by Roger Cohen
Black life was cheap: that was the way it struck my father, returning from England and having to extricate his students from the clutches of Afrikaner cops, and how it always seemed to me. My other relatives, however, viewing the system from within, did not react in the same way. They were attached to their traditional way of life—the so-called TWOL—and the rest of the world was anti-TWOL, even if the lifestyle existed in a permanent state of suspension, and the consignment of the black majority to the status of Untermenschen was the cornerstone of their circumscribed South African world. I never heard from them a remark of the “just come down from the trees” order, but prejudice was so ingrained, it was part of their unconscious.
For Ungar, himself an outsider, a young man who had survived in hiding in Budapest before escaping communist Hungary for England in 1948, South Africa’s racist laws cut to the quick. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act was striking in its echo of the rules that had kept Jews out of certain Hungarian stores, off certain benches, outside certain parks, and away from certain sidewalks: “Any person who willfully enters or uses any public premises or public vehicle or any portion thereof or any counter, bench, seat or other amenity or contrivance which has … been set apart or reserved for the exclusive use of persons belonging to a certain race or class, being a race or class to which he does not belong, shall be guilty of an offense.”
In Hungary it had been the yellow star. Here it was the passbook that tagged the persecuted. From the pulpit of the temple, Ungar railed against the injustices of apartheid. He called the National Party government a bunch of “arrogantly puffed-up little men.” He said it was the moral obligation of Jews, based on their scripture and millennia of exclusion, to stand against the social engineering of a racist system. “I knew I had a clear mandate to say what I was saying from the Jewish experience itself,” Ungar, who went on to work as a rabbi in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, recalled.
His forceful condemnation of white supremacy made the majority of the South African Jewish community, then numbering about 110,000, or about 4 percent of the white population, uneasy. My family was representative enough in its general, but not universal, desire to keep their heads below the parapet. The Afrikaners might turn on them.
The National Party had been shot through with pro-Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s. The Immigration Quota Bill of 1930 took direct aim at Jews by strictly limiting new arrivals from Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Palestine. D. F. Malan, the National Party leader, attacked the Jews in a speech in 1937 that was explicit about their menace: “I have been reproached that I am now discriminating against the Jews as Jews. Now let me say frankly that it is so.… There are too many Jews here, too many for South Africa’s good and too many for the good of the Jews themselves.” Jews were attacked for their success in business and the professions, for “buying” the press, and for refusing to assimilate. The Transvaal section of the National Party banned Jews. Prewar völkisch Afrikaner nationalism advanced by placing Jews in its sights.
But after Hitler’s defeat and their own electoral victory in 1948, the Nats changed tack. Now it was the preservation of power rather than its acquisition that concerned them. They toned down the anti-Semitic rhetoric, decided to co-opt the Jews as fellow whites in the confrontation with the black majority (the Afrikaners sensed they needed the Anglo and Jewish communities to bolster their position), and were forthright in support for the new state of Israel. Prime Minister Malan would be the first head of government to visit the Jewish state. The Afrikaner in a sea of blacks looked with sympathy on the Jew in a sea of Arabs. This bond—composed of Old Testament sympathies, shared isolation, Cold War alignments against communism, and plain survival instinct—was not without its strains, even as it provided the backdrop to significant military and nuclear cooperation between Johannesburg and Jerusalem.
Still, the Jews could be targeted again. Relegation was always possible: perhaps to the status of Indians, an underclass of apartheid but, like the mulatto coloreds, a little less under than the blacks.
Blessed with the color of the ruling caste, and now accepted as paid-up whites in an apartheid system, South African Jews nonetheless lived in an unease they seldom avowed. Jews told Ungar he was putting himself, the congregation, and the whole community at risk. There were threats, anonymous letters, phone calls, and visits. The president of the South African Union of Progressive Judaism defended the government as “men with outstanding careers behind them.”
