GIDEON SHIMONI. Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa. The Tauber Institute for Study of European Jewry Series. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England [for] Brandeis University Press; Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2003. Pp. xv + 337.More than four decades ago, Cambridge historian E. H. Carr cautioned fellow practitioners against passing of moral judgments. Presenting prestigious George Macauley Trevelyan lectures - subsequently published as What Is History? - Carr spoke of impossibility of erecting an abstract and super-historical standard by which historical actions can be judged.1 We are all, he warned, captives to values and ideals of our age. Gideon Shimoni, a distinguished Israeli historian with South African roots, in agreement. Thus his examination of South African Jewry under apartheid is neither indictment nor apologia (p. xiii); historian, contends Shimoni, should not presume to be a moral judge (p. xiii). However, at one level at least, book a sustained judgment, and an extremely sophisticated one at that.It no simple task to examine behavior of different institutions and generations over nearly fifty years under changing circumstances and in variable contexts. Shimoni does this admirably. Ever alert to nuance and motivation, time and place, he avoids facile generalizations. All actors and organizations are treated with great sensitivity. He therefore empathizes with Jewish community's sense of vumerability in wake of Holocaust and National Party's anti-Jewish record in 1930s and early 1940s. Although Dr. Malan had distanced himself and his party from its flirtation with anti-Semitism, some of his lieutenants - likes of Oswald Pirow, Eric Louw, and Louis Weichardt, leader of notorious Greyshirts-were hardly philo-Semites.2Such was setting within which South African Jewish Board of Deputies (the Board), representative institution of South African Jewry, grappled with a response to what was palpably an iniquitous system, at odds with basic Jewish values. The record, at least in early decades of apartheid, far from flattering. Although Board debated seriously an appropriate response, it ultimately chose to deflect what it deemed an issue of ethics onto rabbinate, supposedly moral arbiters of community.In arriving at this strategy, Board could hide behind its founding principles of noninterference in politics. Religious leaders had no such escape. Sadly, only a few rabbis, among them former chief rabbi Louis Rabinowitz and (the Reform rabbi) Andre Ungar, spoke out in unequivocal terms. At one level religious leaders did not wish to upset their congregants- itself an indictment of community and its lay leadership-at another, they seemed to ignore very precepts underpinning their calling. Religious observance was no guarantor of moral outrage. As Shimoni puts it, the more observant of orthodox religious precepts a Jew was, less likely he or she was to be found among even moderate adversaries of apartheid system, not to speak of its radical opponents (pp. 75-76).The converse was also true. Many Jews who were Jews in name only challenged system and, in some cases, confronted directly Board s policy of noninterference in politics. The list of so-called radical Jews endless, a veritable who s who of South African opposition and resistance history-at least insofar as white population concerned. Of twenty-three whites out of a total of 156 persons charged in 1950s Treason Trial, fourteen were Jewish. All five whites arrested at Rivonia, cukninating in trial that led to Nelson Mandela's incarceration, were Jewish. Radicals were not afraid to confront state directly.Jews were also disproportionately prominent among mainstream liberal opposition. They voted against National Party more than any other white group and engaged in legal activism, labor unions, health care initiatives, philanthropic endeavors (here Union of Jewish Women has a proud record), and in protest groups such as Black Sash. …