As demonstrated by Yoav Shamir, in True Stories: Defamation, a 2010 documentary aired by Channel 4, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tends to exaggerate or even fabricate the threat of anti-Semitism, with the purpose of generating support for Israel.[1] Foxman, the ADL’s head from 1987 to 2015, had a very close relationship with the Israeli government, and is sought after by Washington and governments and political leaders around the world. To Yoav Shamir, he explained his power and influence as exploiting the “fine line” of anti-Semitism. Jews, he explains, referring to the false notions put forward in the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, “are not as powerful as Jews think we are, nor as powerful as our enemies think we are. Somewheres [sic] in between. They do believe we can make a difference in Washington, and we are not going to convince them otherwise.” Foxman asks, “How do you fight this conspiratorial view of Jews without using it?” Yoav Shamir interprets Foxman’s explanation to mean, “It’s like a poker game, in which Foxman bluffs the other side into thinking the Jews have more influence and power in Washington than they really have. The downside is, that the idea of Jews being so powerful can result in envy, even hate.”[2]
Zionism depends on anti-Semitism. It’s its raison d’être. Where ant-Semitism doesn’t exist, it must be created. Contrary to popular assumptions, Zionism is not a religious movement. Zionist aspirations began to coalesce in the early part of the nineteenth century in a movement known as the Haskalah, which was influenced by the European Enlightenment, and growing tendencies that began to view cultural groups as nations, analogous to the German idea of volk, meaning “people” or “race.” But, early Zionists met with opposition from, either Jews who had assimilated into European societies, or on religious grounds, from the traditionally-minded rabbinical courts. Without a meaningful religious argument, the Zionists’ only recourse was to highlight the need to escape anti-Semitism. As they are not open to rational dialogue with a people they deem inferior, Zionists have resorted publicly to appeals to pity, and behind the scenes to coercion, even brazenly exploiting to their advantage the canard of “Jewish power.”
The pivotal moment in the history of the Zionist movement was when all its efforts were finally fulfilled on November 19, 1917, in the Balfour Declaration, when the British Zionist Federation was offered the land of Palestine for settlement. The Zionist Federation was established with the help of Moses Gaster (1856 – 1939) a central figure of the Hovevei Zion movement in Romania, and later Hakham, or Chief Rabbi, of the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. The founding of the Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in the United Kingdom in continuous use, is linked to the mission of Menasseh ben Israel (1604 – 1657), leader of the Jewish community of Amsterdam, whose Rosicrucian followers were closely linked with the movement of the false-prophet Shabbetai Zevi (1626 – 1676), who, inspired by the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria (1534 – 1572), declared himself messiah in 1666. His followers then established the Bevis Marks synagogue in London, which was connected with the Royal Society, who ultimately founded Freemasonry and the Illuminati, laying the groundwork for the Occult Revival of the eighteenth century, which produced secret societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which, paradoxically, ultimately influenced the rise of the racist beliefs that inspired the Nazis.
The same network was also responsible for the production of the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, outlining a Judeo-Masonic plot for world domination, that served, as Norman Cohn referred to them, as the Nazis’ “warrant for genocide.” The attraction of The Protocols of Zion is that they provide an easy answer for those who accurately perceive that global politics often operate according to objectives hidden from the public. Hollywood, where Jews hold a predominant place, produces an endless array of titillation that not only distracts from more important responsibilities, but, to use the cliché, corrupts morals. American wars are clearly not fought for the protection of “democracy,” but rather often by proxy to serve Israeli foreign policy objectives. The educational system encourages regurgitation of the same tired narratives. The news media, despite pretending to be “free,” act in unison to disguise the real motives, often under enormous pressure from the influential “Zionist lobby,” using the threat of public humiliation to intimidate critics into submission. And, ultimately, if these are involved in criticism of Israel, they are accused of “anti-Semitism.” How else to explain what appears to be a coordinated effort, than to cry “it’s the Jews!” The astonishing truth is that it appears to be part of a plot by Zionists to give exactly that impression, so as to not only provide the opportunity to denounce any who expose their nefarious deeds as “anti-Semites,” but even more deviously, to create the impression of rampant hatred of the Jewish people, which provides the necessary worldwide sympathy for support of their cause.
Curiously, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), founded in 1913 by the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, is also linked to the history of the forgery of The Protocols. The B’nai B’rith (“Children of the Covenant”) was founded as a secret lodge by a group of twelve Jewish immigrants from Germany and Freemasons in 1843.”[3] The B’nai B’rith is the American arm of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in France in 1860, by five French Jews and Adolphe Crémieux (1796 – 1880), Grand Master of the Masonic Rite of Misraïm and Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of France, responsible for managing the high degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite within the Grand Orient of France.
According to his biographer Peter Grose, Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, who was in Constantinople at the time, discovered “the source” of the forgery which he then provided to The Times, owned by a member of the Round Table.[4] In the first article of Peter Graves’ series, titled “A Literary Forgery,” the editors of The Times claimed to have proven that the Protocols were plagiarized from the work of Maurice Joly (1829 – 1878), The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. What was not reported, however, was that Joly, also a Jew, was a protégé of Crémieux and also a member of Rite of Misraïm.[5] In 1884, according to Victor Marsden, who produced the first English translation, a woman named Yuliana Glinka, a disciple of the occultists H.P. Blavatsky, who inspired the strange racial theories of the Nazis, hired Joseph Schorst-Shapiro, a member of Joly’s Misraïm Lodge, to obtain sensitive information, and purchased from him a copy of the Protocols, and subsequently gave them to a friend who passed them on to Sergei Nilus, who first published them in 1905, as reportedly the product of a secret meeting of leaders at the First Zionist Congress, the inaugural congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), held in Basel on August 29–31, 1897, and convened by Herzl.[6]
As stated by Herzl in his diaries, “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”[7] In 1912, Chaim Weizmann (1874 – 1952)—the author of the Balfour Declaration who served as president of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and who would become the first president of Israel—told a Berlin audience that “each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews.”[8] In his discussion with Balfour in 1914, Weizmann added that “we too are in agreement with the cultural anti-Semites, in so far as we believed that Germans of the Mosaic faith are an undesirable, demoralizing phenomena.”[9]
As pointed out by Edwin Black, in The Transfer Agreement, the Sabbatean Rabbi Stephen Wise himself struggled with the choice of opposing the Nazis and support Jewish settlement in Palestine. On September 6, 1933, Wise said in a speech two days before the Second World Jewish Conference:
Once again the Jewish people seems called upon to play a great role in history, perhaps the greatest role in all the ages of its tragic history. Once again the Jewish people are called upon to suffer, for we are the suffering servants of humanity. We are called upon to suffer that humanity and civilization may survive and may endure. We have suffered before. We are the eternal suffering servants of God, of that world history which is world judgment.
We do not rebel against the tragic role we must play if only the nations of the earth may achieve some gain, may profit as a result of our sufferings, and may realize in time the enormity of the danger they face in that common enemy of mankind which has no other aim than to conquer and destroy. We are ready if only the precious and the beautiful things of life may survive. This is once again the mission of the Jews.[10]
In 1933, when the Jewish War Veterans began to plan a boycott of German goods, Samuel Untermyer, the famous Jewish American lawyer, picked up the idea and began to attempt to transform it into an international Jewish plan. The movement gained momentum and by 1935, large department stores and labor unions had joined in. However, Morris Waldman, executive secretary to the American Jewish Committee (AJC), labeled the boycott as “futile [and] possibly dangerous.” Waldman believed the collaboration against Hitler would confirm the anti-Semitic notions of Jewish power in the world. Additionally, it was believed that a ban on German goods would do more bad than good for America, as Germany was a net importer of America. If Germany were to counter and ban US goods within their borders, it would be worse for the US than for Germany.[11]
Weizmann reported to the Zionist Congress
of 1937 on his testimony before the Peel Commission, a British Royal Commission
of Inquiry, appointed in 1936 to investigate the causes of unrest in Mandatory
Palestine, which was administered by Great Britain:
The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are
centered on emigration. I was asked: “Can you bring six million Jews to
Palestine?” I replied, “No.” …From
the depths of the tragedy I want to save…
young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate
or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world… Only
the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it.[12]
The problems of the Evian conference in July 1938, at which representatives from thirty-two nations had addressed the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria, were exacerbated by disunity among the twenty-one private Jewish delegations attending, which the weekly Congress Bulletin of the American Jewish Congress described as a ‘‘spectacle of Jewish discord and disruption.’’[13] American policy had received much negative attention and criticism from it severely limited quota of refugees admitted to the country. In 1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise had written a letter in which he opposed any change in US immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge: “It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference. It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws.”[14] American representatives at the conference refused to take any substantial number of Jews suffering under the Nazis or unwanted by Romania and Poland. Other nations followed suit. The Soviet Union refused to accept refugees and a year later ordered its border guards to treat all refugees attempting to cross into Soviet territory as spies.[15]
Religious and political differences between Reform, Orthodox, Zionist and anti-Zionists left many American Jewish groups conflicted as to how best to assist persecuted Jews. Some of the Jewish leaders, especially those of German background in the United States and Great Britain, deliberately avoided an open stance against Jewish persecution out of “fear of stirring up an anti-Semitic backlash” within Germany and preferred to negotiate out of the limelight.[16] Golda Meir, the attendee from British Mandate Palestine, was not permitted to speak or to participate in the proceedings except as an observer.
Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion (1886 – 1973) of the Jewish Agency were both firmly opposed to Jews being allowed entry into Western countries, hoping that the pressure of hundreds of thousands of refugees having nowhere to go would force Britain to open Palestine to Jewish immigration.[17] WZO president Weizmann believed that behind the scenes action, performed “privately and separately” with the various delegations in their respective capitals, would more likely lead to positive results. The exclusion of Palestine from the agenda convinced him as well that he would not be granted a “serious hearing,” and would therefore be “a waste of time.”[18] Concerned that Jewish organizations would be seen trying to promote greater immigration into the United States, the AJC’s Morris Waldman acted again, and privately warned against Jewish representatives highlighting the problems Jewish refugees faced.[19] Samuel Rosenman sent President Franklin D. Roosevelt a memorandum stating that an “increase of quotas is wholly inadvisable as it would merely produce a ‘Jewish problem’ in the countries increasing the quota.”[20] Abba Hillel Silver of the United Jewish Appeal said he saw “no particular good” in what the conference was trying to achieve.[21]
The failure of the conference meant that many Jews had no escape and would ultimately become victims of Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Two months after Evian, Britain and France granted Hitler the right to occupy the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. In November, on Kristallnacht, a massive pogrom across the Third Reich was accompanied by the destruction of over 1,000 synagogues, massacres and the mass arrests of tens of thousands of Jews. In March 1939, Hitler occupied more of Czechoslovakia, causing a further 180,000 Jews to fall under Axis control, while in May 1939 the British issued the White Paper which barred Jews from entering Palestine or buying land there.
Before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, there was one twelve-month period shortly when more Jews decided to leave Palestine than decided to immigrate to it.[22] By 1938, some 450,000 of about 900,000 German Jews were expelled or fled Germany, mostly to France and British Mandate Palestine, where the large wave of migrants led to an Arab uprising.[23] In 1939, in response, the British Government, led by Neville Chamberlain, issued the White Paper, which paper called for the establishment of a Jewish national home in an independent Palestinian state within ten years, rejecting the Peel Commission’s idea of partitioning Palestine. However, it also limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 for five years and ruled that further immigration would then be determined by the Arab majority. After he pleaded in vain at a conference in London in January 1939, Ben-Gurion returned to Palestine convinced that Britain would now never agree to a Jewish majority in Palestine. Immediately after his return he told a secret meeting of Labor Zionists: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.
If we can, for a moment, attempt to avoid the fear of the often unfair label of “anti-Semitism,” we will be able admit what are otherwise well-documented realities, that so many recent events have been on behalf of Israel. Like the invasions of Iraq, or the Iran-Contra Operation. More controversial, but no less refutable, has been the role of Zionists in the creation of the United Nations, the first steppingstone to the infamous “New World Order,” and before that, to the machinations that led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which permitted Britain to offer the land of Palestine to Lord Rothschild in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. But how much further can we trace these efforts? To the birth of Zionism with Theodor Herzl? To the beginnings of the debate about the so-called “Jewish Question” during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century? Is there any validity to Zionist cooperation with the dreaded “Illuminati”? Or could this plotting date to still farther back? Back to the destruction of the beloved Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD? Or by the Babylonians in 587 BC?
Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, in The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft, has proposed that Zionism is a heresy of Judaism. In “The Biblical Bases of Zionist Colonialism,” Hassan S. Haddad, points out: “Zionists who are not religious, in the sense of following the ritual practices of Judaism, are still biblical in their basic convictions in, and practical application of the ancient particularism of the Torah and the other books of the Old Testament. They are biblical in putting their national goals on a level that goes beyond historical, humanistic or moral considerations…” He summarizes their goals as follows:
1. The Jews are a separate and exclusive people chosen by God to fulfil a destiny. The Jews of the twentieth century have inherited the covenant of divine election and historical destiny from the Hebrew tribes that existed more than 3000 years ago. 2. The covenant included a definite ownership of the Land of Canaan (Palestine) as patrimony of the Israelites and their descendants forever. By no name, and under no other conditions, can any other people lay a rightful claim to that land. 3. The occupation and settlement of this land is a duty placed collectively on the Jews to establish a state for the Jews.[24]
Ever since the Crusaders established the Kingdom of Jerusalem, following their conquest of the city in 1099, and until the kingdom was finally defeated by the Muslims at the Battle of Acre in 1291, a multitude of European monarchs have used the title of King of Jerusalem, among them Otto von Habsburg (1912 – 2011), who was appropriated by the Priory of Sion mythos. Although otherwise unreliable, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail borrowed from the research of Arthur Zuckerman, who proposed that the perceived basis of the legend of the Holy Grail was the purported descent of these families from Guillaume of Gellone (c. 755 – 812 or 814), who, based on his interpretation of the twelfth-century text, the Sefer ha-Kabbalah, was the son of Makhir, an Exilarch, the exiled leader of the Jewish community of Babylon, who could claim descent from King David.
