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Inaugural lecture examines the future of Jewish life in SA
08 May 2026 | Story Nicole Forrest. Photo Je’nine May. Read time 7 min.
On Wednesday, 29 April, Professor Adam Mendelsohn delivered his inaugural lecture, “Where to for the Jews?” Professor Mendelsohn set out to explore how Jewish communities have evolved – and where they are heading – to a packed auditorium in the Neville Alexander Building at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
Professor Mendelsohn, who is the Isidore and Theresa Cohen chair in Jewish Civilisation and the director of UCT’s Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, used the occasion to take stock of a Jewish community navigating a period of profound uncertainty.
Drawing on decades of demographic data collected by the Kaplan Centre, alongside his deep expertise in comparative Jewish history, he sought to understand the forces shaping Jewish life in South Africa today and what the future may hold.
The lecture was structured around three interconnected themes. The first examined the idea of the Jew as a cultural and historical construct, exploring why Jewish communities have, across centuries and societies, been the target of suspicion, projection and prejudice far disproportionate to their actual numbers.
Mendelsohn then moved on to trace the specific historical arc of Jews in South Africa – including their relationship with UCT – from their origins as immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution in the Russian Empire, through their integration into South African society and the particular role the university played as a vehicle for social and economic mobility.
Finally, he turned to the present, assessing a range of contemporary pressures to offer a sobering view of where the Jewish community in South Africa may be heading.
The paradox of Jewish visibility
Opening his lecture with a striking paradox, Mendelsohn noted that Jews make up just 0.2% of the world’s population and a mere 0.08% of South Africans. Even though the entire South African Jewish population would not fill Cape Town Stadium, he said, “the Jew occupies a prominence in the public and popular imagination that belies their numerical inconsequence”.
The historian identified three principal reasons for this. The first centres on the Holocaust, which “occupies a prominent position in public consciousness and as a cultural reference point” that has embedded Jews in the collective imagination, even for those with no direct connection to living Jewish communities.
“The conflict in the Middle East has ensured that Jews remain a focal point of global attention and, in recent years, of hostility.”
The second related to America. Mendelsohn explained that, as United States cultural influence expanded globally across the 20th century, so too did the visibility of Jewish identity. This, he noted, was accelerated by the rise of the 1960s and ’70s multiculturalism, which gave Jewish artists, filmmakers and public figures greater confidence to express that identity openly.
The state of Israel was the third – somewhat more fraught – factor he pointed to. With close to half the world’s Jews living there – and with Jewish diaspora communities increasingly associated with the Israeli state in the public mind – the conflict in the Middle East has ensured that Jews remain a focal point of global attention and, in recent years, of hostility.
Immigrants, identity and upward mobility
Shifting from the global to the local, Mendelsohn was keen to stress that Jews are not “put upon and passive objects of history”. He highlighted that understanding their experience requires grappling with their agency in terms of what they want, what they think and what they have done.
In South Africa, the majority of the country’s Jewish community can trace its roots to immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Arriving in the country with modest means and few connections, Jews took up the roles they had played in Eastern Europe as peddlers, storekeepers and traders.
“Unlike universities elsewhere, where Jewish students faced formal quotas and physical intimidation, UCT opened its doors to these scholars.”
What changed their trajectory here at the southernmost tip of Africa, Mendelsohn noted, was the access to education they were afforded. Unlike universities elsewhere, where Jewish students faced formal quotas and physical intimidation, UCT opened its doors to these scholars.
As Mendelsohn put it, the university functioned as a “social and economic escalator”. This allowed the children of immigrants to “achieve prosperity and status unimaginable to their immigrant parents, entirely inaccessible” in Europe within a single generation.
That history, he argued, created a sense of loyalty and attachment to the institution; albeit one that has been put under significant pressure in recent years.
An uncertain future
Today, Mendelsohn pointed out, a community that once felt secure in its place in South African society is increasingly uncertain about its future.
The issue is, in part, demographic. As Jews have consolidated into Johannesburg and Cape Town, fewer South Africans encounter them as neighbours, colleagues or friends. “In places where Jews are not present, the distinction is much harder to make and demonisation of Israel or antisemitic biases face less friction,” he said.
However, he added that international geopolitics and social tensions have also forced the South African Jewish community to reckon with vulnerabilities it had long underestimated, but which are now increasingly evident on the internet.
“The Kaplan Centre’s own systematic research tells a dark story.”
“The Kaplan Centre’s own systematic research tells a dark story,” Mendelsohn said. Since 2021, the Centre has tracked racism, xenophobia and antisemitism on social media in South Africa. While 2022 had offered cautious grounds for optimism, the years since have reversed that.
A surge of antisemitic content on Facebook, X and TikTok has normalised material of “a classical antisemitic variety” that, despite being overtly hateful, “escapes comment, criticism and moderation, and too often breaches the barriers between the virtual realm and the real world”.
Mendelsohn was particularly pointed about what he sees as a conflation of legitimate political criticism with ethnic demonisation. Antisemitism, he said, “cannot be treated merely as content to be banned or removed, but as a resilient, flexible and adaptive ideology”.
The result, he added, is that many Jews in South Africa today “feel intensely vulnerable” and in many cases, abandoned by institutions with which they have long and deep historical ties.
While the question he posed at the outset, “Where to for the Jews?”, remained unanswered, the evidence marshalled by Mendelsohn made clear that this is a question that can no longer be deferred.
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The UCT Inaugural Lecture Series
Inaugural lectures are a central part of university academic life. These events are held to commemorate the inaugural lecturer’s appointment to full professorship. They provide a platform for the academic to present the body of research that they have been focusing on during their career, while also giving UCT the opportunity to showcase its academics and share its research with members of the wider university community and the general public in an accessible way.
In April 2023, Interim Vice-Chancellor Emeritus Professor Daya Reddy announced that the Vice-Chancellor’s Inaugural Lecture Series would be held in abeyance in the coming months, to accommodate a resumption of inaugural lectures under a reconfigured UCT Inaugural Lecture Series – where the UCT extended executive has resolved that for the foreseeable future, all inaugural lectures will be resumed at faculty level.
Recent executive communications
2026
Professor Elena Moore of the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town delivered her inaugural lecture on 4 March, titled: “Who Cares? The Directions of State–Family Relationships in Changing Times”. The lecture drew together more than two decades of research into how families and societies organise, experience, and govern care.
09 Mar 20262025
At the heart of modern finance is a question of trust. What happens when the systems built to uphold it begin to falter? The lecture by Professor Phillip de Jager in the Department of Finance and Tax at the University of Cape Town (UCT) explored this thought.
11 Nov 2025
2024
Professor Susan Cleary delivered her inaugural lecture on 14 March.
14 Mar 2024 - 5 min read
2023
Prof Lydia Cairncross’s inaugural lecture provided a snapshot of the career path of a surgeon and community activist whose commitment to social justice means her work doesn’t end in the operating theatre.
02 Nov 2023 - 8 min read
2022
Professor Linda Ronnie is in UCT’s Faculty of Commerce.
28 Sep 2022 - 6 min read
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2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016 and 2015
No inaugural lectures took place during 2015 and 2016.