Jewish Archive (Francoist Spain)

The Jewish Archive (Archivo Judaico) was the name given to a collection of documents compiled by the regime of Francisco Franco in Spain during the Second World War. In accordance with instructions passed down from the Directorate of General Security (Dirección General de Seguridad, DGS) the provincial governors of Spain assembled records of all Jews living in Spain, Spanish or not. The resulting list, which recorded 6,000 Jews living in Spain, was handed to the SS under Heinrich Himmler in 1941 and was included in Adolf Eichmann's Jewish Population Census, tabled at the Wannsee Conference chaired by Reinhard Heydrich in January 1942.

As soon as the Spanish Civil War came to a close, the Franco regime enacted legislation such as the Law for the Suppression of Freemasonery and Communism of 1940 that legalised repressive actions against those who had supported the Republic since October 1934. Jews were not included, as according to Álvarez Chillida the Alhambra Decree of 1492 had already neutralised the "Jewish threat" with its Edict of Expulsion, and as it remained in force there was no need for further legislation against the Jews. Otherwise anti-Semitic rhetoric was present in statements made by Franco as well as his supporters and ideological allies, going back to the late 1920s. Although the regime officially rejected racial anti-Semitism as contradictory to its National Catholic principles, in practice it was tolerated. On January 25, 1938, General Gonzalo Quiepo de Llano imposed a fine of 138,000 pesetas on the Jewish community of Seville eighteen months after his forces took over the region. In one of his nightly radio broadcasts he had accused the Jews of Spain of spending trillions of pesetas on the "promotion of Communism and the preparation of revolutions" through their tithes to the "supreme council known as the Kahal". A department store founded by Jewish refugees in Zaragoza was also closed down and confiscated. In early 1939, one year after Franco's Directorate of General Security formally began police cooperation with the German Gestapo and before the military conflict came to an end, agents of the Gestapo raided the synagogue in Barcelona and committed a number of desecrations. The local authorities refused a hearing to the Jewish community, and German Jewish refugees who called on the German consulate general were also arrested.

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