ISRAEL & RP

• The Marrano brothers Jorge and Domingo Rodriguez are the first Jews recorded to have arrived in the Spanish Philippines. They reached Manila in the 1590s.
• By 1593 both were tried at an auto-da-fe in Mexico City because the Inquisition did not have an independent tribunal in the Philippines.  They were imprisoned, and at least eight other Marranos from the Philippines were subsequently tried by the Inquisition.
• A second group of Jews arrived in the late 1800s.   After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 the Levy brothers of Alsace fled with a stash of diamonds. They first established a jewelry store and then a general merchandising business, Estrella del Norte, which exists in Manila today. Their enterprise branched out from the importation of gems to pharmaceuticals and automobiles.
• By 1898, when the United States took over the Philippines from Spain, the Levys had been joined by more Alsatian Ashkenazim and other Jews, creating a multi-ethnic community of approximately fifty individuals.

There is no record of any Filipino Marrano reconverting to Judaism once the Spanish had departed. Indeed, conversion rates to Christianity were quite high among the general Filipino population.   But Manila Jewry grew by other means.

• By 1918, twenty years after the American takeover, Manila Jewry consisted of about 150 people.  By then it also included Turkish, Syrian, and Egyptian Jews. The new immigrants, according to historian Annette Eberly, considered Manila a second frontier…a place for the young and ambitious to flee to.  It was especially attractive to those who chafed at limitations on social and economic mobility in their native lands.

Most of the newcomers were American servicemen discharged in Manila after the Spanish-American and First World Wars plus Russian Jews fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.  These  arrivals engaged in import and export trade and port side real estate development. They did not, however, interact with a cohesive international Jewish merchant diaspora and in this respect differ from the Jews of Singapore.

Jewish Institutional Development in Manila

• By 1920 Manila Jewry included the founder of the stock exchange, the conductor of the  symphony orchestra, physicians, and architects.  Apart from these purely secular achievements, twenty two years after the commencement of the American occupation there was almost zero Jewish institutional development.
• Spanish repression may explain this phenomenon before 1898.  It does not account for the absence of institutional development under the Americans.
• In 1920 the Zionist fundraiser Israel Cohen, who was greatly impressed by Jewish institutional development in Singapore Jewry, visited Manila.  He lamented that although “there were several hundred Jews, they had not formed a synagogue.”  He wrote:

“they were there twenty years, there was no Jewish organization or institution of any kind. If a Jew wished to get married, he took a day trip to Hong Kong.  I left wondering whether all the fortunes of the rich Jews of Manila are worth the soul of one poor Jew of Zamboanga [a Syrian Jew he had met on one of the outer Philippine islands, who told Cohen ‘we feel here in Galuth…soon we hope to get back to the land of Israel’ –ed].

•  A synagogue was finally built by a weathy Ashkenazi benefactor in 1924 but was rarely serviced by full time clergy.  Rabbis and cantors were imported from Shanghai and elsewhere for short stints.  At one point an itinerant rabbi serviced the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.[33]
•  In 1930 an American journalist reported that the eighty Jewish families and fifty single Jews in the Philippines are all well established yet indifferent to their Judaism.  They have no interest in a Jewish community. There is a handsome synagogue, but it is used only on [the Jewish high holidays of] Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur.  There was a religious school, but it was closed on account of the scarcity of teachers…Most of the children receive absolutely no Jewish education…The religious indifference of their parents plus the lack of knowledge of Jewish affairs of the children counts these families as a total loss to Judaism.

It is clear then that Manila’s Jews experienced precious little of the intensified Rabbinic Judaism of Singapore.   While some faded completely into the seductive woodwork of what historian Eberly called “the good life out there,” others assumed secularized aspects of Jewish identity. The fullest expression of this identity was the aid Philippine Jews gave first to refugees from Hitler and thereafter to Zionism and to the State of Israel.  For many Philippine Jews these two forms of philanthropy became inseparable.  How did they evolve?

Philippine Jews’ Assistance to Holocaust Refugees

The rise of Hitler mobilized some of Manila’s most secularized Jews into communal service.  The niece of the founder of the infrequently-used Manila synagogue observed that “we only became Jewish conscious in a deep way when the terrible threat came out of Europe and suddenly there were Jews in desperate need of help.”

Although the Philippines became an American territorial possession in 1898, by the nineteen thirties, as a self-governing commonwealth, it controlled its own immigration policies.  It was thus exempt from the severe immigration restrictions imposed by the United States Congress in 1924.

