FadeTheButcher
09-08-2004, 12:28 PM
One of my old posts from Original Dissent:
There is a new book out today about the Jews and the role they have played in South Africa in the last fifty years, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa. I have briefly scanned over the book and so far it looks as if it contains some pretty damning information. I will post some interesting excerpts as I read through this. Feel free to circulate them across the internet. Enlighten the masses. http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/images/smilies/smile.gif
"Yet, alongside this overwhelmingly pattern of conformity, a deviant tradition that balked at the established social order is also traceable in the history of South African Jewry. One outstanding early manifestation was related to the struggle for relief from the disabilities suffered by the Indian population from 1906 to 1914. During this campaign the legendary Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi developed his doctrine of active nonviolent resistance, named by him satayagraha and employed year later with empire-shaking effect in India itself. The closest of Gandhi's white associates were in fact Jews, notably Henry Polak, who had come from England, Hermann Kallenbach, who was Litvak-born but had come to South Africa from Germany where he had qualified as an architect, and Sonia Schlesin, a young Litvak immigrant who served faithfully as Gandhi's secretary. Moreover, their actions resonated in perhaps the earliest incidence of a publically aired controversy over the moral implications of Jewish complicity in the South African system of racial discrimination. Polak averred that he had been drawn into the Indian satyagraha struggle "as a Jew who has tried to remember Judaism is a matter not only of belief but also of action."
Ibid., p.7
"Some Jews were also prominent in the Labor Party. The party's race relations policy rested in essence on protection of the interests of solely white workers. However, the justice and wisdom of this policy did not go unquestioned over the years, and Jews in the Labor Party's leadership generally were numbered among the proponents of a color-blind policy. As this failed to gain acceptance, several major players moved politically leftward.
Even more than in the South African labor movement, Jews were prominent in the development of radical socialist groups. A striking early exemplar was Yeshaya Israelstam."
Ibid., p.8
"Formally founded in Johannesburg in August 1917, it commanded a following of a good few hundred members and fellow travelers. The ISL was a major player in the founding of the united Communist Party of South Africa, which duly became an affiliated section of the Communist International.
Thus a self-defined Jewish group was intimately involved in the formation of a communist party from the outset - the only political party that opened its ranks to blacks. Once the party was created the Jewish group dissolved itself, but individual Jews continued to constitute a remarkably high proportion of its active white membership. It is an index of the prominence of Jews in the leadership core of the party that, when directives from the Moscow Comitern forced the South African Communists to adopt the slogan - considered by some party leaders as disastrously unrealistic - of a "Native Republic, with minority rights for Whites," and to launch a compaign against an alleged danger of right-wing deviationists, both the main fomenters and the victims of the purge-like explusions that ensued were Jews."
Ibid., p.9
"The prominence of Jews in the leadership of the Communist Party continued to be an obvious fact of which the authorities were only too well aware. Thus, a police report delivered to Prime Minister Smuts, listing sixty active leaders, secret and open, of the Johannesburg District of the Communist Party of South Africa in February 1946, contained twenty-three Jewish names, one of which was the chairman Michael Harmel. Paralleling the highly disproportionate involvement of individual Jews in the Communist Party, leftist sentiments and affinities continued to be manifest in the framework of cultural activities conducted by a Yiddisher Literarisher Farein that had been founded in 1912 and in an ephemeral socialist-Zionist group of Yiddish speakers formed in 1919, which also participated in the founding of the Communist Party. Assuming the name Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion), it identified with the socialist-Zionist movement of that name, which was an ascendant political force in the world Zionist movement."
Ibid., p.9
"Changes in the attitude of the white population, however, profoundly affected the situation of Jews. This became critically evident in the year 1930, when the South African parliament enacted a new immigration law that effectively reduced the flow of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to a mere trickle. The word Jew was not mentioned, but only the politically blind could fail to see that Jews were the main target of restriction." (Fade: Just like in the United States, this became a locus of Jewish resentment.)
Ibid., p.11
"In late 1936 widespread public opposition rose to a crescendo surrounding the arrival of a ship carrying Jewish would-be immigrants, the Stuttgart, which had been chartered by the Council for German Jewry in London. Prominent among the protestors was Dr. Hendrik F. Verwoerd, a professor at the University of Stellenbosch destined to become prime minister of South Africa and the foremost architecht of apartheid."
