Antisemitism and its Effects on the Political Career and on the Intellectual Oeuvre of Jorge Isaacs

This essay illustrates the instances of antisemitism and its effects associated with the personal failures in the political career of Jorge Isaacs, whose fight for secular education and ethnic identities challenged the Catholic Church’s influence in Colombia. His book La revolución radical en Antioquia, 1880 denounces the abuses of power during the government of La Regeneración and calls for the liberation of the Sephardic identity of the Antioqueños and the consolidation of the Liberals. Isaacs, a radical Liberal, influenced by Positivism and the confluence of Romanticism with history, attacked the clergy by affirming the Antioqueños’s and Indigenous tribes’ cultural history in his poem “La tierra de Córdoba” (1890)