TALI FEINBERG
Pictured: Professors Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn with the updated version of their book “The Jews in South Africa”.
The two are professors in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town, with Shain having been the director of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies there for the past 20 years. Both are retiring at the end of this year.
“This book will hopefully contribute to the ongoing rewriting and re-imagining of the South African Jewish past” said Prof Mendelsohn at the launch. “The book, drawing on recent scholarship (much of it conducted under the auspices of the Kaplan Centre), spans the entire Jewish experience in South Africa over the past two centuries.”
He emphasised that “the book’s view is self-consciously national; it is neither a view from the summit of Table Mountain nor from the top of a Johannesburg mine dump!
“We’ve depicted the fragility of the early foundations, the oscillating fortunes of the community as it matured amidst turbulent currents (both domestic and international), and its latter day challenges and responses,” he said.
Mendelsohn added that “quite deliberately, the book is not a narrow institutional history. Rather it attempts to encompass a broad swath of Jewish life, from the bimah to the boardroom to the bowling green”.
Explaining more about what the updated version of the book includes, Shain said the biggest issue that had dominated the last few years of South African Jewry had been the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The new version explored this in-depth, and this had been written “in the shadow of the first Gaza War”.
They looked at how this was “an explosive time in the community, with many prominent Jews and Zionists speaking out against Israel for the first time”. Shain said this era brought the historians “back to the 1930s – not since then has there been such a challenge to the community’s wellbeing”. At the same time, he reminded his audience that the community had always had divisions, as seen in its history.
During the transition to a democratic South Africa, Shain had surmised that South African Jewry would be fine under black majority rule, “as long as they could express their Jewishness in the way they chose, and that their Zionism was not challenged”. Yet in this updated version of the book, the two explore how this has indeed happened, putting the community under enormous stress.
The book also looks at a variety of other phenomena, including burgeoning religiosity and how there is no longer a “push to run and emigrate” among young Jews – the panic of the 1980s and 1990s has dramatically reclined”, said Shain.
Describing how most general histories of South Africa have effectively ignored the history of the Jews in South Africa, Mendelsohn said that “hopefully this book, with its attempt at re-writing South African Jewish history for the 21st century, will recover the historical experience of a numerically small but nevertheless highly significant minority, not only for a Jewish audience but for a much broader South African audience”.
‘The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History’ (Jonathan Ball, 2014) is available at the South African Jewish Museum shop as well as other bookstores.
