Book of Memoirs

Nehemiah Dov Hoffman

1916

On the third August 1889 I departed from London for South Africa on the steamship Drummond Castle. There were two hundred passengers comprising British, Hollanders, Germans and eleven Jews. We Jews tended to form a group and helped each other along, but we got on well with all the other passengers who were friendly towards us.

The voyage was, on…

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Creator Bio

Nehemiah Dov Hoffman

1860–1928

Born in the Lithuanian reaches of the Russian Empire, Nehemiah Dov Hoffman received his primary education both from religious tutors and in a Russian public school. Hoffman was exposed to the maskilic outlook after his family moved to Birz (today Biržai in Lithuania); there he studied philosophy and natural sciences alongside Hebrew and German. He moved to New York in 1885 to work on the newspaper Di yidishe gazeten, although he returned to Europe within a year. In 1889, he immigrated to South Africa, for a short time self-publishing the country’s first Yiddish serial, Der Afrikaner Israelit. When the newspaper failed to find an audience, Hoffman worked as an itinerant trader for several years, before returning to publishing in Cape Town. He spent the rest of his life publishing newspapers and journals in both Yiddish and Hebrew, helping lay the foundation for the broader Jewish press in South Africa.

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