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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Anti-Semitism in the 1930s: Germany and South Africa |
Author: | Bradlow, Edna |
Year: | 2004 |
Periodical: | Historia: amptelike orgaan |
Volume: | 49 |
Issue: | 2 |
Pages: | 45-58 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Germany South Africa |
Subjects: | racism Jews National Party |
Abstract: | Initially, few German Jews came to South Africa. The existing South African Jewish community, dating from the period 1880-1913, was predominantly of Eastern European origin. While not actually welcomed, the pre-Union arrivals gained fairly easy entry. Whatever anti-Semitism was emerging tended to be individualized and based on cultural perceptions, rather than on racism. With the highly visible number of Eastern European Jews arriving in the 1920s, anti-Semitism emerged as a populist demand for racially-based discrimination. The 1930 Quota Act reflected the shift in the nature of anti-Semitism generated by the South African nationalist build-up. The number of German Jew migrants to South Africa rose considerably after 1935, as Nazi racial laws curtailed their civil and legal rights in Germany. Nazism's appeal attracted both the Afrikaner working class and those among the intelligentsia educated in pre-Nazi Germany. Consequently, the National Party began pitching its message for these voters in anti-Semitic terms. The latter shifted gradually from the suggestion that the Jews were 'unassimilable' and that their economic power was harmful to Afrikaners, to the private bill introduced in 1939 by Eric Louw, the Party's spokesman on Jewish affairs, which explicitly claimed that Jews were 'a race not suitable for immigration into South Africa'. Notes, ref., sum. in English and Afrikaans. [ASC Leiden abstract] |