Rodney Reznek MA, FRANZCR(hon),FFR RCSI(hon), FRCP,FRCR is currently Emeritus Professor of Diagnostic Imaging in the Cancer Institute, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London. He has authored/co-authored 195 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, 120 invited reviews and book chapters, over 200 scientific abstracts and edited 17 textbooks. He has been Editor-in-chief of 2 major scientific journals, section editor of another and on the editorial board of 2 other journals. He has held 8 visiting professorships and given several eponymous lectures around the world.
A Vocabulary of Difference: How Jews Were Denied Entry to South Africa in the 1930’s
Standard texts on the history of South Africa’s Jewish community portray it as the goldene medina (the golden utopia), yet on two separate occasions immigration of Jews was either severely curtailed or stopped: in 1930, an Immigration Quotas Act was passed limiting admission of Eastern European Jews to only a small quota; in 1937, an Aliens Act was passed denying Jews, fleeing events in Central Europe, access into the country. Initial research indicates that the discourse in the 1920s relating to immigration was couched in a scientific eugenicist argument, whereas in the 1930s, “frontier guards” were motivated by a functional, cultural nationalism with arguments about Jewish ‘assimilability’. My research explores the ideas and discourse that lead up to these two Acts of Jewish exclusion and, in particular, the interplay between anti-Semitism, White South Africa’s search for a national identity and its need to maintain supremacy over the Black population.
(Completed: 2017)
