Robert Emmet Briscoe (1894-1969) is perhaps unique among Irish historical figures in that he played important roles in the independence struggle and formation of two different states, Ireland and Israel. Embodying the unusual combination of zealous Irish patriot, loyal Orthodox Jew, and passionate Zionist, he is probably best known as the affable first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin and as a man who became a celebrity, both in Ireland and the United States, as a symbol of religious freedom.
Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in South Dublin, Briscoe was raised in the Orthodox tradition by his father, Abraham Briscoe, a Lithuanian Jew who emigrated to Ireland in the 1880s to escape the pogroms. Abraham led the effort to raise funds to build the synagogue on Adelaide Road, which was the beginning of the modern history of Dublin Jewry, and he also helped to purchase land for its cemetery and established the Board of Shechita, the controlling body of kosher butchering. Briscoe’s mother, Ida Reddick, who was the daughter of a successful Lithuanian Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main that had also emigrated from the Russian Empire to escape antisemitism, wrote poetry, taught in the Jewish Hebrew school, and provided indispensable help to her husband’s business.
In his memoir, Briscoe speaks with awe of his father’s fierce dedication to maintaining the laws of kashrut in a non-Jewish country:
The dietary rules, so complicated and difficult to follow in a non-Hebraic country, were the absolute rule of our house. You may realize how strictly they were observed when I tell you that such great Orthodox Rabbis as Dr. Isaac Herzog [the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland], who is now the Chief Rabbi of Israel, often sat down to eat at my father’s table.
When the young Briscoe asked his father about halachic minutia such as the prohibition against mixing meat and milk and the need for separate Passover dishes, Abraham replied:
Our Jewish laws and customs have been preserved by our ancestors for two thousand years or more, at the cost of great hardship, suffering, and extreme peril. They are a precious heritage. Are we in our comparative comfort and ease lightly to abandon these things they strove so hard to hand down to us merely because they are inconvenient? We are the people chosen by G-d to suffer and strive and serve him; let us do so thankfully.
Abraham taught Hebrew to all his children so that they could recite the Jewish prayers and learn Torah in its original language, and Briscoe proudly learned many of the psalms by heart, writing that “the poetry of David, which is so beautiful even in the King James translation, is even lovelier in the liquid syllables of its original tongue.” Briscoe evidenced his fluency in Hebrew and familiarity with Jewish practice when he was in America in 1923 and asked the synagogue beadle for permission to say kaddish on his father’s yahrzeit. The beadle, who upon learning that he was an Irishman offered to prompt him and assist with the prayer, was stunned when Briscoe fluently recited the Aramaic text, to the point that the beadle called him a fraud.
Briscoe’s religious upbringing was not limited to seriousness and solemnity, as he recalls Shabbat at his parents’ home as a house full of visitors and laughter. Abraham, a man of integrity and an upstanding Jewish businessman, intensely disapproved of his fellow Irish Jews who engaged in usury, and he encouraged the children of the South Dublin synagogues to play pranks on moneylenders during services. In one delightful incident, Abraham told Briscoe and his friends to come to the synagogue on Purim with their pockets full of chestnuts and, when the name Haman was read from Megillat Esther, to bombard a particularly pompous and unscrupulous moneylender. Recalling his parents’ antagonism toward usurious moneylenders, one of his first acts as a member of the Irish legislature was to introduce a bill that would regulate the interest they could charge and that would make their worst abuses unlawful.
Robert and his wife Lily, the daughter of a prominent Irishman, were wed in a Jewish ceremony attended by the leaders of the Irish Jewish community, and he fasted on his wedding day, as per the Orthodox Jewish tradition. Although her father was a staunch anti-revolutionary, Lily actively supported her husband’s activities on behalf of Irish liberation. Briscoe remained a loyal Orthodox Jew, maintaining kashrut even during his many world travels; regularly attending synagogue; observing Shabbat, Yom Tov, and the Jewish fast days; and giving charity to Jewish institutions and causes.
Having come to Ireland penniless, Abraham initially worked as a peddler, then as a brush salesman, then as a merchant of imported tea, but by 1914, he had become a prosperous businessman as the proprietor of Lawlor Briscoe, a furniture factory on Ormond Quay which made, refurbished, imported, exported, and sold furniture all through Ireland and abroad.
