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GIDEON SHIMONI. Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa. The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England [for] Brandeis University Press; Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2003. Pp. xv + 337.
More than four decades ago, the Cambridge historian E. H. Carr cautioned fellow practitioners against the passing of moral judgments. Presenting the prestigious George Macauley Trevelyan lectures - subsequently published as What Is History? - Carr spoke of the impossibility of "erecting an abstract and super-historical standard by which historical actions can be judged."1 We are all, he warned, captives to the values and ideals of our age. Gideon Shimoni, a distinguished Israeli historian with South African roots, is in agreement. Thus his examination of South African Jewry under apartheid "is neither indictment nor apologia (p. xiii); the historian, contends Shimoni, should not presume to be a moral judge" (p. xiii). However, at one level at least, the book is a sustained judgment, and an extremely sophisticated one at that.
It is no simple task to examine the behavior of different institutions and generations over nearly fifty years under changing circumstances and in variable contexts. Shimoni does this admirably. Ever alert to nuance and motivation, time and place, he avoids facile generalizations. All actors and organizations are treated with great sensitivity. He therefore empathizes with the Jewish community's sense of vumerability in the wake of the Holocaust and the National Party's anti-Jewish record in the 1930s and early 1940s. Although Dr. Malan had distanced himself and his party from its flirtation with anti-Semitism, some of his lieutenants - the likes of Oswald Pirow, Eric Louw, and Louis Weichardt, the leader of the notorious Greyshirts-were hardly philo-Semites.2
Such was the setting within which the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (the Board), the representative institution of South African Jewry, grappled with a response to what was palpably an iniquitous system, at odds with basic Jewish values. The record, at least in the early decades of apartheid, is...