Contemporary Australia and its Jewish Past, by Gillian Polack

 I’ve been explaining Jewish Australia to many people recently. This is because the antisemitism here is hurting.

Why is this emerging right now?

At the special memorial event at the Opera House on the Day of Mourning (yesterday, from where I’m typing), many Australians were shocked when they heard the perfectly normal (for Jewish Australia) reminder not to hang around and chat, to keep an eye out, to leave quickly. Until that moment, I think everyone thought their Jewish friends lived as freely as they themselves did. On top of the murders at Bondi Beach, this was an eye-opener. Why was it an eye-opener? 

Jewish Australians have not been treated well for a while now.

Bigots are saying that Jews should leave Australia. We’re not considered Australian. A new migrant said that to me personally last week. That they're working towards citizenship makes them more Australian than my five generations of family. I love it that they are becoming citizens, but my father’s mother’s family were citizens at Federation, and were here decades before then. They don’t know this. It’s not actually conceivable to them that any Jews might be born in Australia.

When someone tells me this, I talk history. History helps lead into a discussion of what is Jewish Australia and what its origins are. It also helps us understand that narratives about Jews in Australia help support the bigotry.

So what is the Jewish history of Australia?

It began in 1788 with the First Fleet and the initial colonisation of Australia by the British. There were a number of Jewish convicts on the first Fleet and at least one Jewish free settler.

That free settler was a baby, Roseanna or Rosanna. Her mother was a 15 year old convict, Esther Abrahams. Esther fell into an arrangement with Major George Johnston, one of the leaders of the Rum Rebellion and they became one of the power couples of the colony. To put the rebellion into perspective of British history, the governor they deposed was Bligh, the same Bligh who suffered the mutiny on the Bounty. Bligh’s daughter kept the rebels at bay with a parasol, but that’s another story. 1808 was an exciting year for the colony.

Eventually Esther married George, but they had children together before that. Those children were baptised, but their older half-sister remained Jewish, to the best of my knowledge. When Johnston was on trial in the UK for his role in the rebellion, Esther managed his holdings and pretty well managed the whole of the colony of NSW, to boot. A friend once drove me down a wide road and announced, “This is the road Esther used to race on.” She raced carriages, of course, and I cannot think of a better start to Jewish life in Australia than Esther winning her carriage races.

I was going to give you a proper potted history, but the carriage racing has led me astray. I’ll tell you about just a few of the more interesting people. I shall eschew chronology and wander wherever I feel like… until I reach the point I intend to eventually make.

First, let me wander back to the UK. A book was published there in 1890. It brought English fairy tales to life and it was written by Joseph Jacobs, who wasn’t an Australian citizen - he was a subject of the British Empire, since Australia didn’t exist at that time - but he was born in 1854 in Sydney. He wasn’t the only Jewish writer from Sydney (not by a long way), but he was one of the most influential. He gave so much of the world their standard versions of English fairy tales. He had a splendid career as a folklorist, and he also spent much of his life fighting antisemitism. He died in New York in 1916, from memory.

I don’t know why I must move from a renowned teller of fairy tales to orcas, but I must.

Last year I spent a week in Eden, exploring several subjects for my fiction. Eden is a beautiful town in the very south of NSW. It was a whaling town for a long time, since before European settlement, I suspect. Why do I suspect this? Its whaling process included locals from old Yuin families. Teams of orcas work with teams of humans. The death rate of humans in this type of whaling was phenomenally low and the orcas punished the humans if the humans didn’t behave and… I need to find out more. While I was exploring, I discovered… one of the whalers was Jewish. His name was Solomon Solomons and I am currently trying to work out if one of his relatives married one of mine.

The important aspect of Mr Solomons was not the whaling. That’s just a curiosity. His importance was that he represents a number of families who, when they came to NSW or to Victoria, set up shops and trade and even hotels in the new country towns. Without these Jewish families (including mine) Australia would have been an entirely different country. From the 1820s through to the 1930s, a single large family would help hold together a whole region. Smaller families (my mother’s grandfather’s, for instance) would connect two or three towns. Colonial Australia was all about farming, and the farmers needed goods. Not all goods were provided by Jewish traders, but that connectivity was terribly important.

It led to bright young Jewish men being brought up rurally, who then went to the Big Smoke and made it big. One of these men was Isaac Isaacs, from Yackandandah, who helped bring about the White Australia Policy (where Jews were never quite White) and who was also Australia’s first home-grown Governor-General.

Jews were not considered White in Australia under the White Australia Policy, but individual Jews were given a kind of honorary status under it. Sir John Monash (who is the main reason many in Australia’s military right are not antisemitic) didn’t benefit from this. When I chatted with locals in the Somme region a few years back, they were very surprised. They had no idea that he was Jewish. 