Ibid., p.13
"Verwoerd suggested a quota system by which, henceforth, licenses would be refused and expired ones not renewed, so that Jews would be barred until the stage when they occupied no more than 5 percent of the country's commerce and industry." (Fade: It is becoming clear that Jews in South Africa began to associate Apartheid with anti-Semitism, and thus militated against white South Africans.)
Ibid., p.14
"As for the attitude of Jews to Katzew's philo-Afrikaner sentiments, there can be no doubt that the conscience of most morally sensitized and politically aware Jews was troubled, if at all, not by the Afrikaner's plight but by that of the underprivilaged and oppressed black majority."
Ibid., p.29
"Chief Rabbi Rabinowitz's demeanor was quite the opposite of Abraham's. By temperament far less repressible, he never wavered in demonstration of his ardent Zionism (he was a foremost supporter of Revisionist Zionism) and, at the same time, tended to make his opposition to apartheid increasingly explicit. . . ."Our concern is with the doctrines of Judaism, not the views of individual Jews," he said, "and we betray these doctrines if we do not proclaim that Judaism teaches, without equivocation, the absolute equality of all men before God." He pleaded that there surely was a specifically Jewish attitude toward discrimination based on race or creed and that "it was as unreasonable to suggest that it was wrong to denounce theft because some Jews favoured it, as it was to suggest that it was wrong to denounce theft because some Jews are theives." In his sermons he protested against the deportation of Bishop Reeves, declaring: "It was the sacred duty of all religious leaders to speak out clearly on the ethical aspects of social problems."
Ibid., p.40
"Throughout the 1950s the foreign relations between Israel and South Africa developed cordially enough, although diplomatic representation remained low-key. Only Israel maintained a permanent diplomatic mission. Although by the late 1950s there were already signs that Israel was developing close relations with several African countries hostile to South Africa's white regime, Prime Minister Verwoerd himself could comment in conversations with Israel's minister plenipotentairy, Katriel Salmon, that he appreciated Israel's restraint regarding the international crusade against South Africa. Verwoerd added pointedly that this contrasted with the difficulties he was experiencing with the Jewish community, whose members had disappointed him by mostly voting nay in the plebiscite on declaration of South Africa as a republic.
A crisis was precipitated in October 1961 when at the United Nations some African states launched an attack on the South African foreign minister unprecedented in its severity. He was none other than Eric Luow, well remembered by Jews as a foremost anti-Semite in the pre-1948 period. Amid the clamorous support of many of the African delegates, the Liberian representative moved that Luow's speech be struck from the record. Although this did not pass, the General Assembly did roundly censure Luow, and Israel voted in favor of this censure. In white South Africa this news was received with much indignation. With the exception of Holland and Israel, all the Western states had abstained from voting or absented themselves from the debate. This made Israel's offense against white South Africa particularly conspicuous.
Ibid., p.47
"Not long after the Eric Luow incident, Israel took another step toward alliance with white South Africa's enemies at the United Nations. Whereas a clause calling for diplomatic and economic sanctions against South Africa met with the opposition of the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western States, Israel again conspicuously aligned itself with those who voted in favor."
Ibid., p.48
"What were the considerations that determined the Israel Foreign Ministry's policy? There can be no doubt that Israel's overriding motivation was to gain the diplomatic support of African states as counterbalance to the chronic international hostility it had to face from the Arab States and the Soviet Union and its satellites. This interest was reinforced by moral repugnance for the racism that apartheid signified."
Ibid., p.49
"When an anxious appeal was made to Minister of Finance Dr. Doenges, he commented sternly that after South Africa had gone to great lengths to be helpful to Israel, Israel had now "slapped South Africa in the face and ganged up with her enemies.". . .
. . .Since Israel continued to vote with the Afro-Asian bloc against South Africa, reprecussions upon South African Jewry was exacerbated. Die Transvaler, for example, said that the hostile behaviour of Israel toward South Africa destroyed whatever compatibility had ever existed between the dual loyalties of the Jews in South Africa. "The Jews will thus now have to choose where they stand. . .with South Africa or with Israel. It can no longer be both."
