South Africa trip report continued

The Jewish Museum in Cape Town told the story of the Jews in South Africa. 80% of them came from Lithuania, including some far-flung branches of my own family. During the middle of the twentieth century, the apartheid government used the pretense of slum clearance to tear down a mixed-race neighbourhood in Cape Town called District Six. This has gone down as an infamous event in the history of apartheid, but because many of those living alongside the blacks were Jewish―the area was one of poor immigrants, much like the east end of London (or the west end of Newcastle)―this event also left its mark on the Jewish community.

Without wanting to ask intrusive questions, I was intrigued to learn about the attitude of the Jews in South Africa. In Johannesburg, the owner of the kosher B&B where I was staying had a black domestic to help run the place. He said he now probably knew more about kashrus (Jewish dietary law) than he did! The Masorti shul I attended had several black members; much to my amusement, I discovered the whites, pretty much to a man, greeted one with "Gut Shabbos" (in Yiddish) and the blacks with "Shabbat shalom" (in Hebrew).

However, both the synagogues I attended were marked by an almost complete absence of young people; this, I adduced, was because most of them now live within a couple of miles of me. (After the rise in crime levels following the end of apartheid, much of the young South African Jewish community left, and many of those seem to have settled in the Jewish parts of London.)

In the Jewish Museum I learned that half of all the whites who stood trial alongside Nelson Mandela (and others) in the treason trial of the 1950s were Jewish, and all of the whites who stood trial alongside him in the Rivonia trial of the 1960s were Jewish. As a result of this, the nationalists started questioning the loyalty of the Jewish community to the country, and, I'm ashamed to say, the Board of Deputies of South African Jews responded by publically distancing itself from anti-apartheid activity, a move reminiscent of the Board of Deputies of British Jews telling people to stay at home during the fascist march through the east end of London in 1936 (which, of course, a large number of young Jews ignored, leading to the Battle of Cable Street). Not until the 1980s did the (South African) Board of Deputies finally come out against apartheid.

At least some dismissive attitude towards the blacks remains to some extent, I do not know how much, amongst the Jewish community today: on telling somebody I was working with the SABC, they replied, "No one watches the SABC." On questioning, I discovered this was because only 20% of its programming was in English. I can't remember now whether I pointed out that since only 20% of the nation's population was white, this seemed to me like a reasonable level of English-language programming, now English and Afrikaans are no longer being forced on the rest of the population. (On a map I saw online, Johannesburg was the only place in the country where English was a majority language, but everyone I encountered everywhere was able to speak it as a second or third language.) At any rate, for this person the 80% who spoke other languages, who might find programmes for them on the SABC evidently did not count as "anyone".

The decline of empires of the West

I was watching a documentary about ten years ago, in which the presenter asserted that the British in the nineteenth century knew very well that no empire has lasted more than a few centuries, and that their turn would come too. I thought to myself "what's your source for this? I have seen no evidence for it anywhere."

This week the calendar aviva_m got me for Chanukah has a quotation from Oswald Spengler, whom I'd not heard of before. (I looked him up because I couldn't tell from his name whether he was German [ɔsvalt ʃpɛŋlər] or American [ɒzwəld spɛŋglər] as I would say it), and the above-linked page gave the impression the idea that western civilisation was due to decline arose with him, in the early twentieth century. (Can anyone add to this?)

On reflection, I can now see this has exerted a profound influence upon modern views of western, particular American, society; it's an idea whose time has come. (Though it's probably old hat to the Chinese, with their long-entrenched view of the cyclical progression of imperial dynasties.)