South African Jewish history refutes the libel of Israel as a ‘settler/colonial’ state

Though Jewish presence in South Africa has been dated back to the era of Portuguese explorers, the majority of Jews in South Africa trace their antecedence to Lithuania from the early 1880s.

They came in response to what was once the largest migration out of Europe as a result of the antisemitism which drove the eventual establishment of Israel. It was that history of seeking refuge from persecution and pogrom that spurred this momentous exodus.

When the libel of Israel being a “settler/colonial” state is bandied about, as it is now done every day, numerous times of the day, this history is crucial to the undermining of this demonising idea.

Like much in Jewish history over the past 150 years, its origins are to be found in Russia.

What started in Russia didn’t stay in Russia

In 1881, an anarchist group assassinated Tzar Alexander II of Russia. He was regarded as a reformer who abolished serfdom in the 1860s and looked at Western Europe to bring Russia into the modern age. The anarchists, however, viewed these reforms as a way to preserve existing social classes rather than abolish them and bring about equality.

The tzar’s successor was his extremely conservative son. Alexander III had been educated under the Russian Orthodox Church, and had no interests in his father’s reforms. He blamed his father’s reformist impulses for his death.

Alexander III imposed a massive crackdown on everything he regarded as inimical to the Russian Empire, and reversed most of his father’s reforms. In 1882, he passed the antisemitic May Laws, which further restricted existing laws regarding where Jews could live, study, and be employed.

Simultaneously, the Russian Empire experienced the great upheaval of industrialisation, predominantly through the building of railroads and electrification.

Industrialisation mostly occurred in the Southern Russian Empire (Ukraine), in cities like Odessa with mixed Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Industrialisation resulted in massive convulsions to society such as urbanisation and the economic weakening of the peasant class. This led to the beginning of mass popular pogroms.

Pogroms spread quickly: the progress of the early pogroms literally followed the rail network. Pogroms became a normal experience. All Jews came to expect them.

Estimates put the number of pogroms at 1 300 in the 40-year period from 1881. The number of deaths is thought to have been as high as 250 000 Jews, most of them occurring during World War I and the Russian Civil War (1918 to 1921).

Because these pogroms coincided with the May Laws and Alexander’s crackdown and his reactionary political impulses, Jews believed that the pogroms were instigated by the regime. This belief was probably incorrect as it reflects a misunderstanding of the internal mechanisms of Russian politics and society.

Pogroms – genuine, authentic, and popular

The root cause of pogroms emanated from the bottom up. The people around whom Jews lived wanted the Jews destroyed, tortured, and dehumanised until they understood that they weren’t wanted.

The most famous pogrom occurred in Kishinev (Moldova) in 1903. What turned Kishinev into a rallying cry throughout the Jewish world wasn’t the 50 dead; it was how they died. The outrage arose from the cruelty of the perpetrators, who raped and murdered women in front of their male relatives.

The outcry over Kishinev, particularly in the United States and Britain, where there were Jews of influence, inflicted serious diplomatic damage on Russia.

Kishinev also inspired the writing of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 by officials of the Russian regime who couldn’t understand why the world cared that Jews had died.

The writers of the Protocols sought to explain the diplomatic crisis by relying on long-held anti-Jewish tropes. They wanted to heighten anti-Jewish politics. The secret police sought to validate the pogroms in intellectual terms.

Although proven to be a fraud on many occasions, “the lie that would not die” has continued to inspire those who seek to spread hatred of Jews.

Reshaping of Russian Jews

The pogroms reshaped Russian Jews mentally and demographically. Approximately three million Jews left the Russian Empire between 1882 and 1922. The vast majority (2.5 million) went to the United States, the source of the demography of most of today’s American Jewry.

Many refugees fled westward to the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires, which were convinced that Russia was trying to dump its Jewish problem on them. The empires were convinced that this was an intentional Russian policy, so they withdrew their credit lines to Russia.

Eventually the pogroms moved from Eastern Europe to Central Europe, and then Western Europe. It happened at different times and in different ways, but it happened systematically.

These events were the beginning of 60 years of the steady emptying out from Europe of Jews. Europe literally became uninhabitable to Jews. In the same period – from about 1880 to 1920 – massive immigration into the United States occurred from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Russia.

Non-Jewish émigrés usually sent young men ahead of their families to establish themselves, after which the families followed. Because they were fleeing persecution, Jews emigrated as families.

