Milton Shain
Fascists, Fabricators and Fantasists: Antisemitism in South Africa: 1948 to the Present

Milton Shain - Fascists, Fabricators and Fantasists: Antisemitism in South Africa: 1948 to the Present

- This is my third lecture in the series on the history of anti-Semitism in South Africa, taking the story from the late 19th century and today, we’ll take it right up to the present day. But the first lecture, I went up to 1930, the Quota Act, and I suggested that a widely shared anti-Jewish stereotype had evolved over the decades preceding this attempt to close, and a successful attempt, to close the door to East European Jewish immigration. Two days ago, we spoke about the Jewish question in South Africa, insofar as that was a fair appellation for the ‘30s and early 1940s. The question of Jewish immigration moved from the fringes of political life, increasingly towards the centre. Shirtist movements, aping the Nazis and fascist movements in Europe, sprung up in South Africa. They influenced debate, they influenced the centre-right, they took onboard many of their ideas, and then it moved to the centre where the ruling party, the United Party of Hertzog and Smuts, had to do something to block the loophole in legislation, and I’m referring to the German Jewish refugees. The Jewish question raised all sorts of issues with regard to rights in South Africa with people on the far extremist right calling for limitations on what had normally been an open society for whites anyway. This evening, we’ll see how the Jewish question rapidly recedes after the Second World War.

The far-right, perhaps in many cases, shocked by what was revealed, although many deny that this was true, but certainly it had a dampening effect on classic Jew hatred and expression and by the 1948 general election, which the National Party won under Dr. D.F. Malan, the Jewish issue hardly arose. Quite a remarkable change from 10 years earlier in 1938 when the Jewish question had been pretty prominent at the hustings and when each side used the Jewish question, particularly the right, as a cudgel to attack their political enemies. There were a few diehards around still in 1945-46. One of them was Eric Louw, by the way, became foreign minister. And Eric Louw wanted no change in attitudes towards the Jew and he also didn’t want Jews to be allowed to have membership of the party, which was the case in most provinces, and he pushed for that. But Malan had second thoughts. He was a great opportunist, Malan, he sensed the wind in the '30s, took on board all the Judeo-Bolshevik ideas, the subverse of liberals, but jettisoned it by 1948. And in fact, Jewish leaders met with him just before the election and just after the election, and they reached a modus vivendi in which Malan actually said, we’re going to put the Jewish question behind us. He didn’t have to worry at that point. There was no German Jewish immigration to talk of, and that threat was not there. And most importantly, as we’ll see as the 1950s unfold, most importantly, the Afrikaner now had the political kingdom. You’ll recall that the Afrikaners had really been underdogs in the economy. There was a huge poor white population.

They’d moved to the cities, they confronted what they saw as the Jew dominating the cities. And I’m talking about a population in the '30s of 5% of the white population, no more, 4.7 in fact. So with the political kingdom at hand, the economic kingdom would follow and we’ll see an upward mobility of Afrikaners through this period. And that’s going to be a very big factor because you’ll recall, I made the point that the '30s and early '40s was a specific moment in South African history. The Jewish question didn’t come out of nowhere. Yes, there was a long preparation insofar as the ideas of the Jew would resonate, but it needed certain conditions. And we’ll come back to that when we reflect later in the lecture on the whole experience of Jews and anti-Semitism in South Africa. But in '48, the issue receded, the scurrilous Hogenheimer cartoons, the ugly caricature of the Jewish bloated capitalist, left the pages by and large, and things got a lot easier for the Jewish community. This is not to say they weren’t sensitive, they were terribly aware, in fact, they were monitoring various extremists at that moment. They were concerned about certain voices. But on the whole, this was an opportunity to Jews to continue their ascent and upward mobility, which had been so evident in the decades earlier, and to really settle in South Africa as privileged whites. No doubt about that. Yet, for all that, the idea of the subversive Jew, the liberal Jew, the Communist Jew, was a powerful idea.

It had deep roots. Jews were prominent on the left, they were prominent among the liberals, and there was still that sense that Jews were undermining, or planned to undermine, the racial order with their liberal precepts. After all, liberalism and communism were terms of a programme in the lexicon of Nationalist Party statements. So the Jews were watched, things didn’t entirely disappear, but they certainly didn’t enter political debate. They became raised in parliament. There would be the odd snigger, the odd comment about communist Jews, liberals, someone later like Helen Suzman, who heard about. Helen Suzman would be noted as a Jewish liberal. Some ugly comments. That was the order of things for quite a while. And then as far as communism goes, one must appreciate that this was the beginning of the Cold War, and South Africa saw itself as part of the West, stopping the force of communism moving down the continent of Africa. They’d been very conscious of the communist threat, particularly of course, because the Black majority were oppressed, had no opportunities in a white dominated economy, and the threat from that sector, inspired by liberal whites or radical communists, was real in the minds of many Afrikaner nationalists, the National Party.

