Reflections on antisemitism in South Africa and Britain

Antisemitism in the South Africa of my childhood played a significant part in shaping my personality. It was crude and confrontational but I seldom felt threatened by it and I regarded its barbs simply as an unpleasant aspect of everyday life, something to be put up with but easily navigated if one chose not to rise to the bait.

For example, there was our ‘manual training’ teacher, a rugged Afrikaner, who would scold a boy (not Jewish) for asking too many questions “like a little Jewboy”, disregarding the sensitivities of the two or three Jewish children in the class. Then there was his colleague, who taught woodwork, who also made frequent disparaging references to “Jewboys”. But these were exceptions. I never sensed an undercurrent of antisemitism in my other teachers, nor did I pick up antisemitism in any of my classmates, with most of whom I was on friendly terms.

This was in Johannesburg, a predominantly English-speaking city with a relatively liberal culture. Things were different in rural South Africa and in the smaller towns which were largely Afrikaner strongholds. I remember my mother telling me about one of her cousins, whose family lived in a ‘dorp’ in a remote region of the Cape Province, saying how he had been tied to a tree and taunted for his Jewishness. ((He later became a leading light in the Zionist movement and wrote extensively on the subject of antisemitism).

Stories like this were enough to scare me and I became determined to keep my head down in the company of gentiles and to only indulge my Jewishness within the safe enclave of family and Jewish friends. I was glad that my name did not have a particularly Jewish ring to it, hoping that I could evade identification as a Jew. I was also relieved that both my parents spoke English without a Yiddish inflection and pleased that my father held a prestigious position as headmaster of an English medium primary school within a system which promoted education along Christian National lines. In retrospect, I was living in two worlds, a modern-day Marrano.

The antisemitism which permeated both the English and Afrikaans speaking white communities was overshadowed by anti-black prejudice, which evolved into the Apartheid ideology. This caused a split in the Jewish community, some of whom identified with the ruling Afrikaner element who saw blacks as a threat to their security and prosperity, while others, drawing on their personal experiences of having been on the receiving end of discrimination, identified with the oppressed black people of the country.

Jews were prominent in the struggle against Apartheid, a stance which lent itself to the generalisation that Jews were traitors to the white cause. They were known as ‘Kaffirboeties’ (brothers to the blacks) and communists, whether they were or not. Many of the leading figures in the Afrikaner Nationalist Party had been Nazi sympathisers during the war and there was a lingering animosity between Afrikaans- and English-speaking white communities dating back at least to the Anglo-Boer war. Furthermore, Nazi theories of Aryan racial superiority had a strong resonance for those whites who sought to dominate other ethnic groups.

At the same time that all this political in-fighting was going on, there arose a curious affinity between Jews and Afrikaners, closer than that which existed between Jews and whites of British origin, despite their common language. Afrikaners, mainly of the Calvinistic persuasion, saw Jews as people of the Old Testament. In many parts of the country the two peoples lived congenially alongside each other and worked harmoniously together. For their part, Jews prospered, Jewish cultural and religious life flourished and when the State of Israel was declared there was strong support for the establishment of mutual ties between the two countries.

Antisemitism in Britain, as I experienced it during the seventies and eighties, was of an entirely different order. It was more covert, in keeping with the well-known British custom of reserve. Therefore, it was often dressed up in circumlocution and understatement. A diplomat of my acquaintance, unaware of my Jewish identity, once made a remark about a conspicuously Jewish neighbour to the effect that “those people should know better, considering that they have lived in this country for so long”, a statement similar in tone to the observation of Mr Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the Labour Party, that “Jewish people don’t quite understand the British sense of humour”.

In the hospitals where I worked, I realised how easy it would be to ape the stiff formality and upper class affectations of doctors at the top of the pyramid. To my astonishment, I learnt that there were several Jews in their ranks, who betrayed no outward sign of Jewish affiliation and who were, if anything, “more British than the British”. It was if Jewishness was a relic which they preferred to disown.

Another assault by antisemites in Britain came from the hard Left of the Labour Party. I discovered this during my tenure of a post in a predominantly multi-ethnic London borough. When I first began working there, hostility, then as now, turned on an anti-Israel axis. On one occasion I felt obliged to take a stand on behalf of an Israeli colleague whose visit to our service was threatened with cancellation, ostensibly because of his country’s policy.

Jews were not usually mentioned by name, making it difficult to pin charges of racism on the assailants. Instead, fire was directed at so called elitists, who were accused of standing in the way of aspiring black and multi-ethnic workers and failing to understand the needs of black families in the community.

To this day, I marvel at how easily the antisemitic virus has mutated in order to adapt to the prevailing social and political climate. I have survived its depredations in two continents over seven decades but I continue to be dismayed by its hardy character and imperviousness to reason.