South African Jews in World War I

South African Jewry’s participation in the war is well illustrated by S G Cohen in his account of Durban Jewry’s involvement (‘A History of the Jews of Durban, 1825-1918’, MA thesis). Chapter 10 describes the part played in many capacities by the Jewish institutions and individuals in Durban’s war effort, presenting in their totality an impressive story of involvement both by individuals and by the community as whole. It may be assumed with confidence that the Durban story was paralleled by what happened elsewhere in South Africa. Indeed, there are occasional references in the Jewish press that Jewish communal life and its requirements were being subordinated to what one writer described as “their [Jews’] usual excess of patriotism” (S Lennox Loewy, Zionist Record, February, 1915) and there were also occasional complaints that support for specific Jewish fund-raising efforts was falling off because of the preoccupation by Jews with the general war needed of the country. The unquestioned obligation for Jews, as citizens, to stand by the country and its government was voiced by, amongst others, Chief Rabbi J L Landau. Addressing a military service in Johannesburg’s Great Synagogue, he declared that it was in Great Britain alone that Jews freely followed the call of the flag without any State compulsion, impelled only “by the thought that no country is better deserving of their sacrifice of blood, and that in no other Empire is the Jew more sure to receive due and full recognition as an active agent in the political drama”.

On Active Service

The sole Jewish Chaplain in the German East campaign was Col Israel Levenson. At the Chanukah service on the second anniversary of the war in the Great Synagogue (Star, 4 August, 1916), Rabbi Landau quoted from a letter he had received from him, in which he wrote, “I am pleased and proud to be able to say that our Jews, in whatever capacity they may be, combatant or not combatant, have behaved in an exemplary manner. If two or more capable and conscientious men had been sent out with me to minister to their needs there would have been enough for them to do and to spare. It does make me feel sad when I go into the tents of chaplains of other denominations and find them stocked with all sorts of comforts for their flock, whereas I have absolutely nothing”. Col. Levenson noted that one official estimate “from a fairly reliable source” gave the number of Jewish soldiers in East Africa as 1980. When World War II broke out, Levenson held the position of principal Jewish Chaplain for the initial period.

Possibly because of difficulties of communication from the distant war front, there is little descriptive material in the contemporary Jewish press of how Jewish soldiers were faring. One of the exceptions is a letter in the Zionist Record of 15 January 1917 from David Ordman (later to become a well-known senior member of the staff of the SA Medical Research Institute). Forwarding a list of a few Jewish fellows on active service in East Africa, he wrote that these men formed “a comparatively large proportion of their respective regiments”. That South African Jews had answered the call “with as much enthusiasm as their fellow citizens” was evidenced, Ordman said, by the numbers of them “met with and heard of as being in districts nearby as well as in other parts of the country”. He declared his personal view “that there is as much Zionism in these days in following the bugle as in organisation and propaganda” and also referred to the “perfect comradeship in the Jewish and Christian soldier”, antisemitic feeling being “very rarely evinced”. The military authorities, he said, were willing to place every facility in the way of the Jewish troops as far as their religious observance was concerned. In another context, the Zionist Record(15 November 1914) referred to the fact that “a large percentage of the Transvaal Scottish” were Jews, who were also found in substantial numbers in the “Irish Regiment”, and that the Wood Rifles and Imperial Light Horse contained “crowds of Jews”. The various commandos [presumably, this refers to the militia raised to suppress the rebellion of that year] likewise contained Jews, “principally country storekeepers who have practically ruined themselves by promptly obeying their country’s call. Many Jews serving as commissioned officers bear an exceedingly high reputation in their respective corps…”

The Recruitment Controversy

The crude abuse to which some of the speakers resorted, the untoward pressure placed upon young men to join up and the frequent injection of specifically anti-Jewish allegations into the whole sorry business were an unpleasant feature of the recruiting campaigns. It is not surprising that as these polemics periodically flared up they occasioned much concern to the Jewish community and deep resentment on the part of the individual especially when from time to time certain newspapers opened their correspondence columns to discussing the subject. In the early months of 1917, when there was a resurgence of such correspondence in the Cape Times, the Jewish reaction was exemplified by a letter addressed to the paper on the 3rd February signed “a British soldier and a Jew”. Jews he wrote had sent as many men to the front as my other section of the community in proportion to their numbers and they had also gained their quota of awards and honours for bravery in the field. “These continued and unfounded charges against the Jew will not induce him to come out” he continued. On the contrary they get his back up, for they convince him of the antisemitic feeling by which he is surrounded. Will you Sir, give your support to stopping this Jew baiting? By so doing you will strengthen the hands of the Jewish leaders who are working quietly but strenuously among their co-religionists with a view to swelling the ranks of the recruits”.

