The Chisinau pogrom of 1903 caused a great shock throughout the world, especially in the Jewish communities of Europe, which were already deeply affected and divided by the emergence of Zionism on the political scene.
by Ricardo Angoso
Before the 1903 pogrom, Chisinau was one of the cities with the largest Jewish population in Europe, some 50.000 people, 46% of the city census, and there were about sixty synagogues, Talmudic schools, clinics, Jewish schools and several cemeteries, the best known and most prominent being the one on Milano Street, still open and active, although it needs some work and several of its buildings are abandoned and in ruins.
The spark that ignited the fire of the pogrom, as had happened so many times elsewhere in Europe, was a fake news story manipulated by local anti-Semites to ignite the population into attacking Jews. In this particular case, the pogrom began after an incident on April 6, 1903 when a young Russian Christian, Mikhail Rybachenko, was found dead in the town of Dubossari about 40 kilometers north of Chisinau. Although it was clear that the young man had been killed by a relative (who was later found), the anti-Semitic Russian-language newspaper Бессарабец (Bessarabets, meaning “Bessarabian”), whose editor was Pavel Krushevan, hinted that he was killed by the Jews. Very soon, the false rumor spread. Information obtained from Wikipedia https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogromo_de_Chisin%C3%A1u).
The Chisinau pogrom of 1903 was horrific. “On April 6, 1903, the Jewish community of Chisinau suffered days of street violence that shocked the world and changed the course of Jewish history. Sparked by a medieval blood libel, now known thanks to the new technologies of the time, it made headlines all over the world’s press. The Chisinau pogrom was the last of the Middle Ages and the first atrocity of the XNUMXth century. This event and the worldwide wave of Jewish outrage it sparked laid the foundation for the modern State of Israel, gave birth to contemporary Jewish-American activism, and helped bring about the downfall of the Tsarist regime,” we read on Wikipedia, which cited several articles from the Jewish-American newspaper Forward.
Literally, this is how Forward reported it in those days: “Armed with knives and machetes, the murderers broke into Jewish homes, where they began stabbing and killing, cutting off heads and beating frail women and small children. If the wicked, angry mob had attacked a Jewish town somewhere in Lithuania, thousands of Jews would have died within an hour. But the Jews of Chisinau were tough, healthy, strong as iron and fearless. When the pogromite murderers began their terrible massacre, children and Jews came running and fought like lions to protect their weaker and older brothers and sisters. Even young girls behaved with incredible heroism. They defended their honor with supernatural strength… The Jews, however, fought with their own hands and the murderers, armed with machetes and knives, were primed to annihilate and decimate the entire people of the Jewish people.”
Even the British newspaper The Times reported about those mournful events in its pages: “That was an organized plan in anticipation of the general massacre of Jews the day after Russian Easter. The crowd was led by the priests and the general cry of 'kill the Jews' during the marches was heard throughout the city. The Jews were caught totally off guard and were slaughtered like lambs. The number of dead was 120 and the wounded were about 500. The scenes of horror that witnessed this massacre are indescribable. The babies were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty crowd. The local police made no attempt to suppress the reign of terror. At dusk, the streets were full of piled-up corpses and wounded people. Those who were able to escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.”
The pogrom, which lasted between two and three days, caused the death of between 60 and 120 Jews, according to sources, 92 seriously injured and 500 slightly injured, apart from extensive material damage, such as the destruction of some 700 homes and an undetermined number of business in Hebrew hands. Other sources consulted only report 49 fatalities. Only two men were convicted, with light sentences, for these events, and the event caused a deep international commotion, being well known at the time and generating the emigration of thousands of Russian Jews to Palestine and several European countries. Apparently, the Orthodox Church itself led the riots and some priests incited the mobs to attack the Jews.
THE SECOND CHISINAU POGREM
A second pogrom took place on 19–20 October 1905. This time, the riots began as political protests against the Russian Tsar, but escalated into an attack on any Jews who could be found. By the end of the riots, 19 Jews had been killed and 56 others were injured, although the figures are also disputed because there is a discrepancy between the sources.
Self-defense groups organized by Jews after the first pogrom helped to contain the violence, but their success was limited and the attack could not be stopped. These two actions against the Jewish community caused the departure of some 12.000 Jews, increasing the census of this population from 65.000 to 53.000 - still a little more than 40% of the total inhabitants of Chisinau - and generating distrust between Moldovans and Jews. The impact of the two pogroms was brutal throughout the region, not only in Moldova, and thousands of Jews from Romania, Russia and surrounding areas would flee forever, terrified by the horror of what happened in Chisinau.
