Speaking out against injustice? Re-examining the SA Jewish Board of Deputies’ response to Apartheid,1948-1976

(Author: Daniel Mackintosh, Vol. 65, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2010) 

Bernhard Schlink, in his novel The Reader, describes how the thousands of students who created the  ‘1968 movement’ became heavily invested in understanding Germany’s past, resulting in a wave of student protests in which the youth accused their parents’ generation of various Shoah-related crimes. Most of the German press saw these students as selfrighteous and finger-pointing, yet, while the ‘1968ers’ asked the older generation difficult questions, they did not confront their parents individually.

Sixteen years have passed since the end of Apartheid and the creation of a democratic order in South Africa and, in many ways, the stirring of the same desire to try and uncover the role that various people and organizations played in propping up and supporting Apartheid has begun. This applies equally to the Jewish community, challenging us to attempt an honest reflection on our past.¹

I was particularly taken by Claudia Braude’s call, at the end of her paper on South African Rabbinic writing, to:

…interrogate the surface facts that constitute the collective memory of the South African Jewish community. It will require something of an internal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, motivated by the desire for self-insight that comes with truth, knowledge and understanding

… It will be necessary to examine what role the Jewish community played in participating in and benefiting from life under Apartheid, and how Judaism, Jewish history, and Zionist ideology were used to this end.²

By making the comparison between German youth after the Holocaust and the South African Jewish youth of today, I am not drawing a direct moral equivalence between the complicity of Germans in perpetrating the Holocaust and South African Jews. Rather, the comparison is made to recognize that a time has come for the hard questions about our past to be asked by the Jewish youth of today.

I do not intend to place either myself, or the South African Jewish youth of today, on a moral pedestal, because we will never know what it was like to collectively live through the Holocaust, and then walk directly into an oppressive Apartheid system. In no way am I suggesting that ‘we would have been different’. However, neither should this absolve us from probing the role that the Jewish community played during Apartheid.

David Biale, in his influential book Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, warns all readers of Jewish history to avoid falling into a simplistic Zionist discourse, where the concept of power is equated merely with the sovereign nation-state.³ The Zionist reading of history argues that the Jews have not had political sovereignty since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, which marked their consignment to two thousand years of powerlessness.⁴ Biale defines power as “the ability of a people to control its relations to other peoples as well as its own internal political, cultural, religious, economic and social life.”⁵ Under the apartheid system, Jews were classified as white and hence were placed in a privileged position. As Jews, they formed organizations that managed the lives of members of the community from ‘birth to grave’, and as individuals, Jews became a part of the ‘upper crust’ of the racially skewed system. Considering that the collective consciousness of the Jewish past is saturated with pogroms and discrimination, living under Apartheid created a significant contradiction for the Jew and required a large degree of selective memory loss as we integrated ourselves into the ‘pharonic class.’⁶

This essay will seek to explore the role of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) between 1948 and 1976, and its decisions to avoid taking a stand against Apartheid.⁷ While it is inaccurate to use the ‘SAJBD’ and ‘the community’ interchangeably when trying to apportion responsibility, this essay will seek to analyse the actions of the Board only, rather than characterise the community as a whole. It will first seek to understand what the SAJBD is and the role that it has played in the life of the South African Jewish community. Thereafter, it will attempt to account for the SAJBD’s statements and actions by dividing the twenty-eight year period (1948-1976) into two parts, 1948-1960 and 1961-1976, attempting to assess the antisemitic threats that existed during the period in question. Finally, in trying to understand the SAJBD’s lack of opposition to Apartheid, three interlinked reasons appear to provide the strongest explanation: the financial success of the Jewish community in the 1950s and 1960s, the ‘sojourner myth’ and the strength of the Zionist discourse within SA Jewry.

The SAJBD, modelled on the British organization of the same name, grew out of a need to respond to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1902, which threatened to halt much of  Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe⁸ by barring non-‘European’ language speakers. The main role that the SAJBD played during this period was the “naturalization of newcomers [Jewish immigrants] … combating antisemitism and … safeguarding the interests of Jews.”⁹ Amongst the chief goals it set itself was to “watch and take action in all matters affecting the Jews in the southern portion of the continent of Africa.”¹⁰

The SAJBD provided the political space for the Jews in South Africa to create institutions and become a prosperous, safe and vibrant community, and it “was recognized, by convention, as the representative organ of South African Jewry.”¹¹  It took on the key role of mediating between the community and the ruling powers, challenges which were particularly acute during the 1930s when antisemitism gained a foothold in white political discourse. The National Party was also under suspicion of antisemitism, which came into focus when they opposed the South African entry into World War Two (seen by Jews as a high priority in light of Nazi atrocities). Braude documents a few of the actual incidents of antisemitism prior to the 1948 elections, which created a very tense situation for SA Jewry. This included a meeting at Stellenbosch University, attended by over fifteen hundred people, at which a resolution was put forward to stop Jewish immigration by “legislation and other measures.”¹² The Board became the key institution that not only defended the Jewish community, but also set its political culture.

