Milton Shain
Antisemitism in South Africa: From Pariah to Parvenu c.1870 to 1930
Summary
Milton Shain explores the evolution of an anti-Jewish stereotype in South Africa that culminated in the 1930 Quota Act. Informed by European ideas and located within the context of South Africa’s ‘mineral revolution’ and intellectual traditions, the stereotype prepared the soil for the ‘Jewish Question’ of the 1930s and early 1940s.
Milton Shain
Milton Shain is emeritus professor of historical studies at the University of Cape Town. He has written, co-authored, and co-edited over a dozen books on South African Jewish history, South African politics, and the history of antisemitism, including The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa (1994), Antisemitism (1998); The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History, co-authored with Richard Mendelsohn (2008); A Perfect Storm: Antisemitism in South Africa, 1930–1948 (2015), and Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations, co-edited with Christopher Browning, Susannah Heschel, and Michael Marrus (2015). In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa. Milton’s latest book, Fascists, Fabricators and Fantasists: Antisemitism in South Africa from 1948 to the Present (2023), is the final volume in his trilogy on the history of antisemitism in South Africa.
Ja, it’s Kruger’s opposition, Piet Joubert, that really tries to tarnish Kruger with being too friendly with Hollanders and Jews. So it gets embroiled in political contests. But Kruger, you know, as you said, he was very close to Sammy Marks, a very important Jew, becomes a senator eventually in the Union government, a very important, wonderful biography by Richard Mendelsohn on Sammy Marks, but Kruger himself was an old-style religious Calvinist, but he had the sense of the Jews as a People of the Book, I would say.