(This is another examination that I had saved on my hard drive for a few months. Although I try to keep these excerpts at manageable lengths, I have to admit that I still might have gone too far with this one.)
Quoting Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth‐Century Spain, pages 471–472:
That Franco had no inclination to magnamity and saw the repression as a long‐term undertaking was made clear by his speech on 19 May 1939, the day on which he presided over the spectacular Victory Parade in Madrid. ‘Let us not deceive ourselves: the Jewish spirit, which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism and which was behind so many pacts with the anti‐Spanish revolution, cannot be extirpated in a day and still beats in the hearts of many.’¹ The belief that the war had been against the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy was reiterated in his end‐of‐year message on 31 December 1939. Franco praised German anti‐Semitic legislation, declaring that the persecution of the Jews by the fifteenth‐century Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel had shown the [Third Reich] the way:
Now you will understand the reasons which have led other countries to persecute and isolate those races marked by the stigma of their greed and self‐interest. The domination of such races within society is disturbing and dangerous for the destiny of the nation. We, who were freed of this heavy burden centuries ago by the grace of God and the clear vision of Ferdinand and Isabel, cannot remain indifferent before the modern flourishing of avaricious and selfish spirits who are so attached to their own earthly goods that they would sacrifice the lives of their children more readily than their own base interests.
Quoting Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo‐Bolshevism, pages 93–96:
The […] end of the monarchy had energized separatist movements in Catalonia and the Basque region that threatened the historical unity of Spain; the Catholic Church feared a wave of secularization; plans for land reform threatened the power of wealthy landowners; monarchists hated the Republican government on principle; and all feared the power of a united Republican Popular Front, which had won a huge electoral victory earlier in 1936.
But across the anti-Republican, or nationalist, coalition, one belief was common: the civil war that soon consumed the entire country was a “crusade” against a “Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevist” conspiracy. For all parties in the nationalist coalition, the idea of the Jewish Bolshevik threat crystallized long-held antipathies to liberalism and republicanism into a clearly “visible” enemy. General Miguel Cabanellas, president of the military junta, denounced “freemasons, Jews, and similar parasites.”
Falangists told the readers of their party newspaper that they “had the obligation to persecute and destroy Judaism, Masonry, Marxism, and separatism.” And in his first statement after the civil war began, Cardinal Isidro Gomá, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, asserted that “Jews and masons had poisoned the national soul with absurd doctrines.”¹⁹
The ubiquity of Judeo-Bolshevism talk among Spanish nationalists is remarkable, since there were only perhaps 6,000 Jews living in Spain in the 1930s. The number of Jews in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco was somewhat larger, about 13,000.²⁰
In addition, some German Jews found their way to Spain after the [German Fascists] seized power. And when the danger to the Republican government became an international cause, antifascists from around the world came to fight for it. Some, like the photographer Robert Capa, who produced some of the most enduring images of the conflict, came from Jewish families; others, like writer George Orwell, did not.²¹ All in all, however, the number of Jews in Spain in the years before and during the Spanish Civil War was tiny indeed.
None of that mattered. For nationalists, the specter of a Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy was so powerful precisely because it effectively demonized both their internal and their external enemies. Republican and Catalan leaders alike were portrayed in the pages of the nationalist press as Jews.
Nationalists also saw Jewish Bolsheviks as controlling the Soviet Union, which was supplying the Republic with arms and military advisers. Marcel Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador to the Republic, was a popular target, frequently derided as the “real dictator of Spain.” Finally, nationalists denounced France as a country controlled by Jews, after a Popular Front government led by the socialist Léon Blum came to power there in 1936.