“The Chisinau Pogrom was a major turning point. It was not the bloodiest pogrom ever, but it was the first time that anti-Semitism was explicitly one of the main drivers of violence. The international press picked up the story, and for the first time the word ‘pogrom’ became known around the world,” Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen rightly noted in The Times.
THE POLITICAL IMPACT OF THE POGROM ON THE JEWISH WORLD
These events caused a deep shock in the Jewish world and helped strengthen the nascent Zionist movement in Europe, which was just beginning at that time. As a result of this concern about the events, a young Hebrew poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik, was sent to Chisinau by a Jewish communal commission to interview survivors and report first-hand on the bloodshed. Deeply impressed by the events, Bialik composed several poems relating to the pogrom and the pain of its victims and ended up writing one of his masterpieces, The city of slaughter, regarding the pogrom. The book is a poetic plea in favor of the attacked Jews and is nourished by the testimony of everything that Bialik saw, heard and knew first-hand on his trip to Chisinau.
But this pogrom also changed the Zionist strategy, and after it, attention began to be paid to what was called “Jewish self-defense,” which consisted of organizing Jewish communities to defend themselves against anti-Semitic attacks and which inspired many heroic examples in various Jewish guerrilla groups in World War II, such as the Bielski partisans. The writer Ilan Greilsammer recalled that “after the Chisinau pogrom, Jewish self-defense was advocated” and after the Sixth Zionist Congress, the Uganda Plan was abandoned because this territory was disconnected from the roots of Judaism. The urgent need was to quickly create a Jewish state, as the bloody events in Chisinau showed.
The same author cited above points out: “Indeed, the terrible news of the Chisinau pogrom led Theodor Herzl to seriously consider the British proposal, both for tactical and practical reasons, without, however, renouncing the final objective: Eretz-Israel.” Collaterally, the Chisinau pogrom had strengthened the idea of Palestine as the Jewish national home, leaving behind forever the initial proposals of some Jewish leaders to establish the same in Uganda, Argentina, Cyprus and even Siberia, where a sort of autonomous Jewish republic with hardly any Jews still exists.
Years after these events, in 1924, the local authorities revoked the citizenship of many Jews who had long lived in Bessarabia, and in Chisinau in particular, leading to widespread unemployment in the community. Not a single year passed without anti-Semitic demonstrations, riots and the suppression of Jewish educational and cultural organizations. Members of the anti-Semitic organization League of National and Christian Defense, led by the Romanian warlord Alexander Cuza, would organize frequent “parades” with the purpose of terrorizing the local Jewish community. There was also the almost wholesale closure of Jewish institutions, schools, newspapers, theaters and cultural organizations. Thus, thousands of Jews from Moldova, but also from other parts of Europe, began to emigrate en masse to Palestine.
Photos of the author of the note
Sources consulted and used:
Aurora
https://aurora-israel.co.il/el-pogromo-de-kishinev-como-catwalizador-de-la-guerra-ruso-japonesa
Wikipedia:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogromo_de_Kishinev
JewishMemory:
http://jewishmemory.md/en/
Documentation Center of the Museum of the Jewish People:
https://www.anumuseum.org.il/museo-del-pueblo-judio/
Despite all the deep knowledge of the massacres in various places due to deeply instilled anti-Semitism, they continue to blame all evils on the Jews and when they defend themselves they condemn them for [genocide] without the slightest shame, not caring about any reason or just cause for their defense.
Although I believe that it has not been investigated in depth, except in well-known psychological experiments that provoke sensational news more than anything else, the unstoppable power of a mass of citizens seems evident; nobody and nothing can stop it once it begins to act violently, enraged or crazy, acting in unison against a minority, although it is very likely that the environment must be heated by the leaders, or that there must be a permanent hostile environment, if not a culture of hatred against the minority. Currently, with all this more or less already known, it is questionable whether the leaders, hidden or not, do not know the foreseeable consequences that the harangues that foment violence will have.
