We're thrilled to share a new article by Prof. Rotem Giladi just published in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History: “Flogging Jack Nafte: Corporal Punishment, Imperial Assimilation, and Jewish Whiteness in Pre-Apartheid South Africa”.
The article examines a ‘notorious’ 1929 Court case that put the Union of South Africa ‘through a fiery ordeal’. It involved a flogging sentence imposed on an East Transvaal farmer found guilty for beating an African servant to death. While described in court record and reported throughout the British empire as ‘white’ and ‘European’, the farmer was, in fact, Jewish. By charting the controversy resulting from the flogging sentence, Prof. Giladi explores how individuals and community institutions negotiated Jewish whiteness in pre-apartheid South Africa. Imperial racial categories and hierarchies, he argues, made some kind of Jewish whiteness more attainable than the imagined ethnic homogeneity of the nation-state.