Justice and Identity: The ‘Non-Jewish Jew’, Cosmopolitanism and Anti-Apartheid Activism in 20th Century South Africa

(Author: Alana Pugh-Jones, Vol. 65, No. 3, Chanukah 2010)

Introduction

Stretching back into history from the moment Moses raised his hand against the oppressive Egyptian overseer and led his people from slavery into freedom; to the instant that Abraham smashed the morally bankrupt idols of his day and opened his home to the stranger; through the modern revolutionary ideas of Marx and Freud and beyond, Jewish radicalism has emerged as a profoundly powerful force that has weaved itself through the epochs. By drawing on the great humanist and cosmopolitan notions of identity and justice within Judaism, a radical Jewish ideology and worldview has formed a tradition within a tradition. Profoundly motivated by the historical memory of the suffering of their own people throughout the ages, Jewish radicals have eternally sought to overturn the corrupt status quo of the day and transform humankind’s structures of thought.

One such target for reform was the apartheid regime, which oppressed millions of black people based solely on their race and ensured a configuration of power that safeguarded the privileges of a small white minority. Although the community at large enjoyed the fruits of an apartheid economy,a disproportionate number of Jews played a role, either within the system as members of parliament and civil society or illegally through banned organisations, in fighting for a more just South Africa.1 In particular, many Jewish radicals stood up against discrimination and injustice, and dedicated their lives to the fight for an equal nation.

Historiography

Employing Isaac Deutscher’s notion of the ‘non-Jewish Jew’ who transcends Jewry, the objective of this paper will be to attempt to trace and identify the changing intellectual patterns and paradigms operating among South African Jewish radicals in the anti- apartheid struggle, focusing in particular on activists’ notions of their own political identity and influences operating on their activism. By employing the use of primary sources as well as a variety of secondary material, especially memoir literature and interviews, an attempt will be made to explore the influence of ‘Jewishness’and Jewish notions of justice upon the lives of these radicals.

The historiography of radical Jews in South Africa is not the historiography of white settlers, nor is it the history of the oppressed peoples of the country. Yet, in many ways it overlaps with both, and therefore it slips through the cracks. Recently, collections of interviews have been published as the number of those in the immigrant generation of radical politics begins to decline. Immanuel Suttner, in his “collection of portraits” Cutting Through the Mountain, and others have attempted to ‘recanonise’ those Jews whose contribution have gone unnoticed and whose life stories were censored by the state and their own community.2 Personal testimony is indeed a channel through which history may be recovered, and occupies an integral part of South Africa’s healing process, embodied in initiatives such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Today, our traditions of historiography have shifted from those of totalising histories to that of a personalized history, one that was often marginalised in the past.3

In order to assess the role of Jewish identity and notions of justice on radicalism, one must delve into the realm of social history in which individuals, studied in a particular context, are used as a means of exploring a broad range of historical issues.4 South African historians have a role in creating a unified yet multicultural historical memory utilising ‘history from below’. This paper is a humble attempt to contribute to the writing of radical Jewish South African history.

Justice in Judaism

There can be little doubt that the teachings of Judaism place great emphasis on justice.Judaism incorporates a set of values which purports to defend the human spirit, its freedom and creativity, and create a system oforder which fosters a harmonious society.5 The writings of the prophets of Jewish history hold all members of society accountable for the injustices perpetrated against the stranger; widow; and orphan, all of whom symbolise the powerless in society. The mitzvoth or commandments of the Torah exhort one, in the words of Isaiah, to“‘Learn to do good, seek justice, vindicate the victim, render justice to the orphan, take up the grievance of the widow’”.6 The call to uphold and implement justice is the uppermost moral virtue echoed throughout Jewish religious texts.

A hallmark of the Jewish tradition from its origins has been the ceaseless struggle for justice.7 There are two distinct pillars to the essential notion of justice in Judaism: tzedakah (charity) and tikkun olam (repairing the world). The philosophy surrounding these concepts is unique in their universal relevance and forms the basis of a humanist tradition within Judaism that breeds sympathy for the underdog. These concepts are explored here for their power and lasting influence over Jewish thought and action throughout the ages into the modern realm.

