What was the significance of anti- and philo-Semitism to South African liberal politics?

Josh.. date, essay for … connecting dreams.

During the early 20th Century, Ashkenazi origin South African Jews became white.1 During the apartheid era, there was no state organised discrimination against Jews.2 Despite this, the security gained under apartheid was fragile, with Jews who refused to conform to the norms of white behaviour facing anti-Semitism and discrimination on the account of their Jewishness. Jewish assimilation with, rather than acceptance by, the Apartheid State represented a victory for a liberal answer to the Jewish question.

This paper seeks to explain the significance of Jews to the liberal imagination, and the interaction between anti- and philo-Semitism and the development of the white supremacy and segregation. My contention is that liberals in South Africa shared the vast majority of the assumptions towards Jews commonly observed in the Afrikaner far-right.3 These essentialist assumptions about Jews, such as their natural business acumen, although occasional rendered as anti-Semitic in the same way as the far-right, were more often expressed as philo-Semitism. When liberal South African politicians and newspapers challenged anti-Semitism they did so on the basis of Jewish whiteness, rather than a critique of a society in which whiteness ensured privilege. It was support for Jews which became symbolic of liberalism within South African society, which allowed self-proclaimed liberals to maintain some semblance of a liberal ideology while not challenging white supremacy in South Africa. This pretence at liberalism was important in differentiating themselves from the far-right politically and legitimising segregation in the eyes of the international community. The development of anti- and philo-Semitism was a crucial element in the development of South African white supremacy and integrally connected, rather than separate from the racial ordering of things.4

The liberal answer to the Jewish question remains neglected in South African historiography. Patrick Furlong demonstrates that anti-Semitism was an important ideological element within National Party networks that were influential in developing apartheid, although sees this as something that largely resulted from the influence of Nazism.5 This focus on far-right Afrikaner anti-Semitism and links between the National Party and Nazism in Germany have tended to overshadow of the role Jews and Jewish migration played for self-defined liberals, and the effect that this liberal answer to the Jewish question had on South African society.

This study will focus on the networks surrounding Jan Smuts and Jan Hofmeyr, two of the most influential self-defined liberals in early 20th Century South Africa. I will focus on the 1900s and the 1930s, as these were two decades in which restrictive laws against Jewish immigration were passed and the Jewish question was at its most urgent for white South African society.

1 There is a growing literature on the process of becoming white Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).2 Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Hanover NH; University of New Hampshire Press, 2003)3 Patrick Furlong, Between the Crown and the Swastika: The Afrikaner Racial Right in the Fascist Era (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999).4 The racial ordering of things is taken from Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)5 Patrick Furlong, Between the Crown and the Swastika: The Afrikaner Racial Right in the Fascist Era (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999)

To understand the significance of Jews to liberal politics requires conceptualising anti-Semitism as playing a structural role within South African society, as a key part of social organisation, rather than as merely an episodic outbreak of prejudice.6 Liberal anti-Semitism played a key role in uniting white South Africans after the Boer war. Debates whether Jews counted as white people reinforced a vision of South Africa where whiteness ensured social, political and economic privilege. It was through discussion of the place of Jews within South Africa that anxieties surrounding ‘poor whites’ and Asian migration were articulated. Anti and philo-Semitism were not an imported European addition to South African society, but embedded within the white supremacy that was the organising principle of South African society. The co-construction of discourses around Jews with other elements of South African history means that a focus on anti-Semitism as purely resulting from anti-Semitic stereotypes will fail to explain the development of anti-Semitism in South Africa. 7 As Hannah Arendt writes ‘if a patent forgery like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion can be believed by so many people that it becomes the text of an entire political movement then the task of the historian is not to discover a forgery’.8 Instead, it the task of a historian is to discover the structural underpinnings that lead to antisemitism, and its role in South African society.

Many liberal South African politicians 1907- 1948 held a dichotomous view of Jews and Judaism. Partly this dichotomy derived from the nature of anti-Semitism which positioned Jews as simultaneously a degenerate underclass and a supernaturally powerful overclass running all governments.9 In 1920 Churchill, a liberal on Jewish questions, summed up philo-semitic ideas surrounding Jews when he stated that Jews could be divided into the categories of the ‘good’ ‘national Jews’ and the ‘bad’ ‘international Jews’.10 This dichotomy was as apt as a description of South Africa as it was England. Wealthy, politically passive, assimilated, English speaking Jews, who adopted characteristics considered desirable for white people were considered to be ‘good’ Jews, whereas those who displayed some variance from this norm were considered ‘bad’ Jews. 11 The maintenance of the dichotomy between good Jews and bad Jews allowed philo-Semites to maintain their love of Jews, which was important in demonstrating their liberalism, while still indulging in conspiracy theories surrounding Jews, restrictions on Jewish migration and questioning the place of Jews within South African society. The dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews was an important part of regulating the Jewish community, so that they did not challenge white supremacy within South Africa. They could benefit from this dichotomy by being a ‘good’ Jew and would become the victim of it if they were a ‘bad Jew’.12

Historiographies of race in South Africa usually view the development of different racisms as isolated phenomena. The assumption amongst traditional South African historiography is that ‘the native question’ was the defining element of white South African discourse during the early 20 th Century.13

6 Ruth Frankenburg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of White Women (London: Routledge, 1993)7 Milton Shain, The Perfect Storm: Anti-Semtism in South Africa 1930-1948 (Johannesburg: Jonathon Ball, 2015).8 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism: Antisemitism (New York: Harcourt, 1964) pg.7. 9 Albert Lindemann and Richard Levy, Anti-Semitism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)10 Winston Churchill, ‘Zionism verses Bolshevisms’ Sunday Herald, February 8th 1920.11 Milton Shain, The Roots of Anti-Semitism Within South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1994) pg.60. 12 Gidoen Shimoni, Community and Conscience, pg.61 notes that this regulation was not entirely success, as Jews were over-represented in the white anti-apartheid struggle. 13 See, for example Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Clifton Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

During the last 20 years, a growing significance has been placed on the other moral and political anxieties of South African life, principally the ‘poor white’ question, the ‘Asiatic’ question and the ‘Jewish question’.14 The creation of a strict historiographical divide between different elements within South Africa accepts as essential the constructed boundaries between groups and risks reinforcing the taxonomies of the apartheid and colonial state.15 Instead, by looking at how the boundaries of these fundamental political groupings were produced we can begin to study how these colonial groupings were constructed. 16 The Jewish community in South Africa during the early part of the 20th Century, was a marginal part of the white community, as a group that gained many of the political privileges of being white but was not uncritically accepted into white society. Far-right groups claimed that Jews were not a European group but in fact were ‘asiatic’ and therefore not white.17 Jews, as a group on the margins of whiteness, were used by liberal politicians and the colonial state to regulate the boundaries of its fundamental taxonomic categories and therefore can only be understood with reference to these categories. This essay, through a focus on the ‘Jewish question’ will trace the interlinked strands of liberal white supremacist thought in South Africa.

