Justice Minister Gen. Jan Smuts, denouncing the “mischief-making” Nazi Greyshirts, has warned that if the movement is permitted to grow “we shall have in this country impossible conditions with racial persecution.”
In a recent address at Standerton he denounced attempts to create anti Jewish feeling and lauded the role of the Jews in the economic development of South Africa. General Smuts declared:
“Some have been more successful than we have, but that is not their fault. If the Jew has a greater trade sense than the Afrikanor that is not his fault. We cannot get past the fact that the Afrikanor has not, as a race, a high business ability, but the business of South Africa has to be done.”
Praising the Jews for sharing “the bitter and the sweet” in the development of the country, he declared:
I want to warn you very earnestly not to allow this movement to go too far,” he declared. “So far it is only a small movement, and perhaps I regard it in too serious a light, but one must take early steps if one recognizes an evil, even if it is still small.
“If it is allowed to grow we shall have in this country impossible conditions, with racial and religious persecution. Let me appeal to you to treat the Jews fairly. There are bad Jews, but there are bad Afrikaners too. We have been taught in a great school and we who know what the Jews have contributed to the world in a religious sense must recognize their achievements in a small nation.
“We who follow old faiths and are not yet uprooted from our old conviction, and believe in and still hold by the great things of the past–it is not for us to forget what the Jews’ contribution is to the well-being of the world and of the people of the world.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
