Sephardic Jews of South Africa

South African Jewry is famously Litvak. Something like eighty to ninety per cent of it descends from Lithuanian Jews who arrived between about 1880 and 1930, most of them from the Kovno region, and that fact dominates every general account of the community.

But the Sephardim were there first, and they are still there. What is easy to miss is that there is no single Sephardi community in South Africa — there are three distinct layers, arriving two centuries apart, with nothing in common except the label.

Which Sephardi communities are we talking about?

Three, and they are unrelated to one another:

A handful of Western Sephardi individuals who passed through or died at the Cape when it was a staging post on the Dutch and English route to India, from the 1660s.
A small number of London Sephardi merchant families who came in the nineteenth century, of whom one built a commercial empire.
The Rhodeslis — Judeo-Spanish-speaking Jews from the island of Rhodes, who arrived from the 1880s and, crucially, arrived again in the 1960s by way of the Belgian Congo and Rhodesia. This is the actual Sephardi community of South Africa, and it is one of the principal surviving fragments of the Jews of Rhodes.

A fourth, smaller wave came from Egypt and Morocco in the 1960s and 1970s.

What happened at the Cape before 1800?

Ships passed through, and almost nobody stayed — because they were not allowed to.

The Dutch East India Company founded its refreshment station at the Cape in 1652, and for a century and a half the Cape existed principally to victual ships on the run to Batavia and India. Company employees had to profess the Reformed religion, so there could be no open Jewish presence and no congregation. The first Jewish settler on record, Johan van Illan in 1669, would necessarily have been a baptised Jew.

But the ships kept coming, and on them were the Sephardi merchants of Amsterdam and London engaged in the Asian trade described on our India page. The Cape is where that route touched Africa.

Religious freedom came with the Batavian Republic in 1803, and the British took the Cape in 1806.

Who was Hieronima de Paiva?

The earliest identifiable Sephardi individual in South Africa — and a life that ties four of this site’s pages together.

Hieronima de Paiva was the widow of Jaques (James) de Paiva, Hebrew name Moses Zagache, the diamond merchant who was the first Jew of Madras and who died there in 1687. Left a wealthy widow on the far side of the world, she became housekeeper, and more, to Elihu Yale, Governor of Fort St George, and bore him a son, Charles Yale.

Charles died at the Cape of Good Hope. In 1712 Hieronima travelled from India to be buried beside him, and her tombstone recorded that she had done so. Julian James Cotton, transcribing the Madras inscriptions in 1905, noted the fact.

Two honest caveats. We do not know whether the stone survives, or where at the Cape it stood — and finding out would be a genuine contribution. And there was no Jewish burial ground at the Cape in 1712, so she must have been interred in a Company or Christian one. Whether she had converted, or whether the burial was simply a practical arrangement for a Portuguese Jewess dying far from any community, we cannot say. We would not call it the oldest Jewish grave in South Africa. But she is certainly the earliest identifiable Sephardi individual in the country, and the earliest woman.

Were there English Sephardim in the nineteenth century?

Yes — but essentially one family.

The first congregation was formed in 1841, when a minyan gathered for Yom Kippur at the Cape Town home of Benjamin Norden, one of the 1820 Settlers from London. They named it Tikvath Israel — the Hope of Israel — for the Cape of Good Hope, which is one of the better congregational names anywhere. The Cape Town Hebrew Congregation followed in 1849, and the St John’s Street synagogue, the first purpose-built one in the country, in 1857.

Norden himself was an English Ashkenazi, and so were most of the Anglo-Jewish arrivals of that period. The genuine Sephardi thread runs through the de Pass family.

Aaron de Pass and his brother Daniel came from the London Sephardi congregation and built one of the great Cape commercial houses — De Pass, Spence & Co. — in shipping, whaling, sealing, fishing, guano and Namaqualand copper. They were among the wealthiest merchants at the Cape and pioneered whole industries. De Pass is a Bevis Marks family, and the connection between the Cape and the Spanish and Portuguese congregation in London runs directly through them. Aaron de Pass was born in 1815 and may have arrived in the 1840s.

Beyond the de Passes, the English Sephardi element in nineteenth-century South Africa is thin, and it consists of individuals inside a predominantly Ashkenazi English emigration rather than a community.

Who are the Rhodeslis?

Judeo-Spanish-speaking Jews from the island of Rhodes — and the real Sephardi community of South Africa.

Rhodes was Ottoman until 1912 and Italian thereafter. Its Jewish community — the Rodeslí — spoke Judeo-Spanish, descended from the exiles of 1492, and by the late nineteenth century was under sustained economic pressure. Its young men began leaving for Africa.

They went in a distinctive pattern, and it is the key to South African Sephardi genealogy: not directly to South Africa, but into central and southern Africa first, as traders and general dealers, and then southward. The nodes were:

The Belgian Congo, especially Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi) in Katanga, where the copper economy drew a substantial Rhodesli community with its own synagogue
Southern Rhodesia — Salisbury, Bulawayo, Gwelo, Umtali — where Rhodeslis ran general dealerships across the country
Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Mozambique — Lourenço Marques and Beira
And South Africa itself, where the Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Johannesburg was founded in 1903, with its Mayfair synagogue in 1917 and a move to Orchards in 1956. Cape Town has its own Sephardi congregation.

Emigration accelerated after the Italian racial laws of 1938.

Why does this community matter beyond South Africa?

Because in 1944 the remaining Jews of Rhodes — about 1,700 people — were deported to Auschwitz, and around 150 survived.