Ibid., p.51
"So much for participation of Jews in conventional white South African politics and what can be surmised concerning the voting preferences of Jews. Turning now to the forces, legal and extra legal, that constituted the vanguard of opposition to apartheid on the part of whites, one cannot but be struck by the extraordinary salience of Jews. Two women, Ella Hellmann and Helen Suzman, exemplified above all other persons the prominent involvement of Jews in the liberal opposition to apartheid, which functioned with them bounds of constitutional legality as laid down by white South Africans.
Dr. Ellen Hellmann, nee Kaumheimer, was born in Johannesburg to Jewish parents who had come from Germany. She obtained her doctorate in social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, specializing in research on the urban African. This led her into expanding social and political concern within the framework of the Institute of Race Relations. She served as its president in 1954-55 and took a leading part in numerous liberal activities such as the Johannesburg Citizen's Native Housing Committee, the board of management of a creche in Soweto sponsored by the Union of Jewish Women, trusteeship of the defense fund in aid of the defendants in the great Treason Trial of the late 1950s, which will be discussed shortly, and the similar Defense and Aid Fund Committee in the mid-1960s. Politically, she associated herself mainly with the Progressive Party, serving on its executive committee in the 1960s and also standing for election to the Johannesburg City Council on that party's ticket in 1962. In all, Ella Hellmann became one of the most prominent and academically authoritative liberal critics of South Africa's system of race relations. In the retrospective typological spectrum of the so-called "liberation struggle" she exemplifies those who worked primarily through the nonparty Institute of Race Relations, rather than through multiracial political agitation, and who have consequently been described by some observers as "social liberals."
Helen Suzman, more than any other political personality, epitomized the white liberal opposition to the apartheid regime in the eyes of the world as in those of South Africans. She is undoubtedly the foremost exemplar of those who worked within the system and used it to attack apartheid intrepidly and relentlessly. In 1953 Suzman commened her parliamentary career - thirty-six years in duration - as the successful United Party candidate for the Houghton constituency in Johannesburg. But before long she came to the conclusion that the United Party was too equivocal and ineffectual an opposition instrument in the face of Afrikaner nationalism's unshakable determination to institutionalize and fortify white racial domination. In 1959 she was part of the group that split to form the Progressive Party. However, the new party made precious little headway within the white electorate. For thirteen years, from 1961 to 1974, Helen Suzman was its sole member of parliament. In that solitary role she courageously battled each and every apartheid measure, often enduring not only general calumny but also anti-semitic taunts from the government benches. Yet occasionally there was also grudging acknowledgments of her political integrity and courage. Her parliamentary speeches were informed by a rationally articulated humanism. They were models of nondemagogic delivery, finely researched data, and sound reasoning.
Although holding fast to her ideological convictions as a political liberal, Suzman also played a key role in rendering every form of legal, material, and moral succor to radicals who feel foul of the apartheid state's laws, whether the accused in the great Treason Trial or political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela and his comrades after they were incarcerated on Robben Island, off Capetown. She retired from her parliamentary career in 1989, shortly before the great transformation of the South African political system, the essentials of which she had consistently and courageously advocated for so many years.
Ibid., pp.58-60
"The forms of white opposition to apartheid that remained within the confines of formal legality ranged on a spectrum that included the work of the Institute of Race Relations, which conducted research and acted as a pressure group on the government; the Black Sash movement, which mobolized women for protest and social action; the Christian Institute, an ecumenical organization founded in 1963 for promoting dialogue; the Liberal Party that existed from 1953 to 1968l and the Progressive Party, which at first coexisted with the Liberal Party and afterward succeeded it, in a sense by default. All these organizations were composed essentially of an English speaking membership led by major public figures such as Alan Paton, or Margaret Ballinger an Patrick Duncan of the Liberal Party, or "renegade" Afrikaners such as Beyers Naude of the Christian Institute. The role of Jewish individuals should not be exaggerated, although they certainly were involved in numbers disproportionate to the size of the Jewish population, and prominent almost emblematically Jewish assailants of apartheid such as the Liberal Party's Leslie Rubin or the Progressive Party's Helen Suzman were perceived in the Afrikaans press as thorns in the side of the positive forces upholding white supremacy.