The Hebrew word tzedakah has the word tzedekas its root, meaning justice or righteousness.8 In Judaism, charity and righteousness are not merely above and beyond the call of duty; they are indeed fulfilling the demands of justice. The call for justice in Judaism is stated most explicitly in the Torah portion Shoftim (Judges).“Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live, and inherit the land which the Lord your God gives you” Shoftim, 20: 16.9

The Jewish ideal of social action and social justice is also expressed in the Hebrew word Tikkun Olam, or ‘repairing the world’. The principle of tikkun olamhas been seen through out history as integral to Jewish programmes of social action. The kabbalistic ideaof tikkun re presents the idea that the world is profoundly broken and can be fixed only by human activity.10 Judaism is an experiential religion, and places merit not in dogma or ideas, but in actions.

Jewish law and its related social ethics are often drawn from events in Jewish history. It is arguable that this historical memory has a long history of influencing the Jewish notion of justice, which is inextricably linked to the history of Jewish social activism. With the arrival of modernity, the vestigial impact of universal and humanist ideas of tzedakah and tikkun olam, so fundamental to a Jewish conception of justice, persisted, albeit transformed into a secular guise. Justice in the Jewish tradition therefore continued to inform the radical activism of secular Jewish thinkers.

Modernity and Radicalism

From Biblical times, the Jewish tradition has encompassed within its ranks the history of a small but disproportionately influential numberof revolutionaries and radicals who employed the cosmopolitan Jewish values of justice as a base upon which they built a world view that challenged the status quo.11 As we move towards modernity in the 18th Century, religious teaching gradually eroded at the expense of secular currents of thought. The latter increasingly informed Jewish intellectual life as emancipated Jewry began to bask in the sunlight of reason. During this period, Jewish radicals rebelled not just against the unsympathetic gentile world which resentfully gave them citizenship rights or no rights at all, but also from the stifling grip of ghetto life.12 Many Jewish thinkers shed the outward symbols of Judaism and embraced a radical, universal world view through which they could navigate modernity and secure a position within the wider gentile society.

Even though they were divorced from the foundations of the Jewish tradition, it will be argued that their ‘historical memory’ came to form part of a lasting Jewish impact on these figures. This was evident through their recollections of the Yiddish spoken by their parents; or the networks of Ashkenazi relatives that diffused the particular ancient Jewish fears and interpersonal relationships of that community and its culture.13 Suttner argues that this was internalised in their “questioning and in their analytical ability, in their drivenness, in their desire to programmatically implement basic institutions about justice, in the food, music and humour they liked, in their professional aspirations and family dynamics”.14 These radicals therefore were very much a part of the Jewish tradition. As Jews emerged from the seclusion of the ghettos into the wider communities, many took up a transformative role as cultural and political revolutionaries and overturned existing monopolies of thought.15 By spanning various worlds, the Jewish radical was able to break free from the shackles of the ghetto mentality and appropriate the language of the modern world to continue the Jewish tradition into the post-Enlightenment era.16

In this way, the utopian views of these Jewish radicals were a secularization of the Jewish values of tzedakah and tikkun olam. Marxism, it has been argued, is a secularized form of messianism.17 It’s concerns with social justice and the struggle of the oppressed is rooted firmly in the Jewish notions of justice and repairing the world. “In the Jewish demand for action as the benchmark by which the individual is measured can be found the direct predecessor of the Marxist formulation that: ‘The purpose of philosophy is not to interpret the world but to change it’”.18 A disproportionate number of Jews are drawn to radical movements in their search for a modern manifestation of the ancient Jewish longing for the messianic utopia. Marxismis therefore the secularization of the Jewish humanist tradition, a universalized religious position where all enjoy the same inalienable rights –attached to the Jewish belief in the sanctity and value of human life but extending these ideas beyond Jewish particularism.19

Historical awareness of dehumanisation is another aspect of the Jewish tradition which may be the fertile soil in which the conviction that prejudices should be challenged was bred. “[And]their knowledge of themselves as the heirs to a messy, painful and ongoing history of being the devalued ‘other’”,Suttner argues, “made the new dichotomies of communism, like working class and owning class, seem full of hope and possibility”.20 Racism, especially with the rise of ‘scientific racism’ in the late 19th Century that located race in inherently biological factors, could then be escaped if it was placed in light of something that could be overturned, such as economic greed. Socialist ideologies held the promise of a better future, and offered an escape from ‘Jewishness’ into a universalistic paradigm without the disloyalty of conversion. By freeing themselves from communal dogmas,and seeking out a modern, rational basis of human continuity and identity, Jewish activists became bound to a radicalism that secularized Jewish notions of tzedakah and tikkun olam. This view has been explored by many authors and holds much sway in the historiography of Jewish radicals.21