Other pogroms that were very significant for Jews were those that took place in Poland during World War II, and even after it ended, when some Jews tried to resume their former life. Jan T. Gross's 2001 book “Neighbors” in English was the first to bring to light the involvement of Polish Catholics in such a serious crime as the criminal pogrom perpetrated by Polish Catholics in Jedwabne, in which 1,600 men, women and children were murdered, with the participation of all the men in the town and with the approval of the German Nazis. Later, in “Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland” (2013), historian Jan Grabowski analyzes the extent of the participation of Polish Catholics in the Shoah, estimating that they were directly responsible for the murder of around 200.000 Jews, especially Jews who tried to hide when the Nazi deportations began. Jan Grabowski received death threats for this book, and the Polish government passed a law shortly after to condemn anyone who publicly claimed that Poles participated in the Jewish Holocaust. These books exposed the manipulations of various Polish governments, from those of the Soviet era to the current ultra-nationalist ones, in hiding the crimes committed by the Poles themselves, mostly villagers, and the various Polish police forces, as well as the Catholic Church, politicians, etc.
They acted for different reasons: deep-rooted anti-Semitism, or political strategies as in the case of some Polish communists, or out of unhealthy greed to get hold of supposed riches that at that time everyone believed were always hidden by Jews, or in exchange for some small reward from the Nazis, such as money, food or simply to keep some of the clothes worn by their Jewish victims. Killing Jews was so common among Polish yokels that at least one case is known of Polish city communists who went to help them in order to gain their political support or to clean up their bad image among the Poles, since the Polish yokels accused the Polish communists, not only the Jews, of having brought about the Russian invasion.
During the deportations of Jews to extermination and concentration camps, most of them located in Poland, many Polish Catholics saw cattle trains loaded with Jews pass by, as can be seen in the famous documentary film Shoah, which includes testimonies recorded in the 1980s. The Polish Catholics were all very saddened by the fate of the Jews or saying that they did not know or could not have done anything. However, a Jewish survivor who appears in Shoah said that from the train he actually saw Polish Catholics laughing at them, knowing that the Nazis were going to murder them.
In Poland, the ultra-nationalist official government version of the 1946 Kielce pogrom, after the Second World War in Europe, also seems to be widespread, and they want to blame the communists for everything. There is no shortage of Poles who continue with the traditional anti-Semitic nonsense in order to blame the Jews, arguing that the crimes committed by the Jews that provoked the Catholic pogroms have not been investigated or have been hidden.
From what can be gleaned from both books, there was a patronage society in Poland, all in collusion or acting in collusion against anyone they did not like, such as the Jews. Every time Polish Catholics found a young Polish girl accidentally dead in the river, or even if she had actually been raped and murdered by a Catholic in the village before, the Jewish leaders had to meet with the Catholic religious authority to pay him a fortune just so that during Sunday mass he would tell the Polish Catholics not to murder all the Jews in the village in a new pogrom.
In the book "Neighbours: The Extermination of the Jewish Community of Jedwabne (Poland)" by Gross, Jan T. Here is the testimony of a Polish Jewish survivor of one of the several pogroms that took place in Poland from 1945 onwards after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the beginning of Communism: «From the ambulance I heard the comments of the soldier who was escorting us and the nurse who called us Jewish rabble, whom they had to save, and that they shouldn't do it because we had murdered children, and that we should all be shot. They took us to the hospital of S. Lazarus on Kopernika Street. First they took me to the operating room. After the intervention a soldier appeared and said that, once the operation was over, he was going to take everyone to jail. He hit one of the wounded Jews who were waiting to be operated on. He pointed a gun at us and wouldn't even let us drink a drink of water. After a while two railroad workers appeared and one said: "It is a scandal that a Pole does not have the civil courage necessary to hit a defenseless person," and hit one of the wounded Jews. One of the patients admitted to the hospital hit me with a crutch. The women, even the nurses, remained behind the door threatening us and saying that they were just waiting for the operation to end so they could disembowel us. The author adds that a large part of the Polish communist leaders were the same ones who were collaborating with the Nazis, they were recycled and could not be anything other than simple scoundrels or political mercenaries without any ideology or who were sold to the highest bidder. The only force that could hold together the crazy Polish Catholic society could only be anti-Semitism or the refusal to admit the numerous robberies and crimes against Jews that a large part of the Polish Catholic yokels committed during the Nazi invasion, when they reached a paroxysm after a continuous anti-Semitism of many centuries before. Among the few Polish Catholics who helped the Jews, those who dared to say in public that they had helped Jews or when the other villagers knew about it, they were continually threatened and coerced until they were forced to change villages. Then, if in the other village or provincial city a