There was a movement, Antikom, the anti-communist movement, which was really dominated by theologian Koot Vorster. Koot Vorster took off from where others had been examining the communist threat in the 1930s. The church had been examining, the Dutch Reformed Church. Godless Communism was always a fear. You’ll recall that there was the 1922 Rand Revolt in which the Judeo-Bolshevik idea was prominent. And Koot Vorster was the brother of John Vorster who became prime minister in the '60s, and both he and his brother had been interned during the Second World War as members of that radical group we spoke about, the Ossewabrandwag. So the Jew and the idea of the Jew as the subversive persisted, hardly disappeared, and it got tangled up, certain levels of politics, but it never really resonated. The Afrikaners were on the move, and they were beginning to experience a mobility and a respect for the Jew as opposed to a competitor seen in the Jew. And of course, they had the State behind them. By the '50s, in this Cold War atmosphere, it couldn’t have gone unnoticed that in the treason trial, this huge catchment of 156 individuals, in this huge catchment of people accused of treason, there were 23 whites of whom 15 were Jewish. That would not go unnoticed and would be part of the memory. Within a few years, you have the Rivonia Trial, the trial that saw Nelson Mandela incarcerated. The Rivonia Trial, all five whites arrested were Jewish.

Now, from the outside, it didn’t matter if you were a communist Jew, a capitalist Jew, the reality was that there was the sense of Jewish subversion with, in a way, an element of understandable truth, insofar as these disproportionate numbers are demonstrable. In fact, in 1968, during student troubles at the white liberal institutions, the Minister of Police, Lourens Muller, in a speech in Potchefstroom, read out a list of subversive Jews at universities and made the point that most of them are Jewish. Quite a frightening statement from the Minister of Police actually calling out that the Jews were so prominent in this liberal effort. The Board of Deputies, the representative voice of the community was angry, but always stood on eggshells, never quite sure what to do, how respected they were, how much faith they could have in the government, because Jews generally were known to be in the opposition. Only in the late 1970s did one in four Jews, in the wake of the Soweto uprising, support the National Party. And they could even hide behind the notion that there was some indication of the party beginning to reform, however slowly. So the liberal subversive Jew becomes a persistent tenacious stereotype. And what’s important for us to appreciate is that ideas do matter. Under the correct circumstances, they can translate into action, as we saw in the '30s, As I said, the traction was not great of these ideas, but it was enough for a major bestselling Afrikaans daily called “Dagbreek en Sondagnuus,” edited by a journalist called Dirk Richard, to actually pose questions to the Jews. Are you loyal? Are you unhappy in this country? This is in the mid 1970s.

And the Jewish leadership was told in no uncertain terms that we’re concerned about where you stand. So these were tense moments, but nothing was happening in the sense of insecurity for Jews. Yes, there were pamphlets being distributed, there was graffiti occasionally on Jewish targets, but nothing serious, and relative to the 1930s, this was an easy period. On the other hand, the flames of fantasy were ignited by what I’d like to call, the true believers. These were the real fantasists, some old style fascists, some fabricators and some living in a world of fantasy, seemingly obsessed by Jews. And I want to just talk about a couple of them to get the flavour. Again, their reach was not all that great, but they did keep alive the flames of fantasy. You will recall Ray Rudman, in the 1930s, a leader of the Greyshirts, that fascist organisation led by Louis Weichardt. You’ll recall that Ray Rudman said the most scurrilous things about Jews in the 1930s. Jan Smuts, in fact, in a meeting with Jewish leaders, referred to this man as the rantings of a lunatic. This was Ray Rudman. He was a horticulturalist, not well educated, although he had done some studies in the United States in horticulture, came back to Natal outside Pietermaritzburg and ran a garden business. But from there he had the Aryan Bookstore, which was really a postal address, and did not stop sending out pamphlets and selling extreme right-wing books to the public.

More than that, he was very well connected with old Neo-Nazis, people who had got out of Germany in Egypt, Istanbul, other sympathisers of Hitler, South America. This man was in constant communication with the wide range of people. Judging by his letters, and I’ve read many of them, he was not a very literate man, but he certainly was obsessed and certainly in touch with many people. And in fact, so much so that the Jewish organisations in the United States picked up on him planning an international conference and wrote to the Board of Deputies to inquire about this man, and they did some sneaking around and looking at this bookshop and finding out what’s going on. And all eyes were on Ray Rudman who did not stop talking about the Jewish menace. Interestingly, within his worldview was the Zionist menace as well, and this is going to be common with a number of these fantasists. The Zionist menace was a menace in which Jerusalem was linked to Moscow. So you have this twin attack on western civilization coming from a Vatican-like centre, Jerusalem, tied to the great threat of Soviet communism. And Rudman persisted with his efforts. He had also been interned, by the way, in the Second World War, but he persisted with his efforts right into the late '60s. He formed an Anglo-Nordic Front, which hardly got attention, but no shortage of pamphlets and material. That was Ray Rudman. While he was busy in northern Natal castigating Jews and inventing stories, there was another fellow tilting at windmills near Hartbeespoort Dam, which is outside Johannesburg, fellow by the name of Johan Schoeman.

