Excerpted from Michael Petrou’s chapter “‘Our Fight Is Not Yet Over’: Jewish-Canadians in the Spanish Civil War” in the book Armed Jews in the Americas (Brill, 2021), edited by Raanan Rein and David M. K. Sheinin.
In July 1937, while crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the Cunard-White Star liner Alaunia, Maurice Constant, a former student at the University of Toronto, wrote a letter to Helen Dunsay, a woman he had met while working at a Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth camp in upstate New York, with an elaborate plan.
The Civil War in Spain had been raging for the past year, pitting a left-wing Republican government against an insurrection led by General Francisco Franco, and backed with men and weapons by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. When André Malraux, the French author and an organizer of the republic’s small air force, came to speak at the University of Toronto’s Hart House Theatre in March that year, Constant was captivated by his lecture in the cavernous, smoke-filled hall, and by his cool nonchalance as afterward he stood outside, smoking in the university grounds with a beautiful blonde French woman by his side. “He had a certain character,” Constant recalled years later. “The reason I admired this guy, that he was my idea of a model, he was an intellectual and a man of action. And that was my model.”
Constant decided he had to get to Spain. But his goal, he told Dunsay, was not to fight, but to report on the war covertly, so as not to provoke deadly retaliation from government spies. “I have contracted to smuggle that most precious of commodities, uncensored stories, out of the Iberian Peninsula,” he wrote. Constant planned to disguise stories in his letters to her that she would then be tasked with assembling, typing, and forwarding to a Toronto newspaper. He would indicate which parts of his letter were meant for publication by coded signals, such as how he dotted his ‘i’s and ‘j’s. It would be a lot of work, he said, but he hoped she would feel rewarded by its unusual nature. “I don’t know whether the observation will flatter you, but one reason I am telling you all this is because I judged you as unromantic enough (in the better sense of the word) not to make a fuss over the apparent mystery [of] it all.”
Constant made it to Spain and there abandoned his plans to merely observe the war. “I soon found out that the only thing worth writing about is the struggle, that the only point from which the struggle may be properly viewed is the front line, and that the only real understanding of the front line is obtained by the soldier,” he wrote in a September letter to Dunsay in which he explained that he had joined the International Brigades.
By taking that step, Constant became one of some 1,600 Canadians, including at least 44 Jews, to fight in Spain. Jews were over-represented among volunteers from many of the contributing countries. Estimates vary, but out of 35,000 to 40,000 volunteers who joined the International Brigades or other militias and units that fought on the anti-Fascist side of the war, Jews accounted for at least 3,500, and perhaps many more. They included about 20 percent of Polish volunteers, 20 percent of British volunteers, and one-third of American ones. The Jewish-Canadian contingent was much smaller, but it was still slightly disproportionate. Jews made up about 1.5 percent of Canada’s population in 1931; they comprised about 3 percent of all Canadian volunteers.
It is tempting to incorporate the story of Jewish-Canadians in Spain within a larger narrative positing that so many Jews volunteered to fight Fascism in Spain because, as Jews, they were uniquely aware of its danger and uniquely motivated to confront it. Everything that came after the Spanish Civil War, culminating in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the killing pits of Ukraine, confirms the clarity of such foresight. And given the awesome scale of the tragedy Jews suffered at the hands of Fascists during World War ii, their resistance to Fascism in Spain was important to their collective identity in the years that followed.
But the story of Jews in the Spanish Civil War has been shaped by hindsight that was not available to young Jews contemplating joining the International Brigades in 1936 or 1937. Even Maurice Constant’s personal story is less straightforward than it appears initially, including his identity as a Jew.
“It also occurs to me that you may not recognize the name,” Constant wrote toward the end of his letter from the ocean liner, “it’s a far cry from Maurice Constant to Moshe Cohen. Just now it seems to symbolize a very distant period, full of incomprehensibilities.” It is unclear whether Moshe Cohen was the name Constant was given at birth, or whether it was simply how he was known among campers at Hashomer Hatzair. Constant’s children, who were unaware of his Jewish heritage until many years later, only heard of Moshe Cohen when they were given copies of Constant’s letters to Dunsay, discovered following her death more than seventy years after they were written. Despite Constant’s youthful involvement with Hashomer Hatzair, he had rejected religion as a boy and refused to have a bar mitzvah.
Other volunteers were religious or more steeped in their Jewish identity. But that does not mean they went to Spain primarily because they were Jews. The decision made by Jewish-Canadians to fight in the Spanish Civil War was influenced by many factors, including a belief that Fascism posed a particular threat to Jews, and that their participation was an opportunity to combat it. There is little evidence however, that this was the dominant motive for most of them. Jewish-Canadians who fought in Spain were also radicalized by the general political climate in Canada during the Great Depression, which intensified the discrimination and marginalization they faced as Jews in Canada. It also contributed to pushing many Canadian Jews toward Communism and the Communist Party of Canada, which championed the Spanish cause. The past, however, never stands still in the minds of the present. And if being Jewish had only a little to do with why many Jewish-Canadians fought in Spain, it would come to matter more for those who looked back on the participation of Jewish-Canadians in the war years later.