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies, the umbrella organization serving as the mouthpiece of the community, declined to intervene. Since the coming of apartheid, it had adopted a policy of nonintervention, urging individual Jews to act according to their consciences but rejecting political opposition to apartheid. This position was in effect one of acquiescence. It would endure for decades: the silence was pretty deafening.
Arthur Suzman, a vice chairman of the board and a liberal who agonized like many Jews over their passivity before evil, summed up the approach in an address to the National Congress in 1974: “The non-intervention of the Board in political issues does not imply that we are indifferent to the inequities of our existing political, social and economic structure. We are not, however, a political body and we cannot take up the cudgels for or against the policy of any particular political party.”
Such statements, of course, sought to finesse the fundamental issue: that apartheid was not simply a “political” question. It was a moral and ethical question involving basic human rights and dignity. The Jewish Board of Deputies strove hard to ignore this fact.
Ungar, unsympathetic to the semantic contortions of South African Jewish caution, continued to wield his cudgel. He was struck by the sense of terror in his congregation. Fear had the upper hand. In late 1956 the rabbi, then twenty-seven, received an order from the Interior Ministry to leave South Africa. He had become persona non grata by urging Jews to resist apartheid and treat blacks as equal human beings.
The Jewish community did not lift a finger over Ungar’s expulsion order. “There is no occasion for the Board to intervene to make a statement,” said the Jewish Board of Deputies, arguing that Ungar had taken his message to the “political platform” and must take personal responsibility for his utterances. Relief was general, with one or two exceptions.
South Africa’s brave chief rabbi, Louis Rabinowitz, sent Ungar a telegram congratulating him on his stand. Rabinowitz used his sermons at the Great Synagogue on Wolmarans Street in Johannesburg to argue that man’s inhumanity to man was a political as much as a religious affair (so disturbing the members of my family who felt the pulpit and politics did not mix). In a Yom Kippur sermon, Rabinowitz would say:
There are some Jews in the community who attempt to do something … and when as a result they fall foul of the powers that be, the defense put up by the Jewish community is to prove that these are Jews only by name, that they do not belong to any synagogue.… Have Jewish ethics ever descended to a more shameful nadir? I have practically abandoned all hope of effecting any change in this matter. The power of fear and the possibility of security being affected are too strong.
Rabinowitz once called apartheid “an abomination that desecrates the sanctity of life.” His telegram comforted Ungar but did nothing to change his fate. In December 1956, the rabbi left South Africa.
At the time, my father, overseeing black students at Wits, also found himself appalled by the tightening noose of the apartheid laws. His students would be forced out of the university in 1959; the drift in that direction was already clear. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd explained to parliament some years later, “There is no space for the native in the European community above certain forms of labor.… Until now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his community and misled him by showing him the greener pastures of European society where he is not allowed to graze.”
Jews often ask how the Holocaust was possible, how an entire civilized nation could turn on t
hem, how so many people could look away as their neighbors were herded toward train stations and boxcars that would usher their doomed loads to the gas, how indifference could overcome outrage and ordinary folk become murderers. South Africa is instructive in this regard. Of course, Hitler’s rise to power occurred in specific historical circumstances. German humiliation and disarray fed the search for a scapegoat, just as the postwar rise of the National Party in South Africa exploited Afrikaner insecurity and grievance. But the human traits that buttress violent systems of racist oppression—fear, envy, tribalism, resentment, conformism, opportunism, acquisitiveness—are universal and enduring. Inject the virus of hatred, with violence if need be, and it will find tissue on which to propagate.
The attempt to annihilate European Jewry had been vanquished only a few years earlier when, in South Africa, a system built around the systematic relegation of the blacks to wretchedness in the township ghetto or “Bantu Homeland” was put in place and extended piece by piece—through the passbook, job reservation, exclusion from higher education, and repression. Most Jews looked on and kept quiet. As in any such situation, where to resist is to put your freedom and perhaps even your life at risk, the majority opted to join the impassive onlookers who tried not to see too much as evil was done.