He nearly didn’t get the job that saved all those lives because of those lobbying against a Jewish solder becoming a general and leading at such an important time.

How did this antisemitism operate? How does it still operate)?

Violent antisemitism used to be much rarer in Australia than it is now. The quiet discrimination against individuals, even those as acclaimed as Monash, was far more typical.

There was some violence (a letterbomb led to a cousin of mine being unable to walk half a century ago, for instance), but mostly it was graffiti, and snark and discrimination. The nicer side of antisemitism was “Keep your differences to yourselves and avoiding being to obvious and we’ll accept you.” This is why so many people were surprised by the closing comment at the memorial: they had no idea that our everyday was different to theirs.

I always describe this as a Gentlemen’s Agreement variety of antisemitism, because it has a fair amount of overlap with the style depicted in Hobson’s novel. It goes right back to the early colonial days. It meant that Jews were accepted in places and professions, but not all. My great-uncle was unable to join the same golf club as his friends, for instance, and, years later, I was told, “You don’t have the right background” for certain other activities. This is a deep current in Australian culture, and still applies. Chanukah on the Beach, the event where so many people were murdered, was criticised just last month because “If Jews hadn’t been out there, celebrating, they could not have been killed.” We’re denied speech in this place and that right now because, “It won’t be safe.”

I can’t help but thinking that this would be a lovely element in an historical novel. That small thing, that trifle, that can change a whole plot. However… while it’s easy to write about the famous people in Jewish history. It’s not so easy to write about the rest of us. We’re not in historical novels. In fact, not even the famous Jewish Australians are in most historical novels. I did some research into Jews in novels by Australian historical fiction writers years ago, and there were few and none of them were major characters. No Esther Abrahams, no Rosanna, not even John Monash.

This is part of the hiding. Historically, some events expose us and make us visible. The Holocaust was one such thing. Bondi Beach in December was another. Yet the work of Linda Phillips to get Australian singers known and to compose and to give cheek to the very misogynistic journalists she worked with is only known to her family. How I know it, in fact, is because she was my father’s first cousin. She lived across three centuries and changed the world around her… but she was Jewish.

I will be writing more about our history, I think. There’s so much fodder for novels… but not if it’s hidden alongside most of Jewish Australia.

T

History and Bigotry, by Leslie Wilson

Paul von Hindenburg, one of the two generals
commanding German troops on 23rd August
1914 at Allenstein

A hundred years ago today was the start of the battle of Tannenberg. It was fought at Allenstein,(Polish Olsztyn), in what was then East Prussia, which is actually 30km away from Tannenberg but in the fifteenth-century battle of Tannenberg, the Teutonic Knights were defeated by the Kingdom of Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania, and this battle was renamed in order to wipe out what was seen as shame.

In the 20th-century Battle of Tannenberg, the Second Russian Army was annihilated, and the subsequent Battle of the Masurian Lakes consolidated that defeat. It was also notable for being a battle in which trains were used to transport corps of German soldiers about; the Russians could not use railways, because their trains used a different gauge from German rolling stock. So technology entered the war.
I should be very surprised to read any mention of this in any of the papers today, or read that it would appear on any of the commemorative broadcasts, though it was strategically so important, and the human cost was so enormous (78,000 Russians killed or wounded, 12,000 Germans. 92,000 Russian soldiers became prisoners of war. The Russian general shot himself.) I have been looking at the schedules and not one that I have seen (readers of this blog are very welcome to point out anything I have not noticed) has dealt with the German experience of World War 1, though there have been many which have dealt with hitherto unnoticed contributors or combatants. But these are all on 'our side.'

I find this deeply depressing. I fear it only reinforces the old jingoistic stereotyping which has made the war something to be celebrated, (particularly by our current Prime Minister) as a war 'we' were right to fight, which validates current and future wars. It makes me think of the memorial I saw in a church in Dorset, which bore the quotation from the Bible: 'He who loses his life for my sake shall gain it.' The radical rabbi Jesus, who said: 'Love your enemy', would surely have been appalled by the suggestion that the mass killing of WW1 was done for his sake.

I would love to see the British exploring the German and Austrian experience of the war, while the Germans and Austrians look at what it was like for the British, the French and the Russians (and all the other combatants). This might begin to change people's mindsets and perhaps ward off further wars, with all the death and misery they involve.
In contrast to the Dorset memorial however, what I have seen on many visits to Germany is the transformation of war memorials, originally erected to glorify 19th-century military victories, into what is called a 'Mahnmal' or a warning memorial, complete with an inscription pointing out the evil of waging aggressive war. Clearly, this is a reaction to the glorification of war in Nazi Germany, and the murderous bellicosity of Adolf Hitler (he was furious after the Munich agreement, for 'peace in our time' was absolutely not what he wanted).

