DISCOVERING JEWS IN BANGALORE

About ten years ago, an American Jewish acquaintance, who had just completed a tour of southern India, complained that he had seen no end of Hindu temples and Christian churches, but only one synagogue. Well, I was not surprised. Once in Venice (Italy), a religious Jew on learning that I am Jewish asked whether my wife (a gentile), an Indian, is Jewish. That got me thinking. I calculated that randomly meeting a Jew born in India was extremely improbable – it is less than 0.0005%.  So, to write about the Jews of India is to describe a minute proportion of the country’s vast population. And as I write, that proportion is only likely to diminish.

While idly flicking through the Eicher street atlas for Bangalore, I noticed, quite by chance, that the city has a “Jewish Grave Yard”. I have visited this cemetery several times. It contains less than sixty graves, but together they open a window that provides a good overview of the Jewish people who have lived in India. The story of India’s Jewry has been described in detail elsewhere (for example: “India’s Jewish Heritage” edited by Shalva Weil and “Shalom India” by Monique Zetlaoui). I will present their tales as viewed through a south Indian lens.

Jews have lived in what is now Kerala since time immemorial. They lived on the Malabar Coast in, for example, Kranganore and Cochin. It is said that St Thomas came to India to convert them into Christians. He failed miserably, converting, instead, the other people who he found living there.  A grave in the cemetery commemorates Elias Isaac, who came from Cochin to Bangalore to act as the schochet (ritual slaughterer) to the Moses family.  Today, there are one or two elderly Jews still living in Kerala.

The oldest graves in the cemetery mark the resting places of Subedar Samuel Nagavkar (1816-1904) and Benjamin Nagavkar (1877-1910). Samuel might have served the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wodeyar, who donated the land for the cemetery in 1904. The Nagavkars were members of the Beni Israel community, whose origins are obscure. According to the historian HS Kehimkar, they claimed to have come from “the North” to India in about 175 BC (BCE). Many of their community still live in and around Maharastra State.

There are several other graves bearing names of Beni Israel Jews. Tor example: the horse trainer Sion E Nissim (1900-58), one of whose horses, Commoner, won the Indian Derby; Mrs Abigail Jhirad, daughter of the Subedar; and Joshua Moses Benjamin  Bhonkar (1920-2005). The latter (aka ‘Joshua Benjamin’) was both a writer (“The Mystery of Israel's Ten Lost Tribes and the Legend of Jesus in India”) and a Chief Minister in the Government of India.

Whereas the origins of the Malabar and Beni Israel Jews are obscure, this is not the case with the Iraqi Jews, who came to India from the Middle East beginning in the 18^th century. Many of them settled in Bombay and Calcutta. The most famous of them being the Sassoon family.

The Bangalore cemetery contains graves for the following families from Calcutta: Ezra, Elias, Earl, and Moses. Edward Earl (1910-1953) was the proprietor of the once well-known Earl’s Pickles company.  Calcutta used to have a large Jewish community, including the Moses family, who are buried in Bangalore and originated in Iraq.

Ruben Moses (1871-1936) left Iraq to join the California gold rush. He left California for India in 1906, following the disastrous San Francisco earthquake. He headed for the Kolar gold fields, but ended up in Bangalore, where he founded a shoe store in the city’s Commercial Street. The store, which is now occupied by Woody’s veg fast-food outlet, was once the largest shoe retailer in southern Asia. His home, now long since demolished, contained a prayer hall where the city’s few local Jews and Jewish visitors from all over the world came to wordship along with the Moses family.

What did the Jews do in Bangalore apart from what I have mentioned above? Poor Moses Ashkenazy(1957-1982) was a student, who died of an overdose of drugs.  Sassoon Saul Moses (d. 1975) was a ‘hawker’, as were many of my Lithuanian Jewish ancestors who arrived in South Africa in the 1890s. The widow Rebecca Elias (1927-1992) lost her husband early, and then worked in a needle factory in Bangalore. GE Moses and Isaac Cohen, neither of whom are buried in the cemetery, were, respectively, a clothes retailer and an auctioneer. The grave of RE Reuben (1877-1939) records that he was “Malarial Supervisor of the C&M Station Municipality”. I wonder whether he ever met the Nobel laureate Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932), the pioneer of the fight against malaria. Reuben’s place of work is mentioned in Ross’s papers.

Troubles with anti-Semitism in Europe and, later, the outbreak of the Second World War (‘WW2’) led to other Jews entering the Indian Judaic scene – refugees and soldiers. They are well represented in the Bangalore cemetery. But, before describing some of them, let me not forget the Russian-born Saida Abramovka Isako, who died in 1932. She was the wife of FY Isako, who was proprietor of the ‘Russian Circus’. Her coffin was carried on a bier drawn by white circus horses. I imagine that the burials of the German refugees Siegfried Appel (1906-1939) from Bonn, Gunther and his mother Mrs Rahmer from Gleiwitz, and Dr Weinzweig, were less memorable. Carl Weinzweig (1890-1966) was a dentist (his surgery was in MG Road), as was Gunther Rahmer.

