(Author: Peter Arnold, Volume 79, #1, Winter 2024)
- Feature image: A group of Jewish refugees in Australia, 1948
“Jews in Israel and the Diaspora. Jews in England and South Africa and Australia. Where do we belong…truly belong?”
While I was preparing for this talk, I was reading James Shapiro’s book, Shakespeare and the Jews. It is thus quite serendipitous that I have been asked to say something about the Jews in England, because that is the essence of Shapiro’s book. He has gone to great lengths to discover how the English perceived Jews before, during and after Shakespeare’s time. He demonstrates that, despite Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews in 1290, there were still some Jews in England throughout the next few centuries until Cromwell’s welcome back in 1656. What Shapiro shows so clearly are the absolutely weird ideas which the English had about Jews at the time Shakespeare’s plays were produced, ideas which undoubtedly influenced the way in which Marlowe and Shakespeare portrayed them.
It is clear that all the old libels about Jews were alive and well in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. The question of whether Jews could be English citizens, or were obliged to remain ‘aliens’, ‘foreigners’ or ‘strangers’ was also very much alive until well into the 19th century. Were Jews to be given the protection of the law as it protected Englishmen? As Shakespeare shows so well in The Merchant of Venice, the law was interpreted in whichever way it would most disadvantage Jews. The Venice of the play, as Shapiro points out, is a thinly disguised London.
A century after Cromwell, in 1753, the “Jew Bill”, allowing Jews to become naturalized without taking the Christian Sacrament, was passed by the Parliament in April, only to be rescinded in November that same year. It was not until a century later that Baron Lionel de Rothschild was allowed to take a seat in the Parliament without taking a Christian oath.
Things improved over the next century, so that, by the time I was born in London shortly before WWII, I automatically gained British citizenship, despite both my parents being South African Jews. I do know, however, that the antisemitism of England even at that time, loudly espoused by Oswald Mosley and his ilk, was sufficient for my father to feel obliged to change his name from Amoils to Arnold. Today Jews sit in both houses of Parliament and an openly practising Jew was, until recently, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
Let’s look at identity first
This is, of course, an age-old question, faced by Jews since the destruction of the First Temple and the start of the diaspora. Are we Jews first, and citizens of a country in the diaspora second, or are we citizens first and Jews second? Am I now an Australian Jew or a Jewish Australian?
In a paper, “Who do I think I am?” published in the Kosher Koala, newsletter of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society, I traced my roots back through genealogical time, historical time, Biblical time and, ultimately, prehistoric time.
My DNA shows that my earliest ancestors originated in the area which is now Pakistan. Their descendants moved to Judea, and, in turn, theirs were taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar and re-settled near the eastern borders of his empire. They followed their trades along the silk route, until pogroms by Muslims and Mongols forced them to flee northeast, through what is now Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Ukraine and Belarus, and finally into a welcoming Lithuania. The earliest record I have of them in Lithuania is around 1730.
At the age of 30, my grandfather left Lithuania for South Africa, where my father was born. When my father was 30, he was studying in London, where I was born. In 1939, with a new non-Jewish surname, my father returned to South Africa, where I lived for 22 years before coming to Australia, and where I have lived for the past 47 years.
Last year, I went with my wife and youngest daughter to Lithuania. As all of our ancestors were shtetl people. We visited around a dozen shtetlach. Almost nothing has changed. Our guide was able to point out that some of the houses would have been the very houses our grandparents had lived in.
So that brings me to the question of identity. Who do I think I am? This was a tricky problem when we had to fill out the 2006 census form. What nationality were our ancestors? My wife and I were both apprehensive about answering ‘Lithuanian’. But what choice did we have?
We certainly don’t identify with the Lithuanians. To answer ‘Jewish Lithuanian’ would have puzzled the Australian Bureau of Statistics. They were not asking about religion. But, considering how much of the killing was done by local Lithuanians during the Nazi occupation, to answer ‘Lithuanian’ didn’t sit comfortably. Although, by virtue of my birth in London, my red British passport enables me to travel through the EU with a simple wave to the immigration officials, I certainly do not feel that I am British. I left there even before I could speak.
