Léon Castro

This article is about the politician Léon Castro, who lives in Egypt. For the Costa Rican politician, see León Cortés Castro .

Léon Castro (* 1884 in Smyrna, today Izmir , † probably 1954) was a lawyer in Cairo . He belonged to the Jewish minority of Egypt , but - like many members of the Egyptian minorities - was not an Egyptian citizen, but presumably had Spanish citizenship. Castro played an important role in the political life of the Jewish community in Egypt and beyond. He was one of the founders of the first Zionist organizations in Egypt, but at the same time was involved in Egyptian nationalist movements, especially in the Wafd party , and in circles close to Marxism. When the National Socialists took power in Germany in 1933, he was the driving force in the newly emerging Ligue Contre l'Antisémitisme Allemand and in a trial against anti-Semitic propaganda in Egypt ( Jabès versus van Meeteren and Safarowsky ); he was elected general secretary of the International League Against Anti-Semitism (LICA). Towards the end of the Second World War he again took over the chairmanship of a Zionist umbrella organization for the Egyptian Jews.

Versatile intellectual

Castro came to Egypt in 1911 at the age of 27. He belonged to the upper middle class of the Jewish community and had considerable influence, but was not a member of the leading families who regularly made the presidents of the community councils in Alexandria and Cairo (Suares, Cattaoui, etc.). Castro studied law in Paris and committed himself to Zionism on his return to Cairo in 1917 or 1918. It is not entirely certain what citizenship he had; In any case, in 1933 it seems to have been the Spanish one. In 1918 and 1919 he published the Revue Sioniste , a French-language Zionist magazine - French was the colloquial language of the Jewish middle and upper classes in Egypt and the lingua franca of most educated Egyptians.

He later turned to the nationalist Wafd party. He was a personal friend of Saad Zaghlul Pascha and worked first during a stay in France in 1921 as a propagandist for this organization, later in Egypt, in the years 1922–1925, as a journalist and editor of the then Wafd organ La Liberté .

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Castro appears to have sympathized with the Marxist left. In any case, at that time he published two magazines around which Marxist study circles of minorities (Jews, Greeks, Italians, Armenians) and “Western” Egyptian intellectuals formed: Les Essayistes and L'Effort . At the same time he played a leading role in the Egyptian B'nai-B'rith lodges , of which he was one of the founders; In 1944 he even became president of the Grande Loge du Districte d'Egypte et du Soudan .

Fight against anti-Semitism

When the National Socialists took power in Germany in 1933, Castro took on important functions in the protests of Egyptian Jews against German anti-Semitism. At mass gatherings in Alexandria and Cairo at the end of March, which were mainly directed against the so-called “ Jewish boycott ” on April 1, 1933, a Ligue contre l'Antisémitisme Allemand, Association formée par toutes les oeuvres et institution juives , was initially founded Elected Committee of Six as leadership. This committee created the Ligue contre l'Antisémitisme Allemand , chaired by Léon Castro. In September this organization joined the International League Against Anti-Semitism as the Egyptian branch , Castro was first Vice-President and then General Secretary of this international organization.

Castro's role in the boycott movement

His activities in Egypt in March and April included protest telegrams on behalf of the mass assemblies and later the Ligue to the League of Nations , the French League for Human Rights and the German President Paul von Hindenburg . Between April 18 and 20, 1933, Castro published an official call for the Ligue to boycott German goods and to break off all relations with the Germans in several newspapers, initially in La Voix Juive :

Jews of Egypt! (...) after Germany cynically proclaims its contempt for everything that is Jewish, you cannot continue relationships of whatever kind with Germany and without demeaning yourself in your own eyes, without betraying your history and your collective and individual dignity entertain the Germans: You have to break off all material, intellectual, social and societal relationships with them. The Germans hate you, despise you. The Germans repudiate you, repudiate them. (...)

The boycott, which was initially quite actively pursued, including visits by boycott committees to companies and occasionally also the setting of pickets , did not noticeably impair economic relations between the German Empire and Egypt, but achieved success in individual areas. German films could hardly be shown in Cairo and Alexandria because the screenings were disrupted. Castro was a member of the LICA Action Committee, which was responsible, among other things, for boycott and press activities. The Egyptian government soon banned all public meetings of both the LICA and the Germans, so that the activities continued as a "silent boycott".

The "Trial against Anti-Semitism"

→ Main article : Jabès versus van Meeteren and Safarowsky

The greatest public attention in this context, however, reached a legal dispute in which Castro was significantly involved. After the German Association in Cairo had published an anti-Semitic pamphlet with the support of the German legation and the NSDAP regional group in Egypt, the Jewish businessman and Italian citizen Umberto Jabès submitted to mixed courts with the support of LICA and B'nai-B'rith -Located a lawsuit for damages against the publisher and printer of the brochure for insult . His lawyer was Léon Castro, who also drafted the relevant briefs and appeared in court. Castro tried to win internationally renowned lawyers (such as Henri Torrés and Vincent de Moro-Giafferi ), but did not succeed, and the trial was lost in the first and second instance.

