The Surprising Extent of Australian Jewishness

The recent media coverage of anti-Semitism prompts a look at the history of Jews in Australia. Australia may be the only country with a Jewish presence dating to the first days of European settlement. Among the 751 convicts transported in the First Fleet, fifteen can be identified as Jews. The Jewish percentage of the white population was at its highest the day the First Fleet landed. Although it has never since exceeded 0.65 per cent of the population, the early Jewish arrivals and the high rate of intermarriage account for the large number of Australians who are not Jewish but have Jewish forebears. Indeed, the number of Australians in this category outnumbers those who identify as Jewish by a substantial margin.

Of the 151,000 convicts transported to the eastern coast of Australia it is estimated that about 800 Jewish convicts had arrived by 1845. Most came from London, were of working-class background and were male. The absence of Jewish women meant large numbers took Christian wives and the attrition rate was high. The subject of conversion was to become a volatile issue as congregations were established. To quote Geoffrey Blainey:

Today in many towns such surnames as Cohen and Levy denote Protestantism—the legacies of the lone and often lonely pedlars who hawked their wares through the outback and were tempted to stay there, intermarrying with Gentile women … The people who have a dash, large or small, of Jewish ancestry and retain no link with Judaism are probably three times as numerous as those who call themselves Jewish.

Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver has remarked on the number of early Jews who married Aborigines and said: “There’s a big mob of black Cohens out there and they’ve got Jewish ancestry.” Abraham Krakouer, a Polish Jew, and progenitor of the vast Krakouer clan, died in 1928 and is buried in the Jewish section of the Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth.

The demographer Dr Charles Price estimated that in 1964 at least 250,000 Australians had at least one Jewish ancestor. Due to methodological deficiencies, which he acknowledges, that figure is probably a gross underestimate. 

Free migration produced a Jewish population of approximately 25,000 before the Second World War and post-war migration produced an estimated Jewish population of some 118,000 at the time of the 2016 census, or 0.5 per cent of the national population.

Australia has been remarkably free of anti-Semitism. Certainly, the social stereotypes typical of contemporary English society were mirrored in Australian society and can be found in authors such as Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson and in Smith’s Weekly and the Bulletin, and some social prejudice was apparent beneath the surface. Yet the primary chasm in Australian society was between Protestant and Catholic, and the small Jewish population was, for the most part, ignored. 

The Jewish contribution to Australian life has been well documented and is not the subject of this article. What has never been examined is the contribution of those with Jewish ancestry. Until the late twentieth century there was a general reluctance to admit to either convict or Jewish ancestry. Yet an examination of those with Jewish forebears reveals a large contribution to Australian life.

Richard Gavin Gardiner Casey, Baron Casey of Berwick, Victoria, was an engineer, diplomat, governor and governor-general, born in 1890 in Brisbane, the eldest child of Richard Gardiner Casey, pastoralist and politician, and his Queensland-born wife Jane Eveline (Evelyn Jane) nee Harris. Casey was a member of Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet and as Lord Casey was Governor-General of Australia. On her father’s side Evelyn Harris was the granddaughter of John Harris, a Jewish London labourer sentenced to death in 1783 for the theft of silver spoons. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was transported to New South Wales with the First Fleet in 1787. Lord Casey was thus the great grandson of a convict Jew. 

Rear Admiral Sir David Martin was the thirty-fourth Governor of New South Wales, appointed in 1989 after a distinguished naval career. He was a great-great grandson of Esther Abrahams, about whom much has been written. Transported on the Lady Penrhyn in 1787, Esther was befriended by First Lieutenant George Johnson, with whom she bore six children. In Newgate Prison she had borne a daughter, Rosanna, who was transported with her. George Johnson played a key role in the Bligh rebellion of 1807 and was nominally in charge of the colony with Esther as first lady until the next governor arrived. Johnson was charged with mutiny, cashiered from the army and returned to the colony where he and Esther farmed as free settlers at Annandale. 

The formidable Mackerras family directly descends from Isaac Nathan, who was born in 1790 and trained as a synagogue cantor and is  commonly referred to as the father of Australian music. The Mackerras family includes Sir Charles Mackerras, the internationally acclaimed conductor, Malcolm Mackerras,  the leading psephologist, his twin brother Colin Mackerras, a leading Sinologist, and Alastair Mackerras, headmaster of Sydney Grammar School from 1964 to 1989. The Australian conductor Alexander Briger is also a descendant of Isaac Nathan. Nathan befriended Lord Byron, who provided him with a series of poems on Hebrew subjects which he set to Hebrew melodies. He was the first musician with a European reputation to settle in Australia and the first to attempt a serious study of Aboriginal music. 

Sidney Myer (born Simcha Baevski), the youngest of eleven children, was educated in the Jewish Elementary School in Krichev within the Russian Pale of Settlement before migrating to Victoria in 1899 with no English. He commenced a retail business in Bendigo which was to become the Myer Emporium. In 1920 he converted to Christianity and married the nineteen-year-old Margery Merlyn Baillieu. On his death in 1934 Sidney Myer left one tenth of his wealth in trust for the charitable, philanthropic and educational needs of the community in gratitude for the opportunity Australia had offered him. The Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne is but one of his endowments. The couple produced four children—Kenneth Myer, Sidney Baillieu Myer, Neilma Gantner and Marigold Shelmerdine (Lady Southey)—who in turn produced a dynasty which has carried on the tradition of philanthropy and as patrons of the arts. 