Amongst the military personnel that passed through Bangalore during WW2, was the future President of Israel, Ezer Weizman, who was stationed at an RAF base in the city. His name appears in the Moses family guestbook. Sadly, the cemetery records the casualties of war, who died in the city. These include Yusuf Guetta (1921-1943), who was evacuated from Ben-Ghazi in Libya by the British in 1941, and Private Morris Minster (1918-1942). Minster served in the South Wales Borderers Regiment and was initially buried in the grave yard. His stone remains, but he has been moved to a large Commonwealth war cemetery in Madras.

The “Jewish Grave Yard” in Bangalore encapsulates the story of the larger of the Jewish ‘groupings’ that have lived in India. The cemetery is so unknown that even a few of the Jews who have lived in the city have been unaware of it. I have met the heirs of the Jewish refugee from Germany, Mr Jacoby, who introduced popcorn and machines for making it to India and settled in Bangalore. Their nearest and dearest are resting in peace in Christian cemeteries, of which there is no shortage in Bangalore.

At the beginning, I mentioned that India’s Jewish population is diminishing. Over the years many Jews left India. My wife, who went to school in Calcutta, remembers that the city had many thriving synagogues and that there were several Jewish girls in her class. When we visited Calcutta four or five years ago, we saw three synagogues. Two of them were well-maintained, by Moslem caretakers, as is Bangalore’s Jewish cemetery. The third that we saw appeared to be about to crumble.

India can be proud to remember that, unlike so many other countries, it was not anti-Semitism that caused Jews to migrate. Just as so many other Indians have left the country to better their economic prospects, so did the Jews.

An album containing annotated photographs of all of the graves in Bangalore's 'Jewish Grave Yard' may be purchased as an e-book (or a paperback) by clicking HERE

From Europe to Freedom

 * * * * *

Almost as soon as the British took over the Cape Colony from the Dutch at the beginning of the 19^th century, practising Jews began arriving there. At first, most of them were occupied in trade although at least one was a medical practitioner. Amongst the earliest traders were well-known names such as Bergtheil, Norden, Solomon, Thalwitzer, and the Mosenthals. The latter were responsible for opening up the interior of the Cape to trade, as well as bringing out more Jewish men from Germany (mainly) to work in their network of trading stores.

Until the discovery of first diamonds and then gold in what is now South Africa, most Jews leaving Europe tended to head westwards to the USA. After the valuable products started being unearthed, the number of Jews heading towards South Africa rose sharply. Both the increasing prosperity of the 4 constituent territories (that were to unify in 1910 to become South Africa) and also the pogroms in Tsarist Russia led to Eastern European Jews, especially from Lithuania and its neighbours, flowing into the country in ever increasing numbers.

Despite the Jewish people always being a small proportion of the European population of South Africa, they ‘punched above their weight’ – they made a disproportionately large contribution to its development, economically, politically, and in many other ways. This has been described masterfully and in great detail in “The Jews of South Africa” edited by Saron & Hotz, which was published in the 1950s.

My book “Exodus to Africa” approaches the story of Jewish migration from Europe to South Africa from a different angle. I have used the stories of some members of my large South African family to exemplify and illustrate a range of aspects of this movement of Jews out of the lands where they were subject to oppression to a place where they were largely respected and allowed to lead their lives without undue hindrance. My story begins with the earliest member of my family to arrive in the Cape (in 1849), the German Heinrich Bergmann, and it ends with the last person to arrive from Europe, Hendrik Jami. He arrived in the Cape in 1949, having travelled from Lithuania via Shanghai.

“Exodus to Africa” - a study of mass movement of an oppressed people - describes why Jewish people left Europe; how they got to South Africa; what they and their descendants did there; and how some of them influenced the history of the country. My stories include those who witnessed, or were in some way directly involved in: the Cape Convict Crisis of 1849; the Anglo-Boer War; the Union of South Africa; railway building in the Eastern Cape; diamond ‘mining’ in South West Africa; Jewish Territorial Organization; the Grey Shirts; building ‘locations’; fighting in both World Wars; municipal government; and opposing apartheid. My book adds a personal flavour to spice the general history. The examples chosen from my family all illustrate general points relevant to the history of the Jews in South Africa. My story might well be subtitled ‘From Mosenthal to Mandela’

The book is available in paperback ( from www.lulu.com) and also in the Amazon Kindle format.

PAPERBACK: click HERE

KINDLE: click HERE

GENESIS OF EXODUS

My latest book contains tales of Jewish people who migrated to South Africa, and what they did there once they had arrived. 

Now, I want to share with you something of the excitement of how I discovered them. 

I will do that by illustrating how I ‘unearthed’ the story of Henry Bergmann, the first of my family to set foot on African soil.

