Milton Shain
Antisemitism in South Africa: From Pariah to Parvenu c.1870 to 1930

Milton Shain - Antisemitism in South Africa: From Pariah to Parvenu

- Okay, well, welcome back, everybody, to our third session, actually, on South Africa, and it is my great pleasure to welcome Professor Milton Shain. Milton, thank you very, very much for joining us. We’re very, very excited to have you on Lockdown. I know that Dennis Davis, our esteemed professor, judge, managed to twist your arm, and we are absolutely thrilled to have you on Lockdown University. So 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,” which was awarded the University of Cape Town Book Prize in 1996. “A Perfect Storm: Antisemitism in South Africa, 1930 to 1948,” won Media 24 Recht Malan Prize for nonfiction in 2016. Milton Shain’s latest book, “Fascists, Fabricators, and Fantasists: Antisemitism in South Africa from 1948 to the Present,” is the final volume in his trilogy on the history of antisemitism in South Africa. In 2014, Milton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa. Today, Milton will be talking about antisemitism in South Africa, “From Pariah to Parvenu, 1870 to 1930.” Milton, thank you very, very much, and we are all looking forward to hearing from you. Over to you.

• Well, thank you very much, Wendy, and thanks to all who helped put this together, and especially Dennis for twisting my arm to take part. Everyone, I’m sure, watching will recall how South Africa was a metaphor for racism and bigotry under the apartheid decades. Everyone knew about that, and yet there’s surprisingly little attention has been given to antisemitism, arguably, in the words of the historian Robert Wistrich, the longest hatred. And the reality is that South Africa has not been immune to antisemitism, not at all. It has a long history, which I’ll be looking at over three lectures, this evening looking from the late 19th century to 1930, the introduction of the Quota Act, which effectively curtailed the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. In the second lecture I’ll be looking at the period 1930 to ‘48, a perfect storm, everything came together, where South Africa really evolved with a Jewish problem. And then in our final lecture, we’ll take it from '48 to the present where we’ll see lingering fantasies and conspiracies. No Jewish problem as such, but we’ll discuss the vexed question of anti-Zionism in South Africa in that third lecture and if it fits into the category of antisemitism through some of its fantasies. So it’s three lectures, and I should say a word or two about how I got into this. The conventional wisdom in South African Jewish historiography and in memory is that we had a Jewish problem in the '30s.

Those connected to South Africa will remember or know of the Ossewabrandwag, The Gray Shirts, under Louis Weichardt, the Nuwe Orde under Oswald Pirow, a close friend of the Nazi regime. People recall that. But historians until recent decades saw this as an aberration in the long history of very good relations between Jews and non-Jews in South Africa, and more than that, they saw it as a product of European fascism penetrating South Africa in the '30s. It wasn’t homegrown, and there’s abundant material to show that it seemed to come as a shock for observers. And yet, it’s no real shock. The question one has to ask is why in 1930, when they passed the Quota Act, effectively stopping East European Jewish immigration, why in 1930, three years before Hitler ascends to power, why was there unanimous support across the political white divide in South Africa to go ahead with that legislation? And that’s the question we need to keep in mind as I continue with the discussion. I got an inkling of what was going on when I was writing a book in the 1970s on the Jews of the Cape Colony, and I came across the most scurrilous cartoons in a weekly called “The Owl,” in another, “The South African Review.” In discussions in parliament, the old Cape House, I came across the remarkable anti-Jewish vitriol, which had hardly been noted up to then.

