The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History, by Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain

The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History, by Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain. ISBN 9781868422814 / ISBN 978-1-86842-281-4

Richard Mendelsohn's and Milton Shain's illustrated history book 'The Jews in South Africa' includes a wide range of historically important photographs, many long unseen, and encompasses a broad swathe of Jewish life.

Milton Shain  Richard Mendelsohn  

Just over 50 years have passed since the publication of the last major general history of South African Jewry. The Jews in South Africa. A History, edited by Gustav Saron and Louis Hotz, focused primarily on the founding years of the Jewish community until the eve of the First World War, with an epilogue covering the subsequent decades. This new history spans the entire Jewish experience in South Africa over the past two centuries, since Sigfried Fraenkel, a ship's surgeon and the first professing Jew to settle in the sub-continent, stepped ashore in August 1807 in Table Bay Its view is national; it is neither a view from the summit of Table Mountain nor from the top of a Johannesburg mine dump. The South African Jewish saga is located within the broader South African past, as well as within the wider Jewish experience and its intersection with international events. This fresh survey - drawing on recent scholarship including unpublished research - avoids a 'Whiggish' view that might have sketched a triumphant and inevitable progression of a community from humble origins to present success. Instead, it depicts the fragility of the early foundations, the oscillating fortunes of the community as it matured amidst turbulent currents, both domestic and international, and its latter-day challenges and responses. It is not a narrow institutional history of a community. Rather it attempts to encompass a broad swathe of Jewish life, from the bimah and the boardroom to the bowling green. It avoids a view of an unproblematic, homogeneous and monolithic community, and instead recognises the evolving divisions and tensions along lines of class, ideology and religiosity. At the same time, it acknowledges the centripetal forces at work and the large measure of cohesion the community achieved historically, one of its most striking features. While the book is wide in scope, it does not intend to provide an exhaustive, encyclopaedic account of the Jewish experience in South Africa. Where individuals appear, they have been included to illustrate broad processes. Accompanying the main text are 'boxes' which explore topics in greater depth. The history of South African Jewry is divided into four broad periods, each with its defining character. The first of these is the age of the pioneers, the Anglo-German Jews who established a Jewish community in South Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. The second is the age of the Litvaks, the mainly Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, invigorated and consolidated Jewish life in South Africa. The third period covers the coming of age in the mid-twentieth century of a South African Jewry - acculturated but not assimilated - after the closing of the gates to Eastern European immigration.The final period, the late twentieth century to the present, is the age of the Jewish South African, well integrated yet more Jewish than ever. Most general histories of South Africa have effectively ignored the history of Jews in South Africa, despite their consequential and at times contested presence. Hopefully this book will recover the historical experience of this significant minority, albeit one that has never comprised more than 4.5 per cent of the white population and numbers today about 80 000, a contested figure but certainly less than one quarter per cent of the total population. [...]

This is an excerpt from the book: Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History, by Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain.

Title: The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History
Authors: Richard Mendelsohn; Milton Shain
Type: Illustrated History
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Johannesburg, South Africa 2008
ISBN 9781868422814 / ISBN 978-1-86842-281-4
Hardcover, dustjacket, 19x25 cm, 248 pages, throughout photos