Les Juifs de Manille (Philippines)

The Manila community tradition readily traces Jewish presence in the archipelago back to the earliest days of Spanish colonization. According to the accounts transmitted and repeated in community records, the first Jews whose history leaves a trace in the Philippines were Spanish Jews — the Marranos — in the seventeenth century. These nuevos cristianos — descendants of Jews forced to convert in the Iberian Peninsula — are said to have arrived in the wake of the transpacific trade linking Manila to Acapulco by galleon.

It is necessary here to distinguish the register of Memory from that of the archive. The expulsion of 1492 and the forced conversions had scattered across the entire Iberian empire a population of converts whose Judaism, often clandestine, was sometimes transmitted across generations; the Séfarade experience was, in general, that of a learned culture and an ethic preserved in spite of territorial rupture [Sáenz-Badillos, 1995]. The extension of the Inquisition to colonial domains, notably through the tribunal of Mexico City on which the Philippines nominally depended, makes the presence of such crypto-Jews in Manila plausible. However, no organized community, no lasting institution can be documented for this period: these were isolated individuals, persecuted or concealed, and not a collective home.

The rupture between this Marrano prehistory and the modern community is total. Nothing connects genealogically or institutionally the hypothetical converts of the seventeenth century to the merchants who would settle two centuries later. The memory of Hispanic anteriority thus functions more as a founding myth — inscribing the community within the long duration of the Séfarade destiny — than as a verifiable lineage. In medieval and modern Séfarade networks, kinship and alliance played a structuring role in the circulation of persons and goods across empires [Ray, 2020]; but in Manila, none of these networks can be shown to extend in any attested way from the Hispanic era. The inaugural chapter of Manila's history thus belongs to the uncertain intersection of remembrance and document: an anteriority affirmed by tradition, which the archive neither refutes nor confirms.

The documented history of the community begins with the last third of the nineteenth century. According to community and historical sources, the first permanent settlement of Jews in the Philippines, during the nearly four centuries of Spanish colonialism, began with the arrival of three Levy brothers from Alsace-Lorraine, fleeing the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The opening of the Suez Canal, in the same decade, by considerably shortening the route between Europe and Asia, facilitated this commercial settlement.

The Levy family embodies the first sociological type of Manila Jewry: that of the European merchant taking advantage of a favorable colonial situation. Established in trade — precious stones, jewelry, imported goods — they prospered rapidly and attracted fellow coreligionists. The community that formed was decidedly cosmopolitan, combining elements of diverse origins. Alsatians and other Western European Jews were joined by merchants from the Mediterranean basin, the Levant, and later, by Jews from Eastern Europe. This constitutive diversity distinguishes Manila from communities with a homogeneous identity: it brought together, on the same distant soil, Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions that, in their places of origin, rarely coexisted.

The transition from Spanish to American sovereignty, consummated by the Spanish-American War of 1898, transformed the living conditions of these merchants. The massive arrival of Americans — including, in 1901, 540 American teachers and some of their families who embarked from San Francisco aboard the United States Army transport Thomas bound for the Philippines — included a number of American Jews and opened a new era. Among the major figures of this period was Emil Bachrach, considered the first American Jew to settle permanently in the archipelago. A prosperous businessman, he was also a generous patron whose liberality extended beyond his own community. It is from this merchant generation — wealthy and integrated — that the institutional framework of the following chapter would emerge.

The interwar period marked the institutional maturation of the community. After the First World War, the archipelago welcomed new arrivals: many Jewish refugees reached the Philippines from Russia in an attempt to flee discrimination. These immigrants from Eastern Europe reinforced the Ashkenaze component and provided sufficient critical mass for formal organization.

Thus, in 1922, the Jewish community formally established itself, and in 1924 the first synagogue was built and named Temple Emil. The sanctuary bore the first name of Emil Bachrach, the principal benefactor of the undertaking. As sources recall, because he is regarded as the first American Jew to have settled permanently in the Philippines, the synagogue and the cultural hall, which the Bachrach family financed over the following decades, bore his name: Temple Emil and Bachrach Hall.

