17, you may have overlooked Bloomsday the day before. If you did, I submit that you missed the more important event. Fathers come and go. There will always, however, be only one Leopold Bloom, whose life and thoughts on June 16, 1904, along with those of his wife Molly and of Stephen Dedalus, the autobiographical hero of James Joyce’s first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are the subjects of Joyce’s second novel Ulysses (1922). Observed annually since 1924, Bloomsday is marked by some lovers of Ulysses by carousing in the pubs of Dublin, the city in which it takes place. Others prefer to settle with it into an armchair at home. It was while performing the latter ritual this month that I was led to consider the case of Agendath Netaim.

The reader first encounters these words in the second chapter of Ulysses. There, the half-Jewish Leopold Bloom is on his way home from a non-kosher Jewish butcher in whose shop he has bought pork kidneys for his breakfast while picking up a loose page from a stack of papers on the counter used to wrap meat in. The page comes from an illustrated Zionist advertising prospectus, and Bloom “walked back along Dorset Street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim: planters’ company.” As he walks, he ponders what he reads:

To purchase vast sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel, and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay eight marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds, or citrons. . . . Your name entered as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the balance in yearly installments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W.15.