throughout his life,” became wholly intelligible and self-evident. “Swann’s punchinello nose, absorbed for long years into an agreeable face, seemed now enormous, tumid, crimson, the nose of an old Hebrew rather than of a dilettante Valois.” Swann’s nose was both his curse and his strength. As Hannah Arendt summed up her discussion of Proust’s pursuit of things lost and recovered, “Jewishness was for the individual Jew at once a physical stain and a mysterious personal privilege, both inherent in a ‘racial predestination.’ ” 57 But it is the defiantly European disciple of Irish Jesuits who is most frequently credited with the creation of modernism’s most sacred text. An odyssey of “silence, exile, and cunning,” Ulysses does battle with the Bible, Hamlet , and every other certifiably divine comedy from Don Quixote to Faust as it follows the wanderings of the “half-and-half” Jew Leopold Bloom, whose son is dead, whose wife is unfaithful, and whose peripatetic father (a peddler, innkeeper, and alleged “perpetrator of frauds” from Szombathely [“Sabbathville”], Hungary) has changed his name, converted to Protestantism, and—in case more proof were needed—committed suicide. Bloom is a modern Everyman because he is the modern Ulysses, and the modern Ulysses has got to be a Jew: “Jewgreek is greekjew.” Or rather, the modern Ulysses is a modern Jew, who is remorseful but unapologetic about preferring Reason to Jerusalem and “treating with disrespect” such “beliefs and practices . . . as the prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal: the hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the ineffability of the tetragrammaton: the sanctity of the sabbath” ( U 17:1894–1901). 58 Thrice converted, Bloom remains a Mercurian among Apollonians (Odysseus among monsters and lesser gods). He “hates dirty eaters,” disapproves of drunkenness, “slips off when the fun gets too hot,” decries the death penalty, “resents violence and intolerance in any shape or form,” abominates the “patriotism of barspongers,” and believes that “if a fellow had a rower’s heart violent exercise was bad.” He is “a new womanly man”: a man of insatiable loquacity and curiosity who journeys ceaselessly in search of lost time, scientific knowledge, personal enrichment, and a social improvement “provocative of friendlier intercourse between man and man.” He is both Homer’s cunning Odysseus and Dante’s tragic Ulysses, both Don Quixote and Faust. He is “a perverted Jew,” as one of his friends and tormentors puts it ( U 8:696, 979; U 16:1099–1100; U 15:1692; U 12:891–93; U 15:1798; U 16:1136–37; U 12:1635). But Bloom is not the only Mercurian in the Inferno of modern Dublin.