| Part of a series on |
| Antisemitism |
|---|
 |
 Category |
Antisemitism in South Africa is the manifestation of hostility, prejudice or discrimination against South African Jews or Judaism as a religious, ethnic or racial group. This form of racism has affected Jews since South Africa's Jewish community was established in the 19th century.
The history of the Jews in South Africa has been marked by periods of official and unofficial antisemitism.
During the 1930s many Nationalist Party leaders and wide sections of the Afrikaner people came strongly under the influence of the Nazi movement which dominated Germany from 1933. There were many reasons for this. Germany was the traditional enemy of Britain, and whoever opposed Britain appeared a friend of the Nationalists. Many Nationalists, moreover, believed that the opportunity to re-establish their lost republic would come with the defeat of the British Empire in the international arena. The more belligerent Hitler became, the further hopes rose that the day of Afrikanerdom was about to dawn. [1]
In 1930, Dr. D. F. Malan introduced the Quota Act, effectively restricting Jewish immigration. [2] The bill, which did not explicitly state to be limiting of Jews, put high restrictions on countries that had majority Jewish immigrants, and did not restrict countries that barely had Jews. [3] Dr. Malan listed three reasons for his support of the Quota Act: "The desire of every nation to maintain its basic racial composition; (2) The doctrine of assimilability; and (3) South Africa’s desire to maintain its own ‘type’ of civilisation.” [2] When the Jews protested this, saying it was antisemitic, Dr. Malan responded by saying that the "measure was really in the interests of the present Jewish population" [4] and said that "[it is] very easy to rouse a feeling of hatred towards the Jews in the country . . . if they want to hit us they may be assured that we will hit back." [2]
The National Party of Dr. Malan closely associated itself with policies of the Nazis. Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe was controlled under the Aliens Act and came to an end during this period. Although Jews were accorded status as Europeans, they were not accepted into white society. The Kelvin Grove sports club for example had an exclusive Europeans Only and No Jews policy. Some 11 such sports clubs had similar policies. Many Jews lived in mixed race areas such as District Six, from where they were forcibly removed to make way for a whites-only development. The architect of grand apartheid Hendrick Verwoerd studied in Germany where he obtained a degree in psychology. Many of the apartheid eugenics programmes that targeted native Africans can be said to have been inspired by racist theories which dominated the campuses of the time, as evidenced by the use of Nazi race indexing tools. [5]
In 1936, Verwoerd joined a deputation of six professors in protesting against the admission to South Africa of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. "Following these demands of the Nationalist Party, Eric Louw, later Foreign Minister, introduced another antisemitic bill that strongly resembled Nazi legislation - the Aliens Amendment and Immigration Bill of 1939. His bill was a means of suppressing all Jews. This bill suggested that Jews threatened to overpower Protestants in the business world and were innately cunning and manipulative and that Jews were a danger to society. To support his claim, Louw maintained that Jews were involved in the Bolshevik Revolution and therefore intended to spread Communism worldwide. This bill defined Jews as anyone with parents who were at least partly Jewish regardless of actual religious faith or practices." [6]
Another organisation with which the Nationalists found much in common during the 1930s was the ' South African Gentile National Socialist Movement', headed by one Johannes von Strauss von Moltke, whose object was to combat and destroy the alleged 'perversive influence of the Jews in economics, culture, religion, ethics, and statecraft and to re-establish European Aryan control in South Africa for the welfare of the Christian peoples of South Africa'. [1]
The 1956 Treason Trial saw Nelson Mandela along with a group of mostly Jewish men and women, arrested for treason. This resulted in accusations of a Jewish conspiracy to overthrow the white government and a plot involving communism. The group of Jews included Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Ben Turok, Leon Levy and Lionel Bernstein. They escaped conviction only to face another trial in 1960 known as the Rivonia Trial. This larger trial included the Zionist Arthur Goldreich, Denis Goldberg, Harold Wolpe, James Kantor and Lionel Bernstein.
During the 1960s, Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader, was a frequent visitor to South Africa, where he was received by the Prime Minister and other members of the Cabinet. At one time Mosley had two functioning branches of his organisation in South Africa, and one of his supporters, Derek Alexander, was stationed in Johannesburg as his main agent.
