How a country remembers a period is often less simple than what actually happened during it. Thinking about Ireland’s years in the Second World War, we first look for a single story, either heroism or guilt. But what historians digging through the archives have found is neither, it’s the story of two voices standing against each other inside the same state.

In 1937, Ireland’s new constitution formally recognized Judaism as a distinct faith alongside the country’s other beliefs. The Taoiseach of the time, Éamon de Valera, had built a personal friendship with the country’s first Chief Rabbi, Isaac Herzog, whose son Chaim would become president of Israel nearly half a century later. This wasn’t an incidental courtesy, de Valera’s own record shows he argued the door should be opened to Jewish refugees.

But the internal correspondence historian Dermot Keogh uncovered shows a far more complicated picture. De Valera himself, together with the Department of External Affairs and the Department of the Taoiseach, argued for a more open line toward refugees. But the Department of Justice, under Patrick Ruttledge, backed by the Department of Industry and Commerce under Seán Lemass, stubbornly held to a restrictive visa policy, despite de Valera rebuking his own bureaucrats on more than one occasion. The state wasn’t speaking with one voice, it was fighting an internal battle, and the side that wanted to open the door was the side that lost.

Ireland’s ambassador in Berlin, Charles Bewley, stood at the most extreme end of that restrictive line. His antisemitism was never a secret, and the government had known about it for a long time. In 1921, still a young trade representative, he targeted Irish Jewish IRA officer Robert Briscoe at a Jewish-owned music hall in Berlin, insulting Judaism, and was thrown out in a drunken brawl. In 1922, diplomat George Gavan Duffy openly objected to sending Bewley to Germany, writing that “his semitic convictions are so pronounced that it would be very difficult for him to deal properly with all the persons and questions” in Berlin, “where the Jewish element is very strong,” suggesting Munich or Vienna instead. But Bewley was sent to Berlin anyway, in 1933, seven months after the Nazis took power, and, presenting his credentials to President von Hindenburg, openly praised Germany’s “national rebirth.”

He deliberately obstructed Jewish refugees’ visa applications, writing that he wanted to save the country from what he called a Jewish “infection.” Bewley’s reports were, quite literally, his story, the narrative of his own prejudice, and that narrative became an official document that shaped real people’s fates. In a report sent to Dublin after the 1938 Kristallnacht........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)