Am I, or was I, a South African?
In that racially stratified society, with Afrikaners at the top and black Africans at the bottom, we Jews were in the third or fourth layer, after the English-speaking non-Jewish. I say third or fourth because the Portuguese Catholics, from what is now Angola and Mozambique, being Christians, might have been ahead of us. Certainly, the Calvinist Afrikaners had little time for either the Catholics (‘the Roman danger’) or the Jews.
Did I feel South African? I can best answer that by saying that I loathed the Afrikaans language, forced on us by an Afrikaner teacher who was an ardent supporter of the Nationalist government and of apartheid. Added to that, I knew no Afrikaners during my school days. My primary school years (through WWII) were as a boarder with the Catholic Marist Brothers, not the sort of school Afrikaners would attend, and my high school was English-medium, so again, no Afrikaners. Even at my English-speaking medical school, there were hardly any. So I certainly didn’t identify with the Afrikaners.
As for the English-speaking non-Jews, there were, of course, a number at both my schools, but with Johannesburg’s being such a very Jewish city, I had no friends amongst them. By the time I finished high school at 16, four years after the Nationalist Party came into power, I had decided to emigrate. Many of my classmates felt the same way, so we chose to study the exportable professions: medicine, dentistry, architecture and engineering.
Although I was involved, but always within the law, in the student protests against apartheid, even earning a dossier at the Bureau of State Security (aptly nicknamed BOSS), I knew that I would be leaving immediately after graduation, which I did.
So I can say, without hesitation, that I never identified as being a South African. Of course, my accent gives me away as someone who has lived there for some time. Do other Jews living in South Africa identify as South Africans? That is a personal question which each would have to answer for themselves. But to judge by the number who have emigrated since 1948, I would suspect that the identification is fairly tenuous, able to be ruptured quite easily by an offer of employment overseas. As much as Jews were a minority in ‘white’ South Africa under the apartheid regime, the diminished numbers today are much more of a minority under the African National Congress regime.
Do I now identify as an Australian?
During my 47 years here, I have contributed in many ways through my deep involvement in diverse medical organisations, culminating in Chairmanship of the Federal Council and State President of the Australian Medical Association and Deputy President of the NSW Medical Board. I have also paid my taxes. And I carry an Australian passport for countries other than the EU.
On the downside, I do not drink beer, watch football or follow the cricket or tennis. Whenever Australian sporting teams compete, I always want them to win. Always? No, not always. I think that it’s a good thing for Australia to lose occasionally, so when the Aussies play New Zealand, I am keen to see New Zealand win.
Now for the $64 question: am I a Jewish Australian or an Australian Jew? Or put it another way: in a sporting competition between Australian and Israeli teams, which would I wish to see win? As one of the respondents to our survey put it, a draw would do just fine!
Belonging
As for belonging, I can answer easily for my 22 years of life in South Africa. Unequivocally, I did not belong. My mother did, having grown up Afrikaans-speaking on an ostrich farm. My father probably did, too, having been born there and living there for 50 years, including six years in the army. With my antipathy towards the Afrikaner government and my dislike of the language, I certainly did not belong in the Afrikaans segment of the population, the top layer.
Being a Jew, I did not belong to the second layer of English-speaking non-Jews. They didn’t welcome Jews to their schools or in their clubs. Being a non-observant Jew who had no interest in making aliyah, I did not belong in a Jewish population which was dominated by active Zionists. Nor did South African Jewry take any pride in those Jews who stood up against apartheid. They did not want us drawing attention to ourselves. “Keep your head down and your mouth shut” was the message of the rabbis and the Jewish organisations.
Naturally, I did not belong within any of the ‘non-white’ layers of South African society. In summary, I had no feeling of belonging in South Africa: my roots were shallow and the soil not conducive to my liberal way of thinking.
Do I feel that I belong in Australia?