Later in the year when there was another spate of anti-Jewish letters in the Cape Times, a correspondent who signed himself “one of four fighting Jewish brothers” wrote: “I hold a government position. I served in the German West campaign going right through the country as a simple trooper to the borders of Ovamboland, and have recently returned home invalided from German East Africa. A second brother also served in the German West Campaign. A Third brother has held a commission for nearly three years in the Navy: a fourth brother holds a commission in the Royal Flying Corps. A cousin is with the Infantry in France (no soft base billets eh!). My remaining little brother is still at school…Have your correspondents ever considered the amount of insults levelled at a professing Jew at the hands of the riff raff of which every regiment seems to possess a sprinkling… what about all the beastly remarks about the commercial instinct of the Jew from the same riff raff? Let a Jew stay at home, and in the elegant language of “South African” he is battening on the “blood and treasure of his English and Dutch fellow citizens”. Let him proceed to German West or German East , then what the devil is he out for but to size up the possibility of a new country?” (Cape Times 5 October 1917).

In the early critical months of 1918, when the Allied forces were faced by a determined German counter offensive and the South African Brigade sustained grave losses, there was an upsurge of patriotic zeal where all manner of devices were resorted to in order to induce new recruits to come forward. In Cape Town, special services were held in the synagogues, where the Rev A P Bender in the Gardens Synagogue and Morris Alexander in the Roeland Street Synagogue urgent appealed for recruits. “Our duty was always clear” Alexander was reported as saying, “It had become irresistible since the momentous British Declaration regarding the future of Palestine”. The SA Jewish Chronicle, which throughout the war had loudly beaten the patriotic drum week by week called upon the Jews to show their loyalty to the Flag under which they were either born or had found a safe asylum”. This was not a “selfish war” the paper declared, but “a holy cause in which Great Britain and her allies are engaged. And therefore patriotism is needed that is tantamount to a devout consecration to the noble championship of humanities rights” (3 May, 1918).

Something of the sense of urgency and patriotic fervour which animated responsible Jewish leaders at that time is conveyed not only by participation of the Jewish Platoon in the route march in Johannesburg, but by Max Langerman when he spoke on behalf of the Board of Deputies. He congratulated the several dozen Jewish recruits present upon the example they had set their co-religionists. Their enlistment, he said, dispelled the idea that the Jew was not ready to do his duty in the war. After referring to the desire expressed by some Jews to fight on the Palestine front, Langerman said that the director of War Recruiting had pointed that his instructions were to enlist men only for the Western front. The war would be won in the West and if the Allies were victorious the Jews would have obtained Palestine in any case.1

We read also of financial inducements to persuade men to enlist. For example the Cape Times (2 September 1918) reported that an offer had been made by Max Rose of Oudtshoorn of £5 for each recruit from Oudtshoorn and districts who volunteered for overseas services and who passed the final medical examination at Port Elizabeth. It added that sixteen recruits had at that time already claimed “the bounty”.

In the course of the polemics relating to the enlistment of Jews it was probably inevitable that the searchlight should be turned especially upon the attitudes and reactions of the ‘Russian’ Jews in South Africa and more particularly of the fairly recent immigrant. Against the background of their own personal experiences of oppression and humiliation by the Tsarist regime and furthermore the reports which came of the hardships endured by the Jews of Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and other countries of the eastern war zones, they were not likely to find it easy to reconcile the war for freedom and justice with the acquisition of Russia as an ally. Because of the closer and more intimate connection between the majority of South African Jews with their homelands in Eastern Europe they were likely to find the Russian connection even less palatable than the Jews of America in the period prior to 1917 (when Americans entered the war soon after the Russians Revolution). Of the attitude of American Jewry the historian Rufus Learas points out that for most of the Jews of America the presence of Russia on the side of the Allies “could not be so easily brushed aside. Compared to the Russian brand of antisemitism the German gave the illusion of being innocuous. Russia was the land of the Pale of Settlement, of mass pogrom, of the Beilis blood libels. Countless thousands of Jews in America have felt the Russian knout in one form of another…” So the prevailing sentiment among them began with sympathy for the Central powers rather than with the Allies. There is no evidence of similar sympathy on the part of South African Jews with the cause of the Central powers but it is clear that their attitudes to Russia were exploited in the polemics relating to the Jewish enlistments.

In the early phases of the war Russian Jews, as unnaturalised aliens, were not eligible to join the South African forces and were in fact rejected. Later when the ‘veto’ was removed many undoubtedly still had their hesitations about becoming aligned with the antisemitic Russian regime which despite demanding military service from its Jewish subjects showed no inclination of removing the discriminatory disabilities under which the latter laboured.

Even the Cape Times, which had so consistently been critical of Jewish enlistments, recognised the predicament of the Russian Jew. It was conceded that “many felt it was difficult to realise that in fighting for the British cause they were fighting for the cause of universal freedom” and recognised that “the sentiment was natural enough for the Russian bureaucracy had treated the Jews abominably”. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in March 1917, however, the paper contended that whatever validity this excuse may have had before the revolution had now gone. “On the contrary, it was claimed, “If the Russian Jew in South Africa previously hesitated to take the field because he feared a victory for the Allies would rivet the chains of his compatriots he ought to rush to the front now, when he finds that the fight for freedom… has already brought complete emancipation in Russia (Cape Times23/3/1917). A similarly optimistic view of the fruits of the Russian Revolution – unhappily so soon falsified as far as Jews were concerned – was expressed by Rev Bender, who described the Revolution as having “fallen like a flashlight across the dark tragedy of Jewish history”.