• A “Jewish Refugee Committee” of Manila, organized in 1937,  sought to take advantage of this loophole in order to assist Jews fleeing Hitler.
• Their first opportunity to shelter a significant number of Jews occurred in August 1937.  In that month the German government offered all Germans in Shanghai free passage to the Philippines if they wished to escape the Sino-Japanese hostilities that had erupted in that city.
  • At the request of the German Consul General in Manila, the U.S. High Commissioner of the Philippines Paul McNutt and President Quezon, authorized the admission of these refugees on the condition that they would not become a public burden.
  • The immigrants would be sponsored either by the ethnic German or the Jewish community of the Philippines.
  • In Shanghai twenty-eight German Jews and an approximately equal number of ethnic Germans took the Nazi government up on its offer.
  • They arrived together in Manila on September 8, 1937 aboard the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship Gneisenau.  The Jewish Refugee Committee assumed the formidable task of providing for the largest Jewish refugee group ever to have landed in the Philippines.
  • On February 15, 1939,  Quezon sent a message to the Philippine congress, which technically oversaw immigration matters, urging the admission of an additional 10,000 German Jewish professionals.
    • Although this grandiose scheme never materialized, Rosenthal and other Manila Jews were able to persuade Quezon to independently authorize the admission of perhaps as many as one thousand Nazi-persecuted Jews.
    • Even these admissions were problematical as the Philippines had no independent consular service and relied on United States diplomatic personnel for the worldwide implementation of its immigration policy.
    • In the blunt words of the son of Manila Jewish community president Morton Netzorg, “wherever the American consular staff was friendly to the Jewish people Jews got out, and where they shrugged their shoulders Jews did not get out.”
•  By a variety of means about 1,000 Jewish refugees reached Manila before the December 1941Japanese attack on both Pearl Harbor and the Philippines  and the subsequent Japanese occupation of the entire Philippine archipelago.
  • Most Jewish refugees arrived penniless and on two year temporary visas.
  • The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee aided these immigrants until the Japanese attack.  Some aid before that date and all assistance for the duration of the war came from the Manila Jewish community itself.  Of particular help were those community members who held Iraqi, Philippino, and—ironically—German passports and who thereby escaped Japanese internment.
  • Morton Netzorg’s son recalled that although “the Jewish community was very small [it] practiced tithing to help the refugees.  Five hundred were brought over in a three year period.”
  • The effort becomes all the more impressive when one considers that after December 1941the Philippines was an intense battle zone and the  community suffered severe wartime losses.
    • During  the Battle of Manila in 1945, 79 individuals, or approximately 10% of the Jewish community, were wartime casualties, a rate similar to that of Manila’s overall population.

Despite these hardships the  Jewish Community of Manila spared perhaps as many as 1,000 Jews from almost certain obliteration at the hands of the Nazis.

• One of the Austrian Jewish survivors asserts that you could never find as generous and solid a group of people [as the Philippine Jewish community] anywhere else in the world. 
• They gave—and give—unstintingly in times of crisis.  They have never neglected the needs of the destitute and the sick. 
• Even before the Japanese came the community set up a special home for the Jewish indigent in Marakina.  It was kept up for years long after the war was over.

The Philippine Jewish Community’S Embrace of Zionism and Assistance to the State of Israel

•  When the aforementioned Zionist fundraiser Israel Cohen visited Manila in 1920 he was greatly disappointed because the Manila Jewish community did not support his movement.  He  lamented that “I spoke to quite a number of Jews, but they simply would not hear of it, and not a single god damn cent did I get.”
• Within twenty-five years many members of the community had made a complete turnaround on the subject of Zionism.  For them Zionism was a natural outgrowth of their wartime experiences.  They had incurred heavy losses at the hands of Hitler and his allies, made significant sacrifices to aid European refugees, and now wanted a secure Jewish homeland for that surviving remnant.
• Members of the community who were close to postwar Philippine President Manuel Roxas were instrumental, along with key advisors to U.S. President Harry Truman, in convincing the Philippine delegation to the United Nations to vote in favor of the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state in 1947.
• The Philippines thus became the only Asian nation to vote for Israeli independence. 
  • It was also among the first to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
  • As was the case in independent Singapore, the local Jewish community cultivated Philipine-Israel relations
  • In 1951 the Philippines signed an aviation agreement with Israel.
  • In that same year, Lt. Col. [Ret.] Shaul Ramati, of the Israel Defence Forces, paid a fundraising visit.  As a result of that campaign, Honorary Israeli Consul Ernest E. Simke was able to write to  the Central Zionist Executive that “the appeal yielded approximately P$60,000.
  • It was the highest collection ever made in the Philippines.”
• In 1956 Simke wrote that “although the community is small, there is a strong Zionist sympathy.”  In that same year the Philippines welcomed Moshe Sharett, Israel’s outgoing foreign minister and former prime minister, on the same visit that included Singapore.

Conclusion: Manila, Singapore, and Other Zionisms

Emigration from the Philippines to Israel and elsewhere shrunk the Manila community from an immediate postwar peak of perhaps 2500, to 1000 in 1946, 400 in 1949, 250 in 1968, and to approximately eighty families in 2005.

Some families, such as the Simkes, took out Philippine citizenship.

The community remains a mix of ethnically-Filipino spouses and/or converts, Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Baghdadis, Americans, Israelis, and others.

Although small in numbers and weak in formal aspects of religiosity, the Jewish community in one of the world’s largest cities and seaports remains secular, Jewish, Filipino, and overwhelmingly Zionistic.

Manila had never had been a YIDDISHE GEMEINDE, or Jewish community in the classic European or even Singaporean Baghdadi sense.  Its religiosity was displayed in quasi-secular ways, notably in its efforts to rescue Jewish refugees and to aid the Zionist movement.  In Singapore, on the other hand, Zionism was the outgrowth of the Orthodox Baghdadi religious commitment of Haham Yosef Hayyim, Sir Menasseh Meyer, and their disciples. It is not surprising that Singapore, with its homogeneity and strong religious identity, contributed so much to the building of the Land of Israel.

The commitment of the highly assimilated, multiethnic Jews of Manila, on the other hand, was both unexpected and distinct.