Zion on the Cape: A Different South Africa

Mirza Khan

Administrative stuff: This TL grew out of this thread. Ruisramos proposed the original idea, and myself and Valdemar II fleshed it out into a passable TL. This is the final, slightly longer version. If no one has any major objections, I'll put it in the Finished TLs and Scenarios forum.

Also, I will be imposing a butterfly net-until 1850, the world outside of South Africa will basically go as OTL. The only real differences will be Portugal's actions that form the POD, and I think they are plausible within the context of Portugal's exploration/trade in the Indian Ocean and Africa, and its policy toward its Jewish population.
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It is often true that the great stories of history begin in unassuming, even incongruos ways. The nation of Capeland is no different, for it owes its beginning to the need of merchant ship crews for grain and beef.

The year was 1516. Six years earlier, the Kingdom of Portugal had conquered the Indian city of Goa from the kings of Bijapur, and had captured the Malaysian entrepot of Malacca the next year. Portugal's trade in the Indian ocean was expanding, and with it the number of ships making the long, ardous journey around Africa's Cape of Good hope. Gradually, some in Portugal had come to realize the need for a way station, a small harbor where Portuguese ships could stop, take on supplies, let their crews rest on land, and perhaps make some basic repairs. In 1516, Portuguese explorer Jose da Silvia [a fictional character, obviously], one of the main proponents of this idea, was finally outfitted with the men and supplies to establish an outpost on the Cape of Good Hope.

Da Silvia did excellent work, and by 1521, a modest castle and docks, known as the Forte da Boa Esperanca (Good Hope Fort), had gone up on the site (still intact today-Kaapstadt's oldest building, and one of its main tourist attractions). At first, the castle had obtained its food supplies by trading with the natives, however, Da Silvia desired a more reliable source, and asked the Portuguese government in Lisbon to send some more settlers to farm the surrounding land. Wanting a cheap source of labor, the Portuguese crown rounded up about a thousand "undesirables", most of whom were Jewish converts to Catholicism suspected of having secretly remained Jews. Sentenced to deportation, the unfortunate souls were crowded into three small ships and sent off, never to see their native country again.

On arriving in Boa Esperanca, the new inhabitants were given plots of land to farm, and most took to growing wheat or cattle ranching. The new arrivals did well, comparatively speaking, and gradually-especially after the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536-Boa Esperanca came to be seen as something of a penal colony, and suspected Jews rounded up by the inquisition were sometimes sent there-almost always impovershed ones that the Portuguese saw little value in taxing. A few Jews are even recorded as having moved to Boa Esperanca voluntarily, to escape persecution in mainland Portugal. All in all, its estimated the Portuguese deported between five to seven thousand people to Boa Esperanca over the course of the 16th century.

The Cape area has a rather pleasant, almost Europe-like climate, and, after the deportees got over the shock of their arrival, they found they could grow most of the same crops that they could in Europe. The Portuguese had made a practice of deporting whole families to Boa Esperanca, and thus by 1600, natural increase had produced a "deportee" population of slightly less than 20,000. The overwhelming majority of these were Jews, and, despite being "officially" Catholic, most still secretly practiced Judaism. However, the Jews continued to supply valuable food, and labor to repair Portuguese merchantmen, so the governors of Boa Esperanca didn't really care what their true religion was, so long as they were descrete about it and maintained a veneer of Christianity. (The inquisition saw things differently, and the few visits from the Portuguese Holy Office were occasions of great dread. Mostly, though, the inquisitors had bigger fish to fry than a small outpost at the bottom of the world).

Other than the Jews, Boa Esperanca had a Christian population of about 1,500-comprised mostly of its garrison, colonial administrative staff, and their families. As the colony grew, it also got into some conflicts with the local inhabitants, the cattle-raising Khoikhoi and hunter-gatherer San. While at first the two groups had peacefully traded with the Portuguese, the expansion of the colony eventually resulted in two conflicts, in 1541-1544 and 1553-1558. However, smallpox decimated the Khoikhoi and San populations, and after the end of the second war, the Khoikhoi were forced to either leave or become laborers (in some cases slaves, in other cases working for a low wage) on (mainly Jewish owned) farms. By 1600, Boa Esperanca's Khoikhoi population stood at around 5,000.
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Mirza Khan

Another go!

