Note 97 — Chapter VI · THE DUTCH IN AFRICA

The part played by the Jews in the development of South Africa has been as remarkable as their share in the settlement and civilizing of North Africa, of the West Indies and the Guianas, of Australia and New Zealand. Between 1840 and 1850 a number of Jewish business houses were founded or became prominent in Cape Colony and Natal. They started the guano collecting off the S.W. coast, the mohair, wool, hides, sealskin and whale oil industries, and sugar-planting. Notable among such were the De Pass and Mosenthal firms. The De Passes came (I believe) from Gibraltar, and followed to the Cape of Good Hope the first consignments of British troops. The protection given by the British Government to Spanish-speaking Jews at Gibraltar from the early part of the 18th century onwards was well rewarded by a great increase of British commerce and political power in the Mediterranean. The Mosenthals were attracted to South Africa by the importation of German troops and German colonists. Already in the early sixties members of the firm of Lilienfeld were established in the Orange Free State and hastened to develop the diamond mining industry of the future Kimberley district. The part played by Alfred Beit (of a Hamburg Christian-Jewish family), by the Lipperts, the Honourable Simeon Jacobs, Sir Sigismund Neumann, Sir Lionel Phillips, Sir George Albu, Sir David Harris, Senator Samuel Marks, Professor Alfred Mosely, by the Mendelssohns, Rabinowitzes, and Rapaports, in South African finance, politics, industry, education, law, and philanthropic work has been a considerable one; and recent South African history, either in the Boer states or in the British colonies and protectorates, cannot be written in detail without an allusion to their names, their achievements, their intentions, influence, mistakes, and dogged, persevering belief in the resources and splendid future of Cis- or Trans-Zambezian Africa. This was a region in earlier days so unpromising to the eye and on the surface that it needed the Semitic flair for gold and precious stones—the same mysterious divination which led the Sabaeans (I am sure) to Zimbabwe, the Phoenicians to Spain, and the Arabs to the Ashanti hinterland—to induce that persistent opening-up of Grikwaland, Orangia, inner Cape Colony, the Transvaal and Rhodesia, which has by the first decade of the 20th century laid the foundations of another United States in the southern quarter of Africa.