The Flogging of Jack Nafte
By Rotem Giladi

The news coursed their way rapidly through the British empire’s domains and well beyond. One report captured the essence of what made the story appear so scandalous to contemporary readers: ‘White Farmer Flogged … for Killing South African Native’. The year was 1929. The scene of the crime, and subsequent trial, was Bethal: a farming town in Eastern Transvaal (present-day Mpumalanga), in the Union of South Africa. The farmer’s name was Jack Nafte. The flogging of a ‘white’ person, as most newspapers reported Nafte to be, was what made the story news fit to print in and out of South Africa. Arthur Conan Doyle, wintering in South Africa with his family, mused about the need for an ‘active Society for the Protection of Natives from Cruelty, especially in cases of labour in outlying farms’ after reading, in Durban, a newspaper report of the case.

In future years, the Bethal potato farms would become infamous for the extreme brutality of a slavery-like forced labour system run by the apartheid state. In time, Bethal would also become a symbol of resistance, thanks to the reporting of activists such as Jewish Ruth First of the Communist Party of South Africa and journalist Henry ‘Mr Drum’ Nxumalo. Yet while Nafte’s flogging sentence fuelled protests and legal appeals, Parliamentary questions and government intervention, electoral manoeuvring and intercessions of mercy, it soon faded from public memory.

The flogging sentence also sparked a fierce controversy within South Africa’s Jewish community, accentuated by the near-complete lack of any reporting of the affair by South Africa’s thriving Jewish press. While reported ‘white’, Jack Nafte was in fact Jewish. Yaacov (or Yankel) Naftelowitz was born in Lithuania, Czarist Russia in 1896; at age 10, he journeyed to South Africa, via London, to join his two older brothers.

That the case should be forgotten was, perhaps, an unlikely outcome. In many respects, the flogging of Jack Nafte presented an unlikely, even fantastic story. It brought together a most unlikely set of protagonists, staring with a ‘boerejode’—a ‘Jewish Boer’—defendant assimilated, in many ways, in an Afrikaner farming community. He was convicted by a jury of his (local) peers—in all likelihood, Afrikaner farmers. The sentence was pronounced by a judge whose father, an illustrious Cape Colony liberal politician, was born Jewish on the Island of St. Helena; later in life he converted to Christianity. At trial, Nafte was defended by a National Party lawyer-politician who would soon turn to fascism and meet, and become an admirer of, Adolf Hitler. In 1956, he would serve as prosecutor in the ‘Treason Trial’: Nelson Mandela was one of the defendants; Ruth First was another. A trailblazing lawyer, a Jewish woman, successfully presented Nafte’s motion to have the lashing sentence postponed.

How did Nafte, and how did the Jews of South Africa—or the British empire—become ‘white’? And just how white could Jews become? The whip, and the exercise of the power to mete out a flogging punishment, attest to the measure of this transformation and to its limits both. In Nafte’s native country, Jewish collective memory held the Jewish protagonist to be at the receiving end of treatment that marked persecution and inferior civil-political status; according to Hebrew and Yiddish literary tropes, he was not the one to hold the whip. In South Africa, however, Nafte’s brutal flogging of an African labourer represented internalised trappings of white status and an acquired place in the country’s racial-political hierarchies.

And yet, the flogging sentence imposed on Nafte revealed that his whiteness remained less-than-stable or secure. This, perhaps, explains why the Executive Council of the South African Board of Jewish Deputies held a ‘special meeting’ to discuss Nafte’s sentence three days after it was announced—but ‘unanimously resolved’ not to ‘join in protest against the severity of the sentence against Nafte’. Instead, the Board decided to ‘take no action in this matter’ because of ‘the grave danger of dragging the Board into this case’. The Board would not be ‘swayed by sentiment in this crisis’; had it interceded on Nafte’s behalf, ‘the very foundations of the Board would be shaken’. In the final analysis, the Board preferred Nafte to be flogged as a white rather than be shown mercy as a Jew. The Board’s attitude, together with the challenges to Jewish whiteness that followed the National Party’s victory in the 1929 elections, helped the episode lapse from memory.

The flogging of Jack Nafte allows us to consider the politics of Jewish assimilation in imperial settings and beyond the state. This episode, like others involving corporal punishment, also suggests that inquiries privileging the Jewish body rather than the seminal texts of political thought or the acts of movements and institutions will likely produce richer understandings of 20^th century Jewish political history and Jewish political agency.