The JRB presents an excerpt from Darker Shade of Pale: Shtetl to Colony by Deborah Posel.

Darker Shade of Pale: Shtetl to Colony
Deborah Posel
Wits University Press, 2025

Chatzkel’s luck

Chatzkel landed in Cape Town in 1895 and headed straight for the Witwatersrand. He was following in the footsteps of his brother-in-law Harris Plein who had made the journey five years before, in 1890. Harris had followed his older brother Solomon, who must have been among the earliest of the Russian Jews to have reached these goldfields.

Harris’s and Solomon’s long treks northwards to the Witwatersrand goldfields would have been far more gruelling than Chatzkel’s. The railway from Cape Town to Johannesburg had been completed in 1892. Chatzkel had the good fortune of arriving three years later, which spared him the slow and arduous trek by ox wagon that travellers in years past had to take, spending several weeks to months on the move, depending on the surprises sprung on the way. The train journey, on the other hand, was likely a three-day, two-night affair, suggests Gordon Pirie, historian of the early railways, although unscheduled stops and interruptions could have made it a lot longer.  For the rapidly expanding mining industry—and the country at large—this innovation would revolutionise the importing and exporting of people and things, a key ingredient in the recipe for Johannesburg’s dramatic rise.

There’s no knowing whether Chatzkel’s train arrived in Johannesburg at night or during the day. Had he arrived after dark, he would have been stunned by the electric lights that dazzled in the town centre. Remarkably, the first central power station had been established by 1890—only four years after the discovery of gold. Streetlights were duly installed, including in Pritchard Street, the already fashionable shopping street, with its cutting-edge glass and steel arcade.

It must have been a magical sight—not least because it was entirely unexpected. Approaching Johannesburg by train at night, one PE Bodington found it alluring: ‘one is weirdly impressed by the blaze of electric light which bursts from the otherwise opaque blackness of the lonely African night.’

Bodington was visiting from Britain; he would have seen electric lighting before. Not so for Chatzkel. Electrification in the Russian Empire had been slow; by the end of the century, only Moscow and St Petersburg had made any progress. Reb Yehuda Schrire, a fellow immigrant from the Pale, was captivated by encountering electricity for the first time in Johannesburg; ‘electric fire’, he called it. There’s something obviously metaphorical about seeing a scintillating sparkle in the pitch dark for the first time—if Chatzkel was inclined to see the light in this way.

Had he arrived during the day, Johannesburg would have shown itself more honestly: more brash and brutal than magical. The air was dirty. Every traveller complained of the ubiquitous dust, a mix of sand blown in from the mine dumps and the sand churned up by the horse-drawn carts on the unpaved streets. According to the well-heeled Florence Phillips (wife of mining magnate Lionel Phillips), ‘the place was very dirty and fearful odours abounded’. Undeterred, the pace in town was brisk and busy; even in its early years, ‘the bustling crowd was quite different from anything else in South Africa’. It was a burgeoning city in a hurry; its tempo of impetuous speed was palpable.

Johannesburg was edgy too, a sense of menace circulating with the dust. Florence Phillips commented that firearms were commonplace, carried openly. Some of the ladies of the town also resorted to guns to protect themselves. Florence was a member of the Ladies Revolver Club and owned her own gun, which she insisted her (White) domestic servants carry as they went about their errands in the town. Maurice Harbord, who took up a commission with the Transvaal Police in the late 1890s, was convinced that the town had a ‘larger criminal population for its size than any other town in the world’.

Crime spanned the spectrum, from the work of well-organised criminal syndicates and gangs to more opportunistic cases of property theft, gruesome assault and murder. All were at risk. Wealthy home owners and prosperous shopkeepers could be robbed, often violently. Lowly mine workers could be assaulted and robbed of their meagre wages. Dishevelled proprietors of modest stores on the edge of the town could be ‘disembowelled and decapitated’.

Sjamboks and whips were common sights, typically in the hands of the self-appointed guardians of the emerging racial order. In 1894, the Sanitary Board (the municipal authority that had formed to govern the place) made it an offence for ‘Natives’ to walk on the town’s pavements. The penalty for breaking the rule was two pounds or ten lashes. ‘As most of the Natives could not pay the fine, lashes were freely inflicted.’

Violence would be part of Johannesburg’s lingua franca from the outset.