Studies of South African Jews, like general studies of South African race, reflect this strict divide between the racial questions of South African society. Furlong goes the furthest in his isolation of the anti-Semitism from other forms of racism, suggesting that for a large part anti-Semitism derives from connections with Nazism, and therefore is not only disconnected from the other forms of racism but from South African society as a whole.18 Shain suggests that right wing anti-Semitism in South Africa was the result of specific South African stereotypes, rather than viewing anti-Semitism as an alien concept imported from Europe, but still he sees anti-Semitism as separate from discrimination against Black African and Asian people.19 Shain’s critique on anti-Semitism contends that it was a result of the ‘Afrikaner internalisation of anti-Semitic stereotypes.’20 This critique isolates anti-Semitism from the social conditions that produced it, seeing anti-Semitism as a result of the stereotypes themselves rather than seeking answers to the role of these stereotypes. Recent scholarship from America, such as the work of Karen Brodkin, has pointed to the links between the development of anti-Semitism and Jewish whiteness and developments in American white supremacy.21 I seek to apply a similar sensitivity to the environment which produced anti- and philo-

14 Charles Van Onselnen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand v.1 New Babylon (Harlow: Longman, 1982) was among the first to draw attention to the significance of the poor white question but this work has been fruitfully followed up by Roos, Neil, ‘Work Colonies and South African Historiography’ in Social History, 36 (1), 2011, 117-150; Hyslop, Jonathon, ‘Undesirable Inhabitant of the Union... Supplying Liquor to the Natives: DF Malan and the Deportation of South Africa’s British and Irish Lumpen Proletariat, 1924-1933’ in Kronos, 40 (Special Issue: Paper Regimes), 2014, 178-197; Krikler, Jeremy, White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); For more work on the ‘Asiatic’ question see older work on Gandhi in South Africa Pachai Bridgal, Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Relations, 1969); Kalpana Hiralal, ‘What is the Meaning of the Word Wife: The Effect of Immigration Laws on Resident Indians, 1897-1930’, Contemporary South Asia, 7 (1), 2017, 1-15; or for a more international perspective the work of Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Man’s Countries and the International Challenge of Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 15 Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)16 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); 17 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, pg.19. 18 Furlong, Between the Crown and Swastika, pg.7. 19 Milton Shain, The Roots of Anti-Semitism Within South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1994) pg.7. 20 Milton Shain, The Roots of Anti-Semitism Within South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1994) pg.4.

Semetic ideas about Jews to the specific late colonial South African condition, where both Jews and white supremacy were constructed very differently.

This essay will be divided in to three sections. Section one will focus on debates surrounding Jewish migration in the run up to the 1907 Immigration Act, the 1930 Quota Act and the 1937 Aliens Act. The debates about Jewish migration which were going on around the passing of these acts, spoke to particular anxieties surrounding what constituted a white man and the assimilability of Jews within the mainstream white population. The second section will focus on the spread of anti-Semitic ideas surrounding Jews within liberal circles. This includes the figure of the ‘hoggenheimer’, a sinister conspiratorial Jewish landlord who was often given responsibilities for the failures of white unity identified by the Boer war. The third section will focus on philo-Semitism. Rhetoric professing appreciation of Jews and support of Zionism was used as a symbol of liberalism. This function of pro-Jewish sentiment allowed South African politicians to claim a sense of liberalism, while endorsing ever more virulent segregation and limitations on the freedom of South Africa’s African and Coloured population. Discourses about Jews were important parts of forming the apartheid system, with both anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism justifying increasing segregation, and discrimination against the Black majority and non-white minorities.

Jewish Migration

During the early 20th Century there was an increase in Jewish migration. This was largely spurred by pogroms in Russia and the Pale of Settlement and then during the 1930s by the increasing discrimination against German Jews. Despite this, Jews made up only a small percentage of total migrants, certainly compared to their discursive prominence.22 Jewish migration was equated with migration from the Indian subcontinent. Debates about Jewish migration featured ongoing discussions about whether Jews constituted white people, and the extent to which they could contribute to white dominance within South Africa. Often this discussion took place using the figure of the ‘Peruvian’, a poor Jewish trickster figure, a combination of European anti-Semitic stereotypes and contemporary South African stereotypes of ‘poor whites’. Debates around Jewish migration revealed the extent to which Jewish whiteness was fragile and the way in which the Jewish question was used to define the nature and basis of white citizenship.

21 Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks and What it Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1998); Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews Race and American Identity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).22 GC Cuthbertson, ‘Jewish Migration as an issue in South African Politics’ Historia, 26 (2), 1981, 119-133.

Fig.1: The Owl, 6/5/1904.

Reproduced in Shain, Milton, The Roots of Anti-Semitism Within South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1994)

During the wave of pogrom related migration after 1907, the right-wing policy, led by Het Volk was to exclude Russian Jews from South Africa on the basis of their unassamilability. 23 The Cape Town Owl, famous for its anti-Semitism, published cartoons describing Jewish migration from Russia as ‘The Coming of the Scum’.24 Much of the right wing discourse surrounding Jewish migration was similar to ideas common in Europe. Common stereotypes of Jews as cheapskates, Jews as conspiratorial and Jews as morally degenerate became centred on the largely poor Jewish migrants coming from Russia.25 One particular focus of right wing anti-Semitism was the use of Yiddish, which was seen as the defining feature of Jewish foreignness and unassimilability.26 This was in part linked to the state discourse where language was the criteria by which migrants Europeanness was assessed.27 In South Africa there was added a selection of stereotypes that equated Jews with ‘poor whites’, as part of a minority of white people who through their poverty and immoral behaviour challenged the foundational assumptions of white supremacy.28 They were often targeted as being degraded and improperly white. Poor Jewish migrants were accused of degrading and inappropriate (for white South African society at that time) relationships with Africans including sexual relationships and relationships involving alcohol.29 Working class Jews were often compared with Asian and Chinese migrants.30 The figure of the working class migrant Jew in far-right rhetoric was key in defining the boundaries of whiteness and deciding who was deserving of citizenship within a white nation.

