The strong Jewishness of the Jews of the South African Union has been the subject of a good deal of speculation. It has aroused questions as to why in this distant part of the African Continent the Jewish spirit should be so strong among the Jewish population. Dr. Immanuel Olsvanger, the Jewish folklorist, whose book of collected folk tales, “Almonds and Raisins”, published a year or two ago caused widespread interest, has been for some years past in South Africa. He is a man whose knowledge of South African Jewry is as wide as his travels among them. By temperament and inclination, he has busied himself not only with the places he has visited, but has gone deeply into the character and the life of the people.
In his opinion, one of the principal reasons for the strong Jewish feeling which exists among the Jews of South Africa, is that the Jews of South Africa came from Lithuania twenty or thirty years ago full of Jewish national feeling. It has remained within them because there was nothing in the life in South Africa to call to it to mingle and become diluted. There has been no assimilation movement in South Africa because there was nothing to attract the assimilative tendencies of the Jews. The culture of South Africa was not strong enough to influence the Jewish culture which they brought with them. The Government of South Africa has been tolerant of national movements. Under General Smuts it was notoriously friendly to Jewish national aspirations. General Smuts left his sympathies in this direction in no doubt General Hertzog, the present Premier has shown himself no less sympathetic to Jewish national ideals.
The Jewish communities in South Africa live isolated lives. Everything they have in them remains within them. There are places in South Africa which are hundreds of miles from any railway station. The people in these remote places, out off from outside life, are overwhelmed when they get a visitor coming to them in their lonliness who tells them of great movements outside their own little homesteads, which touch the strings of their innate Jewishness. They respond enthusiastically, opening wide their hearts and their purses.
The relations of the Jews of South Africa with the non-Jewish population are excellent. In the small towns the Jews and Gentiles live on the best of terms together. When a prominent preacher comes to the local church the Jews of the town go to listen to him too and they discuss the sermon with their Christian neighbors afterwards. I was very amused once to hear two Jews hotly debating a point in Christian dogma which had been raised by the local preacher in his sermon. There are so few people living together in the small out of the way places, that their lives would be terrible, if they did not manage to be close friends and take keen interest in each others’ doings.
With the younger Jewish generation things are beginning to be different. Their education for the last ten or fifteen years has been outside the home. The Jewish child in South Africa is receiving a European education which his parents did not have. They get new ideas. The parents are unable to satisfy their spiritual longings. Some of the best schools in South Africa are the Catholic convents. Jewish parents, especially those in country places, do not like their children, particularly their daughters, to board in private houses; so they board in the convent schools, but while no attempts at conversion are made in the convents either by the Principal or the teachers, the child is during the most important educational years deprived of all Jewish influence.
There is a movement among many of the South African Jews to send their children, if not to settle in Palestine, at least to study there at the Hebrew University. This is a very important move, for the young Jews who will return to South Africa from their schooling in Palestine will bring with them a new feeling of Jewishness which will impregnate the next generation of the Jewish population of the country and keep alive the strongly national Jewishness which is now so marked a feature of South African Jewry.
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.