These elements are found in the 1982 best-seller, Holy Blood, Holy Grail—which was largely plagiarized by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code—whose authors claimed that the Protocols of Zion did not refer to a “Jewish” conspiracy, but to the global aspirations and plotting of a purported “Priory of Sion,” supposedly founded in 1099, which was dedicated to preserving the secret of the Grail, and aiming to establish a New World Order governed by the Great Monarch, prophesied by Nostradamus. According to the story that was concocted, the Priory of Sion were protectors of a holy bloodline of Merovingian kings who were descended from Jesus who secretly married Mary Magdalene. Borrowing from the Masonic legends of Memphis-Misraïm, the legend of the Priory of Sion associates its founding with the followers of Ormus, who moved to territory in France owned by Godfrey de Bouillon (1060 – 1100), the first Grand Master of the Prieuré de Sion. It is also said to have created the Knights Templar as its military arm and financial branch. Discernible through their red hair, the secrets of the bloodline were cryptically referred to in Mary Magdalene being depicted with red hair in Da Vinci’s Last Supper, and survived among the Sinclairs of Rosslyn and the Stuarts. The legendary Holy Grail is therefore the womb of Mary Magdalene, and the Cathars and the Knights Templars the guardians of her lineage and the “true” Christianity, which the Catholic Church tried to suppress. According to Brown, the family have preserved rites of ritual sex magic over the centuries, which purportedly represent the true teachings of Jesus, but which have been mistakenly equated by the Catholic Church with the worship of Satan.
All fantasy? Part truth? As shown by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, in The Sion Revelation, this scenario was invented by participants in an occult tradition known as Synarchism, developed in the late nineteenth century. As revealed in several volumes of Ordo ab Chao, Synarchism exercised a formative influence on the twentieth century, particularly through its association with Nazism. Paradoxically, both Synarchism and Nazism, as well as the related doctrines of Theosophy, are all based on the mystical teachings of the Jewish Kabbalah. Simultaneously, the Kabbalah is also the origin of Zionism.
The great irony is that the most anti-Semitic literature in history is the Holy Bible. The entire story from the Exodus to the Babylonian Captivity is one of repeated and harsh criticism of the Jews for their rebelliousness in failing to uphold the Ten Commandments, and worshipping the pagan gods of foreign nations. In particular, they were guilty of appropriating the worship of the Canaanite gods Baal, equated with the Sun, and his sister-spouse Astarte, equated with Venus. Most astoundingly, it is in the Bible that we find the first accusations of “blood libel,” where Jews were described as passing their children “through the fire of Moloch,” a reference to child sacrifice. This is despite the fact that the Jews were God’s “Chosen People.” At any point in time, however, they could return to God’s favor if they only abided by his commandments. Criticism was not a condemnation, but an appeal to reform. Psalm 78:10-11, 40-42, 56-57, mentions that Ephraim, meaning Israel at large:
…did not keep the covenant of God; they
refused to walk in His law, and forgot His works and His wonders that He had
shown them… How often they provoked Him in the wilderness, and grieved Him in
the desert! Yes, again and again they tempted God, and limited the Holy One of
Israel. They did not remember His power… Yet they tested and provoked the Most High God, and did not keep His testimonies, but turned
back and acted unfaithfully like their fathers.
Finally, in 597 BC, the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah, destroyed the Temple of Solomon, and carried the population into captivity in the city of Babylon, during which time an interpretation of Judaism known as Kabbalah was developed, whose practitioners were mistakenly identified with the Babylonian Magi. As Franz Cumont and Joseph Bidez have demonstrated in Les Mages Hellénisés (“The Hellenized Magi”), these so-called Magi were not priests of the Persian religion of orthodox Zoroastrianism, as has been falsely presumed, but rather of a daeva or demon-worshipping heretical version of it, influenced by the astrology, magic and numerology. As explained in The Dying God: The History of Western Civilization, these “Magi” had apostatized from Judaism, retaining a distorted interpretation of the Jews as “Chosen” people, but adapting a Gnostic interpretation of the worship of Baal, whose Persian equivalent was Mithras. As explained in the Quran, these ideas have their origin in a group of Jews during the Captivity who rejected Judaism to learn magic, which was falsely attributed to King Solomon:
When a messenger was sent to them [the Jews] by God confirming the revelations they had already received some of them turned their backs as if they had no knowledge of it. They followed what the shayateen [satans or satanists] attributed to the reign of Solomon. But Solomon did not blaspheme, it was the shayateen who blasphemed, teaching men magic and such things as were revealed at Babylon to the angels Harut and Marut. But neither of these taught anyone (such things) without saying; “we are a trial, so do not blaspheme.” They learned from them the means to sow discord between man and wife [love magic]. But they could not harm anyone except by God’ s permission. And they learned what harmed them, not what benefited them. And they knew that the purchasers [of magic] would have no share in the happiness of the hereafter. And vile was the price for which they sold their souls, if they but knew. [2:102]
Then, in 539 BC, the Jews benefitted from the religious tolerance of the Persian Empire, when Cyrus the Great in turn conquered Babylon, and allowed the Jews to return to the Promised Land and rebuild their temple, this time referred to as the Second Temple. As explained in The Dying God: The History of Western Civilization, the Magi followed the spread of the Jews not only back to Palestine, but to Greece, where they contributed to the rise of Greek philosophy, particularly Pythagoras and Plato, and to Egypt, giving rise of Hermeticism, falsely attributed to a legendary ancient sage named Hermes Trismegistus. With the conquests of the Romans, these new trends converged in the city of Alexandria, known to scholars as the “Age of Syncretism,.” Neoplatonism, derived from the thought of Plato, became the theology of the Ancient Mysteries, particularly the Mysteries of Mithras, a cult developed by a confluence of the families of the Julio-Claudian dynasty of Roman Emperors, the House of Herod, the House of Commagene in Turkey, and the Priest-Kings of Emesa in Syria. Hermeticism was the “practical” branch of mysticism, giving birth to alchemy.
What all these early occult traditions shared in common was a theology which reversed the interpretation of the Bible, such that God became an oppressor who imposed unnatural laws on humans, while the Devil was their liberator, leading them to the Tree of Knowledge, the knowledge of magic. In its Christian variety, this cult was known as Gnosticism. As outlined by Gershom Scholem, who founded the modern study of the subject, the Kabbalah refers to a set of doctrines that emerged in the last half of the twelfth century, but which had their origin in what he called “Jewish Gnosticism,” with origins among the Essenes, a mystical Jewish sect of the Second Temple period that flourished from the second century BC to the first century AD, and known as the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is with the Essenes, explained Scholem, that are found the first example of a mystical tradition called Merkabah Mysticism, around mystical interpretation of the Chariot vision of Ezekiel and the Temple vision of Isaiah.
A group related to the Essenes were the Therepeutae in Alexandria, mentioned by the Jewish historian Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE). Their existence provided later occultists to propose that through them the tradition of the Essenes had survived in the West, when disciples of Hermeticism joined the sect and then centuries later transmitted these teachings to the famous Knights Templar. The approximate details of that history were shared by Albert Pike (1809 – 1891), Civil War General and Grand Master of the Southern Jurisdiction of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, in his Morals and Dogma, long considered the “bible” of Freemasonry, providing an explanation of the origins of occult history with a level of precision and detail not seen among mainstream scholars:
The Occult Science of the Ancient Magi was concealed under the shadows of the Ancient Mysteries: it was imperfectly revealed or rather disfigured by the Gnostics: it is guessed at under the obscurities that cover the pretended crimes of the Templars; and it is found enveloped in enigmas that seem impenetrable, in the Rites of the Highest Masonry.
Magism was the Science of Abraham and Orpheus, of Confucius and Zoroaster. It was the dogmas of this Science that were engraven on the tables of stone by Enoch and Trismegistus. Moses purified and re-veiled them, for that is the meaning of the word reveal. He covered them with a new veil, when he made of the Holy Kabbalah the exclusive heritage of the people of Israel, and the inviolable Secret of its priests. The Mysteries of Thebes and Eleusis preserved among the nations some symbols of it, already altered, and the mysterious key whereof was lost among the instruments of an ever-growing superstition. Jerusalem, the murderess of her prophets, and so often prostituted to the false gods of the Syrians and Babylonians, had at length in its turn lost the Holy Word, when a Prophet announced by the Magi by the consecrated Star of Initiation [Sirius], came to rend asunder the worn veil of the old Temple, in order to give the Church a new tissue of legends and symbols, that still and ever conceal from the Profane, and ever preserves to the Elect the same truths.
According to Pike, the Templars were students of a group of “Johannite Christians,” who revered the author of the Book of Revelation, a reference to the Mandaean sect of Iraq.[25] The religion of Manichaeism was also a source of influence for the sect of the Mandeans, often equated with the Sabians.[26] The sect of the Mandeans, often equated with the Sabians, was influenced by the religion of Manichaeism, Persian prophet Mani (216 – 274 AD). According to the Cologne Mani-Codex, Mani’s parents were members of the Jewish-Christian Gnostic sect known as the Elcesaites.[27] His teachings were a fusion of Gnostic Christianity with aspects of earlier Zoroastrian and Mithraic traditions, purporting that the creator god was evil, and offered salvation through gnosis. Manichaeism thrived between the third and seventh centuries AD, and at its height was one of the most widespread religions in the world. Manichaean churches and scriptures existed as far east as China and as far west as the Roman Empire. It was briefly the main rival to Christianity before the spread of Islam.
The Mandaeans are often considered to be the same as, or related to, the Sabians of Harran, in Turkey.[28] The Sabians identified themselves deceptively to the Muslim authorities with the “Sabeans” of the Quran, to gain the protection of the Islamic state as “People of the Book.” In reality, the Sabians inherited the traditions of similar Jewish-Gnostic sects, and transmitted the traditions of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism to the Islamic world. They worshipped the planets, and were reputed to sacrifice a child, whose flesh was boiled and made into cakes, which were then eaten by a certain class of worshippers.[29]
The influence of the Sabians exerted itself on a mystical group within the Ismaili sect of Shiah Islam known as the Brethren of Sincerity. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the Shia sect was founded by a Yemeni Jew named Abdallah ibn Saba who embraced Islam. It was an alleged member of the Brethren of Sincerity, Abdullah ibn Maymun, who several biographies claim to have been Jewish, who succeeded in capturing the leadership of the Ismaili movement in about 872 AD.[30] The Brethren of Sincerity significantly influenced the rise of Sufism, but most importantly, of the terrorist sect of the Assassins, led by Hasan-i Sabbah (c. 1050 – 1124), also famously known as the “Old Man of the Mountain,” who according to Masonic legend, transmitted their occult learning to the Templars. In The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche wrote:
When the Christian crusaders in the Orient came across that invincible order of Assassins – that order of free spirits par excellence whose lowest order received, through some channel or other, a hint about that symbol and spell reserved for the uppermost echelons alone, as their secret: “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Now that was freedom of the spirit, with that, belief in truth itself was renounced.[31]
Baghdad, with its Jewish population of approximately 40,000, was the focal point of the world-wide Jewish community of the Middle Ages. They were ruled by an “Exilarch,” referring to the leaders of the Jewish community who held an office traditionally assigned to a hereditary family tracing their lineage to King David through the Persian and Muslim Empires until the eleventh century AD. The Exilarch was depicted as Nasi, a Hebrew title meaning “prince” in Biblical Hebrew.[32] During the Second Temple period, the Nasi was the highest-ranking member and president of the Sanhedrin. Some had considerable power, similar to that of the Exilarch, especially the nesi’im of Israel, Syria, and Egypt.
