A new biographical study of the ‘Rake of Rathfarnham’ reconnects with the Spanish branch of the Comerford family

José Antonio Peña Martínez has published a new biographical study of Philip Wharton (Photographs: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

A new book is always a pleasant present that brings a smile to my face. It is even more welcome when the book is unexpected and when it is signed by the author. And the pleasures are added to when I find that I am referred to a number of times in the text and that I am fully referenced in the citations and the footnotes.

José Antonio Peña Martínez worked for most of his life in the pharmaceutical, agro-chemistry and food technology sectors in Spain. But since he retired, he has concentrated on historical research, particularly focussed on Aragon and on his home town of Llíria, 25 km north-west of Valencia.

Over the past 20 years or so, he has written and published a series of historical studies and biographies, and his latest book is a study of the infamous ‘Rake of Rathfarnham’, Philip Wharton (1698-1731), who became Duke of Wharton and Earl of Rathfarnham. Wharton inherited the Rathfarnham Castle and neighbouring estates, including Knocklyon and Scholarstown, when his parents died in 1716. His property in England included a large estate at Winchendon near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, about 20 miles south of Stony Stratford, where I now live.

Philip Wharton also inherited his parents’ great influence and wealth, with an estimated income of £14,000 a year. But within less than a decade, while he was still in his early 20s, he had dissipated a heritage that had passed to him from the Loftus family.

Later, Philip Wharton married his second wife, Maria Theresa Comerford, in Madrid in 1726 – just three months after the death of his sadly neglected and abandoned first wife Martha Holmes and after a very public affair with Lady Mary Montagu (1689-1762). Maria Theresa’s mother was Henrietta Comerford, her father was Colonel Henry O’Beirne, an Irish colonel in the Spanish army, and her step-father was Major-General John Comerford (ca1665-1723), of Finlough in Loughkeen, Co Tipperary, of Waterford, and of Madrid.

Despite having converted to Catholicism when he married to Maria Theresa Comerford, Wharton founded a lodge of English Freemasons in Madrid in 1728. He continued his dissolute life, and his health broke down completely in the winter of 1730. He died a destitute in the Cistercian Monastery of Saint Bernard at Poblet, near Tarragona, at the age of 32 on 31 May 1731, and was buried in the church there the next day. At his death, all his titles, apart from that of Baron Wharton, became extinct.

Alexander Pope wrote of him in his first Moral Essay, probably noting Wharton’s death, in 1731:

Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days,
Whose ruling passion was the lust of praise …

Wharton appointed his widow as his ‘universal heiress’. But there was nothing for the widowed duchess to inherit. Some time after her mother died in Madrid in August 1747, the former Maria Theresa Comerford moved to London, where she subsisted on a small Spanish pension.

She died at her house in Golden Square, Soho, on 13 February 1777, and was buried in Old Saint Pancras churchyard. There were no children to inherit her claims to her husband’s former wealth and titles in Ireland, including the estates and castles he had disposed of at Rathfarnham Castle, Knocklyon Castle and Scholarstown House. The south Dublin estates had been returned to the Loftus family ten years earlier in a legal victory in 1767.

I have long been interested in Philip Wharton and this duchess related to the Comerford family, and I have spoken about them in lectures organised by Rathfarnham Historical Society and Knocklyon History Society about 20 years ago.

In his new biographical study of Philip Wharton, José Antonio Peña Martínez is particularly interested in his role in establishing freemasonry in Spain and in the masonic symbolism on his tomb in Poblet, one of the largest and most complete Cistercian abbeys in the world.

I am hardly equipped to critically engaged with these aspects of Philip Wharton’s life, but I am pleased that substantive portions of the genealogical details take account of my papers 20 years ago in Rathfarnham and Knocklyon and on my biographical details of the former Maria Theresa Comerford on the Comerford Genealogy site.

José Antonio Peña Martínez has been interested in history and historical figures since childhood. His first book, Edeta. Our Iberian Past (2007), was followed by Llíria in the 13th Century (2008); Martin I the Humane, a King without an Heir (2010); The Compromise of Caspe. A Historical Perspective 600 Years Later (2014); Roger de Lauria, a Titan of the Seas (2016); Saint Teresa of Jesus Jornet Ibars. Her Historical Context (2018); Charles of Trastámara and Évreux. The First Prince of Viana (2019); and The Prince Without a Kingdom (2020), and Marie Curie. La cientifica en un mundo de hombres 2022.

His latest book, a new biography, El Misterio del Masón Enterrado en Poblet (The Mystery of the Mason Buried in Poblet), was published this year. Although I am not descended from Philip Wharton or his Comerford duchess, I am related to her Comerford stepfather. That side of the Comerford family continued to be engaged in Spanish politics and life well into the late 19th century.

Perhaps the exotic and eccentric life of her half-brother’s granddaughter, Doña Josefa Eugenia Maria Francisca Comerford MacCrohon de Sales or ‘Josefina’ de Comerford) (1794-1865), who was involved in Spanish political intrigues in the early 19th century. She was given the title of Condesa de Sales and is the one figure in the history of the Comerford family in Spain who stands out as a femme fatale. She might even make a good subject for another biographical study.

My school-level Spanish helped me to read this well-researched and delightfully illustrated book. book. The author José Antonio Peña Martínez thanks me for sharing my research with him. But I have been more than delighted to be in touch again with this Spanish dimension to my family history.

Greek food for the soul with memories of Thessaloniki, family history and stories of the Jewish communities

The Jewish Museum in Thessaloniki … the the city was known to Jews as ‘la Madre de Israel’ or ‘the Mother of Israel,’ and to non-Jews as ‘the Jerusalem of the Balkans’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Despite yesterday’s refreshing boost that came with rediscovering and listening to some inspirational Greek songs and music, I am still feeling a little low and more than a little sorry for myself following my surgical procedures in Oxford a week ago.

However, I also took some comfort this week in coming across reports of a new book with recipes for and stories about my favourite Greek food and with recollections of the stories of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki. It is a combination that is balm for my soul: Greek food, reminiscences of Thessaloniki, family history and stories of the Jewish communities in Greece.

In a very peculiar way, I have found Thessaloniki is second only to Crete as the part of Greece that I feel most at home in. I first visited Thessaloniki in 1996 – 80 years after my grandfather had been there during World War I and had been sent home with malaria. Since then, I have returned to Thessaloniki at least half a dozen times, walking in my grandfather’s footsteps, writing from there for The Irish Times, attending academic seminars at the Aristotelean University and exhibition, and exploring the story of the Jewish community in a city that was once known in Ladino as La Madre de Israel or ‘Mother of Israel’ and that once had the largest Jewish community in Europe.

The story of the Jews of Thessaloniki reaches back more than 2,300 years, and the Jewish community was boosted in size with arrival of Sephardic Jews who migrated there after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.

During World War II, the Jews of Thessaloniki were forced into a ghetto near the railway lines, and then deported to the concentration camps. On 11 July 1942, known to this day as the ‘Black Shabbat’, all the men of the community between the ages of 18 to 45 were rounded up in Eleftherias Square (Freedom Square) in the city centre. More than 90% of the total Jewish population of the city was murdered in those years, and only 1,200 Jews live there today.

To this day, 80 years after the end of World War II, the descendants of the Jewish communities of Thessaloniki maintain their distinctive language, Ladino, their cultural traditions, their way of praying, their music and their cuisine.

Shaily Lipa’s grandparents, Levana and Angel, at their wedding in September 1946

Shaily Lipa was born and raised in Tel Aviv to a Jewish family with Jewish-Greek origin. She is a culinary and lifestyle expert, and a TV personality. She invites her audience to take part in her daily life with cooking and hosting adventures at home through her Instagram account. She has written 11 best-selling cookbooks in Israel, and Yassou: The Simple, Seasonal Mediterranean Cooking of Greece, published earlier this year (11 March 2025), is her first English-language cookbook.

Levana and Angel lived in Israel, but their world was Greek. ‘All of their friends were Greek — from Thessaloniki,’ Shaily explains. They spoke Ladino with one another, played cards together on Friday nights, listened to Greek music, and ate Greek food. Most of their friends, she believes, were Holocaust survivors like her grandfather Angel. He was born in Thessaloniki, but, like most Jews in the city, his family was deported to Auschwitz in 1943.

