History matters: faking Jose Rizal

How forged artifacts and unfounded conspiracy theories became part of Jose Rizal’s story.

Philippine history gave us a score of objects that may later be valuable or even priceless.  Many of these authenticated artifacts are now part of our tangible heritage and found in either private or public museums and libraries. Among these items belong to our national hero, Jose Rizal. Most of them are found in the National Library vault, like the draft manuscripts of his essays, letters, sketches, notebooks, and his two novels, the Noli Me Tangere and the El Filibusterismo.  

Furniture and personal items once owned by members of Rizal’s family is under the care of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) and on display at the Museo ni Jose Rizal in Fort Santiago and his hometown, Calamba.  The National Museum and the Yuchengco Museum in Makati house two of his prayer books.  His remains are in the Rizal Monument at the Rizal Park in Ermita but a piece of his backbone is on display in Fort Santiago while a glass jar containing pieces of what were allegedly his brains are kept in the Archives of the Ateneo de Manila University.  

Yet, even when it seems that everything about Rizal can be accounted for, there are still some Rizal items that were discovered to be fake or erroneously attributed to the national hero. Here are some of them:

1. Sa Aking Mga Kabata—the fake Rizal poem

Generations of students memorize this verse in Rizal’s poem “Sa Aking Mga Kabatà”—“Ang hindì marunong magmahal sa sariling wikà, masahol pa sa hayop at malansang isdâ”—and quote it during the annual Buwan ng Wika. It was said to be Rizal’s earliest poem, written when he was eight years old as a paean to the Tagalog language.

But scholars like Nilo Ocampo, Ambeth Ocampo and National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario had questioned this work as a Rizal poem citing evidence of spellings that didn’t exist in Rizal’s time (the use of the “k” in the Tagalog text) and ideas (like the word “kalayaan”) that Rizal didn’t know about until he was 20 years old. And, unlike Rizal’s other poems, this one didn’t have an original draft. 

Both Almario and Ocampo concluded that the poem may have been the work of two well-known Tagalog writers, Hermenigildo Cruz (who first published it in 1906) or Gabriel Beato Francisco (who allegedly discovered it), who then passed it off as a Rizal work.

2. The Rizal retraction

The story that Jose Rizal retracted his Masonic beliefs as recounted by a Jesuit priest, Fr. Vicente Balaguer. He said he was one of the priests who attended to Rizal prior to his execution on December 30, 1896.  Doubts about this story persisted for almost 30 years until the Archdiocese of Manila Archives discovered the retraction document with Rizal’s alleged signature. 

Since then, historians and Rizal scholars have given their opinion and published books on the document’s authenticity, citing inconsistencies in Balaguer’s timeline and that Rizal’s signature was forged.

In 2019, a journal article by former NHCP chairman Dr. Rene Escalante mentioned that Rizal may have retracted.  Escalante based his findings on an eyewitness report from an archival document in the Cuerpo de Vigilancia (a spy network during the Spanish period).  The document was part of an archive the Philippine government bought from Spain in 1995.  It mentioned that Rizal signed a retraction document.  The report and other documents in the Cuerpo archives, according to some historians, represent “raw data” that requires cross-checking with other sources. 

Until today, the issue of whether Rizal retracted or not and whether the document is a forgery is a subject of continuous debate between historians and Rizal scholars alike.

The retraction document is still being kept in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Manila.

3. The fake (?) execution photograph

In 2001, the late researcher Pio Andrade, Jr. published an article with the Philippine Daily Inquirer with the eye-catching title of “THE RIZAL EXECUTION PICTURE IS A BIG FRAUD!”

Andrade alleged that the Rizal execution photograph was a fake and that it was actually a print from an early Rizal movie that was made in 1912.  Although he was citing “authentic sources,” Andrade only mentioned an article published in 1925 that casts doubt on the Rizal picture.  Some researchers picked up his article and published their own “findings” online.  A known Rizalist also told his university class (that this author attended) that he has “absolute proof” that the photograph was a fake.

Unfortunately, there were several holes in Andrade’s research.  One was that the photograph already existed in a book written by American reporter, Murray Halstead’s “The Story of the Philippines,” that was published in 1898—a decade earlier than what Andrade alleged.

Another was that early 20^th-century film technology simply could not reproduce a photograph from the negatives (which were not celluloid). 

And lastly, a print from an actual negative found by Ortigas Foundation Library executive director John Silva in the United States already existed in the country, and it is now on display in a private collection.  Andrade never mentioned that he saw or even examined it.

When historians invited Andrade to a discussion about his findings, he simply ignored these invitations, refused to debate about it, and continued to talk about the “fraud” until his death around 2020, leaving behind an unfounded conspiracy theory in Philippine history

4. The fake Rizal sketches

Rizal biographies are always part of historical writings. But none had caused quite a controversy as the 1981 book Jose Rizal, Filipino Doctor and Patriot by Jose Baron Fernandez and published by Manuel Morato.  

It was not the text of the book that caused a furor but its photo section.  It contained sketches allegedly by Jose Rizal that were bought and owned by Morato.  The drawings’ authenticity was questioned in 1982, but the art world was silent about it.  A magazine article doubting if these were real Rizal sketches was published by historian Ambeth Ocampo in 1985, also went unnoticed.

It was only in 1990, when Ocampo published another article in the newspaper Daily Globe that the controversy erupted, with Morato accusing the former of his “flawed writings” on Jose Rizal.  Morato insisted that these were real Rizal drawings and even mentioned the sources where the sketches came from and who “authenticated” them.  However, through meticulous cross-checking and further research, Ocampo established that the drawings were replicas of photographs.  Two of the sketches, in fact, came from pictures that were taken at the time Rizal was already dead. 

(This writer, in fact, had two encounters with the so-called “Rizal sketches” in the 1990s. The first was when a conservator showed a sketch with a Rizal signature and asked my opinion about it.  When I saw it, I immediately told her that it was one of those fake Rizal sketches.  The conservator, in fact, noted some man-made “damage” that was done on the artwork to make it look authentic.  The second instance occurred when I saw another fake Rizal sketch on display at a university archive, which prompted me to call the attention of the archivist.  The archivist informed me that he had already suspected the artwork was fake because the caption about the school was incorrect.)

Unfortunately, this controversy is open-ended.  Morato died in 2021, and there is no news currently about his art collection from his estate.  Ocampo reprinted the Daily Globe debate in 2025 edition of Rizal with the Overcoat and ended this section with a postscript “While the exchange could have continued indefinitely and delighted readers watching the catfight, it needed closure, so I decided to end with one sentence: “As Gustave Flaubert said, “By railing at idiots, we run the risk of becoming idiots ourselves.”

 

 

But scholars like Nilo Ocampo, Ambeth Ocampo and National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario had questioned this work as a Rizal poem citing evidence of spellings that didn’t exist in Rizal’s time (the use of the “k” in the Tagalog text) and ideas (like the word “kalayaan”) that Rizal didn’t know about until he was 20 years old.

 

 

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