Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal (special) -- Avi Beker, executive director of the Institute of the World Jewish Congress, practically raced across a foot bridge crossing a lock of the Panama Canal one day last month.  Stopping mid-span, he bade Efraim Zadoff, an historian who specializes in Latin American Jewry, to take his photograph.  Later, he returned the favor so Zadoff could have a similar souvenir. 

Because Israel’s embassy made the arrangements, Beker and Zadoff were given VIP treatment at the canal -- which graciously was extended to my wife, Nancy, and to me as well. The first step in the tour was a multi-media presentation on the eight major steps a ship goes through on its 50-mile journey from the Altantic to the Pacific Ocean: 1) Atlantic anchorage and channel, 2) Gatun Locks, 3) Gatun Lake; 4) Gaillard Cut; 5) Pedro Miguel Locks; 6) Miraflores Lake; 7) Miraflores Locks and 8) the Pacific channel and anchorage. 

I nudged Beker as a film strip showed one of the cargo ships of Israel’s Zim line proceeding through the canal. “Do you have different movies that show ships from the countries of whatever diplomat visits here?” I kidded our guide Marshall Dazzell who, like more than 95 percent of the work force, is a Panamanian. He assured us Zim’s appearance in the film was one of those nice coincidences.  Being a trivia buff, I was delighted to learn that the Atlantic Ocean entrance of the Panama Canal is actually 22 miles farther west than the Pacific Ocean entrance. You have to look at a map to see why this is so.  The Atlantic Ocean is north of the isthmus of Panama, and the Pacific Ocean is to the south of isthmus. The canal slices through the isthmus on a diagonal line, so that ships going to the Pacific

Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal

actually move in a southeastern direction, while ships going to the Atlantic move in a northwestern direction. 

The second step of our tour was to visit the tunnel in the control building adjoining the locks. Here is the massive machinery for opening the locks’ 730-ton main gates which stand 82 feet high, 65 feet wide and seven feet thick. A 40-horsepower engine can turn the gears to open the main gates in two minutes. Dazzell told us that in the event of a power failure the gates still could be opened by a back-up, manual system. 

“There is a wheel here and you crank it 1600-1800 times to open and 1600-1800 times to close,” he said.  “Every year we test it once or twice, and the last test we had about a year ago, four guys did it in 10 minutes--a new record.”  When the gear system was installed prior to the canal’s Aug. 15, 1914 opening, it was the largest then known in the world, with a reduction ratio of 1600 to 1. 

In addition to the main gate, there is a smaller gate in the lock. It is  designed to protect the large gate from being rammed by a ship. 

After the canal is turned over by the United States to Panama at noon on Dec.  31 of this year, the Panamanian government plans to make numerous improvements and modernizations to the 84-year-old canal. Among these, according to Dazzell, will be the installation by 2005 of a hydraulic system to open and close the gates of the locks. 

The system is expected to reduce maintenance costs while enabling the lock operation to be computerized, Dazzell said. 

With the approach of the Panamanian-flagged, Chinese-owned cargo ship Ever Deluxe  (measuring the maximum specifications for a commercial ship seeking passage through the canal at 964.9 feet long and 105.9 feet wide), the guide broke off his explanation to permit Beker and Zadoff to hurry to another photo vantage point. 

The academicians were fascinated as they watched mechanical trains working on parallel rails slowly pulling the ship into the lock. Carrying 2,000 containers below deck and 2,000 containers above deck, the mammoth cargo ship had paid a toll in excess of  $100,000 to make the transit through the canal -- cheap compared to the cost in fuel and time of circumnavigating the South American continent. 

Once the Goliath ship was positioned, water was allowed to flow by gravity from the lock to a chamber below. In the process, the ship was lowered 27 feet. Once the water levels in the two chambers were equalized, the gate opened and the ship moved into the next lock for another 27-foot descent that would bring it to Pacific sea level. 

As Beker and Zadoff watched and photographed this operation, their excitment seemed palpable. in this, they were hardly unique.  They were only the latest in a long line of Jews who have been attracted by the canal’s romance and its possibilities. 

In modern times, Sol Linowitz negotiated the treaties in 1977 for the United States by which the canal would be turned over to Panama while the U.S. retained the right to use and protect the canal militarily. Today, Panamanian Moises D. Mizrachi is one of four Panamanian members on the 9-member Panama Canal Commission’s board of directors, which oversees canal operations pending the transition. 

But even dating back to the canal’s beginnings, no people have been more bound up in the Panama Canal’s romance and its tragedy than we Jews. 

