SHIFTY POLITICS IN SOUTH AFRICA

 

In 1862, when Adam Yamey's great-grandfather Franz Ginsberg was born, his birthplace BEUTHEN (now Bytom in Poland) was deep within German territory. After 1918 when borders shifted, Beuthen was still in Germany BUT ONLY JUST because it was surrounded on three sides by Poland which was no more than a mile from the city's heart.

While Franz Ginsberg was a Senator in the parliament of the Union of South Africa, legislation, inspired by the Minister of the Interior DF Malan (an architect of apartheid), was being formulated (in March 1930) that would severely restrict the entry into the country of Eastern European Jews. Franz Ginsberg was firmly against this.

One of Franz’s many objections was connected to the impermanence of Europe’s national borders. He said:

“Considerable difficulties will arise with this Bill ... There have been perfectly new boundaries created in Europe since the war (i.e WW1), countries that formerly belonged to Germany have become, for instance, Polish ... there is Silesia too. My birthplace is in Silesia and I am very glad to think that I would not come under the ratio of prohibited countries (i.e countries, such as Poland, whose Jews were to become subject to a quota on immigration to South Africa), although that might have been the case if the boundary laid down in the Peace Treaty had been shifted a few miles...”

Sadly, the South African Government passed the Quota Act of 1930. DF Malan defended its passing. According to the issue of the JTA published in November 1931:

"The Quota Act, he (i.e. Malan) declared, was introduced in the interests of the whole country, including the Jews. There was a feeling of unrest over the low type of immigrants coming from Eastern Europe, and the whole country demanded legislation to limit this immigration. The unrest threatened to develop into a feeling of hatred against the Jews, and as a result of the Quota Act this bad feeling has died down. “

Cynically, Malan was presenting his anti-Jewish legislation as something that would benefit Jews already in South Africa. This was not long before South Africa’s version of the Nazis, the Greyshirts, started becoming really active.

Read more about how Franz tried to defend the rights of Eastern European Jews to enter South Africa, as well his fights for the rights of many of the less priviliged members of South African society in “Soap to Senate: A German Jew at the Dawn of Apartheid” by Adam Yamey. The book is available from Amazon and www.lulu.com

Visit 

 www.adamyamey.com 

to discover more writing by Adam Yamey

THE PRE-HISTORY OF APARTHEID

Senator Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936)

In the 1960s, my late mother used to mention her grandparents Franz and Hedwig, and often remarked that theirs were an odd pair of names. For a long time that was all that I knew about them. My late uncle Sven Rindl gave me an ingeniously designed family tree of our Ginsberg family many years ago, and I kept it as a curiosity. It assumed a great significance when, in about 2000, I began to become interested in the history of the families into which I was born. Soon after this, I learnt that Franz was a South African Senator and that he was held in high regard by my mother’s family. After investigating the lives of other members of my extended family, I began including Franz amongst those whom I researched. Several members of the extended Ginsberg family were kind enough to supply me with much interesting material, but at first I was unable to put them together to form a ‘big picture’ of Franz’s life. As I began to do so, I realised that not only was I discovering a great deal about his life, but also about a fascinating and important period during the history of South Africa.

I obtained a British Library Reader’s Ticket, and that was the key to unravelling Franz’s story. My great-grandfather Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936) left his birthplace in Prussia in 1880, and shifted to King Williams Town (‘King’) in the Eastern Cape of what is now South Africa. He lived there for the rest of his life. The British Library is home to a more or less complete run of one King’s newspapers, the Cape Mercury (the ‘Mercury’). When the newspapers were stored at Colindale, I used to drive there and spend several hours every Saturday morning leafing through the huge bound volumes of the paper. As I did so, fragments of the crumbling paper used to float down off the pages, which I imagine had hardly ever been looked at since they were printed in King and then bound by the library in London. I scoured every page from 1880 onwards looking for mentions of ‘Ginsberg’. Before 1885, there were no mentions of Franz because there was little reason for him to appear in the news. But, from 1885 onward both he and, to a lesser extent, his future brother-in-law the photographer Jakob Rindl began to appear at ever increasing frequency in the pages of the Mercury. For, it was in 1885, that Franz opened his own factory. It made matches. The match factory was followed by an ink factory, and then a candle factory, and later a soap factory.

Mentions of Franz in the Mercury became even more frequent after about 1890, when he entered local politics. First, he was elected a Town Councillor, then the Mayor for a while. Soon, Franz entered national politics, and became elected a Member of the Cape Parliament, a position that he held until 1910 when the Cape Colony and the three other colonies of southern Africa united to become ‘South Africa’. After unification, Franz became King’s member of the newly formed Cape Provincial Council. He remained on this until 1927, when he became the first elected Jewish Senator in South Africa. Franz’s name began appearing in the Mercury with ever increasing frequency until he became a Senator. After his ascent to the exalted position of Senator, he did not disappear from the pages of the Mercury, but mentions of him became less frequent because his civic duties in King occupied less of his time than the affairs of the Senate.