Mahnmal in the Luebbener Hain National
Park in Brandenburg. The plate reads:
Millions of victims of two world wars
call for peace.
Photo: J-H Janssen

However, in spite of all the work that has been done, I was horrified to see that there was an arson attack on a synagogue in Wuppertal this July (the old Wuppertal synagogue was burned down during the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938). The attack, and the hostile anti-semitism which German Jews are now suffering, is thought to be the work of Muslims (FREE PALESTINE was daubed on the walls), but nevertheless there seems to be a resurgence of anti-semitism among other Germans. Part of this may be the legacy of the Communist state, which dismissed the Holocaust as the work of 'the fascists' and thus never engaged with it, as eventually happened in the West. Be that as it may, Jews are being attacked and insulted again in Germany - but not only there, or even chiefly there. It is happening all over Europe and also in Britain.

Clearly, in an atmosphere where racism is becoming respectable again, prejudice against Jews will arise, as well as against Muslims, other Asians, Afro-Caribbean people, Eastern Europeans, and so on. But there is an anti-semitism that is not confined to extreme right-wingers; it can be heard among members of the liberal left.

It is 'justified' by the actions of the state of Israel in Gaza. Israel, according to this narrative, is a gigantic bully, supported by America, powerful, nuclear-armed, aggressive and murderous, and comparisons are even made with Nazi Germany. There is an assumption that all Jews, wherever they are, support all Israel's actions, or are responsible for them. Karl Sabbagh, replying in the Guardian letters page to Jon Henley's account of anti-semitism in Europe, says that since Israel describes itself as 'the Jewish state', 'Jews can hardly complain that the actions of the self-identified Jewish state are sometimes criticised as Jewish actions.'

Photo: Doronef via Wikimedia Commons

Leaving aside the crashing lapse of logic in this statement, it does typify this kind of anti-semitism. Jews, according to this argument, have no right to their own individual views and opinions; they must be judged by the actions of the Israeli government. So the Jew you see in the local supermarket is made responsible for the deaths of children in Gaza. And this kind of hostile (and simplistic) assumption is being made by people who condemn other forms of racism. Yet I know that many Jews (including Israeli citizens) are appalled by the bombardment of Gaza and have wanted ja just peace with Palestinians for years and years. 

What is needed here is a sense of history (though what I have been talking about is the last unrolling of a dismal historical scroll), for that image of Israel is itself a monstrous, deceptive construct of self-righteous prejudice. I know that many people (including some who write to the letters page of the Guardian) may dismiss what I am going to say as specious, yet it is not.

pogrom, Bialystock, 1906, by Henry Nowodworski
(1875-1930)

Zionism began as a result of the pogroms in Russia and the Dreyfus case, at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries; the state of Israel was created in the aftermath of the Holocaust and a war that was emphatically not fought for the Jews. The British, for example, were reluctant to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany (though most people believe otherwise) and though I was always told how horrified Britons were by the documentary about Belsen, I watched that documentary through, at the Imperial War Museum, and at no point in the commentary was it stated that the dead and dying people in the camp were mainly Jews. Anne Karpf writes extensively about this blanking-out of the Holocaust, post-war, in The War After. And no sooner was the war over than Mosley and his fascists were out on the streets of London, attacking London's Jews (many of them ex-servicemen) while the police turned away and did nothing.

Furthermore, the Nazis found eager accomplices in most of the countries they invaded; France, Hungary, Romania, Latvia, the Ukraine spring to mind. It is that historical indifference or murderous hostility that fires Israel's determination to defend herself. And as soon as Israel came into existence, its neighbours declared war on it, and many of them are still determined to wipe it out. To be an Israeli has been, from the outset, to be the object of attack, and it helps nobody to dismiss that fact.

This is not to deny the historic and present suffering of Palestinians. For what my personal opinion, as an outsider, is worth, I wish all success to the enormously courageous organisations which have spent years working to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. Some of these have been set up by people who have lost loved ones in the conflict, and are still prepared to enter into dialogue with their counterparts on the other side. We hear little about these initiatives in the newspapers, just as, during the Northern Ireland conflict, the media told us little about the work of groups and individuals, without which the peace process would have stood little chance.

Daniel Barenboim wrote movingly in the Guardian last month: 'Only through trying to understand the other side’s plight can we take a step towards each other.' Those of us who stand outside the Middle Eastern conflict should surely consider the plight of Israelis as well as Palestinians, and Barenboim's words also apply to the WW1 commemorations, for the heirs of the conflict should surely do all they can to learn about and understand the plight of all participants in that horrific tragedy.