The Kabbalists of Germany and Southern France shared a claim of Davidic descent through the Kalonymus, a prominent Jewish family in Lucca in Italy, descendants of an exilarch from Babylon, who settled in the German Rhineland.[33] Ashkenaz in the Book of Genesis was the son of Gomer was an ally of Gog, the chief of the land of Magog. The name Ashkenazi is thought to be derived from Ashkuza, the name given to the Scythians by the ancient Akkadians, and to be related to Ascanius, legendary king of Alba Longa and the son of the Trojan hero Aeneas.[34] By the high medieval period, Talmudic commentators began to use Ashkenaz to designate Germany, especially in the Rhineland communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, the most important Jewish communities arose.[35]
The story of the Kalonymus parallels an account by Abraham ibn Daud in his Sefer ha-Kabbalah, written about 1161 AD, that Charlemagne had appointed Makhir, a Babylonian-Jewish scholar, perhaps the Exilarch of the Jews of Babylon, at the end of the eighth century as ruler of a Jewish principality in Narbonne in Southern France. As late as 1143, Peter the Venerable of Cluny, in an address to Louis VII of France, condemned the Jews of Narbonne who claimed to have a king residing among them. The place of residence of the Makhir family at Narbonne was designated in official documents as Cortada Regis Judæorum.[36] According to Golb:
This dynastic line, the first of whose members was an eminent personality named Makhir, retained its power and wealth throughout the Middle Ages and until the beginning of the fourteenth century, many of its members were named Todros or Qalomynus. In establishing this office, the Carolingians clearly intended to stabilize and legally to protect the many Jewish communities in this part of their realm.[37]
According to Arthur Zuckerman, Guillaume of Gellone was the son of Alda or Aldana and Theodoric, or Thierry, the name assumed by Rabbi Makhir.[38] In the Medieval romances, Thierry is called Aymery. Zuckerman further proposed that Makhir is to be identified with a Maghario, Count of Narbonne, and in turn with an Aymeri de Narbonne, whom heroic poetry marries to Alda or Aldana, daughter of Charles Martel, becoming the father of Guillaume of Gellone. According to Zuckerman, where the Sefer ha-Kabbalah of Abraham ibn Daud states that Makhir and his descendants were “close” with Charlemagne and all his descendants, it could be taken to mean they were inter-related.[39] Guillaume also ruled as count of Toulouse, duke of Aquitaine, and marquis of Septimania. Deemed to be of Davidic descent, he was later beatified as a saint. As explained by Edward Gelles, in The Jewish Journey: A Passage through European History, Guillaume’s “Christian descendants number many royal and noble families, including those of William the Conqueror and of some of his followers, the Dukes of Guise and Lorraine, Habsburg Lorraine and d’Este and many others.”[40]
Zionists attempts to claim to the Holy Land have their origin in the First Crusade, also known as the Princes’ Crusade, a military expedition led by various leading members of European aristocracy, and whose descendants continued to claim the title of Kings of Jerusalem, even until the present day. Through the Dukes of Normandy, in addition to the House of Anjou of France, thus producing the Plantagenets of England, Guillaume of Gellone’s ancestors thus formed the backbone of the family networks who sponsored the Princes’ Crusade. The First Crusade (1095 – 1099) was called for at the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095, by Pope Urban II (c. 1035 – 1099), a former monk of the Abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 AD by William I of Aquitaine (875 – 918), who was a member of the important network of Grail families who were descended from Guillaume of Gellone. In 925, William I of Aquitaine nominated Berno (c. 850 – 927) as the first Abbot of Cluny, who placed the monastery under the Benedictine rule. Berno was subject to Pope Sergius III (c. 860 − 911), whose rule is known as the Saeculum obscurum (“the dark age/century”), or the “pornocracy” (“rule of prostitutes”), by German historians of the nineteenth century, due to his association with his mistress Marozia (c. 890 – 937), and her family the Theophylacti, their relatives and allies, whose descendants controlled the papacy for the next hundred years. Marozia was the mother of Pope John XI, and ancestress of Popes Benedict VIII, John XIX, Benedict IX.
In his Divine Comedy, the Italian poet Dante (c. 1265 – 1321) placed Guillaume of Gellone in Paradise next to Godfrey of Bouillon. In 1087, Emperor Henry IV confirmed Godfrey of Bouillon as Duke of Lower Lorraine. Along with his brothers Eustace III (c. 1050 – c. 1125) and Baldwin of Boulogne (1060s – 1118), Godfrey joined the First Crusade in 1096. Ultimately, the Princes’ Crusade not only succeeded in the recapture of Anatolia, but also conquered the Holy Land, and culminated in July 1099 in the re-conquest of Jerusalem and the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted for almost two hundred years, until the siege of Acre in 1291. When Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse (c. 1041 – 1105) declined the offer to become ruler of the new Kingdom of Jerusalem, Godfrey accepted the role and secured his kingdom by defeating the Muslim Fatimids at Ascalon a month later, bringing the First Crusade to an end. He died in July 1100, and was succeeded by his brother Baldwin as King of Jerusalem.
Around 1119, ten years after the conquest of Jerusalem, the French knight Hugues de Payens (c. 1070 –1136), a vassal of the Hugh, Count of Champagne (c. 1074 – c. 1125), approached Godfrey’s cousin, Baldwin II (c. 1075 – 1131), who succeed Baldwin I as King of Jerusalem, with the proposal of creating a monastic order for the protection of pilgrims. The order was founded with about nine knights including Godfrey de Saint-Omer and André de Montbard (c. 1097 – 1156). Baldwin II granted the knights a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque, above what was believed to be the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The knights called themselves Milites Christi, soldiers of Christ, but because their first Convent was a part of the palace of the king of Jerusalem, which was supposed to have been built close by the place where once Solomon’s temple stood, they became traditionally known as the Knights of the Temple, or the Templars.
Hugh, Count of Champagne, frequently received as an honored guest the famous Jewish theologian Rashi de Troyes (1040 – 1105), the greatest alumnus of the Kalonymus academy in Mainz, and was reputedly descended from the royal line of King David.[41] There is a legend recounted in Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah by Gedaliah ibn Yahya (1526 – 1587), Godfrey de Bouillon purportedly connected to the Davidic bloodline, visited Rashi to ask him advice about his attempt to lead the First Crusade. Rashi was the author of complete commentaries on the Bible and on the Babylonian Talmud, and famously, his first comment on the first verse of Genesis, which might be the best-known exegesis of the Torah, asserts the God-given right of the Jewish people to possess the Land of Israel:
Rabbi Isaac said: The Torah should have begun with the verse, “This month shall be to you the first of months” (Exodus 12:2) which was the first commandment given to Israel. Why then did it begin with, “In the beginning”? It began thus because it wished to convey the idea contained in the verse (Psalm 111:6), “The power of His acts He told to His people, in order to give them the estate of the nations.” So that if the nations of the world will say to Israel, “You are robbers because you took by force the land of the seven nations,” Israel might reply to them, “The whole earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He. He created it and gave it to them, and by His will He took it from them and gave it to us.[42]
A member of Rashi’s famous Yeshiva, founded in 1070 in Troyes, collaborated with of Stephen Harding (c. 1060 – 1134), the abbot of Citeaux in Burgundy to produce the Harding Bible.[43] During the Middle Ages, Burgundy was home to some of the most important Western churches and monasteries, including those of Cluny, Cîteaux, and Vézelay. Jews living in the region of Cluny, notably in Chalon-sur-Saône, had transactions with the abbey, lending money to it to ensure the security of religious objects. Peter the Venerable, opposed the practice, and the Statutes of Cluny of 1301 expressly forbade borrowing from Jews.[44] Prior to founding the Cistercian Order, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153), the patron of the Templars, sought the counsel of Harding and decided to enter his order of Citeaux. Cîteaux had four daughter houses: Pontigny, Morimond, La Ferté and Clairvaux. It was Hugh of Champagne who in 1115 granted lands to Bernard to found the Cistercian monastery at Clairvaux.[45]
The pupils of the early Kabbalists
coming from Spain to study in the Talmudic academies of southern France were
the principal agents of the Kabbalah’s transplantation to that country, where
they were responsible for the production of a text that drew on the Bahir, the Sefer ha Zohar, or Book
of Light, the most important medieval Kabbalistic text. It was likely while conducting
excavations beneath the site of the old Temple of Jerusalem that the Templars
discovered the contents of the Sefer ha Bahir, which gave rise to the
development of the Kabbalah in the last half of the thirteenth century.
There are many legends about the source of the Templars’ wealth. According to Masonic legend, when the Templars came under trial in 1301, their leader de Molay arranged for them to return to Scotland, where, according to Masonic lore, they had brought with them a number of “Syriac Christians,” who were “rescued” from the Holy Land, thus inaugurating the traditions of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. These “Syriac Christians” were to have been inheritors of the doctrines of the Essenes, and influenced to the religion of Manichaeism, which was connected to the cult of the Mandaeans—also recognized as the Sabians—or the radical Ismaili sect of the Assassins of the Islamic world. According to Pike, the Templars were students of a group of “Johannite Christians,” who revered the author of the Book of Revelation, a reference to the Mandaean sect of Iraq.[46]
It may have been in an attempt to recover the lost treasures of Israel that the First Crusade was instigated. The Crusaders referred to the Al-Aqsa Mosque as Solomon’s Temple, and therefore took the name of Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or “Templar” knights. According to Masonic histories, the aim of the Templars was to find the underground vaults constructed beneath the First Temple and to recover the vast treasures that Saint Bernard believed were hidden there, before Jerusalem was pillaged by Titus and the Roman army in 70 AD. Detailed lists of the temple treasures are included in the Copper Scroll discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Templars also intended to recover the Ark of the Covenant that held the Ten Commandments, as well as the Tables of Testimony, the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments.[47]
In 1867, a group of Freemasons including Captain Charles Wilson (1836 – 1905), Lieutenant Charles Warren (1840 – 1927), and a team of Royal Engineers from the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), re-excavated the area and uncovered tunnels extending vertically from the Al Aqsa mosque, for some 25 meters, before fanning out under the Dome of the Rock, which is generally thought to be the site of King Solomon’s temple. Crusader artefacts found in these tunnels attest to Templar involvement. More recently, a team of Israeli archaeologists, intrigued by the Warren and Wilson discovery, reinvestigated the passage and concluded that the Templars did in fact excavate beneath the Temple.[48]
The Gnostic content of the legends of the Holy Grail is associated with the spread of the influence of the Bahir in Southern France, centered in Septimania, which became known as the Languedoc, which contributed to the emergence of the heretical sect of the Cathars, who were associated with the Templars. In Jewish Influences on Christian Reform Movements, Louis I. Newman concludes:
…that the powerful Jewish culture in Languedoc, which had acquired sufficient strength to assume an aggressive, propagandist policy, created a milieu wherefrom movements of religious independence arose readily and spontaneously. Contact and association between Christian princes and their Jewish officials and friends stimulated the state of mind which facilitated the banishment of orthodoxy, the clearing away of the debris of Catholic theology. Unwilling to receive Jewish thought, the princes and laity turned towards Catharism, then being preached in their domains.[49]
According to Marsha Keith Schuchard, the Templars adopted the Second Temple mysticism that would later feature in Freemasonry, principally from three leading Jewish Kabbalists from Spain: Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Abraham bar Hiyya (c. 1070 – 1136 or 1145) and his student Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1089 – c. 1167), who were the leading influences behind the mystical tendencies of the Ashkenazi Hasidim, and the leading exponents of the Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain.[50] Bar Hiyya, also known as Abraham Savasorda, was a Jewish mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who resided in Barcelona, and was given high official status by the Templars when they came to Spain to fight a crusade against the Muslims.[51] While the Sefer Yetzirah and Merkabah were among the main sources of the Bahir, certain medieval sources had an influence as well, such as a treatise by bar Hiyya.[52] According to Joseph Dan, the author of the Bahir also displayed some awareness of work of Ibn Ezra, one of the most distinguished Jewish biblical commentators and philosophers of the Middle Ages.[53]
Mystical tradition also purports that the Zohar was based on an earlier “Arabic Kabbalah” of the Brethren of Sincerity.[54] Isaac the Blind (c. 1160 – 1235), who widely suspected of being the author of the Bahir, and son of Abraham ben David (c. 1125 – 1198), a father of Kabbalah, was a pivotal figure among the thirteenth century Kabbalists of the Languedoc, and studied not only Jewish, but also early Greek, and Christian Gnostic writings, as well as the Brethren of Sincerity. The philosopher who most personified the interweaving of Judaism and Islam was the Ibn Gabirol, an important eleventh-century Jewish Neoplatonist known to the West as Avicebron, assimilated ideas from the Brethren of Sincerity to such an extent that it was his primary source of inspiration after the Bible.[55]
An additionally proposed source were the
Sabians of Harran.[56]
Masonic authors Rev. C.H. Vail
and John Parker claimed that the Manichean sect operated under many different
names, including Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars, but “always a secret
society, with degrees, distinguished by signs, tokens, and words like
Freemasonry.”[57]
As confirmed by Malcolm Lambert, “That there was a
substantial transmission of ritual and ideas from Bogomilism to Catharism is
beyond reasonable doubt.”[58]
The Gnostic doctrine of the Bogomils, meaning in Slavonic “friends of God,”
maintained that God had two sons, the elder Satanael and the younger Jesus.
Nicetas Choniates, a Byzantine historian of the twelfth century, thus described
the Bogomils as, “considering Satan powerful they worshipped him lest he might
do them harm.”[59]
The Church charged the Cathars with devil worship, human sacrifice, cannibalism, incest, homosexuality and celebrating the Black Mass. Walter Map, in his De Nugis Curialium, described the Publicani, a sect similar to the Cathars who had sent missionaries from Germany to England, as worshipping Satan in rituals involving the “obscene kiss,” very similar to the Sabbaths later attributed to the witches:
About the first watch of the night… each family sits waiting in silence in each of their synagogues; and there descends by a rope which hangs in their midst a black cat of wondrous size. On sight of it they put out the lights and do not sing or distinctly repeat hymns, but hum them with closed teeth, and draw near to the place where they saw their master, feeling after him and when they have found him they kiss him. The hotter the feelings the lower their aim; some go for his feet, but most for his tail and privy parts. Then as though this noisome contact unleashed their appetites, each lays hold of his neighbor and takes his fill of him or her for all he is worth.[60]
On November 1307, Pope Clement V, who had come under strong pressure from Philip le Bel, ordered the arrest of the Templars in every country. The popular narrative is that Philip was driven by greed, and that the accusations were concocted through the use of torture. As detailed by Michael Barber in The Trial of the Templars, though some Templars were in fact tortured, some were not, but “all stressed that their confessions had been freely made and were not a consequence of this ill treatment.”[61] All confessions were consistent, and repeated the accusations made formerly against the Cathars. Among the accusations against the Templars were those of practicing witchcraft, denying the tenets of the Christian faith, spitting or urinating on the cross during secret rites of initiation, worshipping the devil in the shape of a black cat, of practicing the “obscene kiss” and committing acts of sodomy and bestiality. The Templars were also charged with worshipping a skull or head called Baphomet and anointing it with blood or the fat of unbaptized babies.
