Whiteness, Apartheid, and Resistance in Jewish South African Writing

Extended discussions about the intersections between Jewish and post-colonial studies have only emerged in the last decade or so.¹ One of the reasons that has precluded the exploration of the critical parallels between the situation of the Jews after World War II and the postcolonial condition, as Jonathan Boyarin notes, is "an unthinking association of Jews with a monolithic Europe."² In a similar vein, Bryan Cheyette has described postcolonial theory as being unable to "perceive Jews as anything other than as part of the majoritarian tradition."³ Postcolonial literature, however, often successfully engages with these connections, as the works of writers such as Anita Desai, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Zadie Smith confirm, modelling ways of challenging what Cheyette has described as "disciplinary thinking," which prevents thinking across disciplines, and instead adopting modes of "analogical thinking," which Cheyette has argued are necessary to create a comparative framework between Jewish studies and other fields of inquiry.⁴ In this article, I consider how "analogical thinking" can bring together the fields of Jewish and postcolonial studies and particularly their engagement with whiteness and difference. I argue that the South African Jewish novels under discussion—Lionel Abrahams's The White Life of Felix Greenspan (2002) and Tony Eprile's The Persistence of Memory (2004)—complicate the conflation of the figure of the Jew with the idea of a monolithic Europe, read: monolithic white Europe, and the majoritarian, or rather hegemonic, tradition in apartheid South Africa. This conflation is specifically challenged through the ambiguous position of each author's Jewish protagonist—Abrahams's Felix Greenspan and Eprile's Paul Sweetbread—in relation to whiteness, and by implication in relation to race and racial politics in apartheid South Africa.

While many studies focus on whiteness in a South African context, few scholars have focused on South African Jewish perceptions of whiteness and race.⁵ One of the few exceptions is Gideon Shimoni's Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (2003), which outlines the history of the Jews in South Africa and argues that for the early Jewish immigrants, who arrived between the 1880s and the 1930s, it was important

that they had the status of being Europeans, that is to say, whites. From the outset the Jewish immigrant entered into the dominant, caste-like white sector and lived thereafter within its confines.⁶

In the pre-apartheid period, Jews in South Africa were keen to be part of the white elite. Hence, they fitted, at least to a certain extent, into the category of whiteness that Tony Simoes da Silva, following critics such as Toni Morrison and Matthew Frye Jacobson, has identified, namely a whiteness that "is not a natural condition, rather a kind of exclusive club to which one is admitted on the basis of fulfilling certain conditions, and then ensuring that they are carefully guarded."⁷ While South African Jews might not have seen "whiteness" as a "natural condition," many were included in the "exclusive club" of white people. Jewish engagement with race in the United States has attracted much more critical attention than the South African context and many scholars have emphasized that the Jewish racial position is different from that of the white hegemony. Michael Lerner, for example, refuses to identify Jews with whiteness as he does not see their experience in the last five hundred years as one of "privilege" and suggests that considering the Jews as part of the "white" people erases the Jewish history of suffering and persecution.⁸ Seth Forman agrees with this position and adds that considering Jews as white "den[ies] all forms of Jewish exceptionalism."⁹ Thus, conflating Jews with whiteness erases their history of marginalization as well as their complex relationships with different ethnic groups in the countries they immigrated to.

Similarly, in the case of South Africa, while in hindsight Jews might be included in the white hegemonic group during apartheid, they were not always considered as such by other members of this group.¹⁰ The Jewish community was often seen as an outside group as they were not...