The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) bled Spain dry in an endless and bitter conflict and also divided the world for three long years. The free world, led by the democratic powers of Europe and the United States, sympathized with the Republican cause without providing military support, while the fascist powers, Germany and Italy, supported Franco's rebels with weapons and soldiers.
Jews from many countries around the world enlisted by the thousands in the International Brigades that supported the Republicans against Franco in the war. This is, briefly, their story.
by Ricardo Angoso
On July 18, 1936, when Europe was torn between fascism and communism, a group of Spanish soldiers staged a coup against the Second Spanish Republic. The coup, which began in Spanish towns in Africa and the Canary Islands, initially failed, but Spain was divided into two halves: one in the hands of the Republican government, which controlled the large cities where the armed rebels had failed, and the other controlled by the rebel soldiers, who would end up installing their capital in the city of Salamanca. The Spanish civil war had just begun and would last three long, endless years.
The spanish civil war, which has generated an immense literature of all genres, divided the world between those who supported the republican side and those who, on the contrary, openly showed their sympathy for the national side that led Francisco FrancoThe fascist powers, Germany and Italy, blatantly supported the nationalists by sending military forces, while the international left - socialists, communists and also many liberals - took the side of the Second Republic.
The Republican cause was seen in Europe and elsewhere in the world as a romantic struggle to preserve democracy, freedoms and, ultimately, the great values of humanity for which it was worth dying. Then, with the war already in full swing and with fierce fighting on almost all war fronts, thousands of foreigners of more than fifty different nationalities and ideologies came to fight for the Republicans, among whom were several thousand Jews, mainly from France, Poland, Palestine, Germany, the Soviet Union, Canada and also from the United States.
While the cause of the Republicans was well received in democratic Europe and in the United States, the national side was genetically anti-Semitic and sympathized with the fascist regimes of Europe without hiding it or disguising it. The main ideologues of Spanish fascism, attached to the coup cause represented by Franco, had anti-Semitic ideas, such as Ramiro Ledesma, Onésimo Redondo and José Antonio Primo de Rivera -although with nuances-. Other figures of the new national movement, clearly pro-Nazi, such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and "son-in-law" Ramón Serrano Suñer and the journalist Víctor de la Serna, were worthy of separate mention. A newspaper of the Falange, the official party of the new Franco regime, published in those days of war, to clear up any doubts: "We will create concentration camps for lazy people and political criminals; for Masons and Jews; for the enemies of the Fatherland, Bread and Justice. In national territory there cannot remain a single Jew, a single Mason, a single Red."
The Jews, already deprived of all their rights in Germany and later in Italy, openly sympathised with the Republicans, as the Francoist ambassador in Athens, Sebastián Romero Madrigales, wrote in a note to his ministry: “Almost all Sephardim feel sympathy for the Reds, because they know that the Jews of the whole world are with them.” However, that did not prevent a small group of Spanish diplomats, including Romero Madrigales, from helping to save Jews during the Holocaust, outside of Spain’s official position and risking his career.
Although the figures vary greatly depending on the authors, it can be estimated that between 35.000 and 40.000 foreigners fought side by side with the Republicans to defend their cause, of whom between 4.000 and 7.000 were Jews, although the exact figures will never be known and vary considerably depending on the sources. A scholar on the subject, Alberto Fernández, states that “of these forty-five thousand foreign volunteers in the Popular Front zone, it can be calculated that there were between eight thousand five hundred and ten thousand Jews, coming from all parts of Europe and some from Africa and America”, a figure that, frankly, seems exaggerated to me.
I believe, objectively, that the figure should be placed between 5.000 and 7.000 Jews at most, who were enrolled in this military force supporting the Republicans. The scholar and brigadier, based in Israel, Josef Toch, puts this figure at 7.758, but without providing a list that supports this figure quantitatively. The majority of them came from countries where anti-Semitism reigned, as was the case of the Romanians, Germans and Poles of Jewish origin who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and almost all of them professed socialist, Zionist or communist ideas. Despite the doubts about their number, there is no doubt that, despite everything, the Jews were surely the second most important group after the French, who contributed some 10.000 men to the International Brigades. There were at least some 1.200 Jews from the United States, another thousand from Poland and some 450 from Romania.
The fact that they were Jewish was not a determining factor in their enlistment in the International Brigades, but, as Professor Raquel Ibáñez points out, “Jews from these countries tend, consequently, to minimize the influence of a specifically Jewish motivation in their decision to go to Spain and to relegate their Judaism and its possible influences to the private sphere, according to the concept of the general society in which they live; this position is even exacerbated, at least externally, as a reaction to the growing anti-Semitism of certain groups in that society that, precisely, tend to question their belonging to it.”
