Order form: ORDER FORM 2015 new
Jewish Life in the South African Country Communities. Large format, five-volume set. A multi-year project, researched by the South African Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth. Ordering information available from Janine Blumberg, Kaplan Centre, University of Cape Town, <kc@humanities.uct.ac. za>; Telephone: +27 21 650-3062; Fax: +27 21 650-5151.
Through some diligent genealogical detective work about a dozen years ago, I located a distant cousin in Johannesburg, descended from my grandfather’s uncle who had gone to South Africa in the World War I era. But the discovery was ultimately disappointing. I sent my newly found cousin an exuberant letter full of family lore and received in reply a polite Rosh Hashanah card with a note of thanks but not a word of family history.
After that, I put my South African research on ice—until recently, that is, when I had occasion to explore the rich history of the South African Jewish community through perusal of these handsomely illustrated volumes cataloguing the Jewish experience in South Africa. Concisely written by a team of researchers with another team collecting photographs, each of the volumes in this projected series of five books focuses on specific regions and the Jewish communities therein.
Volume 1, published in 2002 and entitled The Northern Great Escarpment, The Lowveld, The Northern Highveld, The Bushveld, details Jewish life in 37 country towns. Volume 2 (2004) provides information on more than 70 country towns in the Western and Northern Cape and the territories of Boland, Bushmanland, Central Karoo, Fairest Cape, Griqualand West, Kalahari Koup, Namaqualand, Swartland, and West Coast. Volume 3 (2007) focuses on Camdeboo, Cape Midlands, Garden Route, Langkloof, Little Karoo, North-Eastern Cape, Overberg, Settler Country, Transkei, and Griqualand East. The two volumes still forthcoming will focus on the Orange Free State and Natal.
Many of these place names will sound as foreign and exotic to many readers of AVOTAYNU as phrases such as Shmah Yisroel, gefilte fish, borei pree hagafen, kreplach, and motzei lechem min ha’aretz might sound to non-Jewish residents of these places. Yet some of the residents of these places bore such familiar surnames as Blumberg, Cohen, Edelstein, Fineberg, Gershowitz, Kaplan, Rosenberg, and Shapiro.
The extent to which Jews once settled the remote South African countryside seems remarkable. Equally remarkable is the fact that for many of these remote places, the books offer comprehensive lists of families that once lived there and a capsule history of the Jewish presence in each place. Nearly every page of the book has a picture of old synagogues, prominent citizens, family and community gatherings, hotels and main streets, farmers and settlers on horseback.
The researchers visited major libraries and archives, as well as smaller research facilities, all over South Africa. They conducted oral interviews with many present and past residents and used the proverbial fine-toothed comb to search the back issues of the London Jewish Chronicle and other historical papers for relevant items. “The aim of this research,” they write, “is to have a permanent record of the Jewish communities in the dorps (country towns) of South Africa.”
Today most of South Africa’s roughly 80,000 Jews (down from nearly 120,000 in 1980) live in Johannesburg and Cape Town, with almost none left in the small towns and the vast and rugged countryside. The first Jews arrived in the 1820s with an influx of British settlers, and their communities grew slowly until the discovery of diamonds in 1869 and gold in 1886. Many thousands of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe arrived over the next half-century and spread far and wide across the country.
“Perhaps the story of Jewish country life still has such resonance among today’s city dwellers because it invokes a time when, through the mere fact of their being found in nearly every town and dorp, Jews were far more connected with the country as a whole than they are today,” senior researcher David Saks wrote in a foreword to volume 2. “South African Jewry is now essentially a two-city community, with 85 percent of the total living in either Johannesburg or Cape Town and most of the remainder in Durban or Pretoria.”
South African Jews and their descendants and relatives who may have moved to Israel, Australia, and major cities in Canada and the United States in recent decades will find these volumes a valuable and intriguing record of a vanished past.
