Abstract:
In her article “Scholarship on South African Jews: state of the field”,
Shirli Gilbert offers a sweeping yet meticulous account of scholarship
on South African Jews beginning on 9 July 1905 when Dr. Joseph Herman
Hertz, the Rabbi of the Witwatersrand Old Hebrew Synagogue, gave a
keynote address to the first Zionist Conference held in Johannesburg
urging Jews to write their own history. Much of Jewish history in South
Africa is bound up in histories of Zionist sympathy and support. In the
late nineteenth century, the age of the new imperialism during which
European global empires were at their zenith, Hertz encouraged Jews
to consider their roles as “discoverer and pioneer” in the South African
colonies. In current scholarship, with its focus on decolonization and
subalterity, an exploration of these roles would be likely to attract censure
rather than celebration. Indeed, Jewish historiography from the early
twentieth century to the present echoes the contours of the discipline of
history more broadly, with so-called empirical accounts told in the tone
of “his master’s voice” gradually replaced by a move towards history from
below, that is, eschewing Whiggish versions of history as the product and
representation of great men and grand events.
