Mandela's Jewish Comrades

The predominance of Jews among the older generation of white anti-apartheid activists is unmistakable. As my father once put it, there was a minyan for every political discussion in Pretoria Central Prison after the imposition of martial law in 1960 - though never for the purpose of prayer, as far as I know. Most of the old-timers were comfortable in their Jewishness, but their rituals had a lot more to do with Marx than with the Almighty.

That Jewish asymmetry was on display this past week as South Africa marked the 50th anniversary of the 1963 police raid on Lilisleaf Farm, near Johannesburg, which served at the time as the headquarters of Umkonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the underground African National Congress. It doesn’t take much perspicuity to notice that all five of the white defendants in the subsequent trial were Jewish. (Another two Jews – one of whom, Arthur Goldreich, lived in Israel until his death in 2011 - escaped from detention before the trial.) Similarly, fully half the white defendants in the earlier Treason Trial (1956) were Jewish, as was the lead counsel.

The head count of white opponents of apartheid reads like a census list from one of the old shtetls in Lithuania (from where most South African Jews originated): Joe Slovo, Harold Wolpe, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Ronald Segal, Dennis Goldberg, Rusty Bernstein, Solly Sachs, Helen Suzman, Ray Alexander, Ronnie Kasrils, Raymond Suttner, Ray Simons, Wolfie Kodish and many others. Some, like Ruth First, paid with their lives. Others were permanently disabled (Albie Sachs) or spent years in jail. Several, including Slovo, Kasrils and Albie Sachs, went on to fill senior positions in post-apartheid South African governments.

It is not only we hyper-sensitive Jews who pay attention to the Jewish hue of the white opposition. The apartheid regime also took note and made hay of it regularly. And Nelson Mandela (whose first employer, at a time when few companies would employ blacks, was my neighbor Lazar Sidelsky) remarked on it in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, when he wrote: “I have found Jews to be more broadminded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice.”

That was certainly true of the Jews Mandela encountered during the struggle against apartheid, but it did not apply to the South African Jewish community as a whole. Nor does a legacy of prejudice adequately explain the heroism of the minority – though it may well account for the apathy and quiescence of the majority.

The fact is that all South African Jews benefited from apartheid and the majority tacitly supported it (while voting, in the main, against Afrikaner nationalism.) The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBOD), which remains the representative body of South African Jewry to this day, was resolute in its refusal to condemn apartheid and it did nothing to support the families of community members who had been banned, jailed or exiled. The Board’s first explicit condemnation of apartheid came in 1985, when South African racism was already on its last legs.

It’s not difficult to understand the stance of the SAJBOD, which accurately expressed the attitude of the community as a whole (excluding, of course, the many anti-apartheid activists.) By the early 1960s (the bulk of the Lithuanian immigration predated the Holocaust by several decades), most South African Jews were prosperous but insecure; the memories of the overt anti-Semitism that had characterized Afrikaner nationalism in the Thirties and much of the Forties were still vivid. At the same time, the community was passionately pro-Zionist (perhaps the most Zionist Jewish community in the diaspora), which both distanced the Jews from South African politics (their emotional involvement being with Israel) and inclined them favorably towards the regime when South Africa and Israel forged their military partnership in the Seventies.

Thus, the attitude of the SAJBOD and much of the community was determined by three, interwoven factors: The economic success of the Jewish community in South Africa, the fear of anti-Semitism and the influence of Zionism. The Board saw its role as doing what was good for the Jews – and, for much of the 20th century, apartheid was good for the Jews. Not for all of them, of course – the Board was able to avert its collective eyes from those in jail, in exile or underground – but for most.

The example of the South African Jewish community does not support Mandela’s assumption that being victims of prejudice in the past creates antibodies to prejudice in general. If anything, the opposite is true – as we know well from our Israeli experience. Victimhood can just as easily desensitize as sensitize. The fear of reawakening the demons of the past can create its own horrors. At the very least, it can – and does – lead to a moral blindness. The South African Jewish community was prosperous but morally bankrupt.

Those members of the community who fought against apartheid swam against the stream. They were motivated more by ideology (communism, socialism and Bundism) than they were by a legacy of prejudice and suffering. By the 1930s, Jewish laborers and artisans occupied leadership positions in the burgeoning South African trade union movement and the majority of the Jewish males who went on to oppose apartheid had joined the all-volunteer South African army to fight against fascism in World War II. My father, Jock Isacowitz, got his political toes wet as one of the founders of the Springbok Legion, an ex-servicemen’s organization that fought for the rights of all former soldiers, irrespective of race.

The Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), was strongly rooted in late 19th century Lithuania and its ideological offshoots, primarily socialism and Zionism, were imported ready-made into South Africa by the immigrants. These ideologies flourished in the African soil, resulting in a strong cadre of dedicated socialists, on the one hand, and a dynamic Zionist movement on the other. My father was one of the few who managed to combine the two. Arthur Goldreich, who fought with the Palmach in 1948 before returning to South Africa and joining the armed underground (he was the official lessee of Liliesleaf Farm) was another. But most of their colleagues regarded Zionism as a colonial enterprise. How sad that Israel should be following the blinkered and indifferent example of the South African Jewish community and proving their critics right.

Roy Isacowitz is a writer and marketer living in Tel Aviv. He spent many years working for the Israeli and foreign media.