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From such sources as The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914  by David McCollough (the same historian who later won a Pulitzer prize for his incisive biography of Harry S Truman), and A Hundred Years of Jewish LIfe in Panama, 1876-1976, written by members of Panama City’s oldest synagogue, Kol Shearith Israel, one can trace the early Jewish involvement with the canal. 

In 1838, Augustin Solomon, a French citizen who lived on the Caribbean island of Guadelupe, obtained a concession from the Colombian government to develop a canal, railroad and highway across the isthmus of Panama, which then was part of Colombia. 

Had Solomon been successful, he would have had a 60-year grant to operate the canal, and a 40-year grant to operate a highway and a railroad. But, in what was a harbinger of French anti-Semitism of the late 19th century, a French official in Panama cabled to his home office in Paris: “The keys of the world are here, but the name of Senor Solomon does not seem to be sufficiently Christian to qualify him for the role of guardian of Saint Peter’s.” 

Colombia revoked its agreement with Solomon concerning a canal in 1843, while permitting him to continue lining up capital to build a trans-Isthmian railroad for which he was granted a 99-year lease.  But European capital markets suffered a collapse in 1848, and Solomon had to forfeit on his contract -- just at a time when the discovery of gold in California created tremendous new demand for a quick way across the isthmus. 

The Panama Railroad was completed in 1855, but not by Solomon. A New York-based company took over the contract. 

Jewish interest in constructing a canal through Panama was rekindled by the man who in 1869 successfully built the Suez Canal--Ferdinand de Lesseps. 

Admired as Le Grand Francais  (The Great Frenchman),  De Lesseps believed that just as the Suez Canal, linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea through the desert of Egypt, had been built at sea-level, so too could the Panama Canal be built at sea level--that is, without the use of locks to raise and lower ships from one elevation to another. 

The problem was that Panama is a country of hills and mountains and gorges, and not a desert like Egypt. Any trans-Isthmus canal route which De Lesseps might design would have to cross the at-times mighty Chagres River. And further complicating DeLesseps’ task was the fact that malaria and yellow fever weakened and killed thousands of his workers. 

Although Le Grand Francais began digging a canal, after nearly two decades of problems -- deaths, injuries, false starts -- his Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique de Panama  ran short of money. A scheme was devised inviting ordinary French people, who adored DeLesseps, to participate in a national lottery to raise the necessary funds. 

Because of his immense popularity, the first installment of the lottery was over-subscribed. But as canal building problems continued to mount, successive lotteries produced less capital. When the company finally had to declare bankruptcy, thousands upon thousands of trusting French citizens were left in financial ruins. 

Edouard Drumont, a newspaper publisher for whom anti-Semitism was a life’s cause, immediately found a way to blame the Jews. He learned that various members of the Chamber of Deputies had received bribes to vote in favor of the lottery bill-- and in his newspaper La Parole Libre, he accused Baron Jacques de Reinach of being the Jewish hand behind the outrage. De Reinach eventually committed suicide under the barrage. 

Not all the money taken out of the Panama Canal company’s account by Baron de Reinach went to bribe politicians. Some went to the mysterious Cornelius Herz, a medical charlatan who offered electrical cures for various diseases and bilked investors in the United States. Fleeing to France after one particularly lucrative con job, he befriended the rich and the powerful. He invested money in Georges Clemenceau’s newspaper, thereby becoming an intimate of the future French prime minister. 

Herz, who was Jewish, left France at the outset of the canal scandal for Great Britain, where he successfully fought extradition on the grounds of health problems. Historian McCollough reports that Herz had been blackmailing de Reinach, but added “what hold Herz had on de Reinach remained obscure, although there were innumerable theories concerning various dark secrets in de Reinach’s past. ...A favorite theory was that de Reinach had committed treason in order to advance himself socially or financially--the sale of state secrets to Italy possibly, or to the British Foreign Office--and that Herz had made it his business to know the details.” 

All these revelations brought down the French government, resulted in the prosecution and conviction of DeLesseps, his son Charles, and investor Alexander Eiffel, and also led in 1893 to a large riotous anti-Semitic rally which foreshadowed French behavior in the so-called “Dreyfus Affair”--in which Capt. Alfred  Dreyfus was convicted of being a German spy in an atmosphere of great  anti-Semitism. 

(The affair was covered by the Hungarian-born journalist Theodor Herzl, who decided the only solution to European anti-Semitism was for Jews to have a home of their own in Palestine.) 