Jews were integrated into various Republican military units and fought on various fronts throughout Spain. There was also a company or unit formed exclusively by Jews known as the Botwin Jewish Unit or Naftali-Botwin Jewish Company, referred to in some war reports as the Second Company of the Palafox Battalion, and it actively participated in the battles of Extremadura, Aragon and, finally, in the failed battle of the Ebro. It was initially founded with 152 men and remained in active combat existence for nine months, with at least six officers in command of the unit being killed and 90 of its members being captured by Franco's troops. During its ephemeral existence it even published a newspaper in Yiddish. Some of its members were Alter Szerman, Karol Gutman, Jasza Zawidowicz, Moishe Rozenberg, Yosef Lipsman and Shamuel Shlosberg, to name just a few from a long list.
THE END OF THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES
There were also Jews in the contingent sent by the Soviet Union to help Spain, as the expert already cited Alberto Fernández tells us: “Of the 557 Soviets who came to Spain –none, apparently, against their will– ten percent were Jews. To name only a few of the best known, we will begin with Rosenberg, who arrived as Consul four weeks after the start of the war; Wladimir Birchitzki, advisor on the arms industry; General GM Stem, the first advisor to the Spanish command; General Iacob Smitkewitch (Douglas), advisor on the Republican aviation; Arthur Stacehwski, of Polish origin, economic advisor to the Government of the Republic; Gregor Kulik, directed Soviet military policy in Spain; General Kleber (Lazar Stem), Orlov, Berzin, who played an important role in the defense of Madrid, etc. Many of those mentioned disappeared during the Stalinist purges.”
At the end of 1938, almost once the Republican defeat was complete after the failure of the Battle of the Ebro, in which the executive of the Republic had placed all its hopes to contain the Francoist side, the first brigadiers began to leave until February 1939, when the last ones definitively left Spain. Among the last to leave were 86 members of the Botwin Unit who were interned in the concentration camps opened by the French to intern the Spanish Republicans who fled by the thousands after the fall of Catalonia and whose fate we do not know.
Among the prominent Jews who fought in the Spanish Civil War, several stand out: Pinkus Karti, who was one of the organizers of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto; Otro, Szyr, who was deputy prime minister in Poland in 1945; the Czechoslovak politician and writer Artur London; the Romanian Water Roman, a high-ranking military officer in the communist government of his country; the British secret agent George Nathan, a brave and cold-blooded soldier; and also three brave Jewish women, who enlisted as nurses to care for Spanish brigadiers and soldiers in the war, the sisters Vera, Golda and Rachel Luftig. There were more Jewish brigadiers and nurses in this civil war, but we will leave their stories for another installment.
Photos received from the author of the note
Good morning everyone, many people say that Francisco Franco was anti-Semitic, but he was very close to my family in Melilla, since the landing that took place from the Canary Islands to the Spanish peninsula was embarked on the fleet of ships of the Salama family.
During the Spanish Civil War, there were at least three major groups of Jews in the country. The first group was made up of Spanish Jews from Ceuta and Melilla, cities located in North Africa. These Jews had achieved Spanish citizenship in the late 1903th century, thanks to the religious freedom laws enacted during the First Republic, a brief attempt at democracy in Spanish history. Later, in XNUMX, a considerable number of Jews joined this community due to anti-Semitic violence that arose during a civil war between Moors in Morocco.
The second group was made up of a smaller number of Spanish Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula. Although this group was smaller, Spain became a refuge for many Jewish immigrants, especially in cities such as Barcelona, which offered relative openness in an increasingly anti-Semitic European context. Barcelona, in particular, was home to a significant population of foreign Jews.
The third group of Jews was also in Barcelona, composed mostly of foreigners who had come to participate in an alternative free Olympics, also known as the People's Olympics, organized in opposition to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Many of these foreign Jews, some of them with communist leanings, joined the Republican side during the conflict.
Franco was a character with a double standard regarding the Jews. On the one hand, he ordered the pro-Nazi Falangists, who were very anti-Semitic, to stop murdering and torturing the Spanish Sephardim of Ceuta and Melilla at the beginning of the military coup, at the request of some Jewish bankers from North Africa who had lent him part of the money for his coup. However, on the other hand, he wrote against the Jews in his anonymous anti-Masonic writings under the pseudonym of Jakim Boor, a name he chose to mock the Masons, since Jakin and Boaz are the names that the Masons give to the two symbolic columns located at the entrance of the lodge, in imitation of those that the master architect Hiram placed in the vestibule of the Temple of Jerusalem (Jakin on the right and Boaz on the left).
It is well known that Franco took a particularly hostile stance towards the Freemasons, trying to eradicate them, as he believed that they were an elite placed by the Jews to conspire against Spain and the world. However, it is also known that he himself tried to be admitted into Spanish Freemasonry on two occasions, probably influenced by his younger brother Ramón, whom he saw as the true hero of the family, or by his father, who also sympathised with Freemasonry and praised it while disparaging his son Franco.
Sorry, the Spanish Jews of Ceuta and Melilla achieved Spanish citizenship at the end of the 19th century, not the 18th, thanks to the religious freedom laws enacted during the First Republic, a very brief attempt at the first democracy in the entire history of Spain.
Sebastián Romero's correct surname was RADIGALES and not Madrigales as the journalist mistakenly wrote twice throughout the article.