Milton Shain's A Perfect Storm offers a profound and comprehensive sequel to his estimable earlier book (The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994]), which explored antisemitism in South Africa up until 1930. Shain now traces antisemitic manifestations chronologically and in detail from that time until 1948, when the Afrikaner National Party headed by Daniel François Malan formed the government that crystallized the infamous political regime associated with the term “apartheid.” From the beginning, Jewish immigrants, stemming largely from the Lithuanian region of eastern Europe, had entered South Africa as Europeans, hence potentially part of the enfranchised, dominant, and dominating white population. To be sure, there had been sporadic attempts to limit their entry, mainly by a stratagem that involved categorizing Yiddish as a non-European language. But these had failed. In this respect, the Quota Act of 1930 was a turning point because it effectively halted immigration from eastern Europe, an immigration that was almost entirely Jewish. As Shain shows, popular promotion and reception of this Quota Act reflected a consensus in the white public that Jews were an unabsorbable minority whose growth had to be stunted.
Shain's narrative proceeds from that point to the mushrooming of virulently antisemitic radical-right groups. Foremost was the organization known as the Greyshirts, founded and led by Louis Weichardt, a self-avowed antisemite. Exacerbating preexistent prejudices and nativism, these hate groups adopted Nazi-style ideology that targeted the Jews and advocated legislative discrimination against them. “Private” antisemitism graduated to new levels of “public” antisemitism, which propelled the postulation of a “Jewish Question” within South African politics. Shain probes and analyzes its sources and substance and shows how its resonance within the entire white public precipitated the Aliens Act of 1937. This legislation stopped up a loophole in the Quota Act, which was allowing entry of Jews fleeing not from eastern European countries but from Nazi Germany. Moreover, there followed blatant political advocacy of occupational quotas and other restrictions on Jews already living in South Africa. The antisemitically animated “Jewish Question” escalated further in the crossfire of inter-Afrikaner political battles during the Second World War. Much of this involved a crude nationalist mass movement known as the Ossewa Brandwag (the Ox-Wagon Sentinel). Finally, Shain examines the waning of antisemitic motifs on the eve of the 1948 elections that led to the defeat of Jan Christiaan Smuts's government, whose political base of support combined English-speakers as well as moderate Afrikaners.
Shain's historical narrative is a fluently presented and copiously documented work of exemplary scholarship. More importantly, it is analytically conceptualized not only within its obvious context, the politics of Africa's whites-only democracy, but also with comparative attention to the tragic European experience of antisemitism in the interwar years. Throughout this study, Shain insightfully applies the South African experience to broader explanatory theories accounting for the ubiquitous phenomenon of antisemitism. Far more than a parochial study of a singular case, this book has much value for Jewish history and the study of antisemitism in general.
Naturally, the book's contribution is at its most innovative in its primary context, the politics of whites-only South Africa. Shain's revelations concerning the Afrikaner political mainstream break new ground, for South African historiography has paid scant attention to the Jewish presence. Even Hermann Giliomee, author of a magisterial study of the Afrikaner people (The Afrikaners: Biography of a People [Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2003]), views antisemitism as merely a manifestation of fringe groups influenced by Nazi literature from abroad. Contrary to this depiction, Shain documents conclusively that it was in fact far from a marginal factor in South African political life. To the credit not only of Shain's work but also of South Africa's present standards of scholarly literature, A Perfect Storm has been awarded prestigious recognition as the best work of nonfiction in 2016.
Shain's analysis of the causality of antisemitism in the case of South Africa focuses heavily on specific societal circumstances. Shain holds that, although rooted in preexisting stereotypes documented in his earlier book, on balance “nativism and economic jealousy rather than deep-rooted fantasies drove hostility” (295). Economic rivalry was a major factor, given the depressed situation of the swelling “poor white” Afrikaner population in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Perhaps Shain's most interesting finding is that antisemitism was less a derivative of the prevalent color-based racism that inhered in white South African society, whether Afrikaans or English speaking, than a function of Afrikaner nationalism in reaction to specific objective factors and contingencies. He concludes that “the key to understanding the potency and depth of antisemitism in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s lies in nascent völkisch Afrikaner Christian Nationalism, in which the Jew was a threatening outsider” (291). He reasons that it is not enough to characterize the ideological mindset of the Afrikaner National Party as merely nativist and reactive to Jews’ upward mobility or to alleged Jewish clannishness. It also became ideologically “völkisch.” Yet Shain emphasizes that it was never as potently toxic as in Europe. He judges that “at no time during these years did it approximate the language of exclusion and frenzy heard in some European countries” and speculates that “beyond immigration prohibition programmatic action was never likely in South Africa” (295). Indeed, it is important to note that nothing much in the mooted program of antisemitic measures, other than immigration legislation, could materialize as long as the disseminators of antisemitic rhetoric lacked governmental authority. Their views, although at times entertained by broad circles of the public, not excluding English speakers, were countered by formidable political forces, above all the famous advocate of Afrikaner-British conciliation and unity Jan Christiaan Smuts.
Shain's scholarly integrity is reflected in the measure of equivocation he shows in defining the nature and potency of antisemitism in the South African case. With fine scholarly restraint, he is at pains to weigh and balance the sometimes ambiguous evidence. This is noticeable in his undecided evaluation of Malan, arguably the political personality who played the most determinative role in the waxing and waning of antisemitic influences within the Afrikaner public. Shain says, on the one hand, that Malan was never a raw antisemite, but on the other hand neither was he simply a political opportunist who exploited antisemitic sentiments, as some South African historians have claimed. Yet it is not quite clear whether this is a case of the leopard changing its spots. Certainly, in the postwar period leading up to the fateful 1948 elections, Malan determined to remove the “Jewish Question” from the political arena. He even enforced this policy against the formidable opposition of so important a political compatriot as Eric Louw, who as foreign affairs minister was later to serve as apartheid's foremost diplomatic envoy.
In the broader context of the modern history of the Jews, Shain's profound study demonstrates the ubiquity of antisemitism way beyond its crucible if not cradle in Europe, as well as its tenacious capacity to infest the minds of European-origin whites even when their racist prejudices are as overwhelmingly focused on the nonwhite Other as they were in South Africa. Shain's revelation of antisemitism's potency within Afrikaner nationalism also provides the essential foundation for understanding the syndrome of mixed fear and moral conscience that informed the response of South Africa's Jewish community leadership to the apartheid regime when it was enforced by the Afrikaner National Party after it came to power in 1948.
The dramatic almost two-decades-long eruption of stormy public antisemitism after several decades of latent “private” antisemitism is aptly reflected in the book's title, “A Perfect Storm.” However, it ought not to leave the impression that thereafter antisemitism vanished from the South African scene. True, since then the weather vane of antisemitism has indicated far more clement conditions. But the storm cast a long shadow on the situation of South Africa's Jews in the apartheid period from 1948 to 1994, and even after the great transformation that enfranchised and empowered the black African majority, new contingencies are generating transmuted manifestations of antisemitism to this day.