A different form of secularization of Jewish values is also evident in the secularization of interpretations of Jewish history in the 20th Century. Modernity brought with it the effects of economic redistribution, acculturation, and religious and educational reforms.22 Through this process a new historical consciousness began to emerge and exert an important influence in the creation of a modern Jewish identity. The stories and figures of justice in the Torah were appropriated and secularized as figures of morality and justice in the modern world. Jewish intellectuals in the last century wrote of the ‘prophetic tradition’ as influencing Jewish political work, which they identified with their own conception of their role as intellectuals. These radical Jews drew on the historical role of Jews as champions of universal justice, even though these concepts of justice were acknowledged to be the common assets of all mankind in modern times.23

Radical Jews, however universal and opposed to nationalism in their Marxist views,were therefore still in someway Jewish in various aspects of their lives. The dislocation of Jews in society, the historical memory of prejudice against the Jewish people and their sympathy for the underdog as rooted in Jewish values of justice, propelled many such radical intellectuals to seek ground breaking and ‘universalising’ theories. These Marxian ideas echoed many of the values within Judaism to create an ideology of equality which stressed a shared humanity, such as tikkun olam, gemilut chasadim and tzedakah.24 Transforming the values and virtues of the Jewish tradition into a modern key, and fostered by the history of Jews as ‘outsiders’ to Western civilization, the ideologies created from the impact of Emancipation sought a humanized, universal and utopian world.25

The disproportionate involvement of Jews in leftist and communist ideologies was expressed as a deep universalism and cosmopolitanism. It has been argued that radical Jews felt an overwhelming sense of dislocation, which grew increasingly unbearable and resulted in a fierce contempt for racial loyalties. Born in an historical and political world that appeared corrupt and contained the seeds of its own destruction, these revolutionaries sought to smash and rebuild the established society, in the spirit of Abraham and the Jewish Prophets. Ferdin and Mount outlines how industrialization, with its imperatives of modernity, sought to maintain itself through the division of labour; the rational organisation of time; the separation of work and play; and the division between home and workplace.26 The subsequent cultural dislocationof these processes united revolutionary minds and instilled within them autopian longing not for a new world but for one which was lost–autopianism which is arguably the cosmopolitanism of Jewish messianic values and a longing for the world of Jewish culture and value.

The history of the Jewish left raises one of the most basic questions of Jewish history, namely the question of the origins of Jewish radicalism.27 This question debates whether the source of Jewish radicalism is uniquely Jewish or based on external influences. From one perspective, the Jews attraction to socialism derived from an authentic and deeply rooted Jewish tradition of social justice, as articulated by the Biblical prophets.The revolutionary Jewish thinkers of Marxism and Socialism are in this light the true heirs of the Prophets, in spite of their radical secularism and contempt for religion, including Judaism. Ezra Mendelsohn questions whether the conspicuous presence of Jews in communist parties and regimes may be attributed to the traditional Jewish concern of social justice,or the erroneous belief by some Jews that communism could shield them from the antisemitism of ‘nationalism’.28

The ‘Non-Jewish Jew’

Jewish radicals therefore appear to be the bearers of historical memory of the tradition of justice, humanism, cosmopolitanism and empathy with the oppressed within Judaism. These secular and modern Jews appear to be influenced by something Jewish, however tenuous. Here it seems that Deutscher’s notion of the ‘non-Jewish Jew’ is most useful. For Deutscher, the Jewish heretic who moves beyondJewry belongs to a Jewish tradition.29 Throughout history, many Jews have found Jewry too narrow and constraining, and have therefore searched for ideas beyond Judaism. These Jews possessed the key ingredients of Jewish experience and intellect, and emerged on the cusp of great epochs. Dwelling on the borders of great civilisations, they came to represent much of the greatness of “profound upheavals in modern thought” and were influenced by diverse cultures and ideologies. “Each of them”, wrote Deutscher “was in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future”.30 These are the ‘non-Jewish Jews’. With the conditions within which they lived not allowing them to resolve themselves with nationally or religiously limited ideas, ‘non-Jewish Jews’ were thus stirred to work for the universal view of life; humanity; and the world.

Deutscher falls into the tradition of Luxemburg, Trotsky and Freud, eacha ‘non-Jewish Jew’ who, he argues,“was formed amid historic cross-currents”.31 These revolutionaries studied societies from the sidelines and came to grasp the basic regularities of life whilst still conceiving the flux of reality.In this way, the common historical experience of Jewry of being the devalued ‘other’, as well as the fundamental essence of Jewish values with their emphasis on learning and justice, was embedded within the ‘non-Jewish Jew’. The common link between the ‘non-Jewish Jew’and their inherent ‘Jewishness’ as they expanded from the particular to the universal, was the notion of justice –from the justice of the Jewish tradition to the justice of radical philosophies.

