Jose Rizal

Encyclopedia : J : JO : JOS : Jose Rizal

Dr. José Protacio Mercado Rizal y Realonda

Dr. José Protacio Mercado Rizal y Alonzo Realonda (June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896), variously called the "Pride of the Malay Race," "The Great Malayan," "The First Filipino," "The Messiah of the Revolution," "The Universal Hero" and "The Messiah of the Redemption." He is the national hero of the Philippines. Despite his relatively short life, Rizal's passion as a patriot together with his intelligence as one of the first Third World intellectuals of the post-colonial era have inspired succeeding thinkers and revolutionaries of the centrality of national identity as a social force in the project of nation-building. He is called by Benedict Anderson as one of the best exemplars of nationalist thinking.

Rizal was a polyglot. The medium of instruction in various academies in the Philippines and Europe where he studied were Spanish, French, Latin and German. There are facsimiles of letters of his that are in excellent German, and he also had correspondence in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, English, German and Dutch. He made translations from Arabic, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Latin, Sanskrit. In addition he had at least some knowledge of Malay, Chavacano, Cebuano, Ilocano, and Subanun besides his native Tagalog.

He was a poet. As a polymath, he was also an amateur architect, artist, educator, amateur economist, amateur ethnologist, scientific farmer, historian, inventor, journalist, mythologist, internationalist, naturalist, novelist, ophthalmologist, physician, propagandist, sculptor, martial artist, and amateur sociologist.

A patriot of the highest order, the anniversary of Rizal's death, December 30, is now celebrated as a holiday in the Philippines, called Rizal Day.

Contents

1 Family
2 Education
3 Writings
4 Courage
5 Legacy
6 Last days
7 See also
8 External links
9 References

Family

Portrait of José Rizal by Juan Luna.

José Rizal was born into a prosperous middle class Filipino and Chinese-mestizo family in the town of Calamba in the Province of Laguna. His parents were Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonzo. He was the seventh child of their eleven children.

Dominican friar landlords granted the family the privilege of the lease of a hacienda and an accompanying rice farm, but contentious litigation followed the friars' attempts to raise tenant rental fees, which the farmers, led by Rizal, disputed while exposing the non-payment of taxes due on friar land taken over by the Dominicans from the Jesuits after their expulsion; later, General Valeriano Weyler had the buildings on the farm torn down.

Upon enrolling at the Ateneo, Rizal changed his surname to "Rizal" to escape the opprobrium of the name "Mercado"--his brother, Paciano, had been linked to the Filipino priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos and Jacinto Zamora who had been declared subversives, suffering horrible death by "garrote".

Rizal was descended from Domingo Lam-co, a Chinese immigrant who sailed to the Philippines from Amoy, China in the mid 17th century (see Chinese Filipino). Lam-co married Inez de la Rosa, a Sangley native of Luzon. To free his descendants from the anti-Chinese animosity of the Spanish authorities, Lam-co changed the family surname to the Spanish surname "Mercado" (market) to indicate their Chinese merchant roots, although their original application was for the name Ricial, apropos their main occupation of farming, which was arbitrarily denied. The name Rizal, originally Ricial, or the green of young growth, was adopted as an alias with Paciano to enable Jose to travel freely, as the Mercados had gained notoriety by their son's intellectual prominence. It is to be noted that Rizal was from early childhood already advancing unheard of political ideas of freedom and individual rights which to the authorities must have been infuriating.

Aside from his indigenous Malay and Chinese ancestry, recent genealogical research has found that José had traces of Spanish, Japanese and Negrito ancestry. His maternal great-great-grandfather (Teodora's great-grandfather) was Eugenio Ursua, a descendant of Japanese settlers, who married a Filipina named Benigna (surname unknown). These two gave birth to Regina Ursua who married a Sangley mestizo from Pangasinán named Atty. Manuel de Quintos, Teodora's grandfather. Their daughter Brígida de Quintos married a mestizo (half-caste Spaniard) named Lorenzo Alberto Alonzo, the father of Teodora. Austin Craig mentions Lacandula, Rajah of Tondo at the time of the Spanish incursion, also as an ancestor.

