The existence of a tiny Jewish community in the Philippines goes back to the end of the sixteenth century. There are tales of two Converso Jews from Spain who were seized in the Philippines and tried in 1593 by an Inquisition court in Mexico because there were no Inquisition courts on the islands.
It is not clear what the two were charged with. By the end of the seven-teenth century, eight more Philippine Converso Jews were tried in Mexico.
Three wealthy Jewish jewelers from Alsace, the Levy brothers, arrived in 1870 in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and set up a flourishing busi-ness in Manila known as Levy Hermanos, Inc. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made it easy for Jews living in countries along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to settle in East Asia. Several Jews from Egypt, Syria, and other parts of the Ottoman Empire arrived thereafter.
Following the American occupation of the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898, a number of Jews who arrived with the Spanish-American army decided to remain there. More Jews arrived from the United States and set up businesses that traded with mainland Asia. They were joined at the beginning of the twentieth century by several Russian and Polish Jews escaping from persecution and pogroms in their home countries. The best-known among the Russian émigrés was Emil Bachrach, who arrived in 1901 via the United States and soon became involved in the furniture, banking, and transport businesses. Fifty additional Russian Jews arrived after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. At the end of the First World War, the local Jewish community numbered some 150 souls but did not have the means to maintain communal institutions such as a synagogue, schools, and a cemetery. The first synagogue was built in Manila in 1924, financed
by the wealthy Emil Bachrach and his family. Religious services were pro-vided by rabbis, circumcisers, and slaughterers who came especially for that purpose from Shanghai.
In the early 1930’s there existed in Manila a Jewish community con-sisting of some five hundred souls, mostly European Jews, Sephardi Jews, and some American Jews. There was significant growth in the community during the 1930’s, attributable to the rise of Hitler to power in Germany in 1933 and the independence granted to the Philippines by the United States in 1934. The first president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, Manuel Quezon (1878-1944), was interested in the immigration of a large number of Jews to his country, believing (like some Japanese officials believed would be the case in Japan) that Jews with capital and skills would be able to speed the economic growth of the young republic. He brought before the Philippine congress a proposal that the country absorb some ten thousand Jewish ref-ugees from Germany and settle them in the southern island of Mindanao.
The Philippines’ immigration laws, different and much more lenient than the American ones, did not pose an obstacle to bringing many Jews to the island nation, but the entire project failed for bureaucratic reasons.
The Philippines as an independent country did not yet have its own Foreign Service, let alone overseas diplomatic and consular offices, and so for consular services they had to rely on local American consuls. Those oper-ated according to the severely restrictive American immigration laws, and showed no interest in granting Philippine visas to Jews, despite the interest of the Philippine government and the willingness of the local Jewish com-munity to help absorb the newcomers. The result was that between 1937 and the outbreak of the Pacific War, only 1,300 Jewish refugees arrived, many of them fleeing from Germany and Austria and arriving via Manchuria, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. On the eve of the Pacific War there were some 1500 Jews in the Philippines, most of them living in Manila. Some of them were stranded in Manila trying to escape to Australia. The Jewish Refugee Committee of Manila was created to help absorb the arriving refugees from Shanghai after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937.
This body was permitted by President Quezon and the American High Commissioner Paul McNuttt (1891-1955) to select the refugees to whom Philippine visas would be granted. In this manner 28 German Jews arrived from Shanghai in September 1937. Most of the funds needed to care for the refugees were supplied by the American Joint Distribution Committee.
When the 14th Army of Japan, commanded by Lieutenant-General Homma Masaharu (1887-1946), occupied Manila on January 2, 1942,
97
Jews in the Japanese - Occupied Territories during the War Years
martial law was proclaimed and enemy aliens were required to register. Their future depended heavily on the passports in their possession. Enemy aliens whose countries were now at war with Japan, including the United States, Britain, Holland, and the British Commonwealth of Nations, were interned in two detention camps: one on the campus of Santo Tomas University and the other in Los Bagnos near Manila. Among the detainees were 250 Jews.
Others not arrested were 1,300 German Jewish refugees (even though they lost their nationality in late 1941) and Jews who held passports belonging to Germany’s allies, such as Austria, Italy, Vichy France, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and Iraq.
The third group of Jews living in the Philippines consisted of Russian Jews who held a variety of passports issued in the 1920’s by the Committee for International Refugees (the so-called Nansen passports) or by the Far Eastern Republic that existed briefly in Siberia and later by the Soviet Union.
The Japanese military authorities did not intervene in the running of the detention camps and allowed the prisoners to run their own affairs.
They did not prevent the Jews who were not interned from helping those detained by sending them kosher food and fulfilling their religious needs.
The Manila synagogue and school functioned throughout the war, and ser-vices were held regularly. In the Philippines, like in other Japanese-occupied areas, there were some cases of looting of property and money. In 1943 a number of antisemitic articles appeared in the local press, and some antise-mitic broadcasts were aired on the local radio station. Still, the Japanese authorities did not go out of their way to discriminate against the Jews, mainly because the local Jewish leadership was able to persuade them not to. While the Japanese authorities did threaten the Jews to discourage them from engaging in black market actitivities, no steps were taken to molest Jews as a people or to curtail the existence of the communal institutions.
While some people lost their homes and businesses and a number were abused, beaten, or on occasion imprisoned, the main physical harm suf-fered by the Jews as a group was illness and starvation. As in other places, a great deal depended on the local Japanese commanders. Some of them, particularly those who had trained in Germany, were somewhat hostile to Jews, but rarely were they aggressive. The leaders of the German Jewish community of the Philippines were able to persuade the Japanese occu-pation forces to abandon rumored plans of creating a ghetto in Manila.
The rumors had spread following the visit to Manila in February 1943 of the German Ambassador to Tokyo Heinrich von Stahmer (1892-1978).
However, if there had been any truth to the rumor, the plan was prevented by the intercession of the leaders of the local German Jewish community.
The main attack on Jewish property occurred during the fighting between invading American forces led by General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) and the Japanese army at the end of 1944 and early 1945. In the battle for the liberation of Manila in February 1945, Japanese soldiers committed atrocities in which some 100,000 civilians were killed, among them seventy Jews. Some of the victims were murdered by Japanese soldiers in a massacre committed in the Red Cross hospital in Manila. But this mas-sacre was carried out against all foreigners, not just on Jews. The local syna-gogue that was used as an ammunition depot by the Japanese was destroyed during the fighting. The majority of the Jews in the Philippines survived the war and reported that during the occupation they rarely encountered antisemitic expressions on the part of either the Japanese occupying forces or the local Philippine community.
The war took a toll on the community, and the majority of its mem-bers did not have the financial means and emotional stamina to remain and rebuild their community the way the Jews of Singapore, Hong Kong, and even Shanghai did. The majority opted to move to the United States, Australia, or (after 1948) to Israel, and a few even went back to Germany.
By late 1948, fewer than 300 Jews remained in the Philippines.
In November 1947 the newly independent Philippines voted in the United Nations General Assembly for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state there. It was the only Asian country to do so, and the vote was the result of American pressure and the feeling of some Philippine leaders that the Jews deserved their own state. The Philippines was among the first Asian nations to recognize Israel and establish diplomatic relations with it.