The religious character of this prosperous community was, however, of moderate intensity. Far from the scholarly ferment that characterized the great Séfarade centers and medieval Jewish education [Kanarfogel, 1995], the cultic life of Manille remained discreet. Chroniclers note it plainly: economic prosperity, combined with a high degree of interaction with the surrounding society, rendered the existence of strong Jewish institutions apparently superfluous; although Jewish families attended the Temple for major occasions, and the adjacent social hall served to centralize Jewish cultural life, the whole remained very low-key. It was, in the words of observers, a lifestyle of very wealthy people of the nineteenth century in which the distinctly Jewish flavor was tenuous.

To serve this community, recourse was made to the world of neighboring Asian diasporas. Once Temple Emil was built in 1923, primarily through the generous contributions of the Bachrach, Netzorg, and Frieder families, the Jewish community of Manille entrusted Motel Goldstein, the Russian Jew who served as a lay rabbi, with engaging an ordained rabbi from Shanghai. The choice fell on Israel Konigsberg: settled in Shanghai immediately after the First World War, he had served as a military chaplain in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; having received training as a cantor in Shanghai, he was engaged to officiate at Temple Emil in Manille in 1924. The circulation of clergy between Shanghai and Manille attests to the community's integration into a trans-Pacific Jewish network, in which the great concessions of China served as a reservoir of ritual expertise.

The most remarkable chapter of this history opens in the late 1930s, when the small Manila community became the instrument of one of the rare organized rescues of European Jews. At the heart of the enterprise stands a family from the generation of American merchants. According to historians of the subject, prominent businessmen from Cincinnati, Ohio, the Frieder brothers — Alex, Henry, Herbert, Philip, and Morris — established their residence in the Philippines in 1920 to develop the family American tobacco business. Cigar manufacturers and synagogue presidents during this period, they would go on to play a decisive role.

The catalyst was the arrival of refugees from the Far East. The plan was first conceived in 1937, when Jewish refugees arrived in Manila from the Shanghai ghetto, evacuated following the fighting between Chinese and Japanese forces. To organize their reception, the Jewish Committee for Refugees was established to assist with their settlement in the Philippines, under the chairmanship of Philip Frieder. It was through these first arrivals that the Frieders learned, from firsthand accounts, of the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

The strength of the Manila project lay in the conjunction of influential personalities. The legend — largely well-founded — holds that the plan was developed during late-night card games. The Frieder brothers approached their poker companions — McNutt, Quezon, Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Marshal Douglas MacArthur — to enlist their support; they conceived a plan aimed at admitting up to 100,000 Jews to the Philippines. The President of the Commonwealth, Manuel L. Quezon, lent active and institutional support: he opposed those who objected to the admission of refugees by the Philippine government and institutionalized the Open Door policy by promulgating Proclamation No. 173 on August 21, 1937, which urged Filipinos to welcome refugees and come to their aid.

The division of roles among the American and Philippine actors was precise: McNutt was tasked with persuading the American State Department to issue as many visas as possible for Jewish refugees seeking to flee to the Philippines, while Eisenhower was to devise a plan for settling the refugees in Mindanao. But the initial ambition ran up against Washington's reluctance. The American government rejected the original plan and authorized only the admission of 10,000 Jews to the Philippines — 1,000 Jews per year over a period of ten years; Quezon also made available his residence, Marikina Hall, as a reception venue for Jewish refugees.

The numerical toll, though modest in relation to the stated ambitions, was significant on the scale of the European tragedy. Approximately 1,200 to 1,300 Jewish refugees, between 1937 and 1941, were able to find refuge there. This dilution of the initial ambition by the diffuse antisemitism of certain administrations serves as a distant reminder of how far the survival of communities everywhere depended on the political will of host states — as studies on persecution in France and North Africa have shown [Poznanski, 1994] [Nataf, 2012]. In Manila, the expertise of figures such as Joseph Cysner, a refugee who became the Temple's custodian and animateur, helped provide spiritual guidance for these newcomers.

The Japanese attack brought the refuge experiment to a brutal end. After Pearl Harbor, every reception arrangement became void: after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the United States entered the war, all plans concerning refugees in the Philippines came to an end. At the moment of rupture, the balance sheet of the rescue operation was nonetheless tangible: by that date, 1,200 Jews had made their way to the Philippines from Germany, finding there a measure of relative safety.