Education

Jose Rizal as an 18 year old student of medicine at the U.S.T.

Rizal first studied under Justiniano Aquino Cruz in Biñan, Laguna. He went to Manila to study. He was accepted at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila where he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1877 and graduated as one of the nine students declared sobresaliente, or super excellent. He continued his education in the Ateneo Municipal to obtain a degree in land surveying and assessor, and at the same time in the University of Santo Tomas where he studied Philosophy and Letters. Upon learning that his mother was going blind, he decided to study medicine (ophthalmology) in the University of Santo Tomas, but did not complete it because he felt that Filipinos were being discriminated by the Dominicans who operated the University.

Without his family's knowledge and consent, but wholly and secretly supported by his brother Paciano, he traveled alone to Madrid and studied medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid where he earned the degree, Licentiate in Medicine. His education continued at the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg where he earned a second doctorate. In Berlin, he was inducted as a member of the Berlin Ethnological Society and the Berlin Anthropological Society under the patronage of the famous pathologist Rudolf Virchow. Following custom, he delivered a learned address in German before the Anthropological Society on the orthography and structure of the Tagalog language, a shining moment in the relations between East and West. Ten years later, the society met to honor him in death with a reading of a German translation of his farewell poem. He left Heidelberg a poem, "A las flores del Heidelberg," which was both an evocation and a prayer for the welfare of his native land, but which presaged the unification of common culture and common values, of a melding of East and West, the hoped-for relations between peoples, the relations of today.

He left much more than goodwill among his European friends who kept almost everything he gave them, even doodlings on pieces of paper. In the home of a Spanish liberal, Pedro Ortiga y Rey, he left an impression that was to be remembered by his daughter, Consuelo Ortiga y Perez, in her diary, a moment, she wrote, to be cherished for a lifetime, of a day Rizal spent there and regaled them with his brilliant intellect and social graces, and sleight of hand tricks. In London, during his research on Morga's writings, he became a regular guest in the home of Dr. Reinhold Rost, head of the India Office Library of the British Museum, who referred to him as "a gem of a man." The Ullmers, family of Karl Ullmer, pastor of Wilhelmsfeld, and the Blumentritts were aware of the aura of destiny surrounding him that they treasured everything he gave them, even buttonholes and napkins with sketches and notes, which were ultimately bequeathed to the Rizal family to form a treasure trove of memorabilia which today offer a glimpse of the man who truly is 'A Man For All Climes.'

Writings

José Rizal's most famous works were his two novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, social commentaries on the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule. These books, inspired by the ideals in Cervantes, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Don Quixote and The Count of Monte Cristo, angered both the Spaniards and the Hispanicized Filipinos, due to the blatant and insulting symbolism in the books. Rizal's first critic was Ferdinand Blumentritt, the sympathetic Philippine Expert, a Researcher and Scholar, whose first reaction was of grave misgiving. The longest and most arduous argument for the truth contained in his novels was with the Austrian, whose mother was the daughter of Andreas Schneider, Imperial Treasurer at Vienna, an orthodox and far advanced thinker in defense of the Catholic Faith. But this did not dissuade him from writing the preface of 'El Filibusterismo,' after he had translated 'Noli me Tangere' into German. As Blumentritt had warned, these led to Rizal's prosecution as the inciter of revolution and, eventually, to a military trial and execution. The intended consequence, of teaching the natives where they stood, brought about the obverse reaction, as the Philippine Revolution of 1896 took off virulently thereafter. Rizal's trial was regarded a travesty even by the prominent Spaniards of his day. Soon after his execution, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, in an impassioned and unforgettable utterance, recognized Rizal as a Spaniard, raised in the best traditions of the country, "...profoundly and intimately Spanish, far more Spanish than those wretched men--forgive them, Lord, for they knew not what they did--those wretches who, over his still warm body, hurled like an insult heavenward that blasphemous cry, 'Viva Espana'." Even in death, Rizal's words inspired. When the Philippine Organic Act was being debated in the U.S. Congress, doubts about the capacity of Filipinos for self-government were swept by a passionate speech by Congressman Henry Cooper of Wisconsin in which he recited an English translation of the valedictory poem "ultimo adios," and capped by a stirring peroration, "Under what clime or what skies has tyranny claimed a nobler victim?"

