At Africa's Southern Tip

For a century and a half, Cape Town was the door. If you were a Jew leaving Lithuania for the southern tip of Africa, you came down the gangplank here, under Table Mountain, blinking at a light nobody had warned you about. The city at the edge of the continent became the gateway to a whole country's Jewish life - and then it kept a large community of its own, the oldest in South Africa, built by people who had crossed an ocean precisely because they knew how to start again.

The beginning was slow, because the rules were against it. The Dutch East India Company ran the Cape from 1652 as a Calvinist concern, and professing Jews could not openly settle. That changed only under later administrations: a religious-freedom proclamation associated with the Dutch commissioner de Mist in 1804, lapsed under early British rule and durably restored by 1820. Real settlement followed from the 1820s, when merchants like Benjamin Norden came south and the first Jewish faces appeared in the colony's commercial life.

The mother congregation

It started, as these things do, in a front room. On the eve of Yom Kippur in September 1841, a minyan gathered at the home of Benjamin Norden and constituted the congregation Tikvath Israel, "Hope of Israel" - the first Jewish congregation in southern Africa, and the mother of all that followed. Within a generation it needed walls of its own. The Old Synagogue in the Gardens, opened in 1863, was the first purpose-built synagogue in the country; the grand Great Synagogue beside it followed in 1905, opened under the presidency of Hyman Liberman, who would also become Cape Town's first Jewish mayor.

Then came the wave that made the community what it is. Between roughly 1880 and 1914, tens of thousands of Jews left the Russian Pale - overwhelmingly from Lithuania - and a great many of them entered South Africa through Cape Town, most carried on the steerage decks of the Union-Castle line. The national Jewish population grew from a few thousand in 1880 to more than forty thousand by 1914. The Litvaks brought their Hebrew, their socialism, their shopkeeping and their arguments, and the small colonial congregation became the head of a national community.

Part of the country's argument

Cape Town's Jews did not stay on the edge of the city's life; they entered its centre, and, when it mattered most, its conscience. They began as pedlars, shopkeepers and cinema-owners, many in the mixed working-class district of District Six before apartheid's bulldozers emptied it. As they prospered they moved up the slopes to the Gardens and Sea Point. And when the country fell into its long moral crisis, a strikingly disproportionate share of the white South Africans who resisted apartheid were Jews - among them Helen Suzman, for years the lone consistent anti-apartheid voice in Parliament. The community as a whole was cautious; its boldest members were not.

What the door still holds

South African Jewry peaked at around 120,000 in the 1970s and has shrunk since, through emigration to Israel, Australia, Britain and North America. Cape Town's community has thinned and greyed with it, yet it remains one of the most cohesive in the diaspora: well organised, well schooled, and gathered tightly around the Gardens, Sea Point and the southern suburbs. The Old Synagogue that opened in 1863 now welcomes visitors as the front hall of the South African Jewish Museum, which Nelson Mandela inaugurated in 2000 - a fitting custodian for the memory of a community that crossed an ocean and helped argue a country towards its better self. The door is quieter now. It is still standing open.