23 Rand Daily Mail, ‘Excluded from the Transvaal’, 14/02/1907.24 See fig.1.25 See figures 2. 3. And 4. 26 Fig. 1. 27 Milton Shain, Jewry and Cape Society: The Origins and Activities of the Jewish Board of Deputies for the Cape Colony (Cape Town: Historical Publications Society, 1983), pg. 29. 28 See Neil Roos, ‘Work Colonies and South African Historiography’ in Social History, 36 (1), 2011, 223-241.29 Hyslop, Jonathon, ‘Undesirable Inhabitant of the Union... Supplying Liquor to the Natives: DF Malan and the Deportation of South Africa’s British and Irish Lumpen Proletariat, 1924-1933’ in Kronos, 40 (Special Issue: Paper Regimes), 2014, 178-197; Charles Van Onselnen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand v.1 New Babylon (Harlow: Longman, 1982).30 Shain, The Roots of Anti-Semitism, pg.11.

These perceptions of Jewish migrants were largely shared by liberals in South Africa, who frequently differentiated between the ‘good Jews’ who were wealthy and assimilated and the ‘low type of Polish Jew’.31 As being branded an anti-Semite was antithetical to self-identification as liberal, those who called for an end to migration of Russian Jews stressed that their anti-Semitism was not on the basis of antipathy towards Jews but based on other factors related specifically to Russian and Polish Jews. Wealthier, more assimilated Anglo-German Jews were the ‘good’ Jews, but for Russian and Polish Jews their Jewishness was problematic for the maintenance of white supremacy.32 A letter writer to the liberal paper the Rand Daily Mail described ‘their painful attempt to shout in broken English’, at a Het Volk political meeting as evidence of their unassailability.33 This reflects the focus on language as the criteria for assimilability. The use of Jewish political activity to demonstrate Jewish otherness reveals the more limited latitude given to Jews to involve themselves in politics. Jewish political involvement was a reflection on Jews themselves, and would be used in order to justify pogroms and restrictions of Jewish migration. This double standard links to the common European anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as disruptive communists.34 While political compliant Jews were accepted, even among liberal political circuits political dissent by Jews meant their Jewishness was challenged. The Rand Daily Mail, went as far as writing ‘Russia should be congratulated in getting rid of [politically active Jews]’.35 Opposition to Jewish migration was regulatory in purpose, to shape the Jewish community so that it did not challenge the segregationist political consensus.

These discourses surrounding Russian Jewish migration to South Africa contributed to a process of delineating whiteness and South Africanness.36 Russian Jewish migration was frequently contrasted with the Chinese migration. John Merriman, at that time president of the Cape Colony, wrote to Jan Smuts that if Chinese migration was to be ended they would be replaced by a ‘kind of working class Jew, who is a scarcely more wholesome element of the population’.37 Richard Solomon, of the South

31 Rand Daily Mail, ‘Letter’, 10/1/190732 Shain, Jewry and Cape Society, pg.95; Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2008) pg.83 discusses the different communal dynamics and the tension between the established middle class anglo-Jewish community and the poorer Eastern European community.33 Rand Daily Mail, ‘Letter’, 10/1/190734 James Campbell, ‘Beyond the Pale: Jewish Immigration and the South African Left’ in Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain ed. Memories Realities and Dreams: Some Aspects of the Jewish South African Experience (Johanesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2000) pg.104. 35 Rand Daily Mail, ‘Letter’, 10/1/190736 Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, pg.8. notes that this process was among the foundational aims of the colonial state. 37John Merriman to Smuts, 14/1/1908 in Hancock and Van Der Poel ed. Selections from the Smuts Papers II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966)

Fig.3: Transvaal Critic, 10/01/1908.

Reproduced in Shain, Milton, The Roots of Anti-Semitism Within South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1994)

African Labour Party, described Indians as the most ‘inoffensive law-abiding people and better than the many European traders (Russian Jews)’ [his brackets].38 The coexistence of political liberalism and advocacy for anti-Semitic restrictions against Jewish migration is demonstrated through the use of anti-Semitism to defend Chinese and Indian migrants, as they were white by comparison to Jews.39 In contrast to Shain’s model of the development of anti-Semitism in South Africa as related to the internalisation of European anti-Semitic stereotypes, this equation between Jewish migrants and Chinese and Asian migration shows that anti-Semitism in South Africa existed as a part, rather than separate from South African racial schemata.40 In defining poor Jewish migrants as other this served to reinforce a society where rights were afforded on the basis of whiteness limited to Christians of Northern European origin. This hostility towards Jewish and Asian migrants was in part a global phenomenon, as similar restrictions were put in to place in other white colonial regimes such as the US, Australia and Canada which increased restrictions, for fear that they would lose their place as a white man’s country.41 The quality of migrants had been a foundational concern within all colonial societies with tension between the demands for a stable migrant labour force and the desire to develop a population that was used to white supremacy.42 The comparison between Jewish migrants and Asian migrants reinforced Jewish racialisation, and through debates as to which groups were more proximate to whiteness, a society where rights were dependent on whiteness was reinforced.