Courage

After writing Noli me Tangere, among the numerous other poems, plays and tracts he had already written, he gained further notoriety with the Spaniards. Against the advice of his family and friends, he came back to the Philippines to aid his family, which was having trouble with the Dominican landlords. He led the townspeople of Calamba to speak out against the friar attempts to raise rent, initiating a litigation which, although backed by overwhelming evidence of tax evasion, only roused their vindictiveness. In retaliation, the Dominicans persecuted the Calamba farmers even more, going so far as to evict them from their homes for refusing to pay the exorbitant land rental fees. Persecutions and suffering could not break his unified family. Equal courage was displayed by Paciano who was tortured by Spaniards trying to extract evidence of Jose's complicity in the revolution, to bolster accusations before the tribunal. Two officers took turns applying pins under the fingernails; with his hands bound behind him and raised several feet, he was dropped repeatedly till he lost consciousness. Not a word fell from his lips.

Wenceslao Retana had slighted Rizal by a careless reference to his parents, and promptly apologized after being challenged to a duel. He survived by issuing an apology, became an admirer, and wrote Rizal's first European biography. Memory as a ten-year old of his mother's unjust treatment at the hands of the civil authorities, doubtless with the knowledge and approval of the church authorities, hurt so much as to explain his reaction to Retana. The incident stemmed from an unfounded accusation that his mother tried to poison the wayward wife of a cousin when she only intervened to help. Without as much as a hearing she was ordered to prison in Santa Cruz and made to walk the ten miles from Calamba. Only after two and a half years of costly appeals to the highest court, the Royal Audiencia, was his mother finally released.

Moments before his execution by a firing squad of Filipino native infantry, backed by an insurance force of a squad Spanish infantry, the Spanish surgeon general requested to take his pulse; it was normal. Aware of this, the Spanish sergeant in charge of the backup force hushed his squad to silence when they began raising "vivas" with the partisan crowd. His last words, 'consummatum est', Jesus' own, prefigured in ways that he knew but could not exactly foresee, that his death would be the end of Spain in the Philippines, and she would lose her moral right to rule. He was the best friend Spain had, and she failed to see it. Indeed, the shot that the crowd heard that moment was the shot that brought Spanish Rule in the Philippines to an end.

Legacy

Rizal was a reformer for an open society rather than a revolutionary for political independence; he advocated popular representation in effecting institutional reforms by peaceful means rather than by violent revolution. In this sense, he was Asia's first modern non-violent proponent of political reforms. Forerunner of Gandhi and contemporary of Tagore and Sun Yat Sen, all four created a new climate of thought throughout Asia, leading to the attrition of colonialism, sapping the colonial powers' self-confidence, and brooking the emergence of new asiatic nations by the end of World War II. Rizal's place in Asian history is assured, his appearance on the scene coming at a time when European colonial power had been growing and spreading, mostly motivated by trade, some for the purpose of bringing Western forms of government and education to peoples regarded as backward. Coinciding fortuitously with the appearance of those other leaders, Rizal from an early age had been enunciating in poems, tracts and plays, ideas all his own of modern nationhood as a practical possibility in Asia. In the body of written works for the period nothing compares to the outright statement in the 'Noli' that if European civilization had nothing better to offer, colonialism in Asia was doomed. Such was recognized by Gandhi who regarded him as a forerunner and as a martyr in the cause of freedom. Nehru, in his prison letters to his daughter Indira, acknowledged Rizal's significant contributions in the Asian freedom movement.