But this irritant was a naught compared with the glaring prominence of Jewish names in the radical opposition. Throughout the first two decades of National Party rule, Jewish names kept appearing in every facet of the struggle: in the lists of "named" communists and of persons banned from all public activity, detained without trial, or placed under house arrest; in the courts, whether as defendents or as counsel for the defense; and among those who fled the country to evade arrest or unbearable harrassment. The public prominence of Jewish names was particularly marked in the course of the epic Treason Trial, which captured the attention of the news media throughout the second half of the 1950s. In a concerted effort to crush the antiapartheid resistance the police had dramatically swooped down upon well over a hundred suspects. When the trial opened in December 1956, 156 people belonging to all apartheid-defined racial groups were charged with treason in the form of a conspiracy to overthrow the state by violence in order to replace it with a state based on communism. The accused were mostly blacks, numbering 105, but there were also 21 Indians, 7 coloreds, and 23 whites. It was a glaring fact that more than half of the whites were Jews. They were Yetta Barenblatt, Hymie Barsel, Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein, Leon Levy, Norman Levy, Syndey Shall, Joe Slovo, Ruth (First) Slovo, Sonia Bunting, Lionel Forman, Issac Horvitch, Ben Turok, Jacqueline Arenstein, and Ronald Press. All had been associated with the Communist Party of South Africa at some time before it was banned in 1950, and some were in the clandestine reconstituted party (formed in 1953 and renamed the South African Communist Party). Most were overtly active in the South African Congress of Democrats and in other organizations associated with opposition to the apartheid regime such as the Society for Preace and Friendship with the Soviet Union and the Federation of South African Women.
The conspicuous disproportion of Jewish names in the list of accused was compounded by the prominence of Jews in the defendants' legal counsel. In the initial prepatory examination stage, the defense counsel included Maurice Franks and Norman Rosenberg. Jews were also prominent in the main fund-raising support within South Africa in behalf of the accused - the Treason Trial Defense Fund. Alongside author Alan Paton and Anglican bishop of Johannesburg Ambrose Reeves, seven of its initial twenty-two sponsers were Jews, as were also two of its four trustees - Dr. Ellen Hellmann and Alex Hepple. The trial was of unprecedented duration, the state repeatedly failing to establish its case, consequently dropping charges against more and more of the accused, and ultimately changing the indictment against the remainder. By August 1958 charges had been dropped against all but 92 of the accused. With (from the Jewish point of view) a twist of irony, however unintended, the trial was then resumed in a building known as "The Old Synagogue" of Pretoria, a synagogue that had fallen into disuse and been purchased from the local Jewish community in 1952.
To top it all, at the most critical stage in the trial the defense counsel was led by a prominent personality in the Jewish community, Israel Maisels, assisted by Sydney Kentridge (son of the notable parliamentarian and Jewish communal leader Morris Kentridge), while the prosecutor was none other than the former Nuwe Ordre (New Order) leader Oswald Pirow. The juxtaposition was striking, and quite invidious from the vantage point of the Jewish community's public relations work: Miasels, the Jew, a prominent leader in both the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Zionist Federation, defending those accused of seeking to overthrow white supremacy; Pirow, the extreme Afrikaner nationalist and former assertive pro-Nazi, defending white supremacy. All in all the trial dragged on for four years and four months. In March 1961 the prosecution finally gave in, and all the remaining accused were released. It was a testimonial to the residual power of the formal rule of law, notwithstanding the fundamentally defective "democratic" polity of South Africa. As such, it was a most frustrating defeat for the governmental apostles of apartheid, who redoubled their efforts to legislate away such legal obstacles as far as was possible by deploying their parliamentary majority.
Prominence of Jewish names continued to glare in periodically issued government gazettes listing persons banned or restricted in various ways for falling fould of the increasingly sweeping repressive legislation. Sensitive to the implications for the public image of the Jewish community, the Board of Deputies monitored and filed such lists as they appeared in official gazettes and the press. One example is a particularly comprehensive list issued in November 1962, containing 437 names of persons who were suspected of being former officeholders, members, or active supporters of the banned Communist Party. According to a Board of Deputies memorandum, gauging by names alone at least 62 of the 132 whites listed were Jews. A later gazette dated 25 August 1967 listed persons (all white) who had been officeholders, members, or active supporters of the banned Congress of Democrats. Of the 35 names, 18 were identifiably Jewish.