The Japanese invasion of 1942 transformed the refuge into a trap. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines in 1942, the influx of Jewish refugees stopped, and many of the refugees already present in the archipelago were taken to internment camps. A bitter paradox of the conflict's geography: Jews of German or Austrian nationality, as subjects of a country allied with Japan, sometimes escaped the internment reserved for citizens of enemy powers, while Jews of American or British nationality were treated as enemy subjects.

The most deadly phase was not the occupation itself but the reconquest. The Battle of Manila, in early 1945, ranked among the most devastating of the entire Pacific War. The Philippines experienced fierce fighting later in the war; the country suffered heavy losses, and many perished, including some of the Jews who had settled in the Philippines from Germany. In this unleashing of urban violence, the community's infrastructure was annihilated: the Temple Emil and the Bachrach Hall were heavily damaged or destroyed, and the Frieder cigar factory was destroyed. The disappearance, in 1944, of the community's political protector brought the era of rescue to a close: Manuel Quezon died in 1944. The preaching and memory of Jews caught in the wars of the twentieth century, in Manila as elsewhere, inscribe themselves within a long tradition of religious interpretation of collective ordeal [Saperstein, 2008].

Liberation did not mean the reconstitution of the pre-war community. The logic that had made Manila a temporary refuge — that of a transit point rather than a home of settlement — asserted itself fully in the post-war period. Most refugees, who had never viewed the Philippines as anything more than a stage of survival, resumed their migration. They moved in large numbers toward the United States, toward Palestine and, after 1948, toward the new State of Israel, or toward other destinations of the Western diaspora. The longtime residents — merchants and American families, many of whom had lost everything in the destruction of the city — also often chose to rebuild their lives elsewhere.

From this outflow, the community emerged drained. From several hundred established members and a thousand refugees, it shrank to a residual presence, numbering by some estimates just a few hundred people at most, composed essentially of expatriates — foreign businessmen, diplomats, transient personnel. This recomposition marks a sociological rupture: the post-war community is no longer the direct heir of the founding families, but a shifting aggregation of individuals tied to foreign presence in a country independent since 1946.

On the scale of the long term, the Manila trajectory illustrates a model specific to the recent diasporas of imperial mobility: rapid formation around trade, brief institutional flourishing, a major historical ordeal, then dispersion. It contrasts with the secular rootedness of the Mediterranean Sephardic communities, whose cultural and juridical life had been sedimented over centuries [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000] and whose Judeo-Spanish culture remained a durable bond even in adversity [Assis, 2004]. Manila did not know this temporal depth; its greatness was of a moment — the moment when a handful of merchants and a head of state knew how to open a door that others were closing. The memory of this rescue, long overlooked, was revived from the 2000s onward by scholarly works and documentaries, restoring to this small community a place in the global narrative of the Shoah and of refuge.

The history of the Jews of Manila reads like a parable of modern diasporas. Born of mercantile mobility in the wake of the Suez Canal and the transition between two colonial empires, this cosmopolitan community blended Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Europeans and Americans, into a discreet and prosperous Jewish identity that acquired formal institutions only late — the formalization of 1922 and the Temple Emil of 1924. Its Memory reaches back, by tradition, to the Marranos of the Hispanic era, but its documented History spans only a few decades.

Its singular place in the world lies in the gesture of refuge: between 1937 and 1941, driven by the Frieder brothers and made possible by the political courage of President Quezon, Manila welcomed more than a thousand Jews fleeing the Reich, against the tide of the general closing of borders. That this door opened only through arduous negotiations with a reluctant American administration, and that it closed again in the violence of the Pacific War, does nothing to diminish the moral weight of the undertaking.

The destruction of Manila in 1945, followed by the postwar dispersal, reduced the community to a residual presence of expatriates. What remains today is not so much a living institution as a Memory: that of an improbable refuge, long forgotten, now restored to its place in the History of Holocaust rescues. The case of Manila is a reminder that Jewish History is played out not only in its great centers, but also at its most unexpected margins, where the conjunction of determined individuals and favorable circumstances could, for a time, make the difference between life and death.