Jos Rizal

Jos Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda (June 19, 1861 December 30, 1896) was
a Filipino nationalist, novelist, poet, ophthalmologist, journalist, and revolutionary. He is widely
considered as one of the greatest heroes of the Philippines. He was the author of Noli Me
Tngere, El Filibusterismo, and a number of poems and essays. He was executed on December
30, 1896 by a squad of Filipino soldiers of the Spanish Army.

Early Life
Jose Rizal was born to the wealthy Mercado-Rizal family in Calamba, Laguna of the Philippines.
The Mercado-Rizals were considered one of the most prestigious Filipino families during their
time. Jose Rizal came from the 13-member family consisting of his parents, Francisco Mercado
II and Teodora Alonso Realonda, and nine sisters and one brother. His parents were
leaseholders of a hacienda and an accompanying rice farm by the Dominicans.
From an early age, Jose Rizal Mercado showed a precocious intellect. He learned the alphabet
from his mother at 3, and could read and write at age 5.

Upon enrolling at the Ateneo
Municipal de Manila, Jos dropped the last three names that make up his full name, on the
advice of his brother, Paciano Rizal, and the Mercado-Rizal family, thus rendering his name as
"Jos Protasio Rizal". Of this, Rizal writes: "My family never paid much attention [to our second
surname Rizal], but now I had to use it, thus giving me the appearance of an illegitimate child!
This was to enable him to travel freely and disassociate him from his brother, who had gained
notoriety with his earlier links to Gomburza. From early childhood, Jos and Paciano were
already advancing unheard-of political ideas of freedom and individual rights which infuriated
the authorities.

Despite the name change, Jos, as "Rizal" soon distinguished himself in poetry
writing contests, impressing his professors with his facility with Castilian and other foreign
languages, and later, in writing essays that were critical of the Spanish historical accounts of the
pre-colonial Philippine societies. Indeed, by 1891, the year he finished his El filibusterismo, this
second surname had become so well known that, as he writes to another friend, "All my family
now carry the name Rizal instead of Mercado because the name Rizal means persecution!
Good! I too want to join them and be worthy of this family name...

Education
Rizal first studied under Justiniano Aquino Cruz in Bian, Laguna before he was sent to Manila.
As to his father's request, he took the entrance examination in Colegio de San Juan de
Letran and studied there for almost three months. He then enrolled at the Ateneo Municipal de
Manila and graduated as one of the nine students in his class declared sobresaliente or
outstanding. He continued his education at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila to obtain a land
surveyor and assessor's degree and at the same time at the University of Santo Tomas where
he did take up a preparatory course in law. Upon learning that his mother was going blind, he
decided to switch to medicine at the medical school of Santo Tomas specializing later
in ophthalmology.
Without his parents' knowledge and consent, but secretly supported by his brother Paciano, he
traveled alone to Madrid, Spain in May 1882 and studied medicine at the Universidad Central
de Madrid where he earned the degree, Licentiate in Medicine. Also, he also attended medical
lectures at the University of Parisand the University of Heidelberg. 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 an
address in German in April 1887 before the Anthropological Society on the orthography and
structure of the Tagalog language. 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 and the unification
of common values between East and West.
Rizal was a polymath, skilled in both science and the arts. He painted, sketched, and made
sculptures and woodcarving. He was a prolific poet, essayist, and novelist whose most famous
works were his two novels, Noli Me Tngere and its sequel, El filibusterismo. These social
commentaries during the Spanish colonization of the country formed the nucleus of literature
that inspired peaceful reformists and armed revolutionaries alike. Rizal was also a polyglot,
conversant in twenty-two languages.

Return to Philippines (1892-1896)
Exile in Dapitan
Upon his return to Manila in 1892, he formed a civic movement called La Liga Filipina. The
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 the publication of his novel.
Rizal was implicated in the activities of the nascent rebellion and in July 1892, was deported
to Dapitan in the province of Zamboanga, a peninsula of Mindanao. There he built a school, a
hospital and a water supply system, and taught and engaged in farming and horticulture.

Abaca, then the vital raw material for cordage and which Rizal and his students planted in the
thousands, was a memorial.
The boys' school, which taught in Spanish, and included English as a foreign language
(considered a prescient if unusual option then) was conceived by Rizal and
antedated Gordonstoun with its aims of inculcating resourcefulness and self-sufficiency in
young men. They would later enjoy successful lives as farmers and honest government
officials. One, a Muslim, became a datu, and another, Jos Aseniero, who was with Rizal
throughout the life of the school, became Governor of Zamboanga.
His best friend, Professor Ferdinand Blumentritt, kept him in touch with European friends and
fellow-scientists who wrote a stream of letters which arrived in Dutch, French, German and
English and which baffled the censors, 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. He condemned the uprising, although all the members of the Katipunan had
made him their honorary president and had used his name as a cry for war, unity, and liberty.
He is known to making the resolution of bearing personal sacrifice instead of the incoming
revolution, believing that a peaceful stand is the best way to avoid further suffering in the
country and loss of Filipino lives. In Rizal's own words, "I consider myself happy for being able to
suffer a little for a cause which I believe to be sacred. I believe further that in any undertaking,
the more one suffers for it, the surer its success. If this be fanaticism may God pardon me, but
my poor judgment does not see it as such."
Arrest and trial
By 1896, the rebellion fomented by the Katipunan, a militant secret society, had become a full-
blown revolution, proving to be a nationwide uprising. Rizal had earlier volunteered his services
as a doctor in Cuba and was given leave by Governor-General Ramn Blanco to serve in Cuba to
minister to victims of yellow fever. Rizal and Josephine left Dapitan on August 1, 1896 with
letter of recommendation from Blanco.
Rizal was arrested en route to Cuba via Spain and was imprisoned in Barcelona on October 6,
1896. He was sent back the same day to Manila to stand trial as he was implicated in the
revolution through his association with members of the Katipunan. During the entire passage,
he was unchained; no Spaniard laid a hand on him, and had many opportunities to escape but
refused to do so.
While imprisoned in Fort Santiago, he issued a manifesto disavowing the current revolution in
its present state and declaring that the education of Filipinos and their achievement of a
national identity were prerequisites to freedom.
Rizal was tried before a court-martial for rebellion, sedition, and conspiracy, was convicted on
all three charges, and sentenced to death. Blanco, who was sympathetic to Rizal, had been
forced out of office. The friars, led by then Archbishop of Manila Bernardino Nozaleda, had
'intercalated' Camilo de Polavieja in his stead, as the new Spanish Governor-General of the
Philippines after pressuring Queen-Regent Maria Cristina of Spain, thus sealing Rizal's fate.