As Chatzkel stepped away from the railway station and began exploring, his gaze would have taken in a landscape of blistering inequality already taking shape. Walking to the east and north of the railway line, he would have glimpsed the distant outlines of the ample houses and their spacious gardens belonging to the town’s elite, set in the neat suburbs of Parktown and Doornfontein. Had Chatzkel headed off to the south and west, beyond the central business district, his visitor’s eye would have alighted upon the ramshackle dwellings of the poorer classes, already congested and overcrowded. Charmless corrugated iron structures they were, many of them simple one-room shacks; home to most of the hapless arrivals struggling to get their bearings.

The cost of living in Johannesburg was notoriously high and many lived with the risk of destitution. Most of those crammed into these desperate parts were single men, who spent their spare time ‘drinking, whoring and gambling’. Olive Schreiner, then a resident of Johannesburg, was one among many appalled by this vortex of vice. ‘I have lived on various places on earth, Monte Carlo, London, Paris; I have worked among the outcast women and drunken sailors in the East End; but anything so appalling, so decayed I have never seen. One realized in Johannesburg what the tone of society must have been in the reign of Charles I. The whole moral fibre relaxed.’

Chatzkel would have noticed and understood from the start that this was a place for hustlers and adventurers. The going would be tougher than in Cape Town, but the promise of reward that much greater. It seems to me entirely appropriate that of the two Posel brothers, it would be Chatzkel who settled in Johannesburg, while Bere remained in Cape Town. I can’t help thinking that early Johannesburg would have eaten Bere and Beila alive.

~~~

• Deborah Posel is a sociologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town. She has written extensively on South Africa’s past and present, and the making of the country’s racial order in particular.

~~~

Publisher information

A family saga that weaves the old Jewish world into the new. Deborah Posel leaves no stone unturned. Trauma and silences are exposed, context and contingency revealed. A deeply researched and moving account unveiling the world awaiting Jewish immigrants to South Africa during the great migrations from Europe. An innovative and valuable contribution to South African historiography.
—Milton Shain, Emeritus Professor of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town

Part memoir, part global history, part historical sociology, part meditation on the ways in which inherited trauma shapes individual lives, Darker Shade of Pale is a poignant story about the life of Deborah Posel’s paternal grandfather. Like the majority of the Jewish immigrants who came to South Africa from the eastern European lands that made up the Pale of Settlement, he was not a remarkable man. His life was not particularly exceptional. But, as Posel shows so brilliantly and with much empathy in this stunning book, he and the thousands like him also belong to the historical record. By giving sympathetic account of her grandfather’s otherwise unremarkable life, Posel not only challenges the myth of Jewish exceptionalism that is so key to the historiography of Jewish Studies in South Africa, she also debunks one of the basic pillars of anti-Semitism.
—Jacob Dlamini, Associate Professor, Department of History, Princeton University

Darker Shade of Pale traces early twentieth century Jewish migration from the Russian Empire to colonial South Africa through one man’s life. Blending personal memoir and historical inquiry, Deborah Posel reveals the hidden costs of uprooting—dislocation, ambition, shame—and the shame of failure in a settler colony.

A sweeping story with intimate roots, Darker Shade of Pale traces a little-known chapter in the history of global migration: the journey of families at the turn of the twentieth century from the Jewish territories of the Russian Empire, called The Pale of Settlement, to the far-flung British colony of South Africa.

At the heart of this book by acclaimed South African sociologist, Deborah Posel, is the story of her grandfather, Maurice Posel. An ordinary man whose struggles and disappointments mirror those of countless others, this book challenges the common narrative of Jewish immigrant success in South Africa. Darker Shade of Pale brings into focus the traumas of dislocation along with the pressures to succeed and the shame of failure. Through one man’s unfulfilled hopes, we discover what was given and what was taken as immigrants sought to build new lives in a strange land.

From the shtetl’s rigid traditions to the racial hierarchies of the British Empire, Posel explores how migrants navigated social orders. She reveals how Jewish preoccupations with status and success travelled from shtetl to colony, and the psychological costs incurred; the ironies of this journeying for literate, working women from the shtetl; the version of whiteness that South Africa assigned to Jews from Eastern Europe and the various ways in which they interacted with Black people; the unexpected economic routes they chose as well as the prejudicial punches that Jewish immigrants had to take—from both the British and the already-assimilated English-speaking Jewish community in South Africa.

Lyrical, probing and unflinching, Darker Shade of Pale is a powerful reminder that the migrant’s story is never simple and always singular.