My first forays into family history began in the mid-1990s when I chanced upon a website dedicated to Jewish genealogy: www.Jewisghgen.org (‘Jewishgen, for short). It contained a section where, after becoming a member of Jewishgen, one could register family surnames alongside the towns or villages associated with them. I entered the only combinations that I knew about at the time: ‘Bloch’ of ‘Barkly East’ (in South Africa) and ‘Yamey’ of ‘Plunge’ (in Lithuania), and expected little would happen. However, I was wrong. Two days later, I received an email from Mark in Canada. He was, he informed me, a descendant of the Bloch family in Barkly East. I checked this was correct with my aunt Manon, who knew his branch of the, my, Bloch family. Mark sent me what he knew of the Bloch family tree.

When I told my uncle Felix about this family tree, he rummaged around and presented me with something that he said I might find interesting. How right he was. It was an enormous family tree of the Seligmann family from Ichenhausen in Bavaria. Very detailed in parts, it also contained some gaps where the compiler, Reinhold Seligmann, lacked information. I set about updating the tree using the Internet including web-based Jewish genealogical discussion ‘boards’. Gradually, I filled in most of the gaps. Whilst I was doing so my wife told me that although the updating was worthy in itself it was really rather dull. She suggested that it would be more interesting to try to find out something about the lives of the people who appeared on the family trees that I was gradually accumulating. I agreed with her. Here is how I researched one of these people, the first of my family to set foot on the soil of southern Africa, Heinrich (later ‘Henry’) Bergmann (1830-1866).

The Seligmann family tree, which my uncle Felix Bloch gave to me, was a brilliant starting point for my investigations into the history of my mother’s side of the family. It shows the descendants of Jakob Seligmann (1779-1843) his wife Gitl (né Bergmann: 1780-1862) of Ichenhausen in Bavaria. They had five children of which one was a son. My mother was descended from the son, Isak Rafael, and also from one of his sisters, Peppi (born ‘Rebekka’). Only one daughter, Minette, failed to marry or produce any offspring. The four children who married managed to give their parents many grandchildren, thirty nine of which survived infancy. Fifteen of these derived from Isak Rafael (1813-1870) and his amazingly fertile wife Hale (‘Helene’) Springer (1819-1896) from Bamberg. She was sometimes pregnant more than once within a single year. She had eighteen children, three of who were very short-lived. The Seligmann family grew rapidly. Most of Jakob and Gitl’s grandchildren produced several children each.

A substantial number of the people who appeared in the Seligmann family tree, which Reinhold Seligmann began compiling in the 1930s, show up in internet searches because they have done something that has made their names worthy of being recorded in the domain of public knowledge. I will first concentrate on the name ‘Rosenfels’ because my communication with of a member of this family, Marion, resulted in shedding a lot of light onto an aspect of the early history of Jewish migration to what is now ‘South Africa’.

The Seligmann family tree shows that Jakob and Gitl’s daughter Klara (1807-1872) married Lazarus Bergmann (1800-1888), who was born in Dittenheim which is close to the Bavarian city of Erlangen. Klara’s eldest son was Heinrich (later known as ‘Henry’ Bergmann). He had a brother Ludwig and three sisters. One of the sisters, Regine, married Sigmund Rosenfels, and they produced a number of children including Max Rosenfels (1862-1944), who died in Southern Rhodesia (now ‘Zimbabwe’). Max, who had been living in Rouxville in the Orange Free State, took his family by ox wagon to Salisbury (now ‘Harare’) in 1894, where he worked for the Scot Thomas Meikle (1862-1939) whose firm Meikle Brothers still serves the citizens of Zimbabwe.

While I was searching the internet for ‘Rosenfels’, I chanced upon an entry posted by Marion Rosenfels in Zimbabwe. It was something to do with a school reunion that she was helping to organize a few years ago. I sent a message to her email address, wondering whether she had any connection with ‘my’ Rosenfels family. She told me that she was married to a Rosenfels to whom I am related, and also supplied me with much interesting information about the family including the fact that her husband has a cousin in New Zealand, who was working at that time in New Zealand’s Foreign Service. His name, she informed me, is John. She was unable to give me any contact address for him. Undaunted by this, I sent an email to the New Zealand Foreign Ministry.

Some weeks later, John sent me an email. Along with his friendly message, he attached a series of emails that had been sent between various departments in the Foreign Ministry. It was clear from the content of these messages that the personnel responsible for security were not sure whether to treat my unsolicited email as the work of a crank or as something that John ought to see. Fortunately, he received it! Making contact with John had several unexpected and enjoyable consequences.

John’s father Robert, who left Augsburg in Germany in the late 1930s, sought shelter from the Nazis in New Zealand, where he anglicised his surname. He was a descendant of Klara and Lazarus Bergmann’s daughter Fanny (c. 1840-1913) who married Nathan Gerstle of Augsburg. Incidentally, John kindly updated his branch of the Seligmann family tree, and sent the information to me. He also informed me that he and his wife were about to pay a visit to London, and that he was keen to meet me.

John wrote that he and his wife would be staying with his sister-in-law in London, where she was a senior diplomatic official in New Zealand House. He told me that she and her husband lived near to us. I wrote back, asking him where exactly they lived. Serendipitously, it turned out that she lived in our street at the time, and that he would be staying a minute’s walk from our place. When we met for the first time, John handed me a spiral-ring bound note book. It contained over one hundred pages in handwritten German. He said that I could borrow it and photocopy its contents, which I did.

