South Africa 2025

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICAN JEWS

Sometime during 1497, the Portuguese armada, led by Vasco de Gama, while searching for a sea route from Europe to India, landed at St. Helena Bay, on South Africa’s northern west coast. He was the first European to set foot on South African soil.

What was so incredible about this voyage, was that he was sailing into an undiscovered part of the world; there were no maps of the area, and he relied entirely on the sun and the stars to navigate. He had no idea where he was going. His objective was to discover a sea route to Asia.

As the story goes, on board was Fernao Martins, a linguist, interpreter and scribe, and because of his knowledge of Arabic, the hope was that they’d encounter Arab traders, and he’d be able to communicate with them.

However, they did not settle there, their objective was finding a way to the Asian continent.

The next Europeans to explore South Africa was the Dutch East India Company in 1652. However, they only accepted Protestants as membership – although there were ‘conversos’ (forcibly converted Jews) whose identity has been lost to time. The Dutch colonized the Cape, and began to develop a limited area as a way-station, with small-scale agricultural enterprises.

It wasn’t until 1806 that the British arrived, and formally colonized the Cape, that the first self-acknowledged Jew arrived. He was Siegfried Fraenkel, a ship’s surgeon. During 1820, an estimated 20 British Jews arrived on the eastern Cape coast.

Their first minyan was officially commemorated at the home of Benjamin Norden in 1841 in Cape Town, and in 1863, Tikvat Israel, the first synagogue was built. It still stands today, and has been converted into Cape Town’s Jewish Museum.

Waves of Jews arrived thereafter, mainly from The Pale of Settlement, the Russian-controlled area, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Their reason for coming to South Africa was quite different to the earlier settlers; they weren’t explorers and adventurers, but were escaping pogroms.

They came from the towns and villages of Lithuania; Kovno, Ponevez, Shavli, Rakishok, Poswohl, Shadowa, Vilna, Grodno, Vitebsk, Courland and Minsk, and a few from Lodz, Warsaw and Odessa. There were three waves of emigration of these Jews: After the 1880 Russian Pogroms, after the 1903 Kishinev Pogroms, and after the deportation of Jews from the Baltics in 1915.

During this time, the South African Jewish community grew from 4,000 to over 40,000. So many came from Lithuania that some referred to the South African Jewish population as a colony of Lithuania.

Jewish emigrants from Tsar-occupied Lithuania are generally thought of as having fled the persecution and poverty for the safe shores of America. A much less known story is that of the many Lithuanians who traveled to South Africa. Most of these migrants came from the Kaunas region (Kovno in Yiddish), but many also came from towns such as Palanga, Panevėžys, Rietavas and Šiauliai.

Vilnius, the capital, was once known as the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’, and had a thriving community of 60,000 Jews, and in excess of 90 synagogues, and had the largest Yiddish library in the world.

Many traveled from Lithuania via the Liepāja port in Latvia on ships bound via the Baltic Sea and – after its opening in 1895 – the Kiel Canal shortcut, for the English ports. From there to Southampton to embark for Cape Town.

This movement of people was not accidental: a whole business existed to cater for them, from the ticket agents in Kaunas or Vilnius, to shipping lines such as the Wilson Line shuttling between Liepāja and Hull, to the ‘Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter’ in London – which housed and orientated many of the trans-migrants – and they then traveled on the Castle Line and Union Line which specialized in the route to South Africa.

Those Lithuanian Jews have become commonly known as ‘Litvaks’, and the Yiddish adjective is ‘Litvish’ means ‘Lithuanian’.  The term Litvak comes from Litwak, the Polish word for ‘a man from Lithuania’.

Litvaks are Jews traditionally from the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – present-day Lithuania, and parts of Belarus, Ukraine and Latvia – and the north-eastern Suwałki region of Poland. Litvaks, as a territorial and linguistic subgroup of Ashkenazi Jews, speak a dialect of Yiddish.

The choice to emigrate to South Africa by these Litvaks was because of their special circumstances in their country, and not because of the attractions offered to the general community of Jewish settlers who came from the United Kingdom.