Far more learned, the son of General Schoeman, who had been what they call a hensopper, a hands-upper, during the Boer War. He had thrown in the towel, so to speak, and their homestead had been burnt by the British in the war. Schoeman was charged and probably could have been sentenced to death. So the young son growing up with the father must have been traumatised to a great extent by the experience of the Boer War, by the situation of his father. And more so when his father was smoking a pipe and put the ash into a lyddite shell tray and it exploded and killed him. So poor Johan Schoeman didn’t come from an easy background, but he read it all in terms of conspiracies, and it wasn’t long before it was the Jews who were behind things. So this was a man who denied the Holocaust, becoming more and more grieved. By the time of the Eichmann trial in the '60s, he could not accept the idea that this had happened. He had a long history of sending pamphlets and writing letters to South African government ministers, to members of Parliament and even overseas. This was a man obsessed with the Jews, with a list of publications and very close connections to the Britons Publication Society in England. That was the crowd who published the “Protocols of Elders” in the '20s, they got the permission to do it, run by a fellow, Henry Hamilton Beamish, who had been in South Africa and in fact appeared as an expert witness in the Greyshirt Trial of 1934. So there’s a network of people,. These two, Rudman and Schoeman, are absolute odd bods, crackpots, paranoids, but they kept the flames alive, as did our next true believer and that’s a fellow, Sydney Eustace Brown, S.E.D. Brown.

In 1955, Brown starts his own monthly, the “S.A. Observer,” and he runs it until his death effectively in '91. And this was a broad sheet of quite remarkable hatred. Again, a huge focus, like Rudman, like Schoeman, a huge focus on the threat of Zionism in collusion with Moscow. S.E.D. Brown was a man quite connected to the National Party, a man who increasingly got frustrated in the 1960s with the nationalist move away from grand apartheid very, very slowly, but there were indications and hence, so much so that there was a split at the end of the '60s in the National Party where Hertzog junior breaks away and forms the Herstigte Nasionale Party, the Revisionist National Party, taking the cudgels as being the true National Party, but hardly getting any mileage in the movement and always remaining a very small party. But Brown and his “S.A. Observer” start supporting him, and they’re very concerned that pristine apartheid is being undermined by the very party that had come to power in '48. That’s Mr. S.E.D. Brown. Of another ilk, but part of the whole circle, is the fellow Ivor Benson, English speaker, a trained journalist, does war reporting in the Second World War. And Benson gets back, he becomes a subeditor, a deputy editor, sorry, of the “Rand Daily Mail,” a proud liberal daily in Johannesburg, fires a few liberals there. And meanwhile, he had experience in Rhodesia being a censor with Ian Smith, and he’s watching people here.

And he’s a man who becomes increasingly more radical. It’s interesting how these radicals begin relatively quietly and end up raving. David Irving is a classic example. You all know David Irving from the Holocaust denier, the Deborah Lipstadt trial. When he began his work, people took him quite seriously on Germany and his work on the Second World War. By the end, he was giving Heil Hitler salutes and so forth. Well, this Benson increasingly gets connected to a global world of fantasy. But he publishes books, he publishes books for friends. He published one, “The Controversy of Zion,” for his old friend who had ended up in Durban, Douglas Reed. Some of you may know Douglas Reed. He was a notorious anti-Semite in England. He had been a normal journalist and then he flipped and ended up in Durban, a low profile, but obviously connected with Benson who published his book, “The Controversy of Zion,” which was a classic tract of fantasy. But he himself wrote a number of books, “Zionist Questions,” “Zionism in History” in the '60s and '70s. So if I have to sum up on these true believers, it would be worth noting, 'cause this is going to be a point I’m going to raise at the end, but these true believe not only were concerned about subversive Jews domestically, but they had this notion of a Moscow Jerusalem axis threatening. They could take some sustenance in the early '60s when the nascent Jewish State Israel was part of the anti-apartheid block and making loud noises against apartheid South Africa in the early '60s.

Of course that changes by the '70s. But, at that point, they could add to the layers of subversion that the centre is again undermining us. It’s playing for all to see. Just as a matter of interest, in the last couple of weeks, a piece appeared in “The Atlantic.” I was in touch with the, or he was in touch with me, the journalist, the chap, Josh Benton, who contacted me with regard to a Dr. Haldeman, a Canadian who had a very chequered history in Canada. He had been part of the Social Credit movement, which was always questionable on the Jewish question, and another movement which was very concerned about international finance. Often the notion of the cosmetology financier, the Jew is part of it. And in South Africa, they had uncovered a letter from the Jewish Board of Deputies in the early 1950s in which this Dr. Haldeman had an interview in a nationalist daily in which he praised the apartheid regime. He had just come from Canada, he was a chiropractor, and he had come with his wife and a young daughter of two years old. Eight years later, he wrote a conspiracy style tract about international finance. But the journalist contacted me because this Dr. Haldeman was the grandfather of Elon Musk. And a few months earlier, the tract he wrote, the sort of booklet, had been exposed by Jill Lepore in “The New Yorker.”