Abraham, who identified with the growing nationalism and Gaelic revival of late 19th century Ireland, also emphasized educating his children in the ancient myths, legends, and histories of Ireland, especially tales of Irish heroes and patriots. According to Briscoe’s memoir, Abraham felt a profound sense of gratitude for the social acceptance and opportunities for success granted to him as a citizen of his newly-adopted country, and he raised his children as Irish Nationalists and supporters of the Home Rule agenda of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
Briscoe was educated at the Catholic Primary School near his home; the Presbyterian Secondary St. Andrew’s College in Dublin, a Presbyterian preparatory school; and the Jewish Public School Townley Castle Hall at Ramsgate in England, a stylish Jewish school with a Jewish headmaster. In 1912 when Briscoe was 18, his father, who had retired from business and sustained a heart attack shortly thereafter, sent him to Germany to study business methods and electronic engineering in the Salaman Handal Akadamie in Berlin and to also study Judaism and Jewish history at the Hildesheimer School, a rabbinical seminary. Serving as an apprentice at the commercial firm Hecht Pfeffer & Co. in Berlin, he developed the skills that he would use in his revolutionary work for Ireland’s freedom and made important contacts that assisted his later work with Jabotinsky’s New Revisionist Zionists in rescuing Jews from Europe (see discussion below).
When WWI broke out in 1914, he was arrested as an enemy alien and was later released in a prisoner exchange; in his memoir, he notes the irony of his freedom being secured through the intervention of the Pope’s Nuncio “on behalf of a Jewish boy he had never seen.” Upon his return to Ireland, Abraham, scarred by his son’s arrest and seeking to avoid his conscription into the Irish armed forces, sent him to New York where, after beginning with a menial job as a packer and being rapidly promoted, he became wildly successful after setting up a factory making Christmas lights in 1916.
However, he followed closely the events taking place in Dublin during and after the “Easter Rising” in 1916, when the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood led the revolt against British rule, the Irish Republic was proclaimed, and the Irish forces held out for a week against the mighty British army before they were defeated and its leaders executed. These events galvanized his Irish nationalist feelings, and he began moving in Republican circles in New York and attending meetings of clandestine Irish revolutionary organizations. Recruited by the IRA, he sold his factory, returned to Ireland in 1917, and went on to become the Sinn Féin’s leading arms runner. Because he had not been involved in the Easter Rising, he was unknown to the British authorities, which made him an invaluable asset to the fledgling IRA. Moreover, the fact that he was known to be Jewish was also very helpful to his clandestine work because, as he delightfully notes in his memoir, “a Jewish member of the IRA was always as improbable as a Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin.”
Over Abraham’s entreaties that his son not join what he considered to be a futile revolutionary movement, Briscoe rejected his father’s belief that Irish freedom must be secured through constitutional means and he became active with Sinn Féin during the Irish Wars of Independence. (Ironically, Sinn Féin periodicals had run “No Jews” advertisements and otherwise manifested blatant antisemitism.) Abraham’s anger reached a zenith when, amidst a Rosh Hashana family meal, Briscoe was summoned by the IRA and Abraham uncharacteristically shouted, “Can we not even eat this sacred meal in dignity and peace?” Although Briscoe did respond to the summons, he rued being forced to disobey the commandment to honor his father and he sometimes pondered thereafter whether he loved Ireland more than his G-d.
Briscoe, who began work for the IRA as a small arms runner, was sent in 1919 by Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins to the Weimar Republic to serve as the IRA’s principal agent for procuring arms, in which capacity as “Captain Swift” he became one of the most successful arms runners of his generation. (Briscoe had once hidden Collins – who affectionately referred to him as “my Jewman” – among Dublin’s Jews, disguised as an Orthodox Jew.) In 1921, he purchased The Frieda to smuggle guns and munitions to Ireland and, on October 28, 1921, the small tugboat set sail with German crew and a reported cargo of 1,500 rifles, 2,000 pistols, and 1.7 million rounds of ammunition, which some commentators characterize as the largest military shipment ever to reach the IRA. His other boats, The Anita and The City of Dortmund, ran cargoes of arms from Germany to ports all around the coast of Ireland.
The 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which brought the Irish War of Independence to an end, provided for the establishment of the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within a year and gave Northern Ireland the opportunity to opt out of the Irish Free State – which it did. The Dáil Éireann, the legislative assembly for the de facto Irish Republic, narrowly approved the treaty, which led to the Irish Civil War in June 1922 against the Irish Republican Army. The pro-Treaty National Army prevailed and the Irish Free State came into existence in December 1922.
Briscoe, returning from New York to Ireland in 1924, decided to end his revolutionary work and to turn instead to earning a living to support Lily and his children. However, together with his close friend Éamon de Valera, who had resigned as President of the Republic when the Treaty was ratified, he split from Sinn Féin and helped to found the Fianna Fail (“Soldier of Destiny”) party in 1926. He was elected in 1927 to the inaugural Dáil Éireann legislature as its first Jewish member – notwithstanding antisemitism from pro-treaty Irishmen and others calling him a “Judeo-Bolshevik” and “an alien ruffian” – and he was continuously reelected until his retirement in 1965.
