(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol. 64, #3, 2009)
How exactly does an organised Jewish community – that is, one whose members are served by and brought together under formal communal institutions – come into being? Those born into a society where such institutions are already in place can all too easily take it for granted that Jewish communal needs – be these religious, welfare, cultural, educational, Zionist or civil rights-related – have always been and will always be automatically catered for. Forgotten is the visionary work of those who pioneered such institutions at a time when literally nothing existed. Also disregarded are the formidable obstacles, which very much included the intracommunal controversies that continually occurred, that militated against the growth, and even survival, of those institutions.
Rabbi Dr Gerald Mazabow’s latest book, The Quest for Community: A Short History of Jewish Communal Institutions in South Africa, 1841-1939, is a scholarly exploration of the origin and evolution of South African Jewry’s impressive communal infrastructure, from the earliest times to just before World War II. For many people, such a subject might be off-putting, and that is understandable. Institutional histories, after all, tend to be dire affairs – dry, self-congratulatory, careful to play down or omit altogether controversy and drearily inclusive of everyone who made a moderate contribution (so as to avoid fariebels and probably also to ensure that at least some people will purchase, if perhaps not actually read, the book). However, The Quest for Community is of a very different order.
As a respected scholar with a lifetime of experience of working within local Jewish communal structures, Rabbi Mazabow is well positioned to bring alive the warts-and-all internal dynamics that characterised the establishment, evolution of and sometimes eventual demise of the organisations most Jews now take for granted. One soon realises from reading his account that there was nothing at all inevitable about the emergence of such important bodies as the Union of Orthodox Synagogues, SA Jewish Board of Deputies, Chevra Kadisha, SA Zionist Federation and SA Board of Jewish Education, to name just a few. It also becomes apparent that the story of how the Jewish communal infrastructure unfolded was not an uninterrupted linear progression from small achievements to large ones; there were many false starts, failures and disappointments as well. Progress towards creating such crucial bodies as a central, authoritative Beth Din for both Johannesburg and Cape Town was slow, often painfully so.
As we now know from other more recent work’s dealing with the community’s history, the traditional view of SA Jewry as being a predominantly of Lithuanian origin, deeply Zionist and religiously tradition (if not usually strictly Orthodox) is an oversimplification. There were other constituencies who came from other backgrounds and saw things differently. These controversies, almost entirely omitted from the earlier historical accounts, are conscientiously addressed by the author.
When, for example, large numbers of East European Jews began arriving towards the end of the 19th Century, the Anglo-Jewish establishment was decidedly underwhelmed. Themselves comfortably assimilated, generally well heeled economically and accepted amongst their gentile peers, they had little in common with the Yiddish-speaking, impoverished, more religious and ardently Zionistic newcomers. The latter, for their part, were scornful of the assimilationist pretensions of the Anglo-Jews, in particular their watered down practice of Judaism that made them appear to be little more than Anglicans of the Mosaic persuasion.
Remarkably, the bonds of Jewish peoplehood proved strong enough to bring about a synthesis of these two very different constituencies (vide Gus Saron’s well-known aphorism that South African Judaism was the result of pouring Litvak wine into Anglo-Jewish bottles). Taken as a whole, South African Jews have achieved a remarkable degree of unity, in fact, this despite the often sharp ideological differences that threatened at various times to bring about fragmentation.
Various communal organisation, since regarded as more or less indispensable, were initially strongly opposed in certain influential quarters when their establishment was first mooted. Thus, the SA Zionist Federation was at first largely hostile to the creation of a Jewish Board of Deputies, seeing it as a deviation from the community’s Zionist mission and a potential threat to its own hegemony. Within the nascent Jewish education movement, considerable tensions existed between proponents of Zionist and religious education (in time resulting in a compromise encapsulated by the official “National-Traditional” ethos that governs the King David and Herzlia school systems to this day).
The author accords ample space to allow the role players from those days to speak for themselves. From the direct quotations he has culled from a wide array of original sources, one gets a vivid sense of the burning issues of the day and the different approaches suggested for addressing them.
While officially commencing its narrative in 1841, the year when the country’s first Jewish institution, the Cape Town Hebrew Congregation, was launched, the book also includes an interesting preliminary section sketching the Jewish presence in the country prior to that date. We learn that the establishment of a Sephardi Jewish presence was not necessarily prevented because of the official Dutch East India Company policy of religious discrimination against non-Calvinists maintained in the Cape. These might have been overcome, as happened in the then New Amsterdam (New York) across the ocean, had the influential and prosperous Sephardi community in the Netherlands desired it. Rather, it was a reluctance to relocate to what was little more than a colonial backwater that delayed the establishment of an organised Jewish community for nearly two centuries.
The Quest for Community delves thoughtfully and with commendable thoroughness into the intricacies of community building that went hand in hand with creating the Jewish South Africa we have inherited. As such, it is a valuable contribution to Jewish historical research that fills in many significant gaps in our understanding of SA Jewry’s origins and development.
The Quest for Community: A Short History of Jewish Communal Institutions in South Africa, 1841-1939 by Gerald Mazabow, 2008, ISBN 978-0-620-40124-1, 213pp, index, photographs. Copies are available from the author through Mrs G. Mazabow at the Kollel Library, 011 728 1308/ info@kollel.org.za
David Saks is Associate Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and Editor of Jewish Affairs.