The consequence is that the Rhodesli communities of Africa, together with those of Seattle, Los Angeles and Israel, are the surviving continuation of the Jews of Rhodes. A South African Rhodesli family is not a branch of a community that still exists on the island. It is, in large part, what is left of it.

That should shape how the records are valued and how the interviews are done, because the memory carried out of Rhodes before 1938 is in many cases the only memory there is.

What did the Congo crisis do?

It made the South African Sephardi community what it is today.

Congolese independence in 1960 and the Katanga secession that followed made the position of the Elisabethville community untenable, and it left almost entirely. A large part of it came to South Africa, and the story of how that congregation found a home in Cape Town is documented in the Kaplan Centre’s exhibition on the Green and Sea Point Hebrew Congregation.

So for a great many South African Sephardi families the chain runs Rhodes, then Elisabethville, then Cape Town or Johannesburg — with dates roughly 1900 to 1930 for the first leg and 1960 to 1965 for the second. The middle leg is the one people forget, and it is where the records are.

The Rhodesian community followed later, mostly after 1980, on the same southward path.

What about the North African wave?

Smaller but real: Sephardi and Mizrahi families from Egypt after the expulsions of 1956 and 1967, and from Morocco. For these, our Egypt and Morocco pages are the place to continue, because as on those pages the trail leads back out of Africa’s south and into the community of origin.

What records can you actually reach?

South Africa is, by a wide margin, the best-documented country in this section of the site.

The single best source: estate files and death notices

If you take one thing from this page, take this. South African death notices are exceptional. Filed with the Master of the Supreme Court as part of the deceased estate, a death notice typically records the deceased’s full name, age, birthplace, the names of both parents, marital status, spouse, and the names of all children. For an immigrant it will often give the town in Rhodes, Egypt or Lithuania.

Estate files also contain wills, inventories and correspondence. They are held at the National Archives of South Africa and are largely indexed and imaged through FamilySearch. Start here.

Immigration and naturalisation

Cape, Natal and Transvaal immigration registers and passenger arrival records
Naturalisation files, which give birthplace, date, arrival and occupation — and for Rhodeslis will name Rhodes
Aliens registration under the 1937 Act
For the Congo leg: Belgian colonial archives (the African Archives, Brussels) and Belgian consular records

Jewish institutional

Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town — the research centre for South African Jewry, and the publisher of the Congo exhibition cited above
SA Jewish Rootsbank (UCT)
South African Jewish Board of Deputies archive, Johannesburg, and the Jewish Digital Archive Project
JewishGen Southern Africa SIG — databases, including congregation and cemetery material
Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Johannesburg, and the Sephardi congregation of Cape Town — for membership, marriage and burial records

Cemeteries

Braamfontein and West Park in Johannesburg, Woltemade and Pinelands in Cape Town, and the country cemeteries of the platteland where Rhodesli storekeepers lived and died. eGGSA, the photographic project of the Genealogical Society of South Africa, has photographed a great many gravestones, and the SA-SIG holds Jewish cemetery data.

For the Rhodes end

Italian civil registration for Rhodes from 1912 — the Italian administration registered births, marriages and deaths, and these are the best vital records the community ever had
Ottoman nüfus registers before 1912
The Jewish Museum of Rhodes (Kahal Shalom) and the Rhodes Jewish Historical Foundation
Deportation records for 1944 through Yad Vashem and the Arolsen Archives

What has and hasn’t been researched

Hieronima de Paiva’s grave. Nobody appears to have looked for it. A 1712 stone at the Cape recording a Portuguese Jewess who came from India to be buried beside her son would be a remarkable survival, and it is a bounded question.
The Rhodesli chain has never been traced end to end. The Rhodes records, the Congo records, the Rhodesian records and the South African records exist separately and have not been joined. A family reconstruction across all four would be the single most valuable piece of work available in this field.
The de Pass family is well known commercially and thinly documented genealogically, despite being a Bevis Marks family with records at both ends.
The Congo departure of 1960–65 is within living memory and is being lost. The Kaplan Centre exhibition is a start, not a finish.
Judeo-Spanish in South Africa — the language came with the Rhodeslis and is going. There is very little recorded.

Organisations and repositories

Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town, and SA Jewish Rootsbank.

South African Jewish Board of Deputies archive and the Jewish Digital Archive Project.

National Archives of South Africa — estate files and death notices, immigration, naturalisation.

JewishGen Southern Africa SIG; Genealogical Society of South Africa and eGGSA.

Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Johannesburg; Sephardi Hebrew Congregation of Cape Town.

National Archives of Zimbabwe, Harare; African Archives, Brussels, for the Congo.

Jewish Museum of Rhodes (Kahal Shalom); Yad Vashem and the Arolsen Archives for the 1944 deportation.

Help us find records

South Africa is well served, so the gaps here are specific:

Any trace of Hieronima de Paiva’s grave or burial record at the Cape, 1712
Records of the Elisabethville congregation carried out of the Congo in 1960–65 — membership lists, marriage registers, photographs
Rhodesli family papers documenting the move from Rhodes to Africa: passports, Italian identity documents, letters
Records of the Bulawayo and Salisbury Sephardi congregations
Recordings of Judeo-Spanish as spoken in South Africa
De Pass family papers at either end

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

South African Sephardi research is usually three countries deep. The South African records are excellent and will take you back to the arrival; the arrival is rarely from Rhodes directly, but from the Congo, Rhodesia or Mozambique; and behind that lies the Italian and Ottoman documentation of Rhodes itself. The commonest mistake is to search only in South Africa and conclude the trail ends there. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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