White Other: Jewish Whiteness in South Africa 1937-2000

This thesis explores Jewish whiteness as it existed within South Africa from 1937-2000. It’s focus is on the ways in which the Jewish community, and Jewish individuals, responded to apartheid’s racial taxonomies and apartheid as a political system. I argue that while Jews more or less received the ‘wages of whiteness’ during the apartheid period, this was dependent on social and political work, to ensure that the community was unthreatening to the state. Participation in this work was controversial, and much discussed within the community, with a constant running debate during the period about the ethics of performing whiteness work, its validity as a strategy for Jewish survival, and the social and cultural compromises which were inherent in completing the work of whiteness. I pay particular attention to dissident factions within the Jewish community who advocated for alternative paths with respect to the community’s relationships with whiteness. Each chapter is themed around a particular facet that differentiated Jewish whiteness from the hegemonic Euro-Christian whiteness in South Africa, covering areas including educational structures, Zionism, the Holocaust and Jewish socialisms.