JEWISH BITTEREINDES OF THE ANGLO-BOER WAR

David Saks is Associate Director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and editor of Jewish Affairs. He is the author of a number of books on South African political, military and Jewish history, including Boerejode: Jews in the Boer Armed Forces, 1899-1902 (2010).

Editor’s note:

To mark the centenary of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, Jewish Affairs devoted its Spring 1999 issue to examining the Jewish role in the conflict. The issue quickly became one of the most popular ever brought out by the journal, which went on to publish further articles on the subject during the following decade. This year being the 120^th anniversary of the commencement of the war, it is an opportune time for Jewish Affairs to revisit this perennially interesting topic, and accordingly, the remaining issues of 2019 will include further items relating to it. We hope readers will forgive the editor for kicking off the series with one of his own pieces, which looks at some of the Jews who not only served on the Boer side, but chose to do so long after the war was lost – in the parlance of the time, “to the bitter end”. An earlier version of the article appeared in the Chanukah 2009 issue of Jewish Affairs.

The Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, the 120^th anniversary of which falls on 11 October this year, was the last and by far the greatest of the many conflicts that wracked South Africa during the 19^th Century. The result of the war, which pitted the forces of two small[1] Boer republics, the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) and the Orange Free State, against the full might of the British Empire, was never seriously in doubt. Even so, during its opening months, it was the British who were firmly on the back foot as they struggled to expel Boer invasion forces in Natal, the Eastern and North-Western Cape and Bechuanaland. Typically, the Boers settled for besieging British garrisons, in Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking, and in attempting to relieve them, the British suffered a series of embarrassing reverses. By the end of February 1900, however, the tide had turned decisively. Within a few months, the Boer capitals of Bloemfontein and Pretoria had fallen and those Boers still under arms were being driven steadily eastwards towards the Mozambique border. It looked all but over, but in reality, the Boers were far from finished. Too outnumbered to continue waging a conventional war, they now split up into smaller units that roamed the countryside and harried the British invaders at every opportunity.

The Jewish Boers

While native-born Afrikaners comprised the vast majority of those who served in the Boer armed forces, between two and three thousand were from other backgrounds. They included Dutch, German, Irish, Scandinavian and other foreign volunteers who made their way to South Africa to fight for the republics. A small number, perhaps 300 in all, were Jews. Some were themselves volunteers from European countries while a handful, including members of the pioneering Baumann family in Bloemfontein, had been born in the republics. The majority, however, were recent immigrants from Lithuania and other East European territories forming part of the then Russian Empire. Being citizens, Free State Jews were conscripted like everybody else; in the ZAR, where few Jews had burgher rights, most of those who served would done so as volunteers.

Unlike the foreign detachments, Jews never comprised a distinct corps, but were spread throughout the Boer forces. The advantage of this from this writer’s point of view was that when writing my book Boerejode: Jews in the Boer Armed Forces, 1899-1902, I was able to bring in all the main features of the war through referring to the role that individual Jews played in them. There turned out to be a Jewish angle, however small, to all the major battles and sieges, the guerrilla war, the home front, the POW camps and even to a limited extent the tragedy of the concentration camps. At least eight Jews were killed in action and four more died in captivity.[2] Nearly a hundred became POWs (sometimes on suspicion of assisting the Boers rather for having actually fought with them).