One of the chief engineers on the Panama Canal project was Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who disappointedly returned to France and joined his brother Maurice in publishing Le Matin. 

Bunau-Varilla came to the aid of Dreyfus by obtaining and publishing a copy of a letter that Dreyfus supposedly had written to the German military attache. Next to this letter, Le Matin  displayed a letter which could be verified as having been written by Dreyfus. The letter to the German attache obviously was not the same handwriting. 

(Another journalist, Emile Zola, also exposed the anti-Semitic plot against Dreyfus wih publication of J’accuse. Eventually, Dreyfus was brought back from prison and restored to honor.) 

The United States long had favored building a canal through Nicaragua instead of through Panama, and after the French failure, discussions of an American effort in Nicaragua again heated up. In 1901, Bunau-Varilla made a highly publicized speaking tour of the United States, telling why he believed it would be a far better idea to continue in Panama. Some believed his tour had been financed by former shareholders in DeLesseps’ Compagnie, who wanted some return on their investment. 

Another line of thought was that it was the family of New York banker Jesse Seligman. According to this speculation, Seligman’s pride had been wounded that his bank had lent its name to the Compagnie’s  fundraising efforts in the United States -- and was in the popular mind therefore connected to the scandal that had spread through France. Impressed by Bunau-Varilla’s work in Panama as well as his efforts in behalf of his fellow Jew, Dreyfus, Seligman quietly sponsored the trip. For his part, Bunau-Varilla said he had paid his own tour expenses. 

As the idea of taking over the French concession became more and more popular in the United States, it became less and less popular in Colombia. American insistence that it exercise control over the Panama Canal zone wounded Colombian national pride. The Colombians were willing to let America build the canal but did not want to give up all their rights over the land through which the canal would pass. 

Amid great tension between the countries--would President Theodore Roosevelt decide against Panama and instead choose Nicaragua? Would he attempt to invade Panama? -- Bunau-Varilla  set up shop in Room 1162 of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. There he conferred with Manuel Amador, who had been physician for the Panama Railroad and who now led the political forces in Panama favoring secession. 

(Among the people who accompanied Amador from Panama to New York was Herbert De Sola, a member of Panama’s small Jewish community, who served as his translator on the ship and in New York. While in New York, Amador worked from the offices of Joshua Lindo, son of another Panamanian Jewish family.) 

Subsequently, Bunau-Varilla met at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt. According to Bunau-Varilla’s account of their meeting on Oct. 10, 1903, they started with a discussion of Bunau-Varilla’s part in coming to the aid of Dreyfus. He said he told Roosevelt that Dreyfus was not the only victim in France of political passions--so too was Panama. 

Bunau-Varilla told the President that he believed a revolution in Panama was imminent. He later quoted Roosevelt as responding: “A revolution?  Would it be possible?” 

Apparently, Roosevelt gave no specific assurances that the United States would support such a revolution, but Bunau-Varilla left the office certain that in no event would the United States help Colombia. 

Bunau-Varilla returned to New York, where again in Room 1162 of the Waldorf--sometimes called the “cradle of the Panamian Republic”--the French engineer wrested from Amador a guarantee that he would be named Panama’s minister to the United States for the purpose of negotiating a canal treaty. 

With some underpaid Colombian soldiers who were in cahoots with Amador’s forces and with American naval power standing at the ready, a bloodless coup was staged on Nov. 2, 1903, and the new Panamanian Republic led by Amador as its first president was recognized the following day by the United States. 

Bunau-Varilla subsequently ceded the ten-mile wide Canal Zone to the United States “in perpetuity” -- a grant that was not changed until 1977 when U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian President Omar Torrijos signed the treaty by which the United States would turn the canal over to Panama following a transition period that would end Dec. 31, 1999. 

Explaining why the United States had insisted on sovereignty over the Canal Zone, Teddy Roosevelt said American control would “bring civilization into the waste places of the earth.” 

Oscar Strauss, who later would be appointed by Roosevelt as the first Jewish Secretary of Commerce (and first Jewish Cabinet member) persuaded the President to instead describe the agreement as a “covenant running with the land.” 

To avoid the disaster that befell the French, American health officials under Col. William Gorgas set about eradicating yellow fever and malaria in the Canal Zone through vigorous anti-mosquito and sanitation measures. The health campaign preceded the construction, referred to popularly in the press as “making the dirt fly.”  The American engineers, led by Col. George Washington Goethals, decided to dam the Chagres River and create Lake Gatun 85 feet above sea level. Locks were installed to move the ships between the lake and the two oceans.