Upon Verwoerd's assassination in 1966, BJ Vorster was elected by the National Party to replace him. Vorster had been a supporter of Hitler during WWII; his policy towards Jews in his own country, however, was ambivalent.
The 1980s saw the rise of far-right neo-Nazi groups such as the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging under Eugene Terreblanche. The AWB modeled itself after Hitler's National Socialist Party replete with fascist regalia and an emblem resembling the swastika.
There were numerous similarities between the laws passed by the Nazis against German Jews and the laws passed by the Afrikaner Nationalists against the Blacks. The scholar Sipo Elijah Mzimela observed similarities in theology between the "role of the Deutsche Christen and the Dutch Reformed Church, on the one hand, and that of the Confessing Church and the English-speaking Churches on the other". This is known as the "apartheid heresy" controversy which became important in the struggle against institutional racism in South Africa. [7]
In May 1998, a Cape community radio station run by a Muslim organisation and aimed at Muslims, Radio 786 broadcast a programme denying the Holocaust. The resulting legal action brought by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies remains unresolved after 14 years. Radio 786 refuses to apologise to the Jewish community and has stood by its version of events. [8]
The 2001 Durban Conference against Racism (CAR) meeting was marked by clashes over the Middle East and the legacy of slavery, and coincided with attacks on Israel and anti-Israel demonstrations at a parallel conference of non-governmental organisations. [9] Canada, followed by the U.S. and Israel walked out midway through the 2001 conference over a draft resolution that, in their opinion, singled out Israel for criticism and likened Zionism to racism. [10]
In 2009, South Africa's deputy foreign minister Fatima Hajaig claimed that "Jewish money controls America and most Western countries." Her comments prompted criticism by Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and a reported "dressing down" by then President Kgalema Motlanthe. [11] Subsequently, Hajaig apologised on two separate occasions for her remarks. [12]
In 2013, ANC Western Cape leader Marius Fransman claimed ninety-eight percent of land and property owners in Cape Town are "white" and "Jewish". The allegation turned out to be false. [13]
During the Rhodes Must Fall protests, President of the Students' Representative Council of the University of the Witwatersrand Mcebo Dlamini, who was leader of the protests, stated he "loved" Hitler because Hitler "knew" that Jews "were up to no good", admired Hitler's "charisma" and claimed that "Jews are devils" and were "uncircumcised in heart". His comments were denounced by the South African Jewish Board of deputies, but were supported[ citation needed ] by the Rhodes Must Fall movement. [14] [15] [16]
Tony Ehrenreich, the then ANC Cape Town city councillor, made the following threat to South African Jewry: "An eye for an eye – the time has come to say very clearly that if a woman or child is killed in Gaza, then the Jewish Board of Deputies, who are complicit, will feel the wrath of the people of South Africa with the age-old biblical teaching of an eye for an eye". Critics have described it as incitement to violence. As of 2021 no ANC nor government person has yet publicly condemned Ehrenreich's statement. The case is still with the SAHRC. [17]
During the debate on Friday, February 23, 2018, Sharon Davids, a member of the ANC provincial legislature, said: "Premier Helen Zille is too much in love with the Jewish mafia". The DA "fabricated" the Day Zero water crisis in Cape Town to gain kickbacks from the Jewish mafia, claimed Davids, adding that former leader Tony Leon was hired to communicate the party's "doomsday message" of Day Zero and that "Zille had it in for Patricia [de Lille] after she stood up to her about this land in the Jewish area". Proof that the DA was favouring Jewish people, said Davids, was illustrated by party leader Mmusi Maimane "hanging out" with DA MP Michael Bagraim, who had spent time on the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. [18]
In 2020, there was an unprecedented conviction for online antisemitism in the country. The Magistrates Court in Randburg found Matome Letsoalo guilty of crimen injuria over incendiary tweets targeting the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD). [19]
The 2023 Hamas terrorist attack and subsequent Israeli counterstrike saw a rise in antisemitic incidents in the country. The SAJBC recorded 182 antisemitic incidents in the first eleven months of 2023. 63% of the incidents took place after the October 7 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. This compares to a total of 67 incidents recorded in the first 11 months of the previous year. [20]
A number of organizations and academics consider the Nation of Islam (NOI) to be antisemitic. The NOI has engaged in Holocaust denial, and exaggerates the role of Jews in the African slave trade; mainstream historians, such as Saul S. Friedman, have said Jews had a negligible role. The NOI has repeatedly rejected charges made against it as false and politically motivated.