Execution
Moments before his execution on December 30, 1896 by a squad of Filipino soldiers of the
Spanish Army, a backup force of regular Spanish Army troops stood ready to shoot the
executioners should they fail to obey orders.
[38]
The Spanish Army Surgeon General requested
to take his pulse: it was normal. Aware of this the Sergeant commanding the backup force
hushed his men to silence when they began raising "vivas" with the highly partisan crowd of
Peninsular and Mestizo Spaniards. His last words were those of Jesus Christ: "consummatum
est",--it is finished.
His undated poem, Mi ltimo adis believed to be written a few days before his execution, was
hidden in an alcohol stove, which was later handed to his family with his few remaining
possessions, including the final letters and his last bequests. During their visit, Rizal reminded
his sisters in English, "There is something inside it", referring to the alcohol stove given by the
Pardo de Taveras which was to be returned after his execution, thereby emphasizing the
importance of the poem. This instruction was followed by another, "Look in my shoes", in which
another item was secreted. Exhumation of his remains in August 1898, under American rule,
revealed he had been uncoffined, his burial not on sanctified ground granted the 'confessed'
faithful, and whatever was in his shoes had disintegrated.
[19]

In his letter to his family he wrote: "Treat our aged parents as you would wish to be
treated...Love them greatly in memory of me...December 30, 1896.

" He gave his family
instructions for his burial: "Bury me in the ground. Place a stone and a cross over it. My name,
the date of my birth and of my death. Nothing more. If later you wish to surround my grave with
a fence, you can do it. No anniversaries."
In his final letter, to Blumentritt Tomorrow at 7, I shall be shot; but I am innocent of the crime
of rebellion. I am going to die with a tranquil conscience. Rizal is believed to be the first Filipino
revolutionary whose death is attributed entirely to his work as a writer; and through dissent
and civil disobedience enabled him to successfully destroy Spain's moral primacy to rule. He
also bequeathed a book personally bound by him in Dapitan to his 'best and dearest friend.'
When Blumentritt received it in his hometown Litomice(Leitmeritz) he broke down and wept.
Works and writings
Rizal wrote mostly in Spanish, the then lingua franca of scholars, though some of his letters (for
example Sa Mga Kababaihang Taga Malolos) were written in Tagalog. His works have since
been translated into a number of languages including Tagalog and English.
Novels and essays
Noli Me Tngere, novel, 1887 (literally Latin for 'touch me not', from John 20:17)
El Filibusterismo, (novel, 1891), sequel to Noli Me Tngere
Mi Ultimo Adios, poem, 1896 (literally "My Last Farewell" )
Alin Mang Lahi (Whateer the Race), a Kundiman attributed to Dr. Jos Rizal The Friars
and the Filipinos (Unfinished)
Toast to Juan Luna and Felix Hidalgo (Speech, 1884), given at Restaurante Ingles, Madrid
The Diaries of Jos Rizal
Rizal's Letters is a compendium of Dr. Jose Rizal's letters to his family members, Blumentritt,
Fr. Pablo Pastells and other reformers
"Come se gobiernan las Filipinas" (Governing the Philippine islands)
Filipinas dentro de cien aos essay, 1889-90 (The Philippines a Century Hence)
La Indolencia de los Filipinos, essay, 1890 (The indolence of Filipinos)
Makamisa unfinished novel
Sa Mga Kababaihang Taga Malolos, essay, 1889, To the Young Women of Malolos
Annotations to Antonio de Moragas, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (essay, 1889, Events in the
Philippine Islands)
Poetry
A La Juventud Filipina
El Canto Del Viajero
Briayle Crismarl
Canto Del Viajero
Canto de Mara Clara
Dalit sa Paggawa
Felictacin
Kundiman (Tagalog)
Me Piden Versos
Mi primera inspiracion
Mi Retiro
Mi Ultimo Adis
Por La Educacin (Recibe Lustre La Patria)
Sa Sanggol na si Jesus
To My Muse (A Mi Musa)
Un Recuerdo A Mi Pueblo
A Man in Dapitan
Plays
El Consejo de los Dioses (The council of Gods)
Junto Al Pasig (Along the Pasig)
San Euistaquio, Mrtyr (Saint Eustache, the martyr)

Born Jos Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda
June 19, 1861
Calamba City, Laguna
Died December 30, 1896 (aged 35)
Bagumbayan, Manila
Cause of
death
Execution by firing squad
Monuments Rizal Park, Manila
Calamba, Laguna
Daet, Camarines Norte
Other names Pepe
Alma mater Ateneo Municipal de Manila,
University of Santo Tomas,
Universidad Central de Madrid
Organization La Solidaridad, La Liga Filipina
Spouse(s) Josephine Bracken (1896)
Children Francsco Rizal y Bracken (who died after birth)
Parents Francisco Rizal Mercado (father)
Teodora Alonso (mother)