But now he was digging further into his Canadian work and wanted to know more about him in South Africa. Well, strangely, he had been under the radar as far as I was concerned. He didn’t make a big noise in the Jewish Board of Deputies archives, although with further digging, we found a couple of things, but nothing much. His daughter, of course, is Elon Musk’s mother. So they were interested, obviously it’s newsworthy. Those were the sorts of true believers. They weren’t the only ones, but they were the most prominent ones. And they kept the idea of the Jew as subversive alive in a very elaborate way. Holocaust denial also takes off in South Africa. Richard Harwood, it’s a nom de plume, Richard Harwood had written “Six Million Did Not Die” and it was popular here. The Jewish Board of Deputies took it to the Publication’s Authority, which was a very powerful body in apartheid South Africa, which banned publications when it chose to, and it was banned. S.E.D. Brown and a couple of friends took the matter to court, but just when they got to court, they dropped the case. And the Jewish Board of Deputies wrote a very fine booklet, “Six Million Did Die.” But that Holocaust denial idea was percolating in the South African consciousness, even in some relatively mainstream places, for example, I mentioned the breakaway from the National Party of the HNP.

They had their own newspaper, “The Afrikaner.” And then later there was another breakaway, the Boerstaat and both published revisionist articles very often. One of them published an article by the SS member, Wilhelm Staglich called “The Myth of Auschwitz.” He had written a book, “The Myth of…” They published one of his pieces. So this was not only the extremists who were talking about Holocaust revisionism, but more mainstream people. And in fact, “The Afrikaner” was edited by a chap, Beaumont Schoeman, no relation to the other Schoeman as far as I know. But Beaumont Schoeman edited it. He was a historian of a kind. He wrote school textbooks, and they didn’t creep into the school textbooks, by the way. And so it was not only extremists who were pushing the myth of the six million and the Holocaust. The 1970s saw further advances in subtle reform by the National Party leading up to the Prime Minister PW Botha using the slogan, “Adapt or die,” basically saying we have to re-look at apartheid and try and get rid of its more jagged edges, so-called petty apartheid and improve on it and set in motion some change, which would be terribly slow and ponderous. But it was there and this terrified the far white right. And interestingly enough, at that point there was another split. It led to the breakaway under a very substantial politician, Dr. Andries Treurnicht, who formed the Conservative Party in the early 1980s.

And he became this sort of true voice of Volkish Afrikaner nationalism. But at the same time, there was a mushrooming of many smaller groups of real neo-fascists. The most prominent of these was the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, the AWB, Afrikaner Resistance Movement, led by a fellow, Eugene Terre'Blanche. He had once stood as a member for the the HNP, and he had a swastika-like symbol and his oratory was modelled on the best of fascists and the pageants of his political meetings were quite frightening by all who observed. And he kept the issues boiling, denied he was an anti-Semite in interviews, but in the documents of the AWB, this was a Christian society, no place for it. And by the way, talking of a Christian society, I should have mentioned, in the '50s and '60s, the Jews were obsessed by two issues besides the fantasy I’ve been talking about, and that is what they call Christian National Education introduced by the National Party, informed very much by its legacy of the Dutch Reformed Church, what we spoke about earlier last time. And Christian National Education was of concerns with Jews and it gave impetus to the incipient Jewish day school movement, which had started earlier, but this was now a reason to really get into first gear.

The other issue was the conscience clause in universities, the idea that you were free to express your opinions in universities and faith or background meant nothing in appointments. And this was under assault and only really resolved in the 1970s. So those were two issues as well, besides this pamphleteering and ugly stuff from the extremists. But Jews were getting on with their business. Like in all societies, there would be subtle moments of anti-Semitism, but generally they were integrating well. We must not get the sense of a society burning. This is not the 1930s. By the time South Africa, the dramatic speech of FW de Klerk in which he ended apartheid effectively on 2 February 1990. By that time there was a Volksfront, an Afrikaner Front, with about eight major fascist-like organisations, people talking about the Blacks as the mud races, the Jews running the world, the classic examples which we all know about. And when de Klerk introduced this dramatic moment, announcement that Mandela would be released from prison after 27 years, that society would be normalised, we would negotiate a new constitution that remarkable day, of course the far right were apoplectic. And within days, on Church Square in Pretoria, the AWB had a meeting going in which Judas Iscariot emerged and the 30 pieces of silver and the burning of a Zionist flag, this is all the far right.