One of the SAJBD’s main goals after 1948 was to establish a process of rapprochement between Afrikaners and Jews. It engaged in a number of activities, including publishing statistical evidence to show that Jewish enterprises in light industry opened up new employment opportunities for poor whites.¹³ However, the primary aim of the Jewish community at large, and hence the Board, was to ensure that Jews were included as members of the racially defined privileged white class.¹⁴ In this manner, prior to 1948, “very few Jews showed political concern that transcended the interests of the white group,”¹⁵ and when there was an opportunity to change the Immigration Restriction Act of 1902 to address Indian and Jewish concerns simultaneously, Jewish representatives “were at pains to dissociate their case from that of the Indians.”¹⁶ The policies of racial oppression against Black/Coloured/Indian people did not begin under Apartheid, but the SAJBD opted out of fully facing this moral problem by defining its interests as those affecting Jews as Jews, while allowing individual Jews to decide for themselves on ‘matters of conscience’ (i.e.: National Party race policy).

Maurice Porter, then SAJBD President, stated in 1972 that the Board was “governed by the principle that it is a non-political body … except in matters which specifically affected the Jewish community”. This policy allowed the Board significant leeway. It did not have to officially account for individual Jews who opposed Apartheid and at the same time, the SAJBD could assuage its conscience by not protesting against Apartheid, because it had identified Apartheid as a political policy, implemented by the National Party, rather than a moral issue. Porter’s statement, which Shimoni characterizes as the explicit justification for not issuing a statement on ‘political issues’,¹⁷ was that “Jewish opinion on politics and racial issues is far from uniform.” Hence, a collective political stance did not exist. A previous statement issued by the Board, pointed out that “we pride ourselves that the Board, as a representative body, comprises members representing every shade of political opinion.”¹⁸ This stance suggests that due to the fact that many people in the Jewish community supported Apartheid, creating a strongly worded anti-Apartheid statement was not possible, as it would not represent the community as a whole and while this does not justify the Board’s actions, it does seem to explain them. Shimoni argues that there is also an implicit reason for this position; that even if a single political stance could be formulated, it would “be illadvised from the point of view of the community’s self-interest [my emphasis].”¹⁹ In addition, the implication of this policy was that Judaism, or the Jewish historical experience, did not dictate “any absolute imperative on the question of how a society such as South Africa’s ought to be politically and socially ordered.”²⁰

However, there are a number of challenges that can be mounted against Porter’s contention that the SAJBD was politically neutral. Significantly, in the 1930s, the Board lent its support and took a political stance against the Purified National Party and its murky position on Anti-Jewish immigration legislation. It even went as far as to actively encourage Jews to give financial and other assistance to the United Party.²¹ In addition Gustav Saron, the longserving director of the Board, gave a speech at the 1945 SAJBD Congress in which he intimated that the Jews were “directly bound up with liberal democratic forces in their struggle with the Ossewa Brandwag, the Nuwe Order and the Herenigde

National Party”.²² Indeed, in the January 1948 edition of Jewish Affairs, there was an editorial which included the following comment: “On racial issues he [the Jew] should take as liberal a view as possible. He should be profoundly sensitive to injustice arising from discrimination based on race or caste. He can and must be progressive.”²³

All of the abovementioned points are easily reconciled with a political stance that is only a product of an attempt to protect Jewish interests (under threat in the 1930s and until the 1948 election). Saron himself qualified his previous statement and suggested finally that the Jew is only bound up with ‘liberal, democratic forces’ insofar as the fight against antisemitism is concerned. Yet they do show that the Board had the potential to make political statements, if they felt that cause was adequately aligned sufficiently with Jewish interests.

