The Pillars of Hercules

Major Brian Cooper Tweedy of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was posted in Gibraltar late in the last century. His daughter Marion, known to all as Molly, lost her virginity to one Harry Mulvey in Gibraltar. Later, particularly at bedtime, she ruminated on her sexual encounters in Gibraltar. This woman, literature’s earth mother, is of course Molly Bloom, and her girlhood in Gibraltar, being kissed under the Moorish Wall, is vividly recounted in her drowsy soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.

Molly remembers “those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar as if the world was coming to an end,” and the obscene Gibraltarian graffiti that “used to be written up with a picture of a woman on that wall in Gibraltar with that word I couldnt find anywhere.” The rock in her memory is emblematic and powerful, “looking across the bay from Algeciras all the lights of the rock like fireflies.”

She ruminates on the weather: “the rain was lovely and refreshing just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant.” And even the apes: “I told him it was struck by lightning and all about the old Barbary apes they sent to Clapham without a tail.”

Most of all, Molly’s remembrance is of her first sexual encounter, one of the most passionate in literature. She hardly remembers Mulvey’s name but the incident is vivid: “we lay over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down.” And the moment itself: “he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue in my mouth.” And the glorious Gibraltarian conclusion: “… I put my arms around him yes and drew down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

There could be a Molly Bloom Defloration Tour of the Rock, but there isn’t. James Joyce never visited Gibraltar; he was scribbling and studying maps in another corner of the Mediterranean—Trieste. But it is a testimony to his imaginative powers that it is impossible to be in Gibraltar and not hear Molly’s sensuous voice. The presence of Jews in Gibraltar interested Joyce greatly—after all, his Ulysses figure, Leopold Bloom, was a Dublin Jew. In spite of Gibraltar being associated with Jewish expulsions, its Jewish community has deep roots. There are five synagogues in the little town.

Still waiting for a reply from Sir Joshua Hassan, I met Stephen Leanse, a Jewish entrepreneur.

“I was born in the Bahamas,” he said, “but my wife’s family, the Serruyas, came here in 1728.”

The majority of Gibraltarians trace their origins to Genoa and are Catholic. Some others are Maltese. A few are British expatriates—shopkeepers, ex-servicemen. No one admits to being Spanish. Stephen was one of a thousand or so Jews in Gibraltar, members of about a hundred Jewish families. It was not a large number, but it was an influential—and cosmopolitan—segment of the population. They were all Sephardic Jews, some of them speaking Spanish—the word Sephardic means “of Spain.” Others were speaking Ladino—the Sephardic language, that combined Renaissance Spanish with elements of Hebrew.

Like most other people I met in Gibraltar Mr. Leanse told me that the place was small, perhaps too small; and business was poor; and the future was uncertain.

“I would love to live in Israel, but my family is here.”

“Are the Jews in Gibraltar associated with any particular business?”

“No. All sorts of businesses. We don’t manufacture anything. Some of us are in banking, or we have shops, or restaurants. Some are politicians.”

One of the Jewish restaurants was The Bomb House Lane Glatt Kosher Restaurant, where I heard Yiddish, Ladino, Spanish, English and Hebrew spoken, all at once, sometimes in the same sentence, under a picture of David Ben-Gurion and another of a girlish Queen Elizabeth II. Everyone in the place wore a yarmulke, even the funny little man depicted on the menu. Because this glatt kosher restaurant was in Gibraltar some of the dishes on the menu were Moroccan. The cook—along with most cooks, cleaners, bus drivers and waitresses in Gibraltar—was Moroccan. A good proportion of the Jewish diners had come from Morocco.