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, also known as H. F. Verwoerd, was a South African politician, scholar, and newspaper editor who was Prime Minister of South Africa and is commonly regarded as the architect of apartheid and nicknamed the "father of apartheid". Verwoerd played a significant role in socially engineering apartheid, the country's system of institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy, and implementing its policies, as Minister of Native Affairs (1950–1958) and then as prime minister (1958–1966). Furthermore, Verwoerd played a vital role in helping the far-right National Party come to power in 1948, serving as their political strategist and propagandist, becoming party leader upon his premiership. He was the Union of South Africa's last prime minister, from 1958 to 1961, when he proclaimed the founding of the Republic of South Africa, remaining its prime minister until his assassination in 1966.
The Ossewabrandwag (OB) was an Afrikaner nationalist organization with strong ties to national socialism, founded in South Africa in Bloemfontein on 4 February 1939. The organization was strongly opposed South African participation in World War II, and vocally supportive of Nazi Germany. OB carried out a campaign of sabotage against state infrastructure, resulting in a government crackdown. The unpopularity of that crackdown has been proposed as a contributing factor to the victory of the National Party in the 1948 South African general election and the rise of Apartheid.
The National Party, also known as the Nationalist Party, was a political party in South Africa from 1914 to 1997, which was responsible for the implementation of apartheid rule. The party was an Afrikaner ethnic nationalist party, which initially promoted the interests of Afrikaners but later became a stalwart promoter and enactor of white supremacy, for which it is best known. It first became the governing party of the country in 1924. It merged with its rival, the SAP, during the Great Depression, and a splinter faction became the official opposition during World War II and returned to power. With the National Party governing South Africa from 4 June 1948 until 9 May 1994, the country for the bulk of this time was only a de jure or partial democracy, as from 1958 onwards non-white people were barred from voting. In 1990, it began to style itself as simply a South African civic nationalist party, and after the fall of apartheid in 1994, attempted to become a moderate conservative one. The party's reputation was damaged irreparably by perpetrating apartheid, and it rebranded itself as the New National Party in 1997 before eventually dissolving in 2005.
Soviet anti-Zionism is an anti-Zionist and pro-Arab doctrine promulgated in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. While the Soviet Union initially pursued a pro-Zionist policy after World War II due to its perception that the Jewish state would be socialist and pro-Soviet, its outlook on the Arab–Israeli conflict changed as Israel began to develop a close relationship with the United States and aligned itself with the Western Bloc. Anti-Israel Soviet propaganda intensified after Israel's sweeping victory in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, and it was officially sponsored by the agitation and propaganda media of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as well as by the KGB. Among other charges, it alleged that Zionism was a form of racism. The Soviets framed their anti-Zionist propaganda in the guise of a study of modern Zionism, dubbed Zionology. The Soviet anti-Israel policy included the regulated denial of permission for Jews in the Soviet Union to emigrate, primarily to Israel, but also to any other country.
The Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) or simply the Broederbond was an exclusively Afrikaner Calvinist and male secret society in South Africa dedicated to the advancement of the Afrikaner people. It was founded by H. J. Klopper, H. W. van der Merwe, D. H. C. du Plessis and the Rev. Jozua Naudé in 1918 as Jong Zuid Afrika until 1920, when it was renamed the Broederbond. Its influence within South African political and social life came to a climax with the 1948-1994 rule of the white supremacist National Party and its policy of apartheid, which was largely developed and implemented by Broederbond members. Between 1948 and 1994, many prominent figures of Afrikaner political, cultural, and religious life, including every leader of the South African government, were members of the Afrikaner Broederbond.
The Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, meaning "Afrikaner Resistance Movement", commonly known by its abbreviation AWB, is an Afrikaner nationalist, neo-Nazi political party in South Africa. Since its founding in 1973 by Eugène Terre'Blanche and six other far-right Afrikaners, it has been dedicated to secessionist Afrikaner nationalism and the creation of an independent Boer-Afrikaner republic or "Volkstaat/Boerestaat" in part of South Africa. During bilateral negotiations to end apartheid in the early 1990s, the organisation terrorised and killed black South Africans.