Until the 1930s, Briscoe had not thought much about Jewish ambitions to reestablish a Jewish State in Eretz Yisrael but, never doubting that, consistent with Orthodox belief, the Jews would be returned to Eretz Yisrael in the Messianic Age, he agreed with Herzl about the importance of a contemporary return to the land. Though he regarded Zionism as “a magnificent inspiration,” he was always primarily preoccupied with Ireland, where he believed that Jews were not subject to the same pressures faced by European Jewish communities. (There had been a Fascist organization of Blue Shirts in Ireland, but the government quickly broke it up.)
Briscoe became more alert to the importance of Zionism with the rise of Nazi Germany and the spread of antisemitism through Europe. Foreseeing the imminent Holocaust, he begged his Jewish friends to flee, but they refused; as he later wrote, they relied upon the sad, but all-too familiar argument that Hitler’s rantings were directed only against the Jews of eastern countries and not against them and ”they waited for the black trains to Buchenwald.”
Moreover, the neutrality of the Irish government in general, and its intransigence in refusing to admit Jews during the 1930s in particular, raised Briscoe’s Jewish consciousness. He worked to encourage Ireland to provide asylum for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, but his efforts, which had to be undertaken tactfully and cautiously lest he jeopardize the neutrality of the Fianna Fail government, failed.
Briscoe’s enthusiasm for Zionism was further fired when Jabotinsky, whom he characterized as “an extraordinary Jew, a profound thinker, and a man of action,” arrived in Ireland. He deeply admired Jabotinsky’s campaign against the British (evocative of the long Irish campaign against the same enemy) and the Revisionists’ campaign of resistance to antisemitism and its efforts to create a Jewish State. As head of the Irgun, Jabotinsky secretly visited Dublin to receive instruction from Briscoe – who proudly characterized himself as “the Chair of Subversive Activity against England” – regarding the use of guerilla warfare against the British Mandate in Eretz Yisrael. From 1939-1940, Briscoe instructed Jabotinsky on how to form a physical force in Eretz Yisrael like the IRA and how to wage guerrilla warfare against the British in Ireland, describing weaknesses in the British military and how best to take advantage of them.
Briscoe sold his company to raise funds for Jabotinsky, under whose auspices he led missions to the United States, Poland, South Africa, and England. In one notable case, he traveled to England to plead for the life of Dov Joseph, the first member of the Irgun to be captured and sentenced to execution by the British, but his every effort failed. On the other hand, Briscoe successfully urged de Valera to vote against the partition of Eretz Yisrael. He reminded the Irish president of the Biblical story of two women claiming to be the mother of a baby and the real mother, rather than seeing it ”partitioned,” asked King Solomon to give her baby to the other woman; De Valera announced, “This is my answer to partition; the rightful owners of a country will never agree to partition.”
With the Hitlerian threat to Jews uppermost in his mind, Briscoe went to Warsaw in December 1938 with a brilliant plan that he believed could save the lives of millions of Polish Jews. Meeting with Colonel Joseph Beck, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs who was to leave for London to negotiate a treaty of alliance with Britain (which was later signed on January 30, 1939), he argued that making the Palestine Mandate a Polish colony would be a “win-win” for everyone: the British, to whom the Mandate was a huge headache, would be thrilled to be rid of it, and Poland could get rid of all its millions of unwanted Jews by sending them to Eretz Yisrael and reap additional benefit from the contributions that this new colony could make to the Polish economy.
An intrigued but still uncertain Beck suggested that Briscoe discuss his plan with the Rabbinical Authority, the representative of Polish Jews in the Polish parliament. After an excited Briscoe arranged a meeting with the rabbis, he was brought to the yeshiva, where three rabbis, including the Chief Rabbi, listened to his passionate presentation before the Chief Rabbi announced, “We must wait for the Messiah to lead us to the Holy Land” and that “All forms of Zionism are treif.” As such, although we will never know whether Briscoe’s plans would have worked, these misguided rabbis may have the lives of three million Jews on their hands.
In 1939, after the British issued the hated White Paper, Briscoe helped to organize wide-ranging “illegal” immigration efforts and he traveled worldwide to raise funds for the program. In the United States, he campaigned for public opinion that might force FDR to pressure England to open the gates of Eretz Yisrael to the fleeing Jewish refugees of Europe, which proved to be a daunting task in the face of vicious opposition, including from many Jewish organizations, who viewed Briscoe as anti-British. Among other American dignitaries, he met with Justices Frankfurter and Brandeis, with whom he discussed in detail the Irgun’s illegal activities but, unfortunately, Brandeis, though a great Zionist, advised Briscoe that he could not agree with Briscoe’s ideas or methods. Briscoe endeavored to set up a meeting with FDR, but he was blocked by Rabbi Stephen Wise, upon whom the president relied for advice on all matters relating to Zionism. (Years earlier, Wise had thrown Briscoe out of Temple Emanuel when he challenged Wise’s support for the partition of Eretz Yisrael.) By his own account, Briscoe’s mission to America was an abject failure.
