Union of South Africa Passport 1923
The 1923 South African Passport That Followed One Man from Pretoria to Jerusalem
Originally published July 2025, updated in 2026 with expanded historical context and sourcing.
One glance at the cover and you might guess elephant hide. It isn’t. The mottled, textured leather binding this 1923 travel document just happens to mimic the real thing, and that small deception is the first clue that this passport has stories to tell before you even open the cover.
A Passport Bound for More Than Show
This document belonged to David Weinberg, a shopkeeper born in Lithuania in 1894, and it was issued to him in Pretoria on 19 November 1923, making it 102 years old today. Weinberg was 29 at issuance, a Lithuanian-born immigrant who had settled in the Union of South Africa and built a life as a merchant there. That single fact, a Lithuanian Jew carrying a South African passport in the interwar years, tells you something about the migratory patterns of the era before you even look at the visa pages.
A Visa Trail Across Three Continents
The visa pages are where this passport earns its keep, tracing a young man’s movement across the British Empire and beyond between 1923 and 1925. The document records a Lithuanian visa issued in Hamburg in 1924 and a German visa issued in Pretoria in 1923, both bearing Lithuanian and South African revenue stamps worth a close look under magnification. From there, Weinberg picked up a visa for Palestine from the British Passport Office in Riga in 1925, routed through Germany, Italy, France, and Romania, followed by another German visa issued in Riga that same year. The Government of Palestine stamped his document in Jaffa in 1925, and his return journey to South Africa carried a visa issued in Jerusalem, routed via Egypt. That is a genuinely ambitious itinerary for a young shopkeeper in the mid-1920s, and it places Weinberg’s passport in good company with other documents I’ve featured showing the well-worn corridor between the Baltic states, the Reich, and Mandatory Palestine, including this German Prussian passport from 1922 marked “Palästinawanderer”, issued to another traveler making a strikingly similar run through Egypt toward the same destination.
The Union That Issued It
The Union of South Africa was the direct predecessor of today’s Republic of South Africa, formed on 31 May 1910 through the unification of four separate British colonies. Those were the Cape, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange River colonies, which absorbed the territory of the two former Boer republics annexed in 1902, the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. After the First World War, the Union also took on administration of South West Africa, the former German colony now known as Namibia, as a League of Nations mandate, a territory it governed in practice like an additional province without ever formally annexing it. The Union functioned as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, with its autonomy confirmed through the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931, and it governed under constitutional monarchy with a governor-general representing the Crown. That arrangement lasted until 31 May 1961, when a new constitution turned the Union into the Republic of South Africa and took it out of the Commonwealth.
Why This Document Matters for Collectors
What makes Weinberg’s passport worth study is the density of its record, a single small booklet documenting exit visas, transit visas, and revenue stamps from at least five jurisdictions inside two years. Collectors chasing British Mandate material will recognize the Jaffa and Jerusalem endorsements as part of the same paper trail that shows up in other Palestine-bound passports of the period, such as this British Palestine passport carrying some of the earliest State of Israel entry stamps, and researchers tracing Lithuanian Jewish emigration routes through Riga will find Weinberg’s document sits alongside pieces like this 1925 Ukrainian Soviet Republic passport, which carries its own German and Lithuanian transit visas from the same Riga consular circuit. For anyone building out a South West Africa mandate or interwar emigration collection, this is exactly the kind of well-traveled document that rewards a page-by-page read.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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