Before answering that question, I’ll put it into perspective. I did not migrate here for my own sake, but for the sake of my future children. All born and educated in Sydney, they belong totally. My daughters have married born and bred Aussies, whose Australian families stretch back many generations. In that way, my migration goal has been an unqualified success.
I think that the question of my own belonging is far less important. One cannot arrive in a country as an adult and expect to soak up what native-born Australians take for granted. In the sense of making a contribution to Australian society, I believe that I have done that. Perhaps the clearest indication of my belonging was the occasion, when sitting in the departure lounge at Los Angeles airport, the QANTAS flight crew walked past to board the plane and I heard those welcome Aussie accents for the first time in some weeks of travel.
But every Jew has, I think, to make a rapprochement with Israel and Zionism. Unlike many of my cousins, I was never an ardent Zionist, willing to make aliyah. To have to practise my profession in a foreign language was daunting. Short of being forced into doing so, it was not my preferred way of practising my wished-for profession.
There was a secondary reason, and to explain this one, I have to ask you to go back in time to 1961, when apartheid was at its peak. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, I doubt that there was anyone who did not strongly believe that South Africa was heading for a bloody revolution. I was not willing to have my future children raised in South Africa, when the future looked so bleak and bloody. Nor did I want them to grow up in Israel, which was, and still is, in a state of war with its neighbors. I did not want them to be in a position where they, or their loved ones, could be killed in yet another war or in a terrorist atrocity.
Having visited Lithuania, I can now identify with the shtetlach from which my family originated. Of course, they are all now judenfrei, but I could at least satisfy my curiosity about the streets and the houses where they lived more than a century ago. There is, of course, no nostalgia.
I have never returned to South Africa, despite being offered a free trip on Medical Board business. I certainly have no nostalgia for that country, which I loathed so intensely.
As for belonging in Australia, yes absolutely. I have been lucky to have been able to contribute to Australian society. In fact, despite being retired, I still contribute occasionally to periodicals and journals. My contribution to medical affairs here now spans 40 years. If that isn’t belonging, I don’t know what is.
But ‘being accepted’ is the obverse of the coin of ‘belonging’. To some of us, being accepted by the wider, non-Jewish world is important, and we aspire to that. To others of us, it is of little moment whether we are or not. But just how fully can we be accepted if we persist in following in the ways of Shylock, as Shakespeare accurately describes them in Act I, Scene 3, when Shylock is invited to have a meal with Bassanio and Antonio: “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.”
Here I think we can learn from Shakespeare the thinker. Inasmuch as we Jews vary enormously in our religious observance, from the ultra-orthodox through to humanist Jews, so I suggest that we need to acknowledge that our acceptance by others does depend on how observant or flexible each of us is in our individual lifestyle. Some of us might pray, at an interfaith gathering, with non-Jews. Some of us will eat and drink with non-Jews; but the truly observant amongst us, those who are glat kosher and shomer Shabbat will not eat with the others. To that extent, our acceptance as fellow Australians is necessarily limited.
Lastly, a few words about the book written by Colin Tatz, Gillian Heller and me. Our book had two origins. Colin Tatz knew of the work being done at the Kaplan Centre in Cape Town on the migration of Lithuanian and Latvian Jews from the Pale of Settlement to South Africa. He was keen to study the ‘re-migration’ of the children and grandchildren of those migrants as they began to leave South Africa after the 1948 election of the Nationalist government. Colin’s approach was basically from a Jewish standpoint.
My approach was different. I had, for many years, chaired the registration committee of the NSW Medical Board and been involved in national discussions on the registration of foreign medical graduates. I was keenly aware of the large numbers of South African Jewish doctors coming here. I was also aware of the dentists, accountants, engineers, teachers, entrepreneurial businessmen and, to a lesser extent, lawyers. What struck me was that this was a unique mass migration for Australia.
While Australia obviously has a long history of mass migrations of English-speaking immigrants, and a shorter history (since World War II) of mass migrations of European professionals, this is the only mass migration of English-speaking professionals. These South Africans are people, not only mostly with recognised qualifications, but with the language to enable them to commence working in their professions almost immediately on landing.
