South African Jewry

Non-Protestants, including Jews, were denied the right to settle during the rule of the Dutch East India Company (1652–1795). This practice was changed under the relatively enlightened Batavian administration (1803–1806) and maintained thereafter by their administrative heirs, the British, beginning in 1806. A handful of Jews, mainly of English, Dutch, and German origin, availed themselves of the new circumstances, which allowed Jews the right to settle. In 1841 they founded Tikvath Israel (Hope of Israel), forerunner of the Cape Town Hebrew Congregation. Their numbers were consolidated by the influx of eastern European Jews, mainly from Lithuania, after the discovery of diamonds in the 1860s and the discovery of gold two decades later. About 40,000 Jews came to the country in the three decades prior to the First World War, but mass immigration of Jews to South Africa was curtailed with the introduction of the Quota Act in 1930. The eastern European newcomers readily adapted to their new setting, including acculturation into a segregated society where Jews came to be regarded as white. This, however, did not spare them from anti-Semitism that peaked in the 1930s, much of it driven by Afrikaner nationalists, who ultimately took power in 1948 and imposed the system of apartheid. The immigrants brought with them a Zionist fervor that continues to characterize the South African Jewish community to this day. The two major national Jewish organizations born in the immigrant period—the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the South African Zionist Federation—reflect these twin impulses. While the board deals essentially with domestic matters —primarily responding to anti-Semitism and representing the community in its interactions with the government—the South African Zionist Federation deals with Israel-related activities. By 1961 virtually the entire South African Jewish population, slightly enhanced by a trickle of Sephardi immigrants from the Belgium Congo, was urbanized, with the overwhelming majority living in the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, and Pretoria. At its zenith in 1970, the Jewish community numbered 118,200, or 0.6 percent of the total population of 21.4 million, and 3.1 percent of the white population of 3.7 million. The community remains vibrant, albeit beset with the worries of post-apartheid South Africa and considerably reduced in size because of mass emigration. The population is now approximately 52,300, less than 0.1 percent of the total South African population of 56 million. More than twenty-five years after the first democratic elections, the Jewish community is still grappling with its past under apartheid and finding its place in the new South Africa.