This article offers an outline of the anatomy of the Jewish community in Cape Town, South Africa, during the last few years of the 19th and the first 30 years of the 20th century. Although the community’s roots lie in the arrival earlier in the 19th century of a small number of English and German Jews, it was after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 that great numbers of Russian Jews migrated to South Africa. According to the 1904 Cape census 8,114 Jews lived in Cape Town proper, and a further 2,568 in the suburbs. Jewish immigration to South Africa continued to increase until 1923. In that year, Section 4(1)(a) of the Immigrants Regulation Act began to be used selectively against Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The article pays attention to the following topics: places of origins and places of settlement of the Jewish migrants; their language, Yiddish; their education and way of living; crime; health and sanitation; charity societies, Hebrew congregations and Jewish associations; and the participation of Jews in politics and trade unions. Ref.