His parents, two sisters, and one brother died; only Angel and his brother Dario survived. However, the two were separated during the war and did not know that each other had survived until they both reached Puglia in Italy as refugees. Angel lived there in a home with several other Jewish refugees. Eager to find a place to pray, they converted one room into a small synagogue. Angel knew how to write in Hebrew and inscribed the parochet, a curtain that covers the Torah ark, for the small sanctuary.

When Dario heard that another member of his family was alive, he went to the home and spotted his brother’s handwriting on the ark, only to learn that Angel had left for Israel the day before. The two were finally reunited in Israel and built new lives there — including the Shabbat breakfasts at Angel and Levana’s home.

Both of Shaily’s grandparents have died. But her memories of those Shabbat breakfasts remain strong and have had a lasting impact on her. Today, Shaily keeps her grandmother’s tradition alive, hosting Greek Shabbat breakfasts when her family is together, making Greek salad, her grandmother’s white beans, and her own version of spanakopita, which she serves as a large pie.

In ‘Yassou’, Shaily Lipa celebrates Greek and Jewish food in a delicious journey (Photographer: Armando Rafael. Food stylist: Judy Haubert. Prop stylist: Vanessa Vazquez)

In her new book, Shaily Lipa recalls how ‘Shabbat breakfast was iconic’ in her family. Every Saturday, they would gather on her grandparents’ balcony for a Greek spread of flaky spanikopita, tangy white bean salad, creamy tzatziki, hard boiled eggs, and a classic horiatiki or Greek salad.

Shaily tells how her Shabbat clothes were always dusted with powdered sugar on Saturday mornings. Her grandparents Levana and Angel hosted the whole family for a Greek Shabbat breakfast on their balcony in Holon, south of Tel Aviv. Before the meal was served, Shaily and her cousins would steal sugar-dusted Greek butter cookies, kourabiedes, from the secret stash their grandmother kept under her bed. But the sugar that dusted their clothes always gave them away.

In a recent interview, she told Jewish Foood Society that when her grandparents lived in Israel, their world was Greek: they spoke Ladino, listened to Greek music, and continued to make the recipes they knew from Thessaloniki where they were born. Their Shabbats have left a lasting impression on Shaily, and inform every page and image in Yassou, in which she celebrates the original Mediterranean diet in a delicious journey.

Greek food embraces abundant fresh vegetables and fish, and includes generous and ample use of olive oil, tomatoes, whole grains, legumes, artisanal cheeses and fruit, accompanied by a healthy glass of wine. In Yassou, the traditions and the rich appeal of this food is captured in the recipes and gorgeous photographs. They include mezes like tzatziki and fried zucchini, through a menu of stuffed vegetables, soups for all seasons, zingy white bean salad with lemon and vinegar, grilled mains like souvlaki, and savoury pies like spanakopita, with 80 dishes in all to prepare, cook, eat and savour.

Now, when Shaily Lipa looks back at those Shabbats at her grandparents’ home, dusted in sugar, she says: ‘I think this is the reason I love Shabbat — thanks to them. I like to host and be social — these are the things I learned from them.’

Shabbat Shalom, Buen Shabat, שבת שלום

• Sally Lipa, Yassou: The Simple, Seasonal Mediterranean Cooking of Greece (Artisan, 2025), 272 pp, ISBN-13 978-1648291852

Book Review, Irish Theological Quarterly: ‘Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles’

Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles. By Andrew Ziminski. London, Profile Books, 2024. Pp. 401. Price £25 (hbk). ISBN 9781800818682.

Reviewed by: Patrick Comerford, Milton Keynes

Among the many groups on social media that I contribute to actively, “Church Crawlers Anonymous” on Facebook is mainly for people who “church crawl” and photograph churches as a hobby and for people with an interest in ecclesiology. But the reasons people have for “church crawling” as a hobby are broader than the criteria for membership. Apart from clergy, liturgists and regular churchgoers, there are people who visit churches simply because they appreciate stained glass windows or furnishings and fittings, organs and bells, the architectural as well as social and local history, monuments, old tombs or the tiles.

Their reasons are many, some may have little or no faith or beliefs, but all appreciate the heritage of old churches and their place in preserving local history and bringing it alive.

Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason, church conservator and author who lives and works in Frome, Somerset. For over 40 years, he has worked on some of the greatest cathedrals and churches in Britain, including the tower of Salisbury Cathedral and the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London. During this career, he admits, he has become “an inveterate church crawler” and says he has visited over half of the 11,000 or so churches of medieval origin in Britain and Ireland. Building on the critical acclaim of his first book, The Stonemason, he has written this second book, Church Going, as his own handbook to the architecture, fixtures, furnishings, and artworks in those churches.

Ziminski realises churches are many things to many people: they are places of worship, they are vibrant community hubs and they are oases of reflection. To know a church is to hold a key to the past that unlocks an understanding of shared history. This beautifully written and richly illustrated book is a celebration of British and Irish architectural history, in which he looks at the histories, features and furnishings of churches, from flying buttresses to rood screens, lichgates to chancels and gargoyles. He begins by inviting us to walk around the churchyard, then looking at the exterior of a church, and takes an interlude to look at the birds, bees and bats, the bells and the ancient graffiti. He then takes us inside to see the porch, the nave, roofs and vaults, and takes a second interlude, with a “Note on Purgatory,” before continuing with the font, wall paintings and furnishings, benches, pews and galleries, interior memorials, devotional and memorial chapels, the chancel arch and its furnishings, the chancel, the altar and sanctuary, the vestry, charnel houses and the apse and crypt.

A walk on the beach in Strandhill, Co. Sligo, led him to search for the reliquary of Saint Patrick’s tooth in the National Museum in Dublin. He recounts the theft and recovery of the reliquary at Saint Manchan’s Church in Boher, Co. Offaly. The “most recent and most disturbing shrine” he has seen is the head of Oliver Plunkett enshrined in Saint Peter’s Church, Drogheda: “seeing his head with its wisps of hair grinning back at you through the thick glass window at the base of the brass spire that covers him today is a moving experience, no matter what your faith is.”

He believes the “pencil-shaped bell towers of Ireland” or round towers “are perhaps Ireland’s greatest gift to architecture.” He is particularly descriptive of the towers in Clonmacnoise and Kildare, and asks why “the style of the stone-built Irish detached round tower didn’t catch on within mainland Britain.” On the other hand, the towers and spires in England that have attracted his attention include Christopher Wren’s spire on Saint Bride’s in Fleet Street in London, the inspiration for many a bride’s choice of a tiered wedding cake, and admires Nicholas Hawksmoor’s eccentric spire at Saint George’s, Bloomsbury – inspired by the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus – with its fighting lion and unicorn, an elongated pyramid, and nineteen steps leading up to a statue of George I clad in a Roman toga.

There are humorous vignettes. Once arriving at a church in Wiltshire to meet an architect to discuss lightning damage to a the spire of a village church, he was asked quizzically, “Do you know how to build a spire?” He gave the one reply he had been waiting his whole career to deliver, “Well, up to a point.” It was an appropriate response, for this book is a collection of lightning strikes. The churches Ziminski visits are chosen randomly, a choice influenced by where he has lived, worked or spent holidays. This means there are whole swathes of England that are not referred to or discussed. There are no college chapels in Cambridge or Oxford. There is not one single church in Staffordshire, with its interesting collection of collegiate churches, including Penkridge, with graffiti grooves in the stonework left behind by practicing arches. There are few references to the great cathedrals of England, with only passing references to York Minister, the largest cathedral completed in the Gothic period, or Norwich, with the largest monastic cloister in Britain, and none to Lichfield, the only medieval cathedral in England with three spires.

Of course a stonemason is going to be interested in Gallarus Oratory in Co. Kerry, with its early stonework, but he does not look at the debates about its purpose and function. How could any church crawler visiting the medieval churches and monasteries in Ireland – particularly a stonemason – neglect to visit the cathedrals in Killaloe and Clonfert or Saint Cronan’s Church in Tuamgraney?

This is an entertaining book, to dip into and out of. But it is certainly not a comprehensive guide to medieval churches in England, still less to the medieval churches of these islands. It is personal, it is amusing, it is delightful. However, I shall continue to take my Pevsner’s guides with me on every church crawling escapade.

