Flogging Jack Nafte: Corporal Punishment, Imperial Assimilation, and Jewish Whiteness in Pre-Apartheid South Africa

This article focusses on the whip and the body to examine an imperial variety of Jewish assimilation. Empire, the article argues, not only provided Jews more diverse opportunities for social mobility and economic and political integration than the nation-state; its variegated categories and racial hierarchies made Jewish whiteness–at any rate, some kind of Jewish whiteness–more attainable than the imagined ethnic homogeneity of the nation-state. In the imperial space of the Union of South Africa, where they were neither ‘native’ nor ‘English’ or ‘Boer’, Jews could strive to attain whiteness that was relative, flexible, and variegated; unstable, yet more readily negotiable. To this end, the article reconstructs the ‘notorious’ trial and controversial flogging sentence imposed in 1929 Transvaal on a Jewish farmer who was classified as ‘European’ and ‘white’ in court records and in press reports throughout the British empire and beyond. The flogging of Jack Nafte illustrates how individual Jews and Jewish community institutions negotiated different shades of whiteness in imperial settings and how, in order to contend with the bar of Jewish ‘unassimilability’ in pre-apartheid South Africa, they could devise two pathways to whiteness: one English, the other Afrikaner.