One of the key issues within South African society was the ‘poor white problem’. It was vital to the interests of the South African state that white people performed their white supremacy, otherwise the fictions that their racialised system of rule were based upon would be revealed as illegitimate. 43 Poor whites were seen as being racially degenerate and more likely to have close relationships with Africans and Coloured people, which were prohibited with increasing force during the early 20 th

Century.44 This concern with poor whites and the potential threat they posed to white supremacy was reinforced by white working class activism, which used the threat of degeneration into poor whites to justify greater professional racial exclusivity and more protections for white workers. 45 Concerns about migration, both of Asians and of Eastern European Jewish migrants were shaped by the concern about the ability of working class white people to find jobs and therefore avoid degenerating in to ‘poor whites’.46 John Merriman wrote that ‘in many cases, to our shame they [Asian migrants] are not that far below the lowest stratum of European’, drawing a direct comparison between these migrants and the degenerated working class.47 Jan Smuts went further, identifying new migrants as a potential threat to the white working class within South Africa. 48 The

38 Richard Solomon to Jan Smuts, 17/01/1908.39 Richard Solomon to Jan Smuts, 17/01/1908.40 Milton Shain, A Perfect Storm: Anti-Semitism in South Africa 1930-1948 (Johannessburg: Jonathan Ball, 2015)41 Marilyn Lake, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)42 Ellen Boucher, ‘The Limits of Potential: Race, Welfare and the Extension of Interwar Child Migration to Southern Rhodesia’ Journal of British Studies, 48 (4), 2009, 914-934.43 Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) writes about the states obsession with regulating white people more generally. For South African work on the issue see Grace Davie, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Annika Teppo, ‘Poor Whites Do Matter’ in Africa Spectrum, 48 (2), 2013.44 Jeremy Martens, ‘Civilisation, Citizenship and the 1927 Immorality Act’ South African Historical Journal, 2007, 59, pp.223-241; Neil Roos, ‘Work Colonies and South African Historiography’ in Social History, 36 (1), 2011, 223-241.45 See for example Rev. Miles Cadman, Socialism for South Africa (South African Labour Party: 1943).46 John Merriman to Jan Smuts, 4/03/1906. 47 John Merriman, ‘Letter to Jan Smuts’, 19/07/1908. 48 Jan Smuts to John Merriman, 31/08/1905.

denial of migration rights to Jews was justified on the basis that if Jews were to demand more rights that would also entail the provision of special protections for Catholics, another group struggling to claim their whiteness in South Africa.49 Conversely, the Rand Daily Mail carried a report of poverty in the East End of London which suggested that amongst Jewish ‘aliens’ children were much better kempt and showed less degeneration then the indigenous working class, and were therefore better deserving of categorisation as white.50 While Jewish otherness was defined as a threat to the white working class, at the same time Jewish whiteness was defined in opposition to the perceived degeneration of the white working class.

Similarly, those liberals who defended Jewish migration defended it not on the basis of humanitarian concerns, or on the intrinsic right of migration but on the basis of an assertion of Jewish whiteness. In White Skin, Black Masks, Fanon criticised a model of liberation that uses success in a European, Christianised value system as a negation of otherness.51 Yet all liberal defences of Jewish migration were on the basis of Jewish success, and Jewish contribution to South Africa, to negate their Jewishness. In these defences, Jews played the role of a model minority, with the supposed Jewish success in South Africa being used to show the intrinsic inferiority and lack of success of other minorities and the Black majority in South Africa.52. Those seeking to define Jews as an unquestioned part of ‘the white race’ did so by comparison to the ‘yellow man’ who deserved to be kept out of South Africa.53 Both liberal defences of Jewish migration to South Africa and attempts to restrict migration to South Africa relied upon and reinforced a society in which privilege was defined in a racialised manner, with whiteness as a defining characteristic to legitimise inclusion within South African society. Their fundamental difference was in the constitution of whiteness, and whether the Russian Jews could be included within South African whiteness.

The debate surrounding Russian Jewish migration to South Africa and the potential for Russian Jews to achieve whiteness showed the extent to which the discourses surrounding Jews were integrated within the racial hierarchies that were fundamental to the political organisation of South Africa. Jews were constantly equated to Chinese and Indian migrant labourers. Discourses in favour and against Jewish migration reinforced a vision of South Africa that was only for white people, in which civil rights and rights of migration were defined by the ability of Jews to depict themselves as white. The introduction of migration restrictions specifically targeted at Jews in 1930 and 1937 prove that to at least some extent they were unsuccessful. The attempts to restrict migration to only the ‘good Jews’ who assimilated within South Africa regulated the potentially subversive Jewish community as any opposition to white supremacy would have been seen as evidence of their lack of whiteness. Liberal discourses on Jewish South African migration followed Churchill’s dichotomy of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jew. ‘Bad’ migrant Jews were contrasted with ‘good’ resident Jews. ‘Good’ Jews were contrasted to the ‘bad’ white working class or the ‘bad’ Asian migrants. Jewish whiteness, and therefore their status as desirable migrants was dependent on the exclusion of others from that whiteness.

Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism played a key role in the formation of white unity within South Africa. A key element of this came in the form of conspiracy theories, which suggested Jews had a supernatural power to control government. Like concerns about Jewish migration, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories had

49 Rand Daily Mail, ‘Excluded From The Transvaal’, 14/02/1907 50 Rand Daily Mail, ‘A London Notebook’ 15/03/1907. 51 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1992) 52 For example Jan Hofmeyr, Christian Principles and Race Problems, (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations: 1945)53 Jan Smuts, 10/02/1907 quoted in Rand Daily Mail, ‘Mr Smuts’ Version’ 11/02/1907.

international and local features. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in South Africa borrowed heavily from established European anti-Semitic ideas.54 However, South Africa developed the ‘Hoggenheimer’ as a unique anti-Semitic stereotype built on the European idea of a conspiratorial Jewish capitalist, which was a combination of a British imperialist, a vulture Capitalist and a Randlord.55 Jewish capitalists were accused of arranging Asian migration to the Rand and starting the Boer war. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories created an external agent to blame for the Boer war and class tensions within South African society. Conspiracy theories about the controlling Jew were linked to the spectre of racial degeneration and to concerns about the ‘native question’ and Asian migration. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, their spread and their adoption were a vital part of both liberal and far right pre-apartheid politics. The adoption of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was coupled with a forthright rejection of Nazism among liberal circles, which reinforced their liberal credentials at a time when they were endorsing much more stringent segregation.

54 Patrick Furlong, Between the Swastika and the Cross, pg.53.55 Milton Shain, A Perfect Storm: Anti-Semitism in South Africa 1930-1948 (Johannessburg: Jonathan Ball, 2015) For depictions see figures 4 and 5.

Fig. 4: The Owl, 20/12/1901.