Why would Theodor Herzl, whose entire mission was to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, have belonged during his student days at the University of Vienna to the Burschenschaft fraternity system, which is known to have been the point of origin for the German nationalism and anti-Semitism behind the rise of the Nazis? And why would Herzl have shared the organization’s admiration for Hitler’s favorite composer Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883), whose ideals participated in the Pan-German movement behind the Burschenschaft system? Herzl opened the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 with the overture from Wagner’s Tannhäuser opera, a story about the Sängerkrieg, or “Song Contest,” during which the medieval Minnesinger Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1160/80 – c. 1220) produced his Grail story Lohengrin, a tale of the Knight of the Swan, which was perceived of some importance by those families who traced their descent back to the leaders of the First Crusade to retake the Holy Land in 1099. Their descendants were not only responsible for the rise of the Rosicrucian movement, Freemasonry and the Illuminati, but of the traditions of German romantic philosophy, with the likes of Goethe, Herder, Fichte and Hegel, who inspired the rise of German Nationalism.
Knight Swan ancestry was linked very early with the English crown, beginning in 1125 with the marriage of Stephen I, King of England, to Matilda, the daughter of Eustace III of Bouillon, the brother of Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin I of Jerusalem. William of Tyre (c. 1130 – 1186), writing his History of the Crusade about 1190, records the tale of the Knight of the Swan from whom Godfrey of Bouillon and his brothers Baldwin and Eustace were descended. The tale was repeated in the Crusade cycle, where Godfrey was the hero of numerous French chansons de geste. The legend of the Knight of the Swan, most famous today as the storyline of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, based on the grail story Parzival by German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1160/80 – c. 1220). Wolfram claimed to have obtained his information from a certain Kyot de Provence, who would have been Guyot de Provins (d. after 1208), a troubadour and monk at Cluny. According to Wolfram, Kyot had uncovered a neglected Arabic manuscript in Moorish Toledo, Spain. Wolfram maintains that Kyot, in turn, supposedly received the Grail story from Flegetanis, a Muslim astronomer and a descendant of Solomon who had found the secrets of the Holy Grail written in the stars.
Wolfram, referring to the Templars, also claims Kyot’s research had revealed a genealogical connection to the Grail: “And the sons of baptized men hold It and guard It with humble heart, and the best of mankind shall those knights be who have in such service part.”[62] According to Wolfram, the Grail sustained the lives of a brotherhood of knights called Templeisen, who are guardians of the Temple of the Grail. Like their real-life counterparts, who made their home in a palace near the site of Solomon’s Temple, the Templeisen were headquartered in a castle. This fictional castle was called Munsalvaesche, or “Mountain of Salvation,” a name which recalls Montsegur, the mountain fortress of the Cathars in Languedoc.[63]
Hugh of Champagne’s step-brother was Stephen II, Count of Blois (c. 1045 – 1102), one of the leaders of the Princes’ Crusade, and the father of Stephen I, King of England (1092 or 1096 – 1154), who married Matilda, the niece of Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin I of Jerusalem. Matilda’s mother was Mary, whose brother was David I of Scotland (c. 1084 – 1153), a supporter of the Templars. The first blood libel case of the Jewish ritual murder of William of Norwich was suppressed, according to Thomas Monmouth, by Stephen I of England. Thomas of Monmouth’s account of the accusation against Jews of the ritual murder of William of Norwich helped inflame antisemitic sentiment in England, resulting in the eventual expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.
Stephen I of England’s brother was Henry of Blois (1096 – 1171), Abbot of Glastonbury, Bishop of Winchester, who was intimately tied to the legends of King Arthur. According to Francis Lot, author of The Island of Avalon, Henry Blois, used Geoffrey of Monmouth as a nom de plume to compose the pseudo-historical Historia Regum Britanniae (“History of the Kings of Britain”), written between 1135 and 1139, and was responsible for the Prophecies of Merlin.[64] The actual author is not proven but Hank Harrison was the first, in 1992, to suggest that Henri of Blois was the author of the Perlesvaus.[65] The fact that the Grail sagas are concerned with a secret and purportedly sacred lineage is indicated in the Perlesvaus, where we read: “Here is the story of thy descent; here begins the Book of the Sangreal.”
Henry of Blois’ other brother was Theobald II, Count of Champagne (1090 – 1152), who inherited the titles of their uncle Hugh of Champagne. Theobald II was among the delegates at the Council of Troyes in 1128 to endorse the recognition of the Templars. Theobald II was the father of Theobald V, Count of Blois (1130 – 1191), married Alix of France, the daughter of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Like his uncle Stephen I of England, Theobald V also came to the defense of a blood libel case against the Jews. Implicated in the affair was Theobald V’s mistress, Pulcelina of Blois, a Jewish woman, mistress and moneylender to the count.[66]
Theobald V’s brother, Henry I of Champagne (1127 – 1181) married Alix’s siter, Marie of France, who sponsored Grail author Chrétien de Troyes (fl. c. 1160 – 1191). Henry of Champagne’s court in Troyes became a renowned literary center, which included Walter Map, source of the Melusina and “Skull of Sidon” legends.[67] According to the legend reported by Map, a Templar “Lord of Sidon” committed a necrophilic act with his deceased lover, and Armenian princess, which nine month later produced the skull and bones, which in due course, passed to the possession of the Templars.[68] Marie’s son, Henry II of Champagne (1166 – 1197) was King of Jerusalem in the 1190s, by virtue of his marriage to Queen Isabella I of Jerusalem, the daughter of Amalric I of Jerusalem, the second son of Fulk of Jerusalem, and Melisende, identified with the demon Melusine, the eldest daughter of Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Morphia, who inspired the necrophilic legend of the Skull of Sidon. Morphia belonged to the Rubenid dynasty, an alleged offshoot of the larger Bagratuni dynasty, who became rulers of Armenia in the ninth century AD, and who claimed Jewish descent.[69]
Before she married Henry II of Champagned, Isabella I had first been married to Conrad of Montferrat (d. 1192). Isabella’s half-sister Sibylla was reportedly the founder of the Order of Melusine.[70] Sibylla married Guy of Lusignan (c. 1150 – 1194), who lost his claim to the throne of Jerusalem when his wife Sibylla died in 1190. Conrad then acquired the title of King of Jerusalem by virtue of his marriage to Isabella I. It was after Conrad was assassinated by the Assassins, Isabella married Henry II of Champagne.[71] After Henry II died in 1197, Isabella married Guy’s brother, Aimery of Cyprus (before 1155 – 1205). They were crowned together as King and Queen of Jerusalem in January 1198 in Acre. Isabella was succeeded as queen by her eldest daughter by Conrad, Maria of Montferrat.
Stephen was succeeded as King of England by Henry II (1133 – 1189), of the Plantagenet dynasty, and husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine. The House of Plantagenet, descendants of the House of Anjou, the House of Luxembourg and French House of Lusignan—all descended, according to medieval folk legends from the dragon spirit Melusine. These dynastic alliances were founders of the Order of the Garter and Order of the Dragon, based on the legend of Saint George, founded by Charles I of Hungary (1288 – 1342). The entire family network would have been aware of the significance of their ancestry from Hungary, and their descent from Magog, the claimed ancestor of the Scythians, and the Khazars, as the Gesta Hungarorum, Latin for “The Deeds of the Hungarians”, a record of early Hungarian history, written by the unknown author around 1200 AD, the Magyars were Scythians, originally descended from Magog. The saga traces the ancestry of Arpad, the founder of the Hungarian dynasty, to the Turul who impregnated his grandmother. The Turul, like the Turkic Toghrul of the Khazars, is a giant mythical eagle, a messenger of god.[72]
In recognition of his heritage, Charles I of Hungary gave importance to the cults of the princess Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, the wife of Landgrave Louis IV of Thuringia (1200 – 1227), famous for having performed the Miracle of the Roses.[73] According to the fable, while Elizabeth was taking bread to the poor in secret, she met her husband Louis on a hunting party. In order to quell suspicions that she was stealing treasure from the castle, he asked her to reveal what was hidden under her cloak, which at that moment fell open to reveal a vision of white and red roses, which proved to Louis that God was protecting her work.[74]
Elizabeth and Louis’ daughter, Sophie of Thuringia, married Henry II, Duke of Brabant (1207 – 1248), who could claim descent from the Knight of the Swan. The story of the fairy ancestry of the Knight of the Swan has been provided to explain the ancestries of not only the Houses of Bouillon, but also of Cleves, Oldenburg and Hesse. As in other versions, Loherangrin is a knight who arrives in a swan-pulled boat to defend a lady, in this case Elsa of Brabant. In Wolfram’s story, Wartburg is the Grail castle Munsalvaesche, where Parzival’s son, the Knight Swan Loherangrin, hears a call of distress from Elsa of Brabant, who is being held prisoner in the castle of Cleves, modern Kleve, Germany. The principal French versions of the romance are Le Chevalier au Cygne and Helyas. Helyas married Elsa of Brabant, producing a son, Elimar, who married Rixa, the heiress of Oldenburg, and became the Count of Oldenburg.[75] Helyas then marries Beatrix of Cleves and becomes king of Francia. They have three sons: Diederik, who succeeded his father in the county of Cleves; Godfrey, who became count of Lohn; and Konrad, who became ancestor of the counts of Hesse.[76]
The Swan line of Cleves was particularly celebrated.[77] The Schwanritter by Konrad von Würzburg (c.1220-1230 – 1287) has the Swan Knight rescuing the Duke of Brabant’s widow, and from them descend the houses of Cleves, Guelders, and Rheinecks. Jacob of Maerlant’s thirteenth-century Spiegel Historiael has the dukes of Brabant as Swan Knight descendants. The Dukes of Cleves in the Grail castle Schwanenburg, located along the Northern Rhine, where Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote the story of Lohengrin, immortalized in Wagner’s famous opera. The Chronicles of the Dukes of Clèves of the fifteenth century depict Beatrice in her Schwanenturm (“Swan Tower”) receiving the Swan Knight.
In 1197, the first duke of Brabant was Henry I, Duke of Brabant (c. 1165 – 1235), who joined as one of the leaders the crusade launched by Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Henry I married Matilda of Boulogne, the granddaughter of King Stephen I of England and Matilda of Boulogne. Their son, Henry II, Duke of Brabant married Sophie of Thuringia, the daughter of Elizabeth of Hungary and Louis. Louis’ father, Hermann I, Landgrave of Thuringia (d. 1217), supported poets like Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach who wrote part of his Parzival at Wartburg Castle in 1203. A contemporary poem known as the Wartburgkrieg presented the story of the Knight of the Swan Lohengrin as Wolfram’s entry in a story-telling contest held at Wartburg Castle by Louis’ father, Hermann I, Landgrave of Thuringia (d. 1217).[78] In the Rätselspiel (“mystery game”), the subsequent poetic duel between Wolfram and the magician Klingsor of Hungary, Wolfram proved himself capable and eloquent, and when Klingsor grew weary he summoned a demon to continue the duel. When Wolfram began to sing of the Christian mysteries, the demon was unable to respond. Klingsor predicted the birth of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, from whom the Landgraves of Hesse in Germany claim their descent. Henry II and Sophie’s son was Henry I, Landgrave of Hesse (1244 – 1308), the first of the landgraves of Hesse.
Early descendants of the Knight Swan included Edward I of England and Ferdinand III of Castile (1199/1201 – 1252), whose reign saw the most massive advance in the reconquista, the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims—with the aim of establishing their own “Second Holy Land.”[79] The Abbey of Cluny also played a significant role in directing the Reconquista. Strong political ties with Burgundy in France, in which the interests of Cluny were closely interwoven, were established with the marriage of Ferdinand III’s ancestor, Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile (c. 1040/1041 – 1109) to Constance of Burgundy, the niece of the Hugh, Abbot of Cluny (1024 – 1109), also known as Hugh the Great, who played an important role through his influence over Pope Urban II, who launched the First Crusade.[80] Alfonso VI’s daughters, Urraca and Teresa, married Constance’s nephew Raymond (c. 1070 – 1107) and his cousin Henry of Burgundy (1066 – 1112). Raymond was the brother of Pope Callixtus II (c. 1065 – 1124), who was connected to Cluny, and uncle of Isabella, the wife of Hugh of Champagne. These marriages produced the descendants responsible for the creation of knightly orders which would represent the survival of the Templars: the Order of Santiago, the Order of Calatrava, the Order of Montesa, the Order of Saint George, and the Order of Christ.
Order of Calatrava was founded by Raymond’s son, Alfonso VII of Leon and Castile (1105 – 1157), who was married to Berenguela, the daughter of the Templar, Ramon Berenguer III (1082 – July 1131), Count of Barcelona.[81] After the conquest of Calatrava from the Muslims, in 1147, Alfonso VII placed his Jewish advisor Judah ben Joseph ibn Ezra, in command of one of his fortresses, later making him his court chamberlain.[82] Judah was related to Abraham Bar Hiyya’s student, Abraham Ibn Ezra, a Judah ben Joseph ibn Ezra, and shared with him a mutual friend in Judah Halevi (c. 1075 – 1141).[83] Judah, also called ha-Nasi, was a relative of a relative of Moses ibn Ezra (c. 1060 – 1140), who belonged to one of the most prominent families of Granada. Judah had considerable influence with Alfonso VII. In the beginning of his reign, Alfonso VII curtailed the rights and liberties that his father accorded to the Jews. Abraham Ibn Daud, in his Sefer ha-Kabbalah, praises Judah ibn Ezra, stating that, in reference to “When I would heal Israel, then is the iniquity of Ephraim uncovered” (Hosea 7:1), God “anticipated [the calamity] by putting it into the heart of King Alfonso the Emperador to appoint our master and rabbi, R. Judah the Nasi b. Ezra, over Calatrava and to place all the royal provisions in his charge.”[84]
In 1171, Alfonso VII’s son Ferdinand II of Leon (c. 1137 – 1188), founded the Order of Santiago, known also as the Order of Saint James of the Sword. Ferdinand II’s nephew, Alfonso VIII of Castile (1155 – 1214), who was a patron of the Order of Santiago, married Eleanor of England, the sister of Richard Lionheart, both children of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II of England. Alfonso VIII was the principal benefactor of the Order of Monfragüe, founded by the knights of the Order of Mountjoy who dissented from a merger with the Templars. Rodrigo Álvarez (d. 1187), a member of the Order of Santiago, founded the military Order of Mountjoy in 1174 in the kingdom of Jerusalem in the tower of Ascalon and affiliated it with the Cistercian Order that he had long patronized.