This book review is published in the Irish Theological Quarterly (Pontifical University, Maynooth), Volume 90 Issue 2, April 2025, pp 239-240

Kuching-based writer tells the story of the last Jews of Penang and their synagogue

‘The Last Jews of Penang’ by Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory tells the story of a lost community (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

After an evening in the Tai Tai Restaurant on Jalan Tabuan in Kuching, while I was researching the history of the building, I came across some rumours that there was once a Jewish cemetery. However, they proved to be no more than rumours, and I could find no historical evidence for any Jewish presence in Kuching or in Sarawak.

The city of Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of neighbouring was once named Jesselton in honour of Sir Charles James Jessel (1860-1928), a British barrister, magistrate and businessman, who was vice-chairman of the British North Borneo Company (BNBC) in 1903-1909.

Baghdadi, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews were integral to the development of Sabah or North Borneo and were pioneers, planters, merchants, political refugees and prisoners of war. Rosalie (Lala) Corpuz has been researching the hidden and diverse history of North Borneo and has told their story.

But I could find no other documented account of a continuous Jewish presence or Jewish community in Kuching or in wider Sarawak. In pursuit of that Jewish story, I had coffee one afternoon last week in the Commons in the Old Court House in Kuching with Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory, the author of The Last Jews of Penang (Petaling Jaya: Matahari Books, 2021).

His book is now out of print, but with its illustrations by Arif Rafhan it recalls Jewish life in George Town, and we talked that afternoon about the history and the legacy of the Jews in Malaysia, stretching back to the 1700s.

Arif Rafhan's image of the former synagogue in Penang in ‘The Last Jews of Penang’ by Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory

There has been little research on the history of the Jews of Penang, and Zayn Gregory relied on local newspaper and magazine articles and one study written in 2002 by an Australia-based researcher, Raimy Ché-Ross. Penang was the home to a Jewish community until the late 1970s, but over the decades these families have left Malaysia.

The first and largest Jewish settlement in what is now Malaysia was found in the bazaars of Malacca, and the Jews of Malacca included Sephardic Jews from Portugal and some Jews from around the Red Sea and Malabar in India.

Due to Portuguese persecutions that continued after the Inquisition, many Jews in Malacca assimilated into the Malacca Portuguese Eurasian community. That creole community is often referred to as Kristang and their Portuguese dialect as Papia Kristang. It is said a number of Kristang-Eurasian families maintain some aspects of Jewish culture, knowingly or unknowingly.

As the British-controlled port in Penang expanded in the early 19th century, it attracted Jewish trading families such as the Sassoons and Meyers from India and Jews Ottoman-ruled Baghdad arrived there fleeing persecutions by Dawud Pasha when he was governor from 1817 to 1831.

Figures from the 1890s show 150-170 Jews living in Penang, although Ezekiel Aaron Manasseh, who migrated from Baghdad in 1895, claimed to have been the only practising Jew in Malaya for 30 years.

Arif Rafhan's depiction of Joseph Hayeem Jacobs, the last shohet in Penang in ‘The Last Jews of Penang’ by Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory

After World War I, more Baghdadi Jews moved to Malaya, and at its height the Jewish population of Penang was about 200. As well as the descendants of Baghdadi Jews and of Malabar Jews who roots in India for over 800 years, there were Mizrahi Jews and families whose ancestors came from Armenia and small numbers of Ashkenazi Jews from England, Poland and Romania.

Penang’s only synagogue opened in a former shophouse at 28 Nagore Road in 1929. It had 12 Torah scrolls, its own hazan or cantor to lead services, and the community had its own shohet or ritual butcher.

Joseph Hayeem Jacobs, who was the hazan, the shohet and the mohel who performed ritual circumcisions, came to Baghdad in 1929 with his father Abraham and grandfather Hayoo.

During the Japanese invasion of Malaya, many of the Jewish community was evacuated from Penang to Singapore. Those who remained in Penang were interned by the Japanese during World War II or forced to wear identifying red and white striped tags on their sleeves. After the war, a majority emigrated to Singapore, Australia, Israel and the US, and by 1963 only 20 Penang Jewish families remained in Malaysia.

One of the most prominent Jews from Penang families was the former Chief Minister of Singapore, David Marshall (1908-1995), who played a pivotal role in the negotiations leading to the independence of Malaya. He was the inaugural Chief Minister of Singapore from 1955 to 1956 and was a Malaysian citizen briefly when Singapore was part of Malaysia from 1963 to 1965.

The synagogue in Penang, closed in 1976 when the community could no longer find a minyan, a quorum of ten or more adult Jews needed for public worship. Zayn Gregory recalls how the former synagogue first became a photography shop, then a pharmacy, a florist’s, and then a print shop. Today it is a coffee shop.

The Jewish community in Penang died out when Mordecai (Mordy) David Mordecai, the former manger of the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, died on 15 July 2011.

Mordecai (Mordy) David Mordecai, who died in 2011, depicted by Arif Rafhan in Penang in ‘The Last Jews of Penang’ by Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory

The Jewish Cemetery in Penang dates from 1805 and is believed to be the oldest Jewish cemetery in Malaysia. It is a plot of land measuring 38,087 sq ft (3,538.4 sq m) on Jalan Zainal Abidin, formerly Yahudi Road, a small link road between Burmah Road and Macalister Road in George Town. The oldest tombstone, dated 9 July 1835, is of Shoshan Levi, an English Jewish benefactor who donated the site after she recovered from an illness.

There are about 107 graves in the cemetery, most in the shape of a triangular vaulted-lid casket. Jewish people from Penang buried in the cemetery include members of the Manasseh, Mordecai, Jacob, Ephraim and Moses families.

The graves of the Cohens are in a separate corner of the cemetery, and they include the grave of Eliaho Hayeem Victor Cohen, a lieutenant in the British Indian Army killed in an accident on 10 October 1941. It is the only grave in the cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

The most recent grave is that of Modi Mordecai, the last Jewish permanent resident of Penang, who died in 2011 shortly before his 90th birthday. His parents, David and Mozelle Mordecai, came from Baghdad to Penang in 1895.

Arif Rafhan's image of the Jewish cemetery in Penang in ‘The Last Jews of Penang’ by Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory

Officially, the cemetery is still open for burial and is managed by a board of trustees established in 1885. It was once a green lung, but much it has been cemented over. Yahudi Road (or Jewish Road) in Penang, where the majority of the Penang Jewish population once lived, has since been renamed Jalan Zainal Abidin after a local politician, erasing another part of the Jewish legacy in Malaysia.

Many of the descendants of the Jewish families of Penang now live in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the US, especially in New York. The only significant presence remaining is the Jewish cemetery and the old synagogue, now a coffee shop.

Zayn Gregory’s book The Last Jews of Penang, with illustrations by Arif Rafhan, was published by Matahari Books in 2021. He is a US-born data analyst, a lecturer in landscape architecture at the University of Malaysia Sarawak and a television host, and he writes and translates Malay poems.

When we met in Kuching last week, he told me how most of the people in Malaysia today who have some Jewish origins or ancestry somewhere in their family trees are descended from people converted to Islam to marry into the Malay community.

He is American-born with a Polish Catholic father and a Jewish mother. He converted to Islam to Islam at age 17, and later moved from Detroit, Michigan in 2002, with his Malaysian-born wife to Kuching, where they are the parents of seven children.

Zayn Gregory’s book tells the history of the once-vibrant Jewish community in old George Town, and refers to some of its famous figures like David Marshall and . Modi Mordecai. He speaks of his book as a requiem of sorts for a community that used to be.

The book tells a story that contributed to the rich multicultural life and religious diversity that was part of Malaya until the early 1960s. Although the book is now out of print, Zayn Gregory hopes it continues to help to build bridges.

After our conversation in Kuching last week, I realised a new edition would be major contribution to religious pluralism, tolerance and diversity in Malaysia today.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום

With Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory, author of ‘The Last Jews of Penang’, in Kuching (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

DNA and a scientist’s challenge to racism show how we are all related since 1400

The cover of ‘Clancarty: The high times and humble origins of a noble Irish family’ by Rod Smith … launched in London today

Patrick Comerford

Book Launch,
‘Clancarty: The high times and humble of a noble Irish family’
by Rod Smith

Kwanglim Room, Wesley’s Chapel,
City Road, London
2:15 pm, 3 October 2024

Genealogy goes through swings and trends in fashion.