Reproduced in Shain, Milton, The Roots of Anti-Semitism Within South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1994)

Anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories were very common in hard right circles. During the 1930s and 40s prominent National Party politicians, including Eric Louw and Oswald Pirow, expressed deep sympathy for Nazi anti-Semitism and the Nazi vision of the unity of race and land.56 Jews were targeted by the South African right as capitalists conspirators who were plotting the downfall of the white race.57 This conception of Jews as sinister capitalist conspirators had its origins in European conspiracy theories of the same type, epitomised by the Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which accuses Jews of being part of a sinister cabal to control the world. Jews were often associated with money lending and financial misdealing. This idea of the sinister meddling capitalist gained particular prominence in South Africa in the aftermath of the Boer war which came to be blamed on the power of the randlords.58 Other elements of anti-Semitism derived from older European Christian traditions, such as the ideas that Jews killed Jesus and the blood libel. The specificity of anti-Semitism, within forms of racism, meant that Jews were often allowed considerably more assimilation and success within white supremacist systems, as long as they conformed to most of their norms. However, this relative success was coupled with a limitation of the roles that could be played by Jews and the ascription of Jewish success down to a supernatural conspiratorial power.

South Africans, especially Dutch South Africans, were very cautious about the influence of mining magnates on the politics in South Africa, given the role that British mining magnates and large scale British capitalists such as Cecil Rhodes or Leander Jameson. This concern was shared by the far right and liberals. Jan Smuts repeatedly refers to the ‘baneful interest of plutocracy’ in creating dissension within white South African society, creating the imperative for white unity after the Boer war. 59 While the reference to the power of plutocrats was not necessarily anti-Semitic, a vision of society controlled by plutocratic conspiracy could easily be shaped as a society that was controlled by Jewish plutocrats. Smuts described much of the colonial government as being ‘completely dictated by the

56 Milton Shain, A Perfect Storm: Anti-Semitism in South Africa 1930-1948 (Johannessburg: Jonathan Ball, 2015) pg.151. 57 Patrick Furlong, Between the Swastika and the Cross: The Impact of the Radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement of the Fascist Era (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1991) 58 Milton Shain, The Roots of Anti-Semitism Within South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1994)59 Smuts to Westenholme, 29/06/1903.

Fig. 5: The Owl, 1/1/1901.

Reproduced in Shain, Milton, The Roots of Anti-Semitism Within South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1994)

mining magnates’, further reflecting a conspiratorial outlook.60 This idea that South Africa was run by a conspiracy, an especially doubtful contention among people who formed the government, was a reflection of prevailing anti-Semitic ideas. Jan Smuts’ Cambridge mentor HJ Wolstenholme explains that these plutocratic interests, referred to repeatedly in Smuts networks meant ‘Jewish financiers and promoters’.61 Smuts made this more explicit when he referred to the trade unions ‘dread of the hoggenheimer’, a clear reference to the anti-Semitic stereotype.62 The politics of the white man’s countries of the US and Australia were compared to the ‘hirelings of the hoggenheimer’ that dominated South Africa.63 This belief that the problems of South African society were the result of the conspiracy of Rand financiers, and more specifically a Jewish conspiracy, allowed South African politicians to externalise divisions within white South African society. This was an intrinsic part of the liberal rebuilding of white solidarity after the Boer war. A Jewish conspiracy explained the tensions between British and Afrikaner, allowing white liberal society to redefine divisions as the result of a conspiracy by an ethnic other.

During the 1930s, anti-Semitism came to be increasingly equated with the Nazi dominance of South Africa. For South African liberals, a support of Jews and an opposition to Nazism became symbolic of their liberalism, while South Africa was becoming increasingly segregated and authoritarian. The role of opposition to anti-Semitism in liberal imperialist discourse is analogous to colonial feminism, or later European homonationalisms play in racist discourse.64 Liberal criticism of anti-Semitism was used as demonstrative of South African civilisation, compared to the uncivilised Eastern European or Germans, who engaged in more serious anti-Semitism. In this way a critique of anti-Semitism acted as a negation of critiques of South African white supremacy and the liberal involvement of this. Opposition to anti-Semitism, rather than being included within a universal critique of the structural racism within South African society, bolstered liberal conceptions of white supremacy. Alfred Heorle writes that the ‘fight against the Jews has ever been the sign of the inferior more envious nations’. 65 Hofmeyr is more explicit when he blames the Nazis for rising anti-Semitism within South African society, describing anti-Semitism as a result of the ‘particularly aggressive’ Nazi propaganda.66 Anti-Semitism represented an external threat to the South African society, rather than something that was born of South African society. A similar moral panic about Anti-Semitism ‘other less civilised’ nations was also reflected in liberal opposition to pogroms in Russia.67 Support for Jews abroad functioned to reinforce the notions of South African liberals embodying white civilisation, in contrast to the uncivilised German and Eastern European others, who engaged in discrimination against Jews.

60 Jan Smuts, Memorandum on the Transvaal Constitution (1906) in Hancock and Van Der Poel ed. Selections from the Smuts Papers II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966)61 H Wolstenholme to Jan Smuts, 20/04/1906.62 John Merriman to Jan Smuts, 30/03/1906. 63 John Merriman to Jan Smuts, 8/03/1907.64 For similar phenomena see Bodo Kahmann, ‘The Most ardent Pro-Israel party: pro Israel attitudes and anti-antisemitism among radical right parties in Europe’, Patterns of Prejudice, 2017, 51 (5), 396-411; On homonationalism Maya Mmikdashi, ‘Gay Rights as Human Rights: Pinkwashing Homonationalism, Jadalliyah, (2011); On Colonial Feminism see the work of Catherine Hall, Civilising Subject: Metropole and Colony in the Imperial Imagination (Cambridge: Polity, 2002) and Gayatra Chakravoty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman ed. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Colombia University Press, 1994). 65 Alfred Heorle, ‘The Problem of Race’, Race and Reason: Being Mainly a Selection of Contributions on the Race Question (Johannesburg: ID MacCrone, 1945) 66 Jan Hofmeyr, Christian Principles and Race Problems (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations: 1945)67 Rand Daily Mail, ‘Anti-Hebrew Riots’, 21/03/1907.

As would be expected from an opposition to anti-semitism which largely concerned itself with demonstrating their Christian civilisation, much of their opposition to Nazism concerned itself with the effect it had on Christians rather than Jews. It was their opposition to the Nazi authoritarianism which led to support of Jews rather than a concern for Jews. This was driven by an anglo-philia and a belief that Nazism was threatening to the maintenance of white Christian civilisation. Jan Smuts writes that the Nazi government seemed to be signalling a ‘return to medieval barbarism’.68 Jan Hofmeyr referred to the Nazi party as a party that sought to replace ‘God with the state’.69 Opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism coexisted with an increasing justification of segregation, as even when opposition to Nazism drove liberals to describe the Jews as a white race, they still describe Indians as a threat to the white man and supported further restrictions on African representation and land ownership.70 Their opposition to Nazism negated their support for segregation.71 To fulfil this function their opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism needed to be qualified by and opposed on the basis of their authoritarianism and its anti-Christianity, rather than on the basis of its anti-Semitism and fundamental racial equality.