Although right-wing opposition forced Blum’s government to maintain a noninterventionist stance, this fact did not prevent Spanish nationalists from accusing the Blum government of funneling arms to Republicans. In the words of one: “The national uprising [i.e., the anti-Republican war] is bound to be a ruthless war, a heroic crusade against what is going on in France under Mr. Léon Blum.” Facing an array of enemies both within and without, Spanish nationalists saw themselves as fighting a holy war to preserve the true nature of Spain as a Catholic monarchy.²²
The idea of Judeo-Bolshevism that circulated among the different parties to the nationalist coalition in Spain was not identical to the image of the Jewish Bolshevik demonized in [Germanic Fascism]. There were important points of comparison. German veterans of the postwar paramilitary violence on the Baltic borderlands had come to identify Jews with the revolutionary dangers they had fought against during the war and after. The [Third Reich’s] fusion of anti-Communism, antisemitism, and colonialism in Eastern Europe had an obvious appeal for them.²³
Similarly, accounts of Jewish conspiracy circulated especially widely among military officers, most notably among the so-called Africanistas who manned the garrisons in Spanish Morocco, who believed in Spain’s colonial mission in North Africa and who played a central role in Franco’s coup d’état in 1936.²⁴ But the Jewish Bolshevik menace perceived by Spanish nationalists was profoundly shaped by Catholic traditions of anti-Jewish thought that fused Latin Christian ideas about monarchy, nationalism, and the state with Catholic traditions of anti-Freemasonry, antisecularism, and antisemitism.²⁵
For this reason, Spanish nationalists invariably described Communism as a Jewish-Marxist-Masonic plot with an emphasis on all three parts of an unholy trinity that would have sounded strange in the German context, even if [other fascist] ideologues did also vilify Freemasonry.²⁶
And Spanish anti-Communists invested the Judeo-Bolshevik enemy with meaning by embedding it in a distinctly Spanish narrative of national history. Many Spanish nationalists believed that the Popular Front and the Republican government that preceded it were a conspiracy to punish Spain for expelling the Jews and defeating the Moors in 1492, and then upholding a traditional Catholic monarchy in the centuries that followed.
As General Emilio Mola, a chief plotter of the 1936 coup, had written as early as 1922, Jews hated Spain “because they blame it for their dispersion throughout the world.”²⁷ Vanquished in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, this age-old enemy of all Spaniards had returned […] in the guise of Communism. Needless to say, this account held no significance at all for Hitler and his colleagues in [the Third Reich].
(Emphasis added in all cases. Click here for more.)
Quoting Isabelle Rohr’s The use of antisemitism in the Spanish Civil War:
Even though there was no systemic persecution of this dwindling Jewish community, aggressive acts occasionally took place. In Seville, General Queipo declared in one of his nightly radio broadcasts that ‘Jews of the whole world are subject to a supreme council known as the Kahal […] Since time immemorial, for forty centuries, every Jew had given 10 per cent of all his earnings’ to this organization. Altogether Queipo declared the Kahal had received over 4 trillion pesetas.⁴³ The supposed existence of the Kahal was used as an excuse to fine the Jewish community of Seville the sum of 138,000 pesetas.⁴⁴
In Saragossa the Nationalists closed a department store that had been founded by Jewish refugees. The firm’s entire property was confiscated.⁴⁵ In Barcelona, where there remained about 800 Jews, agents of the Gestapo broke into the synagogue shortly after the Nationalist troops entered the city in January 1939. They committed a number of desecrations, destroying the vestments used in worship and carrying off the silver vessels. A delegation of the Jewish community, which presented itself at police headquarters to make a formal complaint, was refused a hearing and told that the police were already aware of the matter.⁴⁶ At the same time several German Jews living in Barcelona were arrested on the orders of the German consulate.⁴⁷
The situation in Morocco
The situation in Spanish Morocco was quite different from that in the Peninsula. This was not only because the Nationalists had established control over the protectorate at the onset of the rebellion but also because there was a larger Jewish community of about 13,000 people. One factor that affected these Moroccan Jews was the Nationalists’ reliance on Regulares, Moroccan mercenaries, to fight the Republicans.
To recruit indigenous units the Nationalists used a combination of bribery and propaganda. They tried to get the backing of the Berber tribesmen by offering large subsidies of silver and grain to their chieftains. The attractions of food, money and fighting appealed to the Moroccans and 50,000 of them enlisted in the Nationalist army. The Nationalists also obtained the support of the rural Moroccan nationalists by making vague promises of future autonomy and granting some concessions, such as freedom of the press, the Arabization of indigenous education and a limitation on the land that non-Moroccans could purchase. At the same time, the Spanish insurgents tried to channel Moroccan nationalism against the common enemy, France.⁴⁸
The Nationalist efforts to enlist the support of the Muslim population had an adverse effect on the Jews living in the protectorate. In the spring of 1937 the Spanish authorities promulgated a law that forced the Jews of the zone to lower the rents on their properties by 35 per cent. Although the decree’s aim was to gain the sympathy of the Muslims, it had, in fact, the opposite effect. The houses belonging to the Arabs or the Spaniards stood empty whereas the Jewish properties, being much cheaper, were let [alone].⁴⁹
In the same vein, on the occasion of the Muslim feast of Korban, the Jewish community of Tetuán was forced to give 50,000 pesetas to purchase sheep for the enlisted Moroccans.⁵⁰
[…]
Axis propaganda inflamed the antisemitism of the Falangists and Carlists who resented the Jews’ privileged economic position in the protectorate. When the rebellion broke out, these fascist youths victimized the Jews by boycotting their businesses and confiscating their properties on the grounds that they were sympathetic to the Republican government.⁵⁷ In Tetuán the Falangists decided on their own authority to establish their headquarters in the house of a Jewish notable.⁵⁸
In Xauen, Larache and Melilla they extorted money from members of the Jewish communities by forcing them to swallow castor oil. These excesses prompted the British consul of Tangier, Edward Keeling, to complain to the High Commissioner of Morocco, General Luis Orgaz, who harangued the Falange.