At one time, it was the preserve of titled and landed families, families who appeared in Burke’s or Debrett’s peerage. But that was such a sad way of doing genealogy and of tracing family history. It was reduced to collecting the names and dates of lineal ancestors, often failed to look at contexts or touch the real people, and was oh so badly class laden.

Thankfully, the television series Roots in the mid-1970s created an interest in the genealogy of the oppressed, but also recognised the role of collective family memory in creating identity.

For the past 20 years or more, the television series Who Do You Think You Are? has shown us how the stories of ordinary working class families and families from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds have equally colourful and romantic stories to tell.

A new trend has emerged with the popularity and accessibility of cheap DNA tests, which is good for finding long-lost or discreetly hidden half-siblings and lost cousins, but very poor at telling us the real stories that went into creating that sample of spittle.

Genealogy and family trees are always dependent on collective imaginations and identities. In any family tree, some ancestors are counted in and some are counted out. All genealogists make choices that are based on the needs of a family or an individual to provide a colourful illustration of their sense of identity within community, with place and across generations and down through the centuries.

But a new aid that many genealogists are unwilling to give adequate attention to involves the use of mathematical projections.

I was perplexed by the title of Dr Adam Rutherford’s recent book, How to argue with a racist. Genealogy, when properly pursued, shows the inherent stupidity of every form of racism. And Dr Rutherford, in fact, is not arguing with racists – he is totally dismissive of racism, and points out the absurdity of all racist arguments.

One way he does this is through his critical examination of genealogy, its purposes and its methods, in Chapter 2, headed ‘Your ancestors are my ancestors’ (pp 67-107).

He points out that in the study of genetics, there is an assumed generational time of 24 to 30 years, and he points out that in every generation back through time the number of ancestors you have doubles.

What this means is that over a 500-year period, I have 1,048,576 ancestors. By 1,000 years ago, I have 1,099,511,627,776 ancestors – that is, over a trillion people, a number that is about 10 times the number of people that ever existed.

He says, ‘This apparent paradox reveals quite how incorrectly we think about our ancestry.’ Our family trees coalesce and collapse in on themselves as we go back in time. I certainly have a trillion positions on my family tree 1,000 years ago. But the further I go back, the more frequently these positions will be occupied by the same individual multiple times.

He points out that family trees coalesce with startling speed. ‘The last common ancestors of all people with longstanding European ancestries lived only 600 years ago – meaning that if we could draw a perfect family tree for all Europeans, at least one branch on each tree would pass through a single person who lived around 1400 CE. This person would appear on all our family trees, as would all of their ancestors.’

I have taken part in some of the programmes in the series Who Do You Think You Are?. Alan Rutherford recalls an episode in which the actor Danny Dyer found he was 22 generations in direct descent from King Edward III in the 14th century. But, as he points out, ‘the chances of anyone with long-standing British ancestry being similarly descended from Edward III is effectively 100 per cent. It is true for Danny Dyer, and it is true for the majority of British people too.’

It is true for everyone in this room, and it is true for everyone in this new book by Rod Smith that we are celebrating this afternoon.

But it goes so much wider than that. In conversation, a Muslim theologian asked me did I know that as humans we share 50 percent of the same DNA as bananas. Actually, there is some truth to that startling statistic, although it is not the whole truth.

This idea may have originated in a programme in the US run by the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2013 and led by a genetics expert, Dr Lawrence Brody, as part of an educational video from Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, The Animated Genome. That video noted that DNA between a human and a banana is ‘41 percent similar.’

The scientists working with Dr Brody compared the protein sequence from each banana gene to every human gene. Essentially, they took all of the banana genes and compared them one at a time to human genes. Their study shows that about 60 percent of our genes have a recognisable counterpart in the banana genome. ‘Of those 60 percent, the proteins encoded by them are roughly 40 percent identical when we compare the amino acid sequence of the human protein to its equivalent in the banana.’

It may seem shocking that so many genes are similar in two such vastly different things as a person and a banana. But actually, it’s not. ‘If you think about what we do for living and what a banana does there’s a lot of things we do the same way, like consuming oxygen. A lot of those genes are just fundamental to life,’ Dr Brody says.

As humans, we not only just share a high percentage of DNA with bananas – we also share 85 percent DNA with a mouse and 61 percent with a fruit fly. The remarkable thing is that, despite being very far apart in evolutionary time, we can still find a common signature in the genome of a common ancestor. And all of this is because all life that exists on earth has evolved from a single cell that originated about 1.6 billion years ago.

As Dr Brody says gleefully, ‘In a sense, we are all relatives!’

We are all related, but for a long time we have told our stories in different ways, not realising that your story is my story too.

It is a delight to be part of this book, and not just because I have written one of the forewords, taken one of the photographs, and am quoted on the back cover. But there is a way in which the story of the Trench family – and the story of the Guinness family in Rod’s previous book ( Guinness Down Under) – is your story and my story too … and not simply because of DNA tests or mathematical projections.

As Rod points out, the members of the Trench family not special because of an accident of birth or perceptions of inherited privilege. They lived a mixture of high and humble lives. They are part of the broad canvas of Irish history, and they must not be relegated to the margins and the footnotes of Irish social and political history to the footnotes of Irish history.

As I say in my foreword, the way we understand the place of landed, titled families in Ireland and their contribution to Irish life has changed profoundly in recent years.

This reappraisal has been helped, in part, by the Lthe works in refer to at the University of Galway and Maynooth University, and the work of historians in response to the ‘Decade of Centenaries’, including the Easter Rising in 1916, the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War.

In the past, writers were often dismissive of the roles of families such as these, caricaturing them as oppressive or capricious landlords, portraying them as quaint or eccentric, or finding them relative to nation-building narratives only when they included writers such as William Butler Yeats or George Bernard Shaw, or identified with nationalist causes, as with Henry Grattan, William Smith O’Brien or Douglas Hyde.

Too often, the Irish identity of these families was easily questioned or traduced, with pejorative labels such as ‘planters’ or hyphenated stereotyping such as ‘Anglo-Irish’ that doubted their identity and that implied Irish identity depends on particular cultural, linguistic or supposed ethnic backgrounds.

The recent and unsettling rise of populist racism in Ireland is a consequence of cultivating a definition of Irish identity that is neither broad enough nor tolerant enough, that is not visionary enough, to embrace the variety and breadth of ethnicity and culture that contributes to the mosaic making up the full, beautiful, diverse and rich picture of Irish identity.

The contribution of the Trench family to that mosaic is both rich and beautiful in its scope. They were French Huguenots in their origins, so offering an early contribution to linguistic and religious pluralism in Ireland. And their lives have embraced church life, and the cultural, political, architectural, educational and social life of Ireland.

Thankfully, this new book, lavishly illustrated, thoroughly researched and beautifully produced, introduces the truth that the stories of families such as this must never be confined to the margins and the footnotes of Irish social and political history.

In a blog posting last week, I quoted Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) and his opening sentence in Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

As you read this book, you will find, contrary to Tolstoy’s oft-quoted saying, that the Trench family has, at times, been a happy family, like all happy families, and at times an unhappy family, ‘in its own way’ too.

But is that not so with all families? It is certainly true of the different branches of Comerford family too, as I know – at times, a happy family, like all happy families, and at times an unhappy family, ‘in its own way’ too.

But then, why should we be surprised? We all share many common ancestors, somewhere in the recent past – recent in terms of European and human history. Enjoy this book, for it offers insights into the stories of your family, and your story too.

What I had planned to say at today’s book launch (Patrick Comerford)

Celebrating 100 years of Geza Vermes, Jesus scholar and Dead Sea Scrolls expert who reclaimed his Jewish identity

Geza Vermes, Dead Sea Scrolls expert, Jesus scholar and Jewish theologian … born 100 years ago on 22 June 1924 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

The past week has seen the 100th anniversary of the birth of Professor Geza Vermes (1924-2013), one the leading Jewish scholars in Britain in the 20th century. He was the first Oxford Professor of Jewish Studies, and one of the world’s leading authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the origins of Christianity, and the Jewish culture and identity of Jesus.