John Malcolm Fraser was the twenty-second Prime Minister of Australia from 1975 to 1983. Fraser’s mother, Una, was the daughter of Louis Arnold Woolf, a New Zealand-born Jew.

Hugo Wertheim was a German Jewish immigrant to Victoria who opened a factory in Richmond manufacturing pianos, which operated until 1935. Hugo died in 1919, leaving a wife, two daughters and three sons. One of his daughters was the grandmother of Jeffrey Gibb Kennett, forty-third Premier of Victoria between 1992 and 1999.

Heath Ledger was a celebrated Australian actor. On his mother’s side he was a descendant of Emanuel Solomon, a fifteen-year-old Jew convicted of theft at the Durham Assizes in 1817 and transported to Van Diemen’s Land on the Lady Castlereagh in 1818 with his brother Vaiben. The transportation of Emanuel and Vaiben has attracted significant research and the chain of free migration of the Solomon family following the completion of their seven-year sentences has produced a family tree with over 7000 members. The Solomon descendants can now be found throughout the length and breadth of Australia.

Olivia Newton-John was one of the best-selling music artists of all time and the highest-selling Australian music artist. Her mother was the daughter of Max Born, a German Jew, who received the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physics and was a lifelong friend of Albert Einstein.

Joanna Murray-Smith is an Australian playwright, screenwriter, librettist and newspaper columnist. She is the daughter of Stephen Murray-Smith, an Australian intellectual, editor and writer and his Polish-born Jewish wife Nita Bluthal, who arrived in Australia in 1938 as a refugee from Nazism.

The advent of the internet with its accompanying popularity of family research websites such as Ancestry and 23andMe has fuelled a fascination with family history. Together with such popular television programs as Who Do You Think You Are?, there has been an explosion in the tracing and publication of family histories.

Who Do You Think You Are? has revealed the Jewish forebears of Ita Buttrose, chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and author and former magazine editor, Jason Donovan, Ben Mendelsohn and Rachel Griffiths, Australian actors, Jimmy Barnes, Australian rock singer, and Andrew Denton, media personality.

Additionally, the Jewish ancestry of the Australian novelist David Malouf is well known. In December 2019 Angus Taylor, who was then the federal Energy Minister, declared in parliament that he had a Jewish grandmother.

The Nuremberg Laws were anti-Semitic laws introduced in Germany in 1935 as part of Hitler’s policy to eliminate Jews from Germany. The classification of Jews was complex and many Germans who had converted from Judaism were nevertheless classified as Jewish. The irony was that many people who had converted one or two generations before Hitler’s rise to power had children who were unaware of their parents’ conversions and found themselves classified as Jewish. Many such people entered Australia after 1935 and some, who had always believed they were Roman Catholic or Lutheran, described themselves as Jewish to gain entry and ended up following the Jewish religion. Perhaps the best known from this period is Sir Gustav Nossal, whose Jewish father had been baptised as a child and had been a practising Roman Catholic, a denomination which the family continued to follow in Australia.

By the time of the Second World War, Australian Jewry was led by English-born and Australian-born Jews, was centred around synagogue leadership and was highly Anglicised. The rabbis were English-educated and the rabbis of the Great Synagogue in Sydney and the St Kilda and Toorak Synagogues in Melbourne wore dog collars and were barely distinguishable in appearance from Anglican clergymen. The lay leadership of the congregations were Anglophile in all respects and considered themselves Australians of the Jewish faith. They wore tails and top hats or morning suits to services. The Singers Prayer Book, the standard book used for services, came from England, and the translation of the Hebrew service was in beautifully crafted Victorian English. The president of the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation had been educated at Harrow School in Middlesex.

Added to this Anglophilia was the bitter debate that erupted over Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which was then under British mandate. Sir Isaac Isaacs, a former governor-general, was a bitter opponent of Zionism and was supported by the establishment rabbis, Rabbi Francis Cohen in Sydney and Rabbi Jacob Danglow in Melbourne, who railed against Zionism from their pulpits. The counter argument was powerfully pursued by Professor Julius Stone, Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law in the University of Sydney in a famous pamphlet titled Stand Up and Be Counted!

All this occurred at a time of terrible persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and throughout Europe and strenuous international efforts to find refuge for them in many countries including Australia. The establishment of Australian Jewry was lukewarm towards these efforts, and there were old established Australian Jewish families who did not want foreign-speaking Jews coming into this country. This unfortunate period led to many children of established Jewish families marrying outside the faith, so that descendants of such notable Jews as Colonel Harold Cohen, Sir Isaac Isaacs, Sir John Monash, Sir Richard Kingsland and Major General Paul Cullen are no longer Jewish.

I have given here a sample, and a small sample at that, of Australians who are not Jewish but acknowledge their Jewish ancestry. This sample forms part of the Jewish contribution to Australia, which is of particular interest given the recent prominence generated by international events to anti-Semitism both here and overseas in a country remarkable for its absence of anti-Semitism.

Gavin Silbert KC is the President of the Australian Jewish Historical Society, Victorian Branch.