At a deeper level the Jewish identity of radical Jews, rather than being negated by their mission, was in fact brought to a higher level of fulfilment. Deutscher asks what makes a Jew.“Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I, therefore, a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish tragedy as my own tragedy; because I feel the pulse of Jewish history”.32 This is the framework within which Jewish radicals in have cast themselves. We will see many of these ideas played out in the lives of the South African Jewish radicals.

Jewish Radicals in South Africa 33

The secularization of Jewish values into universal ideologies in the modern world, as well as the failure of the promises of Emancipation, impacted greatly on the Jewish radicals in South Africa. Before moving into an analysis of the immigrant generation of Jewish radicals, it is necessary to briefly explore the broader political context, and the history of Jewish socialist movements, which influenced and shaped the world of the immigrant ‘non-Jewish Jew’.

The 19th and 20th Centuries witnessed an explosion of radical protest movements. These were based on the essential principle that, “economic exploitation of one class by another is evil”. Mendelsohn describes the way in which Jewish socialism was born in the Russian Pale of Settlement prior to the First World War.34 It was here that the two main factors necessary for the emergence of Jewish socialism existed, “a large, mostly Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class, labouring under extremely oppressive economic conditions, and an acculturated but not necessarily assimilated Jewish intelligentsia influenced by both Russian socialist and Jewish nationalist doctrines”.35

In the 1870s and 1880s the first attempts at formulating Jewish socialist ideologies was made, and the earliest organisations were formed. In this period, the founders of Jewish radicalism were faced with the dilemma of reconciling broad socialist principles with a connection and sensitivity to the unique requirements of the Jewish community. The defining aspect of Jewish socialism from its inception was its international character.36

The first Jewish socialist party,established in 1897 in the Jewish religious and cultural centre of Vilna, was the General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, popularly known as the Bund.37 Mendelsohn describes itas“first and foremost a revolutionary organisation, Marxist in orientation and committed to the doctrine of class struggle. It saw itself as the ‘sole representative’ of the Russian-Jewish working class, whose historical task was to lead the revolutionary struggle within the Jewish community and, hand in hand with the working classes of other nations, topple tsarist despotism and replace it with a classless society”.38 Internationalist in outlook, this organisation was also specifically ‘Jewish’ in orientation, and soon came to establish its own form of Jewish nationalism. With the principle at its core of doikeyt, a Yiddish word referring to Jews staying in their place of residence and fighting for their rights in Eastern Europe, the Bund was fiercely anti-Zionist.

At the dawn of the 20th Century, a variety of Jewish groups began to propose a synthesis of socialism and Zionism which would seek to build a national Jewish home in Palestine,and simultaneously establish in the new and old motherland a socialist society based on a Jewish agricultural working class.39

The radical immigrant generation in South Africa, however, was also moulded by processes and influences unique to their specific location and experiences, and these must be addressed for a greater insight into their world. In the early decades of the last Century, most Jewish immigrants to South Africa were working class and many had previously been exposed to socialist ideas in their country of origin, often by the Bund.

Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn grapple with the importance of migration on the ‘South African Jewish Experience’. They state that,“As a community built essentially upon the great wave of Jewish migration from Lithuania in the four decades prior to the First World War, that experience, including the cultural baggage brought by the newcomers, cannot be ignored in the shaping of their new identity and their behaviour in the new country”.40 James Campbell introduces the role of “changing Jewish settlement patterns, class formation, experiences of work and leisure, and perhaps most importantly, about immigrant family life”.41 He underlines the impact of migration, its consequent disruption and alienation, by stating that“South Africa’s celebrated Jewish radicalism”, may be, “a function of historically specific processes of dislocation and conflict”.42 Gideon Shimoni understands Jewish radical activism in the immigrant generation as primarily a sociological factor of, “marginality or outsider status in relation to established elites and interests of white South African society compounded by alienation from Jewish religion and the normative life of the Jewish community”.43

Glenn Frankel writes that the radical activists of South Africa were schooled in dialectical materialism and sought Marxist principles – classic ‘non-Jewish Jews’; they did not deny their ethnic origins but treated them as irrelevant in contrast to the principles of universalism and socialist utopia.44 Far from examples of self-hatred, these activists were, according to Frankel, immersed in a tradition with a long Jewish history, in which the universal subsumed particularism and religion was seen as an atavistic nationalism.45