While opposing Nazi anti-Semitism was an important part of demonstrating their civilisation, it was combined with limited support for other aspects of the Nazi project. Jan Smuts, in 1936, wrote that Hitler had done much ‘for the German people ‘morally and politically’, though Smuts conceded that he had failed economically.72 It was not just in the far-right of South African politics, as identified by scholars such as Patrick Furlong, that there was sympathy for the far-right. In many ways liberal anti-fascism mirrored their opposition to segregation and apartheid, as they adopted many of its underlying assumptions even while opposing the program as a whole. Smuts wrote that the Nazi campaign against the Jews was doomed to fail because the Jews have their hands on the ‘levers of every civilised countries’.73 Anti-Nazism, in South African circles, was perfectly consistent with anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in South Africa were something that were shared by both liberal and far-right South Africans. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories played a key role in uniting white South Africans in the aftermath of the Boer was as it allowed a vergangenheitsbewaltigung which framed the war as the result of sinister external Jewish forces. The post-Boer war settlement, led by self-proclaimed liberal politicians such as Jan Smuts, allowed for an increasing South African view of a united white community that was under siege from ethnic others. This provided the background both for the surge in support for Nazism within South African politics, and for the development of apartheid, which was based on the much the same political rubric of a fragile and besieged white supremacy. South African liberals did oppose Nazism. Their opposition to Nazism and to Nazi anti-Semitism became symbolic of their liberalism. Their liberal opposition to Nazism was limited by the inherent contradiction of their professed liberal non-racialism, while not undermining a segregated system, based on violent white supremacy. Professing an anti-racist politics that was based on support for minorities would have undermined the South Africa based on strict racial dichotomies which they supported. As with critiques based on the idea of the ‘good Jew’ and the ‘bad Jew’, South African liberals were left in a position where they critiqued the severity or authoritarianism of Nazi anti-Semitism while sharing much of its politics. Even at points they expressed admiration for the

68 Jan Smuts, Smuts to Gillet, 04/04/1933.69Jan Hofmeyr, Christian Principles and Race Problems, pg.21. 70 Jan Hofmeyr, South Africa, pg.175. 71 Jan Hofmeyr, Christian Principles and Race Problems (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations: 1945)72 Jan Smuts, Smuts to MPA Hanskey, 07/04/1934.73 Jan Smuts, Smuts to Gillet, 04/04/1933.

ways in which the Nazi’s had dealt with its ‘racial problems’, almost seeing it as a model to deal with the racial problems fundamental to South African society. South African liberals shared many of the political and social assumptions of the far-right and their support for a racially segregated state undermined their ability to make clear critiques of the South African far-right.

Philo-Semitism

A key element of the white liberal South African relationship with Jewish people was philo-Semitism and the support of Zionism. Philo-Semitism shared the same essentialist stereotypes of Jews as far-right anti-Semitism. Liberal South African politics were dependent on the drawing of a dichotomy between ‘good’ Jews and ‘bad’ Jews, in which acceptance within South African society was dependent on conforming to standards of white behaviour.74 The limitations of philo-Semitic support for Jews were reflective of inherent contradiction between the liberal desire to express support for Jews, in order to reinforce their claim to civilised enlightenment, and their need to legitimise an increasingly racialised South African society. Often the support of Jews was most practical expressed through support of Zionism, a movement which in the context of South African society, normalised Jews as having their own settler colonialism and reinforced the sense of Jews as other, not being properly from or of South Africa. While liberal philo-Semitism was limited in its scope by contradictions inherent to South African liberalism, it did play a key role in making Jews white. This whiteness was achieved without compromising the fundamental white supremacist character of South African society, which meant full acceptance for Jews would always be illusive.

Zionism, a key feature of South African society, accepted by much of the far-right and the liberal society.75 Many Afrikaner nationalist saw parallels between Afrikaner nationalism and the Zionist narrative of Jewish history.76 Jan Smuts was such a fervent Zionist that the secretary of the South African Zionist federation suggested that a tract of land in Palestine be named after him. 77 Understanding the solidarity between white South Africans and Zionism requires an understanding of Zionism, not as purely a national liberation movement, a notion that has been orthodox in much Zionist discourse since its foundation.78 Zionism, especially in its South African articulation was a project that was concerned with the settling of a land, and therefore could be said to be a colonial project.79 Like other forms of settler colonialism, Zionism sought renewal of a ‘degenerated’ metropolitan population, relied on myths of an empty land and the idea that newer settlers made better trustees of the land.80 This colonial element of Zionism was especially important for South African Zionist politics, with the Board of Deputies adding a further level of colonial mythology by arguing that Zionism was a way of spreading western civilisation.81 Zionism, like Afrikaner

74 Winston Churchill, ‘Zionism verses Bolshevisms’ Sunday Herald, February 8th 1920.75 Gideon Shimoni, Jews and Zionism: The South African Experience: 1910-1967 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1980)76 Milton Shain, ‘Paradoxical Ambiguity: DF Malan and the Jewish Question’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 2017, 72 (1) pp63-74. 77Jan Smuts, ‘Jan Smuts to J Landau’, 01/03/1934.78 Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (Hanover: University of New England Press, 1995) is an example of such scholarship. 79Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London, Routledge and Keegan, 1980); Paul: Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ Journal of Genocide Research, 8 (4), 2006, 387-409.80 On degeneration Ellen Boucher, ‘The Limits of Potential: Race, Welfare and the Extension of Interwar Child Migration to Southern Rhodesia’ Journal of British Studies, 48 (4), 2009, 914-934; on trusteeship Robert McDermott Hughes, Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape and the Problem of Belonging (Basignstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010); on the emptiness Clifton Crais, ‘This Vacant Land: The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape’, Journal of Social History, 1991, 21 (2), pp.255-275. 81 ‘Jewry in Travail, Jewish Affairs, July 1946.

nationalism was a colonial project which was combined with a claim of autochthony, which reinforced the perceived connection between Afrikaner nationalism and Zionism. The Nationalist Party even went so far to describe Afrikaner nationalism as a form of Zionism.82 The support for Zionism was an important part of the South African Jewish community being made white, as it was through Zionism that Jews could gain their own settler colonialism, the ultimate signifier of whiteness.