Some Jews were active backers of the order from which they drew great benefit. (Abraham and Solomon Krok, through their company Twins, made a fortune from skin-whitening creams sought by blacks who saw a whiter look as the path to advancement.) But a significant number did resist, no matter the risk or likelihood of exile, because their consciences could not be quieted in a land where pigment determined the value of a life.
Perpetrator, bystander, and resister: the pattern repeats itself. The cowardly will always outnumber the courageous. I have seen this in every conflict I have covered and been left in no doubt that what is most precious in Jewish ethics and teaching was distilled by Rabbi Hillel into three sentences: What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary. Go and study it. Or there is the phrase repeated thirty-six times in the Mosaic book: You were exiled in order to know what it feels like to be an exile. Jews are to treat the stranger well, for you were a stranger in a strange land.
The year after Ungar was expelled, in 1957, a young South African Jewish newspaperman, Ronald Segal, took up these themes in an article for Commentary. “No form of oppression,” he wrote, “is as intimately an experience of the Jew as the ghetto. Yet no Jewish organization, let alone the bugle of the community, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, has attacked or even delicately protested against the savage Group Areas Act, which will segregate the races of the country into separate residential pockets at immeasurable sacrifice always to the non-whites.”
His view was contested by Dan Jacobson, a young South African Jewish novelist living in London:
As a result of their upbringing in a passionately color-conscious society, South African Jews in general actually share all the color prejudice of their fellow whites. When I think in the simplest possible way of my innumerable relatives, friends and acquaintances in South Africa going about their business and pursuing what they believe to be their interests, in all conscience I can only wonder what people Mr. Segal thinks he is talking about when he issues his appeals for disinterested sacrifices and martyrdoms, and then grows angry because there is no reply. Is he talking about people at all?
In my own family I saw this failure of imagination—this inability, busy with one’s own interests, to conceive of the suffering at the foundation of South African society. As Nadine Gordimer (no relation to George, although her paternal family hailed from Žagarė) observes in The Lying Days, whites were busy having “a picnic in a beautiful cemetery where people were buried alive.” Sit on the fence, and people get killed behind it. Indifference is midwife to iniquity.
But I also saw anger and resistance. Prejudice and obliviousness were far from universal. On arrival in South Africa, Ungar felt the compulsion from millennial Jewish experience and from his own recent persecution to identify with, and speak out about, the stranger. Expulsion then became inevitable. Only in 1985, almost forty years after the National Party came to power and apartheid was imposed, did the Jewish Board of Deputies, seeing which way the wind was blowing, state its rejection of apartheid and express its “commitment to justice, equal opportunity and removal of all provisions in the laws of South Africa which discriminate on grounds of color and race.”
The silence of the majority of South African Jews over Ungar’s fate and their long acquiescence to a racist system suggest how careful Jews should be in invoking the lessons of history. Jews learn selectively from the past, just like everyone else.
One of the congregants listening and shaking his head in the Wolmarans Street shul as Rabbi Rabinowitz criticized apartheid was my grandmother Flossie’s brother Willie Michel. He was a conservative man who liked his bridge and bowls, and he took the view that Rabinowitz had no business talking politics from the pulpit. “Why must he busy himself with things that don’t concern him?” Willie would mutter. “Shame, it will only bring trouble for us all.”
Willie had more than enough politics at home, a reason for his prickliness. His wife, Joyce, née Levy, was a member of the Black Sash anti-apartheid movement, founded in 1955 by a group of white women, and an outspoken intellectual. She went only once to synagogue, for the bar mitzvah of a nephew. The occasion was doubly memorable because she smoked in the lobby.
Joyce had been to college, Willie had not. But a Michel was a catch. Willie’s men’s store, Manhattan’s, was the second best in Johannesburg. Willie sold Pringle’s cashmere sweaters, fine Italian suits, and fedoras. He worked upstairs where the suits were hung. His business partner, whom he couldn’t stand, sold socks, ties, and underwear on the first floor. When the security services raided Manhattan’s on account of Joyce’s political activities, Willie was not happy. That was the kind of trouble you got into by rocking the boat.