former Catholic redneck neighbour recognised them on the street, they would immediately "squeal" to the Catholic rednecks in the new village, who would again threaten them until they were forced to change villages again. Naturally, in this picturesque Polish Catholic patronage society there was no thought of having to return what they had stolen from the Jews. Polish workers, who were by then all communists by force, went on strike when it became known that the communist authorities were going to condemn the Polish Catholic hillbillies who committed the infamous Kielce pogrom, which was provoked simply by a Polish child’s story about the kidnapping and murder of Jews. According to the children’s story, in this Kielce pogrom 45 Jewish survivors were murdered, as they were waiting to return to their homes and businesses stolen from them by the Polish Catholic hillbillies: “On July 10 [1946], meetings were held in several Łódź factories to condemn those responsible for the Kielce pogrom. People were reluctant to sign a declaration of refusal. However, these statements were published the next day in the newspapers. The event gave rise to a series of protest strikes. The first to go on strike were the workers of the Łódź Spinning Mills and the Scheibler and Grohman factories, who were joined by workers from Buhle, Zimmerman, Warta, Tempo Rasik, Hofrichter, Gampe and Albrecht, Gutman, Dietzel, Radziejewski, Wejrach, Kinderman, Wólczanka, and two sewing workshops. At first the strikers demanded that the false information be corrected, according to which the factory workers had allegedly signed these declarations of rejection; but then they added another demand, namely, that the condemned be released [fourteen people were sentenced to death in a summary trial]. The strikers were very agitated; Violence was resorted to against those who proposed that work be resumed… This type of reaction from workers was quite common in the rest of the country. The majority of the workers refused to vote in favor of condemning the perpetrators of the pogrom.
It was in Eastern Europe that the most recent pogroms took place, which in the rest of Europe were already forgotten or were typical of the Middle Ages, and it was also in Russia where the most famous book among the anti-Semitic libels, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", appeared, which spread like wildfire among all the traditional Western anti-Semites, for example in Spain Onésimo Redondo, one of the 3 great historical leaders of the Spanish fascist party, together with José Antonio, an aristocrat who was elected, or perhaps imposed, by the Spanish businessmen and upper classes, and the more pro-Nazi and nihilist Ramiro Ledesma... while the little dictator Franco, for the most energumenous Spanish fascists and Nazis, would rather be a nobody. Well, this founder of Falange, the traditional Spanish fascist party, published the best-known Spanish translation of the famous libel. We are talking about the fascist leader who was perhaps the most Catholic or perhaps the one who was most determined to fulfill what Catholicism instilled, very close to the Jesuit sect, the ultra-Catholic sect that called the shots in Spain at that time. Cardinal Herrera Oria himself, the leader of the Jesuits, hooked him up with a job as a translator at a German university, during the rise of Nazism. The most classic accusation against Jews, or also against Freemasons, especially by fascists and Nazis, is to believe in anti-Semitic conspiracies based on the general concept that Jews seek economic power, for example through Jewish multinationals they conspire to take control of planet Earth and do whatever they want without anyone saying anything to them, such as rape and child sacrifice to worship the Devil, in addition the money conspiracy is shared with communists and other anti-Semites. But the relatively recent, more criminal anti-Semitism did not so much begin with the German Nazi criminals; this is also how Jews were depicted in one of the most famous anti-Semitic cartoons, from 1893 in the French anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole, founded by Édouard Drumont, with a caricature about the "Jewish ambition" to dominate the world, with a stereotypical-looking Jew, his pockets full of money and his claws clinging to the planet Earth ("His homeland," reads the caption). One of the best books to try to explain what was happening during the new resurgence of anti-Semitism at this time, at the end of the 2011th century, is "On the Jewish Question" (XNUMX) by Elisabeth Roudinesco, a well-known French psychoanalyst, a Jew of Romanian origin. Although the author is a leftist, as a Lacanian, it is not a reading that seems communist or of convoluted psychoanalysis, but rather conveys great knowledge. The traditional discrimination against Jews, which was rather religious, would have turned into visceral hatred in the mid-19th century, precisely in cultured and enlightened France. It was surprising that in France there were so many anti-Semitic intellectuals or those who collaborated, unintentionally providing another argument for the anti-Semites. Furthermore, those who joined the cause were either left-wing or right-wing, or atheists, Catholics, Protestants, or many of these were Jews who denied being Jews. Not infrequently they contradicted each other, or used the arguments of others even though their ideologies were incompatible; their only common link was anti-Semitism. Other times they manipulated by reinterpreting in their own way very popular writers such as Victor Hugo, or Nietzsche himself, when in reality they harshly criticized anti-Semites and those who used their books to justify hatred of Jews. But they took it out on the Jews, they got into that, just as they might have gotten into banging their heads against walls or sucking on light bulbs, and there was no way to get it out of their heads.
