What is Agendath Netaim in Ulysses?
Agendath Netaim was a planters' company advertising plots of land in Ottoman Palestine to be planted with orange groves and olives. Bloom reads its leaflet in the butcher's shop in Episode 4. It stirs dreams of a Jewish homeland, then a vision of a dead land.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Several episodes. Bloom, reading the leaflet on his walk home from Dlugacz's butcher's shop.
Agendath Netaim: planters’ company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees.
What it means in plain English
At first Bloom pictures oranges, melons and olives. Then a cloud covers the sun, and he sees the Dead Sea, “a barren land, bare waste”: an old, tired people.
The name returns all day as a symbol of hope and of exile.
Literary context
The name is a version of the Hebrew for “company of planters”. Zionist land schemes were widely advertised around 1904.
References
- Ulysses, Episodes 4, 8, 11, 14, 15 and 17
- Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (revised edition, 1988)
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Questions readers ask
Is Agendath Netaim real?
It is based on real planters' companies of the time; Joyce adapted the name.
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