The book which he entrusted to me - an almost total stranger - contained his father’s notes on the history of the Bergmann family. My German is not great, but that did not deter me from attempting to decipher Robert Lerchenthal’s handwriting. Soon I will relate what I found most interesting in this personal history of the Bergmann family, but first I want to provide some background to my discoveries.

The Seligmann family tree that my uncle Felix gave me was a copy of another copy that my uncle Sven had made from the original tree. About twenty or more years before I became interested in my family history, Sven and his wife met Fea, who was then living in Camberley. Fea, who was born a Seligmann, was a daughter of Reinhold, who drew the family tree of the Seligmanns. She allowed Sven to run her copy of the huge tree through a special copier designed to reproduce architectural plans.

I became very keen to get in touch with Fea. The address that the my uncle Sven had for her was long out of date. So, I posted enquiries about her on genealogical websites, and also asked my friends Nick and Alice, who live in Tel Aviv, whether they could find out about her or her relatives (I knew their names from the family tree and that some of them might be in Israel). My friends managed to discover the whereabouts of the widow of Fea’s late cousin who had been a chemistry professor in Israel. At about the same time, I received an email from Yoni in Israel, who is Fea’s nephew. He wrote to me and also to Fea, and thus we were able to get in contact.

Fea and I got on very well. She was delighted to have met yet another member of her enormous extended family. I visited to her flat in Richmond. She revealed to me that amongst of her many projects, one was to catalogue and describe the numerous photographs and records of the Seligmann family that her father had gathered over the years. Her father Reinhold (1892-1968) had been born in South Africa in a tiny town called Barkly East. His father Sigmund Seligmann (1856-1939), who was born in Ichenhausen, went to South Africa where eventually he set up the equivalent of a department store in Barkly East.

The material that I received from Fea and John in conjunction with other documentation enabled me to make major discoveries about Henry (Heinrich) Bergmann.

One of the many hundreds of ‘entries’ on Reinhold Seligmann’s family tree, which caught my eye and aroused my curiosity, was that for ‘Heinrich Bergmann’. It contained the information that Heinrich Bergman, son of Klara (né Seligmann) and her husband Lazarus Bergmann: “Gest. Aliwal-North, Süd Afrika. Verheiratet aber kinderlos”  That is:  ‘He died in Aliwal North, South Africa. Married but childless’.

Aliwal North meant little to me apart from the fact that my mother used to tell me that when she and her siblings went from Barkly East to boarding school in King Williams Town they had to change trains at this tiny place. I wondered what my mother’s great uncle Heinrich was doing there.

I looked for references to Heinrich both in a book about the comprehensive history of the Jews of South Africa written in the 1950s, The Jews In South Africa, by Messrs Saron and Hotz and also in the on-line catalogue of the National archives of South Africa (‘NASA’).  Heinrich is mentioned in the book as follows:

“…one Bergman, a German Jew, ‘a very great friend of the De Wet family, associated with all their earliest experiences and troubles, and who was eventually buried on their farm in 1865’”.

An entry in the NASA collection lists his grave as being one of those in the family cemetery of the De Wet family. My interest in Heinrich began to grow, and was given a boost when I discovered the following passage (translated, in this case, by my cousin John Englander, and shortened in this article) in Robert Lerchenthal’s handwritten history:

“The most glittering person - both in the light side and on the shady side, was arguably Uncle Heinrich. … Early on, Heinrich realised the opportunity to emigrate to South Africa. I recall a masterly description of a sailing ship journey, in which he described a mutiny of the sailors, suspenseful as anything written by a novelist”

The extract also contained these intriguing words:  “… But as he had to pay £5,000, he forged a Bill of Exchange in the hope that he would have enough money by its due-date. As this was not the case, he shot himself dead. My grandmother Fanny Gerstle often spoke of him with love and admiration. She related that all of his friends were horror-stricken by his suicide, as they would have lent him the money with gladness.”

This extract fascinated me. The first paragraph of the excerpt reproduced above contains much that I have found to be true. One evening when Fea was visiting our flat for dinner, I showed her that passage from Robert’s handwritten history. She read it without making any remarks.  Some weeks later when we met again, she presented me with a huge folder containing nine or ten large high quality coloured photocopies. These turned out to be copies of the pages of the letter mentioned above. This was the letter written by Heinrich Bergmann in 1849, about which Robert had written that it was: “… a masterly description of a sailing ship journey, in which he described a mutiny of the sailors...” It contained a lot more, but I will return to that when I have introduced you to another of my many cousins, the late John E. who helped me make sense of the letter.