The radical ‘non-Jewish Jews’ of South Africa thus had a sense of ‘Jewishness’ and a conception of justice that was deeply rooted in the Eastern European Jewish immigrant milieu. As Iris Berger writes, this band of Jewish radicals, “tended to express their Jewish identity less in religious observance than through their secular commitment to ‘repairing the world’ through struggles for social justice”.46 Their ‘Jewishness’, in this light, is therefore connected to the extensive Jewish tradition of humanism, empathy for the oppressed and cosmopolitanism. These radicals secularised and universalised the Jewish values of social justice, tikkun olam and tzedakah, and brought them into modernity within the context of a racially divided and prejudiced South Africa.

The radicals briefly explored in the pages that follow were chosen for their lasting influence on South African political history, their role in the anti-apartheid struggle and their international reputation as protectors of justice. Their lives have many discontinuities, but there are also fundamental continuities that link their identities and actions.

Sense of ‘Jewishness’

Emerging from a conventional Jewish childhood,with many such as Ray Alexander and Rowley Arenstein graduating from cheyder, radical Jews of the immigrant generation were exposed to justice in the Jewish tradition from a very early age.47 All imbued a strong sense of ‘Jewishness’, with many, such as Pauline Podbrey, Baruch Hirson and Ronnie Kasrils, even casting their identity and social activism in the mould of the Jewish Prophets. Simultaneously infused with the world and concerns of Eastern European secular Yiddish culture and the radical world of Jewish socialism and communism, these Jews were schooled in critical thinking and universal concerns from the start. Alexander, Arenstein, Slovo and Podbrey all cite the lasting impact of antisemitism in the ghetto on their sympathy for the underdog48, and even a later generation of radicals born in South Africa, such as Taffy Adler, Albie Sachs and Kasrils, describe the enormous imprint the historical memory of the suffering of their parents made upon their lives.49

One example of this is Slovo, who had a consciousness of being Jewish from an early age and grew up in the Yiddish ghetto community of Obel, Lithuania. Slovo describes his sense of ‘Jewishness’ as derived from the humanist notions of Judaism, once stating that his “pedigree is not unconnected with Jewishness and even Zionism”.50 Experiences in the village ghetto; the Jewish Workers Club in Doornfontein; and even membership of the Zionist-Marxist Jewish youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, were all highlighted as formative moments in Slovo’s life. Indeed, he believed that it was only as a result of emerging from a ghetto-community steeped in ‘chauvinism’ that Slovo truly came to understand and ultimately discard religious bigotry.51

For a radical like Arenstein, a Jewish identity also meant a life of struggling against prejudice.“We were taught, you can’t say man is just man. From an early date I learned that man was not just an individual, but a social man. Without society he was nothing. So, that taught me that one must fight for the rights of people”.52 In turn, ‘Jewishness’ for Hirson was linked to the struggles of the past, and the triumph of surviving the perils of prejudice.53

Many of the essential vestiges of Eastern European shtetl culture were disseminated into Adler’s generation for, despite the grim poverty and small-mindedness of shtetl life, it was the positive characteristics of interdependence and inclusive interactions between family and friends that were reproduced in the South African framework.54 This pedigree of the‘ Jewish immigrant’ brand of revolutionary activity ensured that radicals like Adler were also inducted into the Communist family, and that the spirit of this generation was also immersed in the vestiges of the ‘Old World’. This Jewish radicalism was a theme that Adler identifies as evident throughout the generations and “even into South Africa”.55

Although childhood exposure to, and connection with, religiosity differed greatly among these radicals, from the deeply religious Podbrey to Kasrils, who was irreligious even as a very young child, it is apparent that the historical memory of the notions of tikkun olam, tzedakah and a concern for the oppressed was fused with a profound sense of ‘Jewishness’. Whether learnt in cheyder, in the case of Arenstein and Alexander, or revealed through stories of Biblical heroes, as told to Turok and Adler, these Jews all operated in the Eastern European Jewish environment, which combined Jewish identity with radicalism and identified itself with some aspect of the Jewish tradition. In recollecting either their own personal suffering, or the tribulations of their parents generation, they also carried with them the vestigial impact of the distress of Jewish people as the prejudiced ‘other’ in society. It is arguably this burden, or blessing, as well as the sense of ‘Jewishness’ bound in Jewish notions of social activism and justice for all, that motivated radical Jews in South Africa to fight against the racism of apartheid.

