Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa
by Gideon Shimoni
(David Philip)
In the face of considerable revisionism in the way the Jewish community’s response to apartheid is being portrayed in a number of forums, among them Cape Town’s Jewish Museum, Gideon Shimoni’s dense and considered work serves as an antidote to overdoses of self-congratulation.
The fact is that, for whatever reason — possibly the most forgivable being a post-Holocaust fear of persecution by a latently anti-Semitic government, the least being unmitigated self-interest — the community as a community, and its lay and spiritual leadership as bodies, did little to oppose a system that they should have recognised was, in many of its precepts, an uncomfortably close approximation of the one that had led to the deaths of six million Jews.
There is no doubt that at an individual level a disproportionate number of Jews joined the liberation movements, played an active role in civil society organisations opposing apartheid, gave professional help to apartheid victims and joined anti-apartheid political groups like the Congress movement and the Liberal and Progressive parties. But there is also no doubt that the more outspoken and activist they were the more disconcerted the community leadership was by their activities — the hysterical response of South African Jews to the arrival in Israel of Arthur Goldreich after his escape from prison was telling.
The opposing poles were also starkly delineated during the Rivonia trial when a Jew called Percy Yutar, revered by the community and honoured in its synagogues, was responsible for putting behind bars for life not only the world’s most famous political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, but a fellow Jew, Denis Goldberg.
”It is undeniable that the Board, and even more so the majority of the community’s rabbis, not only actively dissociated themselves from radical Jews … but also preferred to obscure the visibility of every form of active resistance to apartheid by Jews. This stood in stark contrast to the conventional celebration of Jewish prominence in all walks of life that conformed with the status quo, not to speak of the lionization of the pantheon of Jewish resisters after the demise of the apartheid regime,” Shimoni observes.
In his preface he states that ”The historian should not presume to be a moral judge. Rather, he should aspire to the presentation of as objective, balanced, comprehensive, and empirically documented an account as possible. This might then form a sound basis for value judgments by each and every reader who chooses to make them …”
He picks up the theme of objectivity in a conclusion that calls again for a dispassionate approach: ”Most detached and objective observers would agree: although there is nothing in this record deserving of moral pride, neither does it warrant utter self-reproach. From a coldly objective historical perspective, this was characteristic minority-group behaviour …”
The opening statement of his introduction, though, makes it clear that there is a non-negotiable starting point for the judgements he calls for: ”A fundamental and conspicuous fact underlies this study: the Jews of South Africa have shared in the status of the privileged in a society based upon a system of legalized discrimination.”
Shimoni presents a chronological account of the actions and reactions of the South African Jewish community from the 19th century when Jews first arrived in the Cape through to the post-apartheid era.
He examines the formation of communal bodies like the Board of Deputies; the relationships between the community and the Afrikaner regime; the responses of individual Jews on both the right and the left; and traces the history of the small pockets of Jewish groups that emerged over the years to oppose the prevailing responses of the communal leadership.
An important element governing the attitude of South African Jewry to the activities of the apartheid government was the relationship between South Africa and Israel — which state, coincidentally, came into being in the year the National Party won control of South Africa.
The South African community’s passionate support for Israel is legendary and, in some part, the leadership’s attempts to appease the Nationalist government were driven by fears that the community’s disproportionately large financial contribution to Zionist funds would be cut off. These fears escalated when Israel, siding with Africa and much of the democratic world, supported the international anti-apartheid campaign. ”The capacity of the Jewish community to stand up to the anticipated ire of the government and the progovernment public was further enfeebled by its being in a sense hostage to Israel’s policy towards South Africa,” writes Shimoni of that period.
In the end, having presented the case from several perspectives, Shimoni lets the community institutions off far too lightly, I believe, describing the Board of Deputies’s policy as ”responsible and sagacious, despite the heavy price paid in terms of moral values”, maintaining that it was obvious that ”its statements constituted an implicit rejection of all that apartheid signified”. As a member of the community allegedly represented by that body, I have to say that the moral price paid was altogether too heavy and the ”rejection” was never obvious to me or to many of those who thought as I did.
Reservations about the conclusions (and about the odd factual error) aside, Shimoni’s book is a timely addition to the growing body of post-apartheid work examining the conscience of apartheid South Africa.