Rodrigo received support from Alfonso II of Aragon (1157 – 1196)—the son of Alfonso VII by his second wife Richeza of Poland—who donated the castle of Alfambra to the order in return for military aid against the Muslims.[85] Wolfram von Eschenbach, claimed to have obtained his information from a certain Kyot de Provence, who would have been Guyot de Provins (d. after 1208), a troubadour and monk at Cluny, who, in his famous La Bible Guiot, named his protectors, who included: Alfonso II of Aragon, Fredrick Barbarossa, Louis VII of France, Henry II of England, Henry the Young King, Richard the Lionheart, and Raymond V of Toulouse, all closely associated with the Melusine line.[86] In 1201, Alfonso II’s son, Peter II of Aragon (1174/76 – 1213), founded the Order of Saint George of Alfama, in gratitude for the patron saint’s assistance to the armies of Aragon.[87] Peter II was killed at the Battle of Muret supporting the Cathars. Peter’s son James I Aragon (1208 – 1276), who was raised by Templars, was known as “the Conqueror” for his role in the Reconquista.[88]
In 1221, the Order of Calatrava was merged into that of Monfragüe, by order of Ferdinand III of Castile, whose son, Alfonso X Castile (1221 – 1284), James I’s daughter Violant.[89] An illustration in the book of chess produced for Alfonso X shows two Templars playing the game, indicating their familiarity with the Castilian court.[90] From the beginning of his reign, Alfonso X, sometimes nicknamed el Astrólogo (the Astrologer), employed Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars at his court from the Toledo School of Translators primarily for the purpose of translating books from Arabic and Hebrew into Latin and Castilian, although he always insisted in supervising personally the translations. Under Alfonso X’s leadership, Sephardic Jewish scientists and translators acquired a prominent role in the School.[91] It was during the time of Alfonso X that the Zohar was written in the Kingdom of Leon by Moses de Leon (c. 1240 – 1305). Yehuda Liebes has presented substantial evidence in support for his hypothesis that Shimon bar Yohai, the central figure of the Zohar, was modeled after a leading Jewish scholar at the court of Alfonso X, Todros ben Joseph HaLevi Abulafia (1225 – c. 1285), a Kabbalist and rabbi recognized by the Jewish community as their Nasi, whose son Joseph was a friend of de Leon.[92]
The island of Sicily had been ruled as
a medieval kingdom since the early 12th century, when Norman lord Roger II of
Sicily (1095 – 1154)—who was married to Elvira, daughter of Alfonso VI of Leon and
Castile and Zaida, a Muslim princess—conquered the
island and established the Kingdom of Sicily.[93]
Roger II of Sicily was a supporter of Anacletus II (d. 1138), who ruled in opposition to Pope Innocent II from 1130 until his
death in 1138. Although many heads of the Catholic Church have been rumored
over the ages to be of Jewish descent, Anacletus II is known to have been born
Pietro Pierleoni, a noble Roman family of Jewish origin, who dominated Roman
politics for much of the Middle Ages. Baruch, the great-grandfather of
Anacletus II, was a Roman moneylender who converted to Christianity and changed
his name to Leo de Benedicto, whose baptismal name comes from the fact that he
was baptized by Pope Leo IX himself. He married into Roman aristocracy, and it
was his grandson, Petrus Leonis, who chose to have his son enter the
priesthood. Petrus studied in Paris and was a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of
Cluny, before returning to Rome.[94]
The enemies of Anacletus II attacked him
for his Jewish ancestry, and he was accused of robbing the church of much of
its wealth, together with Jewish helpers, and of incest.[95]
Anacletus II is associated with the Jewish legend of a Jewish pope named
Andreas.[96]
According to an old Spanish document discovered among some penitential
liturgies by Eliezer ben Solomon Ashkenazi (1512 – 1585), published in 1854,
Andreas was a Jew who, upon becoming a Christian, created such an impression
that eventually became cardinal and eventually pope.[97] According
to a traditional account, Pope Andreas was El-hanan, or Elhanan, son of Rabbi
Simeon the Great, of the Makhir-Kalonynus line, ancestor of Rashi.[98]
Under the marriage agreement between Roger II and Elvira, if Baldwin I and Adelaide had no children, the heir to the kingdom of Jerusalem would be Roger II. Roger was a Templar from Normandy, who conquered Sicily during the time of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.[99] Roger II of Sicily, was to become the “Jolly Roger” of history, related to the legend of the Skull of Sidon, having flown the skull and crossbones on his ships. As a reward for his support, Anacletus approved Roger II’s title of “King of Sicily” by papal bull after his accession.[100]
Roger II and Elvira’s son, William I of
Sicily, married Margaret of Navarre, the niece of a famous count of the Perche,
Rotrou III (1099 – 1144), who according to Swiss scholar André de Mandach was
‘‘Perceval’’ of the Grail legends. Rotrou III married Matilda FitzRoy, Countess of Perche, an illegitimate
daughter of King Henry I of England, and sister-in-law of Geoffrey V of Anjou,
founder of the Plantagenet dynasty, and Robert Count of Gloucester who had
commissioned copies of the Historia Regum Brittaniae by Geoffrey of
Monmouth which popularized the legend of King Arthur. By his second
wife, Hawise, daughter of Walter of Salisbury, Rotrou III was the father of
Stephen du Perche, Archbishop of Palermo, who was Margaret’s counsellor.
Stephen du Perche hired Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135 – 1202), a heretical Cistercian abbot from Calabria—and a disciple of Bernard of Clairvaux, patron of the Knights Templar—who would exercise an enormous influence in millennialism, dealing with expectations of the Biblical End Times.[101] Joachim’s family lived in a region of many Jews, and studies have explored the possibility that Joachim had Jewish origins.[102] Joachim’s ideas were clearly not of a Christian origin, and may stem from the fact that, as pointed out by Robert E. Lerner, who accepts the claims of Joachim’s Jewish ancestry, Joachim was very likely drawing on rabbinical sources.[103] According to Joachim, first was the Age of the Father, corresponding to the Old Testament, characterized by obedience of mankind to the Rules of God. Second was the Age of the Son, between the advent of Christ and 1260 AD, represented by the New Testament, when Man became the Son of God. And finally, the Age of the Holy Spirit when mankind was to come in direct contact with God, reaching the total freedom preached by the Christian message. In this new Age the ecclesiastical organization would be replaced, and the Church would be ruled by the Order of the Just, later identified with the Franciscan order.
By his second wife Beatrice of Rethel, grand-niece of Baldwin II of Jerusalem, Roger II of Sicily had a daughter, Constance, Queen of Sicily, who married Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor (1165 – 1197), the son of Frederick Barbarossa (1122 – 1190) and Beatrice I, Countess of Burgundy. Their son was Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor (1194 – 1250). Frederick II’s birth was also associated with a prophecy of the magician Merlin. According to Andrea Dandolo (1306 –1354), the 54th doge of Venice, writing at some distance but probably recording contemporary gossip, Henry doubted reports of his wife’s pregnancy and was only convinced by consulting Joachim of Fiore, who confirmed that Frederick was his son by interpretation of Merlin’s prophecy and the Erythraean Sibyl.[104] In addition to Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II was also King of Sicily, King of Germany, King of Italy, and King of Jerusalem by virtue of his marriage to Isabella II of Jerusalem, the daughter of Maria of Montferrat.
Sancha
of Castile, Ferdinand II’s sister, married the brother
of Margaret of Navarre,
Sancho VI of Navarre (1132 – 1194). Their daughter Berengaria Sánchez
married Richard the Lionheart. Margaret’s son, William II of Sicily (1153 – 1189).
William II was a champion of the papacy and in secret league with the Lombard
cities he was able to defy the common enemy, Frederick Barbarossa. In the Divine Comedy, Dante places both William
I and Margaret’s son, William II of Sicily, and Joachim of Fiore in Paradise.
It is suggested that Joachim of Fiore’s image of God as three interlaced rings
inspired Dante.[105]
Joan later married Cathar supporter
Count Raymond VI of Toulouse 1156 – 1222), grandson of Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse, one of the leaders
of the Princes’ Crusade.
Margaret’s sister Blanche married Sancha’s brother, Sancho III of Castile (c. 1134 – 1158). Their son was Alfonso VIII of Castile, a patron of the Order of Santiago. Raymond VI was the most ardent defender of the Cathars when the Church finally launched the Albigensian Crusade of 1209, and in reference to the Languedoc center at Albi, when an army of some thirty thousand knights and foot soldiers from northern Europe descended on the Languedoc to extirpate the heresy. It was Raymond VI’s nephew, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne (1185 – 1209), who faced the full force of the first crusade. Raymond-Roger, whose family was related to Rotrou III, was the son of Roger II Trencavel (d. 1194), and Adelaide of Béziers, the daughter of Raymond VI’s father, Raymond V of Toulouse (c. 1134 – c. 1194). Roger II took the most prominent Jews among under his personal protection. For example, he secured the freedom of Abraham ben David of Posquières, who had been thrown into prison by the lord of Posquières, and gave him shelter at Carcassonne.[106]
According to the earliest sources, Percival, one of King Arthur’s legendary Knights of the Round Table, the original hero in the quest for the Grail, was identified with Raymond-Roger Trencavel.[107] Though Raymond-Roger was not a Cathar himself, his wife, Philippa of Montcada, and several of his relatives were.[108] Roger II’s niece, Esclarmonde of Foix was a Cathar, who was mentioned in Esclaramonde, by Bertran de Born, and in Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach. A tradition which is based on a reworking of the Chanson de la croisade albigeoise, written in Languedoc between 1208 and 1219, attributes to her the initiative of the reconstruction of the Cathar fortress of Montsegur.[109]
In the Song of Solomon, according to King James Version of the Bible, which first appears in English in 1611, the beloved—speaking for the mystical Shekhinah—says “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.” The Zohar, the most important and influential text of the Medieval Kabbalah, opens by stating that the rose and the alternate symbol of the lily symbolize Knesset Yisrael, “the Collective soul roots of Israel… Just as a rose, which is found amidst the thorns, has within it the colors red and white, also Knesset Yisrael has within her both judgment and loving kindness.”[110] The rose is a yonic symbol while the lily is phallic, together symbolizing mystical sexual union.[111] Interestingly, the rose and the lily became the heraldic symbols of those families descended from the Princes’ Crusade, while their descendants, who were very conscious of the historical and mystical significance of their ancestry, tracing themselves to both the Melusine legend and the Knight Swan, emerged as the key personalities in the preservation of the various manifestations of the Kabbalah in its Christian forms.
In the thirteenth century, Sicily had become the heartland of Frederick II’s Hohenstaufen empire. However, due to the conflict between Frederick II and the papacy, the age-old conflict between the pro-pope Guelphs and pro-imperial Ghibellines again erupted. When Frederick II died, the kingdom of Sicily was claimed by his illegitimate son Manfred I of Sicily (1232 – 1266), who also came into conflict with the pope. Seeing the opportunity created by Manfred’s contested claim to the throne of Sicily, the pope began to look for a potential claimant to overthrow him, and in 1265, at his invitation, the kingdom of Sicily was invaded and conquered by Charles I of Anjou (1226/1227 – 1285). Manfred of Sicily was drawn into a battle and killed, and Charles’ victory allowed him to establish the Angevin Kingdom of Sicily and Naples, giving him control of Sicily and most of southern Italy.