One of the traditional answers to the lack of a decisive response by the SAJBD was that the fear of antisemitism in South Africa made the Board afraid to oppose Apartheid, lest it create the fertile soil for acts of anti-Jewish violence to break out.²⁴ This traditional answer goes further to suggest that SA Jewry acted in accordance with the precedents set by dispersed Jewish communities for centuries; afraid of persecution, they preferred to hunker down and not challenge the status quo, lest pogroms be directed against them.²⁵ In order to interrogate this assertion, it is useful to break the period before 1976 into two: 1948-1960 and 1961-1976. The first period is influenced by the events of the Holocaust, the creation of Apartheid and the question of the National Party’s latent antisemitism, while the second is largely concerned with how the Jewish community came under fire for its unwillingness to dissociate itself from Israel’s anti-Apartheid position.²⁶

1948-1960

After the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948 and in the light of the Holocaust, the Jewish population felt very uncertain about the extent to which the ‘Jewish Question’ still influenced the new government’s policies.²⁷ These insecurities were exacerbated by the fact that the community still was seen, and saw itself, as an immigrant population. Shimoni also points out that in 1947, Eric Louw, a prominent antisemitic NP politician, quoted an NP Federal Council document which barred new immigrants, called for stricter naturalization laws (directed primarily against Jews), and argued within the NP against changing the antisemitic stance of the party, lest it alienate thousands of Afrikaner nationalists.²⁸

However, once coming into power, the National Party entered into a process of rapprochement with all sectors of the white population to bolster their support in the context of the mounting ‘race problem.’²⁹ Dr. D F Malan, then NP leader, held a staged interview with a pro-government newspaper, Die Burger, in which he firmly stated that the NP was not antisemitic and saw no difference between Jew and non-Jew.³⁰ Malan’s government recognized the fledgling State of Israel in 1948 and Malan himself became the first head of state to visit it in 1953.³¹ Going further, when Malan’s party was reunified with the Afrikaner Party in 1951, it ensured that all of the previous bans on Jewish membership of the NP disappeared, expounding a strong “pluralistic conception of [white] South Africanism and the place of the Jews in it.”³² Mervyn Smith’s speech at the SAJBD 2003 centenary conference, where he criticised the Board and SA Jewish community as a whole for its ‘failure’ during Apartheid, noted that by 1953, Jews were safe from serious antisemitism because the Ossewa Brandwag faction of the Afrikaner Nationalist movement was “silenced and marginalized”.³³ If one adds that there was international sympathy for Jews as a result of the Holocaust and Israel was an established political entity, maintaining an antisemitic policy in South Africa from 1948 was almost inconceivable. During the first twelve years of Apartheid, the SAJBD focused on its primary task of removing any vestiges of ‘the Jewish Question’ from the [white] public discourse. The many overtures made by the government to include the Jews in ‘white society’ meant that Jews faced a steadily decreasing threat of antisemitism. Shimoni, in a response to Smith’s speech at the SAJBD conference,  argued that not only was there popular support for the SAJBD policy of ‘non-involvement’, but that challenging Apartheid in the 1950s or 1960s could have led to a split in the Board, possibly creating two Boards of Deputies.³⁴ In order to cement the process of ‘white naturalisation’, the decision of the SAJBD to refrain from commenting on, or actively opposing Apartheid, although deeply misguided, immoral and shortsighted (since only a system of governance that protects equal rights for all could ever really protect Jews) was, under the historical circumstances, partially justifiable.

1961-1976

Mervyn Smith recalls “that glorious dawn in April 1974 when the [firmly anti-Apartheid] Progressive Party won seven seats throughout South Africa, each constituency matching large pockets of Jewish voters.”³⁵ He draws the conclusion that Jewish voters of the time, by and large those that represented ‘the community’ were, through the ballot box, firmly opposing Apartheid. Smith laments the unwillingness of the Jewish leadership to criticise the Apartheid regime, or at the very least, the racist nature of Apartheid itself, through viewing it as a moral rather than a political issue. By this time, the ‘Jewish question’ had indeed retreated from white political discussion and Jews were participating equally as beneficiaries of the Apartheid system.

The key feature of this period, rather than overt acts of antisemitism, was the impact of Israel’s actions, which had become increasingly anti- Apartheid (in the first few years of the 1960s³⁶) as it followed its own foreign policy by drawing close to the newly independent African states.³⁷ These African countries were stridently opposed to the Apartheid system and NP race policy.