Seeking Justice

Whether in the case of Alexander, making the parallels between antisemitism and apartheid, or like Podbrey watching her mother feed a poor black man only to be greeted by the neighbours’ shock, Jewish radicals all felt that their Jewish moral and social heritage inculcated within them a need to fight oppression.56 As Podbrey states, “The role of the Jew in historyis … the need to fight for freedom, to demand justice, to oppose oppression”.57 The political debates in Raymond Suttner and Ben Turok’s homes, as well as the lessons of the Holocaust which stayed with Kasrils, added to the working class experience of most of these activists who took the Biblical injunction to love your fellow as yourself to heart. These described in their own autobiographies a sensitivity todiscrimination, linked to the radical traditions of justice within Judaism and its secularised counterpart in the form of Marxist theory, that obliged them to act against apartheid.

Emerging from the heart of this Eastern European immigrant world, this band of Jewish radicals,“tended to express their Jewish identity less in religious observance than through their secular commitment to ‘repairing the world’ through struggles for social justice”.58 The ‘non-Jewish Jews’ of South Africa put the Jewish concern for the universal struggles of the underdog around the world into action by embracing a sense of ‘Jewishness’ in terms of the tradition of rebelling against a corrupt status quo.

Cosmopolitanism and Anti-Zionism

This obligation was based on a secular understanding of justice in Judaism, expressed largely as Marxist and radical theory in modern times, which was informed by a cosmopolitanism or universal concern for struggles non-Jewish. Alexander was concerned with the social and political concerns ofpeople around the world, “Because I felt that I belong to the world. I’m an internationalist, which is true”.59 Belonging to the world shows her secularization and universalization of the Jewish concepts which identify with society’s vulnerable: tikkun olam or making the world right, and tzedakah or charity and righteousness. Like Deutscher’s ‘non-Jewish Jew’, Alexander takes these ideas and extends them from the particular to the universal.

As evinced by Alexander’s refusal to debate the Balfour Declaration at a school function,60 or at Slovo’s empathy to Palestinians, this feeling of obligation was rooted in, and in turn deepened, an ambiguous attitude towards the State of Israel and Zionism, or Jewish nationalism.61 As radicals, these Jews stood against ethnic particularism and therefore the notion of a Jewish state; but many, such as Podbrey, retained sufficient ‘Jewishness’ to feel some links to Israel. Kasrils and others note the tension between the particular and the universal within Jewish identity and all looked to Marxism as a means of social action.62

Therefore, despite the clear ‘Jewishness’ of the Jewish radicals of South Africa, the latter were universalists and concerned with the underdog everywhere. In rejecting ethnicity and nationalism, they became wholly concerned with injustice to the downtrodden, and in the case of Israel, the Palestinian people.

Conclusion

Throughout history, Jewry has encompassed a number of radical individuals who sought to overturn the corrupt status quo of their day. Within these rebels,however, is something innately ‘Jewish’ – in their conceptions of justice, their humanist values and ultimately, their universal concern for the underdog. The vestigial impact of the historical memory of the discrimination of their own people profoundly influenced these radicals and motivated them to revolutionary action.

With the coming of modernity and the failure of the promise of Emancipation to integrate Jews as equals into society, many Jews rebelled against outward symbols of ‘Jewishness’ and secularized and universalized Jewish values into revolutionary ideologies. These new philosophies, such as Marxism, focused on Jewish notions of cosmopolitanism, sympathy for the underdog and the creation of a messianic utopia.The ‘Non-Jewish Jews’ that emerged were therefore in society but not in it and found the narrow confines of Judaism too restricting and sought to move beyond it.

This paper has endeavoured to illustrate the ways in which the legacy of radical ‘Jewishness’played itself out in the lives of the Jewish radicals of South Africa who were immersed in the anti-apartheid struggle. The immigrant generation of radicals, such as Alexander, Podbrey and Slovo, born into the poverty of the Eastern European shtetl and the prejudice of the Eastern European areas, are in many ways poles apart from the generation of South African-born activists, like Adler, Kasrils and Coleman among others, who came from middle-class professional families and enjoyed the privileges of white apartheid South Africa. The radicalism of the former was stirred dramatically by their socialist surroundings and raw personal experiences of antisemitism, alienation and dislocation. The latter were touched by events around the world, such as the Holocaust and the Eichmann Trial, and came to a personal realisation, through a sympathetic identification with the oppressed, that they could not be truly free in a society where others were denied justice.63 Ultimately, however, a continuous thread weaved itself through the lives of these radicals and drew them together was their deep commitment to the cosmopolitan and humanist values of justice, as embodied in the Jewish tradition. This was in turn the embodiment of their sense of ‘Jewishness’, a conception of their identity rooted in the notions of tzedakah, tikkun olam and the vestigial impact of historical memory. Together these notions acted as a ‘subtle catalyst’ (in Suttner’s words) throughout their lives and propelled them into a world of resistance against apartheid. Suttner keenly observes that above all, the single most obvious commonality amongst these radicals was their role as ‘shaker-uppers’ in South African society.64