From 1885 onwards, the information that I gleaned from the pages of the Mercury, which is now stored in Yorkshire but made available in the British Library in Kings Cross, gave me a good idea of what Franz and his family were up to. The newspaper entries included detailed reports on the proceedings of the Town Council of King as well as what happened in meetings of other organisations, such as the town’s School Board, in which Franz participated actively for many years. From these reports, I began to build up a picture of how Franz functioned as a politician. The newspapers also included details of his comings and goings as well as a wealth of information about his and his family’s involvement in the life of King.

There are two other important sources of information about Franz, which I consulted. These were the reports of both the Cape Parliament and also of the South African Senate. Both of these publications reported the debates in the two legislative assemblies in great detail. The Cape Parliament reports recorded the debates as reported speech, whereas the Senate was reported more or less verbatim. Therefore, what is reported in the Senate debates is what the speakers actually said, rather than someone else’s summary. In the absence of any known recordings of Franz’s voice, what is preserved in the reports of the Senate’s debates is all that remains of the authentic voice of my great-grandfather.

In addition to the above mentioned, there was a host of other material that I consulted whilst preparing Franz’s biography. Some of this, including much interesting material about Franz’s diamond mining activities in German South West Africa (now ‘Namibia’) and his brother Gustave’s life, were from the National Archives of South Africa. Accessing this material remotely from the UK involved employing locals in South Africa to look up the documents (that I had identified in the archives’ on-line catalogue), and then photographing them to send to me. This was always most satisfactory. Books from the British Library and material sent to me by relatives provided more pieces to complete the jigsaw puzzle.

I have been researching Franz’s life for well over 10 years. Several times I tried to write his biography, but had to give up because although he achieved a great deal in many fields, his story did not seem to me to be of general interest. That was the case before I began looking in detail at what he did and said whilst he was a Member of the Cape Parliament, and then later a Senator in the Parliament of the Union of South Africa.

Franz was a Member of the Cape Parliament between 1905 and 1910. He was a Senator from 1927 until his death in 1936. Between 1910 and 1927, he was involved in provincial, rather than national, politics, representing King on the Cape Provincial Council. During the first 4 decades of the 20^th century, much legislation was passed that diminished what few rights the non-Europeans ever possessed. One can safely say that this legislation paved or eased the way towards the establishment of apartheid in 1948.

Arriving in South Africa aged 18, Franz did not have a university education. His father Nathan was an accomplished academic. For religious reasons, as I explain in my book, Nathan had to turn down offers of academic positions in German universities. So, despite not having attended university it is likely that Franz was well-educated when he arrived in South Africa. When he was involved with national politics, he debated with politicians, many of whom had attained a high level of formal university education: lawyers, clerics, and so on. Yet, the reports of the debates in which he was involved demonstrate that Franz was easily able to hold his own with his highly educated colleagues in the Parliament and the Senate.  Always an opponent of the Nationalists, he was able to see through the deviousness and disingenuousness of their arguments. And, being able to do so, he attempted to combat or at least to mitigate the unfair legislation that they were promoting. Sadly, he was one of a few lone voices crying out in the wilderness.

When I began to see what my investigations into Franz’s political life were revealing, I realised that writing about his life would result in something with greater interest than a simple biography. Franz’s biography opens a ‘window’ into the history of the evolution of apartheid.

Prejudice against non-Europeans in South Africa began as soon as the Dutch first dropped anchor in the waters lapping the Cape of Good Hope. During the 19^th century, under British rule, things did not improve for the non-Europeans. By the beginning of the 20^th century, ensuring the submission of the non-European population became an ever-increasing concern of legislators. The ending of the 2^nd Boer war in 1902, and the desire to unify the 2 former Boer republics (the Orange Free State and Transvaal) with the 2 British colonies (Cape Colony and Natal) led to a further reduction in the political status of the non-Europeans. This was because in order to achieve unification, the British felt obliged to acknowledge, or at least not challenge, the firmly held views of the Boers that non-Europeans were to be regarded as inferiors with no rights at all.

Franz’s role in the politics of this interesting era was that of trying to ensure that non-Europeans were fairly treated. However, this is an oversimplification as I explain in my book. His approach was complex, and at times unusual. Trying to explain his activities to today’s readership in the context of his times was one of the challenges of writing his biography. I feel that this is what gives my narrative interest to a wider audience. One reader in South Africa has already written:

“Your studious unravelling and compilation of Franz’s remarkable life … gave me a sense of the evolution of our country …”

It is this ‘sense of the evolution’ of modern South Africa that I had hoped to convey when I published my biography of Franz Ginsberg, “Soap to Senate: A German Jew at the dawn of Apartheid.” (By Adam Yamey)

Available on Amazon Kindle and from www.lulu.com (paperback edition) by typing “Soap to Senate” in the appropriate places on these websites.