He was born into an assimilated Jewish family, but when he was six his parents converted to Catholicism he was baptised. He survived the Holocaust, and his eventful life later included ordination to the priesthood, a return to Judaism, appointment to a university chair at Oxford, and a voluminous output on the Dead Sea Scroll and on the Jewish identity of the historical Jesus.

Geza Vermes was born in Makó, Hungary, 100 years ago last Saturday, on 22 June 1924, and died 11 years ago at the age of 88 on 8 May 2013. The Vermes family was of Jewish background but had given up religious practice by the mid-19th century. His mother Terézia (Riesz) was a schoolteacher; his father Erno was a journalist and poet who was close to the leading Hungarian intellectuals of the day.

When the family moved to Gyula, his parents converted to Catholicism, and he was six when all three were baptised. Referring to his parents’ conversion, Geza Vermes later said it was a way to escape from the rise in antisemitism across Europe, yet his mother took their conversion seriously and became a devout Catholic.

Geza Vermes attended a Catholic primary school, and when he finished his Catholic secondary school he considered becoming a priest. He was turned down by the Jesuits, but was accepted by the Diocese of Nagyvárad. At the age of 18, he entered the seminary at Szatmárnémeti in north-east Hungary (now Satu Mare in Romania) in 1942 to prepare for ordination. The move would save his life.

Nazi Germany invaded Hungary on 19 March 1944, and within just 52 days, between May and July, 440,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Terézia and Erno Vermes were murdered in the Holocaust but their son never learned when, where or how. He remained hidden by the Church until Russian troops liberated Budapest on Christmas Eve 1944.

He resumed his studies for the priesthood, but an attempt to join the Dominicans was rebuffed. Instead he joined the Order of the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion, and entered their house in Leuven, Belgium, in 1948, and was ordained in 1950. At the Catholic University of Leuven, he specialised in Oriental history, civilisations and languages and received post-graduate degrees in theology and philosophy. He received his doctorate in theology in 1952 with the first dissertation written on the Dead Sea Scrolls and their historical framework.

In 1947, an Arab shepherd had chanced upon the first scrolls – texts written in ancient Hebrew and its sister language Aramaic – in a cave in the cliffs at Qumran by the shore of the Dead Sea. These were published rapidly, but reports kept circulating that more caves containing more manuscripts were being found.

With his careful analysis, Geza Vermes argued that the Jewish sect behind the scrolls originated at the time of the Maccabean crisis in the mid-second century BCE.

After completing his doctorate, Vermes was moved from Leuven to the community’s house in Paris. There he studied under the French Jewish scholar Georges Vajda, a graduate of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest, and Renée Bloch introduced him to the field of Midrash or Jewish Biblical commentary. He worked closely with Paul Demann, who also had Hungarian Jewish origins. Together they challenged antisemitism in Catholic education and ritual of the time. The Second Vatican Council would later accept many of the theological arguments by Vermes, Demann and Bloch.

On a visit to Britain in 1955, a mutual friend introduced him to Pamela Hobson Curle, a poet and a scholar of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. They fell in love, but Pam was then married to Adam Curle (1906-2006), a professor of education and psychology at Exeter University and later a Quaker peace activist, and she was the mother of two young daughters, while Geza was still a Catholic priest.

Pam separated from her husband, Geza left the Fathers of Sion and took up a teaching post in 1957 at the University of Newcastle, where he taught Biblical Hebrew, and they married in 1958. They continued to collaborate in academic work and writing until she died in 1993.

He enhanced his scholarly reputation with Scripture and Tradition (1961), a seminal study of early Jewish bible commentary. As one of the first scholars to examine the Dead Sea Scrolls, he completed the standard English translation, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (1962). It became a best-seller and made him a household name. It became his best-known work, and was revised later and much augmented.

He joined the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in 1965, when he was appointed Reader in Jewish Studies. Some members of the Jewish community opposed his appointment, but he was supported by Oxford luminaries such as David Daube (1909-1999), then Regius Professor of Civil Law and known for his work in Biblical law.

Vermes later embraced his Jewish identity, and in 1970 he reconverted to Judaism as a liberal Jew, and became a member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in North London.

He told the Jewish Chronicle he considered himself ‘someone who belongs to Judaism without practising it and who has a great respect for certain teachings of Christianity.’ In an interview many years later, he said: ‘In fact, I never was anything but a Jew with a temporary sort of outer vestment. I realised I ought to recognise my genuine identity.’

He threw himself into college life as a Fellow of the newly founded Iffley College, which metamorphosed within a year into Wolfson College under the presidency of Isaiah Berlin. His achievements in what he described as ‘the wonderland of Oxford’ were extensive: he taught modules on the Mishnah, he was the editor of the Journal of Jewish Studies from 1971 until his death, turning it into one of the foremost in its field.

Vermes published Jesus the Jew: A historian’s reading of the Gospels in 1973, a controversial book that secured his enduring status as a public intellectual. It was one of the earliest of his many studies of Jesus and the origins of Christianity, and he helped launch the new quest for the historical Jesus.

He became one of the most important voices in contemporary Jesus research, and was described as the greatest Jesus scholar of his time. In Jesus the Jew, he describes Jesus as a thoroughly Jewish Galilean charismatic. In The Gospel of Jesus the Jew (1981), he examines Jewish parallels to Jesus’s teaching.

These were followed by Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983) and The Religion of Jesus the Jew (1993), The Changing Faces of Jesus (2000), which I reviewed for The Irish Times in 2000, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus (2003), and Jesus: Nativity, Passion, Resurrection (2010). In Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (ad 30–325) (2012), he traces the evolution of the figure of Jesus from Jewish charismatic in the synoptic Gospels to equality with God in the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

His work on Jesus focused principally on the Jewishness of the historical Jesus, within the broader context of the narrative scope of Jewish history and theology, while questioning and challenging the basis of the Christian doctrine on Jesus.

Previously, New Testament scholars had struggled to deal adequately with the Jewishness of Jesus. For Vermes, Jesus the Jew was inescapably Jesus the Galilean Jew. He argued that Galilee had a distinctive ethos that made Judaism there different from Judaism in Judaea or in the Diaspora.

He argued that the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels overlapped with portraits of Galilean contemporaries preserved in rabbinic tradition, resembling them in character and behaviour, but outstripping them in eloquence.

He wrote that the Gospel image of Jesus must be inserted into the historical canvas of Palestine in the first century CE, with the help of the works of Flavius Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature. He believed the historical Jesus can be retrieved only within the context of first-century Galilean Judaism. For example, he pointed to the way the word ‘carpenter’ can be used in the Talmud for a very learned man, and suggested the New Testament description of Joseph as a carpenter could indicate he was wise and literate in the Torah.

With Fergus Millar and Martin Goodman, Vermes substantially revised Emil Schurer’s three-volume work, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ over a period of 27 years.

The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies … Geza Vermes directed the Oxford Forum for Qumran Research (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Geza Vermes became the first Oxford Professor of Jewish Studies in 1989 before he retired in 1991. He was one of the founding Iffley Fellows at Wolfson College, and directed the Oxford Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He was also a member of the academic council of Leo Baeck College.

He helped build up Jewish studies as an academic discipline in Oxford. He inspired the creation of the British Association for Jewish Studies in 1975 and the European Association for Jewish Studies in 1981 and was the founding president of both. He attracted a group of talented students to work with him, many of whom became scholars of distinction.

He continued to work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and thanks to his persistence access to the unpublished scrolls was granted to interested scholars in 1991. He edited and with Philip Alexander of Manchester, his first doctoral student at Oxford, published the Cave 4 fragments of the Dead Sea Sect’s rule-book, the so-called Community Rule. It was published as Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXVI in 1998.

His An Introduction to the Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, revised edition (2000), is a study of the collection at Qumran.

He was interviewed on Desert Island Discs in June 2000, and the one disc he chose to take to his desert island was Bach’s St Matthew Passion. His deeply felt comments on the recitative ‘Now from the sixth hour’ led to a cameo appearance some months later on Songs of Praise.

