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STEVE LINDE:
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Cry, beloved country

A white woman lights Shabbat candles. Standing next to her, apparently polishing the silver, is her black maid. This photograph, on the jacket of Community and Conscience, is an image most South African Jews have in their heads.

But this book is not about the relationship between blacks and Jews, which in itself would be interesting. It is an ambitious and serious study of the South African Jewish community from 1948 to 1994, the years of apartheid.

You don’t have to be a South African Jew to enjoy the book, although it helps. The account of an exceptional community during an ugly period of history in a beautiful corner of Africa caused me to cry, a la Alan Paton, for that beloved country with which many of its Jews had a love-hate relationship.

With keen sociological insight, Gideon Shimoni — head of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute for Contemporary Jewry, where he also holds the Shlomo Argov chair in Israel-Diaspora relations — succeeds in telling the community’s story warts and all. He describes its history in wonderful detail, zooming in on its most colorful characters and its mostly colorless leadership, the Board of Deputies, and investigates their relationships with both the South African and Israeli governments.

In the preface, Shimoni states clearly that the book "focuses specifically on the Jewish experience as part of a privileged white minority that dominated a society based upon a system of legalized racial discrimination." Shimoni argues persuasively that while the Jewish leadership, embodied in the Board of Deputies, did not take a clear stand against apartheid, many Jews were at the forefront of the struggle against the system. However, it is an apparent paradox: while many whites who actively opposed apartheid were Jews, few Jews were active opponents of apartheid.

Shimoni also adds in the preface that "the historian should not presume to be a moral judge.‘ Therefore, he aspires to present as ’objective, balanced, comprehensive and empirically documented an account as possible." Let me say at the outset I don’t accept that Community and Conscience is any of these things. For one thing, there are chapters on Jews in the Political System, Rabbis and Reformed Apartheid, and Jewish Student Discontent. There are no chapters on Jewish entrepreneurs, professionals, academics or sportsmen, however, so this is hardly the comprehensive study that it boasts to be.

BUT WITHOUT trying to be objective, balanced, comprehensive or empirical, I’ll tell you why I found it so enjoyable.

It’s exciting to read about the community in which one grew up, where it came from, how it dealt with apartheid, and what happened to it in the post-apartheid period. But mostly I derived great pleasure reading about the outstanding individuals and institutions created by South African Jewry.

I wasn’t that interested in reading about the Board of Deputies’s reticence to take a political stand, a recurrent theme in the book. Shimoni shines when he focuses on real people, whether they be supporters of the National Party and apartheid, or its most vocal opponents. Shimoni does a great job in providing pen sketches of the political and religious protagonists in the history of the community, from communal leaders, conservatives and cowards who supported apartheid to rebellious rabbis, reformers and radicals who opposed it.

I was happy to be reminded that the closest of Mahatma Gandhi’s white associates in South Africa were Jews, and so were Nelson Mandela’s — in fact, he appointed three Jews in the unity government formed after the 1994 elections: Joe Slovo as minister of housing, and Ronny Kasrils and Gill Marcus as deputy ministers of defense and finance. Of course, Mandela’s primary defense attorney, Israel Maisels, and prosecutor, Percy Yutar, were Jewish too.

It is reassuring to read all about veteran liberal Helen Suzman, who Shimoni says both personified the public image of the Jew and became a symbol of parliamentary opposition; exciting to learn more about her young successor, Tony Leon, and disturbing to think again of Abe Hoppenstein, the first Jew to run and almost win a seat for the ruling National Party in the 1977 general election.

More interesting, though, are the Jews who broke the mould, some of whom became radical opponents of apartheid. People like Arthur Goldreich, one of five Jews arrested at his Rivonia home together with the leadership cadre of the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe. He later escaped and came to Israel.

The topsy turvy South African-Israeli relationship is also intriguing, and here Shimoni is at his professorial best, meticulously explaining the ups and downs in ties between two of the world’s most shunned states. He discusses the tensions caused by the Afrikaners’ initial support for the Nazis, Israel’s anti-apartheid votes in the United Nations (even under Cape Town-born Israeli ambassador Abba Eban), the South African government’s decision to punish Israel by barring Jews from sending money via the Jewish Agency (from 1961 to 1967), and the triumph of the Six Day War, which made Israel the hero of the Afrikaners.

SHIMONI DESCRIBES the South African Jewish community as being very homogeneous. Nahum Sokolov once called it "a colony of Litvak Jewry." It is also very Zionist: Although it had a by far smaller Jewish population, South Africa was second only to the US in absolute figures in terms of donations to Israel prior to 1948, and South African Jews led per capita contributors in the first decade of Israel’s existence.

More liberal than other white groups, the community is also heavily institutionalized, with high attendance figures at Jewish day schools and synagogues. Given these communal traits, it’s ironic that Australia and not Israel became the most favored destination of Jewish emigrants from South Africa.

On a deeper level, Mandela’s "reconciliation‘ with apartheid’s supporters, including the Jewish community and Israel, and even his prosecutor at the Rivonia trial, did much to relieve South African Jewry of a collective guilt. Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris, the latest in a string of very dynamic Jewish leaders who Mandela called ’my rabbi" during his visit to Israel, characterized to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee the record of the Jewish community nicely by saying that while many did not agree with apartheid, most benefited from it in one way or another.

Hence, Harris concluded, "in that the Jewish community benefited from apartheid an apology must be given to this commission."

Shimoni himself opts for the historical excuse: from a cold objective perspective, he says, the Jewish community’s decision not to take a united stand against apartheid was characteristically minority-group behavior — "a phenomenon of self-preservation, performed at the cost of moral righteousness."

And yet, as South African President Thabo Mbeki said last month at the opening of the World Jewish Congress meeting in Johannesburg, Jews played an important part in dismantling apartheid and in the reconstruction and development of South Africa — a thesis Shimoni’s book fully supports.