The reprimand, however, proved ineffective and the abuse continued. By 1937 the situation of the Jews living in the protectorate was precarious. Rumours abounded that definite action against them was being prepared.⁵⁹
On the evening of 1 April, two Moroccan mercenaries entered the Jewish club, the Circulo Israelita. They began insulting and threatening those present, with cries of ‘Down with the Jews’, ‘Death to the Jews’, ‘We will burn the club down’. The two Regulares destroyed the Portuguese passport of a Jewish man.⁶⁰ In June, the victory of the Franco forces in Bilbao gave rise to anti-Jewish and anti-French demonstrations in Tetuán.⁶¹
In August, twenty-three Jews—principally women and children—were wounded during a riot of Moroccan soldiers in El Ksar. The Nationalist authorities fined the city’s Jewish community 1,800 pesetas a month for ‘having failed to avoid trouble’.⁶²
In September, the Falange gave instructions that all Jews working for Spaniards be dismissed and replaced by Spaniards and Moroccan Arabs. The High Commissioner rescinded the order.⁶³
Worse treatment was reserved for the Jews affiliated to the Republican organizations or to Freemasonry. As the incarnation of the ‘Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik’ conspiracy, they were tortured and forced to kiss the cross before being shot. About twenty of them were killed in the cities of Melilla and Ceuta.⁶⁴ In October, Albert Saguès, the director of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Tangier, wrote the following:
The Jews residing in the Spanish zone live in a climate of definite insecurity and terror. The fact that those who have been able to leave the zone to take refuge in Tangier never mention the incidents that they might have observed is itself very significant. They remain terrified despite the distance.⁶⁵
While trying to restrain the Falangists’ and Carlists’ excesses, the military authorities, needing to finance the war effort but reluctant to raise taxes, also fined the Jews large sums. In August 1936 the Tetuán Jews had to pay 500,000 pesetas as ‘voluntary contributions’ to the rebels’ treasury. In May 1937 they were again compelled to give 60,000 pesetas to the Nationalist cause.⁶⁶ The Jews were also forced to hand over their merchandise, especially foodstuffs, but also their jewellery and gold. Those who refused to do so were subject to arbitrary arrests, forced to drink castor oil or had their estates confiscated.
[…]
Meanwhile the Civil War was ruining the Jews of Morocco. In Arzila, two-thirds of them lived on charity.⁶⁹ They found themselves in a vicious circle, for those who wanted to leave the protectorate faced a number of impediments. Not only did they have to ask for special permission, but the Falangists also confiscated the property of those who did not come back within an allotted time.⁷⁰
Although a wave of antisemitism was sweeping through the protectorate, the Moroccan Jews realized that it was not comparable to that occurring [under German Fascism]. They kept a low profile and hoped that the hostility would disappear with the end of the Civil War.⁷¹
While there was a spike of patent antisemitism during World War II (1931–1945), in other instances the Spanish parafascists toned it down for opportunistic purposes. Now, do not misunderstand me: the point here is certainly not that any benevolence somehow cancels out the damage, or that there were ‘good and bad parts’ about Spanish parafascism for everybody involved, as if it were a ‘mixed bag’ overall, but rather that it was a complex phenomenon where its harmfulness was in some respects far from obvious. This is not trivia: it is important to recognise the strengths and harmless aspects of our enemies in order to continue identifying them and how they succeed with others.
Quoting Isabelle Rohr’s The use of antisemitism in the Spanish Civil War:
Franco’s […] régime contributed to the rescue of European Jews during the Holocaust by allowing about 40,000 of them to transit through Spain, granting various forms of diplomatic protection to 3,235 others and repatriating 800 Jews from France and the Balkans who were Spanish citizens.⁷⁴
Although the Franco régime did not discriminate against [all] the Jews who found shelter in Spain, it did not allow them to settle in the country. The Jews who reached Spain illegally during the first years of the war, and those whose transit arrangements failed, were imprisoned in the concentration camp of Miranda de Ebro or even turned back to the frontier.