Ibid., pp.60-61
There is a new book out today about the Jews and the role they have played in South Africa in the last fifty years, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa. I have briefly scanned over the book and so far it looks as if it contains some pretty damning information. I will post some interesting excerpts as I read through this. Feel free to circulate them across the internet. Enlighten the masses. http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/images/smilies/smile.gif
"Yet, alongside this overwhelmingly pattern of conformity, a deviant tradition that balked at the established social order is also traceable in the history of South African Jewry. One outstanding early manifestation was related to the struggle for relief from the disabilities suffered by the Indian population from 1906 to 1914. During this campaign the legendary Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi developed his doctrine of active nonviolent resistance, named by him satayagraha and employed year later with empire-shaking effect in India itself. The closest of Gandhi's white associates were in fact Jews, notably Henry Polak, who had come from England, Hermann Kallenbach, who was Litvak-born but had come to South Africa from Germany where he had qualified as an architect, and Sonia Schlesin, a young Litvak immigrant who served faithfully as Gandhi's secretary. Moreover, their actions resonated in perhaps the earliest incidence of a publically aired controversy over the moral implications of Jewish complicity in the South African system of racial discrimination. Polak averred that he had been drawn into the Indian satyagraha struggle "as a Jew who has tried to remember Judaism is a matter not only of belief but also of action."
Ibid., p.7
"Some Jews were also prominent in the Labor Party. The party's race relations policy rested in essence on protection of the interests of solely white workers. However, the justice and wisdom of this policy did not go unquestioned over the years, and Jews in the Labor Party's leadership generally were numbered among the proponents of a color-blind policy. As this failed to gain acceptance, several major players moved politically leftward.
Even more than in the South African labor movement, Jews were prominent in the development of radical socialist groups. A striking early exemplar was Yeshaya Israelstam."
Ibid., p.8
"Formally founded in Johannesburg in August 1917, it commanded a following of a good few hundred members and fellow travelers. The ISL was a major player in the founding of the united Communist Party of South Africa, which duly became an affiliated section of the Communist International.
Thus a self-defined Jewish group was intimately involved in the formation of a communist party from the outset - the only political party that opened its ranks to blacks. Once the party was created the Jewish group dissolved itself, but individual Jews continued to constitute a remarkably high proportion of its active white membership. It is an index of the prominence of Jews in the leadership core of the party that, when directives from the Moscow Comitern forced the South African Communists to adopt the slogan - considered by some party leaders as disastrously unrealistic - of a "Native Republic, with minority rights for Whites," and to launch a compaign against an alleged danger of right-wing deviationists, both the main fomenters and the victims of the purge-like explusions that ensued were Jews."
Ibid., p.9
"The prominence of Jews in the leadership of the Communist Party continued to be an obvious fact of which the authorities were only too well aware. Thus, a police report delivered to Prime Minister Smuts, listing sixty active leaders, secret and open, of the Johannesburg District of the Communist Party of South Africa in February 1946, contained twenty-three Jewish names, one of which was the chairman Michael Harmel. Paralleling the highly disproportionate involvement of individual Jews in the Communist Party, leftist sentiments and affinities continued to be manifest in the framework of cultural activities conducted by a Yiddisher Literarisher Farein that had been founded in 1912 and in an ephemeral socialist-Zionist group of Yiddish speakers formed in 1919, which also participated in the founding of the Communist Party. Assuming the name Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion), it identified with the socialist-Zionist movement of that name, which was an ascendant political force in the world Zionist movement."
Ibid., p.9
"Changes in the attitude of the white population, however, profoundly affected the situation of Jews. This became critically evident in the year 1930, when the South African parliament enacted a new immigration law that effectively reduced the flow of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to a mere trickle. The word Jew was not mentioned, but only the politically blind could fail to see that Jews were the main target of restriction." (Fade: Just like in the United States, this became a locus of Jewish resentment.)
Ibid., p.11
"In late 1936 widespread public opposition rose to a crescendo surrounding the arrival of a ship carrying Jewish would-be immigrants, the Stuttgart, which had been chartered by the Council for German Jewry in London. Prominent among the protestors was Dr. Hendrik F. Verwoerd, a professor at the University of Stellenbosch destined to become prime minister of South Africa and the foremost architecht of apartheid."