A crisis erupted in 1961 when Eric Louw, the Foreign Minister who had attended the United Nations, was attacked by Liberia, which attempted to get his speech removed from the record. Israel (and Holland), voting differently to the rest of the Western states, supported the Liberian motion. Even though the vote did not pass, Israel’s stance resulted in “embarrassment and apprehensiveness [which was] felt by the leaders of both the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Zionist Federation”³⁸ and demonstrated how NP antisemitism still influenced Jewish institutional thinking. The situation was made all the more difficult when Louw turned his frustration on the local Jewish community.³⁹ When the SAZF and SAJBD finalized their joint statement, it was mildly critical of Israel for censoring international freedom of speech.⁴⁰ The Apartheid government punished Israel (and local Jewry) by withdrawing permission for the SAZF to transfer funds raised for Israel to the Jewish Agency.⁴¹

The two time periods identified above seem to suggest a number of conclusions. Firstly, just prior to the 1948 elections, a significant degree of Jewish fear existed as to the future actions of the National Party as a result of their antisemitic past, and while this fear was partially calmed through Malan’s subsequent actions, the threat still existed in the consciousness of many Jews. Secondly, post-1948 and especially after 1961 as the local economy boomed and Afrikaners became increasingly upwardly mobile, “antisemitism declined rapidly”⁴² in South African society. Third, a new uncomfortable situation was created for local Jewry when Israel appeared to portray itself as ‘anti-Apartheid’, leading to charges of dual loyalty. The literature points to a community that was initially scared of its survival in the late 1940s and 1950s to one that in the 1960s was secure as a white minority, although with a particular challenge regarding the actions of Israel.

But, the moral problem remains. Why did the SAJBD not criticise Apartheid? One way to answer this problem was proposed by Immanuel Suttner in his book Cutting through the Mountain, which attempts to understand why so many Jews were a part of the anti-Apartheid struggle. He suggests that:

The Board’s policy was a diaspora Jewish response. It was cautious, prudent, equivocal and tortured, a function of an insecure minority wanting first and foremost to ensure its safety, secondly not to lose its comfortable privileges, and thirdly, not to shorten the rare experience of not being the prime ‘other’⁴³

However, this does not seem to respond to the situation that the SAJBD faced in the 1960s. It had shown that it could potentially be politically active.

It is at this point that Biale’s analysis of Jewish history becomes particularly relevant. He argues that there has been a fundamental shift in the autonomy of Jewish communities worldwide since the twin rise of the United States, with its influential Jewish institutions, and the State of Israel. South African Jews were racially defined as a part of the ruling class, which turned many thousands of years of Jewish history on its head.  Hence, the typical ‘Diaspora’ response that Suttner refers to is a reference to the pogrom-filled memory of exile but is not relevant to a South African Jewish community that was significantly more powerful than any of those during the time of the Middle Ages.⁴⁴

The community’s power manifested in its economic clout and was a key component of the local Apartheid economy. Shimoni alludes to Jewish economic power when he recalls Arthur Suzman’s address to the Board’s conference in mid-1970, in which he said that he could not remember a time that was freer of tension and incident for the Jewish community (i.e. since the mid-1950s). Suzman said that there were many factors other than the “buoyant economic climate”,⁴⁵ yet it was exactly this spectacular growth that played such a significant role in the community’s sense of security and integration into Apartheid South Africa.

Mendelsohn and Shain contend that “although they shared with other middle-class English-speaking whites a distaste for Afrikaner nationalism and its hegemonic agenda, Jews, like their gentile peers, readily accommodated themselves to the new apartheid order and its privileges.”⁴⁶ Jews advanced economically, educationally, socially through the institutions that were created to privilege their ethnicity.

It must be noted that a reoccurring feature of the Western world since the end of the 19^th Century is that Jews are often disproportionately successful financially. Marcus Arkin, writing about the Jewish contribution to the South Africa economy in 1984, attributed this financial success to a “Jewish labour force [that] is wholly urbanized, highly educated and centred in the major metropolitan areas”, adding that Jewish economic activity actually played a key role in “transforming the structure of the [domestic] economy.”⁴⁷ While there are additional reasons for this economic success, the phenomenon becomes morally challenging in the context of Apartheid, where Jews benefited from a system of racial oppression while its institutions remained silent.

