Shain A Perfect Storm

Antisemitism in South Africa 1930 - 1948
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-86842-701-7
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

The interwar years were a tumultuous time in South Africa. The effects of the worldwide economic slump gave rise to a huge number of 'poor whites' and fed the growth of a militant and aggressive Afrikaner nationalism that often took its lead from Nazi Germany. For a great number of whites, both English- and Afrikaans-speakers, the Jew was an unwelcome and disturbing addition to society. A Perfect Storm explores the growth of antisemitism in South Africa between 1930 and 1948 within the broader context of South African politics and culture. A Perfect Storm reveals how the radical right's malevolent message moved from the margins to the centre of political life; how demagoguery was able to gain traction in society; and how vulgar antisemitism seeped into mainstream politics, with real and lasting consequences. Milton Shain, South Africa's leading scholar of modern Jewish history, carefully documents the rise of the 'Jewish Question' in this period, detailing the growth of overtly fascistic organisations such as the Greyshirts, the New Order and the Ossewa-Brandwag. Central to his analysis is the National Party's use of antisemitism to win electoral advantage and mobilise Afrikaners behind the nationalist project. The party contributed to the climate of hostility that resulted in the United Party government drastically curtailing the numbers of Jews admitted as immigrants. Indeed, some of its most virulent antisemites were accorded high office after 1948 when the National Party came to power.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shain, Milton

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

AN UNABSORBABLE MINORITY

‘With the nurturing of the national consciousness of South Africa there has arisen an anti-Jewish feeling that was unknown, or at any rate, unnoticed before.’

– South African Jewish Chronicle, 31 May 1930

‘… it is very easy to rouse a feeling of hate towards the Jews in this country.’

– DF Malan, interview, Die Burger, 2 November 1931

‘I challenge anyone here to accuse me of preaching murder and persecution – the reports you see of the affairs in Germany are lies – but if the Jew does not want to be put in his place, we shall put him there. What objection can the Chosen Race have if I recommend a policy by which they would be happily settled in their own country? What, I ask you, is wrong in that we want to assist them in that direction?’

– Louis T Weichardt, speech in the Koffiehuis, 26 October 1933

‘While we are squabbling, Comrades, Ikey is rubbing his dirty greasy hands, and we are paying the price in blood and tears … Every Jew is a skunk. There is not a good Jew. They are all evil and filthy. Every mother must warn her sons of the fate which is his by the hands of Zion and send her husband and sons out to fight this evil. I urge you, Comrades, forget your animosity, and British, Boer and German, come out together as one man and fight Judaism until we have strangled the snake and it lies dead at our feet. This is a religious fight. The fight for Christianity.’

– Ray (RK) Rudman, Newcastle, 17 June 1934

BETHAL

In summer the daytime temperature in Bethal often rises above 30°C, but evening thunderstorms frequently bring welcome relief to the surrounding potato and mealie (maize) farmers who have for generations interacted with the eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga) town.27 Among these men of the soil in the 1920s were a handful of Jews, most notably the ‘Mealie King’ of the region, Esrael Lazarus.28 He and the other Boerejode (Afrikaans-speaking Jews) were exceptions among a rural community overwhelmingly dominated by Boers, or Afrikaners.29 Nonetheless, they were well integrated with their (white) English-speaking and Afrikaner compatriots, although farming was far removed from the usual trading occupations pursued by the overwhelming majority of their coreligionists in Bethal.30

The community’s origins went back at least to 1906, a time of reconstruction and optimism, driven by British High Commissioner Lord Alfred Milner and his ‘Kindergarten’, in the wake of the devastating Anglo-Boer War.31 Its numbers, though, remained small: the South African Jewish Year Book 1929 reported a mere 60 members of the Bethal Hebrew Congregation.32 Yet the ‘Pact’ government led by the National Party’s revered General James Barry Munnik (JBM) Hertzog, was determined not to alienate Bethal’s Jewish vote in the upcoming by-election scheduled for 22 January 1930.