Ibid., p.13
"Verwoerd suggested a quota system by which, henceforth, licenses would be refused and expired ones not renewed, so that Jews would be barred until the stage when they occupied no more than 5 percent of the country's commerce and industry." (Fade: It is becoming clear that Jews in South Africa began to associate Apartheid with anti-Semitism, and thus militated against white South Africans.)
Ibid., p.14
"As for the attitude of Jews to Katzew's philo-Afrikaner sentiments, there can be no doubt that the conscience of most morally sensitized and politically aware Jews was troubled, if at all, not by the Afrikaner's plight but by that of the underprivilaged and oppressed black majority."
Ibid., p.29
"Chief Rabbi Rabinowitz's demeanor was quite the opposite of Abraham's. By temperament far less repressible, he never wavered in demonstration of his ardent Zionism (he was a foremost supporter of Revisionist Zionism) and, at the same time, tended to make his opposition to apartheid increasingly explicit. . . ."Our concern is with the doctrines of Judaism, not the views of individual Jews," he said, "and we betray these doctrines if we do not proclaim that Judaism teaches, without equivocation, the absolute equality of all men before God." He pleaded that there surely was a specifically Jewish attitude toward discrimination based on race or creed and that "it was as unreasonable to suggest that it was wrong to denounce theft because some Jews favoured it, as it was to suggest that it was wrong to denounce theft because some Jews are theives." In his sermons he protested against the deportation of Bishop Reeves, declaring: "It was the sacred duty of all religious leaders to speak out clearly on the ethical aspects of social problems."
Ibid., p.40
"Throughout the 1950s the foreign relations between Israel and South Africa developed cordially enough, although diplomatic representation remained low-key. Only Israel maintained a permanent diplomatic mission. Although by the late 1950s there were already signs that Israel was developing close relations with several African countries hostile to South Africa's white regime, Prime Minister Verwoerd himself could comment in conversations with Israel's minister plenipotentairy, Katriel Salmon, that he appreciated Israel's restraint regarding the international crusade against South Africa. Verwoerd added pointedly that this contrasted with the difficulties he was experiencing with the Jewish community, whose members had disappointed him by mostly voting nay in the plebiscite on declaration of South Africa as a republic.
A crisis was precipitated in October 1961 when at the United Nations some African states launched an attack on the South African foreign minister unprecedented in its severity. He was none other than Eric Luow, well remembered by Jews as a foremost anti-Semite in the pre-1948 period. Amid the clamorous support of many of the African delegates, the Liberian representative moved that Luow's speech be struck from the record. Although this did not pass, the General Assembly did roundly censure Luow, and Israel voted in favor of this censure. In white South Africa this news was received with much indignation. With the exception of Holland and Israel, all the Western states had abstained from voting or absented themselves from the debate. This made Israel's offense against white South Africa particularly conspicuous.
Ibid., p.47
"Not long after the Eric Luow incident, Israel took another step toward alliance with white South Africa's enemies at the United Nations. Whereas a clause calling for diplomatic and economic sanctions against South Africa met with the opposition of the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western States, Israel again conspicuously aligned itself with those who voted in favor."
Ibid., p.48
"What were the considerations that determined the Israel Foreign Ministry's policy? There can be no doubt that Israel's overriding motivation was to gain the diplomatic support of African states as counterbalance to the chronic international hostility it had to face from the Arab States and the Soviet Union and its satellites. This interest was reinforced by moral repugnance for the racism that apartheid signified."
Ibid., p.49
"When an anxious appeal was made to Minister of Finance Dr. Doenges, he commented sternly that after South Africa had gone to great lengths to be helpful to Israel, Israel had now "slapped South Africa in the face and ganged up with her enemies.". . .
. . .Since Israel continued to vote with the Afro-Asian bloc against South Africa, reprecussions upon South African Jewry was exacerbated. Die Transvaler, for example, said that the hostile behaviour of Israel toward South Africa destroyed whatever compatibility had ever existed between the dual loyalties of the Jews in South Africa. "The Jews will thus now have to choose where they stand. . .with South Africa or with Israel. It can no longer be both."
