Becoming Brigadistas : Jewish Volunteers from Palestine in the Spanish Civil War

‘Side-Line Communists’: The Reasons for Leaving Palestine

Historians offer a variety of explanations for the decision of individuals to leave their respective countries and join the International Brigades. Identification with the Spanish people, ideological and economic motivations, a romanticized sense of adventure – all these played a role in rationalizing a decision which was to have life-long ramifications. Historian Michael Jackson, in his study of the international volunteers, divided them into four main groups: the politically exiled; the economically dispossessed; the anticipators; and the adventurers. ⁸ In reality, these four categories overlapped. Political exile, for example, often translated into economic dispossession. Both conditions might have generated a need to get away from one's immediate circumstances. However, as Jackson rightly notes, the decision to enlist also owed much to the volunteers' sense of adventure, and above all to their ideological commitment.

Of the approximately two hundred men and women who travelled from Palestine to Spain, we have detailed information concerning the life histories of 24 men and two women. The data was collected from personal documents, diaries and letters they sent to family members and are backed up by a series of interviews. While this is in no way an exhaustive sample, it does provide us with sufficient comparative information to draw some conclusions. Ninety per cent of the Jewish volunteers who arrived from Palestine were under the age of 33. Only one of the volunteers we know of was married and only three were born in Palestine. Nineteen emigrated from Eastern Europe and three others were from Western Europe. Twenty of the 26 we know of did not hold stable jobs in Palestine. This was not unusual, if one considers their young age and the mid-1930s' context of the world economy in general and the Yishuv's economy in particular. ⁹ It did mean, however, that they had very little to lose in economic terms.

In retrospect, however, it was not economic hardship but a strong sense of alienation from mainstream Jewish society in Palestine that emerged as the central reason for volunteering. Dora Levin arrived in Palestine from Poland in 1933 at the age of 22. She explained:

… I only spent a few months in the kibbutz. I wasn't suited to life there so I [left] and started working in all sorts of manual jobs: construction work, domestic service. … I saw how the Arabs who lived there [in Palestine] were exploited. What troubled me the most was the fact that we tried to take over jobs that were traditionally theirs. I could not go on living like that. ¹⁰

Shmuel (Shmulik) Segal was several years younger than Michael Baron. His family emigrated from Poland to Palestine in 1926 when he was only eight years old. Segal's parents were long-time Zionists and his uncle, Ya'akov Berman, would become the president of the Jewish Orthodox Hamizrachi Movement in Palestine. Segal remembered the event that drove him to join the Communist Youth Movement:

It all started in high school when we got to the age where students were called in order to defend the notion of Jewish Work. From time to time they would ask us to volunteer for work so that there would be no need to employ Arab labourers. I think that I was greatly impressed by an old Arab, who worked as a guard. He asked me ‘and what about us? Don't we have the right to earn our living as well?’ It really had an effect on me. ¹⁵

Not all members, however, adhered to this line. Arie Lev, a former member of the PCP, explained in an interview he gave in 1972:

We were caught in between currents. Some of us opposed [al-Hilu's] policy, but at that time we could not yet do so openly and consistently. It was hard to think of splitting the party. The reasons were: a belief in the party's unity and in the Soviet Union, the mother of all nations. We did not have the courage yet to stand up against these two forms of worship. Spain was attractive in that sense: we could fight there holding a gun in our hands and at the same time spare ourselves all the mess [back home]. ¹⁶

En Route to Spain: Becoming Brigadistas

When they left Palestine, most of the Jewish volunteers had little information on what was happening in Spain itself, and virtually no idea as to how they themselves would become part of ‘the struggle against Fascism’. In this respect Paris, the first stop on their way, was of great importance. It was in Paris that the reality of being a member of the International Brigades first became tangible through specific practices of affiliation and new personal encounters.