And we saw more of that sort of thing during the negotiations when they set up the Goldstone Commission named for Richard Goldstone, who had to look into things going on politically and killings and so forth in South Africa, third forces operating on behalf of the government. Richard Goldstone was Jewish and the far right made it known with a placard saying, “Goldstone, king of the Jews.” So the far right and its ideas didn’t entirely disappear. Up to now, I’ve spoken for about two hours and we haven’t spoken about the majority of the population, the Black majority, making up over 80% of the population. And it is after all South Africa and we’ve said nothing about them. I have said that Blacks saw oppression in terms of broad race or class, but not in terms of ethnic groups or Jews or Portuguese or whatever, which is not to say they didn’t imbibe ideas over time, but there’s very little historical evidence to get a sense of any widespread notion of the Jew. However, in the late '70s, there were two studies on Black attitudes towards the Jew. One by a student at Wits, Stuart Buxbaum, and another by Melville Edelstein, who happened to be the first person killed in the Soweto riots, so the riots in the mid '70s, so this was earlier, his work, that’s right, just a short time before. And they both showed that there is no doubt Blacks had imbibed anti-Jewish stereotypes over time. Shouldn’t be all that surprising. He put it down to teachings in the church or schools, but whatever the causes were, they were not immune to the longest hatred. And why should they be?

Now, as we normalise South African society in 1990, people come out onto the streets. It’s a much more open society. The society has major, major issues, certainly not a Jewish question, but we can get a greater sense of opinion. And we see examples of Jew hatred across the population groups, at strikes. One strike, they spoke about the late Raymond Ackerman, the supermarket man from Pick 'n Pay. There was a strike and they made allusions to his Jewishness. There were many of those sorts of things, but no political programme. One doesn’t get the wrong idea about that, none whatsoever. But Holocaust denial persisted among white writers and among one very well-known radio journalist, Jon Qwelane, who got into trouble years ago for homophobia. He subsequently has passed away. But Jon Qwelane was a Holocaust denier and completely confused about the protocols of the elders of Zion. But these ideas were there. They had now moved beyond the white population, but they’re not of significance in any programmatic action. In fact, one can go even further and say that classic Jew hatred in the sense would be condemned right through this period, particularly by the ANC, which had no truck with classic anti-Semitism. Now, many of you might be thinking, “Well, what about the anti-Zionism?” Because this also came out of the closet much more. It came out in a way which is quite interesting. South Africa had a very close alliance with Israel from the late '60s, right through into the late '80s. And this was well known. It was known by the liberation movement in exile, the ANC known by the PAC.

And that connection would be remembered, but there would also be a distinct separation in the minds of the ANC and actually spelled out in documents that there good Jews and bad Jews, and good Jews we’ve got in our movement and bad Jews are Zionists. They never had any time for the sort of notion of an ethnic state. They were close to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. And they also saw ethnicity as a means of divide and rule. And Zionism was understood as a ethno-national movement and they had no real truck with that. That was their opinion, they were entitled to that. But there was a firing up of anti-Zionism coming from the Muslim minority, understandably. They had a vested interest in the Israeli Arab struggle. And the Muslim minority, relatively well educated, got out onto the streets in a way they couldn’t in the old South Africa. One of the commentators spoke about the protests being like Tehran on our Grand Parade, a Muslim commentator actually used that notion. Now, South African Jews were quite shocked at this turn of the vociferousness. I’m not concerned here about the Israeli Arab conflict. We’re not going into that. It’s another question. What does interest one is the language, the discourse of opposition. I’ve pointed out how fantasy and imply that fantasy is the hallmark of anti-Semitism, the imaginary, and this becomes quite evident in some of the language. It’s a product of, I would say, 40 years of gestation among the Muslim minority and a different narrative which they had had and held for a long time and in an apartheid society deeply divided. The white population and certainly the Jews wouldn’t have had a sense of where they stood vis-a-vis Israel.

The Muslims were writing about the Nakba, the catastrophe of '48, from their point of view. Some wanted to go fight in the Six-Day War. There were generational shifts where they became more radicalised, began reading important Islamist writers, study groups were held through the '60s, the '70s. Huge contestation intellectually within the Muslim world. And by the early '80s, hidden from the mainstream population, but not hidden on the liberal campuses, which had substantial numbers of Muslim students, there was a greater sense of this hostility. At the time of the Lebanese War in '82, there was a clear sense that this was going to be a challenge for the Jewish community. And of course this all spilled out by, with the normalisation of society, in the early 1990s. But it was long incoming. And even if it was a shock, it was no surprise for people who were really following the process. The language became increasingly conspiratorial among certain sectors, not everyone, and various groups operated. We saw this already in the mid '80s with the creation of that broad Umbrella Movement, the United Democratic Front, where many Muslims were concerned about joining, including the official voice of the community, the Muslim Judicial Council, because it had Zionists on board, because progressive Jews, Jews for Justice, Jews for Social, had joined this Umbrella Movement, and there were serious debates within the United Democratic Front about joining in. There were also even more extremists informed by the Iranian Revolution, Khomeini.