These cartoons would’ve done well in “Der Stürmer.” And I began to look further and deeper into the parliamentary debates, into the government papers, the high commissioners and so forth, and the 1902 Cape Immigration Restriction Act, which was seen by historians as directed against Indian immigration, because you had to write in a European language, that act was, in fact, not only directed against Indians, but the reason people had seen it as inadvertently affecting East European Yiddish speakers, the reason they gave was that it was changed. It was an accident. In fact, when the ships docked and this legislation had come into power, the Reverend Bender from the Gardens Synagogue in Cape Town went rushing down to the docks, arranged with the authorities to let those Jews off, and it became a subject of discussion, and eventually the act was changed, Yiddish was accepted as an European language, and that’s why historians saw this act as accidental insofar as the East European Jews were concerned. But it wasn’t. It was quite clear, if you go into the 1890s in parliament, if you look at the comment in the country, in rural areas, they knew exactly what they were doing. Indians were a target, no doubt, but because of pressure from the shipping companies and because of pressure from the established Jewish community, there was even a Jewish mayor of Cape Town, more or less, at that time, because of that pressure, they managed to change the act insofar as Yiddish became acceptable as a European language, but it took three years for the effective change, although between 1902 and 1905, Jews were coming in.

So once I’d done that, I began to think, well, you know, there’s something more to this consensus around 1930, and I began to dig deeply, and I found right from the start, and I’m talking about the influx of fortune seekers to the diamond fields, or the smous, the rural trader, I found these people were not wholly acceptable for the majority white society, and we know very little about Black opinion at that stage. I should put that up front. We know very, very little, and there’s not a great material amount left behind. I’m not saying Blacks didn’t imbibe anti-Jewish ideas or anything, and we’ll discuss that in the last lecture, but there’s no doubt that across the section of both English speakers and Afrikaners, especially in the platteland or the rural areas, there’s no doubt that Jews were not always welcome. There were many instances of goodwill and help, and people remember that, but there was undoubtedly concern at the aliens coming into South Africa, undoubtedly. We see it on the diamond fields, the most awful caricatures and comment by important people, observers, who quickly associate Jews with illicit diamond buying, that becomes a cornerstone, and with the dishonest business practices. That’s already in the 1870s.

Then you go across to the rural areas and you see the smous, sometimes a figure of fun, sometimes someone who is what they call the “Israelitish boereverneuker,” the farmer swindler. That was a common trope by the 1880s. So it’s IDB. It’s the rural platteland shopkeeper, or the smous, dishonestly exploiting the relatively, in quotes, “backward” farmer. And then we go to the urban centers. Now, wonderful work has been done by Charles van Onselen on the 1890s in Johannesburg, and we see another dimension of the stereotype, and that’s the urban huckster or what became known in 1896 formally, in an article, the Peruvian, and many of you listening to me now will have heard about the Peruvian. It seems unique to South Africa. There’s been some crossover to England, I believe. But it was a common appellation for these East European guys carrying bundles on their backs and running around with the distinctive accents, often accused of being filthy, dirty in their habits, and with a culture that didn’t fit into the South African business world. So the urban Peruvian, the huckster, became an important figure and was quickly associated with the underworld, the illicit liquor trade, liquor sold to the Black population illegally, chains of people, and there were, no doubt, a number of Jews, as Van Onselen’s work has shown, involved in that trade, but that’s a small minority in terms of the total population.

But the city itself, Johannesburg, the British parliamentarian and historian James Bryce spoke of Johannesburg in the 1890s as an Anglo-Semitic town, Johannesburg, an Anglo-Semitic town. No one could ignore the presence of Jews who in the mid-1890s made up about 10% of the white population huddled in the inner city areas, very distinctive in manner, and flooding in as far as the non-Jews were concerned. So you have this Peruvian character, you have the crooks, supposedly, allegedly, on the diamond fields, and you have the exploiters in the rural areas, and you have a strong sense of anti-alienism building up in the 1890s, and not only Johannesburg. It’s in Cape Town as well. We now have to add a third dimension of the stereotype and that is the Jew as the cosmopolitan financier. And of course this plugs directly into the European stereotypes, the Rothschild idea, the Jew banker, the Jew manipulating wars, and so forth. The idea still exist today. I suppose George Soros is the latest incarnation. And there’s this new book on the Rothschilds. It looks at the way they’ve been manipulated through the past. But the cosmopolitan financier becomes a very, very important figure in South Africa, and the reality is that there were a few Jews among the mine owners, and this long history of the diamond mines and then the gold mines in which there was some Jewish involvement saw people painting the Jews as portraying the spirit of mammon, as one author put it.

