THE FOUNDATIONS of ANTISEMITISM in SOUTH AFRICA IMAGES of the JEW C.1870-1930

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THE FOUNDATIONS of ANTISEMITISM in SOUTH AFRICA IMAGES of the JEW C.1870-1930 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ANTISEMITISM IN SOUTH AFRICA IMAGES OF THE JEW c.1870-1930 by MILTON SHAIN M.A.(S.A.); S.T.D. (U.C.T.); M.A.(LEEDS) A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the UniversityDepartment of Cape of History Town University of Cape Town February 1990 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town To take only the subject of the Jews, it would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print. - George Eliot 1 CONTENTS PAGE ASTRACT i PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1 CHAPTER TWO: Gentlemen and Knaves The Ambivalent Image 19 CHAPTER THREE: "Where the Carcass is, there shal 1 the Eagles be Gathered Together" : Pedlars, Peruvians and Plutocrats 45 CHAPTER FOUR: From Pariah to Parvenu : The Making of a Stereotype 117 CHAPTER FIVE: Shirkers and Subversives Embellishing the Jewish Stereotype 186 CHAPTER SIX: The Rand Rebellion : Consolidating the Jewish Stereotype 22L CHAPTER SEVEN: "The Jews are Everywhere Climbing to the Top of the Trees Where the Plums are to be Found" : Ou ts iders and Intruders 271 CHAPTER EIGHT: Conclusions : Reappraising Anti- semitism in the Nineteen Thirties and Early Forties 332 APPENDIX I 352 APPENDIX II 363 BIBLIOGRAPHY 366 ii ABSTRACT Historians of South African Jewry have depicted antisemitism in the 1930s and early 1940s as essentially an alien phenomenon, a product of Nazi propaganda at a time of great social and economic trauma. This thesis argues that anti­ semitism was an important element in South African society long before 1930 and that the roots of anti-Jewish outbursts in the 1930s and early 1940s are to be found in a widely­ shared negative stereotype of the Jew that had developed out of an ambivalent image dating back to the 1880s. By then two embryonic but nevertheless distinctive images of the Jew had evolved: the gentleman - characterised by sobriety, enter­ prise and loyalty and the knave, characterised by dishonesty and cunning. The influx of eastern European 'Peruvians' in the 1890s and the emergence of the cosmopolitan financier at the turn of the century further contributed towards the evolution of an anti-Jewish stereotype. By 1914, favourable perceptions of the Jew,_ associated mainly with the acculturated Anglo-German pioneer Jews, had eroded substantially and the eastern European Jew by and large defined the essence and nature of 'Jewishness·. Even those who separated the acculturated and urbane Jew from the eastern European newcomer exaggerated Jewish power and influence. Herein lay the convergence between the philosemitic and the antisemitic view. iii War-time accusations of avoiding military service, followed by the association of Jews with Bolshevism, consolidated the anti-Jewish stereotype. In the context of the post-war economic depression and ~urgeoning black radicalism, the eastern European Jew emerged as the archetypical subversive. Thus the Rand Rebellion of 1922 could be construed as a Bolshevik revolt. As eugenist and nativist arguments penetrated South African discourse, eastern European immigrants were increasingly perceived as a threat to the 'Nordic' character of South African society as well as a challenge to the hegemony of the English mercantile establishment. Nevertheless antisemitism in the crude and programmatic sense was rejected. The 1930 Quota Act ushered in a change and heralded the transformation of 'private' antisemitism into 'public' antisemitism. While this transformation was clearly related to specific contingencies of the 1930s, this thesis argues that there is a connection and a continuity between anti-Jewish sentiment, as manifested in the image of the Jew prior to 1930, and anti­ Jewish outbursts and programmes of the 1930s and early 1940s. In short, anti-Jewish rhetoric at this time resonated precisely because a negative Jewish stereotype had been elaborated and diffused for decades. lV PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For a society universally regarded as a metaphor for racism and bigotry, remarkably little scholarly attention has been devoted to antisemitism, probably the oldest form of prejudice. Perhaps it is precisely because South Africa's 'race' problems have assumed such overwhelming proportions that attitudes towards the Jew have received so little academic attention. South Africa, after all, has not been immune to 'Judeophobia' or, in the parlance of late nineteenth century Europe, 'Judenhetze ·. In fact, the 1930s and early 1940s witnessed a popular surge of antisemitism, ensuring a prominent position for the 'Jewish Question· on the public agenda. Historians examining this period have hitherto focused essentially on the impact of Nazism interacting with the social traumas being experienced by Afrikaners in the 1930s. While