The melting pot moulding SA’s Jewish community

DAVID SAKS

From a Jewish point of view, though, there is at least the prospect of celebrating a significant milestone in the community’s history.

The year 2016 marks the 175^th anniversary of the birth of South African Jewry as an organised entity, since it was for the Kol Nidre service of 1841 that 17 Jewish citizens of Cape Town came together to form the first-ever minyan in sub-Saharan Africa. The latter went on to form the Cape Town Hebrew Congregation, the Mother Congregation of South African Jewry that continues to function to this day.

Anniversaries of this nature are in the main treated as an occasion for looking back on what has happened, as well as what has been accomplished. It is certainly interesting to reflect on the various elements that have, over the years, come to constitute that entity broadly referred to as the Jewish community of South Africa.

It is, of course, a community whose roots are primarily in the Eastern Europe of the late 19^th century, in particular in the area constituting modern-day Lithuania and the territories adjoining it.

However, while the Litvak element is unquestionably the dominant one in the community’s make-up, it should not be emphasised to the exclusion of other groups, of which there are a fair number. 

In the first instance, it should be remembered that the community’s founders were in the main English Jews, whose arrival dated back roughly to the beginning of the 19^th century when the Cape passed from Dutch to British rule.

For the first 100 years at least, and even after the great East European influx, the spiritual leadership of the community was drawn from the ranks of the Jewish clergy back in the “Mother Country” (England was the original “Der Heim”).

As for the position of chief rabbi, British-born incumbents held this office right up until the end of Rabbi Cyril Harris’ 17-year term in late 2004.

German Jews made up the second-largest element of the community in the early decades. Like their English counterparts, they were generally fairly assimilated (few rigorously observant Jews would have considered coming out in the first place to what, Jewishly speaking, was largely a desert).

Nevertheless, they dutifully joined in establishing congregations where possible and following the basic festivals, rituals and life cycle events. English Jews tended to have rather obviously Jewish, Biblically-flavoured names – Solomon Isaacs, Simeon Lazarus and the like. To this mix was added such German-sounding names as Bergtheil, Baumann and Mosenthal.

The greatest German-Jewish influx, however, was still to come, comprising the 6 000 or so refugees who arrived after 1933 before special legislation reduced Jewish immigration to a trickle. 

A third, often overlooked component of early South African Jewry was those of Dutch origin. During the 1890s, President Paul Kruger of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Transvaal) brought out a large number of Hollanders to, among other things, help staff his civil service, and these included a fair number of Jews.

These tended to be, in the tart assessment of a Litvak contemporary Jane Mendelsohn, “Jews who would not own up” [to being Jewish, that is], but some, at least, were committed enough to remain in the fold. As a result, among the pantheon of South African Jewish names even today, one still finds the occasional De Jong, De Wijze, Van Gelderen, Goudvis or Zwarenstein.  

On the eve of the Second World War, all of these elements had been eclipsed by the flood of East European immigrants, a veritable sea of Karks, Kaplans, Pinchuks and Podlashuks and people with names ending in -nik, -kin, -sky or -witz.

After the war, the community’s diversity was nevertheless broadened by the arrival of Jews from very different backgrounds. They included Ladino-speaking Sephardim from the Aegean island of Rhodos (today part of Greece), and former Israelis from various parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

The Rhodos Jews in the main arrived via the Belgian Congo, Zambia and Zimbabwe, where they had first settled after leaving Europe. They and their descendants are identifiable by such names as Benatar, Hasson, Elkaim, Turiel and Habib. 

There has also been a steady trickle of new immigrants from other parts of the world, such as the US, Argentina, France and Switzerland. Many of these were specifically brought out as rabbis and teachers for a community that was becoming increasingly more religious; in quite a few cases, local Jews of a “frummer” bent went abroad to find their spouses and brought them back to South Africa. The tendency now is unfortunately for the South African partner to relocate.   

Finally, converts to Judaism over the decades should not be forgotten in this brief overview of the community’s make-up. They include a growing number of Afrikaans families that have converted “en masse”, as it were, albeit that they have tended to move on to Israel. While we do not, as yet, have a “Rabbi Pretorius” in our community, that day may not be too far away.