In our Winter issue we published the views of Bloke Modisane, an African writer.  Harry Bloom, lawyer, journalist and novelist, also of Johannesburg, lives now in London.  In our next issue we shall present the views of an Afrikaans writer, Tjaart Coetzee, on the same subject.

"A slander we could be proud of…"

I am frequently asked, "Why are so many Jews mixed up in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa?"  For some reason the question always annoys me.  I know that my annoyance is not rational.  It is surely a matter of pride if Jews take a prominent part in the fight against racial intolerance.  Who, if not Jews, should step in to help other victims of racialism?  This is one subject we ought to know all about.  It is burnt into our skins.

Yet somehow I cannot avoid feeling that the question is loaded.  "Why do we interfere?  Why don't we mind our own business?" – that seems to be the meaning of the question.  Or, "Revolutionary politics is a peculiarly Jewish trait.  It ought to be played down, like the tendency to overdress."  In other words I feel myself being assailed by a subtle anti-semitism – even though coming from Jews – that we associate with our enemies in South Africa.

Perhaps this is all imaginary – I don't know.  Perhaps the question is innocent.  One does find an apparently disproportionate number of Jewish names among those who are now being jailed or exiled for political activities in South Africa.  Perhaps it is a straightforward enquiry, and I am reacting with a typical defensiveness.  But the fact that the question is so often asked, seems to call for an answer.  And let me try to give it without bias or favour.

The first point to make is that anti-government activity in South Africa is by no means a Jewish monopoly.  Jews are prominent, true, for reasons I shall explain, but to think of the movement as being run by them is unfair to thousands of African, coloured, Indian, British and even Afrikaners, who are making bitter sacrifices to overthrow the noxious regime.  The trouble is that when a Jewish name appears anywhere, it seems to light up like a neon sign.

The second point is that Jews as a community in South Africa are noticeable for their passive acceptance of apartheid, rather than resistance to it.  They are whites first, and only Jews afterwards.  They share in the spoils of apartheid like all sections of the white race.  They have a vested interest, a very substantial one, in the economy which is based on the exploitation of cheap forced black labour.  It is a bitter thought, but the argument that Jews were themselves victims of racial persecution, and ought to be quick to resent it being applied to others, carried little weight against this vested interest.  I have heard even German Jews, whose very presence in South Africa is the result of Nazi anti-semitism, vigorously defend Dr. Verwoerd's policies.  I think it is a fallacy to assume that suffering from racial persecution produces an instinct to fight against it when others are involved.  The fact that the great majority of Jews in South Africa are either active supporters of apartheid, or are prepared to live off it without protest, makes their position more objectionable than that of other sections.  I have little pride in my Jewish compatriots back home.

Obviously then – as often happens when a general or national question is discussed as a Jewish one – we have to explain a paradox.  Many Jews are mixed up in the anti-apartheid movement, but this is not something the Jewish community can take credit for.  Not for that matter, blame – which is more to the point, since the majority of South African Jews are terrified of being tagged as the brains and money behind the subversive activity.

The truth is that Jews, or a certain number of them, have taken to the ideas of racial equality because for half a century Jews have been prominent in the intellectual life of South Africa.  For a white South African to reject the life and thought, the whole social environment of his racial sector, involves an intellectual revolution.  He needs to reach for and equip himself with a philosophy.  From one point of view he grows away from the Jewish community and his Jewishness when he takes this step.  But adopting an outlook of racial equality is only one kind of intellectual emancipation.  Jews have been just as prominent in university life, in scientific research, in medicine, law and the arts.  So in a way the question is loaded – it is rather like asking: "Why do so many Jews go to the opera?"

There is, of course, a historical and even a Jewish reason why many Jews have associated themselves with anti-apartheid activities.  Before the war, the Nationalist Party – Dr. Verwoerd's party – was not only openly anti-semitic, but unashamedly pro-Nazi.  They hoped and expected that Hitler would win the war and that they would take over as the local gauleiters.  In fact they didn't need Hitler's victory to achieve this.  In 1948 they were voted into power by a white electorate, though by a rigged electoral system.  Many Jews were of course horrified at the prospect of Nazi rule in South Africa, and joined the left wing movements as the only effective way of fighting back.  The many Jewish names one sees in the movement today, are a carry-over from those times.

Today however the position has changed.  The Nationalist Party no longer needs anti-semitism – it has enough races to oppress to satisfy the most avid fascist – and has even been wooing the Jews.  The Jews, at first timorously and reservedly, have been responding and today many have thrown in their lot with Dr. Verwoerd.  They have simply adopted the slogan of all whites in South Africa – a short lease on a wonderful life.  Only with incidents like the escape of Goldreich and Wolpe or the boycott of South African goods by Israel, do the Jews feel an echoing tremor of the old dangers.

I believe that today it is other sections rather than Jews who are playing the leading part in the movement against Verwoerd.  One has only to think of the Anglican Church – Father Huddleston, Archbishop de Blank, Bishop Reeves and thousands of Christian churchmen throughout the country have fought uncompromisingly against a doctrine they have declared repugnant to Christianity.  If these were Jewish names, imagine what a field day there would be for the anti-semites.

And of course I am speaking here only of the whites.  We must not forget that at all times that vast bulk of Verwoerd's opponents have come from the African, coloured and Indian sections.  Today too the English section appears to be taking the role played by Jews a generation ago.  Now it is they who are feeling the squeeze.  At the time of Sharpeville I was imprisoned as a political detainee.  I found that Jewish detainees belonged mostly to the older generation.  Most of the younger ones were university students with sturdy British names and the clearest British accents.  Resentment at the way the British section has been pushed into the background, has caused these young men to become disillusioned with traditional means of protest, and to examine other movements, and themselves, for an alternative.

So I think the idea that Jews predominate in the opposition to Dr. Verwoerd is a pure myth.  Like many such myths, it seems to arise from a hyper-sensitivity to the sound of a Jewish name.  It gives me no pleasure to destroy this myth.  I would have been happy to say that South African Jews, as a community, are taking a leading part in eliminating one of the ugliest social sores from the face of the earth.  It wouldn't worry me in the least if anti-semites used this as another pretext to slander Jews.  This would be a slander we could be proud of.