During WWII, Briscoe hit on the idea of an independent Jewish army – not a division of the British Army – comprised of Jewish volunteers from around the world that would fight alongside the Allies. He approached Churchill with this initiative, volunteering to personally enlist, but the British government refused, although it permitted the creation of a Jewish Brigade, which fought valiantly beside the British. Though disappointed by Churchill’s decision, he encouraged Jews to enlist with the Brigade and to train and learn the techniques of battle, which he believed would serve them well when, as he foresaw, many would later serve as experienced soldiers in the nascent Israeli army.
In 1949, Briscoe met with Menachem Begin and, after explaining the depths of the horror of the fratricidal Irish civil war after Irish independence, he counseled him to avoid a similar civil war in Israel by immediately effecting a transition in the wake of the Altalena Affair and transforming the Irgun from a paramilitary organization into the Cherut Party (which would later become the Likud) in the new State of Israel. In yet another prophetic prediction, he advised Begin that, while he would not immediately become Prime Minister of Israel, by participating in the government in the opposition he would have the opportunity to learn the art of democratic government and to later run on his experience. Begin followed his advice and, although Cherut won only eleven seats in Ben Gurion’s initial government, he set the foundations for his ultimate election in 1977.
In 1950, Briscoe accompanied de Valera to Israel, his first trip to the Holy Land, and he described his awe at finally seeing, as if in a dream, the land of his ancestors, “the slopes and terraces, the olive groves and orchards, the small tilled fields, and then the City of David and Solomon shining on its hills.” Briscoe saw his Irish patriotism and his love for Israel as entirely consistent: Both countries had the moral imperative on their side; both suffered persecution and fought for their freedom against long odds of success; both sought to revive an ancient language and culture; and both were inspired by a deep and abiding love for their ancestral lands.
With only about 5,000 Jews in Dublin, Briscoe was elected the first Jewish Lord Mayor of the city in 1956 when a tie vote was resolved in Briscoe’s favor through a random drawing from a hat. (Ironically, there was another tie vote when he ran for reelection a year later, when the random drawing went against him, but he was reelected to the mayoralty in 1961.) He pointedly refused to take his oath on a New Testament, saying “even if I swore on that book, I would not be bound, for it is not my Testament.” Never forgetting the Star of David that Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust, he superimposed the Magen David on the Arms of Dublin on his crest and, in a later meeting with the Minister of the new German Republic, he proudly made a point of declaring that he hoped his crest would be a reminder to his children about the Holocaust which could happen again absent due diligence.
In the March 23, 1957, correspondence to Rabbi Leo Jung of the Jewish Center in New York exhibited here, Briscoe recalls fondly his meeting with the rabbi in Dublin and regrets that his busy schedule does not permit a meeting in New York. Rabbi Jung (1892-1987) was one of the major architects of American Orthodox Judaism and the progenitor of the religious day school system common throughout North American Jewish communities.
Briscoe proudly accepted the invitation to review the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York and, when he also accepted an invitation to march in Boston, one of the papers carried the banner saying, “Aaron Go Bragh!” in both English and Yiddish. (This is a play on the traditional “Erin go Bragh,” an allegiance to Ireland, often translated as “Ireland Forever.”) He was invited to meet with President Eisenhower at the White House; New York Governor Averell Harriman brought in a kosher cook for a dinner honoring Briscoe in Albany; and Briscoe was delighted to celebrate Passover at Grossinger’s. During the consequential trip, he visited 48 cities across America on behalf of the U.J.A., which credited him with raising thirty million dollars for the cause.
There is a broadly-embraced misconception that Briscoe was the first Jewish mayor in Ireland, when that distinction actually belongs to William Moses Annyas, the grandson of a Marrano Jew who had emigrated from Portugal, who was elected mayor of Youghal County Cork in 1555. Moreover, although Briscoe was, indeed, the first Jew to actually serve as Dublin’s Jewish Lord Mayor, another Jew, Lewis Wormser Harris, was elected Lord Mayor in 1876, but he died the night before his investiture. In 1874, Harris had entered the election for City Councilor and, when his candidacy was met with antisemitism, he appealed to the public’s tolerance, defended the good name of Jewry, and was elected by a large majority, thus becoming the first Irish Jew to win public office. He also served as president of the Dublin Hebrew Congregation and helped to found the synagogue on Stafford Street.
Briscoe’s memoir, For the Life of Me, was published in 1958. The Emerald Isle Immigration Center in New York, which celebrates the close relationship between Jewish and Irish communities in New York, awards the Robert Briscoe Award to honor Jewish New Yorkers who have helped support immigration in the United States. Winners have included New York Mayor Ed Koch, Governor Eliot Spitzer, and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, who has recently proven himself to be no friend of the Jews and Israel.
