SA Jews: the original Communists

STEVEN KRAWITZ

The earliest Jewish Communists in South Africa were immigrants from particularly Greater Lithuania.  Socialist and Communist ideals found fertile ground among young Jews in the Pale of Settlement. The 19^th century for a Russian Jew was characterised by poverty, high mortality rates, unemployment, famines and pogroms. 

Nascent industrialisation resulting in exploitation was accompanied by political repression. All this created a politicised militant Jewish working class, which organised itself into the “Bund”, the General Jewish Workers’ Union. Many Bundists joined the Communist Party and were involved in the 1917 revolution. 

When they immigrated to South Africa, these Jewish socialist traditions came with them, especially among the sizeable Jewish working class.

Their experience of anti-Semitism made them sensitive to racism.

After the First World War broke out, the anti-war faction of the Labour Party transformed itself into the International Socialist League (ISL), which became the political home for Jewish trade unionists, Bundists and Socialists. In 1917 the ISL set up a Yiddish-speaking branch, based on the Jewish wing of the Russian Bolshevik Party. 

The ISL cultivated links with the Comintern in Moscow, the Russian’s outreach office to spread Communist revolutions around the world, and the ISL, though tiny, was informally recognised by Moscow as the pre-eminent revolutionary group in South Africa.

By July 1921 intensive pressure on all groups sympathetic to the Russian revolution resulted in their union with the ISL, including various Jewish Socialist organisations. This was the official formation of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). In theory the CPSA focused on the needs of black and white working class unity, in practice its initial efforts were concentrated on skilled white workers. 

Jewish Communist Lazar Bach’s story is a sad one. Born in Lithuania, Bach became a key figure in the CPSA when he was included in the Stalin-selected leadership of the Party.  He was called to Moscow in the late 1930s over a political split in the CPSA. 

Stalin’s security police arrested him and two of his South African supporters in 1937. His two comrades were sentenced to death for the dubious charge of “organising sabotage” whereas Bach was sent to a Siberian labour camp, were he died in 1941.

Another iconic Jewish member of the CPSA was Ray Alexander. Born in Latvia in 1913, she became a Socialist while a teenager, got involved in illegal revolutionary activity and came to the attention of the Latvian police.  Her mother sent her to South Africa to avoid the inevitable consequences of her activism. In South Africa, Ray joined the CPSA and was instrumental in creating the Commercial Workers Union in 1933.  She was elected as a Member of Parliament in 1954 by Africans in the Western Cape. 

During and after the Second World War, a disproportionate number of new white recruits to the CPSA were Jewish,  drawn to the party by the radicalising influences of street fights with Afrikaner neo-Nazi fascists, the Second World War and in its aftermath, the Holocaust. 

During this period the CPSA was multiracial, unusual in South African politics – even the ANC was still only open to blacks. The CPSA’s gains were reversed after the National Party victory in 1948 and the passing of the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950 which aimed at destroying the opposition and the advocacy of blacks’ rights, as much as dismantling the Communist Party. 

When the Bill passed through Parliament, Sam Kahn MP, announced the voluntary disbanding of the CPSA. The banned opposition focused its attention on fighting apartheid and on promoting Communism.

Even after the CPSA was disbanded, Jewish names continued to appear prominently in anti-apartheid opposition. Many listed as Communists under the Act, were put under house arrest or under detention.  Jews also continued to appear disproportionately among the names of whites accused of political crimes. 

Of the 23 whites arrested and accused in the Treason Trial of 1956, for allegedly attempting to overthrow the state violently and replace it with communism, 13 were Jewish. 

On July 11, 1963 the police raided Arthur Goldreich’s home in Rivonia, where they captured most of the leadership of MK. In all 17 people were arrested, five of them white –  all Jewish:  Goldreich, Lionel Bernstein, Hilliard Ferstenstein, Denis Goldberg and Bob Hepple. 

These and other Jewish activists contributed an extraordinary amount to the development of a progressive, non-racial political culture in South Africa. 

Generally Jewish Communists were already alienated from their Jewish religion and the Jewish community.  Many were atheists and regarded themselves as internationalists and revolutionaries. To many, there was no connection between their ethnic identity and their politics. 

Goldreich was not even aware that fellow comrades were Jewish. This lack of Jewish identification could be related to traditional Marxist-Stalinist orthodoxy whereby identity politics was seen as a distraction and a potential threat to the revolutionary consciousness.  Stalin’s anti-Semitism could also have caused Jewish Communists around the world to suppress their ethnic identity. 

The official policy of the SA Jewish community’s main organ, the Jewish Board of Deputies, was non-involvement in politics, except when Jewish interests were directly threatened.

This covered both right- and left-wing Jews. Non-involvement meant that the Board was quick to criticise appeals to Jews as Jews to support or oppose apartheid. It also meant that the Board was quick to dissociate the community from the views and actions of radicals. 

Radicals were ignored and ostracised, omitted from communal newspapers and in many cases support was not made available to their families when they were imprisoned or detained.

In the late 1940s the Board met with Sam Kahn, the most prominent Jewish Communist.  It insinuated that Kahn was putting the safety of SA Jews at risk. According to Joe Slovo, Kahn conceded that the link between Communism and Jews was a fascist ploy to encourage anti-Semitism, but that the link between Jews and Business was also exploited for anti-Semitic purposes. “I’ll tell you what, gentlemen,” he said, “as a gesture of concern for the Jews, let’s enter into a bargain:  you give up your business and I’ll then give up politics.”

The Board’s policy was in line with how Jewish communities in the West have generally calculated their political interests, based on their vulnerability as an identifiable, conspicuous and permanent minority group. 

Jewish survival has always topped their agenda, obtaining guarantees for full political, economic, religious and national freedoms.

Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz criticised the non-involvement policy of the Board, asking: “Have Jewish ethics ever descended to a more shameful nadir?”

After 1994 the community has encouraged a revised history of the apartheid era and has lionised Jews who were Communists and fought apartheid as part of the underground struggle.

• This story was gleaned from ‘That Spells Trouble’: Jews and the Communist Party of South Africa, written by Mark Israel and Simon Adams in the Journal of Southern African Studies, 2000.