Yay European fascism!

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Thorgal
Dont forget he was a big admirer of the Catholic Kings who definitively eradicated the big jew comunity living Spain in the 15th century.

Still, Spanish jews are the noblest of all, purified through their contact with catholic Spain.

[lord of the mark]

'Tim Brown says: "In 1966, I was transferred from Tel Aviv to Madrid, and friends in the Israeli Foreign Ministry arranged for me to meet the honorary Israel Consul to Spain after I arrived. He became a close contact and friend and told me a number of things that contradicted the written history of Jews in Spain I had read. This was in the later years of Franco. What he told me was, of course, second hand, as I had no way to check it one way or the other, nor reason to do so at the time. But I set it out below for what it may be worth.

His name, Hans Meyer Morgenthau (I am spelling it phonetically, but I can't find his card so it may have been Mayer), was hardly Spanish. But he said his family on his father's side had lived in Spain for decades and on his mother's side had been there for centuries. He was a member of a synagogue that had been active in Madrid since the 1700s and said there were a few other active synagogues in Spain, two of which predated the Reconquest in 1492, one in Barcelona and one in Vasconia, although I don't remember the city (since my wife's family is of Navarrese Basque origin from the 1200s, I tend to pick up on that region more than its cities). That was certainly not what I had heard or read about the expulsion of the Jews, and I said so during several conversations, to which he would reply, things are often not as they seem, and explain: While almost all Spanish Jews were expelled and others publicly converted, in a number of cases where they were providing important services to the Crown as advisors or financiers a few were allowed to remain without converting providing they kept their religion secret. Meyer gave me the names of, as I recall, three senior advisors to Franco who were members of his synagogue and descendents from these pre-Expulsion Jewish families.

As I was then a Vice Consul, we also discussed what happened during the Holocaust. As he told it, Franco gave orders to Spanish Consuls in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to issue Spanish passports to anyone who came to them and claimed they had Spanish ancestors, not matter how man generations removed. They were instructed not to investigation further but to take such declarations at face value. As a consequence, several thousand German Jews were able to obtain Spanish passports, which the Germans reluctantly honored as Franco's Spain was considered an ally, and escape to Spain, and then go to other countries if they wished. Many went to Argentina and some to Cuba, among other places. He said it was this and support for their struggle to capture the Holy Land that gave Israel considerable willingness to trust Franco Spain and this, in turn, allowed Spain to act as the intermediary on occasional sensitive issues between Israel and several Muslim countries with which Spain also had excellent relations. Of course, his was just one version, but I see no reason to believe it less that other versions".

RH: As for Jews who remained in Spain after 1492, most were conversos, converts to Christianiiy and the object of suspicion. One of the tasks of the Inquisition was to root out judaizantes, Travelers to 18th-century Spain have left fascinating accounts of conversos who were ostentatious in their Catholic practices but who at night practised Jewish rituals in secret.

Ronald Hilton - 11/23/02 '

[lord of the mark]

Still, Spanish jews are the noblest of all, purified througSpanish nationalism strove on the one hand to preserve Catholic Spanishness from foreign habits; on the other hand it claimed that (Sephardic) Jews were part of their nation. The Sephardim were seen as "those who keep the language of the motherland" (Ladino is essentially the Spanish of the sixteenth century preserved by the descendents of the expulsion of 1492).

Ernesto Gimenez Caballero, who supported an eventual return of Sephardim to Spain, was one of the main ideologists of Spanish fascism. He edited and published a series of articles in 1939 by Pio Baroja (a leading Spanish novelist of the twentieth century) under the title Communists, Jews, and other Ilk, where communism is presented as "the Jewish crusade against Europe," and where although Sephardim are seen as gifted in arts and open-spirited, "Ashkenazim are the avant-gardes of communism."

This ambiguity, either sincere or affected, continued during almost four decades of Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975). Catholicism had become the official religion, and Spain was again culturally monolithic. On the one hand, it was difficult to preserve in modern times the same myths about the Jews that characterized the medieval mentality; on the other hand, Judeophobia was still there and had to be justified. Although "in its attitude toward the Jews and the Jewish question, the Franco regime displayed a kind of 'split personality,' there can be no doubt about the anti-Jewish philosophy of Franco, the Falange, and the Church."23 All in all, the pretension of some type of understanding of Jews was always shallow. To Franco, Jewry was one of the "villains" of our time, and since Franco, "the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy" has been an oft-quoted scapegoat. In his conversation with Nazi Ambassador Dieckhof, Franco declared on 3 December 1943, "Thanks to God and the clear appreciation of the danger by our Catholic kings, we have for centuries been relieved of that nauseating burden."24

Nevertheless, the abstracts of the First Conference of Sephardic Studies in Spain were published during the 1960s with the prologue of the most visible leader of the extreme right, Blas Pinar.

During World War II the Spanish government issued passports to more than ten thousand Sephardic Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. A further forty thousand were permitted to pass through Spain to other destinations. For this reason alone, many well- meaning Spaniards, clearly not Judeophobic, reject the notion that Spain has any kind of moral debt towards the Jews, and contend that Jews are too often ungrateful to the Spanish, "who saved so many Jewish lives." The renowned case is that of Spain's diplomatic representative in Budapest during World War II, Angel Sanz Briz, who during 1944 saved almost one thousand Jews who claimed Spanish origin. He based his humanitarian action on a 1924 Spanish law which promised Jews of Spanish descent a restoration of citizenship. Sanz Briz issued protective passports to save them from deportation.

Nazi collaborators were provided shelter in Spain after the war, in which Spain had been for some time a passive ally of Germany. It is notable that the international voluntary brigades that fought with the Republican forces against Franco's nationalists during the civil war included high percentages of Jews. (In some battalions the Jews constituted up to 40 percent, and there was a Palestinian Battalion consisting entirely of Jews.)

To a certain extent Spanish ambivalence towards the Jews continues today. Spain rebuilds and develops its ancient ghettos throughout the country, claiming back the glory of the medieval Jewish community. Yet most of its population persists in perceiving Jews in a negative light.


h their contact with catholic Spain.

[Thorgal]

So as you can see this topic is far of being clear. It is easy to find texts supporting both POW. But knowing Franco´s obsession with the jew-masonic conspiration (the jew-masonic vermins, as he commonly said, were present in almost all his public speeches) i would think he had not much sympathy towards the jews.