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11 Sivan 5763 - June 11, 2003 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Jews In The Anglo-Boer War
by D. Saks

The recent surfacing in Johannesburg of a collection of letters written during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 has provided interesting insights into the difficulties and dilemmas faced by Jewish soldiers seeking to maintain at least a semblance of their Jewish identity whilst on active service in those years.

Jeannot Weinberg, a 19 year-old member of the Bloemfontein Commando, served on the Boer side during the prolonged conflict, the biggest war Britain was involved in between the defeat of Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century and the outbreak of World War One nearly a century later. During this time he wrote some twenty letters in German and English to his parents in Bloemfontein, describing life at the front and, following his capture in early 1900, in the POW camps. The letters are in the possession of his three children, all of whom today live in Johannesburg. Copies were made available to the archives of the Jewish Board of Deputies.

Weinberg, like most of the Jews in the Boer ranks, was not a strongly identifying Jew. Nevertheless, there appear occasional rather touching references to his distress over being separated from his family and community over yom tov. In April 1900, he wrote of his captivity: "There is only one things that troubles me much and that is the thought of having to pass Passover Feast, which commences Good Friday night, without matzes."

In October, he confessed that he had not fasted on Yom Kippur since he had not known the date of the festival. A few months later, in February 1901, he was again complaining of having to spend a matza-less Pesach, writing, "Passover is near and no Matzes. I am becoming a regular Heathen, all this the cause of the British."

Weinberg spent most of his captivity on Ceylon. Jewish Boer prisoners on St. Helena were a little luckier, since the Reverend Alfred Philipp Bender in Cape Town, a leading figure in Cape Town Jewry, was able to arrange for both matzo and kichel and other delicacies to be sent to them over Pesach.

While they numbered no more than about 300 in a total force of some 80,000, a number of interesting vignettes of Jews fighting in the Boer forces have been recorded. One Jewish soldier on the British side, for example, recalls how a Jewish Boer began reciting the Shema as he was being knocked down and disarmed. On another occasion, the same soldier remembered a command being shouted in Yiddish during an attack on a Boer position.

One of the most colorful Jewish characters in the Boer ranks was Chaim David Judelewitz, a former Slobodka yeshiva bochur who briefly served as a Commandant in the Boer forces and was eventually killed in a skirmish on the Orange River.

P. H. Lazarus, another Jew who fought for the British, later recounted how Solly Schultz, a fellow Jew serving in General de la Rey's commando, saved his life following his capture at the battle of Tweebosch. The Boers suspected that Lazarus, who was Intelligence Officer in General Methuen's force, was a burgher (Boer citizen) and would have shot him had Schultz not intervened and informed them that he had been born in England.

A less than heart-warming episode was the apparently antisemitically-motivated shooting of a British Jewish trooper by General Manie Maritz, later to become notorious as a Nazi sympathizer and rabid antisemite, in late 1901. It was claimed that Maritz had walked up to the young Joseph Rabie, a Jew serving in the Western Province Mounted Rifles, and said to him, "Joodjie, wat maak jy hier?" ("Jewboy, what are you doing here?") before shooting him dead. That Maritz had time to make his remark before shooting, and moreover that he knew that Rabie was Jewish, strongly suggests that the latter was an unarmed prisoner when he was shot.

In general, however, there was little antisemitism in the Boer ranks and the contribution of the Jews to the Boer struggle was warmly appreciated. For example at the funeral of Harry Spanier, the first Jewish Boer to be killed in action (and one of the only ones to receive a proper Jewish burial) President Paul Kruger declared that, "even the children of Abraham" were helping the Afrikaner people in the struggle for freedom.

Many years after the war General J. B. M. Hertzog, by then Prime Minister of South Africa, paid tribute to the Jewish Boers, saying that during the war, "among the most faithful and most trusted men on commando, there was almost everywhere to be found a Jew in the ranks of the Afrikaners."

 

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