By 1880 there were about 4,000 Jews in South Africa. Jewish immigration increased rapidly during the pogroms of 1881 to 1884.

The first countrywide Union of South African census in 1911 indicated a population of 46,919 Jews, a majority of whom were Litvaks. By 1921, the Jewish population had risen to 62,103. They settled primarily in the gold-mining and commercial centers of the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal area.

Like their Lithuanian ancestors, who included wealthy capitalists, zealous Zionists, prominent religious scholars and committed communists, South Africa’s Litvaks, have spanned the political spectrum.

Lithuanians began to dominate the Jewish community in South Africa to the extent seen of no other country; international casino and hotel magnate Sol Kerzner, communist party leader Joe Slovo, veteran anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman, and Louis Washkansy, the first heart transplant recipient, make an unlikely group, but are all of Lithuanian descent.

And now, around 90% of the Jews living in South Africa are of Lithuanian descent, and this constitutes the largest group of Litvaks outside Eastern Europe in the world.

The arrival of Lithuanian Jews to South Africa influenced a great change; they solidified the foundations of the Jewish community, replaced the subdued Anglo-German character of prayer to one of fervor and joy, they no longer needed imposing and magnificent buildings, and created a strong affinity with their Holy Land – Zionism.

Sammy Marks is regarded as the pioneer of Lithuanian emigration. He became a friend of President Paul Kruger and was highly successful as an industrialist.

He was born in the Lithuanian district of Taurage in 1843 and was one of the very first Litvaks to arrive on African shores. He came here via England in 1868 and began his career by hawking cheap jewellery and cutlery in Cape Town. Later he moved on to Kimberley where he went into business with his brother-in-law Isaac Lewis and Jules Porges. Together they formed the French Diamond Mining Company.

Following this, Lewis and Marks decided to relocate to the Eastern Transvaal where they established the African and European Investment Company. This company was to become a major finance house with controlling interests in several gold mines. Marks became a leading mining magnate and one of South Africa’s richest men.

Sammy Marks was a close friend and admirer of South Africa’s State President Paul Kruger – who is often called the father of the Afrikaner nation – and a popular figure within the Transvaal business community. It was Marks who advised Kruger to build a railway line from Pretoria to Lorenco Marques (now Mozambique). He served as a senator in the Union Parliament from 1910 until his death in 1920 in Johannesburg.

London-born Barney Barnato was a partner of Cecil John Rhodes in the formation of the De Beers Diamond company – control was later passed to the German/Jewish family of Ernest Oppenheimer, with funding from the Rothschild family.

The South African Jewish community has significantly contributed to the longevity of Litvak identity and memory. In the USA different brands of Eastern European Jewry were moulded into a generic category of a ‘Russian Jew,’ in South Africa, the Jews from Lithuania clearly dominated among other Jewish immigrants.

The Litvaks changed South African Jewry into a firmly established community.

The majority of South African Jews can be legitimately described as descendants of East European Litvaks, and have since acquired a unique South African identity, a blend between the old-world Litvak and new-world South African. The essential components of the South African Jewish experience are the powerful influences of Zionism.

THE AUTHOR

Mark Wade is a documentary film maker and anti-apartheid activist, and was forced into exile during the 1970s due to his opposition to compulsory military conscription – designed to defend government’s apartheid policies. He was offered the ‘right to return’ to the country during the Indemnity Hearings in the early 1990s, prior to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) hearings of 1994 – where the objective was to uncover the human rights abuses under apartheid, grant amnesty to the perpetrators, and offer reparation and rehabilitation to the victims.

As an Orthodox Jew, he’s particularly concerned about the ANC government’s overt anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and their support of Iran’s ‘axis of evil’. South Africa’s Jewish community is now under constant threat from government and the Muslim lobby, requiring the permanent presence of armed guards at their institutions, communal organizations and schools. Out of desperation, the Jewish community has created its own security services, ambulances, and rapid response emergency teams.

His 8-part documentary series titled ‘Legends and Legacies’, on the history and contribution of South African Jews, is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and IZZY TV. Mark is also a researcher for the NGO IsraelFAQs.