Jews in the Spanish Civil War

Of the 40,000 volunteers of the International Brigades who fought in the Spanish Civil War, 20% were Jewish. What were the motivations of the 8,000 Jews who joined the contingents of the more than 50 countries that contributed them? This is what the exhibition ‘For Your Freedom and Ours’ at the Centro Sefarad-Israel in Madrid, which will remain open until 31 May, tries to explain.  

The first thing that the team curated by Almudena Cruz Yabar explains is that ‘the aim of the exhibition is to present the testimonies and motivations of these Jewish brigaders from a historical point of view and a human approach, without moralising the story, either one way or the other, that is to say, neither mythologising nor demonising’.  

To this end, the exhibition includes 400 pieces, mostly photographs and documents, but also press, books, posters, and audiovisuals. The exhibition explains how, before the fighting on the battlefields, the ‘internationalisation’ of the war began with the resistance movement unleashed in Barcelona. In those days in July 1936, the People's Olympics were being held in Barcelona, organised in response to the Berlin Olympics, which Adolf Hitler wanted to use as a showcase for the achievements of National Socialism.  

Athletes, intellectuals, and activists of various nationalities who had come to the Catalan capital to take part in the Olympiad suddenly found themselves at the epicentre of the first battles, becoming witnesses, and sometimes protagonists, of the resistance against the military uprising against the Republic. They were thus the emissaries of what was happening in that war, the stories of which would echo throughout Europe, attracting thousands of volunteers to join the International Brigades.  

Thus, was born, for example, the group named after Thaelmann, the German communist leader. Initially it consisted exclusively of Polish and German Jews who were already living in Spain before the military uprising. This group, which was thus the first of the brigades to be formed, grew to 1,500 members, who also came from other Central European countries and Scandinavia. 

The participation of Jews in the Civil War alongside the forces of the Republic was a response to the then already declared persecution by Nazism, which was to provoke the first exodus of German and Austrian Jews. This also marked one of the political theories of Francoism. It is what was called the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, the ideological device by which Judaism, Freemasonry and communism were designated as the main threats to the nation. 

For those who promoted the idea, Jews were a hidden force acting in concert with Masonic and revolutionary interests to destabilise the country. The post-war Francoist narrative continued to insist that the fighters of the International Brigades were communists, socialists and Jews, all part of the same international plot, thus underpinning a discourse that allowed the conflict to be presented as a nationalist crusade against enemies infiltrating the country.  

As a scenario in which Nazi and Fascist totalitarianism on the one hand, and Stalinist communism on the other, Spain served as a reference point for all to see the harsh reality at first hand. There are, for example, the experiences of the Hungarian Arthur Koestler, who, in addition to spending three months imprisoned and condemned to death by Franco's side, saw his communist convictions crumble until he wrote ‘Zero and Infinity’ (1940), in which he harshly criticised Stalinism and consummated his break with communism.  

Without being direct combatants, other Jewish intellectuals, such as the French Simone Weil and the German Carl Einstein, joined the Durruti Column, both to observe the profound social changes and the ideals of human emancipation and individual freedom embodied by this anarchist leader from León. 

For many of the Jewish brigaders, their journey would end in prisons and concentration camps, especially the San Pedro de Cardeña prison and the Palencia and Miranda de Ebro compounds. Those who managed to flee to France faced further suffering in the internment camps of Gurs, Vernet and Rivesaltes. Many of them would be reclaimed by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz or Mathausen, facing the brutality of the Holocaust.