Molly Bloom and her Jealous Jewish Husband, Leopold

Had Molly ended her soliloquy not with a “yes”
but with a “maybe,” would she still have been as worthy
of our esteem, or would she thereby have become far less
heroic, doubting Thomasina, down-to-earthy?

Would Leopold have loved her more if she had never cheated,
exclaiming always “yes, yes!” whenever she would do so,
with love chains binding, while most amorously heated,
lovers with a spirit praised by Jean Jacques Rousseau?

I ask, post-scriptum, whether Molly was a quoter
of Numbers 5’s verse twenty-two two words, “amen, amen,”
repeated by the jealous husband’s wife who is a sotah,
banned by a priest foreshadowing Ulysses’s literary laymen.

Concerning whether Joyce was as aware of the connection
in Ulysses of Molly to the sotah here’s my daring guess:
one reason not to deny it was deliberate is the detection
in it of many Hebrew texts, suggesting yes, yes, yes, yes.

Leopold Bloom is obsessed with jealousy regarding his wife Molly, who he is sure is going to commit adultery with her lover, Blazes Boylan.
This obsession makes Molly a sotah, like the one described in Numbers whose words are blotted out.  Num. 5:22-23 states:

כב  וּבָאוּ הַמַּיִם הַמְאָרְרִים הָאֵלֶּה, בְּמֵעַיִךְ, לַצְבּוֹת בֶּטֶן, וְלַנְפִּל יָרֵךְ; וְאָמְרָה הָאִשָּׁה, אָמֵן אָמֵן. 22 and this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, and make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to fall away’; and the woman shall say: ‘Amen, Amen.’.

כג  וְכָתַב אֶת-הָאָלֹת הָאֵלֶּה, הַכֹּהֵן–בַּסֵּפֶר; וּמָחָה, אֶל-מֵי הַמָּרִים. 23 And the priest shall write these curses in a scroll, and he shall blot them out into the water of bitterness. .

These curses must be erased in bitter waters, foreshadowing for Joyce not only the bitterness of Leopold Bloom but of James Joyce himself, who, like the sotah, was for a time forced to swallow his story when it was banned as being impermissibly pornographic.

Bloom’s wife Molly Bloom resembles an ecstatic sotah in Numbers 5. Molly’s last, repeated, final words “yes…yes…” echo the sotah’s repeated “amen, amen,” creating for “Ulysses” an inclusion, since the book begins, as James Lichtenberg points out in a letter in the 7/1/22 TLS, with a famous thematic scene in Dublin’s Martello tower. There, Buck (“Baruch”) Mulligan, performs a blasphemous “shaving” mass.  Like Satan, he mocks God, or here, religion. The Baruch to whom Joyce alludes is, of course, the excommunicated Baruch Spinoza. It can be noted that baruch is the first word of any blessing in Hebrew: “Blessed be …” while each blessing ends with “amen.”

Meanwhile, Bloom’s suspicious obsession is analogous to the charge that the husband of the sotah makes about his wife, which leads to a command that he write his curses on a document (Num. 5:22-23).

Ironically, Sotah 9:9 states that Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai abolished the sotah ritual:

. מִשֶּׁרַבּוּ הַמְנָאֲפִים, פָּסְקוּ הַמַּיִם הַמָּרִים, וְרַבָּן יוֹחָנָן בֶּן זַכַּאי הִפְסִיקָן, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (הושע ד) לֹא אֶפְקוֹד עַל בְּנוֹתֵיכֶם כִּי תִזְנֶינָה וְעַל כַּלּוֹתֵיכֶם כִּי תְנָאַפְנָה כִּי הֵם וְגוֹ’.:
From the time when adulterers proliferated, the performance of the ritual of the bitter waters was nullified; they would not administer the bitter waters to the sota. And it was Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai who nullified it, as it is stated: “I will not punish your daughters when they commit harlotry, nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery; for they consort with lewd women” (Hosea 4:14), meaning that when the husbands are adulterers, the wives are not punished for their own adultery.

Bloom himself was hardly pure, either as a Jew or a husband.

The book of “Ulysses” begins with the static word “stately,” beginning with the letter “s”, and ends with the steamy sounds of “s” in “yes”, used more than 80 times in the final chapter and three at the very end.  This provides an inclusion for the entire book of “Ulysses,” with the repetition of “yes” by Molly in the final chapter of “Ulysses” corroborating Leopold Bloom’s suspicion and also suggesting the end of any blessing’s words “amen, amen” repeated twice by the sotah in Num. 5:23.

The character of Leopold Bloom was inspired by a lapsed-Jewish Triestine friend of James Joyce, an industrialist called Italo Svevo whose original name was Aron Hector Schmitz.   He was a highly esteemed writer whose statue graces the city of Trieste.

Endnote corroborated, Gershon and Linda Hepner.