It was a crowd who were manipulating society, and this all became very evident with the Jameson Raid, the attempted regime change in the mid-1890s. Cecil John Rhodes was involved in that and Leander Starr Jameson. But it’s the idea of capital having so much power and trying to undermine the situation in the old Transvaal Republic under Kruger. Kruger, by the way, was accused by his enemies of being too close to the Jews and the Hollanders. That was another dimension of thinking about the Jew in Johannesburg and the Transvaal. But the truth of the matter was that there was always this sense of power of mining capital, not without some fact, of course, and the Jews got caught up and plugged into the European stereotype. It fitted in beautifully. And the man who really pedaled this idea was the Englishman, the great liberal theorist, theorist of imperialism, John Atkinson Hobson. J.A. Hobson was very instrumental in pushing the idea that the Anglo-Boer War was a war fought by a small group of people, German in origin and Jewish in religion, the Anglo-Boer War, and the pro-Boers in England, the left in England, bought into this and added to it. So the Anglo-Boer War became very much a war of Jews trying to manipulate and get control of the financial booty. Atkinson had been a correspondent for “The Manchester Guardian,” just by the way.

He was influential in Lenin’s theories on imperialism. And Atkinson had written back to “The Guardian” about Johannesburg all the time. His columns portray a quite simple Jew-hatred, although there’s some debate in the literature. But he spoke about, “If you look at the telephone directory, you’ll see 68 Cohens for 22 Browns,” that sort of person, and that was already in the late 1890s. The Boer War of course broke out in 1899. This was a war fought for mining capital and their interests. So we have this tripod of a stereotype: the cosmopolitan financier, the urban huckster, and the rural boereverneuker, the Boer swindler. And these continue after the Boer War. You have a wave of anti-alienism, particularly in Cape Town, 1903 and 1904, against a backdrop of economic recession, and calls to curtail the influx of Jews, both from English and Afrikaners, and I’m stressing the English and Afrikaner dimension, because we’ll see in the 1930s, when we really move into the Jewish question, we’ll see that the Afrikaner becomes the focus for particular historical reasons, which I’ll explain when we next meet. But the anti-alienism was widespread and the question of curtailing Jewish immigration persisted. It persisted once Union had formed. It was primarily around, again, the Asians or Indians, but there was always this concern about the East European, and it appeared in legislation, and it was Jewish pressure, influence to the extent that they could rub shoulders with important people, the establishment Jewish community, it was that that really stopped or kept Yiddish as an acceptable European language to get in.

There were looks at cultural patterns and business practices and what the economy can hold, but that would take a few more years. It’s interesting, in the cosmopolitan financier story, we have this character, Hoggenheimer. Now, I know later today, in a couple of hours, you’ll have Dennis interviewing Michael Cardo, who’s written a brilliant biography on Harry Oppenheimer, and a lot of people associate the cartoon caricature, a grossly Semitic cartoon, by the way, a lot of people associate the Hoggenheimer cartoon with Oppenheimer. It’s absolutely nothing to do with the Oppenheimers. It’s to do with a play called “The Girl from Kays,” a musical, and it was first performed on the London stage in 1902, and it really captured this idea of the Jewish landlord taking the money back to Park Lane. And this was performed in London, did very well, and then it toured South Africa. And when it came to Cape Town, and by the way, Jewish audiences loved it, there was not the sensitivity of today to stereotypes, thankfully which we have, but it toured South Africa and at its first showing in Cape Town, in the audience was a cartoonist, D.C. Boonzaier, and Boonzaier had for some time illustrated the power of mining capital through a cartoon caricature, which was just a mine owner. It was not Semitic in its depiction, but it did give the message of mine owners being important. He suddenly decided to give a name to this character on the stage.

