Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (review)

More than four decades ago, the Cambridge historian E. H. Carr cautioned fellow practitioners against the passing of moral judgments. Presenting the prestigious George Macauley Trevelyan lectures—subsequently published as What Is History?—Carr spoke of the impossibility of "erecting an abstract and super-historical standard by which historical actions can be judged." ¹We are all, he warned, captives to the values and ideals of our age. Gideon Shimoni, a distinguished Israeli historian with South African roots, is in agreement. Thus his examination of South African Jewry under apartheid "is neither indictment nor apologia" (p. xiii); the historian, contends Shimoni, should "not presume to be a moral judge" (p. xiii). However, at one level at least, the book is a sustained judgment, and an extremely sophisticated one at that.

It is no simple task to examine the behavior of different institutions and generations over nearly fifty years under changing circumstances and in variable contexts. Shimoni does this admirably. Ever alert to nuance and motivation, time and place, he avoids facile generalizations. All actors and organizations are treated with great sensitivity. He therefore empathizes with the Jewish community's sense of vulnerability in the wake of the Holocaust and the National Party's anti-Jewish record in the 1930s and early 1940s. Although Dr. Malan had distanced himself and his party from its flirtation with anti-Semitism, some of his lieutenants—the likes of Oswald Pirow, Eric Louw, and Louis Weichardt, the leader of the notorious Greyshirts—were hardly philo-Semites. ²

Such was the setting within which the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (the Board), the representative institution of South African Jewry, grappled with a response to what was palpably an iniquitous system, at odds with basic Jewish values. The record, at least in the early decades of apartheid, is far from flattering. Although the Board debated seriously an appropriate response, it ultimately chose to deflect what it deemed an issue of ethics onto the rabbinate, supposedly the moral arbiters of the community.

In arriving at this strategy, the Board could hide behind its founding principles of noninterference in politics. Religious leaders had no such escape. Sadly, only a few rabbis, among them former chief rabbi Louis Rabinowitz and (the Reform rabbi) André Ungar, spoke out in unequivocal terms. At one level religious leaders did not wish to upset their congregants—itself an indictment of the community and its lay leadership—at another, they seemed to ignore the very precepts underpinning their calling. Religious observance was no guarantor of moral outrage. As Shimoni puts it, "the more observant of orthodox religious precepts a Jew was, the less likely he or she was to be found among even moderate adversaries of the apartheid system, not to speak of its radical opponents" (pp. 75–76).

The converse was also true. Many Jews who were Jews in name only challenged the system and, in some cases, confronted directly the Board's policy of noninterference in politics. The list of so-called radical Jews is endless, a veritable who's who of South African opposition and resistance history—at least insofar as the white population is concerned. Of the twenty-three whites out of a total of 156 persons charged in the 1950s Treason Trial, fourteen were Jewish. All five whites arrested at Rivonia, culminating in the trial that led to Nelson Mandela's incarceration, were Jewish. Radicals were not afraid to confront the state directly.

Jews were also disproportionately prominent among the mainstream liberal opposition. They voted against the National Party more than any other white group and engaged in legal activism, labor unions, health care initiatives, philanthropic endeavors (here the Union of Jewish Women has a proud record), and in protest groups such as the Black Sash. Helen Suzman attained international status as a symbol of liberal opposition and a voice of...