UNIVERSITY of CAPE TOWN Universityfebruary 2013
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The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University RECOVERING THE LIVES OF SOUTH AFRICAN JEWISH WOMEN DURING THE MIGRATION YEARS, c1880-1939 VERONICA-SUE BELLINGTown Cape of Thesis Presented for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Department of Historical Studies Faculty of Humanities UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN UniversityFebruary 2013 RECOVERING THE LIVES OF SOUTH AFRICAN JEWISH WOMEN DURING THE MIGRATION YEARS, c1880-1939 ABSTRACT This dissertation sets out to demonstrate how a group doubly situated on the margins, as Jewish and female, helped to build the larger community of South African Jewry and contributed to the wider South African society. The investigation is rooted in the transformation wrought in Jewish communities worldwide in the nineteenth and twentieth century through emancipation, assimilation, immigration, acculturation, and Zionism. The discussion is divided into three sections, of which the first two constitute a description of the normative experience of Jewish women, the majority of whom were first and second generation immigrants from eastern Europe. Entitled “Setting up house”, the first section opens with their migration, their establishment of immigrant neighbourhoods, and the perpetuation of their close knit communities through bonds ofTown marriage. Entitled “Beyond hearth and home”, the second section explores how the period, 1880- 1939, that witnessed dramatic changes in women‟sCape status worldwide - through education, the workplace and the attainment of theof vote - resonated among South African Jewish women. It will show that while pursuing a career beyond marriage was exceptional, participation on the Jewish communal scene, whether in the welfare societies or in the Zionist movement was normative, and by the end of the period women had wrested control of their organisations from the men. In contrast to theUniversity normative experiences described in the first two sections, the third section, “Varieties of integration: case studies of extraordinary women”, that is divided between the fields of „Politics‟ and „Culture‟, compares and contrasts the lives of women, who by virtue of education, career, lifestyle, political or cultural orientation, did not conform to the norm. These female iconoclasts accentuate what is considered to be normative in the South African Jewish community, whether it be the traditional family, the identification with the English language community, or passive conformity to the existing racial status quo. The dissertation will show that these idealistic and driven women were frequently the most far sighted, and their contributions to the political and cultural life of South Africa in retrospect, take on much greater significance. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 4 SECTION ONE SETTING UP HOUSE CHAPTER 1 Women’s Journeys from Eastern Europe to South Africa ........ 23 CHAPTER 2 A Women’s Place: the Neighbourhood ........................................ 46 CHAPTER 3 Marriage Strategies ....................................................................... 71 SECTION TWO BEYOND HEARTH AND HOME Town CHAPTER 4 Education and Careers for Jewish Women ................................. 90 CHAPTER 5 Women and Welfare .................................................................... 115 CHAPTER 6 The Feminization of ZionismCape ................................ ...................... 137 CHAPTER 7 Jewish Women and the Franchise .............................................. 155 of SECTION THREE VARIETIES OF INTEGRATION: CASE STUDIES OF EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN CHAPTER 8 Varieties of Integration: Case Studies, Political: Bertha Solomon, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Ruth Schechter UniversityAlexander, Ray Alexander Simons and Ellen Hellmann ......... 169 CHAPTER 9 Varieties of Integration: Case Studies, Cultural: Roza Van Gelderen, Hilda Purwitsky, Irma Stern, Sarah Goldblatt, Muriel Alexander, Leontine Sagan, and Sarah Sylvia .......................................................................... 206 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 255 GLOSSARY .............................................................................................................. 260 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................... 262 4 RECOVERING THE LIVES OF SOUTH AFRICAN JEWISH WOMEN DURING THE MIGRATION YEARS, c1880 TO 1939 Introduction This dissertation sets out to explore the experiences of Jewish women, immigrants to South Africa from eastern and western Europe during the migration years, from c1880 to 1939. It investigates how a group doubly situated on the margins, as Jewish and female, helped build the larger community of South African Jewry and contributed to the wider South African society. Today women‟s history has been eclipsed by the history of gender, defined as constructions of male and female and the power relations they symbolize. Whereas the use of gender as a category of historical analysis, to examineTown social, economic, and political relationships and the dynamics of power, facilitates the reinterpretation of conventional history, women‟s history is deemed merely to create supplementary narratives.1 However, to quote Sandra McGee Deutsch‟s recently published, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of CapeArgentine Jewish women, 1880-1955 (2010): “Without basic knowledge of women‟sof familial, political, professional, and associational roles, it is difficult to write the history of gender and indeed any kind of history.”2 This history of Jewish women, therefore, aims to contribute towards the understanding of gender relations in the South African Jewish community and within the wider South AfricanUniversity society, but it is not a gender history. In the context of South African women‟s history it hopes to add another ethnic dimension to what Belinda Bozzoli has described as „the patchwork quilt of patriarchies‟3 in nineteenth century Southern Africa, where women were subordinate to men, but where important contrasts in the operation of gender existed, between the different social systems, 1 Joan Wallach Scott, “Women‟s History and the rewriting of history”, in The Impact of Feminist Research in the Academy, edited by Christie Farnham, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1987, pp. 34-50. 2 Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: a History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880-1955, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2010, p. 4. 3 Belinda Bozzoli, “Marxism and Feminism and South African Studies”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 9(2) 1983: 139-171. 5 particularly between the pre-capitalist Bantu-speaking societies, and the colonial states established by the settlers.4 The topic is also located in the field of Jewish Women‟s Historical Studies, first pioneered in the United States in the 1970s,5 that examines women‟s experience of the main processes of nineteenth and twentieth century Jewish history brought about by the Haskalah, the late 18th century Jewish enlightenment, namely: emancipation, assimilation, immigration, acculturation, the Holocaust, and the creation of the State of Israel. The time period spans the period of the great migration from eastern Europe, from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Second World War, when eastern European Jewish immigration was curtailed by the Immigration Quota Act of 1930, and the influx of Jews fleeing Hitler‟s Germany was stemmed by the Aliens Act of 1937. Town Until the introduction of freedom of religion with the British occupation of the Cape Colony, first in 1795 and then in 1805, the entry of Jews into South Africa was largely prohibited. As there was initially no infrastructureCape to maintain a Jewish way of life, the earliest arrivals were assimilated Jews from England, Holland, and Germany who found it easy to blend in with the local whiteof colonists, whether Boer or Briton, while some found it more convenient to jettison their religion, to marry out of the faith and have their children baptized. Those who wished to preserve their faith tended to go back to their home countries to find brides and bring them back to South Africa. With the exception of Sophie Leviseur, the daughter of Isaac Baumann, pioneer of the Orange Free StateUniversity Republic,6 very little is known about the Jewish women in mid- nineteenth century South Africa. With mineral discoveries in Griqualand West in the 1860s and in the Transvaal in the 1880s, the Jewish community grew steadily. Once the religious qualification on the franchise was removed with the British conquest of the South African Republic during the South African War, the stage was set for assimilated English and German 4 See Cheryl Walker, “Women and Gender in Southern Africa: an Overview”, in Women and Gender in Southern Africa in 1945, edited by Cheryl Walker, David Philip, Cape Town, 1990, pp. 1-32. 5 See Gerda Lerner, Teaching Women’s History. American Historical Association, New York, 1981. 6 Myer Pencharz and Dora L. Sowden,”In the Orange Free State”, in Saron