The turning point in Capeland's history would come in 1612, in the course of the long-running Dutch-Portuguese War. Established in 1602, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), looked to break into the lucrative Indian Ocean spice routes, which, for a century, had been dominated by Portugal. In 1612, the conflict's tenth year, a large VOC force from the Netherlands set sail for the strategic Portuguese outpost of Boa Esperanca. The Portuguese governor, Eduardo Dos Santos, and his garrison resisted valiently, but the Dutch assault force outnumbered them by several times, and after several days of bombardment, the Dutch stormed Boa Esperanca fortress. Almost a century of Portuguese rule had come to and end.

The VOC maintained a large garrison in their new fort, which soon became known as Kaapstadt (Cape Town/City), and expanded the fortifications to prevent Portuguese attempts to recapture it. However, the VOC, like the Portuguese, valued the Cape mostly as a repair/resupply station for its merchantmen, and while Kaapstadt was occasionally used as a rallying point for invasions of Portuguese Indonesia or India, it generally remained a backwater.

Dutch rule, however, would have an immediate, and extremely significant, effect on their new colony. Unlike the Portuguese, the VOC cared very little about spreading Christianity, and one of their first acts upon taking possession of the Cape was to legalize the public practice of Judaism, and, in 1615, the VOC allowed the construction of a synagogue in Kaapstadt. The Jewish population responded enthusiatically-several rabbis, now no longer in fear of their lives, wrote comparisons between Maurice of Nassau, the Dutch stadholder, and Cyrus the Great (who, in the Old Testament, was lauded for restoring freedom of worship to the people of Israel after defeating their Babylonian oppressors). Under Dutch rule, the High Holy Days could now be given their proper celebrations, rabbis could be trained, and a true Jewish cultural and religious life emerge.

After taking control of the colony, the VOC had expelled most of the Portuguese population of old Boa Esperanca, and Dutch administrators and a Dutch garrison (in practice mostly made up of German mercenaries) replaced them. In addition, the VOC allowed Dutch settlers to immigrate to the colony as well. Most settled in Kaapstadt and other towns, taking up various trades or becoming merchants, though some farmers settled along the coast, largely producing non-Kosher products (such as pork, dairy, or wine) that were nevertheless wanted by Dutch ship crews and city dwellers. The Cape also saw some continued Sephardic Jewish immigration-most notably a significant wave in the 1640's, fleeing the collapse of Dutch Brazil-and its first Ashkenazi Jews, who came from the Netherlands or Germany, and, like the Dutch immigrants, tended to settle mostly in urban areas. By 1700, the urban areas (Kaapstadt, Hermanus, Stellenbosch, Mauritstadt*), as well as the area along the coast, had come to be dominated by Dutch-speakers (usually known as Kaaplanders, after Kaapland, the usual Dutch name for South Africa), with Yiddish, Ladino, and German-speaking minorities in Kaapstadt and the other towns. The rural interior of the colony, however, remained overwhelmingly dominated by Sephardic Ladino-speaking Jews, who formed an absolute majority of the while population (and a plurality of the population as a whole).

As for the surviving Khoi (and others incorporated into the colony as it expanded northward and eastward), most had become laborers, and had intermarried somewhat with the white population. These mixed-race people were divided into two groups-Mulattos (Ladino-speaking, usually Jewish) formed the majority, but a smaller number, known as Basters, from a Dutch word for bastard or cross-breed**, generally lived in the cities or along the coast, spoke Dutch, and were usually Protestant, like the Dutch population.

By 1700, the eastward expansion of Capeland had hit a wall, as setters began to run up against Xhosa and Sesotho speaking groups, who practiced agriculture and were much more numerous and organized than the nomadic Khoi and San. There were several clashes between the two, almost to the point of open war, but the Dutch authorites in Kaapstadt weren't interested in having a major conflict, and banned settlement beyond the Great Fish River, which came to form Capeland's eastern border***. This caused some grumbling, but the Jewish farmers didn't have the resources to fight the Xhosa on their own, and expansion was generally redirected northward, up along the coast. Capeland was still largely empty, and land wasn't a major problem.