As a leader of the Propaganda Movement of Filipino students in Spain, he contributed newspaper articles to La Solidaridad in Barcelona with the following agenda:

That the Philippines be a province of Spain
Representation in the Cortes (Parliament)
Filipino priests instead of friars Augustinians, Dominicans, or Franciscans in parishes and remote sitios
Freedom of assembly and speech
Equal rights before the law (for both Filipino and Spanish plaintiffs)

The colonial authorities in the Philippines did not favor these reforms, even if they were more openly endorsed by Spanish intellectuals like Morayta, Unamuno, Pi y Margal and others. Upon his return to Manila in 1892, he formed a civic movement called La Liga Filipina. This league advocated these moderate social reforms through legal means, but was disbanded by the governor. At that time, he had already been declared an enemy of the state by the Spanish authorities because of his incendiary novels. Noli me Tangere, in particular, had portrayed the friars in a very bad light, with little or no hope of redemption.

As a political reformer, he is the peer of Gandhi, Tagore and Sun Yat Sen as pioneers who remoulded thinking on the Asian continent, but as modernist who accepted the best that European civilization could offer he transcends both nation and continent, a far-seeing visionary with a relevant message for our time.

Last days

Rizal's execution.

Rizal was implicated in the activities of the nascent rebellion and in July of 1892 was deported to Dapitan in the province of Zamboanga (in Mindanao). There he built a school, a hospital and a water supply system. The boys' school, in which they learned English, a prescient if weird option then, was considered light years ahead of its time, much along the lines of Gordonstoun and wholly in tune with Baden Powell in its aims of inculcating a resourceful and self-sufficient character in young men, who later enjoyed successful lives as farmers and honest government officials. One, a Muslim, became a Datu, and another, Jose Aseniero, who was with Rizal throught the life of the school, became Governor of Zamboanga.

In Dapitan, the Jesuits, some of the best minds of the Church in the Philippines, mounted a great effort to secure his return to the fold, led by Father Francisco de Paula Sanchez, his esteemed former professor, who failed in his mission. The task was resumed by Father Pablo Pastells, the most illustrious member of the Order, in correspondence with the prisoner on profound philosophical questions. In one magnificent and wonderfully timeless and revealing letter Rizal sails close to the ecumenism familiar to us today: "We are entirely in accord in admitting the existence of God. How can I doubt his when I am convinced of mine. Whoso recognizes the effect recognizes the cause. To doubt God is to doubt one's own conscience, and in consequence, it would be to doubt everything; and then what is life for? Now then, my faith in God, if the result of a ratiocination may be called faith, is blind, blind in the sense of knowing nothing. I neither believe nor disbelieve the qualities which many attribute to him; before theologians' and philosophers' definitions and lucubrations of this ineffable and inscrutable being I find myself smiling. Faced with the conviction of seing myself confronting the supreme Problem, which confused voices seek to explain to me, I cannot but reply: 'It could be; but the God that I foreknow is far more grand, far more good: Plus Supra!'...I believe in (revelation); but not in revelation or revelations which each religion or religions claim to possess. Examining them impartially, comparing them and scrutinizing them, one cannot avoid discerning the human 'fingernail' and the stamp of the time in which they were written... No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light. I believe in revelation, but in that living revelation which surrounds us on every side, in that voice, mighty, eternal, unceasing, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal as is the being from whom it proceeds, in that revelation which speaks to us and penetrates us from the moment we are born until we die. What books can better reveal to us the goodness of God, his love, his providence, his eternity, his glory, his wisdom? 'The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork'."

Ever the best friend, Blumentritt sustained him through correspondence, keeping him in touch with the European friends and fellow-scientists who wrote a steady stream of letters which arrived in Dutch, French, German and English and which baffled the censors no end, often delaying their transmittal. Those four years of his exile coincided with the development of the Philippine Revolution, from inception and to its final breakout, which, from the viewpoint of the court which was to try him, suggested his complicity in it. But he was to face a court not of reason but one of emotion. Near the end of his exile he met and courted the step-daughter of a patient, an Irishwoman named Josephine Bracken, but he was unable to obtain an eclesiastical marriage because he would not return to the religion of his youth and was not known to be clearly against revolution, although he considered Josephine to be his wife, with a special place in his heart to the end, the only person mentioned in the poem, "Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, my joy..."