Seven months earlier, in the general election of 1929, the National Party’s Tielman Roos, a shrewd and enigmatic friend of the Jews, had narrowly defeated his South African Party opponent, Hendrik Grobler, in the Bethal constituency. But Roos was in poor health and subsequently resigned as Minister of Justice in October 1929 to take up a position on the Supreme Court of Appeal. It was by no means certain that his replacement, GE Haupt, would hold the seat for the Nationalists in the by-election. The small Jewish vote was therefore important and could not be taken for granted, particularly in light of the National Party’s stated intention to restrict Jewish immigration from eastern Europe.33

This festering issue had been on the back burner during the June 1929 election, which had been dominated by the swart gevaar and issues of South Africa’s relationship with Britain. However, the issue was resurrected at the National Party’s Orange Free State congress, held in the wake of the election, with delegates resolving ‘that the time has arrived to fix a quota of immigration on the basis operating in the United States’.34 This resolution had obvious implications for the upcoming by-elections in both Bethal and Stellenbosch, where the National Party faced a distinct possibility of losing the Jewish vote in these tightly contested seats.35

To secure the Bethal seat for the Nationalists and to assuage Jewish fears about restricting Jewish immigration, the National Party dispatched one of its rising stars, the forty-year-old Oswald Pirow, to the small town. The ‘young gladiator of the Nationalists’, as the Cape Times described him, was Roos’ replacement as Minister of Justice.36 The grandson of German immigrants, Pirow had been schooled in Potchefstroom, but at the age of fourteen had left for Germany before proceeding to England to read Law. At the age of twenty-three he was elected to the Inner Temple, London. He returned to practise law in Pretoria, and in 1925, one year after being elected to parliament for the Zoutpansberg seat, was appointed a King’s Counsel (KC). Four years later Pirow audaciously, but unsuccessfully, mounted a challenge for General Jan Smuts’ seat in Standerton. He was highly regarded and, despite his defeat at the hands of the South African Party leader, was appointed Minister of Justice as a nominated senator in the ‘Pact’ government. A short while later he won a by-election in Gezina, a Pretoria suburb.37

In a lengthy and careful address, Pirow told the voters of Bethal that the National Party had no intention of changing the immigration laws and that no plans were afoot to curtail specifically the influx of Jews from eastern Europe. He assured Bethal’s Jews that the policy of the Nationalists would remain as Tielman Roos had often explained. Pirow went on to warn voters against a surreptitious propaganda campaign, launched by the South African Party, claiming that the Nationalists were hostile to Jews and against Jewish immigration. Indeed, his own experience had led him to believe that Jews were the only immigrants ‘who did not become a burden on the State’.38

To the relief of the Jewish community, immigration from eastern Europe did not appear to be under threat, at least for the time being. ‘We have no doubt that Mr Pirow’s assurance will set at rest the minds of many Jews who were becoming anxious lest propaganda and agitation should drive the Government to discriminate against their race,’ noted the South African Jewish Chronicle (hereafter the SAJC).39 But as a cabinet minister, Pirow’s assurance must surely have been a dissembling political ploy, since it is highly unlikely that he was unaware that plans were already in the pipeline to introduce restrictive immigration legislation aimed specifically at eastern European Jews.40

Oswald Pirow (left) in conversation with a member of the diplomatic corps. (courtesy Museum Africa)

For decades calls had been made from many quarters to curtail this immigration, and these had grown increasingly vociferous in the 1920s with the Cape Times leading the way. Driven by its Oxford-educated editor, the pipe-smoking and urbane Basil Kellett (BK) Long, the Cape Town daily persistently advocated curbs on undesirable immigration from countries where ‘western concepts of morality’ were not understood and democratic ideals were unknown.41 The replacement of South Africa’s ‘dominant Nordic Stock of Europeans by a stock of entirely distinct characteristics, dubious quality, and undoubted unsuitability to the economic conditions of the country’ – as the Cape Times put it – was of great concern. Such immigration would have ‘a profound effect upon the whole character of a white population which is initially well under two nations’.42

A new ‘race’ discourse, in which ‘Russians’ and ‘Jews’ joined ‘Orientals’, ‘Africans’, ‘Europeans’, ‘Anglo-Saxons’, ‘English’, ‘Nordics’ and ‘Mediterraneans’ as racial groups, had crept into discussions about Jewish immigration. So-called moral degeneracy already occupied a prominent place in the lexicon of South African eugenicists, and ‘miscegenation’ or ‘cross-breeding’ – primarily associated with Africans – was a fear voiced even by liberal social scientists and philosophers.43 Such fears were encapsulated in the response of the Star, a Johannesburg daily, to a report on immigration by the census director, John Holloway, who in the mid-1920s had identified the influx of impoverished Lithuanian Jews as a major cause for concern. The newspaper referred to the ‘fecundity’ of the newcomers and the impact this would have upon the country’s intellectual and physical development. Such immigration, it contended, would profoundly modify the racial composition of the country and it would be far better to encourage ‘Nordic immigrants’, as the United States had done.44

THE QUOTA ACT

Only days after the South African Party had won the Bethal by-election and reduced the National Party majority in Stellenbosch, and notwithstanding Pirow’s pious pre-election reassurances to the Jewish community, the ‘Pact’ government’s Minister of the Interior,...