Claudia Braude
CUTTING THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN: INTERVIEWS WITH SOUTH AFRICAN JEWISH ACTIVISTS edited by Immanuel Suttner (Viking, R150)
REVIEWS of Cutting Through the Mountain, a book of wide-ranging interviews with South African Jewish activists who contributed to the struggle against apartheid, have covered obvious questions: what is a Jew, what inclusion criteria were used, what’s the relation between Jewish identity and non-racism?
While these questions are debated, the rich interviews successfully counter earlier South African Jewish histories. Informed by the policy of political non-involvement promoted under apartheid by the community’s leadership in the Jewish Board of Deputies, they suppressed memory of Jews opposing apartheid.
Like much in the new South Africa, however, the book’s success doesn’t extend to a history free of assumptions motivating apartheid consciousness. Suttner reaffirms a wagon-load of apartheid baggage. Continuous with 50 years of South African Jewish historiography, Cutting Through the Mountain demonstrates the Jewish contribution to the country. The “contribution school” of South African Jewish history is propelled both by legitimate pride in the achievements of an immigrant community and, more fundamentally, by fear.
The logic of contributionism originated with parliamentarian Morris Kentridge’s response in 1934 to JBMHertzog’s pro-Nazi accusation that Jews threatening to boycott German goods were disloyal to “the interests of the Union”. Kentridge said, accurately, that “South African history records … that the Jew has … his contribution to the developments of this country, from its earliest days”. The fears of Afrikaner nationalism informed much South African Jewish history written during subsequent National Party rule. Little has changed, it seems, with the shift from Afrikaner nationalist rule to democratic, non-racism. Contributionist discourse still prevails.
A recent review signalled that Cutting Through the Mountain tells a more interesting picture than the sum of its parts: “Who helped Suttner `to move beyond fear and resentment’ in his personal life is not, I believe, of interest in this context.” Suttner acknowledges Life Training [LT], a cognitive-psychology-based process currently gripping local popular interest.
The desire for a cure for fear, apparently offered by LT’s techniques, filters into some of the interviews. Thus, Johnny Clegg’s marvellous descriptions of being arrested by puzzled policemen for learning guitar in the domestic workers’ communities in the skies of Killarney become a symbol of fear for Suttner: “It’s quite symbolic, this enthusiastic teenager surrounded by all this [white/police] fear and suspicion.”
Clegg’s recent exploration of his Jewishness was triggered by Inkatha violence in the Zulu migrant workers’ hostels in which as a teenager he’d constructed his own masculinity. He had a Jewish wedding to please his parents, while himself waiting for the real Zulu thing, and was pressured into circumcising his sons. This acknowledgment offers some of the best lines in the book. “I mean,” says Suttner, “does God want our foreskins?” “Precisely. Does he want our clitori? Does he want scarification on our foreheads?” asks Clegg.
These are important questions. Despite the insignificance ascribed to Judaism and Jewishness by many of the interviewees, Suttner asserts “a whole set of atavistic cultural memories” linking them into the “Jewish collective”. History doesn’t matter after all, since Jewish memory is stored in a collective unconscious, and the ethnic (including for those who really count, the circumcised) body. Assertions of racial bodies as carriers of identity isn’t surprising given continuities with other historical assumptions promoted under apartheid.
Discourses of contributionism and biology merge in Suttner’s understanding of the development of South African Jewish history. For instance, he glosses over the shift from fear of the NP in the Forties and Fifties to support for apartheid from the Sixties onwards: “By the mid-1960s there were many Jews, who, while uncomfortable with the cruelties of apartheid, easily understood Afrikaner fears of being engulfed in a sea of non- Afrikaners, paralleling the situation of white South Africa with that of the embattled state of Israel.”
What is now required is memory that traces the development of these complex shifts in Jewish self-understanding. For instance, what ideological interventions might General Hendrik van den Bergh, head of the Bureau of State Security and architect of military ties with Israel, have engineered in order to replace fear of Afrikaner nationalist anti-Semitism with the promotion of easily understandable sympathy between Jews and Afrikaners and thereby to justify and camouflage the military links?
Neither extending to the Jewish community in general the techniques that helped Suttner move beyond fear nor demonstrating the Jewish contribution to the anti- apartheid struggle are likely to have an impact on the ingrained fears central to the logic of contributionism. Only rigorous grappling with history, including the relation between Jewish opposition to and collusion with apartheid, will loosen the fears.
In the meantime, the interviews themselves provide layered and valuable historical documentation. They will be of value to anyone interested in questions of race, identity, Jewish history and developments in post-1994 South African history.
— Claudia Braude is editing an anthology of South African Jewish writers