Not only is this Australian immigration historically unique, but it is unlikely ever to be repeated, as there is now no country with large numbers of English-speaking professionals who are likely to emigrate. It is this uniqueness which intrigued me, such that I felt that it ought to be chronicled. My approach was basically from an Australian standpoint. We had some very welcome financial support from the Kaplan Centre in Cape Town, which enabled us to end up with a rather handsome book. At the outset, however, a book was far from our minds. We designed, with the help of Professor Sol Encel and Donna Sheiman, a market researcher in Melbourne, a questionnaire containing 66 questions. Colin and I decided that the only practical way to handle all the data was electronic and so decided to conduct our survey through e-mail. We then started a hunt for e-mail addresses of ex-South African Litvaks. We e-mailed those forty or so whom we knew and asked them to forward our e-mail to others. Our ‘snowball’ technique eventually yielded 608 responses to our e-mailed questionnaire. By that time, we had found Professor Gillian Heller, a statistician at Macquarie University, who kindly offered to help to analyse the data. She would have been satisfied with a sample of 500, and so was delighted to have more than 600. The e-mail format had none of the space limitations of paper, thus enabling our respondents to write as much as they liked.
I de-identified all the responses and forwarded to Gillian a spreadsheet which she could then analyse and cross correlate, with the result which you can see in the many tables and splendid graphs in the book. By this time, Colin felt that we could not simply produce our findings without setting them in context. And so our simple survey started its transformation into a book. I handled all the questionnaires; Gillian did all the statistical analysis and Colin did the writing. Gillian and I checked everything Colin wrote, Gillian ensuring that the Johannesburg bias was corrected, and that Cape Town and other communities received due attention, and I did the editing.
With the book having originated from two different perspectives, it should be no surprise that there are two different, but related, messages. Colin, the political scientist and historian, has identified that the South African Litvaks who have come to Australia have brought the shtetl with them – the shtetl from which their grandparents originated. Although this suggestion has been controversial, we substantiate it with reference to the contributions of these Litvaks to Australian Jewish communities. Ours is, intentionally, no glory book. We catalogue no individual achievements. We do, however, use the stories our respondents have told us to illustrate generalities about the migration.
Gillian’s analysis of the facts revealed that, whatever our respondents might have told us about their personal reasons for leaving South Africa, possibly filtered through one or more decades of life in Australia, there were a number of waves of migration (see table, below) which correlated, not only with specific and significant political events in South Africa, but with official statistics kept both here and in South Africa. The election of the Nationalist government in 1948 triggered the first wave; the Sharpeville massacre the second; the 1976 Soweto riots the third; the states of emergency during the 1980s and wars on the borders of the former Portuguese East and West Africa the fourth; and the imminent release from gaol of Nelson Mandela the last.
The data reveal the trend, over three generations, towards professionalisation. A population of Yiddish speaking small traders, basically educated only in Talmud and the commentaries, has metamorphosed, over the next two generations, into an English-speaking group of whom almost three-quarters have professions or academic qualifications. And it is Australia which has been a principal beneficiary.
My wish, in undertaking the survey, was to chronicle this unique immigration into Australia, to gather information from a valid sample of the immigrants and to see how they had integrated into Australian society. The more interesting study, for some future researcher, will be to see that has happened with the next generation, with the children of these immigrants. What impact, if any, are they having on Australian society, and how is Australia affecting them? Will the next generation, and the generation of my grandchildren, feel at home in Australia, or will they feel what the Jews in England felt in previous centuries: that they are perceived as aliens, foreigners or strangers?
Dr Peter Arnold is a retired medical practitioner in Australia, where inter alia he served as Chairman of the Federal Council and State President of the Australian Medical Association. With Colin Tatz and Gillian Heller, he is the co-author of Worlds Apart: The Re-migration of South African Jews (2007). This article has been adapted from an address given at the Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival, 2008.