This is the case of the French anti-Semite Drumont, whose book "Jewish France" is still part of the "trilogy of hatred" along with Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," according to the author. Hitler was the one who took to the extreme or made the desire of all this anti-Semitism that began in cultured France come true, although the majority of the French did not initially harbor such criminal aims, they were more intellectual or theoretical. It is equally surprising that today, in the 21st century, even with the Internet and so many advances, there is room for such anachronistic ideas, repeating the same absurd arguments without any basis. France went from being the country of the Enlightenment, of the Revolution, of the Republic and democracy, to letting itself be dragged along by this gang of reactionaries, absolute monarchists, ultra-nationalists, Catholic and Christian racists, taking France back in time to some point in History that they considered ideal, in the case of France to the Middle Ages, like the Spanish fascists and Nazis, although these crazy Spanish people also make many other space-time leaps, probably with alien technology, including trips to ancient Rome, or to the Celtic times of the witches or druids of their superior Aryan race of the Galicians, or surely many others go to other planets where the Nazis of Hitler's UFOs now reside. According to Roudinesco, "Although he proclaims himself European in his crusade against the Jews, Drumont calls everything that is not "French" Jewish. Consequently, the immigrants are Jews. But this is not enough. For a non-Jew to be equated with a Jew, he will have to be either a Freemason, or an atheist, or a Republican, or a Protestant, or a Jacobin. Thus, Cambacérès is considered Jewish because he considers himself a Freemason, and the same happens with Léon Gambetta, because he is a Republican and of Italian origin. By the grace of this reasoning, France was "Judaized" from all sides, since, through the fault of Voltaire and the Abbé Grégoire - the first for being anti-Christian and the second for being an apostate - the Jews took over everything because of their emancipation." With this last term he is referring to the tendency among the Jews of the time to integrate into the secular societies of the European states, dressing and behaving like the Europeans of the country, even being atheists. Emancipation was a common custom among Jews or an update to the times that ultimately meant that things were even worse for them, compared to what they had previously experienced in Europe. Today's fascists and Nazis are no different from those criminals who brought Europe to the brink, who threw all European values overboard. They did not care, since they themselves, along with their ideologies and beliefs, would be above all else; to achieve their fundamentalist final objectives, the means did not matter. In her book, Elisabeth Roudinesco mentions not only the origins of anti-Semitism, but also of denialism or the equating of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, which unites various apparently antagonistic ideologies: Islamists who support Arab terrorist groups, fascists, neo-Nazis, leftists, anarchists, etc. For example, the well-known left-wing guru Noam Chomsky is a fervent anti-Zionist who wrote the prologue to a book by the anti-Semite Robert Faurisson, the book that gave rise to the most modern denialism or its intellectual justification. We must not forget that communists and anarchists, from all over the world and also in Spain, not only tend to believe all the nonsense that Chomsky spouts, they also tend to repeat the world conspiracy of Jews and Judeo-Masons, for example through secret sects like the world-famous Bilderberg Club. Perhaps the communists are a little more focused on the part of world economic domination while the fascists and Nazis, or the ultra-Catholics, like to mix everything up more in those same conspiracies, that is, they mix money with political control, with that of the health of the population and mental control through pharmaceuticals, also with occultism, paranormal powers, or with kidnappings, orgies, rapes of children and human sacrifices for the invocations of the Devil, or with the theory of "the great replacement", a great world plan with which Jews and Freemasons, together with their like-minded left-wing parties, although other new anti-Semites like the disturbed Americans of QAnon call all of these with the euphemism of "the elites", want to exterminate the white race through their lax policies with immigrants, with abortion, with homosexuals, etc. Other curious cases of Holocaust deniers include several left-wing anarchists who became fervent Holocaust deniers, repeating the same nonsense as neo-Nazis, such as Paul Rassinier, even though he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald for being a socialist and anarchist. But right now the fascists and Nazis, together with the ultra-Catholics and some others on the right, are now more focused on going against communism. It seems that they have forgotten or left the Jews aside, although what is happening now with their anti-Masonic ideology is not very clear, especially in Spain where traditionally the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy is mainly focused against the Masons. Surely all these ideologies have now joined together or have greatly facilitated this new world front against communism from the mental diarrhea of the American evangelical sects, those of the Protestant central in the United States, because they drag hundreds of millions of very energetic and obedient followers like vulgar Spanish ultra-Catholics. These new evangelical sects have been very strong against communism, in what everything indicates is a crusade against communism that they have mounted, they are also more than homophobic and sexist lunatics, their sectarian leaders instill that the Jews are their equals and that when Israel destroys all its enemies, and the Jews convert to Christianity, only then will the second coming of Jesus Christ occur, which will save the good evangelicals and the converted Jews. and very fond of asking for a “heavy hand” from the military and police, of finishing off the Moors, etc., they are almost worse than the Spanish fascists and Nazis, on top of that in Spain they are even more frightening, apparently being very strange creatures because they are from a Christianity foreign to ultra-Catholicism, which is the only Christian thing that the Spanish know.