Arthur Goldreich was a South African-Israeli abstract painter and a key figure in the anti-apartheid movement in the country of his birth and a critic of the form of Zionism practiced in Israel.
South African Jews, whether by culture, ethnicity, or religion, form the twelfth largest Jewish community in the world, and the largest on the African continent. As of 2020, the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town estimates 52,300 Jews in the country. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies estimates that the figure is closer to 75,000.
This is a list of countries where antisemitic sentiment has been experienced.
Israel–South Africa relations refer to the current and historic relationship between the Republic of South Africa and the State of Israel. During the 1950s and 1960s, Israel became an open critic of the apartheid regime in South Africa, hoping to establish good relations with black-majority countries in Africa. However, most African countries severed ties with Israel in 1973 due to economic threats by oil-rich countries in the Arab world. This situation led Israel to deepen its diplomatic ties with South Africa throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Up to 1986, Israel had a vibrant economic relationship but was forced to sanction South Africa in 1987, mainly as a consequence of American pressure.
Antisemitism in Canada is the manifestation of hostility, prejudice or discrimination against the Canadian Jewish people or Judaism as a religious, ethnic or racial group. This form of racism has affected Jews since Canada's Jewish community was established in the 18th century.
Racism in South Africa can be traced back to the earliest historical accounts of interactions between African, Asian, and European peoples along the coast of Southern Africa. It has existed throughout several centuries of the history of South Africa, dating back to the Dutch colonization of Southern Africa, which started in 1652. Before universal suffrage was achieved in 1994, White South Africans, especially Afrikaners during the period of Apartheid, enjoyed various legally or socially sanctioned privileges and rights that were denied to the indigenous African peoples. Examples of systematic racism over the course of South Africa's history include forced removals, racial inequality and segregation, uneven resource distribution, and disenfranchisement. Racial controversies and politics remain major phenomena in the country.
Melanie Verwoerd is a South African and Irish political analyst and diplomat. She was previously a politician, ambassador, and the director of UNICEF Ireland.
Antisemitism in Russia is expressed in acts of hostility against Jews in Russia and the promotion of antisemitic views in the Russian Federation. This article covers the events since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Previous time periods are covered in the articles Antisemitism in the Russian Empire and Antisemitism in the Soviet Union.
Antisemitism in Greece manifests itself in religious, political and media discourse. The 2009–2018 Greek government-debt crisis has facilitated the rise of far right groups in Greece, most notably the formerly obscure Golden Dawn.
Henry Allan Fagan, QC was the Chief Justice of South Africa from 1957 to 1959 and previously a Member of Parliament and the Minister of Native Affairs in J. B. M. Hertzog's government. Fagan had been an early supporter of the Afrikaans language movement and a noted Afrikaans playwright and novelist. Though he was a significant figure in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and a long-term member of the Broederbond, he later became an important opponent of Hendrik Verwoerd's National Party and is best known for the report of the Fagan Commission, whose relatively liberal approach to racial integration amounted to the Smuts government's last, doomed stand against the policy of apartheid.
Mcebo Dlamini is an Swazi-born South African politician who was one of the prominent leaders of the #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa which led to a conversation on the introduction of free tertiary education for the poor, mainly black students, in the country.
Since the foundation of the Conservative Party in 1834, there have been numerous instances of antisemitism in the party, from both Conservative party leaders and other party figures.
Racism in Jewish communities is a source of concern for people of color, particularly for Jews of color. Black Jews, Indigenous Jews, and other Jews of color report that they experience racism from white Jews in many countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Kenya, South Africa, and New Zealand. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews also report experiences with racism by Ashkenazi Jews. The centering of Ashkenazi Jews is sometimes known as Ashkenormativity. In historically white-dominated countries with a legacy of anti-Black racism, such as the United States and South Africa, racism within the Jewish community often manifests itself as anti-Blackness. In Israel, racism among Israeli Jews often manifests itself as discrimination and prejudice against Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, African immigrants, and Palestinians. Controversially, some critics describe Zionism as racist or settler colonial in nature.