The making of a South African Jewish activist: the Yiddish diary of Ray Alexander Simons, Latvia, 1927

The Communist Party of South Africa, formed in 1920, enjoyed disproportionate Jewish patronage from its very beginnings, when the Party was imported by English-speaking British immigrants and by Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. Before its establishment, former members of the Bund, the Jewish Workers’ Party in Eastern Europe, supported the International Socialist League (ISL), a forerunner of the Communist Party that had a ‘Yiddish Speaking Group’. The ISL was a major player in the founding of the united Communist Party of South Africa, which duly became an affiliated section of the Communist International.1