Ibid., p.51
"So much for participation of Jews in conventional white South African politics and what can be surmised concerning the voting preferences of Jews. Turning now to the forces, legal and extra legal, that constituted the vanguard of opposition to apartheid on the part of whites, one cannot but be struck by the extraordinary salience of Jews. Two women, Ella Hellmann and Helen Suzman, exemplified above all other persons the prominent involvement of Jews in the liberal opposition to apartheid, which functioned with them bounds of constitutional legality as laid down by white South Africans.
Dr. Ellen Hellmann, nee Kaumheimer, was born in Johannesburg to Jewish parents who had come from Germany. She obtained her doctorate in social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, specializing in research on the urban African. This led her into expanding social and political concern within the framework of the Institute of Race Relations. She served as its president in 1954-55 and took a leading part in numerous liberal activities such as the Johannesburg Citizen's Native Housing Committee, the board of management of a creche in Soweto sponsored by the Union of Jewish Women, trusteeship of the defense fund in aid of the defendants in the great Treason Trial of the late 1950s, which will be discussed shortly, and the similar Defense and Aid Fund Committee in the mid-1960s. Politically, she associated herself mainly with the Progressive Party, serving on its executive committee in the 1960s and also standing for election to the Johannesburg City Council on that party's ticket in 1962. In all, Ella Hellmann became one of the most prominent and academically authoritative liberal critics of South Africa's system of race relations. In the retrospective typological spectrum of the so-called "liberation struggle" she exemplifies those who worked primarily through the nonparty Institute of Race Relations, rather than through multiracial political agitation, and who have consequently been described by some observers as "social liberals."
Helen Suzman, more than any other political personality, epitomized the white liberal opposition to the apartheid regime in the eyes of the world as in those of South Africans. She is undoubtedly the foremost exemplar of those who worked within the system and used it to attack apartheid intrepidly and relentlessly. In 1953 Suzman commened her parliamentary career - thirty-six years in duration - as the successful United Party candidate for the Houghton constituency in Johannesburg. But before long she came to the conclusion that the United Party was too equivocal and ineffectual an opposition instrument in the face of Afrikaner nationalism's unshakable determination to institutionalize and fortify white racial domination. In 1959 she was part of the group that split to form the Progressive Party. However, the new party made precious little headway within the white electorate. For thirteen years, from 1961 to 1974, Helen Suzman was its sole member of parliament. In that solitary role she courageously battled each and every apartheid measure, often enduring not only general calumny but also anti-semitic taunts from the government benches. Yet occasionally there was also grudging acknowledgments of her political integrity and courage. Her parliamentary speeches were informed by a rationally articulated humanism. They were models of nondemagogic delivery, finely researched data, and sound reasoning.
Although holding fast to her ideological convictions as a political liberal, Suzman also played a key role in rendering every form of legal, material, and moral succor to radicals who feel foul of the apartheid state's laws, whether the accused in the great Treason Trial or political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela and his comrades after they were incarcerated on Robben Island, off Capetown. She retired from her parliamentary career in 1989, shortly before the great transformation of the South African political system, the essentials of which she had consistently and courageously advocated for so many years.
Ibid., pp.58-60
"The forms of white opposition to apartheid that remained within the confines of formal legality ranged on a spectrum that included the work of the Institute of Race Relations, which conducted research and acted as a pressure group on the government; the Black Sash movement, which mobolized women for protest and social action; the Christian Institute, an ecumenical organization founded in 1963 for promoting dialogue; the Liberal Party that existed from 1953 to 1968l and the Progressive Party, which at first coexisted with the Liberal Party and afterward succeeded it, in a sense by default. All these organizations were composed essentially of an English speaking membership led by major public figures such as Alan Paton, or Margaret Ballinger an Patrick Duncan of the Liberal Party, or "renegade" Afrikaners such as Beyers Naude of the Christian Institute. The role of Jewish individuals should not be exaggerated, although they certainly were involved in numbers disproportionate to the size of the Jewish population, and prominent almost emblematically Jewish assailants of apartheid such as the Liberal Party's Leslie Rubin or the Progressive Party's Helen Suzman were perceived in the Afrikaans press as thorns in the side of the positive forces upholding white supremacy.