He wrote a review of the play, the musical, and he called him Hoggenheimer, and he actually said, “With apologies to 'The Girl from Kays.’” Well, at this point, it was not grossly Semitic, but it became so in the decades to come, and D.C. Boonzaier is mostly associated with it, although other cartoonists, like Egersdorfer and others, they were very much involved with the same type of caricature of the Jewish grasping mining capitalist. But the play toured the country and Hoggenheimer became a commonplace term within a few years. But 1905, everyone knew the name Hoggenheimer, and in fact, it still exists, far less today, but it still can be called up. So Hoggenheimer is that cosmopolitan financier, and we’ll see, in the 1930s, he emerges as a very important factor in the radical right. The stereotype was also seen in other theater venues. There was a play Stephen Black wrote, called “Helena’s Hope, Ltd.,” and two Jewish characters, Abraham Goldenstein and a fellow, Shearer, they swindle an Afrikaans farm girl who doesn’t know there’s gold on her farm, they swindle her of their gold. This was also seen by Jews. There was one protest in Johannesburg opposed to the idea, the message had got to them, but generally, this was the image of the guttural-speaking, Yiddish-speaking alien Jew who was swindling. There was another play, “A Girl from Springfontein.”

The same theory. You have this idea of the boereverneuker and the Hoggenheimer, and these people are pulling the strings in South Africa. They’re a concern, and generally, because of that underworld in the Jewish world, there’s the sense of a different culture operating which we don’t want. The overriding notion of these people was they were undesirable. That was a term used, undesirables, and they shouldn’t be here, for many people. At the same time, you have the parallel development that many small towns had Jewish mayors, and larger centers. So it’s a parallel idea. There was still a notion of a gentleman Jew, but there was also the knave. With the First World War, there’s an additional dimension to the stereotype, and that is the shirker. The same as in Germany in the First World War, where Jews were accused of not participating and taking part and giving their weight to the war effort, the same thing happened in South Africa. The Jews were accused of shirking. They were all seen to be enjoying the beach in Muizenberg. They were all exploiting while the real South Africans, the patriots, were fighting in the First World War. Of course, it was a complex issue, because the Russian Jews, most of them, and I use Russian in the broad term, the Russian Jews didn’t want to be on the side of Russia that had treated them so badly, hence the Jewish migration.

So this was terribly concerning to Jews. They looked into it, they tried to defend themselves, but it was another layer in this anti-Jewish stereotype, the shirker. But there was another big one, and that comes after the Russian Revolution, because now you have, which is a worldwide Red Scare, and this happened in England, happened in the United States, the idea of Bolshevism spreading and the idea of the Judeo-Bolshevik as the specter facing the West. It’s at that time that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which we’ll hear about much more in my next lecture, but “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” move westward, originally formed in 1903, but by after the First World War, spread. And of course these Russian Jews were tarred with the Bolshevik brush, and it was a great concern again to Jewish leaders. Only a small minority were really supportive of the Bolshevik cause, although they were very, very pleased the tsar had been overthrown. There was real panic when two Jews, Bolshevik Jews came on a tour of South Africa in 1919, Lapitsky and Sosnovik, and there was real panic that they were spreading the gospel of Bolshevism and this would be a challenge. Now, this must all be seen in the context of a rising Black African proletariat moving into the cities and these Bolsheviks would be manipulating the Black Africans and challenging the state itself.

So this was a moment of panic and it became very evident during the Rand Rebellion of 1922. The Rand Rebellion began as a result of the mine owners trying to cut back on the costs of workers, allowing more Blacks to do work at the expense of whites, and the whites resisted this. It’s fascinating to see how both sides use the Jewish bogey in that struggle. On the one side, the workers spoke about Hoggenheimer and slurred people like Morris Kentridge, the father of Sydney Kentridge, a Labor politician, bringing up his name, Kantrovich, and pointing to his foreignness, and to others, that’s the one side, anti-Bolshevik, and then anti-Hoggenheimer, because these were bad people and they were the exploiters. So that evolves in 1922. We now have a shift in language. I pointed out how you have the undesirable Jew going back to the late 19th century. These aliens, these Yiddish-speakers, they were undesirable, but we now suddenly find in the ‘20s, they were unassimilable. It became a very commonly used word in the English media and in the Afrikaans media. The Jews were “unassimilable.” They were of a different culture with a different business morality, and they were not welcome. And you’d be quite horrified if you read the comment in good dailies, like the “Cape Times” under B.K. Long, the editor at the time, the sorts of things they spoke about, “These people who are simply not of our morality, not of our racial stock,” and that’s another stock phrase, forgive the pun, “Our racial stock is European, Nordic.”