*The first three are OTL South African towns, the last where Malmesbury is IOTL. See the map.
**I didn't make this up-there's an OTL ethnicity that uses this name
***I can't find a map-its (roughly) halfway along the east-west length of modern South Africa, and marks a rough boundery between Bantu-dominated areas and Khoisan (and later European/Coloured) dominated areas.
 
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kasumigenx

kasumigenx

That is what I did in my TL but on the Americas..

This scenario is less ASB because the population density of the cape is less..
 

Mirza Khan

mowque said:
The Xhosa are a big nut to crack. Very interesting so far. Keep it realistic!
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I will. South Africa (or Capeland in this TL) will not include most of the Bantu-majority areas of OTL South Africa. For one thing, its going to make the race problem a lot less of an issue than OTL...

Also, do any of my readers have any good knowledge of pre-expulsion Iberian Jewish languages? Wikipedia has an article on something called "Judao-Portuguese" and implies that this was orginally a separate language from Ladino (Judao-Spanish), that got absorbed into Ladino as the former Spanish and Portuguese Jews mixed after the expulsions. Of course, in this TL, Capeland's Sephardic population is predominately made up of Portuguese Jews, so "Judao-Portuguese" will survive...does anyone have any idea of how different it was from Ladino, exactly?
 

mowque

Banned
Mirza Khan said:
Er, yes, but someone else gets to fight the Zulu (haven't quite decided who). Capeland's eastern border will remain at the Great Fish River.
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No Great Trek or anything. Do you plan to have the Brits take over at some point? BTW, you might want to look into Jewish cowboys in Argentina OTL.
 

Mirza Khan

Update:

The 18th century was largely uneventful in Capeland's history. The colony continued to grow, and Dutch ships passed through Kaapstadt on their way to the Dutch Indes. The colony was still rapidly growing, though still in a somewhat unorganized way. As Capeland exported relatively little (and almost all of that was basic foodstuffs, leather, and low-to-mid quality wine), the VOC administration had little interest in it other than as a way station, and little "government" existed outside of Kaapstadt and a few other towns. Even in Kaapstadt, many complained of VOC neglect and indifference, to the point that, in 1769, over a hundred important citizens of Kaapstadt circulated a petition to have the Dutch States-General take over the colony. As it would continue to have full rights to Kaapstadt harbor, the VOC expressed little opposition to the move, and thus, Capeland passed out of their hands and into those of the States-General, which organized their new aquisition as the territory of Staates-Kaapland. Its first governor, Willem van der Poort, would distinguish himself, reorganizing and regularizing the Cape's haphazard adminstration system into a regular beauracracy. The taxation system was standardized along the lines of the rest of the Netherlands, and taxes were regularly collected (this was introduced gradually to rural areas, to minimize discontent). The local armed forces were enlarged to 15,000, made up of a mix of mercenaries and local recruits. A regularized public education system was introduced, open to both Christians and Jews (though in practice, it operated only in the towns). Infrastructure projects, including a major expansion of the road network, were undertaken.

By 1790, the colony of Capeland boasted a population of over 280,000-Sephardic Jews were still the majority at 150,000, with 50,000 Christian Dutch, 30,000 Ashkenazi Jews, and 50,000 people of mixed race (with about 40,000 Jewish Mulattos and 10,000 Christian Basters). The old Portuguese fort still guarded Kaapstadt's harbor, surrounded by a town that in many places looked like it could have been plucked from Utrecht, Holland, or Guelders. Indeed, at 20,000, Capeland had reached the size of a large Dutch town, and had managed to aquire most of the trappings of European urban life.

But trouble was brewing in France, where the mobs of Paris cast down Louis XVI, to raise in his place a "French Republic". In 1795, crossing the frozen Rhine, French troops captured the German Rhineland and the European territory of the Dutch Republic. Stadholder Willem V and his government fled to Britain, while the VOC territories in the East Indes passed to the "Batavian Republic" proclaimed by France and its allied Dutch politicians.


