Born in Randfontein, a gold-mining town 70 kilometers west of Johannesburg, David Goldblatt (1930-2018) was raised in a middle class, liberal white Jewish family who had come to South Africa in the 1890s to escape persecution in Lithuania.
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Though not politically active, his family practiced basic tenets of morality, treating all whom they encountered — Afrikaners, Blacks, and Indians — with fundamental respect. It was not always returned in kind; Goldblatt remembers experiencing anti-Semitism as a child from the colonizers, unclear why they felt the need to degrade him for simply being alive.
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In 1948, the very year Goldblatt graduated high school, the National Party came into power. “I remember on their election poster outside my father’s shop in the main street of Randfontein a caricatured Hoggenheimer, the archetypal Jewish capitalist,” Goldblatt wrote in 2006 for an essay that appears in Some Afrikaners Photographed (Steid).
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“Besides the swart gevaar [Afrikans for ‘Black danger’] Jewish capitalists were the ultimate evil in the eyes of the party. Right-wing Afrikaners made no secret of their sympathies for the Nazis and their hatred of Jews….Aside from a declaration of prejudice against Jews and Indians, this was a government that subscribed to the notion that whites were inherently superior to Blacks. These things weight heavily on us.”
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