In the particular case of Spain, in principle currently, or until now, only the most energumenal Spanish fascists and neo-Nazis are those who continue to be blatantly anti-Semitic, for example like the one shown by the Falangist Isabel Peralta, who recently became famous for a more than blatant anti-Semitic public speech, or then the neo-Nazi Falangist continued when he was expelled from Germany, where he went to learn with those very violent neo-Nazis who are still around there, or they also published a video where he appears with a pro-Palestinian speech, together with a group of Spanish neo-Nazis, in which he harangued Palestinian terrorists, making an apology for terrorism against Israel, or against the Jews. The first time that Spaniards came across some objective information about some of the things that the Spanish fascists and Nazis did during the Civil War and the fascist dictatorship could well have been the book “The Last Spaniards of Mauthausen”, the Spanish bestseller published by Carlos Hernández in 2015, which provided information about what happened to the Republicans at the end of the Civil War, as well as many other historical facts. For example, in this same book there is mention of a then journalist Manuel Aznar, the grandfather of the former Prime Minister Aznar, who wrote articles about the invasion of his beloved Nazi Germany shortly before becoming an important diplomat for the fascist regime, a meteoric rise after changing sides, previously belonging to the Basque nationalist or separatist party. After the invasion of France by Hitler's Nazi Germany, he wrote the following in the newspaper ABC for the Spanish fascists: "Legions of Jews and Freemasons fell upon the French people as if upon an immense booty and there they made bait and meat for their appetites." Aznar's grandson, former Prime Minister, was also once a staunch fascist. As a teenager he wrote a passionate letter for a Falangist pamphlet, which was logically published since he came from such an influential fascist family. A letter in which he called for a return to the original Falangism or that of the fascist leader José Antonio, an ideal, if you will pardon the redundancy, that Aznar claimed had been lost over the years. Shortly after the Nazi defeat, even the original Falangists were given a facelift by pretending to be unaware of the methods employed by their former German Nazi comrades. Their attitude before the Nazi defeat was very different. The Franco regime followed its most fundamentalist slogans, based on the original Nazi-style Falangism and on ultra-Catholicism, or a very particular Catholicism or one specific to these Spanish fascists, who are mainly based on the rancid medieval and imperial past of Spanish ultra-Catholics and on a then very ultra-Catholic sect of the Spanish Jesuits, identifying the Jews with dark and greedy beings linked to the Communist International, apart from the traditional accusation that they were the murderers of Christ, although the majority of these Spanish fascists took it rather against the Masons, surely because there were almost no Spanish Jews in the peninsula or not enough for the nonsense to be credible. Although they distinguished between Spanish Jews or Sephardim, who would in some way be blessed by the Spanish fascists, very different from the rest of the Jews or the Ashkenazis. Manuel Aznar was an amateur compared to other Spanish fascist journalists, who directly praised the discriminatory and repressive measures against the Jewish people adopted by Nazi Germany, with niceties such as the following: "If it is the persecuted race, it is because of the divine curse that it carries upon it and that is why they hide among other peoples, and no Jew wants to be called a Jew (...). Those Jews who are packing their bags in France, Greece, Turkey, Italy and the African coasts are an indication of that old Spanish determination to never admit anything anti-Spanish and to recognise only what is Spanish and Christian. A Spanish journalist who was with the Spanish Nazis or volunteer Falangists of the Blue Division informed the rest of the Spaniards from Russia: "(The Russians) have no concept of Fatherland, not even of universality; they are only capable of considering very lightly the events that occur at the moment. In that they resemble monkeys and are, of course, the last layer that separates man from stone (...). The contrast with this infrarace produces two feelings in the Spanish. The first is one of contempt and the second one of commiseration. It is clear that we Mediterraneans are only capable of temporary cruelty, as strong as you want, but without refinements of ultimate consequences. The Russians look for us because they find compassion in us. And even the Jews, who in their flesh pay for all the sins of their cursed lineage, have the tender look of a beaten dog when the Spanish soldier mistreats them without reason... that is, even if they themselves admit that they are fascists and very close friends of the Nazi criminals, or even if they are just as murderous, they would be a darling or Pearls of the Caribbean. A Falangist colonel of the Blue Division, Colonel García Navarro, who commanded the last group of Spanish volunteers on the Russian front, said the following when the dictator Franco ordered them to return home to their mother: "Our country is in mourning because it is forced, in a transitory chance of the circumstances of the war, to obey its own enemies; those who, at the present time and in the continuity of History, have always tried to hurt and diminish us. It is a bitter moment that only miserable people and scoundrels can rejoice in. Let no one ignore the scope of this fact! It is being returned against our will, as well as against the feelings of the best part of our country. Spain forced to accede to foreign taxation! (...).