Capeland, however, remained loyal to the Stadholder. While Willem of Orange preferred to stay in London, near the center of anti-French politics, Capeland become, de facto, an independent country, heavily supported by Britain. Capeland's governor, Hendrik Jansen, strove to maintain law and order in the territory, and, in order to placate the pro-Batavian sentiment that existed in some quarters, made a number of reforms, the most important of which was the declaration-supported by Stadholder Willem-that Jews were now equal citizens, with the same standing under the law as Christians. This bolstered the loyalty of the Jewish population and-as Jews could now be conscripted like Christians-greatly increased Capeland's potential military reserves. Also, the last remaining school fees were abolished, and the now free education system was further expanded to cover almost all of Capeland's urban population. While Jewish students were given Hebrew classes, the use of Yiddish and Ladino were discouraged, leading, in the following decades, to a collapse of those languages in Kaapstadt and other cities. (Rural Sephardim were largely uncovered by the new education system, and thus Ladino continued to thrive outside cities).

To counter the threat of attack from France, thousands of conscripts were called up, coastal fortifications were expanded, and the British military was invited in to help defend the territory. However, the French navy was never in a position to attack Capeland, and after the Battle of Trafalgar the threat gradually receeded, though several thousand British soldiers remained stationed in Kaapstadt until the end of the Napoleonic wars.

In 1815, the newly formed Kingdom of the Netherlands under King Willem I again took possession of Capeland, the only Dutch territory to have remained loyal to the House of Orange throughout the war. To a population that had had two decades of effective self-rule, the re-imposition of government from Amsterdam was rather jarring, and Willem I's autocratic rule caused increasing resentment. The situation came to a head in 1848, as all of Europe as torn asunder by a series of dramatic revolutions. Inspired by the events on the continent, two revolts broke out in Capeland-one, centered around the coast and the outer towns, was led by a Christian Dutchman named Johan Bermen, and the other orginated in the interior hinterland and was led by a Sephardic Jew named David Abravanel. The two rebellions succeeded in reducing Dutch control to Kaapstadt, and (isolated) compounds in Stellenbosch and Hermanus, but were mutually suspicious (both wanted independence, but Abravanel pressed for the creation of a "Jewish Republic" while Berman envisioned continued dominance of Christian Dutch-speakers), and soon got into a war whose only real success was to break both armies, allowing the Dutch to easily retake Capeland in the beginning of 1849. However, the Dutch wanted to prevent another outbreak of violence, and agreed to a further series of reforms. Capeland was granted its own States-General, subordinate to the national States-General in Amsterdam but with broad local autonomy, and Ladino was declared an official language of government, co-equal with Dutch. Schools and government services were extended outward into Ladino-speaking areas, and Sephardic children could now get at least the beginnings of an education in Ladino. However, the franchise was still very narrow, and the elections-and new States-General-were controlled by a small, mostly Christian elite based in Kaapstadt.

For the next few decades, Capeland continued to grow. Immigration-Dutch, German, and Jewish-gradually increased, and the state education system began to produce a large class of assimilated, Dutch-speaking Jews, as well as an educated elite of Sephardim. The position of Yiddish declined-indeed, assimilationism was the prevelent ideology of most of Capeland's Ashkenazim, who taught their children Dutch, and some Hebrew, but tried to rid them of "jargon", as Yiddish was often called. This was less the case among the Sephardic population, who were much more militant. Ladino's status as an official language arrested its decline, and after 1850, socialist-influenced Ladino political movements gradually began to take shape, pushing for more rights and aiming to break the political power of the "Kaapstadt elite". Similar, but less radical, ideas also began to gain currency among the urban Ashkenazim.