these factors are certainly important, they fail to explain why antisemitic ideas resonated so forcefully at the popular level and why they provided such a useful means of political mobilisation for the Afrikaner 'right wing· . This is the essential issue addressed in this study. In the search for explanations, I have been assisted by numerous colleagues and friends. In particular, I am indebted to my promoter, Dr Edna Bradlow, for her guidance and supervision. Most importantly, she tempered my more V outrageous intellectual flights of fancy and ensured that my feet were firmly planted on the ground. I also wish to thank Mohammed Adhikari, Richard Mendelsohn, Harry Saker, Gideon Pimstone, Sally Frankental and Millie Pimstone for enduring my intellectual probings and questionings. I was also fortunate to benefit from the insights of scholars at the Hebrew University when I spent a year as a Fellow of the International Centre for the Teaching of Jewish Civilisation in Jerusalem. It was extremely useful for me to be able to present an outline of my thesis to a seminar under the auspices of the Hebrew University's Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism. I benefitted similarly from two seminars which I presented to the Department of History at the University of Cape Town. Of course, in the final analysis it was my 'dialogue' with the printed word - housed in a range of libraries 1n numerous cities - that enabled me to reach the conclusions presented in this study. I therefore wish to extend my sincere gratitude to the staffs of the following institutions: the Archives of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, Johannesburg; the South African Library, Cape Town; the State Library, Pretoria; the Cape Archives, Cape Town; the State Archives, Pretoria; the Unisa newspaper library, Pretoria; the Standard Bank Archives, Johannesburg; the Manuscript Division of the Jagger Library, University of Cape Town; the Gitlin Library, Cape Town and the Wiener vi Library, London. I also wish to thank my typists, Marlene Williams and Anne Grant who never baulked at the thought of an additional footnote or a reconstructed paragraph. Lastly, I wish to acknowledge the financial assistance received from the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research at the University of Cape Town, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, New York and the Human Sciences Research Council. Needless to say, opinions expressed and conclusions reached are those of the author and are not to be regarded as a reflection of the opinions and conclusions of these institutions or of any other person. 1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION I Anti-semitism was not a natural growth in South Africa - in view of our traditions, our traditions of a religious outlook and reverence for the Bible, of hospitality and of the love of freedom, it might have been expected that it would never get a foothold here But during the last twenty years our traditional attitude towards the Jew has been widely breeched .... It is with the Nazis that anti-Semitism took on a particularly aggressive form, and the anti-Semitism of Nazism was an article meant for export. The seeds of this evil thing were blown over the oceans even to South Africa. The stock libel of Nazi propaaanda came to be sedulously disseminated among us, sometimes skilfully adapted to our local cir­ cumstances, and anti-Semitism grew apace. J. Hofmeyr, Hoernle Memorial Lecture, 1945.l Hofmeyr·s argument that anti-Jewish manifestations in South Africa during the 1930s and early 1940s were an aberration, a departure from traditional patterns of interaction between Jew and Gentile, accords well with the dominant thrust of South African Jewish historiography.2 That historiography 1. J. Hofmeyr, Christian Principles and Race Problems. ~ . Hoernle Memorial Lecture, Johannesburg, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1945, p.18. 2. General South African historiography has paid little, if any, attention to the Jews. For example, T.R.H. Davenport's standard history mentions Jews only with reference to immigration legislation in the 1930s and the Nazi-type Greyshirt movement. T.R.H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, third edition, Johannesburg, Macmillan, 1987, p.335. 2 has underplayed, if not entirely ignored, antisemitism 3 in South African society. Historians writing prior to the 1960s, in particular, turned a blind eye to anti-Jewish manifestations and instead lauded the pioneering decades as years during which Jews were accorded great respect and hospitality.' Afrikaners especially were singled out for their kindness and courtesy towards the 'people of the Book· . The itinerant Jewish pedlar or smous5 was conmonly 3. Because 'senite' denotes peoples oriainatini in south­ western Asia and therefore includes Arabs and Jews, some scholars have dropped the hyphen and capital "S" for a more precise term.
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