Further activity in the LICA

Nevertheless, the LICA stabilized, which, according to Castro, had 1,500 active members in Egypt in 1935. The boycott lost much of its momentum, however, as leading members of the Jewish community, including the Chief Rabbi of Cairo, publicly spoke out against a continuation at the end of 1933. Another blow to activities was when the Zionist organizations, which had concluded the Ha'avara Agreement with the German Reich, attempted in 1935 to apply this agreement to Egypt. The LICA criticized this attempt, which was incompatible with the boycott, very harshly. In April 1935 negotiations took place between Ha'avara representatives and those boycott leaders who were close to Zionism, including Castro. The boycott is said to have officially ended, but it was never formally discontinued and continued with decreasing intensity.

Another field of activity of LICA and especially Castro was to collect information about National Socialist and Fascist activities on Egyptian territory and to pass it on to the British authorities, which were still responsible for Egyptian foreign and defense policy.

Castro and the Zionist Federation from 1943

At the end of 1943, the lack of a Zionist umbrella organization in Egypt was clearly felt. The Zionist executive in Jerusalem saw the best opportunity to “entrust the experienced Léon Castro with the building of a new Zionist federation”, especially since Castro, due to his diverse activities over the past twenty years, had excellent contacts with the various branches represented in the Jewish community as well as to circles of the Wafd party. In January 1944, Castro became President of the Provisional Committee of the Zionist Federation of Egypt ( Comité Provisoire de la Fédération Sioniste d'Egypte ). The federation quickly grew to 750 members. The organization dealt, among other things, with fundraising campaigns that were officially intended for charitable purposes, but reached Palestine through covert channels. At the same time she ran a "Jewish Agency for Palestine (Immigration Office)" in Alexandria.

While the authorities observed these activities with suspicion (for example, Castro was threatened with deportation in the spring of 1945), but largely tolerated them, there was clear opposition to them in the Cairo Jewish community because they feared negative repercussions on Judaism in Egypt. Renè Cattaoui, chairman of the Cairo community, wrote in a letter to Castro at the end of 1944 that the propaganda for the alijah undermined the sacred institution of the family and paternal authority and endangered relations between the community and the state authorities. The municipal council could not allow such activities. A little later, Cattaoui threatened that he would be forced to “request the intervention of the Egyptian authorities in the general interest”. Castro, however, dismissed any responsibility for the aliyah's activities and simply carried on unmoved. He presided on January 7, 1945 in Alexandria a first "Territorial Conference of Egyptian Zionism", at which he was elected chairman of the Central Committee. In April 1945, the Federation succeeded in bringing 100 Egyptian Jews to Palestine as part of the Aliyah Bet .

When martial law was proclaimed in Egypt during the Israeli War of Independence in May 1948 and numerous prominent Jews were interned, Castro escaped this fate - probably because of his good relations with Wafd and the British.

Fonts

• La guerre et les contrats privés. In: L'Égypte contemporaine , Volume 8 (1917), pp. 141–167, also published as a separate brochure in Cairo.

literature

• Ovadia Yeroushalmy: Léon Castro . In: Norman A. Stillman (ed.): Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World . Brill Online, Jerusalem 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gudrun Krämer : Minority, Millet, Nation? The Jews in Egypt 1914–1952 . Wiesbaden 1982, p. 393. For citizenship see Albrecht Fueß: The German community in Egypt from 1919–1939 . Hamburg 1996, p. 96, which refers to a document from the German Foreign Office dated November 6, 1933.
2. ↑ Gudrun Krämer: Minority, Millet, Nation? The Jews in Egypt 1914–1952 . Wiesbaden 1982, p. 258.
3. ↑ Gudrun Krämer: Minority, Millet, Nation? The Jews in Egypt 1914–1952 . Wiesbaden 1982, pp. 339 and 394.
4. ↑ Gudrun Krämer: Minority, Millet, Nation? The Jews in Egypt 1914–1952 . Wiesbaden 1982, pp. 261-263; La Tribune juive , October 5, 1934 (No. 40), p. 791 ( online ).
5. ↑ Mahmoud Kassim: The diplomatic relations of Germany to Egypt 1919-1936, Hamburg 2000, p. 290.
6. ↑ French original by Gudrun Krämer, p. 267: “Juifs d'Egypte, (…) Puisque l'Allemagne proclame cyniquement son mépris de tout ce qui est juif, vous ne pouvez pas, sans déchoir à vos yeux, sans trahir votre histoire et votre dignité collective etiquette, continuer à entretenir avec l'Allemagne et les Allemands des relations quelconque: vous devez rompre avec eux tous rapports matériels, intellectuels, sociaux et mondains. Les Allemands vous haïssent, méprisez-les. Les Allemands vous repoussent, repoussez-les. (...) »
7. ↑ Krämer, p. 271.
8. ↑ Krämer, p. 393
9. ↑ Krämer, p. 399.
10. ↑ Krämer, p. 414.