South African liberals also appreciated the extent to which Zionism was a transformative project for Jewish people, with the aim of physical, spiritual and political renewal. Alfred Heorle went as far as suggesting that Zionism had given the Jewish people ‘a new soul?’.83 This idea of the development of a national identity leading to a spiritual, physical and political renewal reflects the assumption that Jews had developed an essentially disadvantageous character within the diaspora, and that this character could only be reformed by a national homeland. This Zionist aim to reform the Jewish character, and create the ‘New Jewish Sabra’ can be seen in the Zionist back to land movements which aimed to undo the racial degeneration that they believed had occurred in the diaspora, due to excessive urbanisation.84 The belief in the degenerated diasporic Jew sat comparatively easily with the anti-Semitic belief in the degenerate Jew.85 The forthright endorsement of Zionism conformed to the established trope of the division of the Jewish community in to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews. In Churchill’s original formation the role of the ‘good’ Jew was played by the ‘national’ Zionist Jew, as it was in South Africa.86 The Rand Daily Mail even went so far as to publish an article suggesting that ‘a Jew was a Zionist born, or he was not a Jew’.87 This division reflected the politics of non-Zionist South African Jews who represented a sizeable minority within the Jewish community, and were more likely to involved in socialist politics and oppose segregation.88 South African societies unquestioning adoption of Zionism was part of their attempt to produce a compliant Jewish community through strategically allowing fuller political recognition to Jews, who conformed to their beliefs surrounding what Jews should be.

The mass support for Zionism within South African society and especially amongst its more liberal elements was shaped by the belief that Zionism would solve South Africa’s Jewish problem. Zionist belief in the autochthony of Jews in Palestine reinforced the belief that Jews were not properly from South Africa, or properly deserving of migration to South Africa. The Rand Daily Mail argued that ‘the provision of a territory upon an autonomous basis is the immediate solution of the Russian Jewish question’.89 Support for Zionism justified within a liberal nationalist framework hostility towards Russian Jewish migrants, as it allowed the issue to be framed as the denial of a national home to the Jews rather than as a humanitarian imperative. The widespread support for Zionism within South African society was important in the liberal framework of giving limited support for Jews, as a

82 Patrick Furlong, Between the Crown and the Swastika: The Afrikaner Racial Right in the Fascist Era (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999) pg.53. 83 Heorle, ‘On the Concept of the Soul of the People’ Race and Reason: Being Mainly a Selection of Contributions on the Race Question (Johannesburg: ID MacCrone, 1945) pg.17. 84 For example Julius Miller, ‘Ort Farming Techniques’, Jewish Affairs, January 1947; On the Sabra Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London, Routledge and Keegan, 198085 Heorle, ‘On the Concept of the Soul of the People’ Race and Reason: Being Mainly a Selection of Contributions on the Race Question (Johannesburg: ID MacCrone, 1945). 86 Winston Churchill, ‘Zionism verses Bolshevisms’ Sunday Herald, February 8th 1920.87 ‘Johannesburg Zionist Society’, Rand Daily Mail, 21/01/1907.88 Gideon Shimoni, ‘Accounting for Radicals in Apartheid South Africa’ in Memories, Realities and Dreams: Some Aspects of the Jewish South African Experience ed. Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2000)89 ‘Settlement of Jews’, Rand Daily Mail, 26/01/1907.

symbol of their liberalism, while espousing deeply conservative racial ideas at home. Support for Zionism relied on Ashkenazi Jewish settlers being considered whiter than the Palestinian population before mass Jewish migration.90 They were framed as ideal settlers completing a valuable colonial project, and therefore as a state which should be supported by any right-thinking South African settler colonialist.91 Zionism became the prevailing philo-semitic discourse because it was through Zionism that South African liberals could solve the Jewish problem while maintaining their liberal values.

Liberal philo-semitism attempted to directly contradict anti-Semitic discourses about Jews being culturally and physical degenerate and failing to contribute to colonialism. This challenging of anti-Semitic beliefs through arguing for a Jewish contribution to colonialism failed to challenge the basis of these anti-Semitic beliefs that the failure to contribute to a Euro-, Christian- Centric society would justify discrimination. As Fanon astutely observed ‘if philosophy and education have been invoked to justify equality then they have also been invoked to justify extermination.92 Smuts argued that anti-Semitism was unjustified on the basis that Jewish intellectual achievements, such as the work of Einstein were ‘lights on the human path’.93 The Rand Daily Mail wrote that ‘the Jew today is intellectually keen and is at the same time clever at music’.94 Others praised Jews for their commercial advancement as ‘today they were buldeldraagers tomorrow they owned a horse and cart and the next day they were the largest shopkeepers in the village’. 95 While philo-Semites viewed Jewish commercial, cultural and intellectual success as something to be imitated, they fundamentally accepted the stereotype of the Jew within anti-Semitic literature in which Jews were viewed as greedy, culturally degenerate and given supernatural abilities for commercial success. To break out from these essentialised defences of Jews and Judaism would mean defending Jews from anti-Semitism on the universal basis that people were deserving of equality regardless of their achievement of Euro-centric notions of culture; a contention that would have made continuing to deny equal rights to Black and Asian communities in South Africa untenable.