The ‘Jewish Regiment’ debate

The context in which this polemic took place between the Rev Bender and Morris Alexander on the one hand and the Cape Times on the other should be explained. A Gentile member of the Cape Recruiting Committee of which both Bender and Alexander were members had put forward the proposal that a Jewish regiment should be formed, believing that this would prove an inducement to those Jews who had hitherto hesitated to come forward. The Cape Times supported this argument, notwithstanding the fact that the proposal had been withdrawn by the man who made it on learning that Jewish leaders had consistently rejected the idea. Rev Bender pointed out that from the beginning of the war, Jewish leaders had been opposed to any denominational force of Jews being raised, since “Jewish citizens of the Empire have been only too proud to stand side by side with their fellow citizens”. Alexander, supporting Bender, said that he was in close touch with the community and had not heard a single person express any different view from that expressed by Rev Bender: “The Jew did not wish to be singled out from other religious denominations. Should the time come for forming Presbyterian or Baptist regiments that would be the time to ask for a Jewish regiment. In the Jew they could not separate the national from the religious, and there was a strong objection to keeping the Jew in a class apart. In any case, they would have to provide for the withdrawal of all Jewish soldiers from other regiments a completely impracticable suggestion as the South African defence authorities had categorically declared.

This was not the first time that the idea had been mooted that Jewish servicemen should be constituted into a separate Jewish battalion. Indeed it had been raised in the early months of the war partly at least in order to demonstrate the falsehood of the charge that Jews were failing to join the forces. It was periodically revived in the first place after the announcement of the formation in England of a Jewish Regiment which aliens of Jewish birth, mostly Russian, were eligible to join under the conscription laws as an alternative to being repatriated to Russia. The situation in England was clearly not parallel to that in South Africa, where there was no conscription but voluntary enlistment and where responsible opinion (both Jewish and Gentile) was in principle opposed to the isolation or separation of Jews and the creation of religious or national sections in the army. Some of the reasons for Jewish opposition to this idea were set out in a carefully argued editorial in the Zionist Record of 15 November, 1914. It was pointed out firstly that no other religious body as such had deemed it necessary to vindicate its patriotism by enlisting its members under the banner of its beliefs and that in fact there was ample scope for Jews to serve in the established units as was the case on the Witwatersrand. A second reason against a separate Jewish battalion was that “the good feeling which existed between Jews and their fellow soldiers does not warrant a segregation, such as is taking place in London, on account of antisemitic feeling in a certain district there. In the third place, “people would point to the strength of this battalion as a measure of Jewish patriotism, forgetting the thousands of Jews serving in other corps” and it would be quite impracticable to draw Jews from different regiments in the Transvaal and band them together in a separate corps.

The situation had changed, however, towards the end of the war, when the conquest of Palestine was one of the Allied objectives and the publication of the Balfour Declaration on 2 November 1917 held out the promise of the creation of a National Jewish home in Palestine. The formation of a South African Jewish regiment to fight in Palestine then seemed a realistic proposition, especially as Jewish regiments for service in Palestine had been recruited in a number of other countries. Towards the end of 1918, representative Jewish bodies in South Africa sought permission from the military authorities to recruit for special service in Palestine (Zionist Record, 16 September, 1918) but the authorities declined, pointing out that the claim of the South African Brigade in Europe was paramount; that the recruiting for Palestine would tend to a lose of strength in Europe; and that in any case the war would be won on the Western front.

Commemorating the Fallen

It is interesting to recall that when General Smuts returned to South Africa from Europe in 1919, he was one of the first to advocate that the Jewish community establish a permanent memorial to those South African Jews who had fallen in the war. When it was decided that a Jewish Guild War Memorial Hall should be erected as a cultural and communal centre, Smuts actively helping to raise funds for this and presided at the laying of the foundation stone in November 1922. A few years after the building was completed, the unveiling ceremony of the memorial tablet which had since been added was performed by the Earl of Athlone, then Governor General in 1930. Paying tribute to “the gallant and faithful service of over 2000 South African Jews and particularly the sacrifice of those 112 who gave their lives for the cause they served and whose names were there inscribed” the Governor General said that it was a record for which all should feel pride and for which all might be “grateful to the Jewish community in this country” that its sons bore themselves so well.

Speaking at the same occasion, Rabbi Dr Landau once again stressed that the men who had made the supreme sacrifice had “vindicated their people’s claim to unshaken loyalty and devotion to the welfare of the country which they had made their home. Two facts he said deserved to be emphatically stated: that these men “were not forced and could not be forced to join the ranks as there was no conscription in South Africa” and, secondly, that a considerable number of them were not British born and many were not even naturalised, their parents having immigrated to the country only a few years before the outbreak of the war. They had volunteered their services “realising theirs, and their people’s deep indebtedness to the British crown and the British Empire” (Ha’Ivry, 1 February, 1930).