But this irritant was a naught compared with the glaring prominence of Jewish names in the radical opposition. Throughout the first two decades of National Party rule, Jewish names kept appearing in every facet of the struggle: in the lists of "named" communists and of persons banned from all public activity, detained without trial, or placed under house arrest; in the courts, whether as defendents or as counsel for the defense; and among those who fled the country to evade arrest or unbearable harrassment. The public prominence of Jewish names was particularly marked in the course of the epic Treason Trial, which captured the attention of the news media throughout the second half of the 1950s. In a concerted effort to crush the antiapartheid resistance the police had dramatically swooped down upon well over a hundred suspects. When the trial opened in December 1956, 156 people belonging to all apartheid-defined racial groups were charged with treason in the form of a conspiracy to overthrow the state by violence in order to replace it with a state based on communism. The accused were mostly blacks, numbering 105, but there were also 21 Indians, 7 coloreds, and 23 whites. It was a glaring fact that more than half of the whites were Jews. They were Yetta Barenblatt, Hymie Barsel, Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein, Leon Levy, Norman Levy, Syndey Shall, Joe Slovo, Ruth (First) Slovo, Sonia Bunting, Lionel Forman, Issac Horvitch, Ben Turok, Jacqueline Arenstein, and Ronald Press. All had been associated with the Communist Party of South Africa at some time before it was banned in 1950, and some were in the clandestine reconstituted party (formed in 1953 and renamed the South African Communist Party). Most were overtly active in the South African Congress of Democrats and in other organizations associated with opposition to the apartheid regime such as the Society for Preace and Friendship with the Soviet Union and the Federation of South African Women.
The conspicuous disproportion of Jewish names in the list of accused was compounded by the prominence of Jews in the defendants' legal counsel. In the initial prepatory examination stage, the defense counsel included Maurice Franks and Norman Rosenberg. Jews were also prominent in the main fund-raising support within South Africa in behalf of the accused - the Treason Trial Defense Fund. Alongside author Alan Paton and Anglican bishop of Johannesburg Ambrose Reeves, seven of its initial twenty-two sponsers were Jews, as were also two of its four trustees - Dr. Ellen Hellmann and Alex Hepple. The trial was of unprecedented duration, the state repeatedly failing to establish its case, consequently dropping charges against more and more of the accused, and ultimately changing the indictment against the remainder. By August 1958 charges had been dropped against all but 92 of the accused. With (from the Jewish point of view) a twist of irony, however unintended, the trial was then resumed in a building known as "The Old Synagogue" of Pretoria, a synagogue that had fallen into disuse and been purchased from the local Jewish community in 1952.
To top it all, at the most critical stage in the trial the defense counsel was led by a prominent personality in the Jewish community, Israel Maisels, assisted by Sydney Kentridge (son of the notable parliamentarian and Jewish communal leader Morris Kentridge), while the prosecutor was none other than the former Nuwe Ordre (New Order) leader Oswald Pirow. The juxtaposition was striking, and quite invidious from the vantage point of the Jewish community's public relations work: Miasels, the Jew, a prominent leader in both the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Zionist Federation, defending those accused of seeking to overthrow white supremacy; Pirow, the extreme Afrikaner nationalist and former assertive pro-Nazi, defending white supremacy. All in all the trial dragged on for four years and four months. In March 1961 the prosecution finally gave in, and all the remaining accused were released. It was a testimonial to the residual power of the formal rule of law, notwithstanding the fundamentally defective "democratic" polity of South Africa. As such, it was a most frustrating defeat for the governmental apostles of apartheid, who redoubled their efforts to legislate away such legal obstacles as far as was possible by deploying their parliamentary majority.
Prominence of Jewish names continued to glare in periodically issued government gazettes listing persons banned or restricted in various ways for falling fould of the increasingly sweeping repressive legislation. Sensitive to the implications for the public image of the Jewish community, the Board of Deputies monitored and filed such lists as they appeared in official gazettes and the press. One example is a particularly comprehensive list issued in November 1962, containing 437 names of persons who were suspected of being former officeholders, members, or active supporters of the banned Communist Party. According to a Board of Deputies memorandum, gauging by names alone at least 62 of the 132 whites listed were Jews. A later gazette dated 25 August 1967 listed persons (all white) who had been officeholders, members, or active supporters of the banned Congress of Democrats. Of the 35 names, 18 were identifiably Jewish.
Ibid., pp.60-61