We have a movement called Qibla at that time, emerging post the downfall of the Shia. And this went into the melting pot. We cannot speak of a monolithic Muslim community. Certainly not. There are serious debates within it. And there are fascinating nuances. And yet there was a common sense of hostility to the Zionist enterprise. They might have been arguing about other things, but that was a commonality. And in fact, some Muslim scholars who are certainly in the anti-Zionist camp have even gone so far as to say, and I’m thinking of a fellow like Farid Esack, a very fine Muslim intellectual, saying that in the late '80s, said, whatever the Jews do, it won’t be forgiven because of Israel. They will not be accepted. Even if they stopped supporting Israel, they would not be accepted because it had percolated in a way into a conspiracy mindset, and this was quite significant. In higher areas of government, there were also examples and within the ANC of fantasy, things bubbled obviously like all over during conflict with Arabs and Israelis, the Gaza War and so forth. But the upper echelons were not immune to saying ugly things. A deputy minister of foreign affairs speaking at the time of the Gaza War in a protest meeting said the most scurrilous things about international Jewish finances running the world. A minister in a provincial government spoke about Jews owning 98% of the property in Cape Town, absolutely untrue, and dominating society.

A member of the Provincial Council, a woman, Sharon Davids, spoke about the drought conditions as not been true, but orchestrated by the Jewish lobby to get Israelis to help with sorting out our water issues. That sort of thing was there, but we’re not talking about anything widespread or massive. One wasn’t waking up to any programmatic policies on the part of anti-Zionists, but that was the condition. And Holocaust denial was there, white right continued. I remember going to a… I was speaking to a group of journalists in 1998 when the Cape Town Holocaust Centre was opened and the following week, in the mainstream Muslim newspaper, was a article on the opening and they said there’s some horrific pictures of suffering and so forth, but next week we will tell you the truth. And the next week was a double spread on Holocaust revisionism and recommending what to read, all the classics, Arthur Butts. So that strain of Holocaust denial and Revisionism is a powerful strain on the right and in the radical left as well. You will recall “The World at War” series. Jeremy Bloomberg and others created that wonderful series in the Second World War. Well, the episode on the Holocaust was an issue of contention in South Africa in the late 1970s and was stopped and then pressure saw it being done again.

There were reviews of Arthur Butt’s “Hoax of the Twentieth Century” Huge praise for it in the “South African Observer.” So we have a long history of this. Where does this all go and what does it mean? Well, South Africa is not a society awash with anti-Semitism. Having said that, Pew surveys and other surveys have shown that hostile stereotypes are pretty widespread. And besides a few other countries, including Brazil, outside the Muslim world, they are very disturbing in the measurement. But measurement of stereotypes does not mean you’re going to have a Jewish question or action against Jews automatically. It certainly doesn’t. If you look at the surveys in the United States in the '30s where they also had something of a Jewish problem, you could have expected pogroms and so forth. It doesn’t necessarily work. It needs a context. And that’s my final point. I want to remind us of the whole context over 100 years and try and tease out how one should look at the Jewish question and anti-Semitism in South Africa. Firstly, you seem to have a changing cast of characters. In the early 20th century, anti-alienism, the Jew is undesirable, is shared by English and Afrikaner merchants and people moving in the cities. It’s very different from the Jewish question, which is very much a product of Afrikaner Volkish ethno-nationalism, and I stress the word ethno-nationalism because the Jew served as an outsider that could help unite the insiders.

You could define yourself against the Jew. You could paper over divisions, particularly class divisions. So ethno-nationalism is a huge question when it comes to the Jewish question. We’ve seen this in Europe over and over again. It’s quite obviously sought in Canada with a coup d'etat movement. Ethno-nationalism can be bad for the Jews. Today, in South Africa under the constitutional democracy we have, we don’t have an ethno-national idea. There is a rising, Black African nationalism, no doubt, but it’s a multicultural society celebrating diversity with lots of checks and balances within the Constitution and lots of opportunity for enjoying a rich cultural life in South Africa. This is not the '30s and our new South Africa is certainly not driven, at the moment anyway, by an ethno-nationalism. There is a xenophobia in South Africa, but that’s directed against Black Africans from north of our borders in the main. When there’ve been, pogroms is probably the best word, it’s targeted against Black Africans. Jews are part of the white population essentially, and they share the fears and worries of the white population generally, health, education and so forth. But there’s no targeting of Jews as such. So finally, one must bear in mind that the transformation of anti-Semitism in South Africa from a maturing anti-Jewish steer it up to a Jewish question took place under specific conditions. Those conditions have not existed in apartheids of Africa, 1948 to 1994, and they don’t exist today. History has taught us to not be complacent, and Jews of all people cannot afford to be complacent and they need to watch and understand the dynamics of anti-Semitism. But at the moment, besides these stereotypes surviving at a certain level, besides the ugliness, there is no Jewish question in South Africa. And I think we can understand the dynamics and we probably would be able to see when we need to get more worried. Thank you very much.

