Orientalism, Alterity and Social Identity : A historical analysis of the socio-psychological and socio-cultural dimensions of Afrikaner Nationalism, Antisemitism, and Jewish Identity in South Africa in the 1930s to the 1960s.

Abstract

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of Orientalism, Alterity and Social Identity. It provides an intricate historical, socio-psychological and philosophical analysis of cross-temporal, global antisemitism as a component of Orientalism, and how this historical Orientalist discourse taking the form of the subjugation and oppression of Jews throughout history culminated in a very particular historic consciousness that, at least to an extent, determined a particular social dilleniatieon of Jewish identity in 20th century South Africa before and during Apartheid. The study first provides an explanation of the theoretical and methodological means by which it would analyse historical subject matter and reach conclusions; the study will focus on a poststructuralist theoretical analysis of antisemitism and Afrikaner identity, and display the seminal importance of alterity as a core socio-psychological phenomena to understand the way social identity is constructed. The study will also focus on Social Identity Theory (SIT) to display the way in which identity is constructed collectively according to the disciplinary analysis of social psychology. The study then provides a sweeping analysis of antisemitism from antiquity straight through to apartheid South Africa, encompassing antisemitism during the antiquarian, early-Christian, Medeival, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment eras. The study displays how antisemitism thrived on a universal discourse of alterity in pagan, religious and scientific/pseudo-scientific narratives throughout a trimillennial period, the same discourse of alterity inherent in Orientalism as a study of the lopsided relationship of power between the Orient and the Occident. The study then gives an analysis of the rise of Afrikaner social identity in South Africa, and how its rise to power in the 20th century was imbedded in the same discourses of alterity fuelled by similar religious and pseudo-scientific narratives based on arbitrary social-denominators of race and ethnicity as was the Orientalist antisemitism studied in previous chapters. The study then analysis the rise of antisemitism in South Africa, and how it culminated in a brief period of volatile antisemitism in the 1930s and 1940s. The study then concludes by analysing the specific tangent in which Jewish identity was constructed in South Africa during Apartheid following the large-scale oppression of the country's native population by means of discourses remarkably similar to those that legitimated antisemitism for almost three millennia.