Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz, better-known for his stirring sermons and political outspokenness, was also a keen historian.
His pet project during the late 1940s was to document the then little-known role of Jews in the Boer armed forces during the 1899-1902 War. As a result of his efforts, a flurry of articles appeared in both the Jewish and Afrikaans press and much valuable information, now housed in the Jewish Board of Deputies library, was painstakingly collected.
Important work was also done in the field by Eric Rosenthal and Samuel Rochlin, two industrious chroniclers of South African Jewish history who began writing on the subject at least a decade before.
The following article combines the original work of these pioneers with the author’s own updated research and is hopefully not the last word on the subject. The Boer fight for freedom was, after all, one of history’s most stirring independence struggles, and that Jews played a not insubstantial part in it is surely something to take pride in.
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