According to Robert Blake, Rhodes’s column of five hundred pioneers who first came north back in 1890 included at least one Jew. Four years later, the colony’s first synagogue was established in Bulawayo. Its yizkor board includes the names of two Jewish soldiers who died in the First Matabele War in 1893. Successive waves of Jews arrived in the country for just about every reason Jews arrive anywhere, through to the UDI period. These included Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Orthodox, Conservative, and Zionists. It was just the kind of country that Jews always go to to seek a new life.
Prominent Rhodesian Jews include Bennie Goldin, a Rhodesian High Court justice during the UDI period, Abraham Eliezer Abrahamson, minister of the treasury of Southern Rhodesia during the federal period, Bennie Goldberg, federal minister of education, Sam Levy, Salisbury real estate developer and city councilman, and Ahrn Palley, an independent member of parliament in the 1960s, one of Ian Smith’s most vociferous and articulate critics, and the only white politician to ever win a seat in a “B roll” (i.e., majority black) constituency.
Two men who should likewise be mentioned here are Alfred Beit and Roy Welensky. Beit, a Jewish banker, was a friend and business associate of Cecil Rhodes and was involved in financing many projects in Rhodesia during its earliest years. He is not strictly speaking Rhodesian, as he never actually resided in Rhodesia. But then again, neither did Rhodes himself. Two enduring legacies in Africa still bear Beit’s name. The most obvious is the Alfred Beit Road Bridge over the Limpopo River and the two towns on either end of it: Beitbridge, South Africa and Beitbridge, Zimbabwe. The other is the Beit Trust, which continues to provide scholarships to African students.
Sir Roy Welensky (born Raphael Welensky) was the second of only two prime ministers of the Central Africa Federation (aka “The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland”). He towered over political life in Rhodesia for most of the 1950s and the early 1960s. His father was a Jew from Lithuania. He was not strictly speaking Jewish, as his mother was Afrikaner. According to Robert Blake, young Welensky honed his boxing skills by picking fights with Afrikaners whom he overheard making anti-Semitic comments in Afrikaans.
By all accounts, Jews liked Rhodesia and remember it fondly just as other Rhodesians do. But Jews liked something else about Rhodesia, too. They were able to have a separate Jewish communal life there while suffering very little antisemitism. This was due to sociological conditions unique to Rhodesia. It was tribal, and so quite conducive to a Jewish life apart. Any kind of clannishness, even the need for separate Ashkenazic and Sephardic synagogues, was not out of place. At the same time, while Jews were barely 2.5% of the white population, whites themselves were barely 5% of the black population. This meant that the whites could not afford not to count Jews as fully white and thus the antisemitism prevalent in the British Empire at the time was kept in check. Jews as a group enjoyed high socioeconomic status and there were few if any obstacles to individual Jews going far in business and public life.
Australian-American blogger and orthodox convert Luke Ford has a masthead on his blog that reads:
American Jews want to maintain a distinct identity and on the other hand want to be fully integrated into broader society and don’t want the distinctiveness to come at a price.
Yet it seems that for about three quarters of a century, Rhodesian Jews actually got to live this diaspora dream life that for American Jews has always seemed just beyond the horizon.
Something else Rhodesian Jews had in common with American Jews was their disdain for right-wing politics. The Rhodesian Front and Ian Smith probably counted more black supporters than Jewish supporters, even as a percentage of their respective numbers.
It is not hard to understand why this should be. It is a result of the precarious nature of Jewish exile, the proverbial fiddler on the roof. A black man in Africa is at home. An Englishman in Africa is proudly advancing British civilization in the darkest continent, etc. But a Jew knows this is just one more station in a long chain of exile. Sephardim lived a gilded existence in Andalus for several hundred years, then it ended. The current golden age for Jews in America will end some day, too. Jews were proud to contribute to building Rhodesia and enjoyed everything the country had to offer, but at some level they knew they also owed their position there to being needed to pad out white demographics. Every time they heard a white person refer to black people as “kaffirs” or “munts,” it was a stinging reminder that under different circumstances, similar epithets might be directed at them.
Janice Benatar, in her 2022 youtube video for the myjewishlearning channel, describes her memories of growing up in the Sephardic community of Salisbury with the same glowing nostalgia as any other Rhodesian. She is strongly supportive of the transition to Zimbabwe, even defending the high crime rates there on the not unreasonable grounds that people have nothing to eat. She also describes the near total emigration of the Jews of Zimbabwe by the turn of the 21st century, with only a handful of senior citizens left behind supported financially by their descendants abroad.
Yet this begs the question that should be asked of all Jewish liberals everywhere: if adherence to Jewish values compels the kind of social change that transforms a Rhodesia into a Zimbabwe, why does this tend to produce the kind of country where the existence of a Jewish community is an impossibility and where black people are condemned to starvation and crime?
Zimbabwe is a particularly stark example, but the pattern is too robust across time and place to ignore. What American Jew hasn’t seen something similar happen in the urban neighborhoods where our grandparents grew up? Of course Jews are too few in number to turn the tide politically one way or another on any of these trajectories, but they overwhelmingly voice support for the very trends that destroy communities, including their own. Furthermore, they take these deeply cherished beliefs with them to their newfound locales, where the whole process begins anew. Do they think there is always going to be yet another suburb a little further out or another richer country somewhere they can flee to? Or do the famed liberal “Jewish values” really logically entail the end of Jews and perpetual misery and degradation for everyone else?
Steven Abramowicz, the most prolific Rhodesian Jewish blogger, was a student at Prince Edward School in Salisbury in the 1970s and remembers being beaten up by classmates for doing comic impressions of Ian Smith. Forty years later, he denounces Rhodesia as racist and anti-semitic. Yet despite spending most of his life elsewhere, he hasn’t lost his Rhodesian accent and comes across as the quintessential Rhodesian. He regrets not fighting in the war, even knowing now that it would not be won and even though it was for a cause he did not support. Speaking on Dave Bloom’s youtube channel in 2015, he says:
To this day I regret I never went to the army in Rhodesia. Not because it was right or wrong, because I think I missed out on a murra big adventure...
I miss Rhodesia, not because it was Rhodesia, I miss what is now Zimbabwe. I miss the place and the smells and the people. My dog speaks Chilapalapa.
In 2022, he wrote on his blog:
And every time one of us dies, no matter where they have passed on — Down South, or in America, Australia, Israel, England, wherever — who gathers round the bereaved but other Rhodesians. Messages of comfort, of love, of respect and remembrance from home; because as we get fewer in number, we need each other more and more. Because home just might be where one grew up, and not where one lives now.