One of Klari Bergmann’s sisters was my direct ancestor Rebecka Seligmann (1810-1893). She married Heinrich Wimpfheimer (1813-1876), and both were born in Ichenhausen. The curious sounding (to English ears) name ‘Wimpfheimer’ both amused and fascinated me. I knew nothing about this ‘root’ of the family. It did not take me long to discover that there was a well-documented Wimpfheimer family from Ittlingen, and that ‘our’ Wimpfheimer family from Ichenhausen had no known connection with it. By contacting various descendants that were mentioned on Reinhold Seligmann’s family tree, I began to piece together clues about ‘our’ Wimpfheimers. Some important clues were embedded in Here am I, the entertainingly written autobiography of yet another cousin, a portrait artist who had the unlikely name of Samuel Johnson Woolf (1880-1948). Eventually, I was able to piece together a family tree of, and much information about, the Wimpfheimers of Ichenhausen. I published my investigative endeavours and results in Stammbaum, a journal about German Jewish genealogy that used to be published by the Leo Baeck Institute (‘LBI’) in New York City.

After my article was published, I received an email from John E. Retired and living in the New York Borough of Queens, he worked as a volunteer at LBI several days a week. One morning, he picked up the latest issue of Stammbaum and spotted my article. He became very interested when he realised that it was about the very same Wimpfheimer family that his ancestors had belonged to. This prompted him to write to me, and thus began a wonderful correspondence between us. I managed to meet him and his lovely wife in New York a year before he died.

As I transcribed successive portions of Heinrich Bergmann’s long letter of 1849 from cursive Gothic script into German (in modern Latin script), I sent them to John, who was born in Germany before WW2 and a fluent German speaker.  He made sense of the errors that I made in the transcription and gradually we translated almost the entire letter apart from a few sentences on the last page, which were illegible.

Material contained in Heinrich’s letter contained clues as to what he did in South Africa, and what brought the earliest Jewish settlers to the country long before the discovery of diamonds and then gold. My researches continued when we visited South Africa in 2003. A visit to the small museum in Aliwal North, and to descendants of Heinrich’s friends the De Wet family produced resulted in me obtaining even more information about Heinrich. All of this, combined with some library research including obtaining copies of documents from The South African National Archives, helped bring a long forgotten name on a family tree ‘back to life’.

The genesis of the stories in my book, Exodus to Africa, derives from research such as described above as well as on what I have learnt by talking to a number of my relatives who remember much more than they believed when I first approached them. 

"EXODUS TO AFRICA"

by Adam Yamey

is available in 

Paperback (click: HERE )

& on Kindle (Click: HERE)

THEY WENT TO SOUTH AFRICA

EXODUS TO AFRICA

By Adam Yamey

This is to tell potential readers what my latest book Exodus to Africa is all about.

Prior to the British taking over the Cape Peninsula in about 1800, Jews were not permitted to live there by the Dutch East India Company that had been governing the region for several centuries. Some Jews, who converted to Christianity, did set foot in what is now ‘South Africa’, but unconverted Jews did not. The arrival of the first openly practising Jewish settlers followed close on the heels of the commencement of British rule.

At first, there was a small trickle of Jewish settlers, almost all of them from Great Britain and the German states. A few arrived from St Helena. With the arrival of the Mosenthal brothers from Kassel, the flow began to increase. The Mosenthals and their Jewish associates began setting up a chain of trading stores, which effectively began to make the remote interior of the Cape Colony begin to prosper. All of this activity began before diamonds (in about 1868) and gold (in about 1880) put South Africa (i.e. the territories that united after 1910) amongst the economically significant countries in the world. Before the discovery of these precious commodities and the opening of the Suez Canal, The Cape was little more than a place, like the tiny island of St Helena, where ships stopped to pick up water and supplies whilst they travelled between Europe and Asia. It was not a place that attracted many immigrants, Jewish or otherwise, from Europe. The USA was the most favoured destination for those seeking a better life. The diamond and gold ‘industries’ that began in the latter half of the 19^th century changed this. South Africa became attractive to immigrants including the Jews. The trickle of Jews from Europe to South Africa began to become an exodus (especially from Tsarist Lithuania). At the beginning of the 19^th century, there were a handful of Jews in southern Africa. By the 1930s, as many as one in twenty ‘white’ people was Jewish.

My book, Exodus to Africa, takes a fresh look at the reasons Jews chose to travel to South Africa; how they got there; what they did when they arrived; what they and their descendants did to affect the history of the country; how they helped to oppose racial inequality (apartheid and its antecedents).

The first of my relatives to arrive in South Africa was Heinrich Bergmann from Bavaria. He disembarked at Cape Town in 1849. The last of them, my father’s cousin Hendrik Jami, who arrived 100 years later. Between these two dates, many members of both of my parents’ families migrated from Europe to South Africa. Their diverse experiences cover many aspects of Jewish life in the country. Using many of their stories to illustrate these, I have attempted to produce a history of the Jews in the south of Africa.  The stories are told against the ever changing historical background of the troubled country where they chose to settle. My book is based on a multitude of sources, both previously unpublished primary material (documentary and from interviews) and also published secondary documentation.

Here are a few of the ‘protagonists’, whose tales are unfolded in my book:

Heinrich Bergmann (1830-1866), an early settler typical of the Jewish man who joined the Mosenthal Brothers.  His life took a surprising turn.

Jakob Seligmann (1846-1906), from Bavaria, was a ‘founding father’ of a small town in the Orange Free State. He fell afoul of the law and fled from Africa.