• [Host] Thank you very much for that. Would you be happy to take some questions and comments at this time, Professor?

• Certainly for about 10 minutes, I can do.

Q&A and Comments:

Q - [Host] Absolutely. So we have Howard asking, “Have positive attitudes towards Jews in South Africa been measured and tracked? What would the findings be?”

A - That’s a very good question. You know, all the findings are usually the surveys, peripherally touch on these things. There could be a sense of respect for Jewish entrepreneurship. I certainly think at a subtle level this has dampened the Afrikaner’s attitudes towards Jews as they’ve moved into the middle class and gained respect for that. But in terms of hard measurement, I can’t answer that, Howard.

Q - [Host] Ralph asks a similar question, “From the 1950s, is there any data on anti-Semitism, either in English speaking high schools, especially in Durban or at the universities? I was on the Wits medical faculty during the '70s, and it was well known that certain departments seemed to have a preference for non-Jews.”

A - Well, those sort of exclusions might happen, but if you take the country as a whole and social exclusion, it’s far less in terms of country clubs and private clubs than in the United States. We don’t have a long history. We have the famous Kelvin Grove Club in Cape Town, which didn’t have Jews and subsequently had a Jewish president. But people would’ve been aware of the disproportionate involvement of Jews. But there is no great record of hostility to Jews in the modern post-war period.

Q - [Host] Jonathan asks, “Is the support of many South Africans for Russia in the Ukrainian War, which is more widespread than in most western countries, and remembering that Zelenskyy is Jewish, related to anti-Semitism?”

A - Well, the only study that I know of that has actually measured South African opinion with regard to the Russo-Ukrainian War, 70% of South Africans support Ukraine. Now that sounds odd because the chattering class, the leadership, has gone out pretty vocally against the West, and they’ve used this notion of NATO having as a proxy, Ukraine. They’ve bought into that line very, very strongly. And if you listen to the talk shows, it’s wall to wall. Every intellectual talks, it’s anti-western talk. This goes back to the long history of apartheid and the attempts to overthrow apartheid. The close ties between Russia, which they’ve conveniently forgotten, has included Ukraine, but the close ties to Russia, the intellectually imbibing of a anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, one can understand where this comes from, but that’s the framework. And the Zelenskyy issue is Jewish hardly emerged. I don’t think it’s a factor at all.

• [Host] David says, “I’m a Canadian and I’m confused about Mandela’s views of Jews. I have heard both sides.”

• Mandela certainty is on record and there’re booklets on this of, you know, being greatly impressed by Jews. Because of his record, he certainly remembers that as a law student at the University of Witwatersrand, that Jews were among his closest friends. He has a sense of Jews as underdogs with a particular history. So I would certainly lean towards that way. And I’ve never really heard, I’m interested that you mentioned you’ve heard both sides, but in records and documents, I haven’t heard anything. There was a little bit of a blip. Soon after he was released, he went to meet Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader in Zambia, and this shook the Jewish community. But one of his greatest friends and confidants was Chief Rabbi Harris from England, who was chief rabbi in South Africa. And I am sure the late Rabbi Harris would strongly deny any hostility towards Jews per se, by Nelson Mandela.

Q - [Host] Romaine asks, “Can you expand on your interesting idea of fantasy as a hallmark of anti-Semitism, especially from a sociological perspective?”

A - Well, if one looks historically at the Jews, going back to the divisions between church and synagogue, one can argue that that was rational in the sense of a disagreement about texts, a long running battle about texts, I suppose you can argue to the present day. But there was a rationality to it. So only really in the 12th century, despite Jews suffering up to then in many instances, but it’s only in the 12th century that one gets things like the blood libel emerging, the idea that Jews used Christian blood for ritual purposes. Later on, all the other charges against Jews of a fantasy kind culminating in the protocols the elders have signed, that fabrication, forgery. Now that is what I define as fantasy. And I think it’s a very useful way and it’s not original, it actually comes from the work, and you mentioned sociology, this is a mediaeval historian, the late Gavin Langmuir, and I’d recommend his books on anti-Semitism. You’ll see them, two big volumes, if you Google Gavin Langmuir, Stanford University. And he has made a strong case for fantasy being the real turn and the hallmark of anti-Semitism. And I think I’m happy to go with that idea when it comes to trying to get a sense of South Africa and anti-Semitism as well, especially this prickly problem of anti-Zionism. Because one can argue that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same things, that it’s not axiomatic that an anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite. And we all know those arguments are ongoing and won’t disappear. But when one moves into the world of conspiracies, and I haven’t got time now, but I’ll give many, many examples of people talking about Zuma being led by the Zionists and the ANC being controlled by the Zionists and the Zionists in collusion to take over the entire Middle East. That’s fantasy and that’s what’s really dangerous and defining.