The Sephardim became known again in Spain at the beginning of the 1903th century after some expeditions abroad, first by Dr. Pulido in the summer of XNUMX through the countries of the Danube, and later by the military of Morocco, who were very surprised that some Jews spoke to them in an old Spanish. Shortly afterwards, Sephardim received Spanish nationality thanks to the former military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, the father of the great leader and one of the founders of the fascist party Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. This Falangist was not the most anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi of the three founders of Falange, probably because his father, the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, approved through the Military Directorate on December 3, 20 a decree "on the granting of Spanish nationality by letter of nature to protected persons of Spanish origin." According to Wikipedia, the policy of the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship towards the Sephardim has been called by Joseph Pérez and Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida as “right-wing philosophicism” or “right-wing philosophicism”. This, according to Pérez, would have arisen among the Africanist military men stationed in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco who despised the "Moors" and who, on the contrary, considered the Sephardic Jews to be much better educated and "half Spanish." This idea was already taken up by the diplomat José Antonio de Sangroniz in his book Marruecos published in 1921 and developed in La recuperación cultural de España (The Cultural Expansion of Spain) in 1926, in which he adopted the positions of Ángel Pulido Fernández in his approach to the Sephardim, a right-wing politician although apparently close to Freemasonry or at least he belonged to the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Education), a state institution during the liberal governments to lift the Spanish lower classes out of ignorance and illiteracy, which at that time was a large number of the Spanish population. The National Anti-Masonic and Anti-Semitic League was a Spanish anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic organization founded in 1912 by the Sevillian Catholic and Carlist José Ignacio de Urbina, who stood out for his opposition to the pro-Sephardic campaign of Dr. Ángel Pulido Fernández and received the support of twenty-two bishops through letters published in the League's newspaper El Previsor, directed by Urbina himself between May 1912 and February 1918. Ángel Pulido is the architect of the idea of strengthening ties with the Sephardic Jews, who still preserved an ancient Spanish language, Ladino and other variants, in North Africa and the Balkans, all descendants of Spanish Jews who until then were totally unknown to the Spanish. For his part, the diplomat José María Doussinague also prepared a report in 1930 entitled Economic Sephardism in which he stated that Sephardic Jews were superior to Ashkenazim because their blood was mixed with that of Castilians and advocated using them as a weapon for commercial penetration in the Balkans. The diplomat and writer Agustín de Foxá also supported the Sephardic cause and even dedicated some poems to it, such as the one entitled The Romance of the Sephardic House. One of the pro-Sephardic Africanist military men was, according to Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, Francisco Franco, as evidenced by the article “Xauen la triste” that he wrote for the Revista de cadáveres coloniales in 1926, when he was 33 years old and had just been promoted to Brigadier General. In the article he highlighted the virtues of the Sephardic Jews with whom he had interacted, which contrasted with the “savagery” of the “Moors.” In his script for the film Raza (1942) there is an episode that reflects this Sephardic philosophy. The protagonist visits the synagogue of Santa María la Blanca in Toledo with his family and says: “Jews, Moors and Christians were here and were purified upon contact with Spain.” According to Álvarez Chillida, “For Franco, as we see, the superiority of the Spanish nation was manifested in its ability to purify even the Jews, converting them into Sephardim, quite different from their other coreligionists,” that is, the Ashkenazim would no longer be good Jews. Franco's Sephardic philosophy has been attempted to be explained by his supposed Jewish-convert origins - which some have even linked to his devotion to Saint Teresa of Jesus, from a converted family, with whose "incorruptible arm" he slept and traveled because it brought him luck and also because he believed himself to be an enlightened person with the right to possess it - but there is no proof in this regard - apparently the Nazi Heydrich, head of a kind of secret service of the Nazi party, ordered an investigation into Franco's Jewish ancestry, without any results. In any case, General Franco's Sephardic philosophy did not affect his policy of keeping Spain free of Jews, except in