A Perfect Storm: Antisemitism in South Africa, 1930–1948 by Milton Shain

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Perfect Storm: Antisemitism in South Africa, 1930–1948 by Milton Shain Gideon Shimoni Milton Shain. A Perfect Storm: Antisemitism in South Africa, 1930–1948. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2015. 296 pp. Milton Shain’s A Perfect Storm offers a profound and comprehensive sequel to his estimable earlier book (The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994]), which explored antisemitism in South Africa up until 1930. Shain now traces antisemitic manifestations chronologically and in detail from that time until 1948, when the Afrikaner National Party headed by Daniel François Malan formed the government that crystallized the infamous political regime associated with the term “apartheid.” From the beginning, Jewish immigrants, stemming largely from the Lithuanian region of eastern Europe, had entered South Africa as Europeans, hence potentially part of the enfranchised, dominant, and dominating white population. To be sure, there had been sporadic attempts to limit their entry, mainly by a stratagem that involved categorizing Yiddish as a non-European language. But these had failed. In this respect, the Quota Act of 1930 was a turning point because it effectively halted immigration from eastern Europe, an immigration that was almost entirely Jewish. As Shain shows, popular promotion and reception of this Quota Act reflected a consensus in the white public that Jews were an unabsorbable minority whose growth had to be stunted. Shain’s narrative proceeds from that point to the mushrooming of virulently antisemitic radical-right groups. Foremost was the organization known as the Greyshirts, founded and led by Louis Weichardt, a self-avowed antisemite. Exacerbating preexistent prejudices and nativism, these hate groups adopted Nazi-style ideology that targeted the Jews and advocated legislative discrimination against them. “Private” antisemitism graduated to new levels of “public” antisemitism, which propelled the postulation of a “Jewish Question” within South African politics. Shain probes and analyzes its sources and substance and shows how its resonance within the entire white public precipitated the Aliens Act of 1937. This legislation stopped up a loophole in the Quota Act, which was allowing entry of Jews fleeing not from eastern European countries but from Nazi Germany. Moreover, there followed blatant political advocacy of occupational quotas and other restrictions on Jews already living in South Africa. The antisemitically animated [End Page 260] “Jewish Question” escalated further in the crossfire of inter-Afrikaner political battles during the Second World War. Much of this involved a crude nationalist mass movement known as the Ossewa Brandwag (the Ox-Wagon Sentinel). Finally, Shain examines the waning of antisemitic motifs on the eve of the 1948 elections that led to the defeat of Jan Christiaan Smuts’s government, whose political base of support combined English-speakers as well as moderate Afrikaners. Shain’s historical narrative is a fluently presented and copiously documented work of exemplary scholarship. More importantly, it is analytically conceptualized not only within its obvious context, the politics of Africa’s whites-only democracy, but also with comparative attention to the tragic European experience of antisemitism in the interwar years. Throughout this study, Shain insightfully applies the South African experience to broader explanatory theories accounting for the ubiquitous phenomenon of antisemitism. Far more than a parochial study of a singular case, this book has much value for Jewish history and the study of antisemitism in general. Naturally, the book’s contribution is at its most innovative in its primary context, the politics of whites-only South Africa. Shain’s revelations concerning the Afrikaner political mainstream break new ground, for South African historiography has paid scant attention to the Jewish presence. Even Hermann Giliomee, author of a magisterial study of the Afrikaner people (The Afrikaners: Biography of a People [Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2003]), views antisemitism as merely a manifestation of fringe groups influenced by Nazi literature from abroad. Contrary to this depiction, Shain documents conclusively that it was in fact far from a marginal factor in South African political life. To the credit not only of Shain’s work but also of South Africa’s present standards of scholarly literature, A Perfect Storm has been awarded prestigious recognition as the best work of nonfiction in 2016. Shain’s analysis of the causality of antisemitism in the...