In 2004, when journalists from The Guardian invited him to a press preview of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ to judge its authenticity, he chortled derisively, ‘It’s quite obvious that none of the actors could speak Aramaic.’ As one Guardian journalist put it, Vermes ‘knew hokum when he saw it.’

Penguin Books celebrated the golden jubilee of The Dead Sea Scrolls in English at Wolfson College, Oxford, on 23 January 2012. The book has sold half-a-million copies worldwide, and a 50th anniversary edition was published in the Penguin Classics series.

He was a Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and he continued to teach at the Oriental Institute in Oxford until he died.

He had a doctorate from Oxford (DLitt 1988) and honorary doctorates from many universities. He was a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Humanities.

Pamela died in 1993, and in 1996 he married Margaret Unarska, a Polish scientist whom he and Pam had known for years. Geza Vermes died 11 years ago on 8 May 2013 at the age of 88.

May his memory be a blessing, זיכרונו לברכה

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום

Penguin Books celebrated the golden jubilee of ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls in English’ at Wolfson College in 2012 … Geza Vermes was a Fellow of Wolfson College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Mitch Albom’s new book ‘The Little Liar’ is set in Jewish Thessaloniki during the Holocaust

The Little Liar, the new book by Mitch Albom, is set in the Jewish community in Thessaloniki during the Holocaust

Patrick Comerford

The American author Mitch Albom has been a strongly influential spiritual writer with books such as Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) and The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003).

Now he has published a moving new novel, The Little Liar set in Thessaloniki during and after the Holocaust. When the Nazis invade Thessaloniki, a German officer offers Nico Krispis, an 11-year-old Jewish Greek boy a chance to save his family.

Nico must convince his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading ‘north’, where safety and protection awaits. But when the final train is loaded, Nico sees his family being herded into a boxcar. Only then does he realise that he has helped send them, and everyone he knew, to their doom at Auschwitz. Nico escapes but never tells the truth again.

In The Little Liar, Nico's story is interwoven with those of his family, friends and even the Nazi officer who changed their lives. Through the war years and the decades that follow, Albom reveals the consequences of their decisions, eventually bringing them back to where it all started.

It is a powerful story about how a boy, known for his honesty, becomes a pathological liar after unwittingly helping the Nazis. Reviewers have described the book as a thought-provoking story about truth, war, humanity and loss, in which we are alerted to how often truth is the first causality of war.

For more than two decades, Mitch Albom has been one of the best-selling living Jewish author alive, and his books tend to embrace a much broader and more amorphous definition of faith. He had a Jewish upbringing and education, and he has been involved with Jewish faith leaders in many charities, including an orphanage in Haiti, to which he has flown Rabbi Steven Lindemann of the Temple Beth Sholom in New Jersey.

Tuesdays With Morrie made him a household name, focused on his relationship with Morrie Schwartz, his Jewish mentor at Brandeis University. A follow-up memoir, Have A Little Faith (2009), discussed his relationship with his childhood rabbi, interspersed with his friendship with a local priest.

Sometimes Albom’s characters wander through heaven, which can be a physical place. Sometimes they are granted the ability to spend time with their dead relatives, are admonished for turning their backs on godly ideas like living each moment to its fullest, or are asked to put blind faith in figures who may or may not themselves be God.

Although he has written two memoirs about his Jewish mentors, The Little Liar is the first book in which he has incorporated Judaism openly in his fiction, and is a definitively Jewish story.

Like Jurek Becker’s Holocaust novel Jacob the Liar (1969), this story involves a Jew lying to his people about the Nazis. But he also realised that he did not want to tell a story ‘that began in Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto, all the familiar backdrops.’

Unlike other Holocaust novels, Albom traces the repercussions of that moment for decades, following the events of the Holocaust itself, through four central characters who wrestle with the trauma and violence of their past.

This new book includes great historical detail, from the descriptions of the thriving pre-war Jewish community in Thessaloniki to several real-life figures such as the Hungarian actress and humanitarian Katalin Kárady and the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. But this book is also a morality tale about the nature of truth and lies, and is narrated by Truth itself.

Recent years have seen a rash of Holocaust books, from The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Librarian of Auschwitz to John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. So, in a pre-publication interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Albom admits he did not want to write a ‘Holocaust book’ per se.’ he said.

But, he said, ‘I think as a Jewish writer, I almost felt an obligation, before my career was over, to create a story that hopefully would be memorable enough, set during the Holocaust … I think people remember The Diary of Anne Frank longer than they remember statistical numbers of how many Jews were slaughtered or how many homes were destroyed by the Nazis.’

The Jewish Holocaust Memorial at Liberty Square, Thessaloniki … a bronze sculpture by Nandor Glid of a menorah whose flames are wrapped around human bodies (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The original inspiration for this book was a visit to Yad Vashem. However, the book is set apart from other Holocaust books by its setting in Thessaloniki, which once had the largest Jewish population in Europe, and where the overwhelming majority of the city’s 50,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis. There have been Jews in Thessaloniki since 300 BCE, and the Nazis wipe them out in a year or less.

The author lived in Greece for a short time after he left college. After seeing an ad in a newspaper in Athens, he ended up as a nightclub singer and a piano player in a bar in Aghios Nikolaos on n the island of Crete. ‘I could just spend my days in the sunshine and eating the amazing food and being amongst the amazing people,’ he told the interviewer. ‘So I’ve always loved Greece.’

The story does not end with the liberation of the camps, but continues decades later, with scenes of a Jewish character trying to reclaim his old home or of America sheltering Nazis after the war.

He visited Thessaloniki to talk to people there about what happened when the Jews came back, how they did not get back their businesses and their homes, and the new sets of problems the survivors faced, and even ‘certain things they don’t want to talk about.’

As for Crete, he has never forgotten his time in Aghios Nikolaos in his 20s. He says on Instagram: ‘I’ve always had a fantasy about going back to that same resort where I worked and getting my old job back as a piano player and seeing what it would be like now, all those years later, and if it would still be as much fun.’

Shabbat Shalom

The first train deporting Greek Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp left on 15 March 1943 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Saint Edmund, the English king and martyr who almost replaced Saint Patrick as the patron saint of Ireland

Saint Edmund depicted in a window in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Saint Patrick’s Day always falls in Lent, and this year it coincides with the Fifth Sunday in Lent, which used to be known in the Church Calendar as Passion Sunday, marking the beginning of the two-week period of Passiontide before Easter Day.

To mark Saint Patrick’s Day this year, the latest edition of the new Dominican journal Conversations, edited by Bernard Treacy, has published a paper by me, asking: ‘Did St Patrick Bring Christianity to Ireland?’

Throughout Lent this year, in my prayer diary on my blog each morning, I am looking at the life and influence of an early, pre-Reformation English saint or martyr commemorated in the Church of England in the calendar of Common Worship.

This morning, I was reflecting on Saint Edmund, the ninth century king, who was martyred in 869 or 870 and who is commemorated Common Worship on 20 November. As I was researching his life and story, I came across the fascinating claim that Saint Edmund almost supplanted Saint Patrick as the patron saint of Ireland in the 14th century.

Perhaps, after England’s defeat of Ireland at Twickenham yesterday, I dare not suggest that Saint Patrick was probably what we would today call an Englishman. Of course, that is a form of an anchronism, as the Angles had not yet arrived in former Roman Britain by the time of Saint Patric. But the story of another English saint, Saint Edmund, and how he almost replaced Saint Patrick as the patron of Ireland, has been told recently by Dr Francis Young in his book Athassel Priory and the Cult of St Edmund in Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2020), and in a feature that year in History Ireland, ‘St Edmund: Patron Saint of Ireland?’

Saint Edmund was the Anglo-Saxon king of East Anglia when he was shot through with arrows and finally beheaded by Viking invaders. His shrine at Beodricesworth, the Suffolk town that later became Bury St Edmunds, was an important centre of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages. By the end of the 11th century, Saint Edmund was seen throughout Europe as the patron saint of England and his shrine church at Bury St Edmunds was of the largest Romanesque churches ever built. He became the patron saint of pandemics as well as kings, and he remained the patron saint of England until he was supplanted by Saint George.