Q - [Host] You have Jonah, Hillary, and Shelly all wondering how you would describe Desmond Tutu’s views on Jews?

A - Well, Desmond Tutu, of course being a very important player in the liberation in South Africa and also getting a Nobel Prize, the head of the Anglican Church, his voice counted a lot, huge amount of credibility and he said controversial things and certainly moved into the camp that was hostile to Israel or pro-Palestine. He sometimes said he wasn’t, I’m told by people who were quite close to him, that he accepted the idea of a Jewish state. I don’t know who wrote his speeches, I’ve got an idea, but he certainly is controversial. That’s all I can say. It’s not a opting out of a difficult question. I think there was a lockdown university debate with Judge Dennis Davis and Jeremy Rosen on the Tutu issue, and if I’m correct, then look it up and I’m sure that would be very enlightening.

Q - [Host] Dennis asks, “Did the ANC require all its members of Parliament denounce any connection with Israel?”

A - Well, I don’t think it’s ever been formally denounced, but the level of hostility, particularly of late, is such that when the Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, a deep committed Christian, took part in a webinar with the “Jerusalem Post” a couple of years ago, he was castigated from the highest levels, including the foreign minister, for doing this. And he was, you know, sorry to use the word, he was almost crucified by the popular sort of ANC media, but formally telling people not to go there. We have all the time, the issue of some people going for a Miss Universe contest or sports competition, it’s a hot issue and there’s a wall-to-wall hostility towards Zionism in the country, a wall-to-wall hostility among the chattering class. And yet, the Pew survey of 2007, the only one measuring attitudes, showed that about 43% supported the Israeli Jews, far less than that 27% the Arab cause and the rest didn’t know and didn’t care. That’s quite interesting because the chattering class give a very different impression.

Q - [Host] Ingrid comments, “When I grew up in Johannesburg in the 1960s, the Jewish community seemed relatively secular. Now there seems to be a large, extremely orthodox community with its own kosher supermarkets, kosher restaurants, et cetera. How are they regarded by the society at large?”

A - Well, this transformation, you’re quite correct in pointing out, whatever its roots are, it’s been noticeable from the 1970s, has ballooned into a far more religious community or divisions between religious and secular are very apparent. But no doubt there’s been a rise in religiosity. It might be part of the same thing that sees a rise in Christianity and Islamism. But with the Jews, you’re quite right, supermarkets, synagogue attendants and so forth. It’s difficult to know if distinctive dress or neighbourhoods have an impact on how people see the Jews. I don’t think it would be quite as simple as them defining who is a Jew. I think there’s a sense of South African Jews being overwhelmingly Zionist. It is a long history of support for the Jewish state in all sorts of ways. So I think that the outsiders see Jews in whatever way, but including seeing them as Zionists.

Q - [Host] Ralph is asking, “Did any Nazis seek and get refuge in South Africa as in South America after the war?”

A - Yes, it wasn’t a great haven, Southwest Africa, the neighbour, was more so, but there were lower level people who came here and then you had the odd Neo-Nazi visiting. I mentioned Louis Weichardt, the leader of the Greyshirts, he actually entertained a very prominent Nazi, Selezny, I don’t want to mispronounce his name, but he had been prominent in the SS and came to our parliament to have a cup of tea with Weichardt, who had become a senator, by the way, under the National Party.

• [Host] Elizabeth remarks, “Recently, I was told about an eminent lawyer, a clever and highly respected one, who applied to sit on the bench at the Constitutional Court. He was refused because in the past he’d been involved with the Jewish Board of Deputies.”

• That is David Unterhalter, who was passed over again 36 hours ago with another application to the Supreme Court. He has been acting in the Supreme Court. He’s one of the finest legal minds. At the time, where he previously had been excluded, the media sort of connected it with a question from Julius Malema, the extreme, some would say fascist leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters. Malema had raised the question of ties with the Jewish Board of Deputies, which was enough to provoke some to see conspiracies and distrust and he didn’t get it. But it seems to be far more complex than that in connection with two different sittings for judgements that seem to have played the bigger role in his problems. But having said that, there have been voices in the ANC who’ve said Jews must decide if they’re South Africans and the Board of Deputies is disloyal. And there’ve been even voices among students who’ve said Zionists shouldn’t be here. So these things bubbled beneath the surface.

• [Host] Well, I think that’s all that we have time for today. Lots of other fascinating comments and questions here. Lots of people appreciative for the lecture today and interested about further explorations on these topics. So thank you so much, Professor.

• It’s a pleasure, thank you for having me.