In 1277,
Charles I of Anjou bought a claim to the throne of Jerusalem from Mary of
Antioch, by proximity of blood to Conradin (1252 – 1268), who had crowned
himself King of Jerusalem as the grandson of Frederick II and his third wife,
Isabella of England. Mary was the granddaughter of Aimery
of Cyprus Isabella I of
Jerusalem. Conradin, however, was executed in 1268 by Charles I of Anjou, who
had seized Conradin’s kingdom of Sicily by papal authority. At the time of his
death, Marie of Antioch was the only living grandchild of Isabella I, and
claimed the throne of Jerusalem on the basis of proximity in blood to the kings
of Jerusalem. The High Court of Jerusalem passed over her claim, however, and
instead chose her nephew Hugh III of Lusignan (c. 1235 – 1284),
a great-grandson of Isabella I, as the next ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Charles I of Anjou also managed to extend his power over Rome, to the extent that the Sicilian Vespers revolted against his rule in 1282. Known as the War of the Sicilian Vespers, it was a conflict fought in Sicily, Catalonia and elsewhere in the western Mediterranean between the kings of Aragon helped by the Italian Ghibellines against the Charles I of Anjou, his son Charles II of Naples (1271 – 1295), the kings of France, supported by the Italian Guelphs and the Papacy. In 1279, Charles II had discovered the purported body of Mary Magdalene the Dominican’s basilica at Saint-Maximin near Aix-en-Provence after she appeared to him in a vision, an event that linked the House of Anjou to the Magdalene, whom they then adopted as patron saint of their dynasty.[112]
In the twelfth century, Berenguer Ramon I, Count of Provence (1115 – 1144), the son of the Templar Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona, had established Saint-Maximin as a town under his care. Berenguer Ramon I’s sister, Berenguela, was the wife of Alfonso VII of Leon, founder of the Order of Calatrava. In 1246, following the death of Raymond IV Berenger (1198 – 1245), the cousin of Peter II of Aragon, Provence passed through his younger daughter to Charles II’s father Charles of Anjou. The founding tradition of the relics at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume were that the true remains of Mary Magdalene were preserved there, and not at Vézelay. After he discovered her remnants, Charles II founded the massive Gothic Basilique Sainte Marie-Madeleine in 1295, with blessing of Boniface VIII, who placed it under the new teaching order of Dominicans. Under the basilica’s crypt is a glass dome said to contain the relic of her skull. Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume gradually displaced Vézelay in popularity and acceptance.[113]
After the uprising, Sicily became an independent kingdom under the rule of Peter III of Aragon (c. 1239 – 1285), the son of James I and Violant, who married Manfred I’s daughter, Constance II of Sicily. Three of their children were involved in the survival of the Templars. Their son, James II of Aragon (1267 – 1327), who absorbed the Templar properties into his own neo-Templar Order of Montesa, whose recruits were mainly drawn from the Order of Calatrava.[114] In 1399, James II’s great-grandson Martin of Aragon (1356 – 1410) decided to merge Order of Saint George of Alfama with the larger Order of Montesa. With the approval of antipope Benedict XIII, the orders were amalgamated the following year, and thereafter known as the Order of Montesa and St. George of Alfama.[115]
Peter III of Aragon’s brother, Alfonso II, Count of Provence (1180 – 1209), was the father of Ramon Berenguer V, Count of Provence (1198 – 1245), who was also raised by Templars, along with his cousin James I of Aragon. Ramon married Beatrice of Savoy, and they had three daughters who married royalty. Margaret of Provence married Louis IX of France (1214 – 1270), whose mother was Blanche of Castile, daughter of King Alfonso VIII of Castile. Eleanor of Provence married Henry III, King of England (1207 – 1272). Sanchia of Provence married Henry III’s brother Richard, King of the Romans (1209 – 1272). Beatrice of Provence married Louis IX’s brother, Charles I of Anjou (1226/1227 – 1285), King of Sicily, who in 1277 purchased a claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The Italian adventurer and Templar Roger de
Flor (1267 – 1305), one of the most successful pirates of his time, was in the
service of James II’s brother, Frederick
III of Sicily (1272 – 1337). Frederick III married Blanche’s sister Eleanor of Anjou. In 1302, the year the War of the Vespers ended, Frederick III married Eleanor of Anjou, the
daughter of Charles II of Naples. In 1294, among the escorts of Eleanor’s
brother Charles Martel of Anjou (1271 – 1295), while he was in Florence, was
the famous Italian poet Dante, who speaks warmly of and to Charles’ spirit when they meet in
the Heaven of Venus. Charles II of Naples’ daughter Blanche of Anjou married James II of Aragon. Martel of Anjou was the father of Charles I
of Hungary, founder of the Order of Saint George.
Constance, the daughter Frederick III and Eleanor, married Henry II of Lusignan (1270 – 1324), the son of Hugh III of Lusignan, heir of the title of King of Jerusalem and Grand Master of the Knights Hospitallers. The Lusignans were rulers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, or more accurately, Acre, which from the time of its capture by Richard the Lionheart in 1191 to its final conquest by Saladin in 1291, had formed the base of the crusading empire in Palestine. After Tyre fell without a fight the next day, and Sidon fell in June, and Beirut in July, the Kingdom of Jerusalem ceased to exist on the mainland. Henry II, with the few survivors, escaped to Cyprus and resumed his throne with the aid of the Hospitallers. In 1305, Clement sent letters to both Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Templars, and Fulk de Villaret (d. 1327), Grand Master of the Hospitallers, to discuss the possibility of merging the two orders. Neither was amenable to the idea. In 1306, the Templars conspired to place Henry II’s brother Amalric, Lord of Tyre (c. 1272 – 1310), on the throne. Henry II was deposed and exiled to Armenia, where King Oshin of Armenia (1282 – 1320) was Amalric’s brother-in-law. Upon Amalric’s murder in 1310, Oshin released Henry II, who returned to Cyprus and resumed his throne with the aid of the Hospitallers in 1310, imprisoning many of Amalric’s co-conspirators.
Henry II was in contact with the famous alchemist Raymond Llull (c. 1232 – c. 1315), who was seneschal to Peter III’s younger brother, James II of Majorca (1267 – 1327). James II married Esclaramunda of Foix, a Cathar and the great-granddaughter of the Raymond-Roger of Foix (d. 1223), the brother of Esclarmonde of Foix. Llull, who was named Doctor Illuminatus, and born in Majorca in a mixed environment of Christian, Muslim and Jewish culture, was familiar with the teachings and methods of the Sufi Brethren of Sincerity.[116] Moshe Idel argues that Llull had access to techniques of ecstatic Kabbalah, similar to those taught by Abraham Abulafia (1240 – c. 1291), the founder of the school of “Prophetic Kabbalah,” and described in contemporary Hebrew treatises on the Sefer Yetzirah.[117] In 1276 a language school for Franciscan missionaries was founded at Miramar, funded by James II of Majorca.[118]
In 1293, Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Templars, began a tour of the West to try to gather support for a reconquest of the Holy Land, developing relationships with Pope Boniface VIII, Edward I of England, James I of Aragon and Charles II of Naples. Pressure had been growing in Europe for the Templars to be merged with the other military orders, like the Knights Hospitaller.[119] The same plan was supported by Llull. Meeting frequently with the Templars and Hospitallers, Llull tried to enlist them for a peaceful crusade. In 1275, he wrote the Book of the Order of Chivalry, in which he laid out a program for the knights. Llull hoped the aggressive King Philip IV le Bel of France (1268 – 1314) would lead a new crusade, and he presented his plan for the reformation and unification of the military orders. In 1299, he then travelled to Cyprus, where he urged Henry II of Lusignan to join his campaign to convert the Jews and Muslims of the island to Christianity. Though Henry was not interested, Jacques de Molay, “cheerfully received” Llull into his house in Limassol for several weeks in 1302.[120] Llull wanted a united Order under what he called a Bellator Rex, a role he expected would be filled by James II’s nephew, James II of Aragon.[121]
After the Templar’s suppression by Pope
Clement in 1312, some Templars fled to Scotland, and sought refuge with the
excommunicated the king of Scotland, Robert the Bruce (1274 – 1329). However,
the majority of the Templars joined their compatriots in Portugal. By papal
decree, the property of the Templars was transferred to the Hospitallers,
except in the Kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal.[122] With the
protection of King Denis I of Portugal (1261 – 1325), who
refused to pursue and persecute them, they were reconstituted the Order of
Christ.[123]
Denis’ father Afonso III of Portugal was the great-grandson of Henry of
Burgundy, and the grandson of Alfonso VIII of Castile. Denis’ mother was the
daughter of Alfonso X of Castile. Denis’ wife, Elizabeth, the sister of James
II of Aragon and Frederick III of Sicily, more commonly known as Saint
Elizabeth of Portugal, was the great-niece of Elizabeth of Hungary, and was
also featured in her own version of the “miracle of the roses.” Like others at
the time, the Order of Santiago also took in Templars after 1312.[124]
In 1357, the Order of Christ was moved to the town of Tomar, former seat of the
Templars in Portugal. Although Henry II
became the last crowned King of Jerusalem, and also ruled as King of Cyprus,
the Lusignans continued to claim the lost Jerusalem and occasionally attempted
to organize crusades to recapture territory on the mainland.
Matilda of Brabant, the daughter of Henry II of Brabant by his first wife Maria of Swabia, married Robert I of Artois (1216 – 1250), brother of Louis IX of France and Charles I of Anjou. Their daughter, Blanche of Artois, was the widow of Henri III, Count of Champagne, whose father was Theobald IV of Champagne (1201 – 1253), called the Troubadour. According to local legends, souvenirs that Theobald IV brought back to Europe in 1240 from the Barons’ Crusade included the rose called “Provins” from Damascus. Blanche of Artois then married Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster (1245 – 1296), the son of Henry III of England. Edmund’s brother, King Edward I of England (1239 – 1307), took the rose as his emblem, becoming known as the red rose of Lancaster.[125]
Edward I of England, Eleanor of Castile, the step-sister of Alfonso X, was said to have perpetrated acts of anti-Semitism, and is considered to have influenced Edward’s policies towards the Jews.[126] In order to fund his crusading venture, Parliament granted a tax of a twentieth, in exchange for which the Edward I agreed to reconfirm Magna Carta, and to impose restrictions on Jewish money lending.[127] Finally, in 1290, Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion, by which the Jews were expelled from England, a ban which remained in place until it was overturned more than 350 years later by Oliver Cromwell in 1657. Shortly after he expelled the Jews from England in 1290, Edward I added royal approval to the cult of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln by building him a shrine.[128]
Edward I’s son, Edward II of England (1284 – 1327), married Isabella of France, the daughter of Philip IV le Bel and Joan I of Navarre, the granddaughter of Theobald IV of Champagne. Despite the fact that his grandfather Philip IV le Bel ordered the arrest of the Templars in 1312, Edward III founded the neo-Templar Order of the Garter, inspired by King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Edward III, who was king of England from 1327 to 1377, led England into the Hundred Years’ War with France, and the descendants of his seven sons and five daughters contested the throne for generations, climaxing in a series of civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses (1455–85). The name “Wars of the Roses” refers to the heraldic badges associated with the two rival cadet branches of the royal House of Plantagenet who fought for control of the English crown: the White Rose of York and the Red Rose of Lancaster.
The Gesta Hungarorum was written by Anonymous, the notary of Bela III of Hungary (c. 1148 – 1196). Bella married Agnes of Antioch, who was associated with Pontigny Abbey of the Cistercians, and the ancestress of all subsequent Kings of Hungary, and from her descended the Kings of Bohemia from the Přemyslid, Luxembourg, Jagiellon and Habsburg families. A copy of the Gesta Hungarorum, was given by Louis I of Hungary (1326 – 1382), the son of Charles I of Hungary, to Charles V of France (1338 – 1380). Like his siblings, John, Duke of Berry (1340 – 1416), Duke Louis I of Anjou (1339 – 1384), Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (1342 – 1404) and Marie of Valois, Duchess of Bar (1344 – 1404), Charles V was the child of John II, King of France (1319 – 1364), and Bonne, from the dynasty of Luxembourg, who traced their descent to the dragon spirit Melusine. Walter Map was also responsible for the development of the legend of Melusine, or Melusina, a feminine spirit of European folklore, usually depicted as a woman who is a serpent or fish from the waist down, much like a mermaid.
Jean d’Arras novel, La Noble Histoire de Lusignan (“The Noble History of the Lusignans”), which he presented in 1393 to John, was dedicated to Marie of Valois, and expressed the hope that it would aid in the political education of her children. Melusine is popularly known from her depiction of the logo of Starbucks. The House of Luxembourg, the House of Anjou and their descendants the House of Plantagenet and the French House of Lusignan are descended, according to medieval folk legends, from the dragon spirit Melusine from Avalon. Melusine would become a snake from the waist down every Saturday. Bettina Knapp, among others, suggest that Melusine’s transformations on Saturdays evokes the Sabbat of the witch, as well as the Jewish Sabbath.[129] By her magical powers, Melusine was to have built in a single night the Château de Lusignan, the largest castle in France, before she transformed herself into a serpent and flew away, never to be seen again.
John of Berry and his siblings were the first cousins of Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368 – 1437), who was first married to Charles’ granddaughter Mary of Hungary, and his modelled his own Order of the Dragon on Charles’ Order of Saint George. Emperor Sigismund appears in a grimoire titled The Book of Abramelin, which gained significant popularity amongst occult groups of the eighteenth century, in particular the influential Golden Dawn. The introduction to an alchemical book attributed to Nicholas Flamel (c. 1330 – 1418)—a purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, preceding René of Anjou—claims that Flamel purchased the book in 1357. The book tells the story of an Egyptian mage named Abramelin, who taught a system of magical and Kabbalistic secrets to Abraham of Worms, a Jew in Worms, Germany, presumed to have lived from approximately 1362 to 1458. After concluding his studies with Abramelin, Abraham recounts that he travelled to Hungary and employed his skills to give the Emperor Sigismund a “Familiar Spirit of the Second Hierarchy, even as he commanded me, and he availed himself of its services with prudence.” Abraham of Worms also confesses to have used magical means to bring about Sigismund’s marriage with his second wife, Barbara of Cilli (1392 – 1451), with whom he co-founded the Order of the Dragon in 1408.
Sigismund’s only daughter and successor from Barbara was Elizabeth of Luxembourg. In 1411, Sigismund had managed to have the Hungarian estates promise that they would recognize Elizabeth’s right to the Holy Crown of Hungary and elect her future husband as king, Albert II of Germany (1397 – 1439), of the House of Hapsburg. Abraham of Worms also claimed, “I aided the flight of the Duke [probably Albert II of Germany], and of his Pope John [XXIII], from the Council of Constance, who would otherwise have fallen into the hands of the enraged Emperor [Sigismund]; and the latter having asked me to predict unto him which one of the two Popes, John XXIII and Martin V, should gain in the end, my prophecy was verified; that fortune befalling which I had predicted unto him at Ratisbon.” John XXIII (1410–1415) was antipope during the Western Schism, that had resulted from the confusion following the Avignon Papacy. At the instigation of Sigismund, Pope John called the Council of Constance of 1413, which deposed John XXIII and Benedict XIII, accepted Gregory XII’s resignation, and elected Pope Martin V to replace them, thus ending the contributed to end the Western Schism in 1417.