On 18 August 1936, the Communist International (Comintern) passed a resolution confirming its intention to proceed with the recruitment of volunteer soldiers from among the working classes, with a view to training and sending them to Spain. The Kremlin supplied the International Brigades with the majority of its commanding officers, political commissars and weapons. But an entity such as the Brigades needed an organizational hub outside of Spain where the volunteers arriving from all around the world could gather, and from which passage into Spain could be supervised. Paris, where the largest Communist party outside of the Soviet Union operated, became the organizational centre of the Brigades. ¹⁹ However, any initial aid that the Spanish Republic might have expected from a fellow Popular Front government in France vanished officially in the autumn of 1936. The signing of the Non-intervention Treaty by Prime Minister Léon Blum and the mounting pressure of the French Radical Party, Blum's main partner within the Popular Front government, brought about the official closure of the border between the two countries in November of that year. From that point onwards, all the steps taken by the PCF (Parti Communiste Français) in order to assist the international volunteers became illegal. ²⁰

From the testimonies of those arriving from Palestine, it seems that this state of affairs did not hinder in any way the process of enlistment. Several of the newcomers arrived in Paris seeking a specific contact person. A few simply turned up at the offices of the Communist-led General Confederation of Labour, the CGT, on 22 Place du Combat. Others demonstrated their naivety by asking Parisians they met on the street or in a café whether they could tell them how to cross over to Spain. Once in Place du Combat, the volunteers had to present their union cards. The Socialist Zionist David Karon remembered the importance of his Histadrut (General Confederation of Jewish Workers) card: ‘I had to prove that I was a member of the working class. They did not accept any members of the bourgeoisie. So I pulled out my Histadrut card. That was proof enough for them’. ²¹

Karon was born in 1915 in Poland and immigrated to Palestine in 1931 to study at an agricultural school. In 1936 he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Kfar Menachem. He served first in the Mickiewicz Battalion and then in the Botwin Company. He was one of the first fighters to return to Palestine after the war.

The time the international volunteers spent in Paris varied significantly. Those who arrived in mid-1937 converged with the main wave of brigadistas and spent only a day or two in the city. Those who came before or after that time had to spend several weeks, and at times even months, in the French capital. The encounter with French society, culture and politics provided the Jewish volunteers with an opportunity to reflect further on the reasons for their enlistment and on their lives in Palestine.

The letters written by American and European brigadistas during their stay in Spain have received much attention from historians. ²² Messages sent by the same individuals during their weeks in France, however, are often missing from the common narrative about the Brigades. This was especially true for the volunteers from Palestine whose letters have only recently been discovered. And yet the letters sent from France are of special relevance. Particularly for the Jewish volunteers arriving from Palestine, Paris was a novelty. It was rich with cultural experiences that no city in Palestine could boast of. But, more importantly, it was a place where they could contemplate some of the advantages offered to the working class within a full-scale democracy.

Two of the volunteers – Luba Mamut and Pinchas Cheifetz – wrote extensively to their families and friends in Palestine about their time in Paris. Mamut was born in the Ukraine and raised in Berlin. In 1933 he emigrated to Palestine, which he left in August 1937 in order to travel to Spain. His letters to his younger sister in Palestine expose a strong sense of class solidarity and an ambivalent attitude towards the Zionist enterprise. In his first letter from Paris Mamut wrote:

You tell me that I will be back within a couple of years. You say that Jews are oppressed all over the world, the USSR included. Well there isn't much I can say on the subject since I do not feel oppressed in any way. The one place where I did feel oppressed was Palestine. There I worked for hours while my supervisor spent all her time in coffee shops wasting my hard-earned money. ²³

A second set of detailed letters about experiences in Paris was written by Pinchas Cheifetz. Cheifetz was born in Palestine in 1900. His father died when he was a year old. He grew up in an orphanage, and suffered deprivation and hardship. A carpenter by profession, at a young age he joined the Communist Youth Alliance. He arrived in Paris in September 1937. Like Mamut, he spent several weeks in the French capital. In his letters he referred to the issue of class differences within French society. In that respect, he was willing to admit that the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine was more egalitarian. At the same time, Cheifetz was struck by the personal freedom that liberal democracy offered. In a letter sent to his brother in September 1937, he wrote:

As you well know, the government here is a Popular Front government. It is not a classical capitalist regime, but there is still a long way to go before we could call this a proletarian regime. … Workers are still being exploited and class differences are more apparent than ever. But the one thing everyone enjoys here is freedom. I am not sure to what extent a young person such as yourself can appreciate this. But someone like me, who was jailed and had to hide his true opinions – when I got off the ship in Marseilles, I wanted to run in the streets and shout ‘I am a Communist and I am not afraid of anyone’. ²⁶

Both Mamut and Cheifetz found in Paris more respect for personal liberty and individual rights than in the kibbutzim which they had left behind. Their descriptions seem to support historian Tom Buchanan's assertion that many of the volunteers in the International Brigades were fascinated by social upheaval in France and upheld a fluid notion of democracy:

… looser and perhaps of a more inspirational meaning: an egalitarian, compassionate and spontaneous way of life, born out of revolutionary upheaval that had nothing to do with parliamentary democracy. This was the ‘democracy’ of the French factory occupations of June 1936 and the anarchistic direct democracy that so appealed to foreign observers among the militia at the outset of the Spanish Civil War. ²⁷

During their stay in Paris the volunteers came into contact with representatives of the Spanish Republic for the first time. In a letter sent in September 1937 Cheifetz described a rally organized by the PCF:

Comrade [Margarita] Nelken, leader of the [Spanish] Communist Party [sic], talked to us about the Spanish people [and] their struggle for freedom. She asked for the help of the French working class in breaking the embargo.

[…] On Saturday we attended the funeral of a Polish doctor killed in Spain. They buried him in the same cemetery as the heroes of the Paris Commune. Henri Barbusse, a victim of the February 1934 uprising, is also buried there. That was the uprising of the French Fascists after which the Popular Front was formed. ²⁸

Between Spain and Palestine: The Civil War Experience

In his book Fallen Sparrows, historian Michael Jackson suggested that one of the main goals behind the formation of the International Brigades was to provide the Republican Army and the Spanish people with a model of military efficiency. ³¹ Reality on the ground, however, was somewhat different. Within the first three months of fighting, 400 out of the first 600 English-speaking volunteers were killed. ³² Three weeks of fighting in Jarama had taken the lives of 750 out of 1,000 German volunteers. ³³ With some exaggeration, Jackson affirmed that, ‘In general the men of the International Brigades knew as little about making war as they knew about conjugating Spanish verbs’. ³⁴

Whatever military capabilities the Jewish volunteers from Palestine had, they were acquired mostly in Spain. Shmulik Segal confessed: ‘When I started off with my initial training it was pure luck if one of my bullets hit its target. But they decided to send me to sniper training nevertheless’. ³⁵ If Segal's dubious skills at firing a gun qualified him for sniper training, most of the other Jewish volunteers did not go that far. Michael Baron felt his experience as a boy scout in Germany provided him with some military background. However, both he and his officers soon realized he could be better used in a different capacity. ³⁶

Peter Fry considered himself lucky since after five weeks at the International Brigades' training base in Albacete he was allowed to fire five bullets – five more than most of his comrades. ³⁷ David Karon summed up frankly the situation of many of his fellows in the International Brigades:

We were volunteers, so in principle they would put us wherever there was a hole to fill, wherever help was needed, where there was trouble and there was a void … wherever people had to die. ³⁸

While many of the Jewish volunteers that arrived from Palestine did not hold combat positions, they did serve on the front. Mordechai Milman served in the Lincoln Brigade and was promoted to captain due to his bravery on the battlefield. ⁴⁰ David Karon was a communications officer; Michael Baron functioned as a political commissar; Peter Fry and Yossef Gruber worked as translators; Luba Mamut was a paramedic; Kurt Goldstein served as a driver. Among the women, Dora Levin, Hannah Hobs and Jadwiga Welikanowicz were nurses in the International Brigades' sanitary compound in Murcia. The hospital complex in Murcia functioned under critical conditions until the International Brigades were evacuated from Spain in October 1938. The training that nurses such as Dora Levin received in this hospital was of immeasurable importance and would be put to good use by those of them who returned to Palestine, especially during the 1948 War of Independence.

In order to fully understand the ways in which life in the International Brigades affected the volunteers' personal identifications and ideological world view, one has to examine their relationships with, and knowledge of, Spanish society. Most of the novels and some of the autobiographies written by former volunteers in the International Brigades emphasized the warm welcome they were given by the Republican Government and the Spanish people. Most historians, however, stress the volunteers' isolation from the Spanish population at large. They were received at the Brigades' training base in Albacete by members of the French Communist Party, such as André Marty. For most of the volunteers, their only meeting with members of the Republican government took place on the eve of their evacuation from Spain. Language barriers and the Brigades' organizational structure prevented the formation of meaningful relations with Spanish comrades and the population around them. While archival sources indicate that some units within the International Brigades included a substantial number of Spanish volunteers, they are hardly mentioned in the testimonies of Jewish brigadistas from Palestine. More than anything else, they portray the Brigades as a haven of cosmopolitanism. Luba Mamut often referred in his letters to the German volunteers he served with. Others wrote of their commanding officers, who were mostly of Polish or German origin. Perhaps the most representative (and idealized) text in this respect can be found in one of the letters sent by Robert Aaquist to his sister in Palestine:

The International Brigades – much will be told about them in future history books … You know, the things made possible by the International Brigades are incredible … Frenchmen fighting shoulder to shoulder with Germans against Germans … Moroccans and Ethiopians commanding units of white men; Negros giving classes of political instruction to [white] Americans; Jews leading men who previously identified with Nazism in an attack against German tanks. You can only make sense of all of this by witnessing it first-hand. ⁴¹

One of the central motivations that kept many volunteers fighting, despite the material and psychological hardships of the war, was the empathy they felt towards the Spanish population. All of the Jewish volunteers had felt a strong commitment to the Spanish Republic prior to their departure from Palestine. This commitment became more profound and tangible when they were faced with the suffering caused by the war. David Karon, for example, described his initial encounter with the Spanish population, which overlapped with his first war experience:

The strongest memory I have is of my first war encounter. It is an image I will not forget for as long as I live. A bomb hit a school full of Spanish kids. It did terrible damage and I can still see all those mothers digging with their bare hands in the rubble trying to find their children, or what remained of them. If until that moment I was not 100% sure why I came, it certainly hit me at that moment: I was in the right place doing the right thing. ⁴³

In their encounters with the Republican population, the volunteers were sometimes struck by what they perceived as a lack of ideological awareness. In his letters to his sister in Palestine, Luba Mamut referred briefly to the ideological and political schisms among Communists, anarchists and Trotskyists. Generally, however, the Spanish people he met seemed to him less interested in framing their everyday reality in ideological terms. Both Mamut and Kurt Goldstein assumed that this was the result of their imperfect ideological formation. It never occurred to them (or if it did, they never acknowledged the fact) that some of the Spaniards they met simply did not share their world view. A significant sector of the Republic's supporters did not identify with Communism, and even less so with the Comintern's policies. Trotskyists, anarchists and liberal republicans appreciated the military aid that the International Brigades provided, but many did not welcome the heavy indoctrination that accompanied the presence of the Brigades.

Jews in the Spanish Trenches: Brigadistas and Ethnic Identity

A central issue in discussing the experiences of volunteers from Palestine concerns the brigadistas' view of themselves as Jews. As we have seen, many of the volunteers that arrived from Palestine were of Eastern European origin. When they immigrated to Palestine, they left family and friends behind. Some, like David Karon and Dora Levin, would never see their families again. Against this background, it is only reasonable to ask what role, if any, their Jewish identity played in their decision to join the International Brigades, and what weight their internationalist solidarity with the Spanish working class carried in motivating them to journey to the Iberian Peninsula. A further, and more important question, is, how was their identification as Jews affected (if at all) by their experiences during the Spanish Civil War?

Salman Salzman was one of the Jewish volunteers who left Palestine for Spain in early 1937. Following the foundation of the State of Israel, Salzman devoted much time and energy to recording the history of the Jewish volunteers within the International Brigades. While aware of the fact that many volunteers played down the ethnic or religious components of their identity, Salzman still felt these identity components had a role in their decision to become brigadistas:

American Jews will say, of course, that they did not go to Spain as Jews. But how come there were so many Jews among the International Brigades in general? They enlisted because they were first generation immigrants [fleeing] the pogroms [in Eastern Europe]. ⁴⁶

Shmuel Stamler referred in a letter to his girlfriend to the changes that he had hoped the presence of Jews among the International Brigades would produce:

The Spanish people have changed their attitudes towards the Jews during this war. A Spanish soldier serving in my unit [the Botwin Company] told me that before the war he thought all Jews were merchants and thieves. And now that he has seen Jewish volunteers fighting for liberty shoulder to shoulder with Spanish soldiers, he is proud to be one of those soldiers. ⁵¹

Pinchas Cheifetz returned to France in early 1938 after he had been wounded in Spain and was left blind in one eye. In the letters he sent to his family when he first reached Paris, it was easy to sense his disillusionment with Jewish society in Palestine. Cheifetz, as we have seen, felt that Paris offered him greater freedom as a Communist. In none of his early letters did he refer to himself in terms of his Jewish affiliation. But in 1938 he wrote to his brother:

In the moments of longing for my eyes, I will remember that I last had my eyesight on the frontlines, during the heroic struggle of the Spanish people, where they fought alongside representatives of the international working class. I am honoured to have been among them. In September when I left for Spain, I enlisted in the Jewish Botwin Company. This company has bestowed much honour upon the Jewish people. And not this company alone. Jewish workers could be found in their thousands in the International Brigades. Not a single Spanish person can accuse the Jews of being cowards! Not a single person in this world will ever again have the right to do so! ⁵²

They grew up in Jewish families, often experiencing anti-Semitism in their countries of origin. For some of them, their years in Palestine were traumatic precisely because they had to face the fact that Jewish society there, while providing them with some sense of security and freedom as Jews, could also be sectarian and exclusionary. They volunteered in the International Brigades hoping to aid in the creation of a Fascist-free Europe in which there would be a place for them both as individuals and as Jews. But the time they spent in Spain did not resolve the dilemma: neither in Spain nor in the future State of Israel were they able to create the inclusive and egalitarian society they were ready to die for. While their personal histories may not tell us very much about the nature of the Spanish conflict itself, they make abundantly clear their own sense of dislocation and alienation within the society from which they came.

Conclusions

Despite expressions of solidarity with the Spanish Republic, most of the political parties in the Jewish Yishuv were against sending youth from Palestine to join the International Brigades. The goal of strengthening the Jewish presence in Palestine was given priority over and above international solidarity or the anti-Fascist struggle. Therefore, only a dozen of the volunteers who left for Spain belonged to the Zionist camp. The PCP, which operated clandestinely, also initially rejected members' requests to go to Spain. This was due, on the one hand, to the unclear policy of Moscow during the first few weeks of the Spanish Civil War, and on the other, to its small membership and the fear that diminishing numbers would not allow it to fight both Zionism and British imperialism. Many of the Communist volunteers from Palestine were therefore either activists deported by the British police or internal opponents of the party line.

The contemporary Jewish media of the Yishuv conspired to silence the story of the volunteers who left for Spain, so as not to encourage others to follow them. In the news items and op-eds published on the International Brigades, the absence of any reference to the volunteers from Palestine was conspicuous. Kol Ha’am, the organ of the outlawed Communist Party, was the only newspaper to mention the participation of volunteers from Palestine and to publish several personal accounts of these fighters, such as those of Isaak Yoffee, who declared in one of his letters: ‘How good it is to be a brave soldier fighting the Fascist enemy’. ⁵³

Several letters written by volunteers appeared in the mid-1960s in Israel Centner's book From Madrid to Berlin. Centner, who fought in the International Brigades himself, had been asked by the Communist Party already in 1937 to document the story of the volunteers who left Palestine to fight in Spain. Obviously, the letters published and the interpretation given to them was partial and biased, with the aim of establishing their status as heroes. ⁵⁴

It is only in recent years that a larger number of letters sent by the Jewish brigadistas to their loved ones in Palestine has been recovered, and they offer us a fresh perspective on their experiences in Spain, as well as the process they went through on the way to becoming brigadistas. The growing willingness of family members to share their archives with both researchers and the Israeli public has to do with the gradual entry of these Jewish fighters into the Israeli pantheon of heroes. As Communists, most volunteers who left Palestine to fight in Spain tended to emphasize the international solidarity of the working class and similar universalistic notions. The idea of affirming their Jewish identity was alien to them. Reading their letters and testimonies, however, it becomes clear that their ethnic identity as Jews was certainly a key factor in their decision to risk their lives in the Spanish fratricide. They had to reconcile their sometimes conflicting identity components as they prepared their voyage to Spain, as well as at the different stations along the way, especially in Paris. Many of their letters from either France or Spain refer to Jewish immigrants in Paris, to the history of Spanish Jews and to anti-Semitic incidents. In their letters to friends and family in Palestine, as well as in later testimonies, they highlighted the decisive rejection of anti-Semitic behaviour in the International Brigades.

Shmuel Segal remembered how one of the soldiers in the sniper training school said ‘something that sounded anti-Semitic, although there was no anti-Semitism among the volunteers in Spain’. But, still, there were several Polish coalminers and they came with traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Red Army veteran Ivan Krasnoborov ‘gave them a piece of his mind. He gave them a lecture about racism, something that you would not forget’. ⁵⁵

Armed with retrospective information on all that took place during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, as well as under the Francoist dictatorship, many of the Jewish volunteers who made their way back to Palestine would present themselves in later years as the precursors of the Jewish partisans and ghetto fighters of World War Two, and sometimes also of the Jewish soldiers who fought for the establishment of the State of Israel and its survival. ⁵⁶