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."