Between 1908 and 1925, many non-Jewish immigrants returned to Europe – 57% of Italians; 40% of Poles; 64% of Hungarians; 67% of Romanians; and 55% of Russians. Among the Jews, the figure was just 5%. For the Jews, life in America was better, though often not by much, than the lives they’d left in Europe.

A significant factor for these returnees was an economic crash – the Panic of 1907. Consequently, there weren’t many jobs for people who didn’t speak good English, or didn’t have family connections, or have higher education. Immigrants couldn’t move up the social ladder in America in the immediate aftermath of the Panic.

Western quotas sealed the fate of the Jews

The actions of the Western world that sealed the fate of European Jewry were the imposition of immigration quotas. As Jews fled westwards, European nations systematically closed entrance to them.

In 1921, the United States Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act (Quota Act). The Americans had been trying since 1910 to slow Jewish immigration to America. The pogroms during the Russian Civil War – from 1918 to 1921 – added to that pressure.

In 1921, more than 120 000 Jews arrived in New York. The US Congress then drafted the Emergency Quota Act, which imposed quotas by nationality. “Nationality” was defined explicitly to exclude Jews. In 1924, the Act was passed; consequently, the number of Jews immigrating to the US was reduced from about 120 000 to 10 000 per annum.

By 1934, just 2 700 Jews made it into America, while Hitler had come to power in 1933.

In 1930, the South African government of JBM Hertzog passed the Quota Act which restricted immigration, specifically targeting Jews from Eastern Europe, to maintain South Africa’s “basic racial [white] composition”. Hertzog and the National Party succeeded Jan Smuts and his South African Party in 1924. Hertzog led four successive governments to the fateful year of 1939. He resigned due to his support for the Germans in World War II.

Hertzog’s Union of South Africa government (National and Labour Parties) passed the Aliens Act in 1937 which predominantly excluded Jewish immigration from Germany. There was a significant antisemitic mood in the country and sympathy for Nazi Germany.

As the urgency for the Jews escalated, the West closed its doors – America; Canada; Britain; France; Argentina; Brazil; Australia; and South Africa. Essentially, Jews were being corralled into the Holocaust.

The most profound consequence of a world closed by quotas was immigration to Mandate Palestine. Palestine wasn’t a particularly attractive destination – it was poor, hot, swampy, and malaria-infested. The countries most Jews fled to or wanted to flee to were those of the new world, particularly America and democratic Europe. The march of antisemitism and pogroms, together with imposition of quotas from the early 1920s until 1939 in Europe and the New World pushed many more Jews to go to Mandate Palestine than would likely have chosen to go there.

Little changed after World War II

The fundamental Jewish experience didn’t change after the war. The quotas were not lifted. After the war, 250 000 Jews remained behind barbed wire in a network of displaced persons’ camps, formerly concentration and extermination camps. Truman begged Congress, unsuccessfully, to lift the quotas.

There were no longer millions of Jews left anymore. In 1939, there were 9.5 million European Jews, 57% of world Jewry. By the end of the war, there were three million, the last vestiges of a decimated Jewish world.

Although Bergen-Belsen was liberated on 15 April 1945, Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) were still there in 1947. With quotas still in place eight months after the war ended, there were about 250 000 Jewish displaced persons in Europe. Approximately 750 000 non-Jewish DPs had been absorbed and naturalised in 40 countries in 1946.

For about 90% of the Jewish DPs, the only choice for resettlement was Mandate Palestine. The camps emptied of their Jewish inmates only with the founding of Israel in 1948. Probably a quarter of the Jews who fought in the War of Independence in 1948 were DPs.

As Haviv Rettig Gur says, this was not about ideological or practical Zionism. For a soldier to be an Israel Defense Forces soldier after three years in Bergen-Belsen, after surviving the Holocaust, and after knowing that his parents and grandparents lived through the six decades from 1882, this is what the founding of Israel was mostly about: refuge.

Conclusion

Antisemitism, both the religious and the mutation into the biological, in countries such as Germany, France, and Austria, compounded the plight of Jews beyond rural Russia.

Consequently, many highly skilled and educated Jews ended up in the backwaters of Mandate Palestine.

The counterfactuals to this fraught history can only be imagined, but whenever someone throws the accusation of Israel being an illegitimate, white settler/colonial state, this ignored or unknown history lesson must be communicated, irrespective of whether it is received sympathetically or not.

• Sara Gon is an independent political commentator and fellow of the South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR). She has written numerous articles for the Daily Friend, the IRR’s opinion portal, and Politicsweb on South African politics as well as antisemitism.