It has been argued that these ‘non-Jewish Jews’ embodied the Jewish tradition in which words become actions. Rather than disowning their ‘Jewishness’, they brought Jewish values to a higher fulfilment by extending notions of justice beyond the parochial. If being Jewish, as Suttner asserts, “means being compassionate and having the willingness to nurture and create”, many of the ‘non-Jewish Jews’ in this thesis were in fact Jews in the deepest Talmudic sense.

Notes

1. Immanuel Suttner, (1997), Cutting Through the Mountain –Interviews with South African Jewish Activists. (South Africa: Viking), p2
2. Ibid., drawing on cover commentary
3. Maya Ruth Scholtz, (1999), Mervyn Susser and Zena Stein: Pioneers in Community Health and their Jewish identity as an orienting factor in their contribution (Durban: University of Natal Press), p 5
4. Ibid., p2
5. See Rabbi Dr Warren Goldstein, (2006), Defending the Human Spirit: Jewish Law’s Vision for a Moral Society (Israel: Feldheim Publishers), drawing on page 8
6. Ibid., p177
7. M. Becher, (2005),Gateway to Judaism: The What, How, and Why of Jewish Life (Shaar Press), p356
8. Ibid., p357
9. Cited in A. Kahn, (2000), ‘Shoftim: Justice Justice’. Found at: http://www.aish.com/torahportion/moray/Justice3_Justice.asp, accessed 27/ 11/ 2006
10. Ibid
11. Within Judaism, many scholars see two contradictory traditions working simultaneously –a particularist exclusivity and a universal cosmopolitanism. See, S. Lundgren, (2001): Particularism and Universalim in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: Academic Studies in the History of Judaism, Global Publications). Radical Jewry would fit into the cosmopolitan tradition that exists within Judaism.
12. Paul Johnson, (1987), A History of the Jews (Great Britain: Weidenfeld and Nicolson), p340
13. Suttner, p601
14. Ibid
15. The impact of the Emancipation on Jewry, and the subsequent failure of its promise to Jews for socio-political and economic equality as citizens in a secular nation-state, is seen by many historians as the reason for modern Jewish radicalism. The argument of the ‘Ordeal of Civility’, a phrase coined by John M. Cuddihy to describe the shock of Emancipation experienced by Jews, is a viewpoint expounded upon by Ferdinand Mount as the confrontation between the traditional Jewish world and the modern secular paradigm. From this perspective, it was the impact of the Emancipation and its clinical world of the Capitalist ethic that made some Jews create revolutionary ‘structures of thought’ that would overturn the status quo of the times.
16. For Cuddihy, revolutionary structures of thought of post-emancipation Jewish origin have a double audience, addressing the Jews in order to bring about their reform as well asthe gentile world as a way of apology for, and defence of, Jewry. Radical ideologies created by Jewish intellectuals can be seen as ideologiesof redemption in the modern world. Cuddihy sees Jewish thought on‘dedifferentiation’ as transformingthe struggles faced by newly emancipated Jewry into ‘scientific problems’, thereby making Jewry less disreputable. This phenomenon created a disproportionate number of radical Jews who were the modern symbols of a legacy extending back to the time of the Hebrew prophets, who criticised the world around them and sought tobring about a perfected future for humankind.
17. See Suttner, Cutting Through the Mountain, and ‘The Passion of the Jews’ (1975) in Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4, Summer. Found at: www.jstor.org, accessed 21/09/2006
18. Suttner, p604
19. Ibid, p605
20. Ibid, p601
21. The rise of Jewish socialist movements may also be highlighted as a continuous thread of the Jewish tradition –not only as the heir to the Jewish religious notions of social activism and justice, but to the Jewish tradition of poverty and ‘outsider’ status in the Diaspora. Both these forces can be seen to have united and created the growth of Jewish radical movements and attest to its influence of the Jewish tradition. See, Suttner, Cutting Through the Mountain, and Ezra Mendelsohn, (1997), ‘Introduction’ in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left (USA: New York University Press)