And of course Nordicism is something with a long pedigree, and it bursts onto the scene in South Africa in the '20s, that the Afrikaner and English are of Nordic stock and the Jew is not part of that. When I say “the Jew,” they’re talking about the East European Jew, but one must remember that the East European Jew really were dominant by the 1920s. That old, original movement of Anglo-German Jews, they were more or less subsumed by the East European. You quickly entered into South African society, but they were distinctive, and all the stereotypes came into play in the 1920s, and you now have an ongoing call to stop these people. “They are breeding too much. They breed too quickly.” There was a census report. The director of the census, Dr. Holloway, he spoke about their numbers. And by the way, the numbers were 1,000, 1,500 a year. We’re not talking about a flood, but I think all of you will appreciate the sorts of sentiments when one thinks of migration today and one thinks of the right and how other peoples undermine the character of a country, and this is exactly what was going on in South Africa. Our Nordic origins, the founders of South Africa, in their mind, they were going to be undermined by this alien influence. And it’s not just alien.

It’s alien with all the stereotypes I’ve spoken about. That becomes louder and louder, that voice, through the '20s. And again, I stress, English and Afrikaans media and newspapers are saying that, and there are calls to now stop the immigration, and those calls grow louder when the United States introduces quotas against East European immigrants, Jewish immigrants, in 1924. The Johnson-Reed Act gets South Africans concerned that there’s now going to be a shift to South Africa, the numbers are going to increase greatly. So what does one do? Well, by 1926, '27, party conferences, I’m talking about the South African Party, I’m talking about the Pact Government, which comes to power, National Party and Labor Party, from '24 to '33. They adidem when it comes to “We must deal with this issue. We can’t allow a flood of East Europeans.” The voices get louder from the right. We have this chap, Manie Maritz. Now, Manie Maritz cut his teeth in the old Boer Republic and disliked Jews, those immigrants at that time. He became something of a hero among Afrikaners during the Boer rebellion of 1914. He ended up defeated, goes to Portugal, comes back, and it’s a checkered history, but he eventually is forgiven, and in 1925, he makes a very ugly speech against Jews, exploiting everything I’ve said, comes out in this speech. He’s not the only one, but he’s interesting, because we’ll come back to him in the 1930s when Manie Maritz writes his book, “My Lewe en Strewe,” “My Life and Struggle,” in which he incorporates “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his book, and he becomes a very important radical right voice until he’s killed in a car accident in 1940. But we’ll come back to Manie Maritz at another time.

For now, it’s interesting to note that when he spoke out at a small town called Makwassie against the Jews and the way they exploit the Boers, the National Party came to the defense of the Jews. Why was this? Put simply, it was an attempt to get the Jewish vote, which sounds odd for this small community, which at that time numbers less than 4% of the white population, but in some constituencies they were important. Nothing was set in stone and one didn’t want to lose the Jewish vote. So people started doing their best to keep the Jewish vote. At the same time, at national conferences of both the South African Party and the National Party, at these conferences, there would be resolutions to look into immigration, to do something to stop the East European Jews, and this becomes louder and more noticeable through the '20s. It’s an age, in the '20s, of segregation policy, which of course Colin would’ve spoken about yesterday, but it’s also an age in which there’s concerns of a eugenicist kind against mongrelization, and these Jews were different, they’re going to mongrelize South Africa, and not the stock, another word they used, “Not the stock that we need.” So something’s building up here, and this is homegrown. I’m not saying there’s no import of ideas. Of course there are imported ideas from Europe. That’s not surprising. Ideas travel.