The genesis of apartheid in South Africa

 

The book "SOAP TO SENATE: A GERMAN JEW AT THE DAWN OF APARTHEID" by Adam Yamey is the story of an enterprising man. His life was dedicated to improving the lot of those who were less fortunate than him, as well as advancing his own family. He lived in South Africa during the gestation period of apartheid  that was completed a dozen years after his death. Had there been more men who acted as he did, it is possible that apartheid might never have seen the light of day.

The man was my great-grandfather, the late Senator Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936). 

At the age of eighteen, he migrated from Germany to King Williams Town in the eastern part of the Cape Colony (in what is now ‘South Africa’). During the 56 years that he lived there, he served his adopted country and its people generously. He was a ‘Victorian’ man. However, he stood out s being unusual amongst his contemporaries because he tried to counter the relentlessly racist tide in South African governmental policy-making - something that he was able both to observe first-hand and also to criticise in the positions of public office that he occupied for many decades.

Ten years after Franz’s death, Steve Biko, the black anti-apartheid activist, was born in the King Williams Town (‘King’). This man, a founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, was callously murdered by the South African apartheid government in 1977. They were terrified by him, his ideas, and his powerful influence. In 2003 when I visited the Steve Biko Foundation headquarters in King, I was shown a room that contained a number of commemorative wall plaques. Each of these celebrated someone who was considered to have been important by the Foundation. With the exception of one, all of the plaques commemorated black Africans involved in the struggles for their rights. The exception was one to remember my great-grandfather. At first sight, there would appear to be little to link a German Jewish immigrant, such as Franz was, with a martyr to the cause of freedom of the black people in South Africa. However, there is a connection. Biko was born and also lived in an African ‘township’ in King Williams Town. Steve’s birthplace, Ginsberg Township, was named in honour of my great-grandfather. Franz wanted it built to give his African workers better housing.

Franz arrived in South Africa with a high-school German education, and then began working as a photographer’s assistant. Within a few years, he became one of King Williams Town’s leading industrialists. Soon after that, he entered local, and then, national politics. In 1927, he was awarded a great honour: he was elected a Senator in the South African Parliament, the first Jew to be so elected.

This book describes the life of my great-grandfather, who left Germany both to seek his fortune and also to escape religious prejudice. In his adopted country, South Africa, he found himself privileged to be a white man accepted by other Europeans on the basis of merit rather than religious beliefs. However, being a man of conscience with great sympathy for his non-European neighbours, he tried to strike a moral balance between easing the lot of his severely disadvantaged non-white compatriots and safeguarding the superior advantages of the white man. Franz exemplified the words of the famous Jewish scholar Hillel the Elder:

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I?”

The book is fully illustrated with photographs and maps

"SOAP TO SENATE: A GERMAN JEW AT THE DAWN OF APARTHEID"

IS

AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK by clicking HERE

AND AS A KINDLE by clicking HERE

Or just type "SOAP TO SENATE" in the search box of either Amazon (your local regional site) or lulu.com

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.

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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)

Most children don't ask ...

In general, children look forwards, not backwards: to the future, not the past.

This is a good thing generally speaking. An exception to this is based on the fact that one’s parents and other elders in the family are younger when you are younger. Often their memories are better when they are in their prime than when they have aged.

At a school reunion, the current headmaster at my old school, Highgate in North London, once addressed a group of us ‘old boys, who were in our 50s. One of the things he said, and it is the only one that I remember, was that we who were assembled to listen to him had reached the age when the ‘nostalgia gene’ kicks in.

Some of us who have reached the age where this gene begins to express itself have already lost older close family members, or those who remain, are beginning to lose their memories. My mother died over 30 years ago, but fortunately for me a number of my uncles and aunts, as well as my father, have thrived without loss of memory. So, when my ‘nostalgia gene’ kicked in, in my 50s, and I became interested in knowing more about the past of my family, they were able to help me gather information. This allowed me to realise in which directions to further direct my researches.

If only I could turn back the clock and speak to my mother or my grandmother or my father’s step-father, whom I knew until I was in my teens, how much more I would have learnt. But, being young, I was looking forwards rather than backwards. And, several unrepeatable opportunities were lost.

My advice to anyone, who wants to learn about their family’s past, is to start young. If a relative says something that recalls the past, jot it down – you never know when you will become seriously interested, and will then value what you have noted.

I decided to set down a summary of what I had researched over the years so that if those who follow me ask about my family’s history when I can no longer recall it, it will be set down in writing. I decided that rather than confine myself to my own family’s history, some of which was based on what my elders have told me, I would try to write something that covered this, but with a more general appeal.

The result is my latest book “Exodus To Africa”, which I hope will interest people who like me have a Jewish South African heritage. Naturally, I hope that this book will also appeal to a more general audience.

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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. 

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