The Council of Constance also contributed
to the Hussite Wars, when Jan Hus (c. 1372 – 1415) was
condemned as a heretic, leading to his execution, despite the fact that
Sigismund had granted him a safe-conduct and protested against his imprisonment.[130]
According to Louis I. Newman, in Jewish Influence on Christian Reform
Movements, there was distinct Jewish influence in Hus’ thought. A note in
the Book of Acts of the Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna of
1419 mentions a conspiracy between the Waldensiens—a sect associated with the
Cathars—with Jews and Hus’ followers.[131]
Hus made use of the works of the Jews of Prague, and quotes from Rashi, the Targum
of Jonathan ben Uzziel, the famous rabbinic sage of the first century, and the
commentary of Gershom ben Judah (c. 960 – 1040). He makes extensive use of the Postilla
of the Franciscan teacher Nicholas of Lyra (c. 1270
– 1349), which in turn is based on Rashi.[132] Not only was Hus stigmatized as a “Judaizer,”
but when he was about to be burned at the stake for heresy in 1415, he was
denounced with the words: “Oh thou accursed Judas, who breaking away from the
counsels of peace, hast consulted with the Jews.”[133]
Barbara performed ceremonial duties as the first lady of Europe in the Council of Constance. However, Barbara was very unpopular with the nobility, who resented her sympathy for the Hussites. Because she was accused of adultery and intrigue, Barbara became popularly known as “The German Messalina,” named after the scandalous third wife of Emperor Claudius.[134] Barbara has also been portrayed as a lesbian vampire. Pope Pius II, chronicled Barbara in his Historia Bohemica, written in 1458, where he accused her of associating with “heretics” and denying the afterlife, and claimed that Barbara and her daughter Elizabeth used to profane the Holy Communion by drinking real human blood during the liturgy. Barbara was also accused of maintaining a female harem and staging huge sexual orgies with young girls.[135]
According to Balkan folklore, Barbara known as the “Black Queen,” is remembered as a beautiful but cruel woman with long black hair, who was always dressed in black. Since she dabbled in black magic, she was able to control various beasts. She apparently kept a black raven which was trained to gouge the eyes and tear off the skin of her enemies. The queen had many lovers, but when she lost interest in them, she would order her guards to throw them over the walls of the castle. She reportedly gave herself and the Zagreb fortress of Medvedgrad, ruled by her brother Frederick, to the Devil to save her treasure from Turkish attacks. She Later tried to trick the devil but failed. She was turned into a snake. But once every hundred years, on a certain day, it is possible for a man who, if he encounters her in the form of a snake, to remove the curse with a kiss.[136]
Barbara also had a reputation as an astrologer and alchemist. Stanislav Južnič, described Barbara as “the richest female alchemist of all times,” and how she used very expensive but easily breakable tools for her experiments, such that today there is no remaining evidence.[137] In a manuscript that is now lost around 1440, the Bohemian alchemist Johann von Laz is said to have reported on their alchemical experiments in the castle above Samobor, where she kept a laboratory in the basement.[138]
In 1431, Emperor Sigismund crowned Vlad II, prince of Wallachia (before 1395 – 1447), in Nuremberg and also conferred upon him membership in two prestigious orders, those of Saint Ladislas and the Order of the Dragon.[139] It was Vlad II’s son, Vlad III the Impaler (1431 – 1476/77), who inspired the name of the vampire “Count Dracula” in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The name Dracula means “Son of Dracul,” and was a reference to being invested with the Order of the Dragon. In the Romanian language, the word dracul can mean either “the dragon” or, especially in the present day, “the devil.” Vlad acquired the name “The Impaler” for his preferred method of torture and execution of his enemies by impalement.
The House of Luxembourg’s struggle for supremacy with the House of Habsburg within the Holy Roman Empire and Central Europe, all came to end in 1443, when it suffered a succession crisis, precipitated by the lack of a male heir to assume the throne. Since Sigismund and his niece Elizabeth of Görlitz were both without heirs, all possessions of the Luxembourg dynasty were redistributed among the European aristocracy. The Duchy of Luxembourg become a possession of Philip the Good (1396 – 1467), Duke of Burgundy, grandson of John of Berry’s brother Philip the Bold. Philip the Good also inherited the lands of Brabant, which were affiliated with the Swan Knight legend. Philip the Good founded the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1430 to celebrate his marriage to Isabella of Portugal, sister of Prince Henry the Navigator, Grand Master of the Order of Christ.
Emperor Frederick III (1415 – 1493), first emperor of the House of Habsburg, continued decorating aristocrats with the Order of the Dragon.[140] Frederick III’s son Maximilian I (1459 – 1519) married the heiress Mary of Burgundy, the granddaughter of Philip the Good, and became Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Their son, Philip I of Castile (1478 – 1506), married Juana, the daughter of Spain’s Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II (1452 – 1516) and Queen Isabella (1451 – 1504), who reigned together over a dynastically unified Spain. Ferdinand II’s great-grandfather was Alonso Enríquez (1354 – 1429), also known as Alfonso Enríquez, who was Lord of Medina de Rioseco and Admiral of Castile, who was the son of Federico Alfonso of Castile, 1st Señor de Haro (1334 – 1358) and his mistress, a reputedly Jewish woman named Paloma, who belonged to the bin Yahya family, members of which were prominent in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, and before that going back to the Exilarchs in Babylonia and Persia.[141] Philip and Joanna’s son, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500 – 1558), inherited an empire where “the sun does not set,” eventually uniting the Habsburg, Burgundian, Castilian, and Aragonese inheritances.
Elizabeth of Austria, the daughter of Emperor Sigismund’s daughter Elizabeth of Luxembourg and Albert II of Germany, married Casimir IV, King of Poland. They had four children who would produce the most important personalities in the history of the occult, through an inter-mingling of the Order of the Dragon, descendants of the Knight Swan, the Medici and the supporters of Martin Luther. The Renaissance began during the de facto rule of Florence by Cosimo de Medici (1389 – 1464), the influential Italian banker and politician and the first member of the Medici family. Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519 – 1574), great-grandson of Cosimo the Elder and a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, was brought up in Naples at the household of Don Samuel Abarbanel (1473 – 1551), the son of the famous Kabbalist, Don Isaac Abarbanel (1437 – 1508), and his daughter-in-law Benvenida.[142] Both Eleanora and Cosimo I had their portraits painted gesturing the secret hand-sign of the Jewish converts to Christianity known as Marranos, and also as Conversos, a deliberate positioning of the hand where the index and the fourth finger are touching together, while the second and fifth fingers are spread apart.[143] Their children would intermarry with the important houses of Este, Sforza, Visconti, Gonzaga and Savoy—who were hereditary claimants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem—producing several Grand Masters of the so-called Priory of Sion, popularized in Dan Brown’s sensationalistic The Da Vinci Code.
On August 2, 1492, on Tisha B’Av (“the Ninth of Av”)—a day commemorated in Judaism as involving great disasters, primarily the destruction of both Solomon’s Temple, Isaac Abarbanel, famously led 300,000 fellow Jews out of Spain carrying a Torah. The following day, Christopher Columbus (1451 – 1506) set sail for the New World. Contrary to popular assumption, Columbus’ voyage was not funded by Ferdinand and Isabella, but rather by two Jewish Conversos, Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez, along Abarbanel.[144] “In the same month in which Their Majesties issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories—in that same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies,” announced Columbus in his account of his expedition.[145] “The connection between the Jews and the discovery of America was not, however,” noted the famous Jewish historian Cecil Roth, “merely a question of fortuitous coincidence. The epoch-making expedition of 1492 was as a matter of fact very largely a Jewish, or rather a Marrano, enterprise.”[146] A portrait of Columbus painted by Renaissance painter Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1485 – 1547) has him deliberately gesturing what is believed to be a secret hand-sign of the Marranos.
Thomas of Torquemada (1420 – 1498), despite that fact that, like the Catholid Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella themselves, was as of Marrano origin, to be one of the chief supporters of the Alhambra Decree enforced the expulsion of the Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1492.[147] Torquemada was the first Grand Inquisitor of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, a group of ecclesiastical prelates that was created in 1478, for “upholding Catholic religious orthodoxy” within the lands of the newly formed Kingdom of Spain, ruled by the Catholic Monarch, Ferdinand and Isabella. Torquemada was concerned that of the more than half of the Jews of Spain who, like many Muslims, converted to Christianity in order to escape persecution, known as Marranos, continued to hold secretly to their faith. Owing to the use of torture to extract confessions, and his advocacy of burning at the stake for heretics, Torquemada’s name has become synonymous with cruelty, religious intolerance, and fanaticism. This led Torquemada, despite that fact that, like the Monarchs themselves, was as of Marrano origin, to be one of the chief supporters of the Alhambra Decree enforced the expulsion of the Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1492.[148]
While secret conversion of Jews to another religion during the Spanish inquisition is the most known example, as Rabbi Joachim Prinz explained in The Secret Jews, “Jewish existence in disguise predates the Inquisition by more than a thousand years.”[149] There were also the examples of the first Gnostic sects, which comprised of Merkabah mystics who entered Christianity. Likewise, in the seventh century, the Quran advised the early Muslim community, “And a faction of the People of the Scripture say [to each other], “Believe in that which was revealed to the believers at the beginning of the day and reject it at its end that perhaps they will abandon their religion.”[150] As reproduced in 1608 in La Silva Curiosa by Julio-Inigues de Medrano (1520’s – 1585-1588?) in 1492, Chemor, chief Rabbi of Spain, wrote to the Grand Sanhedrin, which had its seat in Constantinople, for advice, when a Spanish law threatened expulsion. This was the reply:
Well-beloved brothers in Moses, if the king of France forces you to become Christian, do so, because you cannot do otherwise, but preserve the law of Moses in your hearts. If they strip you of your possessions, raise your sons to be merchants, so that eventually they can strip Christians of their possessions. If they threaten your lives, raise your sons to be physicians and pharmacists, so that they can take the lives of Christians. If they destroy your synagogues, raise your sons, to be canons and clerics, so that they can destroy the churches of the Christians. If they inflict other tribulations on you, raise your sons to be lawyers and notaries and have them mingle in the business of every state, so that putting the Christians under your yoke, you will rule the world and can then take your revenge.[151]
Samuel Usque (c.1500 - after 1555), a Portuguese Marrano who settled in Ferrara, wrote an apology titled the Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, where he warned European rulers:
You should consider how much harm you bring upon yourself by compelling Jews to accept your faith, for these ways… in the end become the means that undermine and destroy them [European rulers].
Jews were God’s chosen people, he reminded his readers, and when they were forced to convert, they became God’s chosen agents against their oppressors: “
Since throughout Christendom Christians have forced Jews to change their religion, it seems to be divine retribution that these Jews should strike back with the weapons that are put into their hands to punish those who compelled them to change their faith…[152]
The Medicis were one of several influential
Italian families, sometimes referred to as the Black Nobility, who included the
Orsini, Farnese and Borgia families, often protectors of the Jews, at times
even suspected of being secretly Jews, who also produced a number of popes. The
House of Borgia, for example, an Italo-Spanish noble family from Aragon, which
rose to prominence during the Italian Renaissance, was widely rumored to be of
Jewish origin.[153]
Several rumors have persisted throughout the years, primarily speculating as to
the nature of the extravagant parties thrown by the Borgia family. One example is
the Banquet of Chestnuts, a supper purportedly held in the Papal Palace by former
Cardinal, Lucrezia’s brother, Cesare Borgia (1433 – 1499), who was a major inspiration
for Machiavelli’s The Prince.
The Jews of Florence were one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in Europe, and one of the largest and one of the most influential Jewish communities in Italy. The fate of Tuscan Jewry in the early modern period was inextricably linked to the favor and the fortune of the Medicis. Many Jews who settled in Florence were merchants and money lenders. The Jewish presence in Italy dates to the pre-Christian Roman period. Though a Jewish presence was registered in Lucca as early as the ninth century and a network of Jewish banks had spread throughout the region by the mid-fifteenth, the organized Jewish communities of Florence, Siena, Pisa and Livorno were political creations of the Medici rulers.
Growing persecution in other parts of Europe had led many Kabbalists to find their way to Italy, which during the Renaissance became one of the most intense areas of Kabbalistic study, second only to Palestine. According to Gershom Scholem, “the activities of these migrants strengthened the Kabbalah, which acquired many adherents in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.” Laying the basis for the rediscovery of the occult tradition of classical philosophy was, as noted by Moshe Idel, one of the foremost scholars of the subject, has pointed out, that “Kabbalah was conceived by both Jewish and Christian Renaissance figures as an ancient theology, similar to and, according to the Jews, the source of such later philosophical developments as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Pythagoreanism, and atomism.”[154]
The key representative of the Italian
Kabbalists of the Renaissance was Leone Ebreo (c. 1465 – c. 1523), the son of
Don Isaac Abarbanel. Following medieval Jewish sources, Ebreo saw Plato as
dependent on the revelation of Moses, and even as a disciple of the ancient
Kabbalists. While Rabbi Yehudah Messer Leon, a committed Aristotelian,
criticized the Kabbalah’s similarity to Platonism, his son described Plato as a
divine master. Other Kabbalists, such as Isaac Abarbanel and Rabbi Yohanan
Alemanno believed Plato to have been a disciple of Jeremiah in Egypt.[155] In Ge Hizzayon or Valley
of Vision, by Rabbi Abraham Yagel (c. 1553 – 1624), Hermes and Abraham ibn
Ezra are mentioned together in a discussion of scientific issues.[156]
On the similarity of the teachings of the Greek philosophers and the Kabbalah,
Yagel commented:
This is obvious to anyone who has read
what is written on the philosophy and principles of Democritus, and especially
on Plato, the master of Aristotle, whose views are almost those of the Sages of
Israel, and who on some issues almost seems to speak from the very mouth of the
Kabbalists and in their language, without any blemish on his lips. And why
shall we not hold these views, since they are ours, inherited from our
ancestors by the Greeks, and down to this day great sages hold the views of
Plato and great groups of students follow him, as is well known to anyone who
has served the sage of the Academy and entered their studies, which are found
in every land.[157]
Cosimo was influenced by Gemistus Pletho (c. 1355/1360 – 1452/1454), considered one of the most important influences on the Italian Renaissance as the chief pioneer of the revival of Greek scholarship in Western Europe. As revealed in the Nomoi or Book of Laws, which he only circulated among close friends, Pletho rejected Christianity in favor of a return to the worship of the pagan gods of Ancient Greece, mixed with wisdom based on Zoroaster and the Magi.[158] Pletho drew up plans in his Nomoi to radically change the structure and philosophy of the Byzantine Empire in line with his interpretation of Platonism, and supported the reconciliation of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches in order to secure Western Europe’s support against the Ottomans. Pletho re-introduced Plato’s ideas to Western Europe during the 1438–1439 Council of Florence, a failed attempt to reconcile the East–West schism. There, Pletho met Cosimo de Medici and influenced him to found a new Platonic Academy.