South Africa is an immigrant society. All the old canards spoken about in Europe, these would get to South Africa eventually, and they were rooted in a particular history, a particular moment, the 1890s, the power of capital, the poor white Afrikaner in the rural areas struggling and looking for scapegoats, and then the poor white Afrikaner who moves towards the cities, and in the cities he’s, you know, hopelessly ill-equipped to really play an important role at that stage, the 1920s, and that poor white Afrikaner problem, and I’ll stress Afrikaner problem, is really burgeoning and is going to become a big subject, and we’ll talk about it in the next lecture. But in 1929, the young Oswald Pirow, who would eventually become Minister of Defense and Minister of Justice, Oswald Pirow tells Gus Saron, who’s the Secretary General of the Board of Deputies, that they are thinking of curtailing East European immigration, notice, East European. Don’t want to be anti-Jewish. Want to be anti-East European: “We don’t mind Jews from Western Europe, England, Germany.” So it’s not antisemitic, they say. Well, Saron knows about this. He’s heard about it, but there’s no sign of this at the opening of parliament. The Governor General opens the session and usually they talk about the legislation coming, and there’s no sign of any attempt to curtail East European or Jewish immigration.

And in fact, there are two by-elections, which have quite a few Jews living in the constituencies. Strangely, I’m talking about Bethel, in then the Eastern Transvaal, and in Stellenbosch, and those by-elections are taking place in January, 1930. And Oswald Pirow goes to the hustings in Bethel, a small town, but Jews are farming there and fairly influential in the town, and he goes there and specifically puts out the flames of concern that there’s going to be upcoming legislation: “It’s not going to happen.” But of course he was trying to get the Jewish vote, or at least not lose the Jewish vote. The truth of the matter is that, what you could call a bombshell, D.F. Malan, the Minister of the Interior who later becomes first prime minister of the apartheid regime in '48, D.F. Malan comes along and he introduces the Quota Bill. Now, this was a bill which had certain countries called scheduled and certain countries non-scheduled, and some countries, including Eastern European countries, would not be allowed to have more than 50 immigrants to the country a year. This was directly against the East European Jews. But D.F. Malan, a religious man, D.F. Malan denied this was antisemitic. He effectively said, “Look, every country has its own soul. It wants to keep its soul, its culture, its character. It wants people to enter the country who are its kith and kin. It doesn’t want a strange culture undermining the values and the way we do things.”

And he tells the House in this lengthy speech, introducing the Quota Bill, that this is not anti-Jewish: “We’re not casting aspersions on any group.” Speaker after speaker follows, very excited about the legislation, across the benches, that this has to happen, and it’s quite clear that they are after East European Jews, no more of them, they shouldn’t enter. And there are four Jewish parliamentarians in the House, and C.P. Robertson gets up and he says, “Look, don’t kid yourself. Today it’s East Europeans. Tomorrow it’s the Jews from Germany, from France, from England. It’s not going to stop with East Europeans. We know what this is all about.” And that was the Quota Act passed, of 1930. So to sum up, we’re talking about the evolution and maturation of an anti-Jewish stereotype. It’s in the realm of ideas. It’s not action. You’ve got action in the sense of immigration legislation, but besides one or two concerned about general dealer’s licenses early in the 20th century and using language as a test to stop Jews, especially the smous and the ostrich feather trade, that was something that concerned people, came up in indigency commissions. It came up in the examination by Dr. Gregory who looked at the Immigration Act. This was certainly in the realm of ideas more than anything else. It doesn’t translate into real action. The historian of Anglo Jewry, funnily enough, Todd Endelman, an American historian in Michigan, he’s separated the idea of private or ideational antisemitism from programmatic or public antisemitism.

And what he means by that is that with ideas, people walk around carrying stereotypes in their head, and we’ve seen the evolution of this anti-Jewish . It’s not held by one or two people. It’s widespread. Hoggenheimer is a household term. That play, “Helena’s Hope,” resonates with people, the smous, et cetera. And what Todd Endelman argues is that when private antisemitism turns into programmatic or political antisemitism, it’s a very different issue. It means injecting the Jewish question into political life, and that’s going to happen in the 1930s, this complete switch from private to public, programmatic antisemitism, people calling for certain things, which we’ll talk about in the next lecture. But I think I’ve spoken enough and maybe more can come out with questions. Thank you, Wendy.

