Antisemitism in South Africa

During the 1930s many Nationalist Party leaders and wide sections of the Afrikaner people came strongly under the influence of the Nazi movement which dominated Germany from 1933. There were many reasons for this. Germany was the traditional enemy of Britain, and whoever opposed Britain appeared a friend of the Nationalists. Many Nationalists, moreover, believed that the opportunity to re-establish their lost republic would come with the defeat of the British Empire in the international arena. The more belligerent Hitler became, the further hopes rose that the day of Afrikanerdom was about to dawn.^[1]

In 1930, D. F. Malan introduced the Quota Act, effectively restricting Jewish immigration.^[2] The bill, which did not explicitly state to be limiting of Jews, put high restrictions on countries that had majority Jewish immigrants, and did not restrict countries that barely had Jews.^[3] Dr. Malan listed three reasons for his support of the Quota Act: "The desire of every nation to maintain its basic racial composition; (2) The doctrine of assimilability; and (3) South Africa’s desire to maintain its own ‘type’ of civilisation.”^[2] When the Jews protested this, saying it was antisemitic, Dr. Malan responded by saying that the "measure was really in the interests of the present Jewish population"^[4] and said that "[it is] very easy to rouse a feeling of hatred towards the Jews in the country . . . if they want to hit us they may be assured that we will hit back."^[2]

The National Party of Dr. Malan closely associated itself with policies of the Nazis. Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe was controlled under the Aliens Act and came to an end during this period. Although Jews were accorded status as Europeans, they were not accepted into white society. The Kelvin Grove sports club for example had an exclusive Europeans Only and No Jews policy. Some 11 such sports clubs had similar policies. Many Jews lived in mixed race areas such as District Six, from where they were forcibly removed to make way for a whites-only development. The architect of grand apartheid Hendrick Verwoerd studied in Germany where he obtained a degree in psychology. Many of the apartheid eugenics programmes that targeted native Africans can be said to have been inspired by racist theories which dominated the campuses of the time, as evidenced by the use of Nazi race indexing tools.^[5]

In 1936, Verwoerd joined a deputation of six professors in protesting against the admission to South Africa of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. "Following these demands of the Nationalist Party, Eric Louw, later Foreign Minister, introduced another antisemitic bill that strongly resembled Nazi legislation - the Aliens Amendment and Immigration Bill of 1939. His bill was a means of suppressing all Jews. This bill suggested that Jews threatened to overpower Protestants in the business world and were innately cunning and manipulative and that Jews were a danger to society. To support his claim, Louw maintained that Jews were involved in the Bolshevik Revolution and therefore intended to spread Communism worldwide. This bill defined Jews as anyone with parents who were at least partly Jewish regardless of actual religious faith or practices."^[6]

Another organisation with which the Nationalists found much in common during the 1930s was the ' South African Gentile National Socialist Movement', headed by one Johannes von Strauss von Moltke, whose object was to combat and destroy the alleged 'perversive influence of the Jews in economics, culture, religion, ethics, and statecraft and to re-establish European Aryan control in South Africa for the welfare of the Christian peoples of South Africa'.^[1]

The 1956 Treason Trial saw Nelson Mandela along with a group of mostly Jewish men and women, arrested for treason. This resulted in accusations of a Jewish conspiracy to overthrow the white government and a plot involving communism. The group of Jews included Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Ben Turok, Leon Levy and Lionel Bernstein. They escaped conviction only to face another trial in 1960 known as the Rivonia Trial. This larger trial included the Zionist Arthur Goldreich, Denis Goldberg, Harold Wolpe, James Kantor and Lionel Bernstein.

During the 1960s, Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader, was a frequent visitor to South Africa, where he was received by the Prime Minister and other members of the Cabinet. At one time Mosley had two functioning branches of his organisation in South Africa, and one of his supporters, Derek Alexander, was stationed in Johannesburg as his main agent.

Upon Verwoerd's assassination in 1966, BJ Vorster was elected by the National Party to replace him. Vorster had been a supporter of Hitler during WWII; his policy towards Jews in his own country, however, was ambivalent.

The 1980s saw the rise of far-right neo-Nazi groups such as the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging under Eugene Terreblanche. The AWB modeled itself after Hitler's National Socialist Party replete with fascist regalia and an emblem resembling the swastika.

There were numerous similarities between the laws passed by the Nazis against German Jews and the laws passed by the Afrikaner Nationalists against the Blacks. The scholar Sipo Elijah Mzimela observed similarities in theology between the "role of the Deutsche Christen and the Dutch Reformed Church, on the one hand, and that of the Confessing Church and the English-speaking Churches on the other". This is known as the "apartheid heresy" controversy which became important in the struggle against institutional racism in South Africa.^[7]