To dissociate himself from a bloody revolution Rizal volunteered and was given leave by the Spanish Governor General Ramon Blanco y Erenas, who later was to present his sash and sword to the Rizal family as an apology, to serve in Cuba to minister to victims of yellow fever. By 1896, the rebellion fomented by the Katipunan, a Nationalist secret society, had become a full blown revolution, proving to be a truly nationalist uprising and leading to the proclamation of the first truly democratic republic in Asia. Rizal was arrested en route, imprisoned in Barcelona, and made to stand trial. He was implicated in the revolution through his association with members of the Katipunan and was to be tried before a court-martial for rebellion, sedition, and conspiracy. During the entire passage, he was unchained and had many opportunities to escape but refused to do so. It was a signal emblem of his character that no Spaniard ever laid a hand on him. Rizal was convicted on all three charges and sentenced to death. The level-headed Governor General Blanco had been forced out of office, and the willful friars had 'intercalated' Polavieja in his stead, sealing Rizal's fate.

With his execution nearing, Rizal wrote his last poem, which, though untitled, eventually came to be known as "Mi Último Adiós" (My Last Farewell). The poem is more aptly titled, "Adios, Patria Adorada" (literally "Farewell, Beloved Country"), by virtue of logic and literary tradition: the words come from the first line of the poem itself. Written during the early hours before his execution, in his fine handwriting in two small pieces of paper, it was hidden in an alcohol burner and handed to his family with his few remaining possessions, including the final letters and his last bequests. Within hearing of the Spanish guards, he said in English, "there is something inside," to emphasize the poem's importance.

In his final letter, of a voluminous exchange unparalleled in Asian letters, to the Sudeten-German Professor Fernando Blumentritt - My dear Brother, when you receive this letter, I shall be dead by then. Tomorrow at 7, I shall be shot; but I am innocent of the crime of rebellion... He had to reassure him that he had not turned revolutionary as he once considered being, that the ideals they both had fought for were his to the very end. He also bequeathed a book personally bound by him in Dapitan to his 'best and dearest friend.' When the Austrian received it he broke down and wept.

After Rizal's execution, doubts about the account of the events surrounding his death surfaced. Many continue to believe that Rizal neither married his sweetheart Josephine Bracken in Roman Catholic rites hours before his execution nor ever retracted those parts of his writings that were anti-Roman Catholic, a controversy which has not abated, with the Church still locked, as it were, trying to defend the marriage and retraction, but with decreasing vigor. Rizal's prescience would be his own defense after life. Tucked in 'Adios' is a revealing clue, "I go where there are no slaves, no hangmen or oppressors, where faith does not kill..." It was his final comment on the Catholic Church of his day, when precious few of its colonial missionaries were at all men of character and probity, men of the cloth who were the real rulers and the real government, in effect a Frailocracy, whose ire demanded his martyrdom. Much of the Church's case rests on priestly claims of a signed retraction, a copy of which could not even be produced and shown to the Rizal family despite their repeated requests. Besides, his deeply religious mother and sisters would have been greatly unburdened and relieved if he had assured them so. Rizal was all too wary of friar duplicity, hence the importance he gave to his poem.

Jose Rizal stands among a few who belong to no particular epoch, who belong to the world, and whose lives have a universal message. Although his field of action lay in politics which he bore in the cause of duty--rendering him a rarity in human affairs, a leader without ambition and a revolutionary without hatred--his real interests lay in the arts and sciences, in literature and in his profession as an ophthalmologist. Few people have had a leader who so entirely gave of himself as he did, and who asked so little for himself.

A statue now stands at the place where he fell, designed by the Swiss Richard Kissling of the famed "William Tell" sculpture. The statue carries the inscription "I want to show to those who deprive people the right to love of country, that when we know how to sacrifice ourselves for our duties and convictions, death does not matter if one dies for those one loves – for his country and for others dear to him".

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

[Special]

References

. This also contains the latest (December 2005) English translation of Rizal's valedictory poem.