Sigmund Seligmann (1856-1939), also from Bavaria, started as an employee in the Cape Colony, and then began his own successful trading business before retiring to Germany in the late 1890s.

Franz Joseph Ginsberg (1862-1936), from a part of Prussia that is now Poland, began life in South Africa as a photographer. Soon, he became an industrialist, and then first an influential local politician, and later a national one. In 1927, he was elected a Senator in the Parliament of united South Africa.

Gustav Ginsberg (1872-1922), Franz’s brother, a dentist, who suffered from the effects of the vagaries of first the 2^nd Boer War and then later the First World War. His sons became well-known in the arts, both in South Africa and the USA.

Iwan Bloch (1886-1931), from Baden-Württemberg, who began working as a shop assistant in Zurich, and ended up the Mayor of a town in South Africa.

Joseph Halperin (1870- c. 1949) sailed to South Africa with his wife and three children. Ran a bakery and then a dairy in Cape Town before retiring to enjoy the successes of his children who had advanced up the ‘social ladder’.

Solomon Yamey (1883-1931) left his shtetl in Tsarist Lithuania and became a wandering pedlar (‘smous’) in the Cape before owning his own successful store in an Afrikaans speaking town near Cape Town. 

 By the time that John Katzin (1866-1931), who was born in Tsarist Lithuania, arrived in South Africa he had already lived in Amsterdam and London. In South Africa, he made a fortune in the laundry business. Some of his children became noted in wider world of public work and literature.

Henry Polak (1882-1959), [seated left in the picture above] a lawyer with London, became one of MK (later the ‘Mahatma’) Gandhi’s close associates in South Africa.

David Kitson (1919-2010) was one of the brave people with Jewish roots who actively supported the struggle against apartheid. His cousins the Budlenders, of Lithuanian and Polish Jewish extraction, risked arrest and worse because of their brave stand against the iniquities of racial oppression in South Africa.

There is no doubt that though a small proportion of the European population of South Africa, the 

Jewish people played a disproportionately large role in the development and history of its country 

from 1800 onwards. Freed from the repression and hostility that they faced in the countries where 

they were born, they flourished in a country that was no stranger to oppression. Exodus to Africa  explores all of this and much more. 

Exodus to Africa is NOW available on KINDLE:

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A FRIEND REMEMBERED

Shoreditch Town Hall, 21 March 2014

Sometime in March 1965, when I was almost 13, I attended a birthday party held by my school friend Hugh Watkins. After attending a showing of the latest James Bond film Goldfinger at our local Odeon cinema in Temple Fortune in northwest London, we had afternoon tea at Hugh’s home. It was at that tea party that I first met the brothers Francis and Michael Jacobs. They lived next door to Hugh. Michael, who shared his birthday with my mother, 15^th of October, was a few months younger than me. It is curious that his mother shares the same birthday, 8^th of May, with me.

Michael Jacobs (in pink shirt) with Adam Yamey (in white robes and holding a coconut) in India, 1994

Yesterday, 21^st of March 2014, I attended a large gathering to celebrate the tragically short life of Michael Jacobs. This moving occasion was beautifully organised by his wife Jackie along with his good friend Erica Davies. His death on the 11^th January 2014 came as a complete shock and surprise to me as I had not known of his illness. A number of people who had known him for varying numbers of years shared their memories of this remarkable person at the gathering yesterday. In this essay, I wish to share some of mine, a few of which derive from an era before which some of yesterday’s speakers knew him.

Michael was very musical. During his school years, he became an accomplished clarinettist. He told me that whenever he went on holiday, he had to carry a mouthpiece with him so as not to lose his lips' embrasure. His grandmother Sophie was friendly with John Beckett (1927-2007), a close relative of the writer Samuel Beckett. John was one of the people who began to re-introduce early music, and its ‘authentic’ performance into the concert repertoire. Sophie gave Michael and Francis a number of records that his ensemble Musica Riservata had recorded. We loved listening to these on the Jacob’s gramophone, and Michael learnt how to sing some of the renaissance songs. His renderings of these were superb, and continued to bring joy to his friends during the rest of his life. One of these, which he sang often, was called El Grillo.

During his later years at Westminster school, both Michael and I developed an interest in the Gothic and neo-Gothic eras. We were both interested, for example, in the novels of Walpole and Beckford. He carried this further by organising a ‘Gothic’ event at Westminster School. I was invited to attend this curious occasion, of which I recall little except that Michael had persuaded a number of his school mates to dress up in monk’s habits and wander around the cloisters whilst ‘Gothic’ music from his and also my collection of early music LPs was played over loudspeakers. The school authorities must have thought highly of him to allow him to put on this extraordinary event.

Michael enrolled at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in about 1971. Very soon, he became recognised as one of the Institute’s better students. This caused him to be selected to join a group of academics on the Institute’s highly exclusive annual overseas excursion. He had to join the tour somewhere, which I cannot recall, in Europe. It might have been Bavaria. He asked me whether I would like to join him on a trip through the Low Countries and West Germany on his way to wherever it was that he was joining the art historical elite. I was on my university vacation, and it sounded like a good idea. We decided to camp to save money. I provided the tent, and we set off from London to Dover, where we crossed the English Channel.

