There are many genres of Jewish literature, including a secular library about Judaism that has grown concurrently with the saga of the people itself.
The stereotypical view of Jews as bookish actually entered the Jewish galaxy of idiomatic expressions in the Eastern European diaspora and, in Yiddish at any rate, we have sayings like: “An Idishe ganef ganvet nor bikher” [A Jewish thief steals only books]. Basically life in the 2000-year exile was a communal endeavour and antisocial behaviour was supposedly kept to a minimum. There were Jewish self-help organisations; there was free education; arranged marriage; and a tightly controlled religious life that revolved around the synagogue of the hamlet known as a shtetl.
The lives once lived in the shtetls were recorded by ordinary people in thousands of books known as sefer zikhronis or memoirs. These were self-published or published by home-town associations in the new world once people had left Eastern Europe. They allowed an often sentimental glimpse into what came across as a panacea of simplicity lived against all odds in the Russian Pale of Settlement, with its pogroms and restrictions on trade and on broader education.
They also recorded the names of those who died in the Holocaust, and it is these memoirs that give us a privileged insight into the often painful journeys of the founders of the local community.
When the second wave of emigration happened at the end of the 19th century, before the Holocaust, 40 000 Jews emigrated to South Africa by boat. Between 1880 and 1914 they passed through London en route, where they were housed in official institutions and temporary shelters before finally landing in Cape Town.
From Cape Town the road led to Johannesburg and that’s where a new narrative begins, one that links various disparate factors: poverty, gradual wealth accumulation, a crime underworld and a new underclass that was black.
In their recent, rather handsome pictorial history, The Jews in South Africa (Jonathan Ball), Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain use a wide variety of sources to tell the story of how the present-day Jewish community came into being. Most poignant is the fact that, as they write, “today no South African Jew can claim ancestral ties to the 17 Jewish males who gathered for prayer in Cape Town in 1841”.
This disjunction and the subsequent struggles for recognition (there was a Quota Act instituted from 1930 to 1940) gave rise to what Mendelsohn and Shain called a “Jewish Question”. In case you think local Jews were always the darlings of the apartheid regime, there is the story of how Afrikaner nationalists accused South Africa’s Jews of fomenting the Boer War and inciting blacks against whites.
There was also a notorious, sensational trial in Grahamsown in 1934 when the Greyshirts went on trial for doctoring a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that they claimed to have found in a synagogue in Port Elizabeth. It was supposed to show “hostility towards Christianity and white South Africa”.
The authors tell us that “Anti-Jewish ideas penetrated the Afrikaner Nationalist mainstream, and were fertilised by a clutch of Afrikaner intellectuals, some of whom had studied in Germany”. The cry from the right (Hendrik Verwoerd’s newspaper Die Transvaaler) was that Jews could not be assimilated and, anyway, were too domineering in business.
The turnaround is explained in a page of copy devoted to the “Pretoria-Jerusalem Axis”, when two pariah states –Israel and South Africa — linked arms and traded arms. There was “conjecture about a joint nuclear experiment” and investment by Israeli business in the homelands.
Coming clean on the tough stuff also includes a look at “other” national heroes who fought apartheid: trade unionist Ray Alexander, Joe Slovo, Ruth First and Solly Sachs. Even the conscience-raising Not in My Name Movement championed by Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils gets its page.
The Jews in South Africa makes a great companion to the hardback volume of 1991 Founders and Followers: Johannesburg Jewry 1887 to 1915, edited in that year by Mendel Kaplan and Marian Robertson.
Subsequently there have been two volumes of Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities making a growing library of resource books that capture many facets of this small but visible group.
The visibility of local Jews (now numbering only 80 000) is not a new phenomenon. As Gandhi is reported to have said about his stay in the country: “In South Africa I was surrounded by Jews.”