Response to Shirli Gilbert

Abstract

In her article “Scholarship on South African Jews: state of the field”, Shirli Gilbert offers a sweeping yet meticulous account of scholarship on South African Jews beginning on 9 July 1905 when Dr. Joseph Herman Hertz, the Rabbi of the Witwatersrand Old Hebrew Synagogue, gave a keynote address to the first Zionist Conference held in Johannesburg urging Jews to write their own history. Much of Jewish history in South Africa is bound up in histories of Zionist sympathy and support. In the late nineteenth century, the age of the new imperialism during which European global empires were at their zenith, Hertz encouraged Jews to consider their roles as “discoverer and pioneer” in the South African colonies. In current scholarship, with its focus on decolonization and subalterity, an exploration of these roles would be likely to attract censure rather than celebration. Indeed, Jewish historiography from the early twentieth century to the present echoes the contours of the discipline of history more broadly, with so-called empirical accounts told in the tone of “his master’s voice” gradually replaced by a move towards history from below, that is, eschewing Whiggish versions of history as the product and representation of great men and grand events.