Isaac Michel with his three sons: Basil, Willie, Googoo
There was worse. On Yom Kippur Willie emerged from shul to find his wife having a picnic lunch by the pool with two prominent anti-apartheid figures, Julius and Tamara Baker. It was one thing to pooh-pooh religion, but this defiance, Willie felt, was in his face. He was fasting, wasn’t he? Still, he was not confrontational; he kept quiet. He soaked it up. They played bridge together. That was the family way: stoic silence.
Their daughters, Sue and Peta, born in 1942 and 1944, were not given any religious education, at Joyce’s insistence, to Willie’s dismay. He was happy when Sue, at the age of eleven, influenced by some girls who were having bat mitzvahs, suggested they keep a kosher home. Joyce replied, “You can be kosher if you want to, darling, but I don’t believe in all that, and our home will not be.” Shame, Willie thought, but so be it.
Julius Baker, who picnicked on Yom Kippur, was a lawyer and adviser to the African National Congress, revered by both the ANC and the South African Communist Party; Tamara was a Black Sash activist. They would both be hounded out of South Africa in the 1960s. Joyce helped them make good their escape to London.
Joyce’s intelligence and engagement earned her a special place in my parents’ hearts. She was the sane one among South African relatives. We would often stay at her lovely house at 22 Second Avenue in Houghton, ten blocks from the old Isaac Michel mansion. Joyce smoked and talked; Willie listened. She moved in a milieu of resistance that included several prominent Jewish figures, most of whom were atheist leftists like her and the Bakers, people who looked to Marx, not Moses. Joyce, a great beauty in her youth, busied herself with street collections for the protracted Treason Trial, which began in 1956 and was conducted partly in Pretoria’s Old Synagogue, vacated a few years earlier by a suburbia-bound Jewish community. Of the 156 defendants accused of treason, 23 were white, and of these 14 were Jewish, a disproportionate number indicative of the determined minority that
broke from the compliant attitudes of the Board of Deputies.
Nelson Mandela was successfully defended at the trial by Israel (“Issy”) Maisels, assisted by another Jewish attorney, Sydney Kentridge, a member of my father’s 1938 graduating class at King Edward’s School. Joyce’s circle also included Joe Slovo, a Lithuanian Jew who became a leading figure in both the ANC and the South African Communist Party, before, after long exile, becoming a minister in Mandela’s first postapartheid government. Helen Suzman, another descendant of Lithuanian Jews, who represented Houghton for decades in Parliament and was a fearless opponent of apartheid, was a friend. Joyce and her daughters would go to reelection meetings in the Houghton school hall. They were involved in all Suzman’s political campaigns. Suzman, accused of posing questions in Parliament that embarrassed South Africa, famously responded that it was not the questions that were embarrassing, but the answers.
There was a lot of unease at home. Sue and Peta carried books about Lenin to their grandmother, Dora Levy, to be hidden when there were raids by the security services. Dora disapproved. At times the whole house seemed like a workstation in the cause, full of pamphlets and activity. When blacks refused to board buses because of rising fares, Joyce would pack the young girls into the car as she drove black workers back and forth to the townships. Her action and Willie’s inaction, her conviction and Dora’s disapproval, demonstrate how South African politics inhabited every family.
Tensions rose after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. Slovo moved into the armed struggle. Three years later security forces raided Lilliesleaf Farm, a property on the outskirts of Johannesburg in Rivonia acquired as a safe house by a communist named Arthur Goldreich. The five whites arrested were all Jews, a fact that led to renewed rumblings in the National Party. The Rivonia trial sent Mandela to prison and Joyce into a state of great agitation, but she managed, unlike some of her friends, to walk a fine line that kept her in South Africa, out of the ANC, and out of incarceration.