The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa

The history of South African Jewry provides an extraordinarily interesting case study of the modern Jewish experience in countries of the New World. The reason for this is principally that until very recently, that community’s members have participated (and prospered) in the privileged stratum of a society based upon a system of legalized racial discrimination. By all accounts this was an unusual situation for Jews, although, to be sure, not entirely without parallel—witness the situation of the Jews in the American South. Yet, in most other respects the Jews of South Africa experienced much the same post-emancipationist conditions as did the Jews of other New World countries. Although tiny in comparison with the Jewish community of the United States, it is noteworthy that the proportion of Jews in the total white population, which thoroughly dominated South Africa, was comparably significant: in 1911 about 47,000 constituting 3.7% of the whites, in 1936 about 90,600 constituting 4.52%. Indeed, outside of the British and the Afrikaners the Jews were the most salient white ethnic group. As in the United States, Jewish immigrants to South Africa enjoyed rapid upward mobility as they successfully integrated into the economic, cultural and political fabric of the host society. Given these comparative circumstances, it is pertinent to ask: Were the host society’s perceptions and images of Jews in South Africa different from those in other New World countries or, for that matter, in Britain, which had a particularly formative influence on the development of South Africa?

The reader will find in Milton Shain’s volume a thoroughly researched and cogently presented answer to this question. To be sure, Shain’s analysis is limited to the perceptions of the population of European origin, i.e., the whites, but understandably so, since it is doubtful whether in the period surveyed, the “non-white” majority evinced any differential attitudes toward Jews or constructed any specific images of the Jew. At any rate, for the historian this remains an almost impenetrable terra incognita.

Methodologically, Shain’s work belongs to a historical genre that has for some time engaged the interest of scholars in a number of countries: research into the stereotyping of the Jew as reflected in the political rhetoric, the press and literature of particular societies. When such studies focus on the period from the nineteenth century onwards—the period of great Jewish migration—they invariably find that the development of these images is markedly influenced by responses to successive generations of migrant Jews moving from eastern to western Europe and Britain, or to the countries of the New World. Shain’s book is the first systematic, scholarly undertaking of this genre that has been applied to South African society. As well as illuminating a facet of South African history, it makes a substantial contribution to this field of knowledge in a universal context.

Shain draws upon an impressive range of sources. Newspapers, of which he surveys a wide and representative variety, are a major resource. His research is further enriched by enquiry into literary sources, parliamentary debates, relevant archival documents and private papers. Not least in value are his references to jokes and caricatures, some of the latter provided as illustrations in this attractively produced volume.

In probing these sources the author successfully avoids the pitfall of tendentious selectivity to which a work of this genre is prone. He is scrupulously careful in evaluating and weighing texts and images that are unfavorable to Jews against others that are favorable (Shain terms these “philosemitic”) or ambiguous. At the same time he discerningly draws out the significant convergence between antisemitic and philosemitic views insofar as the latter too were predicated upon the assumption that Jews were remarkably, if not inordinately, successful and powerful. Although concerned with a minor Jewish community this is not a parochial work. Shain shows acute awareness of comparative studies in other countries as well as of more theoretical treatments germane to his task of identifying, inferring and conceptualizing images and stereotypes from the sources he mines.

The eruption of a “Jewish Problem” in South Africa of the 1930s and 1940s has been well documented in other works. However there has been a tendency to underrate pre-1930 Jewish-Gentile tensions, and even to idealize early relations between immigrant Jews and the rural Boer (Afrikaner) population. Against this background, antisemitic manifestations in the 1930s and 1940s were characterized as radical departures from earlier patterns of amicable interaction. They were attributed largely to the importation of alien Nazi propaganda, at a time of social and economic travail and heightened Afrikaner nationalist frustrations and assertiveness. Shain’s work provides a significant corrective to this understanding of the Jewish experience in South Africa. Indeed, the writer of the present review acknowledges this corrective also in relation to his own published work on South African Jewry. For Shain demonstrates not only that antisemitism was an important element in South African society long before 1930 but also that even early Boer perceptions of the Jewish immigrants to South Africa were tainted by negative images. To be sure, in the latter respect one is left with something of an enigma in accounting for the gaping discrepancy between the evidence he marshals and that provided by contemporary correspondents to the Jewish press in Russia (for example in Ha-mel’itz and Ha-tzfira) who invariably reported distinctly favorable relations with the rural Boers. Could it be that their perceptions were so wholly mistaken?

Be that as it may, Shain convincingly argues that the antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s was able to resonate as strongly as it did because of the prevalence of potent, multi-layered, anti-Jewish stereotypes with roots in the late nineteenth century. Seeds transmitted from the European legacy of antisemitism had easily struck root and sprouted in forms and image constructions specific to the South African context. The most striking of these was encapsulated in the opprobrious term “Peruvians” applied to the immigrant Jews. The term is of obscure origin, perhaps an acronym for Polish and Russian Union, a Jewish club established in the early diamond mining town of Kimberley. The Peruvian was typically described as “the apparition of a slovenly, unkempt and generally unwashed edition . . . of the wandering Jew . . . holding money clenched in his sinister hand . . .” A parallel and equally uniquely South African representation was the cartoon caricature “Hoggenheimer,” which stereotyped the Jew as the quintessential parvenu, a greedy and wily cosmopolitan financier. Shain intriguingly traces this image back to a stage character in a London West End musical comedy of 1902.

By 1914 initial ambiguities in the imaging of the Jew had given way to distinctly negative stereotyping. Paralleling patterns known in other New World countries and in Britain itself, these South African images were further compounded during World War I, firstly with accusations that Jews were evading military service, thereafter by associating them with subversive Bolshevism. Thus on the gold Rand around Johannesburg, a worker’s rebellion of 1922—which was in fact a uniquely South African white labor reaction to the profit-seeking attempt of the mine owners to upgrade employment of black workers—could be construed as a product of Jewish Bolshevism. Shain’s narrative proceeds to illuminate the appropriation of eugenicist assumptions from the United States’ nativist immigration discourse of the 1920s. It is interesting to note that quite independently of the fundamental racism of South Africa’s traditional color bar, these intra-white racist assumptions were incorporated into the South African context, it being argued that East European immigrants (read for this, Jews) were a dire threat to the Nordic character of (white) South African society.

Thus Shain traces the evolving images of the Jew entertained by white South Africans, both English-speaking and Afrikaner, up to the point at which these underlying currents of hostility facilitated severe immigration restriction aimed at the Jews, albeit without explicitly stating so (the Quota Act of 1930). The outcome was not only acerbic political manifestations fomented by peripheral Nazi-type “grey shirt” organizations but also the adoption of antisemitic rhetoric by the mainstream Afrikaner nationalist movement. Shain’s fluent account leaves one in no doubt as to why that hostile rhetoric was able to resonate so widely after 1930.

Overall, the broader significance of this work emanates from the evidence it provides for the ubiquity of antisemitism in modern western cultures. That the world was already contracting into a global village by the turn of the century is apparent from observing the facility with which the European heritage of anti-Jewish stereotypes and rationalizations were transmitted and adapted to local conditions in this faraway New World environment. Of course, elucidation of the genesis, transformations and dissemination of these invidious images is not coextensive with explication of the overall civic status of Jews. One ought not to lose sight of the fact that unlike the Jewries of Europe, but in common with those of other New World countries (and also of Britain), the equal civic status of South African Jewry was never undermined, notwithstanding the phenomena so ably traced and analyzed in this fine study.