Just how successful was the local community? The roots of its wealth were laid before Apartheid became official policy, but white economic dominance was still legally enforced. Shain and Mendelsohn refer to a 1935 survey which found that 8% of Jewish males were in ‘the professions’, a rate double that of the ‘general population’.⁴⁸ They also refer to the Jewish owned businesses of the 1930s that would become household names, especially in the clothing, textile and retail industries – Foschini, Truworths, Woolworths, Edgars and Rex Truform. In a survey of the Jewish community in 1977, Dubb refers to the Jewish mean income in 1951, placed at R1432 compared with R882 for Anglicans (which could be used as an indicator to measure Englishspeaking whites) and R688 for Dutch Reformed adherents (a measure for Afrikaners).⁴⁹

By 1960, 23% of all practising doctors in South Africa were Jewish⁵⁰, while the percentage of the Jewish population that entered the professions had climbed from 9.7% in 1936 to 20% in 1960.⁵¹ Arkin adds that while Jews made up only 3.9% of the white population in 1970, they constituted 10.2% of the total whites in commerce.⁵² In terms of employment in the 1970 census, 85% of Jews involved in agriculture were employers, while in the finance, construction, services and commerce sectors, the proportion of Jews who were employers was between 38-42%.⁵³

The South African Jewish Yearbook of 1965, while celebrating some of the Jewish entrepreneurs in the mining industry (particularly problematic considering what the migrant labour system did to black communities), pays homage to the contribution of Jewish businessmen like B.J. ‘Barney’ Barnato, Herman Eckstein and Lionel Phillips.⁵⁴  So successful were Jews in South Africa, that the 1965 Yearbook says that there was “hardly a branch of South African industry in which Jewish men of enterprise and initiative have not had some part, and not seldom the part of the pioneer and innovator.”⁵⁵ The Yearbook’s chapter ends by stating that the “Jewish community can be proud of the part it has played, and will continue to play, in keeping South Africa strong and secure.”⁵⁶ In the context of Apartheid, this statement reinforces the extent to which South African Jews felt a part of the system.

One final indicator of the success, and hence sense of security that Jews had in white South Africa, were the extensive capital projects that the community embarked upon. Mendelsohn and Shain note that a building boom took place in the 1950s and 1960s as new synagogues were built in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg. The community also constructed a new range of Jewish day schools, Herzlia in Cape Town and the King David Schools in Johannesburg, which were “sited on expensive suburban campuses and modelled on the prestigious government and private schools with which they competed for the enrolment of Jewish children.”⁵⁷

The community justified their beneficial status in the context of Apartheid in two ways: by believing in the myth that South African Jews were ‘sojourners’ and by allowing the strong Zionist heritage of the local community to dominate the communal discourse. The common feature of these two intellectual factors is that being Jewish in South Africa, even as benefactors of Apartheid, placed no responsibility on the community, since Jews were not a direct part of the machinery that maintained the oppressive system.

Myth is concerned primarily with the story that we tell ourselves, ‘the master narrative’. It is “partial and self selective” serving “specific functions in particular periods”⁵⁸. Steven Friedman argues in Jewish Affairs that the South African Jewish myth “holds that we were never collectively responsible for Apartheid and its consequences.”⁵⁹ He says that the myth originates in the very foundations of the establishment of our community, in that our great grandparents came to South Africa just to escape the ghetto and Eastern European poverty, not to enjoy the fruits of being the benefactors of an exploitative racial system. The myth was extended during Apartheid as we found ourselves in a clash between Afrikaners and Africans. Yet we had kept our moral integrity in tact by “earning an honest living and [hence] cannot possibly be held responsible for the grotesque racial experiment through which we lived”.⁶⁰ Yet, as ‘sojourners’ we became a part of the pharonic class in the first place.⁶¹ External factors added to our self-justification, like Malan’s ‘reminder’ to SA Jewry at the 1940 NP party congress in the

Transvaal that “they were guests in South Africa.”⁶²

Claudia Braude contends that the SAJBD responded to the Jewish community’s sense of self doubt concerning their place in South Africa by “actively discouraging Jews from criticising government policy.”⁶³ She argues that the Board referred to its pre-existing policy that “Jews had no right to comment on politics as Jews.”⁶⁴ Braude notes that one of the major causes of the Jewish community’s lack of opposition to Apartheid was its increasingly close interaction with Afrikaner nationalism, which affected the way that Jews in South Africa saw their religion, history and role in politics.⁶⁵[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

SAJBD Chairman Julius Rosettenstein welcomes Prime Minister and Mrs. Vorster to a banquet in Vorster’s honor after his return from Israel, April 1976.