I was carrying a rucksack with my belongings and the tent. Michael’s baggage was heavy and unwieldy. He was carrying not only the clothes and the sleeping bag that he needed for our camping trip but also things that he needed for his forthcoming trip with the academics. As this was to be a smart affair with formal dinners, he had to carry a dinner jacket and its accompaniments including smart shirts, shoes, and ties. He also lugged an enormous bag filled with huge hard-backed art books that he felt that he might need for that event. We camped somewhere near Lille in northern France on the first night. All went well until the following night, which we spent at Grimbergen just outside Brussels. We awoke the next morning to discover that the rain was falling heavily. Our tent was soaked, as were our sleeping bags. The rain managed to get into our baggage. Michael’s books got wet, and his formal clothes became dishevelled. We decided not to continue with camping, but instead to spend the rest of our trip sleeping in youth hostels.

Michael guided us to fascinating museums on our trip. He was somewhat short-sighted, and often went up close to paintings in order to - as he explained to me - examine artists’ brush-strokes. This often caused the men and women guarding the works of art to become anxious. They had nothing to fear from this young man, who was destined to become a significant art historian and a well-known writer.

When we reached the West German city of Marburg, I told Michael that I had run out of money. The £60 or so that I had budgeted had almost been spent. There was just enough to pay for my railway ticket back to London. On my way back, I had to spend the night in Liége. With nothing in my pocket except my ticket, I slept on a bench in the railway station. Michael continued on his way to meet up with the Courtauld party. Despite having had to cut it short, I enjoyed the journey and Michael introduced me to a lot of art which was unfamiliar to me. For example, had we not visited the art gallery in Dortmund, it might have been many years before I might have finally, if ever, learnt of the existence of the Blaue Reiter Group and the marvellous expressionist paintings produced by its members.

Some years later in 1982 when I qualified as a dental surgeon, I learnt to drive and acquired a car. Michael, who never learnt to drive a car, was grateful to his many friends who were happy to enjoy his company and drive him around. I was one of them.

In 1984, Michael along with Paul Stirton published The Traveller’s Guide to Art: Great Britain & Ireland. The research for this involved a great deal of travelling around the British Isles. One holiday, I drove Michael along the south coast of England and around Wales so that he could visit museums and galleries in these parts. I had a cassette player in the car, and played many of the tapes that I had recorded from my large collection of Central European and Balkan music LPs. Michael enjoyed the exotic music, and once remarked to me that listening to it whilst travelling through the British countryside, made the somewhat familiar landscape seem a little less familiar, even a bit foreign and hence more interesting.

We began our journey along the south coast at Eastbourne. We arrived there in the late afternoon. Michael was dismayed to find that its art gallery was already closed. He suggested that we walk up to the building, and then try to peer in through its windows. This was unsuccessful; we could not see much inside it. Undaunted, he approached two young lads walking in the street close by. He began asking them whether they had ever visited the gallery. I thought that he was being a little over optimistic; the lads were skin-heads. And, in those days they were the least likely people to have been interested in art, and were potentially violent. Fortunately, we escaped unscathed.

During that trip, we celebrated Michael’s birthday by staying at a better than average bed and breakfast (‘B&B’) near to Newport in South Wales. He had chosen a beautiful place to stay. The breakfast that we were served was one of the best that I have ever eaten in a B&B. Apart from being offered a selection of different kinds of teas we were served perfectly prepared fish as well as the usual English breakfast items.

After visiting fine art galleries in Cardiff, Swansea, and Llanelli, we made a detour to Laugharne, where the writer Dylan Thomas lived and worked. It was a lovely spot.

The west coast of Wales was devoid of places that were deemed suitable for his forthcoming book, but we drove along it one Sunday. We stopped for the night at an isolated village at the western end of the Lleyn Peninsula. The sole place to stay in this Welsh speaking village, which resembled the Scottish village that starred in the 1984 film Local Hero, was the place’s only pub. The village was teetotal on Sundays. So, we sat in the deserted bar eating an unsatisfactory evening meal without being able to wash it down with something alcoholic. As we were eating we could hear the thudding of loud pop music coming from somewhere in the building, but we thought nothing of it. After dinner, we decided to go for a late night stroll; Michael was a keen walker with an abundance of energy. When we left the bar and entered the lobby, some doors burst open, and a couple of young girls burst out. Seeing us, they asked us (in English rather than in their usual Welsh) whether we would like to join their party. We followed them into a room where a party was in full swing. There, we were offered beer and other alcoholic drinks; and were made to feel most welcome.

Llandudno, which we visited on the next day, had the most curious museum on our trip. It housed a collection of carved wooden Love Spoons. I can not remember whether Michael and Paul included this in their book eventually.