Eric Calderwood’s Moroccan Jews and the Spanish colonial imaginary, 1903–1951:
The survival of Philo-Sephardism is paradoxical, since it persisted in the face of the Franco régime’s anti-Semitic rhetoric.¹⁹ […] Yet the spectre of the ‘Judeo-Masonic’ enemy did not prevent people closely aligned with the Franco régime from pursuing a Philo-Sephardic programme in Spain and Morocco, especially in the academic institutions created under Francoism. As in the case of Pulido’s Philo-Sephardic campaign, the Francoist brand of academic Philo-Sephardism garnered the support of many Moroccan Jews.
[…]
In January of 1938, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, a group of Jewish leaders in Tetouan sent a letter to Juan Beigbeder, the High Commissioner of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, in the name of the ‘Israelite Community of Tetouan.’²² The letter expresses support for a proposal to establish a centre for Talmudic studies in Tetouan, justifying the proposed centre by casting Tetouan and its Jewish inhabitants as the heirs to the cultural splendour of Sepharad. […] Franco’s régime received early and significant support from [some] Moroccan Jewish leaders, and this support was often framed as a manifestation of the Moroccan Jewish community’s historical links to Sepharad.
Whether this attempt to appeal to the Spanish parafascists was itself a form of opportunism, or these Jews sincerely appreciated parafascism, I leave that up to you. We must not deny, though, that many Jewish adults have willingly supported wrongful causes before.
Whatever the case may be, it is worth noting that Moroccan Jews were in a Spanish colony rather than in Spain proper, and there does not seem to have been an especially aggressive campaign to settle Spaniards in Morocco. Because of this separation, I can imagine that many Iberian antisemites found these Jews easier to tolerate than the Jews in Iberia. Hence:
On November 24, 1939, a few months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Franco created the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), which still serves today as Spain’s primary national research organisation. The CSIC was organised into various schools and institutes, one of which was the School for Hebraic Studies.²⁴ The school published Spain’s first academic journal of Hebrew studies, Sefarad. […] The prologue then describes the new journal’s aims and scope, which include the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew philology, archaeology, and (crucially) Sephardic culture. On this last topic, the editors say:
Another goal of the activities of the School of Hebraic Studies is the study of Hebraic-Spanish culture. Hispanic Judaism, throughout its trajectory, moved, in general, in a spiritualist environment […] We must keep in mind that Spanish Judaism offered the highest values in religious poetry, Biblical exegesis, Hebrew philology, philosophy, and pure and experimental sciences.
[…]
Bensabat notes that members of Tangier’s Jewish community have accused the Maimonides Institute ‘“of being a Hispanophile propagandist,” as if this were a crime, when it makes us proud to be considered that way’ (1951, 2). The comment, made in passing, highlights Bensabat’s complicity with Spain’s colonial mission in Morocco. More broadly, the case of the Maimonides Institute and its director Bensabat illustrates the migration of the Philo-Sephardic programme from early-twentieth-century liberal circles in Spain to Francoist academic culture and also to some elite Jewish intellectuals and professionals in the Spanish Protectorate zone.
Click here for events that happened today (January 16).
1908: Günther Prien, Axis U‐boat commander, came into existence.
1941: Eighty Luftwaffe Stuka dive bombers attacked Valletta Harbor, Malta, trying to finish off damaged Allied aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. HMS Illustrious, destroyer HMS Decoy, and cruiser HMAS Perth, and ship Essex took damage, but none sank, and the Axis lost ten flightcraft.
Additionally, Axis submarine U-96 sank Allied troopship Oropesa with three torpedoes 150 miles northwest of Ireland at 0616 hours, causing 106 deaths. Survivors drifted in six lifeboats, but only five lifeboats, containing 143, were found and rescued. Coincidentally, Axis submarine Luigi Torelli attacked an Allied convoy 350 miles west of Ireland, sinking Greek ship Nicolas Filinis and causing three deaths.
Lastly, Hans-Joachim Marseille began a period of rest at home in Berlin.
1942: The Axis commenced deporting Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to the Chełmno extermination camp… on a less tragic note, Ernst Scheller, Fascist politician and captain, died.
1945: The Third Reich’s head of state moved into his underground bunker, the so‐called Führerbunker.
1988: Andrija Artuković, Ustaše Minister of Internal Affairs and Minister of Justice who contributed to the Samudaripen, did what he should have done long ago and dropped dead.
2014: Hiroo Onoda, Imperial intelligence office who fought for the Axis until March 1974 (seriously), and was therefore easily one of the longest serving Axis soldiers (second only to Teruo Nakamura), finally left the world.