its African territories. Before the fascist coup, the majority of Spanish Jews resided in Ceuta and Melilla, the vast majority of them Sephardic, descendants of those expelled by decree of the Catholic Monarchs, who still retained traces of their Hispanic culture and spoke Jaquetía, the particular dialect of northern Morocco, including the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, of the Judeo-Spanish language spoken by the Sephardic Jews of the area. They arrived in a cultural and economic position that was sufficiently comfortable to prosper almost immediately, and to make these Spanish cities prosper. All of them acquired Spanish nationality in recent times, first during the very brief period of the First Republic, the first attempt at democracy in the entire history of Spain at the end of the 1903th century, and then there was a second great wave of migration from XNUMX onwards due to anti-Semitism during the wars between Moors in Morocco. In fact, in Franco one can find a character with double standards with regard to the Jews, as when he ordered the very anti-Semitic philo-Nazi Falangists to stop murdering and torturing the Spanish Sephardim of Ceuta and Melilla at the beginning of the military coup because he was asked to do so by some Jewish bankers from North Africa who lent him part of the money for his coup d'état, then he wrote against the Jews in his anonymous anti-Masonic writings under the pseudonym of Jakim Boor, a pseudonym to mock the Masons, Jakin and Boaz are the names with which the Masons designate the two symbolic columns situated at the entrance of the lodge, imitating those that they suppose the master architect Hiram placed in front of the vestibule of the temple of Jerusalem (Jakin on the right, and Boaz on the left). It is well known that the dictator Franco took it out on the Freemasons in particular, trying to exterminate them because he thought they were a minority or elite placed there by the Jews to conspire against Spain or the world, although it is also known that he himself tried to be admitted into Spanish Freemasonry twice, to imitate his younger brother Ramón, the true hero of the family, or his father who also sympathised with Freemasonry, always praising it while calling his son Franco an inept brat. The fascists murdered around 2000-2500 Spanish Masons out of a total of 5000-7000, although they also accused many more Republicans under the cover of their anti-Masonry laws, such as the lay teaching officials of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. In addition, during the dictatorship the fascists also included Jews in the same anti-Masonry laws; they were also not allowed to work as doctors, dentists, etc.
In general, although it could be said that Spanish Jews did not suffer the same discrimination as the Masons, according to the testimonies of Spanish Jews and the few foreign Jews who managed to find refuge in fascist Spain, there was a mixed bag. During the first days of the fascist coup, several Jews from Ceuta and Melilla were murdered or tortured, with the Falangists acting like German Nazis, especially against left-wing Jews. A Spanish Jew recalled that some Falangists shaved the head of a Jewish beggar to draw a Christian cross on his head. Jews taken to Spanish concentration camps were given the option of going free and then joining the fascist side "voluntarily," but according to the testimony of a survivor, they were given a stick to pretend they were shooting, so that the fascists would know where the Republicans were shooting from. Other Jews were saved from prison or from being killed by explaining to the fascists that they had been mistaken for Masons. or the well-known Jewish leaders Fortunato Benarroch and Samuel Sequerra received threats from the German Falangists and Nazis; the fascists also stole money, businesses and property or asked the Spanish Jewish communities to donate large sums of money “voluntarily”, money that was partly used to finance the 50.000 Spanish Falangists of the Blue Division who went to help in Nazi Germany’s Operation Barbarossa; the Spanish Falangists assumed that they were going on a paid vacation in Russia, although they soon saw that “things were going well”, almost when they arrived, Franco ordered them to return. When Spain signed the military pacts with the United States from 1953, the fascists or Franco forced them to call him “the savior of the Jews”, going so far as to order a real savior, the Spanish ambassador to Hungary Angel Sanz Briz, to tell the Israeli authorities that he acted under Franco’s orders. The regime carried out an intense international propaganda campaign, a tale that many Jews believed, and surely many still believe. Shortly before the signing of the pacts, the Spanish fascists became close friends with the Arab countries, taking advantage of their common anti-Semitic ideologies, and because of the oil, Franco sent Falangists, weapons and Nazi fighter planes and bombers, sold to him by Hitler's Germany, to help the Arab countries during Israel's War of Independence from 1.948 to 1.953.