The liberal opposition to anti-Semitism based on accepting the essentialised anti-Semitic characterisation of Jews was limited to ‘good Jews’. ‘Good’ Jews were seen as acceptable, whereas Jews who failed to conform to this essentialised version of what a Jew should be considered less worthy of protection and inclusion within whiteness. The Rand Daily Mail described a ‘good Jew’ as ‘good neighbour and a good citizen’.96 Another article identifies Jews as ‘industrious, thrifty and always loyal to the flag which guarantees liberty and justice.97 Liberty and justice for Jews in this liberal framework was contingent on their loyalty to the flag and supporting the segregationist aims of the pre-apartheid state. Jewish whiteness was not essential, but to become white and to gain acceptance within South African society ‘it was for Jews to prove that they deserved the love of the king and his people’.98 A philo-Semitism that was based on Jewish political compliance was not one which sought to oppose anti-Semitism but sought to limit anti-Semitism to Jews who failed to publicly behave in the way that they expected, or to challenge the political dynamics of pre-apartheid society. Limited philo-Semtism was not an anti-racist impulse but a regulatory impulse, an

90 Jordana Silverstein, ‘From the Utter Depth of Degradation to the Apogy of Bliss: The Genderings of Diasporic Zionism and Jewish Holocaust Education’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 22 (3), 2012, 377-398. 91 Jan Smuts, ‘Smuts to Chaim Weizmann’, 28/11/1929. 92 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967)93 Jan Smuts, ‘Jan Smuts to J Landau’, 01/03/1934.94Rand Daily Mail 20/08/190795 Jan Smuts Speaks, Rand Daily Mail, 10/05/190796 Letter, Rand Daily Mail, 21/01/1907.97 Rand Daily Mail 05/06/170798 Rand Daily Mail, /11/11/1907

attempt to create a society which directly tied Jews to loyalty to the state and acceptable social behaviour for white people. The idea that ‘good’ Jews were white people who were deserving of the social and political benefits that came with whiteness had similar aims to arguments developed by right wing anti-Semites that Jews should be excluded from whiteness. Both led the Jewish community to adopt all the expected behaviours of white people in order to avoid discrimination.

Philo-Semitism among liberal circles shared the essentialist assumptions surrounding Jews as the anti-Semitism of the far right. They adopted the tropes of Jews being financially successful, cultural competitive and intellectually keen, the same tropes that had been used to justify discrimination and the exclusion of Jews from white supremacy. Their ability to criticise anti-Semitism on more universal grounds was severely limited by their widespread acceptance of the white supremacy as the organising principle of society. This general acceptance of white supremacy made advocating for Jewish inclusion within the white group all the more important, as support for Jews was symbolic of their liberalism. Zionism fit perfectly within these principles. Its denigration of diasporic Jewish life provided a liberal framework with which to justify restrictions on Jewish migration, as the Jewish problem could be solved by the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Zionism also provided another way of organising the South African Jewish community in to ‘good’ Jews and ‘bad’ Jews key to ensuring that the community was politically unproblematic. Zionism was in many ways the ultimate assimilatory project for South African Jews in that by creating a new nation and a new colonial project Jews could become a normal white nation, where being successfully involved in a colonial project was of the key signifiers of whiteness. Philo-Semites aimed to create a society in which Jews were considered to be white people in a society that was based on discrimination against those who were not white. The Jewish achievement of whiteness which liberal philo-Semites advocated for was one which was contingent on Jewish behaviour and assimilation, so that they might have been considered good Jews, worthy of designation as white people within a white supremacist system.

Conclusion

With respect to the Jewish question, if not with respect to other ‘questions’ within South African society, it was the liberal policy which became hegemonic during the apartheid era. Jews were not subject of organised discrimination, except with respect to migration. Jews were allowed to own property, had Black servants and full voting rights. A history of the social role of discourses surrounding Jews in early 20th Century could be located with the growing body of literature on how groups achieved whiteness.99 Jewish inclusion within whiteness was produced by discourses designed to exclude others, and to reinforce the white supremacy as the organising principle of society. To say that the South African Jewish community became white, erases the extent to which this journey towards whiteness was a contingent process and their achievement of that whiteness was fragile. The liberal agitation for Jewishness to not be exclusive of whiteness, was dependent on the Jewish community being ‘good’ Jews. To be white they needed to be national, not international, conservative not radical and faultlessly loyal to the flag. They needed to behave as white people were expected to within South African society. Without this performance of white supremacy Jews would lose their designation as white. This marginality was not so much the creation of the anti-Semitic far right but was the result of liberal politics and liberal opposition to anti-Semitism.

99 Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks and What it Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1998); Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews Race and American Identity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).

It is inadequate to talk about anti-Semitism in isolation from the racial politics of South Africa, as scholars such as Milton Shain seek to do, and it is further inadequate to write about the racial politics of pre-apartheid South Africa without anti-Semitism. As Sartre observed ‘if Jews did not exist then the non-Jew would invent them.’100 Hannah Arendt’s insight that the development of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism in Europe was heavily linked to the development of imperial racism point to a much more complex relationship between Jews, whiteness and other groups on a margin of whiteness, than previous scholarship has suggested.101 Jews and discourses about Jews played an important social role within the pre-apartheid system. Jews were the model minority, a symbol of whiteness to poor whites and Asians. They were often compared negatively to these groups. It was through comparison with Jews that the major early 20th Century South African policies surrounding those groups took shape. The myth of a Jewish conspiracy eased the development of white unity following the Boer war, as sinister Jewish capitalists could be blamed for the break in white unity, so facilitating the development of a politics that was mainly aimed at solving the native problem. Debates surrounding whether Jewish migrants counted as white, and whether Yiddish counted as a European language reinforced the extent to which South African citizenship was conferred on the basis of whiteness. Even defences of Jews against anti-Semitism accepted and reinforced a society in which social and political rights were given on the basis of whiteness. Support for Jews was especially important for liberal politics as an opposition to anti-Semitism, especially directed abroad was vital in defining their liberalism. Without advocating for large scale changes to South African society, liberals could use their love and respect for the Jews in order to create a liberal identity for themselves while accepting the premise of segregation and a white supremacist economic system.

Anti and Philo-Semitism, far from being marginal to the development of apartheid within early 20 th

Century South Africa had a key social role in defining the boundaries of whiteness and reifying a society that was based on white supremacy and white unity as its fundamental organising principle. This social role played by ‘the Jew’ was one which was as important to self-declared liberals, such as Jan Smuts or Hofmeyr as it was to the far-right. As ‘good’ Jews gained whiteness, the system of white supremacy was strengthened rather than undermined. A system that imposed great restrictions on those who were not considered white, and restrictions on the ways in which someone could be acceptably Jewish without compromising their white supremacy. In a society divided by both the colonial state and tradition historiography into the white Christian coloniser and the Black African colonised, Jews were at the centre of the liberal political imagination, as the symbol of their liberalism and as the foundation of white unity.

100 Jean Paul-Sarte, The Anti-Semtite and the Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (New York: Shocken Books, 1948) pg.8.101 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.