As the century wore on, pressure for extension of the franchise grew, culminating in the Great Reform Bill of 1872, which reduced property qualifications, redrew jerrymandered districts, introduced new penalties for election fraud (though it remained widespread), and, all in all, increased the size of the voter rolls by several times-allowing many modest businessmen and landowners to, for the first time, vote. The direct result, in 1873, was the election of Isaac Goldstein, Capeland's first Jewish Prime Minister. Goldstein would rule on and off for the next fifteen years, with his Liberals-who drew support from modest farmers and businessmen, both Jewish and Christian-gradually marginalizing the Conservatives, the party of the old elite. Capeland had entered a new era.
 
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Dathi THorfinnsson

Mirza Khan said:
While Jewish students were given classes in Hebrew, the use of Yiddish and Ladino were discouraged, leading, in the following decades, to a collapse of those languages in Kaapstadt and other cities. (Rural Sephardim were largely uncovered by the new education system, and thus Ladino continued to thrive outside cities).
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If by that you mean that the classes were TAUGHT in Hebrew, this is impossible. Hebrew at that time was a purely Biblical and liturgical language which was fine for arguing theology, perhaps, but lacked any modern vocabulary.

The Modern Hebrew used in Israel today is the result of a century of creation. My Hebrew prof (in the single class I took) pointed out proudly in class the word that her ?uncle? had contributed to the language. And there was a LOT of that.
 

Mirza Khan

Dathi THorfinnsson said:
If by that you mean that the classes were TAUGHT in Hebrew, this is impossible. Hebrew at that time was a purely Biblical and liturgical language which was fine for arguing theology, perhaps, but lacked any modern vocabulary.

The Modern Hebrew used in Israel today is the result of a century of creation. My Hebrew prof (in the single class I took) pointed out proudly in class the word that her ?uncle? had contributed to the language. And there was a LOT of that.
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No, I meant "taught [Biblical] Hebrew"-the medium of instruction would have been Dutch (or possibly Ladino after 1848). I'll reword that sentence to make it more clear.

mowque said:
So, er...what about the blacks?
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Well, the Bantu actually never penetrated western South Africa, due to its climate not being suitable for their crops (see this map). The native inhabitants of that area were divided into migrant pastorialist tribes (known as Khoikhoi) and nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes (known as San), who didn't farm, and thus had a very low population density and were overwhelmed by white settlement. TTL Capeland's borders will not include most of eastern South Africa (I'll cover it, along with the broader Scramble for Africa, in the next update)
 
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Julius Vogel

Julius Vogel

I think in post 12 you said that the local armed forces were about 15,000 in size from a population of 280,000.

This seems like rather a high number for the period and especially for a low population colony. Did you mean part time armed forces?

As a point of comparison, even during the height of the Land Wars in New Zealand colonial and Imperial forces numbered at most 18,000 and this number was temporary as the colonial milita was largely volunteer and had to return to work/farms pretty quickly. While NZ at the time probably had slightly lower population than Capeland does in 1790, it was in the midst of a long series of land wars which were actively fought for a decade or so, so it could justify the expense of a large colonial milita while also convincing London of the need for Imperial troops
 

Valdemar II

Banned
I like it, through in my suggestion the 15000 soldiers included their families. But there are a few reason for the high amount of soldiers, in Europe you were usual able to call burgher militias up in case of war, here with such a large Jewish population you the state aren't willing to do that except among the Dutch, free Baster and Christian Mulatto. So a bigger than usual force are needed.
I would personal put it 5-7000 soldiers 3-4000 wives and the rest children. Beside a significant part of the soldier population hjasn't brought wives from Europe with them and have married local womens, they are usual included in the Mulatto, Baster, Ladino and population, even through their children will be included either in the Baster or Dutch population (after colour).
In economical terms I would say that the soldier are urban workers, while not being training, guard or campaign, they usual work in skilled (a significant number of the asoldier are former journeymen)or unskilled works, this are a important extra income. Their wife too works in these kinds of work. This make the soldier and their families a important part of the garrison towns economy. In many way breaking the local guilds monopol and in some of the more isolated towns the main workers in these kind of trades. As such they are important for the development of the different garrison town into local trade hubs, where the local farmers can trade raw material and crude manufactoried goods for more developed ones
 
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