A Brilliant Commodity
By Saskia Coenen Snyder
(Oxford, 287 pages, $34.95)
"'Mere carbon, my good friend, after all," says Godfrey Ablewhite in Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone." Published in 1868, "The Moonstone" is one of the first detective novels. A diamond arrives in England through theft and murder, and brings disaster to all who own it until the diamond is restored to its rightful owner, the statue of a Hindu god in India. As Saskia Coenen Snyder shows in the detailed and wide-ranging "A Brilliant Commodity," the reality of the late-Victorian diamond trade was another story.
In 1869 a Griqua herdsman discovered an 83.5-carat rough diamond by the Orange River in Cape Colony, South Africa. He sold it to a Boer farmer for cattle worth about GBP 400. The farmer sold it to the Lilienfeld cousins, two Jewish traders, for GBP 11,200. They sent it to Adolph Mosenthal & Co. at Port Elizabeth, who shipped it to their London headquarters, which sold it to the jewelers Hunt & Roskell, who sold it to the Earl of Dudley for GBP 25,000. The Star of South Africa, as it is called, sparked a diamond rush that altered the map of colonial Africa and created a global industry linking the Cape to London, Amsterdam and New York.
In 1869 Cape Colony exported 16,542 carats, valued at GBP 24,813, to London. In 1889 it exported nearly 3 million carats, valued at GBP 4.8 million. Jews played "crucial roles in every segment of the commodity chain," writes Ms. Coenen Snyder, a professor of modern Jewish history at the University of South Carolina. In particular, they played a "disproportionate" role in the consolidation and expansion of the industry in the 1880s. Some began as kopje-wallopers (small dealers) in the early diamond fields. Many became diamantkoopers, middlemen dealing in digging supplies and shipping klippe (rough stones) from mine to auction, and auction to the coast. By 1890 Jews owned three of the five consolidated firms that established industrial diamond mining in South Africa. They ran the Cape's eight biggest export firms, and all 10 of the firms in the Diamond Syndicate, the London-based cartel that, working with De Beers, controlled the import, production and value of diamonds.
The two biggest consolidated firms, De Beers and Standard, were founded and owned by Christians. Cecil Rhodes of De Beers was the epitome of the English Anglo-Saxon in empire-building mode. By the early 1890s, Rhodes and De Beers controlled "over 90 percent of South Africa's production." De Beers sold each year's entire yield to the Diamond Syndicate. The Syndicate re-exported rough stones to the Jodenfabrieken ("Jewish factories") of Amsterdam, where the cutting and polishing industry sustained as much as half of the city's Jewish population. As the American market expanded, Dutch Jews moved to Manhattan. Today, the Diamond District on 47th Street is the world's largest consumer diamond market.
The association of Jews and jewels in the popular imagination was well established by the time Shakespeare had Shylock lament the loss of a diamond that cost "two thousand ducats in Frankfort." It later became a concrete, multi-faceted fact, Ms. Coenen Snyder writes, because Jews were "well positioned" in an emerging market. Like the Klondike and California, South Africa was open to all. Jewish incomers, many fleeing pogroms in the Russian empire, fell on the white side of the colonial color line. They constituted less than 1% of the white population but arrived with the requisite general skills: "literacy and numeracy, familiarity with itinerant or long-distance trading . . . working knowledge of commodity merchandise, a sensitivity to the wants of the market, and a network of contacts for distribution and credit."
Those same networks afforded access to particular skills. Jews were already active in the other, European end of the production chain -- importing, working and distributing jewels from India and South America. In 1850, when the 186-carat Koh-i-noor came to London after British troops seized it from the maharajah Duleep Singh, Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, entrusted the cutting to two Amsterdam Jews. Ms. Coenen Snyder traces the pathways of commerce from extraction in South Africa to distribution in London, refinement in Amsterdam, and then sale in the cities of Europe and the Americas. It was a dirty business. The Africans did most of the digging and saw none of the profits. The customers seem to have been more perturbed by the origins of the middlemen than the origins of their product.
In H. Rider Haggard's bestseller "King Solomon's Mines" (1885), three English explorers stumble into an African cave containing diamonds the size of pigeon eggs and gold pieces stamped with "Hebrew characters." The Englishmen laugh as they steal the loot. Meanwhile, in "The Moonstone" (as in Trollope's "The Eustace Diamonds," 1871), the "agents moving gemstones across imperial borders" through "illicit and invisible channels" are Jewish. As the diamond industry modernized, so too did stereotypes. The satirical magazine Puck called the Koh-i-noor the "Cohen-oor." Less wittily but more imaginatively, when the British and the Boers went to war in 1899, Henry Hyndman, who founded Britain's first left-wing party, accused Jewish merchants of manipulating Britain into establishing an "Anglo-Hebraic Empire in Africa."
"A Brilliant Commodity" is one of those fascinating academic studies that abound in new research but suffer from theoretical constriction. Jews are "both orientalist and orientalized." The frontier chaos of South Africa, which ran beyond the control of the London government, is somehow part of an "imperial project." The text also suffers some alarming lapses into vagueness. By the end of the 1880s, we read, diamonds constituted "a full third of the total exports of the entire Cape Colony" and also "half of the Cape Colony's total exports." That difference is worth millions. Nor was the "cruel system of Apartheid . . . first officially enacted in Kimberley in the 1870s." When Britain annexed the area around Kimberley in 1871, it annulled a Boer law banning black Africans from owning mining licenses and never enacted racial laws on claim ownership, despite pressure from white diggers. It was market forces, the consolidation of small claims into big companies, that forced out black license holders. A small flaw may enhance the brilliance of a diamond, but in history it detracts from the value of the commodity.
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Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society." [1]
1. Flawed History
Green, Dominic. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 21 Dec 2022: A.15.
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