Immigrants to citizens : civil integration and acculturation of Jews into Oudtshoorn society, 1874-1999

Includes bibliography.The dissertation aimed at providing a model for the study of rural Jewish communities in South Africa during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular of the processes of acculturation and assimilation pertaining to Jewish immigrants in a frontier society. Oudtshoorn, an agricultural district in South Africa, was chosen because it possessed the largest rural Jewish community in South Africa (five hundred families) around its peak in the early twentieth century, and had. a continuous history of Jewish life from 1874 to the time of the study in 1999