In a society that was obsessed by race and tribe, I experienced my Jewishness as a problem — a peculiar tribalism in a world of tribal warfare. Both my parents were Ashkenazi Jews whose parents came from eastern Europe. My father grew up in a small anti-Semitic Afrikaans village; he was the last of five brothers in the solitary Jewish family, which true to stereotype owned the only shop in the village. His first language was Yiddish, which he spoke at home to his parents and brothers, then Afrikaans, used in school. Only later did he become fluent in English. Yiddish was the language of the Ashkenazi ghettos — a mixture of Hebrew, German, and Slavic languages written in the Hebrew alphabet. By their neighbors and themselves, the Ashkenazi were considered a people apart, distinguished by ethnicity, language, dress, and religious practice.
During the Middle Ages, when the majority of the European population was illiterate, Jews had achieved almost universal literacy in Hebrew. Literacy was a condition of religious practice, which involved reading and ritually reenacting an epic story of identity — of tribal, desert nomads, bonded by shared revelation and then shaped by over a thousand years of history amid the arid crossroads between Africa, Asia, and Europe. Since religious practice was tied to a story of identity, Judaism had little interest in converting outsiders.2 Eventually, Ashkenazi Jews became one of the most genetically isolated and culturally distinct ethnic groups in all of Europe.3 By the nineteenth century this group constituted the heart of world Jewry, with some five million concentrated on the western boundary of Russia, in a gigantic reservation known as the Pale of Settlement. Here they lived in largely self-governing communities, practicing an exclusive religion, dressing and eating differently, speaking Yiddish, and praying and studying in Hebrew. It was a peculiarly contradictory tribe, insular and fiercely protective of its culture and religion, yet simultaneously landless, rootless, and cosmopolitan.
According to a czarist survey at the end of the nineteenth century, the largest group of Jews in the world constituted the most impoverished and destitute of all the oppressed ethnic minorities in Russia.4 They were also the most politicized, disproportionately represented in the leadership of progressive, revolutionary, and utopian movements of the time. This was the crucible of modern political Zionism, a movement that created the modern State of Israel, widely admired in its early years, much reviled today. But Zionism also produced a unique utopian community — the agrarian, democratic kibbutz — which in the words of the Jewish philosopher and mystic Martin Buber was the “experiment that did not fail.”
After the anti-Jewish massacres at the end of the nineteenth century, some Jews moved to Palestine, inspired by the Zionist dream of building a new country in the ancient homeland. There they joined the small, impoverished Sephardic (Spanish) communities that had returned to the Holy Land in the fifteenth century when the Inquisition expelled the Jews of Spain. But the bulk of the Ashkenazi emigrants left for the rapidly growing capitalist economies of the West. The Jewish community of South Africa came almost exclusively from the Lithuanian part of the Pale. Of those who remained in Lithuania, 90 percent were exterminated during the Holocaust.
South African Jews enjoyed the benefits of honorary white status, doing well in business and professional life, and suffering only indirectly from cultural anti-Semitism. But their political sensitivity inspired a disproportionate number to join, and sometimes lead, the struggle against apartheid. For example, in 1955, when police arrested 156 antiapartheid activists for treason, more than half of the 23 whites arrested were Jewish. In 1963, the South Africa security service raided the headquarters of the underground antiapartheid African National Congress (ANC). As a result, Nelson Mandela and nine of his comrades were charged with sabotage. Of the nine, four were black, five were white, and all five whites were Jews. All but one received life sentences. The first white elected as a member of the ANC national executive was a Jew, Joe Slovo, who remarkably went on to become chief of staff of its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, “Spear of the Nation.”5 My sense of being part of a minority in opposition to brutal, powerful rulers was a source of some pride, but also anxiety. We still lived with the ancient tension of a tolerated, sometimes privileged outsider, aware of past and impending persecution.
My father’s hero was the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi, who had spent his early years fighting apartheid in South Africa. In my ignorance and insecurity, I rejected this as the traditional Jewish path of passivity, perhaps cowardice. Like most of my peers, I was drawn to a more assertive Jewish nationalism. I joined the South African branch of a global kibbutz-Zionist youth movement, Habonim — “The Builders,” based on a mix of the utopian socialism of the Israeli kibbutz, the back-to-nature movement of the German Wandervogel, and the heroic vision of returning the Jews to their biblical homeland after two thousand years of exile and persecution. Habonim made sense of the weirdness of being a Jew in Africa and started framing my political worldview.
Zionism attempted to grasp the entirety of Jewish existence in a single passionate narrative: millennia of struggle, culminating in the present moment as an opening for creative politics — redemption through a return to the land of origins. The narrative began with Jewish identity forming around the monotheistic revelation, and the creation of the biblical Kingdom of Israel, followed by a succession of wars, foreign occupation, exile, and return. This ended with the final conquest by Rome in the first century and the global dispersal of the Jews into the Diaspora — the Galut. For centuries Jewish history in the Diaspora was a cycle of oppressive decrees, anti-Semitic riots, massacres, and expulsions, only to be followed by acceptance into a new country and accommodation, until the inevitable cycle of persecution and expulsion returned.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century and during the first part of the twentieth century, small groups of young Jews from eastern Europe organized themselves through the international Zionist youth movements and moved back to the biblical homeland to form communal agricultural settlements. Land was purchased by the Jewish National Fund through the Keren Hayesod and held collectively for the nation; it was given to these young groups of idealists. Technically they were colonists, but of a radically different sort from the European colonists who came to America, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. First of all, they were without a motherland and without state backing. They were not part of commercial ventures by chartered companies in search of profit. Nor were they looking for gold or silver or opportunity in a fertile land or for good jobs in a growing economy. They were idealists who were united in a near-mystical notion of transformation, a dream of remaking self and society through hard physical labor on the ancestral homeland. Out of this grew the agrarian, communal settlement — the kibbutz — that became one of the founding institutions of the State of Israel. Like most nationalist movements of liberation, Zionism was almost wholly self-absorbed; it never creatively engaged the indigenous Palestinian population. Early Zionists conveniently saw “a land without a people” for a persecuted “people without a land.” Palestinians saw outsiders and colonists arriving, buying up land, and asserting an alien identity. Only a handful of visionaries saw the larger, more complex reality and struggled, vainly, for creative coexistence.
Conflicting needs and mutual incomprehension resulted in violence. Escalation of violence eroded the vestiges of mutual empathy and set in place the vicious cycle that today is the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In my youth I was oblivious to Palestinians. Zionism healed me by explaining my alienation as an outcome of a collective condition — life in exile. I felt empowered, wholly absorbed in the drama of Jewish redemption, which would be simultaneously or la’goyim, a moral example to the world. I felt part of the Kabbalist ideal of tikkun ha’Olam — healing and repairing the world through practical action.
South Africa might have been the original Garden of Eden, but most of my childhood was spent in an indoor hell.