Throughout the trip, and others that I made with Michael, he was supposed to be our navigator. This was a good arrangement. He was a good map reader.  The only problem was that Michael had a tendency to fall asleep in moving vehicles. Whilst investigating the art treasures of southern England, he was asleep as usual when we speeded through Cheltenham and had continued beyond it. Suddenly, he woke and asked me where we were. I told him that we were almost at Gloucester. Somewhat panicked, he charmingly persuaded me that we should turn around and head back to Cheltenham which we had overshot by almost 10 miles. He had forgotten to tell me that it was supposed to be one of his stopping places before he had drifted off.

In 1986, Michael published another book, The Good and Simple Life. This book about the artist colonies of Europe at the end of the 19^th century also required several chauffeurs during its research phase. I drove him to the West Country so that he could carry out field research in the Cornish towns of Newlyn and St Ives. We stayed in Newlyn, where he was allowed to bring the hand-written diaries of the artist Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947) from a local library to our bedroom in the B&B. He read them during the night, and the next morning we sat together for breakfast. We were the only two guests in the B&B, and we were confronted with a vast spread of greasy fried breakfast fare. I ate a little of it. Michael ate his share. Then, he looked at what was left on the table - a substantial amount of food - and said that we would have to finish it. I told him not to be ridiculous, but he replied that he did not want to hurt our landlady’s feelings by leaving it. He was genuinely concerned not to upset her. So, he finished it off. During the rest of the day, he kept clutching his stomach; his kind-heartedness and thoughtfulness for others was making him suffer.

I have to thank Michael for introducing me to St Ives. I have visited this beautiful little port many times since. Apart from visiting the Barbara Hepworth Museum there, Michael and I also visited places associated with the artists who worked together in the town’s artist colony. This involved visiting the St Ives Art Club which was founded in 1890 and the archives of the town’s library.

At some stage during this trip, we stopped, and spent the night at, at Worth Matravers near to Corfe Castle on the Isle of Purbeck. He took me to a pub where the artist Augustus John (1868-1961) used to drink. When we entered, Michael asked the barman whether there were any traces of this artist in the pub, maybe some graffiti or something scratched into the woodwork of the bar. The barman, whose cultural knowledge was a microscopic fraction of Michael’s, looked at him blankly and said nothing. So, we ordered a pint or two, just as the great artist would have done many years before our arrival.

At yesterday’s memorial event, the renowned cookery writer Claudia Roden praised Michael’s culinary skills. This praise was well-deserved. Long before Roden sampled his cooking, I had been fortunate to have enjoyed many dishes prepared by him in the kitchen that he had constructed with his own hands in his home in Hackney.  His mother was an excellent cook, but he surpassed her by being both excellent and also successfully ambitious. Few people could prepare a coulibiak (кулебя́ка) - in essence, a pastry filled with fish - as delicately as he did for me on at least 2 occasions.

His food was worth waiting for, and indeed one had to do just that. He would generously invite guests for dinner, but would arrive full of apologies long after them. The dishes that he would prepare for us as we sipped aperitifs never disappointed; and that was not just because we had all becomes so hungry waiting for them. As a cook, he was a genius. However, occasionally he was a little over ambitious.

This was the case when he decided to make home-made fresh pasta for a large number of people who were going to celebrate his 40^th birthday at his home. He had decided to make enough fresh tagliatelle for at least 30 people. I arrived early at his house, and found him in the kitchen cranking his hand operated pasta machine. Layer after layer of strips of tagliatelle were accumulating on his kitchen table. To his dismay, he realised that they were beginning to stick to each other. I suggested to him that fresh pasta needed to be hung up to dry a bit. So, we separated the ribbons of pasta and hung them over the backs of the assortment of wooden chairs in his kitchen and anywhere else that seemed suitable. When that was complete, he had to face the problem of cooking this vast amount of pasta, and then serve it with his home-made ragu.

On another occasion, my wife and I turned up at his home the day after he had had a dinner party, at which he had served his home-made filled pasta. Not only had he made the pasta himself, but also the delicious filling.  The few leftovers that he cooked for us matched the best tortellini that we hade ever eaten anywhere - and my wife had lived in Italy for 4 years.

Michael was blessed with a great sense of humour. He was very witty. When his brother got married in Ireland, I drove Michael and Jackie to Avoca in Eire, where the wedding was being held. At the reception after the ceremony, Michael began his best man’s speech by saying something like: “Unaccustomed as I am to speaking in public…” then pausing for a few seconds before continuing, “… without being paid.” This had everyone present roaring with laughter. A few moments later, he continued: “I had originally thought of projecting a few slides showing Francis’s development from infancy to adulthood, but then I decided against it. After all, this is a family show…”

Michael’s death has left a gap in many people’s lives. As the memorial event at Shoreditch Town Hall demonstrated so vividly, he meant many different things to many people. But all of us, who attended the event, were united in at least one thing: we all felt his great affection for us. Overall, he was one of the most life-enhancing people I have ever met. 

Michael Jacobs with Lopa and Adam Yamey at their wedding reception in Bangalore, 1994

I feel privileged to have been his friend and that he was one of the few people who made the long journey from Europe to India in order to celebrate my marriage to Lopa in Bangalore.

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