At an early stage, Saint Edmund also became a popular saint in Ireland. A hoard of coins minted by 10th-century Vikings in memory of Saint Edmund within a century of his death, was found in Co Offaly in the 19th century. It seems Saint Edmund was also popular in Norse Dublin by the early 11th century, and he is named in the 12th century Irish text, the Félire Húi Gormán or Martyrology of Gorman.

Following the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169-1170, a chapel was dedicated to Saint Edmund in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. Francis Young wonders whether devotion to Saint Edmund was been brought back to Ireland by knights who fought under the banner of Saint Edmund to save the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in 1173. Or, he suggests, there is the possibility that the chapel was partly funded by English merchants from East Anglia, as merchants from Chester had paid for Saint Werburgh’s Church in Dublin.

Saint Edmund depicted in a window in Saint Mary’s Church in Whitby, Yorkshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Francis Young is a writer historian who was born in Bury St Edmunds. He studied Philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Classics at the University of Wales, Lampeter, before receiving his doctorate in History from Cambridge University. He points out that the early leading Anglo-Normans in Ireland included William de Burgh (died 1206), who took his name from the village of Burgh-next-Aylsham in Norfolk, and who was ancestor of the powerful Burke or Bourke family. Young argues that William de Burgh’s devotion to Saint Edmund is explained by his origins in East Anglia. William founded two significant churches dedicated to Saint Edmund – one at Ardoyne, Co Carlow, and the other at Athassel Priory, near Golden, Co Tipperary.

Athassel Priory became the largest mediaeval priory in Ireland and for 300 years it was the centre of the veneration of Saint Edmund in Ireland for the next 300 years. Saint Edmund’s status as the patron of England gave Athassel a special status for the English of Ireland.

At the beginning of the reign of Richard II (1377-1399), a monk of Bury St Edmunds claimed that Athassel Priory held a miraculous image of Saint Edmund. The story claimed that immediately before the death of the head of the Burke family of Clanwilliam, the image of Saint Edmund would hurl the spear it was holding onto the pavement of the choir. The monk named Saint Edmund as the patron saint of Ireland, describing him as ‘the protector and defender of that whole land.’

The claim that Saint Edmund was the patron saint of Ireland could easily be dismissed as the ramblings of an English monk, Young writes. But, he points, nine years later, when Richard II gave the title ‘Duke of Ireland’ to Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, in 1386, he also gave him the right to quarter his coat of arms with the arms of Saint Edmund (three gold crowns on a blue background) – for as long as he remained Lord of Ireland.

The three crowns of Saint Edmund were used as an emblem of English royalty from as early as 1276, and, from 1460, the three crowns of Saint Edmund appeared on coins minted in Dublin in the name of the king. However, Saint Edmund’s significance in England had been declining steadily from the mid-14th century, and by the 15th century Saint George was well established as the patron saint of the Order of the Garter and of England’s military.

Under the Tudors, Saint George became the sole patron of England and Saint Edmund lost his popular appeal. When Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1542, the three crowns of Saint Edmund disappeared from Irish coins, replaced by the harp. By then, it appears, the original meaning of the three crowns was forgotten, and Henry VIII’s officials thought they represented the triple tiara of the pope and the papacy’s long-standing claim to Ireland as a papal fief.

Young sees lingering traces of the mediaeval importance of the cult of Saint Edmund in the flag of Munster, with three gold crowns on a blue background. The flag is first recorded in the 17th century, but Young tries to link it with the Butler family, Earls of Ormond, who had replaced the Burkes as patrons of Athassel Priory in the early 16th century.

He sees a further trace of the once-prominent cult of Saint Edmund in Ireland in the persistence of the name Edmund and its Irish equivalent Éamon, popular in Ireland since the 14th century. Éamon was one of the few male names of English origin to gain widespread popularity in Gaelic Ireland in the Middle Ages. The earliest individuals to bear the name in Ireland were members of the Burke or Bourke and Butler families, successive patrons of Athassel Priory. The earliest Gaelic Irish families to adopt Éamon as a forename were the septs of Ó Broin (O’Byrne) and Ó Cinnéide (O’Kennedy), clients of the Butlers of Ormond.

The name Edmund or Edmond is first found in the Comerford family, thanks perhaps to close connections with the Butlers of Ormond, in the person of Edmund Comerford from Co Kilkenny, who died in 1509. He was educated at Oxford, and was Rector of Saint Mary’s, Callan, Prior of Saint John’s, Kilkenny, a canon and then Dean of Saint Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, and Bishop of Ferns (1505-1509). Although Hore, Leslie, Foster and Gillespie incorrectly give his name as ‘Edward,’ although he is named Edmund in Cotton, Carrigan and Crockford’s, and is called both Edmond and Edmund by Grattan-Flood.

Edmund’s brother, Richard Comerford, was the direct ancestor of the Comerford families of Ballybur and Bunclody, and the name Edmund continued to be passed down in the Comerford family through Edmund Comerford (1722-1788), until my father’s generation: the eldest brother he never knew was Edmond Joseph Comerford (1900-1905).

Saint Edmund’s connection with Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, continues. A stained glass window by Clayton and Bell in the Baptistry depicting Saint Edmund was presented by the architect George Edmund Street (1824-1881) in memory of his second wife Jessie (1843-1876). They were married on 11 January 1876, but she contracted typhoid fever during their honeymoon in Rome and died on 6 March 1876, eight weeks after their wedding.

However, Saint Edmund’s brief time as patron saint of Ireland in the late Middle Ages was long forgotten until Francis Young published his research in recent years.

Further Reading:

Anthony Bale (ed), St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint (York Medieval Press, 2009).
Francis Young, Edmund: in search of England’s lost king (London: IB Taurus, 2018).
Francis Young, Athassel Priory and the cult of St Edmund in medieval Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2020).
Francis Young, ‘St Edmund: patron saint of Ireland?’, History Ireland (July/August 2020), Vol 28 No 4.

The Chapel of Saint Edmund in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Last edited: 14 March 2024

Ensuring the beautiful words and actions of the liturgy do not become formal and unreal

The Journal of Malankara Orthodox Theological Studies is published by the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Kerala, India

Review:

Towards a Theology of Liturgy: A Collection of Essays on West Syrian Liturgical Theology, Fr Dr KM Koshy Vaidyan, Kottayam: Mashikkoottu, 2023, 232 pp, ISBN 978-81-966011-5-7

Patrick Comerford

For four years I worked beneath a life-size, three-quarter length portrait of Bishop William Pakenham Walsh in my office in Overseas House, Rathmines, Dublin.

Bishop William Pakenham Walsh (1820-1902) was Deputy Secretary of CMS Ireland from 1851 to 1873. He later became Dean of Cashel (1873-1878) and Bishop of Ossory, Ferns and Leighlin (1878-1897) in the Church of Ireland.

When I first met Father Koshy Vaidyan in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, he was pursuing post-graduate studies in my old alma mater, the Pontifical University in Maynooth, leading to his MTh and PhD, while I was lecturing in liturgy and church history in the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. Our conversation turned immediately to Bishop Pakenham-Walsh and his third son, Bishop Herbert Pakenham-Walsh (1871-1959), who features prominently in this welcome new collection of articles and studies.

While Father Koshy was a student n Maynooth, he also served as Parish Priest of Saint Thomas Indian Orthodox Parish in inner city Dublin (2006-2012). The parish was sharing Saint George’s and Saint Thomas’s Church in Cathal Brugha Street, and I got to know many of the priests and members of the congregation through my work there with the ‘Discovery’ Services. Since returning to India, Father Koshy has returned in Ireland at times to research Bishop Herbert’s life and work, so it was a delight to read the some of the fruits of his research in his new book.

The Indian Orthodox Church regards Bishop Herbert as a saint, and his grave is a centre of pilgrimage. He was a missionary in Bangalore (1907-1908), was the warden of Bishop Cotton Boys’ School in Bangalore (1907-1913), the first Anglican Bishop of Assam (1915-1924), and the Principal of Bishop’s College (Seminary) in Calcutta. The ashram he founded in retirement in 1936 sought to integrate Celtic spirituality and Orthodox spirituality, expressed in a life of worship, prayer, meditation and service. His ashram is now a monastery of the Indian Orthodox Church.

The influence of Indian liturgy on western liturgy through the liturgical reforms in the west in the 20th century should never be under-estimated, and the introduction – reintroduction – of the peace is a prime example of this influence and mutual interaction.

