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The
Normalcy of the Australian Jewish Experience
Compared with the span of Jewish history, Australian
Jewry is a very young community. Within two centuries,
however, it has emerged as one of the most vibrant
of Jewish communities in the world. The position of
Jews in Australian society has been rather different
from that of Jews in other places. As historian W.
D. Rubinstein has written, one of the most outstanding
features has been “the normalcy of Jewish life”.
| This
‘normalcy’ can be traced as far back as 1788.
It has been noted that there were at least eight,
and perhaps as many as fourteen Jewish petty criminals
among the convict cargo on the First Fleet. Thus
Jews were among the first whites to arrive in
Australia and so have “never been considered to
be aliens to quite the same extent as elsewhere”.
Most of Australia’s Jews prior to the end of the
19th century were either English-speaking convicts
or migrants from Britain or their Australian-born
descendants. This must certainly have added to
the normalcy of their situation for, apart from
religion,they
passed in colonial society indistinguishable from
the general population. |
Esther Abrahams, Jewish "First Lady"
of N.S.W., from an 1824 portrait
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Overall, the experience of Jewish Australians has
been inextricably bound up with that of all other
whites.
By 1820 a few hundred Jewish people, mostly men, were
living in New South Wales. The first purpose-built
synagogue in Australia was opened in York St, Sydney,
in 1844. Most of the early settlers were Anglo-Jewish,
middle-class immigrants who transposed the English
pattern of Jewish practice to Australia. Synagogues
were modelled on the Anglican Church, with great stress
on decorum and formality, and rabbis wore a ‘dog collar’
so that they looked like Protestant ministers.
In 1878 the Great Synagogue in Sydney was consecrated
and its imposing structure remains an historic feature
of the Sydney landscape. In the 1840s, Jewish congregations
were established in Hobart, Launceston, Melbourne
and Adelaide. Victorian Jewry expanded rapidly as
a result of the gold rushes and increased from 200
in 1848 to 3000 people in 1861. By now Jews were on
the whole well accepted into colonial society. In
the 1860s a visiting rabbi from Jerualem, Rabbi Jacob
Levi Saphir, summed up this situation in his travelogue:
“There is no discrimination
made between nation and nation. The Jews live in
safety, and take their share in all the good things
of the country. They also occupy Government positions
and administrative posts. In this land, they have
learnt that the Jews also possess good qualities,
and hatred towards them has entirely disappeared
here.”
When Queensland became a separate colony, a number
of Jewish families left Sydney for Brisbane, where
a synagogue was consecrated in 1886. The first Jewish
community in Western Australia was formed in 1887
in Fremantle, then a synagogue was opened in Perth
in 1897.
Assimilation
into the Mainstream
By the end of the 19th century Jews participated
in every facet of civic, economic, and social life
in Australia. When small numbers of Jewish refugees
fleeing pogroms in Russia and Poland began to arrive,
the Anglo-Jewish establishment was very concerned.
These new Jews spoke Yiddish, were distinctively dressed
and were less attuned to British or Western European
customs. The Establishment feared that the new immigrants
would provide the wider Australian community with
a new (and negative) image of what Jews were like,
and consequently pushed for their rapid assimilation.
There were many success stories among this new group,
including that of immigrant businessman Sidney Myer,
founder of what is now Coles-Myer.
As the 19th century moved into the 20th, Jewish society
overall became even more assimilated into the majority
Australian culture, with many Jews totally abandoning
their cultural heritage and identity. Jews entered
mainstream Australian public life in ever-increasing
numbers. So much so, that in 1917 the New South Wales
Legislative Assembly had to close on Yom Kippur because
both the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker were Jewish.
This was at a time when Jews in New South Wales made
up only 0.4% of the population. Australian Jewish
men and women served in the Australian Armed Forces
in wars from the Sudan Campaign of 1885 through to
the Vietnam War. For World War One, 11% of the Jewish
community enlisted voluntarily, engaging in both front
line and home front action. An estimated 15% lost
their lives, a figure higher than that of the general
population. Australia’s greatest WW1 leader was the
Jewish Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, who became
commander-in-chief of the AIF.
More Polish Jews, also fleeing pogroms, arrived in
Australia in the 1920s. There was considerable intermarriage
(marriage between Jews and non-Jews) during this period
and into the early 1930s. Observers of the period,
both Jewish and non-Jewish, remarked on the high proportion
of Jews active in public life. In an article entitled
“One Hundred Years of Judaism” in the Sunday Times
newspaper of 24th December 1922, for example, it was
stated:
“‘Every country has the sort of Jews it deserves.’
Berthold Auerbach made this epigram about his own
race and if there is any truth in it, New South
Wales has deserved exceedingly well. In every branch
of our activities since the earliest times, members
of the Jewish community have taken a large and distinguished
part.”
In 1933 the number of Jews in New South Wales was
10 309, but the percentage of Jews in the population
had declined to 0.36%. Nevertheless, the Jews’ contribution
to the general community continued to outweigh their
numbers. Participation in the public life of the nation
was encouraged by both lay and religious leaders,
as they believed that in this way Jews could prove
themselves to be loyal and worthy citizens and thereby
prevent antisemitism,
which they now saw sweeping through Europe. As the
editor of the Hebrew Standard of Australasia
stated, the Jews of Australia were “in a land of freedom,
only to remember that we are citizens of that land
and it is our duty to make that land the best on God’s
earth.”
For further details, read Rutland,
S. (1997) The Edge of the Diaspora, Sydney, Brandl, Schlesinger
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