• Thank you. That was actually astonishing. I didn’t realize that. I learned so much today. Thank you, Milton. So there are questions. Are you happy to answer them?

• Absolutely, yes.

• Okay, so do you want me to run through them with you or do you have .

• Please, if you can run through them now.

Q&A and Comments:

Q - So from Simon, “You mentioned Charles van Onselen. Is that the same person who was apparently a security police informer?”

A - A security? I didn’t get the last bit.

• So Charles van Onselen,

• [Milton Shain] Yes?

• is he the same person who apparently was a security police informer?

A - No, Charles van Onselen is a historian, and not to my knowledge an informer in the police, but he certainly did some stunning work on Johannesburg and he also wrote a fascinating study of a real psychopath called Joe Silver, and that added to this whole world of the Jewish underworld. So that’s Charles van Onselen. He is currently, he was at Wits for many decades, currently Pretoria University.

Q - Didn’t he write the history book, Van Onselen? Isn’t that the book that we used to, wasn’t it our history book at school?

A - No, no, no, no.

Q - No, okay. Here’s a second question. “Was the anti-Indian sentiment based on race, religion, or both, like with the Jews?”

A - Anti-Indian sentiment would be colored, color, I mean, really, the idea of forming another column, and it was an ongoing discussion later with Mahatma Gandhi with Smuts. They didn’t want an additional race problem. But we’ll see this exactly with the Jews in the 1930s. It’s not religion in the sense that it would be a foreign religion, Hinduism, or Islam for many, but it’s really a distinctive difference, seen in color. I wouldn’t rule out religion, but it all goes into one rubric.

Q - Okay, “Why did the Indians want to immigrate to South Africa and what were the numbers of Indian immigrants compared to Jewish immigrants?”

A - The Indians had been brought to South Africa in the 19th century as indentured labor and then free labor. It was an ongoing issue, but there was movement, and it’s the usual, you know, connection with families or opportunities, for some people, bringing out labor, very important on the sugar plantations, that sort of thing.

• Right, so they saw opportunity. So Michael Polonsky, hi, Michael-

• Well, and the settled population saw opportunity to exploit.

Q - Okay, great. Michael says, “What was President Kruger’s attitude to the Jews? He was very friendly with Sammy Marks and allegedly allowed him a day at the mint to make gold coins.”

A - 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.

Q - Right. Okay. So was there a level of respect, or was he in awe a little bit or not, if he was a religious person?

A - It’s respect insofar as the People of the Book, but he wouldn’t want more and more Jews coming in. I’m not sure if he ever left a trace about the war in the sense of Jewish war, but he would’ve known, and after the war, “The Century of Wrong” by Reitz would’ve given this idea of the power of mining capital, and he was a victim in a sense.

Q - All right. “Was there a Polish-Russian union, therefore peruvniks?”, asks Errol.

A - Yes, that’s one of the possible derivations of the Peruvian. The are other indications that they got their geography wrong and they thought that those Jews were moving to Argentina, Baron Hirsch’s scheme to Argentina. People got their geography wrong and thought it’s Peru. There’s talk about Peruva being a word for Poland, all sorts of ideas.

• [Wendy] Right.

• But the best idea is that a peruvnik is linked to a trier, someone who’s trying to make a life.

• Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Sonny has reminded me that our history textbook was Van Jaarsveld. Thank you, Sonny. That’s exactly right.

• Ah. Van Jaarsveld will come up in the final lecture, because he gets tarred and feathered by the far right.

• Right. Yeah, I remember that. And there are many, many comments here on what a wonderful presentation, from many. So thank you very, very much, Milton. It was truly fascinating and I’m actually quite shocked. Well, I shouldn’t be, I suppose. So from both sides came this narrative. Fascinating, as Trudi would say. All right, thank you very, very much for a wonderful hour. We look forward to seeing you next week.

• Yes, thank you very much, and see you next week.