When the peace was introduced into the liturgy of the Church of Ireland in the 1980s, there were vocal objections from some people in the pews, and I still hear people say they feel that it is not very Anglican. But it predates the liturgical reforms introduced in the west through the Second Vatican Council. Indeed, the peace was first introduced into Anglican liturgies first in in India, where it was adapted from the Syrian Orthodox liturgy.

I was reading Father Koshy’s book in the weeks and days immediately before Christmas, and was delighted to be reminded once again how much we share and have in common. His journey through the Church Calendar is a reminder that all the churches share the same salvific story of the Birth, Life, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, and it was an Advent reminder that we journey together as we wait in hope for his coming again

His studies of the vision in the Orthodox ecclesiology of Alvares Mar Julius and the ecumenical vision of Dr Paulose Mar Gregorios are reminders that our liturgy provides the foundations for all our endeavours in ecumenism and our vision for church unity.

In this book, Father Koshy realises his hope of opening another door into the world of West Syrian Liturgical Theology and Eucharistic Theology. The Divine Liturgy is never static, rigid or fixed, and we must always keep before us the purpose and reality of all our celebrations of liturgy.

As Father Koshy reminds us, Bishop Herbert once offered this caveat about becoming too wedded to the formality of the liturgy: ‘Even the most beautiful words and actions can become formal and unreal, and the life that is lived outside the Church may contradict the worship within it. This is danger for the priest as well as for the people.’

(Rev Canon Professor) Patrick Comerford is an Anglican priest, a former lecturer in liturgy in the Church of Ireland Theological Institute and a former adjunct assistant professor in Trinity College Dublin. He lives in retirement in England.

This book review is published in February 2024 in The Journal of Malankara Orthodox Theological Studies (Orthodox Theological Seminary, Kerala, India), Vol viii No 2 (July-December 2023), pp 113-115.

With Father Koshy Vaidyan during a visit to Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, in 2015 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A surprise reminder of my first book, published 40 years ago at the height of the last Cold War

My first book was published 40 years ago in 1984 … do we need a new edition called ‘Do You Want to Die for Trump and Putin?’

Patrick Comerford

Last week’s visit to Paris had been long arranged before an invitation arrived for a book launch in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick. Dr Seán William Gannon and Dr Brian Hughes have edited Histories of Protestant Limerick, 1912–1923, which was published shortly before Christmas, but which was launched officially last Thursday (8 February 2024).

I am one of the contributors to this new book, with a chapter on ‘Church-goers in Limerick During War and Revolution’ (Chapter 6, pp 83-89).

This was the second time in a matter of weeks that I have missed the launch of a book to which I have contributed papers … and all because of travel arrangements. Shortly before Christmas, I missed the launch in the Royal Irish Academy of Professor Salvador Ryan’s new collection, Christmas and the Irish (Dublin: Wordwell), in which I have three papers. I was at Luton Airport early one morning about to check-in for a flight to Dublin when I realised I had left my passport back in Stony Stratford.

Missing both book launches, and an unexpected exchange of Facebook messages in recent weeks, both reminded me that it is 40 years since my first book was published and launched in Dublin in 1984.

At the time, I was managing to do more than burn the candle at both ends. I was 32 and I was working as a journalist on the Foreign Desk of The Irish Times. But I was also chairing both the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Christian CND, and I was writing a post-graduate theology thesis at the Irish School of Ecumenics and Trinity College Dublin, comparing different attitudes in the Roman Catholic Church on nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament.

As a consequence of a late night meeting in Sean MacBride’s home, Roebuck House, with Todd Andrews and Captain John Feehan, I was also commissioned to write my first book, which was published by Mercier Press in 1984 with a title that now seems very twee to me, Do You Want to Die for NATO?

Ten years earlier, Seán MacBride received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974. In 1984, he was the President of Irish CND and the International Peace Bureau, and he was a former Minister for Foreign Affairs and a founder of Amnesty International.

Todd Andrews had chaired both CIÉ and RTÉ, although he is often remembered for closing down many railway lines. He is father of David Andrews and Niall Andrews and the grandfather of Ryan Tubridy and David MacSavage. Captain John Feehan founded Mercier Press 80 years ago in 1944 and was its managing director.

The book was part of a series co-ordinated by Dr Carol Coulter, asking searching questions relevant in the mid-1980s. It was launched in Buswell’s Hotel, close to Dáil Éireann, by Senator Brendan Ryan, along with two other books in the series, Andrew Boyd’s Have the Trade Unions Failed the North? and Carol Coulter’s Are Religious Cults Dangerous?

In January or February 1984, The Irish Times generously gave me a few weeks paid leave to write that book. At the time, The Irish Times often serialised large excerpts from books by its own writers. But it decided not to do so with my book, in a decision I believed was taken by a then deputy editor Dennis Kennedy. Perhaps I was too radical in my views even then, and my book also received a poor review on the book pages by a retired army officer who seemed never to have read the full book.

Much of the book was read into the record of the Bundestag by the late Petra Kelly, a leading German Green politician. At the end of the year, Seán MacBride nominated Do You Want to Die for NATO? in the Sunday Tribune as the ‘Book of the Year’, and recommended it should be on the reading list in every school in Ireland.

I truly was burning the candle at more than two ends. I embarked on another degree in theology at Maynooth, and stepped down as chair of Irish CND, although years later I was invited to be President, an honour held by Seán MacBride until he died in 1988.

Some years ago, the Belfast Telegraph published a ‘chilling map’ that shows how Northern Ireland was marked for a nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War. The report said the targets were pinpointed in Northern Ireland in 1980 in case the Kremlin decided to conquer the UK, and cited as its source my book Do You Want to Die for NATO?

The report said: ‘Comerford said that at the same time the Soviets drew their map, British defence experts held secret maps in Belfast during the 1980s showing the spots they thought were likely to be hit by doomsday attacks. Belfast was first on the Soviet hit-list — with the city and international airports marked for attack.’

Ballykelly army barracks and the former US naval facilities at Lishally, both around Co Derry, were also marked down, and an airfield at St Angelo near Enniskillen, regularly used by the US air force in World War II, was marked for destruction by Russians. ‘To top it off, the Sperrin mountains that span Derry and Tyrone were primed for atomic holocaust because they were home to US Navy transmitters.’

The report went on to say: ‘In British intelligence maps, Comerford says RAF facilities in Bishopscourt, Downpatrick, were open to attack, along with army transmission hotspots in Antrim and Derry. A sea strike at Inishtrahull off the Donegal coast was also predicted, as was the bombing of military headquarters in Lisburn. And, with its military communications facilities, Omagh was regarded as a top target for the Reds in the event of nuclear war.’

The Belfast Telegraph said: ‘Comerford revealed the Soviets were most likely to have used the one-megaton SS-4 missile or an SS-11 intercontinental ballistic torpedo. Both warheads have a terrifying nuclear payload 50 times worse than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.’

It quoted me as saying: ‘The strategic position of Ireland, the facilities offered by ports and airports, and the fuel stocks make it highly likely that Ireland will be a target.’ He said the Republic was just as much at risk as Northern Ireland. The reporter pointed out that I wrote this book in 1984, ‘but his warnings are now more relevant than ever.’

The late Andy Boyd’s daughter recently came across his copy of Do You Want to Die for NATO?, which I had signed for him. He had given it to her to read when she was a teenager and he told me: ‘I remember him speaking of you on many occasions.’

I wrote that book 40 years ago in 1984, when I was 32. I have since written, co-authored or contributed to three dozen or more other books … and, hopefully, there are more to come. But the fears I raised and the questions I asked in Do You Want to Die for NATO? are still relevant 40 years later in 2024.

The war in Russia and Ukraine, the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, his jingoistic language and his willingness to contemplate a Russian atack on NATO members in the Europe, conflicts in the Middle East, and the war-mongering language of Vladimir Putin, all mean world tensions are as threatening today as they were at the height of the Cold War.

Perhaps we need an up-to-date version of my book from 1984. If Mercier Press should ask me to update it 40 years later, I might consider changing the tone of the book and renaming it: Do You Want to Die for Trump and Putin?

An invitation to last week’s book launch in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick