critical appreciation of essay on man

An Essay on Man: Epistle I

by Alexander Pope

To Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan; A wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot; Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye Nature’s walks, shoot folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; But vindicate the ways of God to man. I. Say first, of God above, or man below, What can we reason, but from what we know? Of man what see we, but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer? Through worlds unnumber’d though the God be known, ‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own. He, who through vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, What varied being peoples ev’ry star, May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are. But of this frame the bearings, and the ties, The strong connections, nice dependencies, Gradations just, has thy pervading soul Look’d through? or can a part contain the whole? Is the great chain, that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee? II. Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find, Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind? First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess, Why form’d no weaker, blinder, and no less! Ask of thy mother earth , why oaks are made Taller or stronger than the weeds they shade? Or ask of yonder argent fields above, Why Jove’s satellites are less than Jove? Of systems possible, if ’tis confest That Wisdom infinite must form the best, Where all must full or not coherent be, And all that rises, rise in due degree; Then, in the scale of reas’ning life, ’tis plain There must be somewhere, such a rank as man: And all the question (wrangle e’er so long) Is only this, if God has plac’d him wrong? Respecting man, whatever wrong we call, May, must be right, as relative to all. In human works, though labour’d on with pain, A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain; In God’s, one single can its end produce; Yet serves to second too some other use. So man, who here seems principal alone , Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown, Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal; ‘Tis but a part we see, and not a whole. When the proud steed shall know why man restrains His fiery course, or drives him o’er the plains: When the dull ox, why now he breaks the clod, Is now a victim, and now Egypt’s God: Then shall man’s pride and dulness comprehend His actions’, passions’, being’s, use and end; Why doing, suff’ring, check’d, impell’d; and why This hour a slave, the next a deity. Then say not man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault; Say rather, man’s as perfect as he ought: His knowledge measur’d to his state and place, His time a moment, and a point his space. If to be perfect in a certain sphere, What matter, soon or late, or here or there? The blest today is as completely so, As who began a thousand years ago. III. Heav’n from all creatures hides the book of fate, All but the page prescrib’d, their present state: From brutes what men, from men what spirits know: Or who could suffer being here below? The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ? Pleas’d to the last, he crops the flow’ry food, And licks the hand just rais’d to shed his blood. Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv’n, That each may fill the circle mark’d by Heav’n: Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, And now a bubble burst, and now a world. Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar; Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore! What future bliss, he gives not thee to know, But gives that hope to be thy blessing now. Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest: The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come. Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; His soul, proud science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk, or milky way; Yet simple nature to his hope has giv’n, Behind the cloud -topt hill, an humbler heav’n; Some safer world in depth of woods embrac’d, Some happier island in the wat’ry waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. To be, contents his natural desire, He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire; But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company. IV. Go, wiser thou! and, in thy scale of sense Weigh thy opinion against Providence; Call imperfection what thou fanciest such, Say, here he gives too little, there too much: Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, Yet cry, if man’s unhappy, God’s unjust; If man alone engross not Heav’n’s high care, Alone made perfect here, immortal there: Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod, Rejudge his justice , be the God of God. In pride, in reas’ning pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell, Aspiring to be angels, men rebel: And who but wishes to invert the laws Of order, sins against th’ Eternal Cause. V. ask for what end the heav’nly bodies shine, Earth for whose use? Pride answers, ” ‘Tis for mine: For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow’r, Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev’ry flow’r; Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew, The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew; For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings; For me, health gushes from a thousand springs; Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; My foot -stool earth, my canopy the skies.” But errs not Nature from this gracious end, From burning suns when livid deaths descend, When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep? “No, (’tis replied) the first Almighty Cause Acts not by partial, but by gen’ral laws; Th’ exceptions few; some change since all began: And what created perfect?”—Why then man? If the great end be human happiness, Then Nature deviates; and can man do less? As much that end a constant course requires Of show’rs and sunshine, as of man’s desires; As much eternal springs and cloudless skies, As men for ever temp’rate, calm, and wise. If plagues or earthquakes break not Heav’n’s design , Why then a Borgia, or a Catiline? Who knows but he, whose hand the lightning forms, Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms, Pours fierce ambition in a Cæsar’s mind, Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind? From pride, from pride, our very reas’ning springs; Account for moral , as for nat’ral things: Why charge we Heav’n in those, in these acquit? In both, to reason right is to submit. Better for us, perhaps, it might appear, Were there all harmony, all virtue here; That never air or ocean felt the wind; That never passion discompos’d the mind. But ALL subsists by elemental strife; And passions are the elements of life. The gen’ral order, since the whole began, Is kept in nature, and is kept in man. VI. What would this man? Now upward will he soar, And little less than angel, would be more; Now looking downwards, just as griev’d appears To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears. Made for his use all creatures if he call, Say what their use, had he the pow’rs of all? Nature to these, without profusion, kind, The proper organs, proper pow’rs assign’d; Each seeming want compensated of course, Here with degrees of swiftness, there of force; All in exact proportion to the state; Nothing to add, and nothing to abate. Each beast, each insect, happy in its own: Is Heav’n unkind to man, and man alone? Shall he alone, whom rational we call, Be pleas’d with nothing, if not bless’d with all? The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find) Is not to act or think beyond mankind; No pow’rs of body or of soul to share, But what his nature and his state can bear. Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly. Say what the use, were finer optics giv’n, T’ inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n? Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er, To smart and agonize at ev’ry pore? Or quick effluvia darting through the brain, Die of a rose in aromatic pain? If nature thunder’d in his op’ning ears, And stunn’d him with the music of the spheres, How would he wish that Heav’n had left him still The whisp’ring zephyr, and the purling rill? Who finds not Providence all good and wise, Alike in what it gives, and what denies? VII. Far as creation’s ample range extends, The scale of sensual, mental pow’rs ascends: Mark how it mounts, to man’s imperial race, From the green myriads in the peopled grass : What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam: Of smell, the headlong lioness between, And hound sagacious on the tainted green: Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood, To that which warbles through the vernal wood: The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line: In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From pois’nous herbs extracts the healing dew: How instinct varies in the grov’lling swine, Compar’d, half-reas’ning elephant, with thine: ‘Twixt that, and reason, what a nice barrier; For ever sep’rate, yet for ever near! Remembrance and reflection how allied; What thin partitions sense from thought divide: And middle natures, how they long to join, Yet never pass th’ insuperable line! Without this just gradation, could they be Subjected, these to those, or all to thee? The pow’rs of all subdu’d by thee alone, Is not thy reason all these pow’rs in one? VIII. See, through this air, this ocean, and this earth, All matter quick, and bursting into birth. Above, how high, progressive life may go! Around, how wide! how deep extend below! Vast chain of being, which from God began, Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can see, No glass can reach! from infinite to thee, From thee to nothing!—On superior pow’rs Were we to press, inferior might on ours: Or in the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d: From nature’s chain whatever link you strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. And, if each system in gradation roll Alike essential to th’ amazing whole, The least confusion but in one, not all That system only, but the whole must fall. Let earth unbalanc’d from her orbit fly, Planets and suns run lawless through the sky; Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurl’d, Being on being wreck’d, and world on world; Heav’n’s whole foundations to their centre nod, And nature tremble to the throne of God. All this dread order break—for whom? for thee? Vile worm!—Oh madness, pride, impiety! IX. What if the foot ordain’d the dust to tread, Or hand to toil, aspir’d to be the head? What if the head, the eye, or ear repin’d To serve mere engines to the ruling mind? Just as absurd for any part to claim To be another, in this gen’ral frame: Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains, The great directing Mind of All ordains. All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul; That, chang’d through all, and yet in all the same, Great in the earth, as in th’ ethereal frame, Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees , Lives through all life, extends through all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent, Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart; As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns, As the rapt seraph that adores and burns; To him no high, no low, no great, no small; He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all. X. Cease then, nor order imperfection name: Our proper bliss depends on what we blame. Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree Of blindness, weakness, Heav’n bestows on thee. Submit.—In this, or any other sphere, Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear: Safe in the hand of one disposing pow’r, Or in the natal, or the mortal hour. All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony, not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

Summary of An Essay on Man: Epistle I

• Popularity of “An Essay on Man: Epistle I”: Alexander Pope, one of the greatest English poets, wrote ‘An Essay on Man’ It is a superb literary piece about God and creation, and was first published in 1733. The poem speaks about the mastery of God’s art that everything happens according to His plan, even though we fail to comprehend His work. It also illustrates man’s place in the cosmos. The poet explains God’s grandeur and His rule over the universe.
• “An Essay on Man: Epistle I” As a Representative of God’s Art: This poem explains God’s ways to men. This is a letter to the poet’s friend, St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. He urges him to quit all his mundane tasks and join the speaker to vindicate the ways of God to men. The speaker argues that God may have other worlds to observe but man perceives the world with his own limited system. A man’s happiness depends on two basic things; his hopes for the future and unknown future events. While talking about the sinful and impious nature of mankind, the speaker argues that man’s attempt to gain more knowledge and to put himself at God’s place becomes the reason of his discontent and constant misery. In section 1, the poet argues that man knows about the universe with his/her limited knowledge and cannot understand the systems and constructions of God. Humans are unaware of the grander relationships between God and His creations. In section 2, he states that humans are not perfect. However, God designed humans perfectly to suit his plan, in the order of the creation of things. Humans are after angelic beings but above every creature on the planet. In section 3 the poet tells that human happiness depends on both his lack of knowledge as they don’t know the future and also on his hope for the future. In section 4 the poet talks about the pride of humans, which is a sin. Because of pride, humans try to gain more knowledge and pretend that is a perfect creation. This pride is the root of man’s mistakes and sorrow. If humans put themselves in God’s place, then humans are sinners. In section 5, the poet explains the meaninglessness of human beliefs. He thinks that it is extremely ridiculous to believe that humans are the sole cause of creation. God expecting perfection and morality from people on this earth does not happen in the natural world. In section 6, the poet criticizes human nature because of the unreasonable demands and complaints against God and His providence. He argues that God is always good; He loves giving and taking. We also learn that if man possesses the knowledge of God, he would be miserable. In section 7, he shows that the natural world we see, including the universal order and degree, is observable by humans as per their perspective . The hierarchy of humans over earthly creatures and their subordination to man is one of the examples. The poet also mentions sensory issues like physical sense, instinct, thought, reflection, and reason. There’s also a reason which is above everything. In section 8, the poet reclaims that if humans break God’s rules of order and fail to obey are broken, then the entire God’s creation must also be destroyed. In section 9, he talks about human craziness and the desire to overthrow God’s order and break all the rules. In the last section the speaker requests and invites humans to submit to God and His power to follow his order. When humans submit to God’s absolute submission, His will, and ensure to do what’s right, then human remains safe in God’s hand.
• Major Themes in “An Essay on Man: Epistle I”: Acceptance, God’s superiority, and man’s nature are the major themes of this poem Throughout the poem, the speaker tries to justify the working of God, believing there is a reason behind all things. According to the speaker, a man should not try to examine the perfection and imperfection of any creature. Rather, he should understand the purpose of his own existence in the world. He should acknowledge that God has created everything according to his plan and that man’s narrow intellectual ability can never be able to comprehend the greater logic of God’s order.

Analysis of Literary Devices Used in “An Essay on Man: Epistle I”

literary devices are modes that represent writers’ ideas, feelings, and emotions. It is through these devices the writers make their few words appealing to the readers. Alexander Pope has also used some literary devices in this poem to make it appealing. The analysis of some of the literary devices used in this poem has been listed below.

• Assonance : Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line. For example, the sound of /o/ in “To him no high, no low, no great, no small” and the sound of /i/ in “The whisp’ring zephyr, and the purling rill?”
• Anaphora : It refers to the repetition of a word or expression in the first part of some verses. For example, “As full, as perfect,” in the second last stanza of the poem to emphasize the point of perfection.
• Alliteration : Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line in quick succession. For example, the sound of /m/ in “A mighty maze! but not without a plan”, the sound of /b/ “And now a bubble burst, and now a world” and the sound of /th/ in “Subjected, these to those, or all to thee.”
• Enjambment : It is defined as a thought in verse that does not come to an end at a line break ; instead, it rolls over to the next line. For example.

“Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.”

• Imagery : Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. For example, “All chance, direction, which thou canst not see”, “Planets and suns run lawless through the sky” and “Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d”
• Rhetorical Question : Rhetorical question is a question that is not asked in order to receive an answer; it is just posed to make the point clear and to put emphasis on the speaker’s point. For example, “Why has not man a microscopic eye?”, “And what created perfect?”—Why then man?” and “What matter, soon or late, or here or there?”

Analysis of Poetic Devices Used in “An Essay on Man: Epistle I”

Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is the analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

• Heroic Couplet : There are two constructive lines in heroic couplet joined by end rhyme in iambic pentameter . For example,

“And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.”

• Rhyme Scheme : The poem follows the ABAB rhyme scheme and this pattern continues till the end.
• Stanza : A stanza is a poetic form of some lines. This is a long poem divided into ten sections and each section contains different numbers of stanzas in it.

Quotes to be Used

The lines stated below are useful to put in a speech delivered on the topic of God’s grandeur. These are also useful for children to make them understand that we constitute just a part of the whole.

“ All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony, not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”

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An Essay on Man

30 pages • 1 hour read

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Epistle Summaries & Analyses

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Epistle 2 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Summary epistle 2: “on the nature and state of man with respect to himself, as an individual”.

In Section 1 (Lines 1-52), the speaker argues that humanity should try to understand itself before trying to understand God. They describe people as stuck between many contradictory impulses: The ability to reason and the ability to feel, the desire to act and the desire to contemplate. The “chaos of thought and passion” (Line 13) empowers humans to be masters over nature , but people are still weak compared to nature’s power. People can understand the movements of the comets but cannot control their own passions: “What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone” (Line 42). Because human reason is fallible, it is important to regard the products of rationality with a healthy skepticism and do away with reason that has been corrupted by pride, vanity, or “curious pleasure” (Line 48).

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Pope's Poems and Prose

By alexander pope, pope's poems and prose summary and analysis of an essay on man: epistle ii.

The subtitle of the second epistle is “Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to Himself as an Individual” and treats on the relationship between the individual and God’s greater design.

Here is a section-by-section explanation of the second epistle:

Section I (1-52): Section I argues that man should not pry into God’s affairs but rather study himself, especially his nature, powers, limits, and frailties.

Section II (53-92): Section II shows that the two principles of man are self-love and reason. Self-love is the stronger of the two, but their ultimate goal is the same.

Section III (93-202): Section III describes the modes of self-love (i.e., the passions) and their function. Pope then describes the ruling passion and its potency. The ruling passion works to provide man with direction and defines man’s nature and virtue.

Section IV (203-16): Section IV indicates that virtue and vice are combined in man’s nature and that the two, while distinct, often mix.

Section V (217-30): Section V illustrates the evils of vice and explains how easily man is drawn to it.

Section VI (231-294): Section VI asserts that man’s passions and imperfections are simply designed to suit God’s purposes. The passions and imperfections are distributed to all individuals of each order of men in all societies. They guide man in every state and at every age of life.

The second epistle adds to the interpretive challenges presented in the first epistle. At its outset, Pope commands man to “Know then thyself,” an adage that misdescribes his argument (1). Although he actually intends for man to better understand his place in the universe, the classical meaning of “Know thyself” is that man should look inwards for truth rather than outwards. Having spent most of the first epistle describing man’s relationship to God as well as his fellow creatures, Pope’s true meaning of the phrase is clear. He then confuses the issue by endeavoring to convince man to avoid the presumptuousness of studying God’s creation through natural science. Science has given man the tools to better understand God’s creation, but its intoxicating power has caused man to imitate God. It seems that man must look outwards to gain any understanding of his divine purpose but avoid excessive analysis of what he sees. To do so would be to assume the role of God.

The second epistle abruptly turns to focus on the principles that guide human action. The rest of this section focuses largely on “self-love,” an eighteenth-century term for self-maintenance and fulfillment. It was common during Pope’s lifetime to view the passions as the force determining human action. Typically instinctual, the immediate object of the passions was seen as pleasure. According to Pope’s philosophy, each man has a “ruling passion” that subordinates the others. In contrast with the accepted eighteenth-century views of the passions, Pope’s doctrine of the “ruling passion” is quite original. It seems clear that with this idea, Pope tries to explain why certain individual behave in distinct ways, seemingly governed by a particular desire. He does not, however, make this explicit in the poem.

Pope’s discussion of the passions shows that “self-love” and “reason” are not opposing principles. Reason’s role, it seems, is to regulate human behavior while self-love originates it. In another sense, self-love and the passions dictate the short term while reason shapes the long term.

Pope’s Poems and Prose Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Pope’s Poems and Prose is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The Rape of the Lock

In Canto I, a dream is sent to Belinda by Ariel, “her guardian Sylph” (20). The Sylphs are Belinda’s guardians because they understand her vanity and pride, having been coquettes when they were humans. They are devoted to any woman who “rejects...

Who delivers the moralizing speech on the frailty of beauty? A. Chloe B. Clarissa C. Ariel D. Thalestris

What is the significance of Belinda's petticoat?

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Study Guide for Pope’s Poems and Prose

Pope's Poems and Prose study guide contains a biography of Alexander Pope, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Pope's Poems and Prose
• Pope's Poems and Prose Summary
• Character List

Essays for Pope’s Poems and Prose

Pope's Poems and Prose essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Alexander Pope's Poems and Prose.

• Of the Characteristics of Pope
• Breaking Clod: Hierarchical Transformation in Pope's An Essay on Man
• Fortasse, Pope, Idcirco Nulla Tibi Umquam Nupsit (The Rape of the Lock)
• An Exploration of 'Dulness' In Pope's Dunciad
• Belinda: Wronged On Behalf of All Women

Wikipedia Entries for Pope’s Poems and Prose

• Introduction
• Translations and editions
• Spirit, skill and satire

An Essay on Criticism Summary & Analysis by Alexander Pope

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" seeks to lay down rules of good taste in poetry criticism, and in poetry itself. Structured as an essay in rhyming verse, it offers advice to the aspiring critic while satirizing amateurish criticism and poetry. The famous passage beginning "A little learning is a dangerous thing" advises would-be critics to learn their field in depth, warning that the arts demand much longer and more arduous study than beginners expect. The passage can also be read as a warning against shallow learning in general. Published in 1711, when Alexander Pope was just 23, the "Essay" brought its author fame and notoriety while he was still a young poet himself.

• Read the full text of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

The Full Text of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

1 A little learning is a dangerous thing;

2 Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

3 There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

4 And drinking largely sobers us again.

5 Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,

6 In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts,

7 While from the bounded level of our mind,

8 Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

9 But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise

10 New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

11 So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try,

12 Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;

13 The eternal snows appear already past,

14 And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

15 But those attained, we tremble to survey

16 The growing labours of the lengthened way,

17 The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,

18 Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Summary

“from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” themes.

Shallow Learning vs. Deep Understanding

• See where this theme is active in the poem.

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts, While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

Lines 11-14

So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky; The eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

Lines 15-18

But those attained, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthened way, The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Symbols

The Mountains/Alps

• See where this symbol appears in the poem.

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

• See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

Extended Metaphor

“from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• A little learning
• Pierian spring
• Bounded level
• Short views
• The lengthened way
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

Rhyme scheme, “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” speaker, “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” setting, literary and historical context of “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing”, more “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” resources, external resources.

The Poem Aloud — Listen to an audiobook of Pope's "Essay on Criticism" (the "A little learning" passage starts at 12:57).

The Poet's Life — Read a biography of Alexander Pope at the Poetry Foundation.

"Alexander Pope: Rediscovering a Genius" — Watch a BBC documentary on Alexander Pope.

More on Pope's Life — A summary of Pope's life and work at Poets.org.

Pope at the British Library — More resources and articles on the poet.

LitCharts on Other Poems by Alexander Pope

Ode on Solitude

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Critical appreciation of the superannuated man

Charles Lamb used his own experiences to inform his writings. His essay the superannuated man explores different aspects of his life; however, they also reveal his personality, preferences, and values he holds. The Superannuated Man is concerned particularly with the tensions in Lamb’s life caused by the tension between his artistic sensibilities and the monotony of his job as an accountant. With humor and a few quips, Lamb highlights the monotony of his job that nearly made him an unnatural, mechanical creature. He was at his desk for so many hours that it felt as that the wood had penetrated inside my mind.

While he complains about his experience working as a professional, we see an odd and real-life discord in his behavior after the decision has been made to grant him early retirement from his job. Alongside the feeling of relief from living an orderly, regular life, we also see Lamb feeling a sense of unease. Lamb frequently goes to work with colleagues and feels there is a gap that is forming between them. Additionally, Lamb is extremely disturbed discovering that other people are using his desk and peg, even though Lamb knows this will happen.

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Lamb begins by stating that anyone who has spent his life in the ‘stupid isolation’ of an office and lost his way and forgot the joys of a relaxed childhood or an unexpected vacation can understand his joy at the ‘deliverance of clerical servitude.

The third paragraph of the superannuated man focuses on Sundays of Lamb’s that have been a bit sour despite being a weekly holiday. The beauty and color of weekdays are absent on Sundays because they are devoted to worship and worship, which can be a very serious event. The closing of shops as well as the lack of the familiar sounds of cities, the grumpy faces of the traders, apprentices, and maidservants who’ve lost their sense of freedom, the absence of ballad-singers, and the general feeling of sadness caused due to the absence of activities has made Lamb’s Sundays incredibly monotonous.

The only other days the man has spent with himself are during the Easter holiday Christmas, Easter, and weeks-long summer holidays. The summer vacations, in particular, helped him get through the long work schedule. They always seemed to get a bit too fast, and instead of enjoying the freedom, Lamb generally spent the entire vacation wondering how to maximize the enjoyment.

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In this section, Lamb discusses the impact the accounting job was a burden on his mind. He was increasingly scared of making mistakes that could have a major impact on his work, and this anxiety kept him awake in the form of nightmares that kept him awake all late at night. The advancing age of his life made it even more difficult to deal with anxiety, and the symptoms of depression started showing on his face.

The people around him became extremely worried about him, and upon discovering his struggles, his employers offered his early retirement.

The superannuated man as a personal essay

Lamb talks about the immediate impact of his retirement and his newly discovered freedom. He was initially overwhelmed by the glimmer of freedom without limits. Lamb jokes that he was suddenly so wealthy at a time that he believed that he would need a bailiff or steward to handle the “estates of time for him.

After his retirement, Lamb was beginning to appear more like a younger man due to the fact that Lamb had spent all of his time working for others, and in the time, he was spending with himself, he hadn’t aged much.

See more The evolution of english poetry from Sir Thomas Wyatt to Edmund Spenser

In Paragraphs 9 and 10, we see the disorientation of a man wishing to be free from his job and yet is entangled to it strangely. Lamb is disengaged from his colleagues at work. The intimacy he previously enjoyed with them has disappeared, and not even the kindliest gestures from them will convince him that all is exactly the same as it was previously. It hurts him to realize that the desk used to sit at and the peg that the hat he was hanging is now utilized by someone who is not him. In time he adjusts to his new lifestyle and gives an end to his work as a professional.

A few weeks later, Lamb is at peace and content with his life. He can now enjoy every moment without being overwhelmed and can be as free as he wants to. He is in control of his time. He no longer holds specific days of the week with dread. They are all the same to the individual, each exactly as enjoyable as others. Despite his years full of activities, he’s totally devoted to his contemplative life.

Lamb has become his very own boss. Lamb has fulfilled all of his obligations and is now completely free to do whatever Lamb wants.

Charles lamb prose style

Lamb speaks about all the above in a humorous style; however, as is typical of his work, the humor is closely linked to emotion. Every little detail of the comedy exposes the confusion of a man who is completely cut off from his world of work. Lamb’s is desperation-inducing humor. His life was filled with mishaps and painful events, and the only way to preserve his sanity was to come up with a sense of humor that would conceal the hurt from the world and him. Therefore, in the works of Lamb, his character is constantly visible, displayed to the audience, yet it is meticulously crafted and controlled before being presented.

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Spenser is at once a child of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Discuss

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Home › Experimental Novels › Analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 31, 2020 • ( 0 )

This is the title that Joyce gave to his first published novel, derived, as noted below, from the shorter version given to an earlier prose piece. Joyce composed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man over the course of seven years, and, although it represented a significant advancement from earlier work, it undeniably grew out of a long-standing plan for a Kunstlerroman (novel about the development of an artist) whose early manifestation appears in the surviving fragments of the novel Stephen Hero , which was abandoned within a year or so after Joyce had left Dublin in favor of work on Dubliners .

In its final version A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stands in very distant relation to Stephen Hero , the work from which it was derived, but its link to this ur-work remains a useful measure of its achievement. The episodic format and concern with the consciousness of its protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man announce a modernist disposition absent from the surviving fragments of Stephen Hero even as they express the concern, apparent in Joyce’s earliest writing, for the difficulty in defining an artistic identity in an unremittingly parochial world. The narrative’s supple oscillation between detached objectivity and an empathetic awareness of Stephen’s most intimate thoughts, desires, and apprehensions shows a discursive sophistication not present in its predecessor while at the same time they mark the maturing artistic vision of an author now firmly in control of descriptive patterns only partially comprehended before.

When it began to appear in serial form in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seemed to display far greater affinity, both formally and thematically, with Dubliners than with Stephen Hero. Nonetheless, the fundamental thematic features that shaped the narrative trajectory of the earlier prose work retain pride of place in its successor. Like Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man chronicles the life of an emerging artist, Stephen Dedalus (essentially the same character who appeared in the earlier work, with a slight modification in the spelling of his surname). The discourse follows the gradual maturation of Stephen from his infancy, through his primary, secondary, and university education, to the eve of his departure from Ireland. It displays a similar fascination with the most mundane elements in Stephen’s life, and it asserts the same presumption of distinction in his nature.

Unlike Stephen Hero, however, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man avoids the imaginative constraints and mechanical accounts that can grow out of naturalism by not attempting a detailed sequential account of Stephen’s life. Instead, it introduces epiphanic moments to give the narrative a unique discursive rhythm, breaking up the action into discrete episodes and drawing readers into the action to resolve the apparent disunities of the fragmented accounts. As a result, the narrative feels free to move abruptly from chapter to chapter and even from scene to scene, while trusting to the reader the obligation to make the connections among them.

Of course, that is not to say that anarchy reigns. The overall narrative is united thematically, and the story that is driving events traces with increasing insistence Stephen’s growing alienation from the inflexible social, cultural, and creative environments in Ireland that threaten first to circumscribe and then to stifle the imagination of the young artist.

The narrative features withdrawal but not defeat—ultimately privileging an interpretive strategy that parallels the techniques of “silence, exile, and cunning” that in the final chapter Stephen announces as his weapons of self-defense. In a carefully choreographed sequence of events, culminating in the final chapter, the narrative records Stephen’s progressive disillusionment with the central institutions defining the nature of Irish- Catholic society: the family, the church, and the nationalist movement. The striking feature of this movement lies in the way that its restrained development mimics the gradual enlightenment that comes out of most human experience. Thus, through a skillfully orchestrated sequence of events stretched over the five chapters of the novel, Stephen successively comes to a greater and greater sense of each institution as an oppressive and inhibitive force, antipathetic to all that he has come to value in his life. As a result, he turns with increasing determination from society and toward art.

As noted already, critics have come to see A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a paradigmatic modernist novel, a work of fiction that cleanly breaks from earlier artistic conventions and that establishes a commitment to an aesthetic vision as a moral value, but the very label runs the risk of limiting one’s sense of Joyce’s achievement. Rather than see the work as a benchmark in literary history, it is far more useful to consider the source of its continuing impact on contemporary readers. Given the episodic structure of the discourse, this approach is best accomplished through a chapter-by-chapter survey. However, a slight detour is first necessary.

James Joyce/Getty Images

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stands as Joyce’s only published work preceded by an epigraph: Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes . The passage comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses , and it can be translated as “he turned his mind to unknown arts.” It records the response of Daedalus, the fabulous artificer, when told by King Minos of Crete that he and his son would not be allowed to leave the island. Daedalus in turn produced the wax wings that allowed him and Icarus to soar away but that also led to his son’s death when the young man flew too close to the sun and the wax melted. This epigraph traces wonderfully the narrative movement of each chapter, which ends on a high note only to be brought low by the depressing image or scene that introduces the next chapter. Even more to the point for readers, the epigraph stands as an open invitation to interpretive freedom. The vague pronoun of the phrase (it becomes masculine only because of Ovid’s context) and the image of imaginative exploration invite all readers, men and women, to open their minds to new ways of seeing.

The epigraph also serves as a good reminder of the provisionality of the novel’s title. This is “a” portrait, with the indefinite article providing a sense of the openness and subjectivity of the narrative. Further, a portrait by its very nature reflects as much of the perceiver as it does of the subject. Thus, even before one begins to read, Joyce has offered ample warning that those who approach the text seeking definitive meaning or a prescriptive reading will only succeed in creating a great deal of frustration for themselves.

Chapter 1 immediately enforces the need for the interpretive flexibility suggested by the title and epigraph. It announces its groundbreaking intentions by opening the novel with an arresting departure from conventional narrative forms: an abrupt introduction into the experiences of the work’s central character that demands immediate and sustained reader involvement. The fractured recapitulation of the fairy tale that Stephen’s father, Simon Dedalus, tells to his young son, nicknamed Baby Tuckoo—“Once upon a time and a very good time it was . . .”—challenges traditional interpretive methods and announces a new role for the reader. From these first few lines, the source of the speaker and function of the narrative come into question. This is not to say that the narrative is flawed but rather that it is intentionally incomplete or ambiguous. Joyce self-consciously sustains a range of interpretive options within his discourse by allowing the reader to resolve or complete such moments in the narrative. The reader quickly sees that, from early on, much of the meaning of the novel will derive directly from his or her own interpretive choices, without the usual authorial guidance. Further, these decisions have a provisionality that allows readers to reconfigure the meaning of the novel every time they encounter it.

Immediately following this opening, readers encounter the disturbing and disorienting images of fear and punishment. As young Stephen cowers under a table, he learns that the consequences of disobedience have mythic authority: “Eagles will come and pluck out his eyes.” At the same time, as the phrase “Pull out his eyes Apologize” is repeated in a singsong fashion, the reader must decide if this represents the voice of authority hammering home the lesson or the consciousness of an already rebellious Stephen throwing back the threat in a mocking tone.

Already, two key features of the narrative have become evident to readers. The voice that recounts the experiences of Stephen Dedalus, while not exactly Stephen’s consciousness, has at all times a keen sense of Stephen’s feelings. Further, that voice articulates its views in a vocabulary roughly equivalent to what one would expect from Stephen at whatever age he is when the discourse recounts specific experiences or attitudes. This gives readers a powerful sense of the maturation process even as it conveys a feeling of intimate knowledge of the developing attitudes of the central character.

Finally, these first two pages of the novel provide a brief introduction of the central themes that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will take up— the roles of family, Catholicism, and nationalism in the formation of identity. None are developed in any detail, but that too suits the structure that Joyce has chosen. Just as the very young Stephen will only be aware of these institutions in very general and unformed fashion, readers glimpse their significance in his consciousness without a specific idea of their effect.

Next, the narrative goes on to describe life at Stephen’s first school, Clongowes Wood  College, the prestigious institution that marks the beginning of Stephen’s association with the Jesuits. In the process, the discourse begins to outline for the reader the particular character traits that will set Stephen apart from others, and the challenges that he will face in his efforts to sustain the uniqueness of his nature in a society that emphasizes conformity.

Stephen feels the predictable homesickness and disorientation of a very young boy sent away from home. He finds himself frustrated by being the butt of jokes—when Wells asks him if he kisses his mother, Stephen is chagrined to learn that there is no answer that will not produce ridicule. At the same time he comes to take pride in his budding intellectual abilities and in his growing sense of how he is expected to behave. (When he becomes ill after Wells shoulders him into the muddy water of the square ditch, he keeps the schoolboy code of silence.) While a hasty reading might suggest that Stephen is simply an outsider shunned by his classmates, a more careful assessment shows a young boy carefully making his way in a complex world. He gains a measure of respect from his fellows even as he also shows his callowness.

The chapter ends with two well-known episodes that underscore the complexity of Stephen’s world. In the first, readers see the fragility of the structures that seemingly support and nourish the young boy. In the second, we get a good sense of the resilience of Stephen in the face of injustice.

The Christmas dinner scene begins with deceptive good cheer. In an upbeat tone it announces a pleasant rite of passage, Stephen’s first opportunity to eat a holiday meal with the adults rather than with the other young children. However, the cheerfulness that initially characterizes the narrative quickly dissipates with the outbreak of a bitter argument over Charles Stewart Panell between Stephen’s father and Mr. Casey, supporters of Parnell, and Dante Riordan, an ardent nationalist who nonetheless follows the dictates of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in condemning Parnell as an adulterer. The quarrel captures stark divisions among political, social, and spiritual goals without offering a clear sense of right and wrong in the dispute. The argument ends with a paradoxical inversion of stereotypical roles—the men are in tears and Dante boisterously exits the room shouting her defiance—and it leaves Stephen wondering which if any of the Irish institutions invoked by both sides during the bitter confrontation—family, church, and nationalist movement—can be trusted.

The chapter concludes with a description of maltreatment and melioration that inverts the pattern of the Christmas dinner scene. Back at Clongowes Wood, some time after the Christmas recess, an aura of confusion and resentment permeates the world of the boys at school. Some older students have done something so serious that the Jesuit teachers have responded with a series of repressive punishments applied to everyone. In a wonderfully developed interchange in which the boys try to puzzle out the cause of the turmoil, Joyce captures both the naïveté and the bravado of the group. One of the students, Athy, claims to know the cause of the turmoil, and sententiously announces that the older boys were “smugging.” Though no one knows the meaning of the word, including the reader, all the others nod as if the situation was now crystal clear. (The word in fact is a neologism that Joyce employs to make his point. It allows one to imagine whatever one wishes rather than contend with a narrative that strictly details the offense. Once again, this underscores Joyce’s intention to give the reader an integral role in completing the meaning of the text.)

The incident, whatever it may be, has also shaken the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood, and their reaction is to redouble discipline at the school. As a result of overzealous efforts to make an example of any and all offenders, Stephen, who cannot participate in lessons because his glasses have been broken, finds himself unfairly pandied by Father Dolan, the prefect of studies. (Pandying consisted of a series of sharp blows administered on the hands with a leather strap.) Stephen and his classmates feel the injustice of Father Dolan’s act, and his schoolfellows press Stephen to seek redress. When he goes to the rector, the Rev. John Conmee, SJ, to complain of this treatment, Stephen receives assurances that it will not recur. Conmee’s solicitous treatment of Stephen stands as an important, if underrated, element of the narrative. Joyce does not seek to evoke a Dickensian world that sets oppositions in stark contrast. Stephen’s break from social institutions comes gradually because, despite their flaws, the narrative records ample instances of their meliorating behavior. Thus, the chapter ends with Stephen feeling a genuine sense of triumph, for events have reaffirmed, for Stephen at least, the predictable order that social institutions can be said to bring to our lives, Of course, for readers, with the advantage of detachment and hindsight, the resemblance between order and authoritarianism stands out all too clearly and presages conflicts to follow. Nonetheless, the narrative’s unwillingness here to oversimplify the complexity of human interaction signals its sophisticated sense of the development of Stephen’s identity.

Chapter 2, like all subsequent chapters, opens with a marked shift in narrative tone from euphoria to depression. The first image one encounters reasserts one of the narrative’s favorite forms, inversion. Uncle Charles, the elderly relative who had been unable to intervene in chapter 1 to prevent the harsh conflict at the Christmas dinner, is now banished by Stephen’s father to a building behind the main house to smoke. Although in itself, the act seems trivial, it introduces themes of isolation and humiliation that will soon characterize the fortunes of the Dedalus family.

Throughout the summer in the south Dublin suburb of Blackrock, where the family has moved, Stephen gradually becomes aware of the changes in the world around him. The narrative establishes a seemingly innocent routine in Stephen’s life, even as it introduces disconcerting images such as that of Mickey Flynn, the track coach in appalling physical condition. Stephen comes to realize that unspecified obstacles will prevent him from returning to Clongowes Wood in the fall, and even more serious problems quickly become evident. Seeking less expensive housing, the Dedalus family soon moves again into Dublin proper, and the discourse begins to make direct reference to Simon Dedalus’s growing financial concerns that will accelerate over the remainder of the novel. In the midst of this unsettled time, Father Conmee, the former rector at Clongowes Wood College, who had come to Stephen’s aid at the end of chapter 1, again steps in to provide assistance. This time he does so by securing for Stephen (and probably Stephen’s brother Maurice) a scholarship to the prestigious Jesuit school, Belvedere college, in Dublin. (Father Conmee’s kindness is recounted secondhand by Simon Dedalus, who ran into Conmee on the street and who evidently persuaded the priest to intervene for Stephen. During this encounter, Conmee has also given Simon an account of Stephen’s visit after the pandying episode. As Simon retells the anecdote, Conmee comes across as less sympathetic and more amused than Stephen or perhaps the reader had realized. The priest’s recollection, as it is recounted by Simon to Stephen and the rest of the Dedalus family, has a dual function. It reminds readers of the highly subjective point of view that the narrative presents as it reflects Stephen’s views of the world, and it draws us once again into an active engagement with the text, leaving it to us to decide how, if at all, this very different impression of events affects Stephen’s sense of the occasion.)

In the episodic fashion that characterizes the narrative, the discourse abruptly shifts its attention to Stephen’s renewed academic career. At Belvedere, Stephen has quickly established his intellectual prowess and become one of the more notable students. In contrast to his rather diffident role at Clongowes Wood, at Belvedere Stephen has assumed the position of class leader, although he still maintains a measure of aloofness. This transition, however, has not gone completely smoothly, and the middle portion of the chapter chronicles a series of events that highlight Stephen’s intellectual and social rivalry with his classmate Vincent Heron.

As a striking contrast to Stephen’s success at Belvedere, the narrative also recounts the continuing financial deterioration of the Dedalus family. A trip that Stephen takes to Cork with his father to sell off the last of the Dedalus family property there to pay Simon’s accumulated debts highlights the consequences of Mr. Dedalus’s profligacy. At the same time, it shows, through his father’s drunken competitiveness with his son, a growing distance between Stephen and his family. At the same time, the narrative introduces ironic parallels between the father’s and the son’s handling of money. In the penultimate section of chapter 2, the discourse offers an extended account of Stephen’s spendthrift ways as he squanders the prize money of 33 pounds.

The closing episode unfolds with startling abruptness an account of a strangely passive Stephen apparently experiencing sexual initiation with a Dublin prostitute. (The narrative does not make clear whether Stephen had previously been to a prostitute, but his intense excitement and palpable nervousness make it seem unlikely.) As the final paragraph makes clear, it is the prostitute who initiates all of the action, while Stephen, with an artistlike detachment, both experiences and records the scene.

By the beginning of chapter 3 Stephen’s initial sensual euphoria has now become a near mechanical process of satiation. His imagination now takes as much pleasure contemplating the possibility of stew for dinner as recalling the gratification offered by the prostitutes he has known. In this chapter the narrative focuses almost exclusively on giving an account of a religious retreat that the boys at Belvedere have to make, and it specifically foregrounds the sermons preached by the retreat master, Father Arnall.

Although the retreat receives a rather melodramatic representation, heightened by the selective attentiveness of Stephen’s overactive imagination, the liturgy itself was a long-established practice and, as Joyce would have known, one held in particular esteem by the Jesuits. (The Society of Jesus was the first religious order that made the retreat obligatory for its members.) The format of the retreat described in chapter 3 follows the standard approach prescribed at that time by the church. It has the retreat master leading the boys toward personal assessments through a series of meditations on death, the Last Judgment, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

The narrative plays a selective and possibly misleading role in its account of the retreat in which Stephen participates. It reports verbatim portions of the sermons, and then counterpoints the priest’s words with Stephen’s reactions to them. To anyone unfamiliar with the practice, it might seem that these passages cover the entire retreat. To the contrary, what we see in the text is a reflection of the factors that most hold Stephen’s attention: pride and guilt. As a result, emphasis falls on representations of guilt and punishment.

Despite the actual breadth of the retreat format, in passage after passage, Stephen dwells exclusively upon the consequences of his mortal sins with something akin to morbid pleasure, and this state of mind brings him to a form of repentance, based almost exclusively on a mixture of conceit over the presumed magnitude of his sins and fear of retribution as a consequence, that highlights the conclusion of the chapter.

The primary motivation for Stephen’s repentance offers important insights into his nature. Though remorse plays at the margins of Stephen’s feelings and a fear of punishment has a significance in Stephen’s decision to repent, pride stands as the dominant impulse in the chapter. Pride initially leads Stephen to feel that his sins are too grave for forgiveness. As the retreat sermons unfold, his pride makes him feel as if every word were directed at him. His pride causes him to dream of a personal vision of hell, like the great saints mentioned by Father Arnall. And pride leads him to imagine reconciliation not through his own approach to the Eucharist but rather with the Body of Christ coming to him: “The ciborium had come to him.”

At the same time, despite these reservations about the nature of his reconciliation with the church, Stephen’s gesture of repentance seems sincere. Indeed, this marks a time of genuine happiness for Stephen. However, predictably, the initial gratification derived from the renewed practice of his faith has become a habitual adherence to a mechanistic routine by the time chapter 4 begins. The episode opens with a detailed account of the near-masochistic regime of spiritual exercises and acts of selfdenial that Stephen has formulated for himself in an effort to atone for his sins. Nonetheless, despite the fervor characterizing Stephen’s commitment to piety, this scheme rapidly degenerates into a series of perfunctory, emotionless practices emphasizing the mortifications of the flesh rather than the spiritual enlightenment that is the real goal of these acts.

In a scene that raises a number of problematic issues relating to belief and service, the narrative focuses attention on the impact of religion on the life of a prospective artist. As one would expect in the tight-knit atmosphere of the school, Stephen’s piety has come to the attention of the director of studies at Belvedere. He meets with Stephen and asks the young man to consider the possibility of a vocation to the priesthood, specifically as a member of the Society of Jesus. As in the retreat sermons, much of what the director says, particularly about the sacramental powers that priests enjoy, appeals to Stephen’s pride. Likewise, one does well to remember that the narrative emphasizes Stephen’s perspective, so hasty judgments about the manipulative quality of the suggestion oversimplify the dynamics of the exchange. Indeed, at one point, the director very bluntly urges careful consideration, for an ill-conceived decision to become a priest would be disastrous. In any case, the director’s suggestion precipitates a crisis of conscience in Stephen. He conducts a rigorous, probing consideration of the values that actually inform his natureand weighs them against the demands that such a full commitment to the church would place upon him. Ultimately, the confining life and rigorous discipline of the priesthood runs contrary to his perceived need for experiences to feed his creative impulses. This brings him to a decision to break with the church (a course of action made explicit in the next chapter) and choose art over religion as his life’s vocation.

The chapter ends with a passage that has come to be seen as a crucial moment in Stephen’s artistic development: the embodiment of the creative possibilities offered by his choice through the vision of a young girl wading in the waters of Dublin Bay. As Stephen walks along Dollymount Strand he sees a young woman, whom critics have come to label the Birdgirl, standing knee deep in the water. The beauty of this image has an aesthetic rather than an erotic impact on him that ultimately confirms for him the absolute correctness of his choice. It marks an epiphany in which Stephen realizes how much he wishes for the power to evoke through his writing the same sense of pleasure he feels as he contemplates the girl’s beauty.

As with the other moments of exhilaration that have ended previous chapters, this exuberance disappears with the opening of chapter 5. The scene in a tenement shows the tawdry, even desperate, daily life of the Dedalus family as they struggle to sustain themselves through increasing economic hardship. With harsh criticism of Stephen from Simon Dedalus opening the chapter and his mother’s plea for him to return to the church near its end, Stephen’s growing alienation from his family brackets a series of episodes marking his break with Ireland and his full commitment to art.

Clashes with authority have marked every stage of Stephen’s development. Here the narrative methodically traces Stephen’s final rejection of the institutions that have endeavored to set his moral direction—Irish nationalism, the Catholic Church, and the family. In this fashion it lays out his reasons for breaking with each, and then leaves it to the reader to decide how close Stephen has come to achieving his goal of being an artist.

The first formative force the narrative addresses is patriotism. To his friend Davin (the only character in the novel to call Stephen familiarly by a diminutive of his first name—Stevie), Stephen explains that he cannot give himself over to the Irish nationalist movement. In Stephen’s opinion the history of hypocrisy and betrayal that surrounds Irish patriotic endeavors precludes any rational human being from giving his loyalty to this cause.

Before going on to address Stephen’s break with other Irish institutions, the narrative offers a sketch of the values governing the alternative approach to life that the young man has embraced. To Vincent Lynch, a fellow student at University College, Dublin, Stephen outlines the tenets of the aesthetic theory that have come to replace Catholic dogma as the moral center of his universe. This is a section full of the self-importance and sententiousness that can at times dominate Stephen’s nature. Wisely, the narrative punctuates Stephen’s pedantic and humorless disquisition with Lynch’s interjection of his sardonic views and his complaints of the hangover that plagues him. Although the sinuousness of the aesthetic theory itself challenges readers, it raises a larger interpretive issue, namely, to what degree one should apply the values expressed by Stephen to the novel in which they appear. Joyce wisely does not force the issue, but no complete interpretation of the book can ignore the need to come to some resolution of this question.

After the dry examination of artistic values, the narrative returns to the core issues of social environment. Talking to another friend and confidant, Cranly, also a classmate at University College, Dublin, Stephen touches on his religious alienation when he explains his break with his mother over his unwillingness to profess publicly his Catholic faith by making his Easter duty. While Lynch, suffering from the effects of a heavy night of drink, was a distracted and often disinterested listener, Cranly provides a very different response. Although he evinces no greater loyalty to Irish institutions than does Stephen, Cranly does maintain a cynical pragmatism that challenges Stephen’s idealistic approach. For Cranly, appearances mean little, and so apparent acquiescence to the authority of the family, church, and state will have little effect uponhim. He offers Stephen the alternative of accommodation, and the logic behind his reasoning shows how tempting his suggestions must have been. In the end, however, Stephen rejects Cranly’s approach, and in doing so he forecloses the possibility of continuing to live in Ireland.

Near the end of the chapter, the narrative makes a final, radical shift in form, and introduces direct evidence of Stephen’s artistic maturation. In a series of diary entries, readers see Stephen’s summation of his views on Ireland and art, and they can judge from this written evidence how close Stephen has come to attaining his ambition. As Stephen completes his account of his emancipation from Irish cultural institutions, he utters a paradoxical declaration that neatly sums up his imaginative condition. On the point of leaving the claustrophobic atmosphere of Ireland to go to Paris, he nonetheless affirms his inextricable connection to his cultural, spiritual, and imaginative heritage, declaring: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” ( A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 252–253). Stephen will not come to a full sense of this dependence upon Ireland as an inspiration for his art until the pages of Ulysses , but this statement clearly announces the direction in which his development is headed.

Although readers in Joyce’s time may not have realized it, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has established itself as the foremost example of English modernism in the canon. As one expects from a modernist work, it offers a thorough critique of the key social institutions that seek to shape the life of its central character—in Stephen’s case the family, the church, and the state (in the form of Irish nationalism). With deft attention to detail, the narrative traces, in the five chapters of the novel, the gradual lessening of influence exerted by each institution. It avoids the melodramatic sunderings chronicled by some of the lesser modernists like D. H. Lawrence, and instead presents an account of Stephen’s cumulative sense of the inadequacy of the institutions in the world around him. As an alternative to the absence of valid guidance and support from these entities, the narrative shows the growing confidence of the artist’s ego as the valid benchmark for guiding behavior. Also in the modernist tradition, the narrative develops in an episodic, open-ended form that actively draws readers into the completion of its meaning.

Arnall, Father

He is a Jesuit priest who first appears in chapter 1 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As Stephen Dedalus’s Latin teacher at Clongowes Wood College, he exempts Stephen from his studies after Stephen breaks his eyeglasses. However, when the prefect of studies, Father Dolan, enters Father Arnall’s classroom and unjustly accuses the boy of being an “idle little loafer” ( A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 50), Father Arnall does not defend Stephen when he is pandied. Later, in chapter 3 of the novel, Father Arnall reappears to give the sermons during the retreat conducted when Stephen is at Belvedere College. The fierce tone that Father Arnall adopts during the retreat is strikingly different from his classroom demeanor at Clongowes, but in fact the outline of the sermons comes from a very detailed program that all retreat masters of Joyce’s day would have followed.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Brigid is a servant in the Dedalus household. Although she does not appear in the novel, while lying sick in the infirmary at Clongowes Wood College the young Stephen Dedalus recalls the words of a song about death and burial that Brigid had taught him ( A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 24).

Butt, D., SJ

In Stephen Hero Father Butt is identified as the dean of students at University College, Dublin, where he also teaches English. He probably reappears lighting the fire in the Physicans Theatre episode of chapter 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , although in that novel the dean of students is not identified by name. Most likely, Joyce modeled his depiction of Father Butt on his recollections of the Rev. Joseph Darlington, SJ, who was the dean of studies and a professor of English at University College, Dublin when Joyce attended (1898–1902).

Casey, John

He appears in the pivotal Christmas dinner scene in chapter 1. There, he and Simon Dedalus argue with Mrs. Riordan (Dante) over the proper role of the Catholic Church in Irish politics, and, in particular, he condemns the church’s repudiation of Charles Stewart Parnell. The Fenian John KELLY, a friend of John Stanislaus Joyce, James’s father, served as the model for John Casey.

Charles, Uncle

He is Stephen Dedalus’s elderly, maternal granduncle. Uncle Charles is present at the Christmas dinner when John Casey, Mr. Dedalus, and Dante Riordan argue over Charles Stewart Parnell. Chapter 2 opens with a request by Stephen’s father that Uncle Charles smoke his “black twist” tobacco in the outhouse, a shed behind the main building, to which the old man good-naturedly agrees. Later the narrative describes Stephen spending much of his time in Blackrock during the early part of the summer with Uncle Charles. Joyce based Uncle Charles on William O’Connell, a prosperous businessman in Cork who was a maternal uncle of Joyce’s father.

Clery, Emma

She is a young woman, specifically identified by name in Stephen Hero , who is the object of Stephen Daedalus’s romantic fantasies there. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , she may be the E—— C—— with whom the young Stephen Dedalus rides home on a tram after a children’s party at Harold’s Cross, and whom he is tempted to kiss. She seems to appear throughout the novel both as Stephen’s idealized vision of Irish womanhood and as a representation of the Irish society’s stereotypical attitudes of and toward women against which Stephen rebels. In chapter 3, during the retreat, Stephen imagines that Emma is with him in an encounter with the Blessed Virgin ( P 116). Near the end of the novel ( P 252) Stephen describes his awkward meeting with an unnamed young woman in Grafton Street who seems very like Emma, sympathetic to Stephen’s problems yet a bit afraid of his unconventional attitudes. In Monasterboice , a play by Padraic Colum about Joyce’s quest for artistic identity, Colum uses the name Emma for the girl who accompanies Joyce to the monastery at Monasterboice, and Colum attributes to her qualities similar to those that so attracted Stephen Dedalus to Emma in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Conmee, Rev. John, SJ (1847–1910)

He was an actual Jesuit priest and the rector at Clongowes Wood College from 1885 to 1891. In 1893, Father Conmee arranged for both Joyce and his brother Stanislaus to attend Belvedere College on scholarships. According to Herbert Gorman, Joyce received comfort from Father Conmee and described him to Gorman as “a very decent sort of chap.” Conmee was appointed prefect of studies at Belvedere College (1891–92), prefect of studies at University College, Dublin (1893–95), superior of St. Francis Xavier’s Church (1897–1905), provincial (1905–09), and rector of Milltown Park (1909–10).

Fictional versions of Conmee appear in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. In the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Stephen Dedalus appeals to Father Conmee after being unjustly accused of idleness and pandied by Father Dolan. In the second chapter, Simon Dedalus relates having met Father Conmee, and announces that the priest has promised to intervene to obtain a scholarship for Stephen (and possibly his brother Maurice) to attend Belvedere College.

He appears in both Stephen Hero and in chapter 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Cranly is a close friend of Stephen’s, and a classmate at University College, Dublin. Cranly provides pragmatic advice on how to get along in theclaustrophobic world of Dublin. During an extended walk around the city they discuss religious belief and family relations. Cranly is modeled on Joyce’s mild-mannered friend and confidant, John Francis Byrne.

He is a character who appears in chapter 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Davin is one of Stephen Dedalus’s classmates at University College, Dublin. He is a nationalist who comes from rural Ireland, a devout Catholic, and a sexually chaste young man. In this respect, Davin stands as Stephen’s polar opposite. The contrast allows Davin to serve as a foil for Stephen’s attitudes, giving the reader a clear sense of the changes that have occurred in Stephen as he matures physically, emotionally, and psychologically over the course of the novel and as his literary aspirations develop. At the same time, despite their very different backgrounds and views, Davin enjoys a particularly close friendship with Dedalus, and he is the only person outside the family in the book to address Stephen by his first name. (In fact he uses the diminutive, Stevie, that no one else does.) The character of Davin is modeled on Joyce’s friend and university classmate George Clancy, who is also the model for the character of Madden who appears in Stephen Hero.

Dedalus, Katey

She is one of Stephen Dedalus’s younger sisters, appearing in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in a more extended role in Ulysses . In chapter 5 of A Portrait, Mrs. Dedalus asks Katey to prepare the place for Stephen to wash, and she in turn asks her sister Boody.

Dedalus, Simon

He appears in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Simon Dedalus is the improvident and alcoholic father of Stephen Dedalus and the head of the Dedalus household. Like his precursor (Mr. Simon Daedalus in Stephen Hero ), Joyce modeled Mr. Dedalus’s character on that of his own father, John Stanislaus Joyce.

The consequences of Mr. Dedalus’s financial and social ruin significantly shape much of the material and emotional circumstances informing the life of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses . In spite of Mr. Dedalus’s failures, his intolerant temperament, his resentments, and his strong political and religious opinions, he is nonetheless presented as a witty raconteur and amiable socializer. His ability to tell a good story and sing a good song in pleasing tenor voice makes him a pleasant companion at least for those not dependent upon him for financial support. Throughout Stephen has ambivalent feelings for his father, and readers repeatedly see the danger for Stephen of becoming a Dublin character like Simon Dedalus.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with direct references to Mr. Dedalus’s storytelling and singing, talents that make a lasting impression on the young Stephen and readers as well. As the novel develops and his financial circumstances worsen, he recedes into the background, relinquishing his role as head of the family and becoming merely a disruptive influence in the lives of his wife and children. In the final chapter, when asked about his father by Cranly, Stephen sardonically sums up the life of Simon Dedalus with a dismissive series of labels: “A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past” (P 241).

Dedalus, Stephen

He is the central character of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a major character in Ulysses . Both his surname and given names have symbolic significance. Stephen was the name of the first Christian martyr, stoned to death for his religious convictions (see Acts 7:55–60 ). Dedalus (or Daedalus as the name appears in Stephen Hero ) was the mythical “fabulous artificer” who made feathered wings of wax with which he and his son Icarus escaped imprisonment on the island of Crete. (Icarus, however, flew too close tothe sun; the wax melted, and he plunged into the Ionian Sea and drowned.) Like the first Christian martyr with whom he shares a given name, Stephen, in advancing a new cause, breaks from tradition and faces persecution by his peers. Like Dedalus, he must use artifice and cunning to escape his own imprisonment—by the institutions of the family, the church and Irish nationalism. Stephen writes in his diary: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” ( P 252–253).

Although he does not narrate the novel, his point of view shapes the perspective of the work. As the central consciousness of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Stephen’s actions and attitudes set the pace and frame the development of the discourse. The book traces Stephen’s intellectual, artistic, and moral development from his earliest recollections as “Baby Tuckoo” through the various stages of his education at Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, and University College, Dublin, to his decision to leave Ireland for the Continent. The novel also follows the decline of the Dedalus family from upper-middleclass respectability to abject poverty, noting the progressive alienation of Stephen from his family as an almost inevitable consequence.

These deteriorating economic conditions develop rapidly in the second chapter, punctuated by the family’s move into Dublin and Simon Dedalus’s disastrous trip to Cork, accompanied by Stephen, to sell off the last of the family property. Given these events, it is no surprise that Stephen’s distancing from his family occurs in a direct and linear fashion. However, his relations with the church are characterized by a much greater degree of uncertainty and vacillation. After a period of unrestrained sexual indulgence while at Belvedere, Stephen returns to the church, terrified by the images conjured up during the sermons at the retreat recounted in chapter 3. As a consequence, Stephen embarks upon a rigorous penitential regimen. However, he finds that the prescribed spiritual exercises do not give him the satisfaction for which he had hoped. By the end of chapter 4, with his erotically charged aesthetic vision of the young woman wading, the Birdgirl on Dollymount Strand, Stephen has given himself completely over to art.

In the final chapter, a number of Stephen’s college classmates attempt in different ways to integrate him into the routine of Dublin life and thus bring him under the sway of dominant Irish social, cultural, religious, and political institutions. Davin seeks to enlist him in the nationalist cause. Vincent Lynch proposes small-scale debauchery as a means of sustaining himself in the suffocating atmosphere of Dublin middle-class life. Cranly, with perhaps the most seductive temptation, suggests that Stephen adopt the hypocrisy of superficial accommodation as a way of liberating himself from the censure of his fellow citizens. Stephen rejects all of these alternatives and remains devoted to his artistic vocation.

As the novel closes, he is about to leave Dublin to live in Paris, to attempt “to fly by those nets” of nationality, language, and religion and, as he writes in his diary, “to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” ( P 203, 252–253). The Daedalus motif of the cunning artificer is alluded to here and culminates in these last lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Dolan, Father

He is the unsympathetic prefect of studies at Clongowes Wood College who appears in chapter 1. His role as prefect of studies makes him an assistant to the rector and puts him in charge of the academic program. In Joyce’s novel, Father Dolan seems to be acting as a dean of discipline as well. He appears near the end of chapter 1 where he accuses Stephen Dedalus of having broken his eyeglasses on purpose to avoid studying. As a punishment for this supposed transgression, Father Dolan pandies Stephen. (That is, he hits the young man’s hands with a leather-covered pandybat.) Joyce modeled this character on Father James Daly, who served as prefect of studies when Joyce was attending Clongowes Wood and who reportedly punished Joyce in this way.

Doyle, Reverend Charles, SJ

He appears in chapter 2, identified as one of the Jesuit teachers at Belvedere College, though Stephen Dedalus does not study under him. The fictional Father Doyle is modeled on an actual faculty member of the same name. In 1921, Joyce wrote to Father Doyle enquiring about Belvedere House, the name by which the school had been called before it became Belvedere College.

These are presumably the initials of Emma Clery, the subject of a youthful poem written by Stephen and the girl with whom he seems to be enamored for most of the novel. In Stephen Hero , the narrative refers to her by her full name and not just by her initials. Flynn, Mike He is Stephen Dedalus’s running coach, appearing very briefly at the beginning of chapter 2. Flynn is identified as an old friend of Stephen’s father and is called the trainer of some of the most successful runners in modern times. Flynn was the proponent of a particularly rigid running style that Stephen had to follow: “his head high lifted, his knees well lifted and his hands held straight down by his sides” ( P 61).

Ghezzi, Rev. Charles, SJ

He is a Jesuit priest and the professor of Italian at University College, Dublin, under whom Joyce studied the works of Dante Alighieri, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and other Italian writers. Joyce would also often discuss with Father Ghezzi philosophical issues pertaining to Giordano Bruno and the aesthetics of St. Thomas Aquinas. Ghezzi served as a model for Father Artifoni, Stephen Daedalus’s Italian instructor in Stephen Hero . In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , however, Joyce used Father Ghezzi’s actual name for the character. In chapter 5 in the diary entry of March 24, Stephen Dedalus refers to his instructor as “little roundhead rogue’s eye Ghezzi” (P 249).

Henry, Rev. William, SJ

He was the actual rector of Belvedere College during Joyce’s time there. He also instructed Joyce in Latin. Additionally, according to Joyce’s biographer Peter Costello, Father Henry also directed the Sodality of Our Lady, to which James Joyce was admitted on December 7, 1895, and of which he was elected prefect, or head, on September 25, 1896. Throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Henry is never referred to by name but always by the title “the rector” or “the director.” In chapter 3, he speaks to Stephen Dedalus’s class about their forthcoming retreat, and in chapter 4, after a prolonged discussion he invites Stephen to consider a priestly vocation. This is a key scene, for Jesuits are prohibited from actively recruiting someone to join the order, and critics have debated whether Father Henry oversteps his authority in what he says to Stephen. (Father Henry also served as the model for Father Butler in the Dubliners story “An Encounter.”)

Heron, Vincent

He appears in chapter 2 in the contradictory roles of Stephen Dedalus’s aggressive rival and putative school friend at Belvedere College. In its description of him, the narrative puns upon Heron’s name by describing his “mobile face, beaked like a bird’s” ( P 76), employing the avian imagery prevalent throughout the novel. This particular group of metaphors often indicates a threatening presence, as in the opening scene in which Stephen is menaced by the image of an eagle pulling out his eyes ( P 8).

In keeping with this pattern Heron, too, takes the role of a threatening figure in Stephen’s life. Heron embodies the narrow-minded, entrenched attitudes of the middle-class lifestyle that increasingly presents itself in opposition to Stephen’s gestures of independence. During their first encounter, Heron demonstrates this antipathy for any sort of autonomous thinking. He clumsily tries to force Stephen to admit that the poet Byron was heretical and immoral by instigating an attack by two other classmates on Stephen ( P 81f). Later, as the reader observes near the end of chapter 2, Heron will become more polished in his efforts to force Stephen into conformity, just as Stephen will become more adept at using his wit to sidestep such attempts.

Lynch, Vincent

He is a character who appears as a student at University College, Dublin, in both Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and later as a medical student in Ulysses. In Stephen Hero , Lynch serves as a sounding board for Stephen Daedalus, facilitating the exposition of his views on women and the Catholic Church. In chapter 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he listens to Stephen’s disquisition on aesthetics, and his acerbic comments, growing out of his hungover condition, punctuate Stephen’s disquisition and prevent it from becoming pedantic. Joyce’s Dublin friend Vincent Cosgrave was the model for Lynch.

He is a character, identified only by his surname, who appears in chapter 5. The narrative depicts MacCann as the most vocal political activist at University College, Dublin. MacCann champions the cause of pacifism, and bristles at Stephen Dedalus’s refusal to sign a document that he is circulating praising the efforts of Czar Nicholas to promote universal peace. Joyce modeled MacCann on Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a friend and University College classmate. McGlade He is a character who appears only briefly in chapter 1. The narrative identifies McGlade as one of the prefects at Clongowes Wood College. From the conversation between Stephen Dedalus and the other boys, it appears that he is associated at least marginally with the boys who are involved in the notorious smuggling  incident.

Moonan, Simon

He is a character who appears in the first chapter, identified by the narrative as one of the older boys at Clongowes Wood College and a favorite of “the fellows of the football fifteen.” An aura of homoeroticism surrounds Moonan, although nothing more specific than innuendo appears in the story. Because Moonan is one of the boys implicated in the smugging incident, he faces a flogging as punishment. He may also be the Moonan who is referred to in chapter 5 as a fairly dull student who has nonetheless passed his exams at University College, Dublin.

Moran, Father

This is the name of a priest who appears in both Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . In both novels his expression of nationalist sentiments and his friendship with Emma Clery arouse equal measures of disdain and jealousy in Stephen Dedalus.

Riordan, Mrs.

She is one of the characters who appears in chapter 1, where she is called “Dante.” (A corruption of “auntie,” the name “Dante” is a term of familiarity and affection.) Though not an actual blood relation, Mrs. Riordan is a widow who has lived for a time in the Dedalus household, apparently as a governess. Despite the benevolence implied by her name, for the young Stephen Dedalus she stands as a harsh authority figure. At one point in the opening pages of the novel, the narrative goes so far as to make her menacing. When Stephen’s mother asks him to apologize for some unspecified misbehavior, Dante threateningly adds: “O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes” ( P 8). Her attitude epitomizes the narrowminded religious and political views Stephen will later in life reject.

Mrs. Riordan also plays a key role in the Christmas dinner scene. There she is portrayed as headstrong and intolerant, with inflexible religious and political views that make her unsympathetic to the recently disgraced Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. After a violent dinner-table argument with Simon Dedalus and John Casey over the Irish rejection of Parnell after his adulterous affair with Kitty O’Shea became a matter of public knowledge, Mrs. Riordan stalks out of the room and disappears from the narrative. Mrs. Riordan’s character is based upon that of Mrs. “Dante” Hearn Conway, a woman originally from Cork who came into the Joyce household in 1887 as a governess. Like her fictional counterpart, Mrs. Conway had a bitter fight (with John JOYCE and his Fenian friend John Kelly) over the character of Parnell during the Joyce family Christmas dinner in 1891. She seems to have left the Joyces shortly thereafter.

He is a character who appears in chapter 2 in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the English master at Belvedere College, and inStephen Hero where he is identified, in passing, as Stephen Daedalus’s English professor at University College, Dublin. In chapter 2 of A Portrait , Mr. Tate good-naturedly calls attention to a putative line of heresy in one of Stephen’s class essays, thereby unwittingly precipitating Stephen’s confrontation after school with his rival Vincent Heron and two other bullies. The character of Mr. Tate is based upon one of Joyce’s English teachers at Belvedere, Mr. George Dempsey, who taught at the college from 1884 to 1923.

Vance, Eileen

She is a character who appears in the first two chapters of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . She lives in Bray and is the neighbor and childhood friend of Stephen Dedalus. Stephen’s attraction to Eileen is tempered by Dante Riordan’s admonition not to play with her because the Vances are Protestant. Joyce based this character on his recollections of a childhood playmate of the same name.

Wells, Charles

He is a minor character who appears both in Stephen Hero and in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When Stephen first meets him in chapter 1 of A Portrai t, Wells is a bully at Clongowes Wood College. Wells embarrasses Stephen by asking the boy if he kisses his mother good night and then ridiculing the answer. The narrative also implies that Wells is responsible for the illness that sends Stephen to the infirmary because Wells was the one who had pushed Stephen into the square ditch (the cesspool behind the dormitory) and implores the young boy not to reveal that fact.

Analysis of James Joyce’s Dubliners

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The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot: Critical Analysis

The poem certainly bears a strong thematic resemblance to the waste land theme. 'The Hollow Men' is a meditation on the subject of human nature in this world and on the relationship of this world to another, the world of death, or eternity. The Hollow Men is also a new poem as regards its music and its final emotional significance.

The Hollow Men is remarkable for its music. The short lines, the faltering rhythms, the subdued, irregular rhymes help in producing a lamenting music regarding the condition of the Hollow Men. We are not told who they are, where they are or why they are in their present abode. They seem to be in a timeless region.

There is little hope of redemption for the Hollow Men as the poem ends with a 'whimper'. The word 'whimper' suggests the theme of rebirth. It is the first faint querulous sound which shows that a child is born and is alive. It is a sign of hope and salvation. The hope of salvation is present, although very faintly, for the Hollow Men, but there is little assurance that the hope of salvation will be accepted because the shadow prevents the Hollow Men from attaining the given salvation.

The hollow men wait for the final destruction because between now and then there is only an endless series of birth, death, and rebirth which is inescapable and which is, in itself, a waste land not only because it is inevitable, but because it offers no salvation from the wheel on which they turn. The eyes and the rose may well be symbols like the Holy Grail; a salvation sought but unattainable. The hollow men, like the knights of the Grail legends, quest for salvation, but because they are blind, spiritually and physically, they cannot find what they seek. The poem is, therefore, an impressive symbolic picture of an age without belief, without meaning and its tone is one of rankling despair.

In its images the poem seems to contain in epitome both what goes before and what is to come after. The opening images of the guys, the scarecrows tossing in the wind of the second section, the better compressed metaphor of "this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms" recalling 'the dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit' of 'The Waste Land', and the rewriting of the nursery rhyme, with the prickly pear in place of the mulberry bush are like samples of the images we find in such profusion in the Preludes, Gerontion and The Waste Land. But mingled with these are traditional poetic images of stars - 'a fading star' and 'the perpetual star' - of 'a tree swinging' and voices 'in the wind's singing' and of 'sunlight on a broken column.' These, with the Dantesque 'gathered on this beach of the timid river', and the unexpected introduction of religious symbol of the 'multifoliate rose' from The Divine Comedy point forward to the imagery of Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets. And the use of these images as recurring symbols and of the potent word 'kingdom' to lead up to the broken petitions from the Lord's Prayer, anticipate the treatment of imagery in the later poems.

T. S. Eliot has provided two epigraphs for The Hollow Men 'Mistah Kurtz - he dead' and 'A Penny for the Old Guy'. The first epigraph shows a basic contrast and the second points to a basic resemblance with the Hollow Men. The Hollow Men are antithetic to Mistah Kurtz, but they resemble the 'Old Guy'. Mistah Kurtz, the hero of Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness is better than the Hollow Men because he is dead and they are deadened. There is a likeness between the Hollow Men and the 'Old Guy' or the effigy of Guy Fawkes because the latter is also a hollow man. The protagonist is, in fact, one of the stuffed dummies who symbolizes the condition of the sensitive part of humanity in the modern wasteland.

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Shrestha, Roma. "The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot: Critical Analysis." BachelorandMaster, 7 Sep. 2017, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/the-hollow-men-analysis.html.

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The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.

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By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti

• May 16, 2024 Updated 5:53 a.m. ET

This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

Listen to this article, read by Jonathan Davis

Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.

Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.

The interviews, along with classified documents written in recent months, reveal a government at war with itself. One document describes a meeting in March, when Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, gave a withering account of the efforts by Bezalel Smotrich — an ultraright leader and the official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank — to undermine law enforcement in the occupied territory. Since Smotrich took office, Fox wrote, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.” Moreover, Fox said, Smotrich and his allies were thwarting the very measures to enforce the law that the government had promised Israeli courts it would take.

This is a story, pieced together and told in full for the first time, that leads to the heart of Israel. But it begins in the West Bank, in places like Khirbet Zanuta. From within the village’s empty ruins, there is a clear view across the valley to a tiny Jewish outpost called Meitarim Farm. Built in 2021, the farm has become a base of operations for settler attacks led by Yinon Levi, the farm’s owner. Like so many of the Israeli outposts that have been set up throughout the West Bank in recent years, Meitarim Farm is illegal. It is illegal under international law, which most experts say doesn’t recognize Israeli settlements in occupied land. It is illegal under Israeli law, like most settlements built since the 1990s.

Few efforts are made to stop the building of these outposts or the violence emanating from them. Indeed, one of Levi’s day jobs was running an earthworks company, and he has worked with the Israel Defense Forces to bulldoze at least one Palestinian village in the West Bank. As for the victims of that violence, they face a confounding and defeating system when trying to get relief. Villagers seeking help from the police typically have to file a report in person at an Israeli police station, which in the West Bank are almost exclusively located inside the settlements themselves. After getting through security and to the station, they sometimes wait for hours for an Arabic translator, only to be told they don’t have the right paperwork or sufficient evidence to submit a report. As one senior Israeli military official told us, the police “exhaust Palestinians so they won’t file complaints.”

And yet in November, with no protection from the police or the military, the former residents of Khirbet Zanuta and five nearby villages chose to test whether justice was still possible by appealing directly to Israel’s Supreme Court. In a petition, lawyers for the villagers, from Haqel, an Israeli human rights organization, argued that days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a raiding party that included settlers and Israeli soldiers assaulted village residents, threatened murder and destroyed property throughout the village. They stated that the raid was part of “a mass transfer of ancient Palestinian communities,” one in which settlers working hand in hand with soldiers are taking advantage of the current war in Gaza to achieve the longer-standing goal of “cleansing” parts of the West Bank, aided by the “sweeping and unprecedented disregard” of the state and its “de facto consent to the massive acts of deportation.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the relief the villagers are seeking — that the law be enforced — might seem modest. But our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against them: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one.

Separate and Unequal

The devastating Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, the ongoing crisis of Israeli hostages and the grinding Israeli invasion and bombardment of the Gaza Strip that followed may have refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s ongoing inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank where the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law and democracy are most apparent.

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.

The violence and impunity that these cases demonstrate existed long before Oct. 7. In nearly every month before October, the rate of violent incidents was higher than during the same month in the previous year. And Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, looking at more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction. Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000 — speaking out now because of his concern about Israel’s systemic failure to enforce the law — says this singular lack of consequences reflects the indifference of the Israeli leadership going back years. “The cabinet, the prime minister,” he says, “they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Ayalon’s assessment was echoed by many other officials we interviewed. Mark Schwartz, a retired American three-star general, was the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, overseeing international support efforts for the partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “There’s no accountability,” he says now of the long history of settler crimes and heavy-handed Israeli operations in the West Bank. “These things eat away at trust and ultimately the stability and security of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s undeniable.”

How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most established members of Israel’s ultraright, unpunished for their crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state altogether.

Many Israelis who moved to the West Bank did so for reasons other than ideology, and among the settlers, there is a large majority who aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against Palestinians. And many within the Israeli government fought to expand the rule of law into the territories, with some success. But they also faced harsh pushback, with sometimes grave personal consequences. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts in the 1990s, on the heels of the First Intifada, to make peace with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, gave rise to a new generation of Jewish terrorists, and they ultimately cost him his life.

The disagreement over how to handle the occupied territories and their residents has bred a complex and sometimes opaque system of law enforcement. At its heart are two separate and unequal systems of justice: one for Jews and another for Palestinians.

The West Bank is under the command of the I.D.F., which means that Palestinians are subject to a military law that gives the I.D.F. and the Shin Bet considerable authority. They can hold suspects for extended periods without trial or access to either a lawyer or the evidence against them. They can wiretap, conduct secret surveillance, hack into databases and gather intelligence on any Arab living in the occupied territory with few restrictions. Palestinians are subject to military — not civilian — courts, which are far more punitive when it comes to accusations of terrorism and less transparent to outside scrutiny. (In a statement, the I.D.F. said, “The use of administrative detention measures is only carried out in situations where the security authorities have reliable and credible information indicating a real danger posed by the detainee to the region’s security, and in the absence of other alternatives to remove the risk.” It declined to respond to multiple specific queries, in some cases saying “the events are too old to address.”)

According to a senior Israeli defense official, since Oct. 7, some 7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. They were given specific orders: Do not leave the settlements, do not cover your faces, do not initiate unauthorized roadblocks. But in reality many of them have left the settlements in uniform, wearing masks, setting up roadblocks and harassing Palestinians.

All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.

In this system, even the question of what behavior is being investigated as an act of terror is different for Jews and Arabs. For a Palestinian, the simple admission of identifying with Hamas counts as an act of terrorism that permits Israeli authorities to use severe interrogation methods and long detention. Moreover, most acts of violence by Arabs against Jews are categorized as a “terror” attack — giving Shin Bet and other services license to use the harshest methods at their disposal.

The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet called the Department for Counterintelligence and Prevention of Subversion in the Jewish Sector, known more commonly as the Jewish Department. It is dwarfed both in size and prestige by Shin Bet’s Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism. And in the event, most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause. This system, with its gaps and obstructions, allowed the founders of groups advocating extreme violence during the 1970s and 1980s to act without consequences, and today it has built a protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands . Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.

Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”

Two months after that, two Israeli settlers were murdered in an attack by Hamas gunmen near Huwara, a village in the West Bank. The widespread calls for revenge, common after Palestinian terror attacks, were now coming from within Netanyahu’s new government. Smotrich declared that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out.”

And, he added, “I think the State of Israel needs to do it.”

Birth of a Movement

With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.

Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.

The legality of that agenda was an open question. The Geneva Conventions, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade occupying powers to deport or transfer “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But the status of the territory was, in the view of many within and outside the Israeli government, more complex. The settlers sought to create what some of them called “facts on the ground.” This put them into conflict with both the Palestinians and, at least putatively, the Israeli authorities responsible for preventing the spread of illegal settlements.

Whether or not the government would prove flexible on these matters became clear in April 1975 at Ein Yabrud, an abandoned Jordanian military base near Ofra, in the West Bank. A group of workers had been making the short commute from Israel most days for months to work on rebuilding the base, and one evening they decided to stay. They were aiming to establish a Jewish foothold in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli designation for the territories that make up the West Bank, and they had found a back door that required only the slightest push. Their leader met that same night with Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister, who told the I.D.F. to stand down. Peres would treat the nascent settlement not as a community but as a “work camp” — and the I.D.F. would do nothing to hinder their work.

Peres’s maneuver was partly a sign of the weakness of Israel’s ruling Labor party, which had dominated Israeli politics since the country’s founding. The residual trauma of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — when Israel was caught completely by surprise by Egyptian and Syrian forces before eventually beating back the invading armies — had shaken citizens’ belief in their leaders, and movements like Gush Emunim, directly challenging the authority of the Israeli state, had gained momentum amid Labor’s decline. This, in turn, energized Israel’s political right.

By the late 1970s, the settlers, bolstered in part by growing political support, were expanding in number. Carmi Gillon, who joined Shin Bet in 1972 and rose by the mid-1990s to become its director, recalls the evolving internal debates. Whose responsibility was it to deal with settlers? Should Israel’s vaunted domestic security service enforce the law in the face of clearly illegal acts of settlement? “When we realized that Gush Emunim had the backing of so many politicians, we knew we shouldn’t touch them,” he said in his first interview for this article in 2016.

One leader of the ultraright movement would prove hard to ignore, however. Meir Kahane, an ultraright rabbi from Flatbush, Brooklyn, had founded the militant Jewish Defense League in 1968 in New York. He made no secret of his belief that violence was sometimes necessary to fulfill his dream of Greater Israel, and he even spoke of plans to buy .22 caliber rifles for Jews to defend themselves. “Our campaign motto will be, ‘Every Jew a .22,’” he declared. In 1971, he received a suspended sentence on bomb-making charges, and at the age of 39 he moved to Israel to start a new life. From a hotel on Zion Square in Jerusalem, he started a school and a political party, what would become Kach, and drew followers with his fiery rhetoric.

Kahane said he wanted to rewrite the stereotype of Jews as victims, and he argued, in often vivid terms, that Zionism and democracy are in fundamental tension. “Zionism came into being to create a Jewish state,” Kahane said in an interview with The Times in 1985, five years before he was assassinated by a gunman in New York. “Zionism declares that there is going to be a Jewish state with a majority of Jews, come what may. Democracy says, ‘No, if the Arabs are the majority then they have the right to decide their own fate.’ So Zionism and democracy are at odds. I say clearly that I stand with Zionism.”

A Buried Report

In 1977, the Likud party led a coalition that, for the first time in Israeli history, secured a right-wing majority in the country’s Parliament, the Knesset. The party was headed by Menachem Begin, a veteran of the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that carried out attacks against Arabs and British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, the British colonial entity that preceded the creation of Israel. Likud — Hebrew for “the alliance” — was itself an amalgam of several political parties. Kach itself was still on the outside and would always remain so. But its radical ideas and ambitions were moving closer to the mainstream.

Likud’s victory came 10 years after the war that brought Israel vast amounts of new land, but the issue of what to do with the occupied territories had yet to be resolved. As the new prime minister, Begin knew that addressing that question would mean addressing the settlements. Could there be a legal basis for taking the land? Something that would allow the settlements to expand with the full support of the state?

It was Plia Albeck, then a largely unknown bureaucrat in the Israeli Justice Ministry, who found Begin’s answer. Searching through the regulations of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine in the years preceding the British Mandate, she lit upon the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, a major effort at land reform. Among other provisions, the law enabled the sultan to seize any land that had not been cultivated by its owners for a number of years and that was not “within shouting distance” of the last house in the village. It did little to address the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but it was, for her department, precedent enough. Soon Albeck was riding in an army helicopter, mapping the West Bank and identifying plots of land that might meet the criteria of the Ottoman law. The Israeli state had replaced the sultan, but the effect was the same. Albeck’s creative legal interpretation led to the creation of more than 100 new Jewish settlements, which she referred to as “my children.”

At the same time, Begin was quietly brokering a peace deal with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the United States at Camp David. The pact they eventually negotiated gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt and promised greater autonomy to Palestinians in the occupied territories in return for normalized relations with Israel. It would eventually win the two leaders a joint Nobel Peace Prize. But Gush Emunim and other right-wing groups saw the accords as a shocking reversal. From this well of anger sprang a new campaign of intimidation. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of Gush Emunim and the founder of the settlement in the heart of Hebron, declared the movement’s purposes on Israeli television. The Arabs, he said, “must not be allowed to raise their heads.”

Leading this effort would be a militarized offshoot of Gush Emunim called the Jewish Underground. The first taste of what was to come arrived on June 2, 1980. Car bombs exploded as part of a complex assassination plot against prominent Palestinian political figures in the West Bank. The attack blew the legs off Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus; Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah, was forced to have his foot amputated. Kahane, who in the days before the attack said at a news conference that the Israeli government should form a “Jewish terrorist group” that would “throw bombs and grenades to kill Arabs,” applauded the attacks, as did Rabbi Haim Druckman, a leader of Gush Emunim then serving in the Knesset, and many others within and outside the movement. Brig. Gen. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, then the top I.D.F. commander in the West Bank, noting the injuries suffered by the Palestinian mayors under his watch, said simply, “It’s a shame they didn’t hit them a bit higher.” An investigation began, but it would be years before it achieved any results. Ben-Eliezer went on to become a leader of the Labor party and defense minister.

The threat that the unchecked attacks posed to the institutions and guardrails of Jewish democracy wasn’t lost on some members of the Israeli elite. As the violence spread, a group of professors at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent a letter to Yitzhak Zamir, Israel’s attorney general. They were concerned, they wrote, that illegal “private policing activity” against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories presented a “threat to the rule of law in the country.” The professors saw possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities. “There is a suspicion that similar crimes are not being handled in the same manner and some criminals are receiving preferential treatment over others,” the signatories to the letter said. “This suspicion requires fundamental examination.”

The letter shook Zamir, who knew some of the professors well. He was also well aware that evidence of selective law enforcement — one law for the Palestinians and another for the settlers — would rebut the Israeli government’s claim that the law was enforced equally and could become both a domestic scandal and an international one. Zamir asked Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, to lead a committee looking into the issue. Karp was responsible for handling the most delicate issues facing the Justice Ministry, but this would require even greater discretion than usual.

As her team investigated, Karp says, “it very quickly became clear to me that what was described in the letter was nothing compared to the actual reality on the ground.” She and her investigative committee found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere. “The police and the I.D.F. in both action and inaction were really cooperating with the settler vandals,” Karp says. “They operated as if they had no interest in investigating when there were complaints, and generally did everything they could to deter the Palestinians from even submitting them.”

In May 1982, Karp and her committee submitted a 33-page report, determining that dozens of offenses were investigated insufficiently. The committee also noted that, in their research, the police had provided them with information that was incomplete, contradictory and in part false. They concluded that nearly half the investigations opened against settlers were closed without the police conducting even a rudimentary investigation. In the few cases in which they did investigate, the committee found “profound flaws.” In some cases, the police witnessed the crimes and did nothing. In others, soldiers were willing to testify against the settlers, but their testimonies and other evidence were buried.

It soon became clear to Karp that the government was going to bury the report. “We were very naïve,” she now recalls. Zamir had been assured, she says, that the cabinet would discuss the grave findings and had in fact demanded total confidentiality. The minister of the interior at the time, Yosef Burg, invited Karp to his home for what she recalls him describing as “a personal conversation.” Burg, a leader of the pro-settler National Religious Party, had by then served as a government minister in one office or another for more than 30 years. Karp assumed he wanted to learn more about her work, which could in theory have important repercussions for the religious right. “But, to my astonishment,” she says, “he simply began to scold me in harsh language about what we were doing. I understood that he wanted us to drop it.”

Karp announced she was quitting the investigative committee. “The situation we discovered was one of complete helplessness,” she says. When the existence of the report (but not its contents) leaked to the public, Burg denied having ever seen such an investigation. When the full contents of the report were finally made public in 1984, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry said only that the committee had been dissolved and that the ministry was no longer monitoring the problem.

A Wave of Violence

On April 11, 1982, a uniformed I.D.F. soldier named Alan Harry Goodman shot his way into the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, one of the most sacred sites for Muslims around the world. Carrying an M16 rifle, standard issue in the Israeli Army, he killed two Arabs and wounded many more. When investigators searched Goodman’s apartment, they found fliers for Kach, but a spokesman for the group said that it did not condone the attack. Prime Minister Begin condemned the attack, but he also chastised Islamic leaders calling for a general strike in response, which he saw as an attempt to “exploit the tragedy.”

The next year, masked Jewish Underground terrorists opened fire on students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three people and injuring 33 more. Israeli authorities condemned the massacre but were less clear about who would be held to account. Gen. Ori Orr, commander of Israeli forces in the region, said on the radio that all avenues would be pursued. But, he added, “we don’t have any description, and we don’t know who we are looking for.”

The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.

Carmi Gillon, who was head of Shin Bet’s Jewish Department at the time, says the fact that Shin Bet hadn’t learned about a plot involving so many people and such ambitious planning earlier was an “egregious intelligence failure.” And it was not the Shin Bet, he notes, who prevented the plot from coming to fruition. It was the Jewish Underground itself. “Fortunately for all of us, they decided to forgo the plan because they felt the Jewish people were not yet ready.”

“You have to understand why all this is important now,” Ami Ayalon said, leaning in for emphasis. The sun shining into the backyard of the former Shin Bet director was gleaming off his bald scalp, illuminating a face that looked as if it were sculpted by a dull kitchen knife. “We are not discussing Jewish terrorism. We are discussing the failure of Israel.”

Ayalon was protective of his former service, insisting that Shin Bet, despite some failures, usually has the intelligence and resources to deter and prosecute right-wing terrorism in Israel. And, he said, they usually have the will. “The question is why they are not doing anything about it,” he said. “And the answer is very simple. They cannot confront our courts. And the legal community finds it almost impossible to face the political community, which is supported by the street. So everything starts with the street.”

By the early 1980s, the settler movement had begun to gain some traction within the Knesset, but it remained far from the mainstream. When Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset in 1984, the members of the other parties, including Likud, would turn and leave the room when he stood up to deliver speeches. One issue was that the continual expansion of the settlements was becoming an irritant in U.S.-Israel relations. During a 1982 trip by Begin to Washington, the prime minister had a closed-door meeting with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to discuss Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year, an effort to force out the P.L.O. that had been heavy with civilian casualties. According to The Times’s coverage of the session, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, then in his second term, had an angry exchange with Begin about the West Bank, telling him that Israel was losing support in this country because of the settlements policy.

But Israeli officials came to understand that the Americans were generally content to vent their anger about the issue without taking more forceful action — like restricting military aid to Israel, which was then, as now, central to the country’s security arrangements. After the Jewish Underground plotters of the bombings targeting the West Bank mayors and other attacks were finally brought to trial in 1984, they were found guilty and given sentences ranging from a few months to life in prison. The plotters showed little remorse, though, and a public campaign swelled to have them pardoned. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir also made the case for pardoning them, saying they were “excellent, good people who have erred in their path and actions.” Clemency, Shamir suggested, would prevent a recurrence of Jewish terrorism.

In the end, President Chaim Herzog, against the recommendations of Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry, signed an extraordinary series of pardons and commutations for the plotters. They were released and greeted as heroes by the settler community, and some rose to prominent positions in government and the Israeli media. One of them, Uzi Sharbav, now a leader in the settlement movement, was a speaker at a recent conference promoting the return of settlers to Gaza.

In fact, nearly all the Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial reductions in prison time. Gillon, the head of the Jewish Department when some of these people were arrested, recalls the “profound sense of injustice” that he felt when they were released. But even more important, he says, was “the question of what message the pardons convey to the public and to anyone who ever thinks about carrying out acts of terror against Arabs.”

Operational Failures

In 1987, a series of conflicts in Gaza led to a sustained Palestinian uprising throughout the occupied territories and Israel. The First Intifada, as it became known, was driven by anger over the occupation, which was then entering its third decade. It would simmer for the next six years, as Palestinians attacked Israelis with stones and Molotov cocktails and launched a series of strikes and boycotts. Israel deployed thousands of soldiers to quell the uprising.

In the occupied territories, reprisal attacks between settlers and Palestinians were an increasing problem. The Gush Emunim movement had spread and fractured into different groups, making it difficult for Shin Bet to embed enough informants with the settlers. But the service had one key informant — a man given the code name Shaul. He was a trusted figure among the settlers and rose to become a close assistant to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the Gush Emunim leader who founded the settlement in Hebron.

Levinger had been questioned many times under suspicion of having a role in multiple violent attacks, but Shaul told Shin Bet operatives that they were seeing only a fraction of the whole picture. He told them about raids past and planned; about the settlers tearing through Arab villages, vandalizing homes, burning dozens of cars. The operatives ordered him to participate in these raids to strengthen his cover. One newspaper photographer in Hebron in 1985 captured Shaul smashing the wall of an Arab marketplace with a sledgehammer. As was standard policy, Shin Bet had ordered him to participate in any activity that didn’t involve harm to human life, but figuring out which of the activities wouldn’t cross that line became increasingly difficult. “The majority of the activists were lunatics, riffraff, and it was very difficult to be sure they wouldn’t hurt people and would harm only property,” Shaul said. (Shaul, whose true identity remains secret, provided these quotes in a 2015 interview with Bergman for the Israeli Hebrew-language paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Some of his account is published here for the first time.)

In September 1988, Rabbi Levinger, Shaul’s patron, was driving through Hebron when, he later said in court, Palestinians began throwing stones at his car and surrounding him. Levinger flashed a pistol and began firing wildly at nearby shops. Investigators said he killed a 42-year-old shopkeeper, Khayed Salah, who had been closing the steel shutter of his shoe store, and injured a second man. Levinger claimed self-defense, but he was hardly remorseful. “I know that I am innocent,” he said at the trial, “and that I didn’t have the honor of killing the Arab.”

Prosecutors cut a deal with Levinger. He was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, sentenced to five months in prison and released after only three.

Shin Bet faced the classic intelligence agency’s dilemma: how and when to let its informants participate in the very violent acts the service was supposed to be stopping. There was some logic in Shin Bet’s approach with Shaul, but it certainly didn’t help deter acts of terror in the West Bank, especially with little police presence in the occupied territories and a powerful interest group ensuring that whoever was charged for the violence was released with a light sentence.

Over his many years as a Shin Bet mole, Shaul said, he saw numerous intelligence and operational failures by the agency. One of the worst, he said, was the December 1993 murder of three Palestinians in an act of vengeance after the murder of a settler leader and his son. Driving home from a day of work in Israel, the three Palestinians, who had no connection to the deaths of the settlers, were pulled from their car and killed near the West Bank town Tarqumiyah.

Shaul recalled how one settler activist proudly told him that he and two friends committed the murders. He contacted his Shin Bet handlers to tell them what he had heard. “And suddenly I saw they were losing interest,” Shaul said. It was only later that he learned why: Two of the shooters were Shin Bet informants. The service didn’t want to blow their cover, or worse, to suffer the scandal that two of its operatives were involved in a murder and a cover-up.

In a statement, Shin Bet said that Shaul’s version of events is “rife with incorrect details” but refused to specify which details were incorrect. Neither the state prosecutor nor the attorney general responded to requests for comment, which included Shaul’s full version of events and additional evidence gathered over the years.

Shaul said he also gave numerous reports to his handlers about the activities of yet another Brooklyn-born follower of Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League: Dr. Baruch Goldstein. He earned his medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and in 1983 immigrated to Israel, where he worked first as a physician in the I.D.F., then as an emergency doctor at Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron.

In the years that passed, he gained the attention of Shin Bet with his eliminationist views, calling Arabs “latter-day Nazis” and making a point to visit the Jewish terrorist Ami Popper in prison, where he was serving a sentence for the 1990 murder of seven Palestinians in the Tel Aviv suburb Rishon LeZion. Shaul said he regarded Goldstein at the time as a “charismatic and highly dangerous figure” and repeatedly urged the Shin Bet to monitor him. “They told me it was none of my business,” he said.

‘Clean Hands’

On Feb. 24, 1994, Goldstein abruptly fired his personal driver. According to Shaul, Goldstein told the driver that he knew he was a Shin Bet informer. Terrified at having been found out, the driver fled the West Bank immediately. Now Goldstein was moving unobserved.

That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting , firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.

The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”

Following the massacre, a state commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by Judge Meir Shamgar, the president of the Supreme Court. The commission’s report, made public in June 1994, strongly criticized the security arrangements at the Cave of the Patriarchs and examined law-enforcement practices regarding settlers and the extreme right in general. A secret appendix to the report, containing material deemed too sensitive for public consumption, included a December 1992 letter from the Israeli commissioner of police, essentially admitting that the police could not enforce the law. “The situation in the districts is extremely bleak,” he wrote, using the administrative nomenclature for the occupied territories. “The ability of the police to function is far from the required minimum. This is as a result of the lack of essential resources.”

In its conclusions, the commission, tracing the lines of the previous decade’s Karp report, confirmed claims that human rights organizations had made for years but that had been ignored by the Israeli establishment. The commission found that Israeli law enforcement was “ineffective in handling complaints,” that it delayed the filing of indictments and that restraining orders against “chronic” criminals among the “hard core” of the settlers were rarely issued.

The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

A Curse of Death

One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer. Purim revelers often dress in costume, and on one such occasion, caught on video, Ben-Gvir even wore a Goldstein costume, complete with a fake beard and a stethoscope. By then, Ben-Gvir had already come to the attention of the Jewish Department, and investigators interrogated him several times. The military declined to enlist him into the service expected of most Israeli citizens.

After the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a new generation of Kahanists directed their anger squarely at Rabin for his signing of the Oslo agreement and for depriving them, in their view, of their birthright. “From my standpoint, Goldstein’s action was a wake-up call,” says Hezi Kalo, a longtime senior Shin Bet official who oversaw the division that included the Jewish Department at that time. “I realized that this was going to be a very big story, that the diplomatic moves by the Rabin government would simply not pass by without the shedding of blood.”

The government of Israel was finally paying attention to the threat, and parts of the government acted to deal with it. Shin Bet increased the size of the Jewish Department, and it began to issue a new kind of warning: Jewish terrorists no longer threatened only Arabs. They threatened Jews.

The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura , and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef .

Carmi Gillon by then had moved on from running the Jewish Department and now had the top job at Shin Bet. “Discussing and acknowledging such halakhic laws was tantamount to a license to kill,” he says now, looking back. He was particularly concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who were stoking the fury of the right-wing rabbis and settler leaders in their battles with Rabin.

Shin Bet wanted to prosecute rabbis who approved the religiously motivated death sentences against Rabin, but the state attorney’s office refused. “They didn’t give enough importance back then to the link between incitement and legitimacy for terrorism,” says one former prosecutor who worked in the state attorney’s office in the mid-1990s.

Shin Bet issued warning after warning in 1995. “This was no longer a matter of mere incitement, but rather concrete information on the intention to kill top political figures, including Rabin,” Kalo now recalls. In October of that year, Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following month, Rabin was dead.

Conspiracies

Yigal Amir, the man who shot and killed Rabin in Tel Aviv after a rally in support of the Oslo Accords on Nov. 4, 1995, was not unknown to the Jewish Department. A 25-year-old studying law, computer science and the Torah at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, he had been radicalized by Rabin’s efforts to make peace with Palestinian leaders and had connections to Avishai Raviv, the leader of Eyal, a new far-right group loosely affiliated with the Kach movement. In fact, Raviv was a Shin Bet informant, code-named Champagne. He had heard Amir talking about the justice of the din rodef judgments, but he did not identify him to his handlers as an immediate danger. “No one took Yigal seriously,” he said later in a court proceeding. “It’s common in our circles to talk about attacking public figures.”

Lior Akerman was the first Shin Bet investigator to interrogate Amir at the detention center where he was being held after the assassination. There was of course no question about his guilt. But there was the broader question of conspiracy. Did Amir have accomplices? Did they have further plans? Akerman now recalls asking Amir how he could reconcile his belief in God with his decision to murder the prime minister of Israel. Amir, he says, told him that rabbis had justified harming the prime minister in order to protect Israel.

Amir was smug, Akerman recalls, and he did not respond directly to the question of accomplices. “‘Listen,” he said, according to Akerman, “I succeeded . I was able to do something that many people wanted but no one dared to do. I fired a gun that many Jews held, but I squeezed the trigger because no one else had the courage to do it.”

The Shin Bet investigators demanded to know the identities of the rabbis. Amir was coy at first, but eventually the interrogators drew enough out of him to identify at least two of them. Kalo, the head of the division that oversaw the Jewish Department, went to the attorney general to argue that the rabbis should be detained immediately and prosecuted for incitement to murder. But the attorney general disagreed, saying the rabbis’ encouragement was protected speech and couldn’t be directly linked to the murder. No rabbis were arrested.

Days later, however, the police brought Raviv — the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne — into custody in a Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, on charges that he had conspired to kill Rabin, but he was released shortly after. Raviv’s role as an informant later came to light, and in 1999, he was arrested for his failure to act on previous knowledge of the assassination. He was acquitted on all charges, but he has since become a fixture of extremist conspiracy theories that pose his failure to ring the alarm as evidence that the murder of the prime minister was due not to the violent rhetoric of the settler right, or the death sentences from the rabbis, or the incitement by the leaders of the opposition, but to the all-too-successful efforts of a Shin Bet agent provocateur. A more complicated and insidious conspiracy theory, but no less false, was that it was Shin Bet itself that assassinated Rabin or allowed the assassination to happen.

Gillon, the head of the service at the time, resigned, and ongoing inquiries, charges and countercharges would continue for years. Until Oct. 7, 2023, the killing of the prime minister was considered the greatest failure in the history of Shin Bet. Kalo tried to sum up what went wrong with Israeli security. “The only answer my friends and I could give for the failure was complacency,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir. “They simply couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen, definitely not at the hands of another Jew.”

The Sasson Report

In 2001, as the Second Intifada unleashed a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, Ariel Sharon took office as prime minister. The struggling peace process had come to a complete halt amid the violence, and Sharon’s rise at first appeared to mark another victory for the settlers. But in 2003, in one of the more surprising reversals in Israeli political history, Sharon announced what he called Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, with a plan to remove settlers — forcibly if necessary — over the next two years.

The motivations were complex and the subject of considerable debate. For Sharon, at least, it appeared to be a tactical move. “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” his senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz at the time. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” But Sharon was also facing considerable pressure from President George W. Bush to do something about the ever-expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank, which were a growing impediment to any regional security deals. In July 2004, he asked Talia Sasson, who had recently retired as the head of the special tasks division in the state attorney’s office, to draw up a legal opinion on the subject of “unauthorized outposts” in the West Bank. His instructions were clear: Investigate which Israeli government agencies and authorities were secretly involved in building the outposts. “Sharon never interfered in my work, and neither was he surprised by the conclusions,” Sasson said in an interview two decades later. “After all, he knew better than anyone what the situation was on the ground, and he was expecting only grave conclusions.”

It was a simple enough question: Just how had it happened that hundreds of outposts had been built in the decade since Yitzhak Rabin ordered a halt in most new settlements? But Sasson’s effort to find an answer was met with delays, avoidance and outright lies. Her final report used careful but pointed language: “Not everyone I turned to agreed to talk with me. One claimed he was too busy to meet, while another came to the meeting but refused to meaningfully engage with most of my questions.”

Sasson found that between January 2000 and June 2003, a division of Israel’s Construction and Housing Ministry issued 77 contracts for the establishment of 33 sites in the West Bank, all of which were illegal. In some cases, the ministry even paid for the paving of roads and the construction of buildings at settlements for which the Defense Ministry had issued demolition orders.

Several government ministries concealed the fact that funds were being diverted to the West Bank, reporting them under budgetary clauses such as “miscellaneous general development.” Just as in the case of the Karp Report two decades earlier, Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues discovered that the West Bank was being administered under completely separate laws, and those laws, she says, “appeared to me utterly insane.”

Sasson’s report took special note of Avi Maoz, who ran the Construction and Housing Ministry during most of this period. A political activist who early in his career spoke openly of pushing all Arabs out of the West Bank, Maoz helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and would soon go on to his first term as prime minister. Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring Netanyahu’s political survival.

“The picture that emerges in the eye of the beholder is severe,” Sasson wrote in her report. “Instead of the government of Israel deciding on the establishment of settlements in the territories of Judea and Samaria, its place has been taken, from the mid-1990s and onward, by others.” The settlers, she wrote, were “the moving force,” but they could not have succeeded without the assistance of “various ministers of construction and housing in the relevant periods, some of them with a blind eye, and some of them with support and encouragement.”

This clandestine network was operating, Sasson wrote, “with massive funding from the State of Israel, without appropriate public transparency, without obligatory criteria. The erection of the unauthorized outposts is being done with violation of the proper procedures and general administrative rules, and in particular, flagrant and ongoing violation of the law.” These violations, Sasson warned, were coming from the government: “It was state and public agencies that broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state itself had determined.” It was a conflict, she argued, that effectively neutered Israel’s internal checks and balances and posed a grave threat to the nation’s integrity. “The law-enforcement agencies are unable to act against government departments that are themselves breaking the law.”

But, in an echo of Judith Karp’s secret report decades earlier, the Sasson Report, made publicly available in March 2005, had almost no impact. Because she had a mandate directly from the prime minister, Sasson could have believed that her investigation might lead to the dismantling of the illegal outposts that had metastasized throughout the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, with his high office, found himself powerless against the machine now in place to protect and expand the settlements in the West Bank — the very machine he had helped to build.

All of this was against the backdrop of the Gaza pullout. Sharon, who began overseeing the removal of settlements from Gaza in August 2005, was the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the settler dream of a Greater Israel, and the effort drew bitter opposition not only from the settlers but also from a growing part of the political establishment. Netanyahu, who had served his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and who previously voted in favor of a pullout, resigned his position as finance minister in Sharon’s cabinet in protest — and in anticipation of another run for the top job.

The settlers themselves took more active measures. In 2005, the Jewish Department of Shin Bet received intelligence about a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow up vehicles on a major highway. Acting on the tip, officers arrested six men in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the future minister overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank.

Smotrich, then 25, was detained and questioned for weeks. Yitzhak Ilan, one of the Shin Bet officers present at the interrogation, says he remained “silent as a fish” throughout — “like an experienced criminal.” He was released without charges, Ilan says, in part because Shin Bet knew putting him on trial might expose the service’s agents inside Jewish extremist groups, and in part because they believed Smotrich was likely to receive little punishment in any case. Shin Bet was very comfortable with the courts when we fought Palestinian terrorism and we got the heavy punishments we wanted, he says. With the Jewish terrorists it was exactly the opposite.

When Netanyahu made his triumphant return as prime minister in 2009, he set out to undermine Talia Sasson’s report, which he and his allies saw as an obstacle to accelerating the settlement campaign. He appointed his own investigative committee, led by Judge Edmond Levy of the Supreme Court, who was known to support the settler cause. But the Levy report, completed in 2012, did not undermine the findings in the Sasson Report — in some ways, it reinforced them. Senior Israeli officials, the committee found, were fully aware of what was happening in the territories, and they were simply denying it for the sake of political expediency. The behavior, they wrote, was not befitting of “a country that has proclaimed the rule of law as a goal.” Netanyahu moved on.

A NEW GENERATION

The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.

Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”

A former member of Hilltop Youth, who has asked to remain anonymous because she fears speaking out could endanger her, recalls how she and her friends used an illegal outpost on a hilltop in the West Bank as a base to lob stones at Palestinian cars. “The Palestinians would call the police, and we would know that we have at least 30 minutes before they arrive, if they arrive. And if they do arrive, they won’t arrest anyone. We did this tens of times.” The West Bank police, she says, couldn’t have been less interested in investigating the violence. “When I was young, I thought that I was outsmarting the police because I was clever. Later, I found out that they are either not trying or very stupid.”

The former Hilltop Youth member says she began pulling away from the group as their tactics became more extreme and once Ettinger began speaking openly about murdering Palestinians. She offered to become a police informant, and during a meeting with police intelligence officers in 2015, she described the group’s plans to commit murder — and to harm any Jews that stood in their way. By her account, she told the police about efforts to scout the homes of Palestinians before settling on a target. The police could have begun an investigation, she says, but they weren’t even curious enough to ask her the names of the people plotting the attack.

In 2013, Ettinger and other members of Hilltop Youth formed a secret cell calling itself the Revolt, designed to instigate an insurrection against a government that “prevents us from building the temple, which blocks our way to true and complete redemption.”

During a search of one of the group’s safe houses, Shin Bet investigators discovered the Revolt’s founding documents. “The State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not bound by the rules of the game,” one declared. The documents called for an end to the State of Israel and made it clear that in the new state that would rise in its place, there would be absolutely no room for non-Jews and for Arabs in particular: “If those non-Jews don’t leave, it will be permissible to kill them, without distinguishing between women, men and children.”

This wasn’t just idle talk. Ettinger and his comrades organized a plan that included timetables and steps to be taken at each stage. One member even composed a training manual with instructions on how to form terror cells and burn down houses. “In order to prevent the residents from escaping,” the manual advised, “you can leave burning tires in the entrance to the house.”

The Revolt carried out an early attack in February 2014, firebombing an uninhabited home in a small Arab village in the West Bank called Silwad, and followed with more arson attacks, the uprooting of olive groves and the destruction of Palestinian granaries. Members of the group torched mosques, monasteries and churches, including the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. A police officer spotted Ettinger himself attacking a herd of sheep belonging to an Arab shepherd. He stoned a sheep and then slaughtered it in front of the shepherd, the officer later testified. “It was shocking,” he said. “There was a sort of insanity in it.”

Shin Bet defined the Revolt as an organization that aimed “to undermine the stability of the State of Israel through terror and violence, including bodily harm and bloodshed,” according to an internal Shin Bet memo, and sought to place several of its members, including Ettinger, under administrative detention — a measure applied frequently against Arabs.

The state attorney, however, did not approve the request. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 323 incidents of violence by settlers against Palestinians in 2014; Palestinians were injured in 107 of these incidents. By the following year, the Revolt escalated the violence by openly advocating the murder of Arabs.

The Shin Bet and the police identified one of the prominent members of the Revolt, Amiram Ben-Uliel, making him a target of surveillance. But the service failed to prevent the wave of violence that he unleashed. On the night of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uliel set out on a killing spree in a central West Bank village called Duma. Ben-Uliel prepared a bag with two bottles of incendiary liquid, rags, a lighter, a box of matches, gloves and black spray paint. According to the indictment against him, Ben-Uliel sought a home with clear signs of life to ensure that the house he torched was not abandoned. He eventually found the home of Reham and Sa’ad Dawabsheh, a young mother and father. He opened a window and threw a Molotov cocktail into the home. He fled, and in the blaze that followed, the parents suffered injuries that eventually killed them. Their older son, Ahmad, survived the attack, but their 18-month-old toddler, Ali, was burned to death.

It was always clear, says Akerman, the former Shin Bet official, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.” He is still furious about how the service has handled Jewish terrorism. “Shin Bet knows how to deal with such groups, using emergency orders, administrative detention and special methods in interrogation until they break,” he says. But although it was perfectly willing to apply those methods to investigating Arab terrorism, the service was more restrained when it came to Jews. “It allowed them to incite, and then they moved on to the next stage and began to torch mosques and churches. Still undeterred, they entered Duma and burned a family.”

Shin Bet at first claimed to have difficulty locating the killers, even though they were all supposed to be under constant surveillance. When Ben-Uliel and other perpetrators were finally arrested, right-wing politicians gave fiery speeches against Shin Bet and met with the families of the perpetrators to show their support. Ben-Uliel was sentenced to life in prison, and Ettinger was finally put in administrative detention, but a fracture was spreading. In December 2015, Hilltop Youth members circulated a video clip showing members of the Revolt ecstatically dancing with rifles and pistols, belting out songs of hatred for Arabs, with one of them stabbing and burning a photograph of the murdered toddler, Ali Dawabsheh. Netanyahu, for his part, denounced the video, which, he said, exposed “the real face of a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security.”

American Friends

The expansion of the settlements had long been an irritant in Israel’s relationship with the United States, with American officials spending years dutifully warning Netanyahu both in public and in private meetings about his support for the enterprise. But the election of Donald Trump in 2016 ended all that. His new administration’s Israel policy was led mostly by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had a long personal relationship with Netanyahu, a friend of his father’s who had stayed at their family home in New Jersey. Trump, in a broader regional agenda that lined up perfectly with Netanyahu’s own plans, also hoped to scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that Barack Obama had negotiated and broker diplomatic pacts between Israel and Arab nations that left the matter of a Palestinian state unresolved and off the table.

If there were any questions about the new administration’s position on settlements, they were answered once Trump picked his ambassador to Israel. His choice, David Friedman, was a bankruptcy lawyer who for years had helped run an American nonprofit that raised millions of dollars for Beit El, one of the early Gush Emunim settlements in the West Bank and the place where Bezalel Smotrich was raised and educated. The organization, which was also supported by the Trump family, had helped fund schools and other institutions inside Beit El. On the heels of the Trump transition, Friedman referred to Israel’s “alleged occupation” of Palestinian territories and broke with longstanding U.S. policy by saying “the settlements are part of Israel.”

This didn’t make Friedman a particularly friendly recipient of the warnings regularly delivered by Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, the three-star general who in 2019 arrived at the embassy in Jerusalem to coordinate security between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. A career Green Beret who had combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the military task force with authority over U.S. counterterrorism special missions units, Schwartz wasn’t short on Middle East experience.

But he was immediately shocked by the landscape of the West Bank: settlers acting with impunity, a police force that was essentially nonexistent outside the settlements and the Israeli Army fanning the tensions with its own operations. Schwartz recalls how angry he was about what he called the army’s “collective punishment” tactics, including the razing of Palestinian homes, which he viewed as gratuitous and counterproductive. “I said, ‘Guys, this isn’t how professional militaries act.’” As Schwartz saw it, the West Bank was in some ways the American South of the 1960s. But at any moment the situation could become even more volatile, resulting in the next intifada.

Schwartz is diplomatic when recalling his interactions with Friedman, his former boss. He was a “good listener,” Schwartz says, but when he raised concerns about the settlements, Friedman would often deflect by noting “the lack of appreciation by the Palestinian people about what the Americans are doing for them.” Schwartz also discussed his concerns about settler violence directly with Shin Bet and I.D.F. officials, he says, but as far as he could tell, Friedman didn’t follow up with the political leadership. “I never got the sense he went to Netanyahu to discuss it.”

Friedman sees things differently. “I think I had a far broader perspective on acts of violence in Judea and Samaria” than Schwartz, he says now. “And it was clear that the violence coming from Palestinians against Israelis overwhelmingly was more prevalent.” He says he “wasn’t concerned about ‘appreciation’ from the Palestinians; I was concerned by their leadership’s embrace of terror and unwillingness to control violence.” He declined to discuss any conversations he had with Israeli officials.

Weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Israel for a trip that delivered a number of gifts to Netanyahu and the settler cause. He announced new guidelines requiring that goods imported to the United States from parts of the West Bank be labeled “Made in Israel.” And he flew by helicopter to Psagot, a winery in the West Bank, making him the first American secretary of state to visit a settlement. One of the winery’s large shareholders, the Florida-based Falic family, have donated millions to various projects in the settlements.

During his lunchtime visit, Pompeo paused to write a note in the winery’s guest book. “May I not be the last secretary of state to visit this beautiful land,” he wrote.

A Settler Coalition

Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to become prime minister for an unprecedented sixth term came with a price: an alliance with a movement that he once shunned, but that had been brought into the political mainstream by Israel’s steady drift to the right. Netanyahu, who is now on trial for bribery and other corruption charges, repeatedly failed in his attempts to form a coalition after most of the parties announced that they were no longer willing to join him. He personally involved himself in negotiations to ally Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, making them kingmakers for anyone trying to form a coalition government. In November 2022, the bet paid off: With the now-critical support of the extreme right, Netanyahu returned to office.

The two men ushered into power by this arrangement were some of the most extreme figures ever to hold such high positions in an Israeli cabinet. Shin Bet had monitored Ben-Gvir in the years after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, and he was arrested on multiple charges including inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He won acquittals or dismissals in some of the cases, but he was also convicted several times and served time in prison. During the Second Intifada, he led protests calling for extreme measures against Arabs and harassed Israeli politicians he believed were insufficiently hawkish.

Then Ben-Gvir made a radical change: He went to law school. He also took a job as an aide to Michael Ben-Ari, a Knesset member from the National Union party, which had picked up many followers of the Kach movement. In 2011, after considerable legal wrangling around his criminal record, he was admitted to the bar. He changed his hairstyle and clothing to appear more mainstream and began working from the inside, once saying he represented the “soldiers and civilians who find themselves in legal entanglements due to the security situation in Israel.” Netanyahu made him minister of national security, with authority over the police.

Smotrich also moved into public life after his 2005 arrest by Shin Bet for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He made Shin Bet’s Jewish Department a frequent target of criticism, complaining that it was wasting time and money investigating crimes carried out by Jews, when the real terrorists were Palestinians. His ultraright allies sometimes referred to the Jewish Department as Hamakhlaka Hayehudit — the Hebrew phrase for the Gestapo unit that executed Hitler’s Final Solution.

In 2015, while campaigning for a seat in the Knesset, Smotrich said that “every shekel invested in this department is one less shekel invested in real terrorism and saving lives.” Seven years later, Netanyahu made him both minister of finance and a minister in the Ministry of Defense, in charge of overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank, and he has steadily pushed to seize authority over the territory from the military. As part of the coalition deal with Netanyahu, Smotrich now has the authority to appoint one of the senior administrative figures in the West Bank, who helps oversee the building of roads and the enforcement of construction laws. The 2022 election also brought Avi Maoz to the Knesset — the former housing-ministry official whom Talia Sasson once marked as a hidden hand of Israeli government support for illegal settlements. Since then, Maoz had joined the far-right Noam party, using it as a platform to advance racist and homophobic policies. And he never forgot, or forgave, Sasson. On “International Anti-Corruption Day” in 2022, Maoz took to the lectern of the Knesset and denounced Sasson’s report of nearly two decades earlier, saying it was written “with a hatred of the settlements and a desire to harm them.” This, he said, was “public corruption of the highest order, for which people like Talia Sasson should be prosecuted.”

Days after assuming his own new position, Ben-Gvir ordered the police to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces in Israel, saying they “incite and encourage terrorism.” Smotrich, for his part, ordered drastic cuts in payments to the Palestinian Authority — a move that led the Shin Bet and the I.D.F. intelligence division to raise concerns that the cuts would interfere with the Palestinian Authority’s own efforts to police and prevent Palestinian terrorism.

Weeks after the new cabinet was sworn in, the Judea and Samaria division of the I.D.F. distributed an instructional video to the soldiers of a ground unit about to be deployed in the West Bank. Titled “Operational Challenge: The Farms,” the video depicts settlers as peaceful farmers living pastoral lives, feeding goats and herding sheep and cows, in dangerous circumstances. The illegal outposts multiplying around the West Bank are “small and isolated places of settlement, each with a handful of residents, a few of them — or none at all — bearing arms, the means of defense meager or nonexistent.”

It is the settlers, according to the video, who are under constant threat of attack, whether it be “penetration of the farm by a terrorist, an attack against a shepherd in the pastures, arson” or “destruction of property” — threats from which the soldiers of the I.D.F. must protect them. The commander of each army company guarding each farm must, the video says, “link up with the person in charge of security and to maintain communications”; soldiers and officers are encouraged to cultivate a close and intimate relationship with the settlers. “The informal,” viewers are told, “is much more important than the formal.”

The video addresses many matters of security, but it never addresses the question of law. When we asked the commander of the division that produced the video, Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth, why the I.D.F. was promoting the military support of settlements that are illegal under Israeli law, he directly asserted that the farms were indeed legal and offered to arrange for us to tour some of them. Later, a spokesman for the army apologized for the general’s remarks, acknowledged that the farms were illegal and announced that the I.D.F. would no longer be promoting the video. This May, Bluth was nonetheless subsequently promoted to head Israel’s Central Command, responsible for all Israeli troops in central Israel and the West Bank.

In August, Bluth will replace Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, who during his final months in charge of the West Bank has seen a near-total breakdown of law enforcement in his area of command. In late October, Fox wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.” The I.D.F. is the highest security authority in the West Bank, but the military’s top commander put the blame squarely on the police — who ultimately answer to Ben-Gvir. Fox said he had established a special task force to deal with Jewish terrorism, but investigating and arresting the perpetrators is “entirely in the hands of the Israeli police.”

And, he wrote, they aren’t doing their jobs.

‘Only One Way Forward’

When the day came early this January for the Supreme Court to hear the case brought by the people of Khirbet Zanuta, the displaced villagers arrived an hour late. They had received entry permits from the District Coordination Office to attend the hearing but were delayed by security forces before reaching the checkpoint separating Israel from the West Bank. Their lawyer, Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, noting that their struggle to attend their own hearing spoke to the essence of their petition, insisted that the hearing couldn’t proceed without them. The judges agreed to wait.

The villagers finally were led into the courtroom, and Mishirqi-Assad began presenting the case. The proceedings were in Hebrew, so most of the villagers were unable to follow the arguments that described the daily terrors inflicted by settlers and the glaring absence of any law-enforcement efforts to stop them.

The lawyers representing the military and the police denied the claims of abuse and failure to enforce the law. When a judge asked what operational steps would be in place if villagers wanted to return, one of the lawyers for the state said they could already — there was no order preventing them from doing so.

The next to speak was Col. Roi Zweig-Lavi, the Central Command’s Operations Directorate officer. He said that many of these incidents involved false claims. In fact, he said, some of the villagers had probably destroyed their own homes, because of an “internal issue.” Now they were blaming the settlers to escape the consequences of their own actions.

Colonel Zweig-Lavi’s own views about the settlements, and his role in protecting them, were well known. In a 2022 speech, he told a group of yeshiva students in the West Bank that “the army and the settlements are one and the same.”

In early May, the court ordered the state to explain why the police failed to stop the attacks and declared that the villagers have a right to return to their homes. The court also ordered the state to provide details for how they would ensure the safe return of the villagers. It is now the state’s turn to decide how it will comply. Or if it will comply.

By the time the Supreme Court issued its rulings, the United States had finally taken action to directly pressure the Netanyahu government about the violent settlers. On Feb. 1, the White House issued an executive order imposing sanctions on four settlers for “engaging in terrorist activity,” among other things, in the West Bank. One of the four was Yinon Levi, the owner of Meitarim Farm near Hebron and the man American and Israeli officials believe orchestrated the campaign of violence and intimidation against the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. The British government issued its own sanctions shortly after, saying in a statement that Israel’s government had created “an environment of near-total impunity for settler extremists in the West Bank.”

The White House’s move against individual settlers, a first by an American administration, was met with a combination of anger and ridicule by ministers in Netanyahu’s government. Smotrich called the Biden administration’s allegations against Levi and others “utterly specious” and said he would work with Israeli banks to resist complying with the sanctions. One message that circulated in an open Hilltop Youth WhatsApp channel said that Levi and his family would not be abandoned. “The people of Israel are mobilizing for them,” it said.

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.

But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”

Additional reporting by Natan Odenheimer.

Top photograph: A member of a group known as Hilltop Youth, which seeks to tear down Israel’s institutions and establish ‘‘Jewish rule.’’ Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times.

Read by Jonathan Davis

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by David Mason

Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer who has been covering Israel and Palestinian territories since 2012. He is a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

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