22. M. Meyer, (1988), ‘The Emergence of Jewish Historiography: Motives and Motifs’ in History and Theory, Vol. 27, No. 1, Beiheft 27: Essays in Jews Historiography, December. Found at: www.jstor.org, accessed 17/3/2007, p160
23. Jonathan Rosenblum, ‘Hostile to Israel’, www.aish.com/societyWork/society/Hostile_to_Israel.asp, 2007, accessed 18/3/07,
24. According to Mount, being born on the fringe of a great culture, a ‘borderline case’ in one sense or another; showing contempt for particularistic patriotism; and an ancestry of ‘borderers’, are all factors that most revolutionaries have in common. These assertions aptly describe the location of Jews in society throughout the ages and may well explain why Jews are disproportionately represented on the left and how the Jewish tradition informed Jewish radicals.
25. For assimilating Jewry at the end of the 19th Century, each day brought veiled transformations and problems of ‘civility’ in the world of strangers. As Jews moved ‘beyond the pale’ at the time of Emancipation, they were exposed to the individualistic and ceremonial modernity of the West, and found their shtetl Yiddishkeit philosophy to be lacking. This came to reconstitute the ‘Jewish Emancipation problematic’ in social modernity. The problems of assimilation into Western ‘bourgeois’ manners created the need for Jewish intellectuals to define a neutral social space in their ideologies, in which the common human experience would constitute equality between human beings. In the ‘culture shock’ resulting from Jewish emancipation; assimilation; and modernization, the Jewish intellectual became caught between ‘his own’ and the ‘host culture’. The great discoveries of Jewish intellectuals, such as Freud, Marx and Levi-Strauss, is thus seen by Cuddihy and others as attempts to deal with this continuing and unsuccessful ‘hidden transformation’.
26. Ferdinand Mount, (1977), ‘Revolutionaries –Their Mind, Body and Soul’ in Encounter, Vol. XLIX, p69
27. Mendelsohn, (1997), Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, p15
28. Ibid.
29. Isaac Deutscher, (1968), The Non-Jewish Jews and Other Essays (London: Oxford Univ. Press), p26
30. Ibid, p27
31. Ibid, p30
32. ‘The Passion of the Jews’, (1975) in Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4, Summer. Found at: www.jstor.org,, pp166-7
33. For a fuller examination of the autobiographical writings of the Jewish radicals mentioned in this paper, and a detailed analysis of their thoughts on radicalism in the Jewish tradition, see my full thesis at the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies & Research, Justice and Identity: The ‘Non-Jewish Jew’, Cosmopolitanism and Anti-Apartheid Activism in Twentieth Century South Africa(2008)
34. Mendelsohn, p1
35. Ibid, p2
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid, ‘Introduction’, drawing on pages 3 to 4
38. bid, p3
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid, p8
41. J. Campbell, (2000), ‘‘Beyond the Pale’: Jewish Immigration and the South African Left’ in (eds) Shain, M. and Mendelsohn, R, (2000), Memories, Realities and Dreams: Aspects of the South African Jewish Experience (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers), p99
42. Ibid., ‘Introduction’ by M. Shain and R. Mendelsohn, p11
43. Ibid, Gideon Shimoni, ‘Accounting for Jewish radicals in Apartheid South Africa’: Jewish Immigration and the South African Left’, p185
44. Milton Shain and Sally Frankental, (1993), ‘Accommodation, Apathy and Activism: Jewish Political behaviour in South Africa’ in Jewish Quarterly, Spring, p7
45. Glen Frankel, (1999), Rivonia’s Children (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers), drawing on concluding chapter
46. Iris Berger, (2004), ‘Introduction’ in Alexander, Ray, All My Life and All My Strength (Johannesburg: STE Publishers), p7
47. Suttner, drawing on p24
48. Ibid, p230
49. Baruch Hirson, (1995), Revolutions in My Life (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press), p13
50. Suttner, p223
51. Ibid, p224
52. Ibid,p374
53. Hirson, p13
54. Ibid, p12
55. Ibid, p9
56. Pauline Podbrey, (1993), White Girl in Search of the Party
57. Suttner, p64
58. Berger, ‘Introduction’, p7
59. Suttner, p44
60. Ibid, p27
61. Ibid, p243
62. Ibid, p281
63. Ibid, p597
64. Ibid, p598

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