About 1460, Cosimo de Medici the Elder commissioned the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum by Italian philosopher Marisilio Ficino (1433 – 1499), an Italian scholar, astrologer and Catholic priest, who become one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the Renaissance. Ficino was succeeded in the leadership of his academy by Pico della Mrandola (1463 – 1494), one of the first exponents of Christian Kabbalah. Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, which is taken as a characteristic example of Renaissance humanism, begins by quoting Hermes Trismegistus, “what a great miracle is man.” Renaissance humanism, however, did not help to diffuse interest in the “irrational.” “On the contrary,” noted Jean Seznec, in The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, “the first effect of humanism was to encourage astrology.”[159] According to Seznec, Ficino was inspired by the Picatrix, an astrological book of the Sabians, which focused particularly on what it called “talismans,” which it compared explicitly to the alchemical elixir.[160]
Three works of Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445 – 1510), a purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, being some of the most recognized Renaissance paintings, The Minerva and The Centaur, The Birth of Venus, and The Primavera, all dealt with occult themes and represent the magical practice of drawing down planetary influences into images. For the Primavera, had consulted Ficino. Frances Yates commented: “I want only to suggest that in the context of the study of Ficino’s magic the picture begins to be seen as a practical application of that magic, as a complex talisman, an image of the world arranged so as to transmit only healthful, rejuvenating, anti-Saturnian influences to the beholder.”[161] Botticelli’s chief patron, along with the Este and the Gonzaga families, was the grandson of Cosimo de Medici, Lorenzo de Medici (1449 – 1492), also known as “the Magnificent” (Lorenzo il Magnifico) by contemporary Florentines.
Cosimo the elder was a member of the neo-Arthurian Military Order of the Crescent, founded in 1448, by René of Anjou (1409 – 1480), also known as Good King René, who was a prince of the blood, and for most of his adult life also the brother-in-law of the reigning king Charles VII of France. René was the grandson of Marie of Valois, the sister of John, Duke of Berry, who claimed descent from Melusine. René, through his descent from Charles I of Anjou, was King of Jerusalem, as well as of Naples and Hungary, Duc d’Anjou, de Bar et Lorraine. René married to Isabella, Duchess of Lorraine, and in 1434, was recognized as Duke of Lorraine by Emperor Sigismund, founder of the Order of the Dragon.
Cosimo’s interest in ancient manuscripts, which gave birth to his academy of Platonic studies in Florence headed by Marsilio Ficino, was through the encouragement of René of Anjou, who also fostered the transplantation of Italian Renaissance thought in his own dominions.[162] In his fight to gain the Kingdom of Naples, René had been supported by Cosimo de Medici the elder, whose descendants became Dukes of Florence and later Grand Dukes of Tuscany as well as John de Montgomery (c.1445 - c.1485), Constable of the Garde Écossaise, the Scots Guard. The group wore a Fleur de Lys on their left breast to show that they owed allegiance to the King of France.[163] They participated at the siege of Orleans alongside Rene d’Anjou and Joan of Arc in 1428. René d’Anjou was “Reignier” in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, where he pretends to be the Dauphin to deceive the French heroin Joan of Arc (c. 1412 – 1431), who later claims to be pregnant with his child. Henry VI of England was the son of Henry V, a member of the Order of the Dragon. Henry V, who also claimed Swan Knight ancestry and adopted the swan as a crest, was also a close ally of Philip the Good, founder of the Order of the Golden Fleece.[164]
In 1439, following the granting of its
patent, Montgomery, with funding from Cosimo de Medici, and under the patronage
of René, formed the Ordre du Lys.[165]
In 1444, René ended his war with Philip the Good, founder of the Order of the
Golden Fleece, by marrying his eldest son, John II, Duke of Lorraine (1426 – 1470),
to Philip’s niece Marie of Bourbon. In 1448, the year of the marriage of his
daughter Margaret of Anjou to Henry VI of England, René founded the Order of
the Crescent, whose avowed purpose was the re-establishment of the
Judaic-Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.[166]
In the same year, the
Order was fighting in Serbia, in an army that consisted of Hungarians,
Wallachians and Knights of the Orders of the Dragon, the Order of the Crescent
and the Order of the Lys. A number of Jewish warriors also joined one or other
of the Orders, certainly the Lys, and fought or acted as physicians, alongside
their Christian brethren. According to the order’s website, the reasons for
this date back to the foundation of the Jewish Princedom of Septimania in the
Languedoc region of Southern France in the eighth century.[167] Many of the
members who fought in the Balkans were descendants of Jews brought out of Spain
and later Byzantium by the Medicis.
In 1490–1492, the Order of the Fleur de Lys became involved in moving large numbers of Jews out of Spain and Portugal and resettling them in the domains of the of the Medicis and those of René II of Lorraine (1451 – 1508), the son of René of Anjou’s daughter Yolanda of Bar, and Ferry II of Vaudémont, a member of her father’s Order of the Crescent.[168] René II succeeded Ludovico Sforza as Grand Master of the Order of the Lys. Married twice, René II of Lorraine’s first wife was Jeanne d’Harcourt de Montgomery, Countess of Tancarville, daughter of René de Montgomery, René of Anjou’s godson, and son of John Montgomery. After Jeanne’s death, he married Phillipa of Guelders, the daughter of Adolf, Duke of Guelders (1438 – 1477). Adolph’s mother, Catherine of Cleves (1417 – 1479), was the daughter of Adolph I, Duke of Cleves (1373 – 1448), who was raised by Emperor Sigismund as duke and a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire in 1417. Catherine commissioned the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, upon the occasion of her marriage to Arnold, Duke of Guelders (1410 – 1473). The Hours is considered one of the most lavishly illuminated manuscripts to survive from the fifteenth century and has been described as one of the masterpieces of Northern European illumination.[169]
Succeeding René as Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys was a close friend of Cosimo, Francesco I Sforza (1401 – 1466). Francesco and his father-in-law Filippo Maria Visconti (1392 – 1447) commissioned the Visconti-Sforza tarot decks, the oldest surviving tarot cards.[170] Francesco’s son, Ludovico Sforza (1452 – 1508) commissioned Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. He was married to Beatrice d’Este, in a double-wedding in 1491, orchestrated by da Vinci, with his niece Anna Sforza and Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1476 – 1534), of the House of Este, who was reputed to be of Davidic descent.[171] Alfonso I d’Este later remarried in 1502, to the notorious femme fatale Lucrezia Borgia (1480 – 1519), the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI (1431 – 1503).
Il sorriso di Caterina, la madre di Leonardo, by the historian Carlo Vecce, one of the most distinguished specialists on Leonardo da Vinci, da Vinci’s mother was a Circassian Jew born somewhere in the Caucasus, abducted as a teenager and sold as a sex slave. As summarized in the Jerusalem Post:
One thing, however, is beyond dispute: Leonardo, although deeply critical of the injunction of the Torah against idolatrous images for ignoring the transcendental relationship between painting and God (he considered painters to be the grandchildren of God) was, nonetheless, deeply influenced by Jewish mysticism. Given his quest for the original, his exposure to and participation in the world of Christian Kabbalists and Hebrew-speaking Renaissance philo-Semites in Florence and Milan, his universalism, esotericism, ecumenism, admiration for the Jewish concept of free will, his rejection of dogmas, contempt for the Inquisition and its raging friars like Savaronola (nothing appalled Leonardo more than the bonfires of the vanities), it could not have been otherwise.[172]
As the capital city of the dukes of d’Este, Ferrara was a center of Italian and European Judaism. Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and Sephardim, welcomed after their expulsion from Spain, lived under the protection of the local authorities. In 1448, upon a request from Leonello d’Este (1407 – 1450), Pope Nicholas V suppressed the anti-Jewish sermons of the friars. In 1451, his brother Borso (1413 – 1471) declared that he would protect the Jews who entered his lands. In 1473, Borso’s half-brother and Alfonso I’s father, Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1431 – 1505), in opposition to papal demands, protected his Jewish subjects, particularly the moneylenders. In 1481, he authorized Samuel Melli of Rome to buy a mansion in Ferrara and turn it into a synagogue, which is still used. The Spanish Jews were also well received by Ercole I in Tuscany through the mediation of Jehiel of Pisa (d. 1492) and his sons. Jehiel was on intimate terms with Don Isaac Abravanel, with whom he carried on a correspondence. The Italian rabbi and Kabbalist Johanan Alemanno (c. 1435 – d. after 1504), the teacher of Pico di Mirandola, seems to have lived for years in Jehiel’s house.[173] In 1492, when the first refugees from Spain appeared in Italy, Ercole I allowed some of them to settle in Ferrara, promising to let them have their own leaders and judges, permitting them to practice commerce and medicine, and granting them tax reductions.
Alfonso I’s sister Isabella d’Este has been proposed as a plausible candidate for da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, who features the hand-sign typical of Marranos.[174] Isabella married Francesco II Gonzaga (1466 – 1519). Gianfrancesco I Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua (1395 – 1444), the first Gonzaga to bear the title of marquess, which he obtained from Emperor Sigismund, was Francesco II’s great-grandfather. His son, and Francesco II’s grandfather, was Ludovico III Gonzaga (1412 – 1478), Marquis of Mantua, who married Barbara of Brandenburg, niece of Emperor Sigismund. Isabella and Francesco II’s son, Ferrante Gonzaga (1507 – 1557), was a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys and a purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Ferrante’s nephew and successor as Grand Master of the Priory of Sion was Federico II Gonzaga (1500 – 1540). Isabella d’Este was a renowned patron and collector who supported artists such Andrea Mantegna, Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, who supposedly preceded Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, as Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Purportedly, da Vinci had succeeded as Grand Master of the Priory of Sion after Sandro Botticelli, Yolande de Bar and her father René of Anjou. Botticelli’s chief patron was Lorenzo de Medici, along with the Este, the Gonzaga families.
Francesco I Sforza was also the grandfather of Cosimo I de Medici. In 1537, Jacob Abarbanel, who was one of the two brothers of Isaac Abarbanel, was instrumental by influencing Cosimo I de Medici in allowing Jews and Marranos from Spain and Portugal to settle in Florence. Cosimo’s wife, Eleonora di Toledo, was the daughter of Pedro Álvarez de Toledo, Viceroy of Naples. Before eventually settling in Tuscany, Eleonora was brought up in Naples at the household of Jacob Abarbanel’s son Don Samuel Abarbanel and daughter-in-law Benvenida, whom she continued to honor as her mother.[175]
René of Anjou, who was well-versed in the occult, included at his court a Jewish Kabbalist known as Jean de Saint-Remy, who, according to some accounts, was the grandfather of the famous mystic Nostradamus (1503 – 1566).[176] Michel de Nostredame, usually Latinized as Nostradamus, was a French physician and reputed seer. Nostradamus’ family was originally Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism before he was born.[177] Nostradamus is best known for his book Les Propheties, a collection of predictions of future events, first published in 1555. Joachim of Fiore and Savonarola and others were major sources for his prophecies.[178] Catherine de Medici, great-granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, grandson of Cosimo de Medici the Elder. Catherine, a leading sponsor of Nostradamus, was also a practitioner of the Black Mass.[179] Cosimo Ruggeri (d. 1615), who was reputed as a master of the occult, black magic and witchcraft during his lifetime, was believed to be Catherine’s own “trusted necromancer, and specialist in the dark arts.”[180]
Catherine married Henry II of France (1519 – 1559), son of Francis I of France (1494 – 1547), one of Europe’s two most powerful kings, and a knight of the Order of the Garter and the Order of the Golden Fleece. Francis I was the grandson of Philip II, Duke of Savoy, and married Claude of France, the daughter of Louis XII of France. A prodigious patron of the arts, Francis I promoted the emerging French Renaissance by attracting many Italian artists to work for him, including da Vinci, who brought the Mona Lisa, which Francis I had acquired.
Francis I’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre, was a poet, novelist, and also an important sponsor of the French Renaissance, gathering around her a protected circle of poets and writers, including François Rabelais (1483 – 1553), author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is in the first book that Rabelais writes of the Abbey of Thélème, built by the giant Gargantua, where the only rule is “fay çe que vouldras” (“Fais ce que tu veux,” or “Do what thou wilt”). The word “thelema” is rare in classical Greek, where it “signifies the appetitive will: desire, sometimes even sexual,”[181] but it is frequent in the original Greek translations of the Bible.
Marguerite’s most notable works are a classic collection of short stories, the Heptameron, and a controversial religious poem, Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (“Mirror of the Sinful Soul”), a mystical narrative of the soul as a yearning woman calling out to Christ as her father, brother and lover. As explained by Christopher Prendergast, “It derives directly from the series of erotic love songs exchanged by a bridegroom and his bride in the Song of Songs, interpreted since the twelfth century as an allegorical expression of the love between Christ and the individual believer.”[182] The theologians of the University of Sorbonne condemned her work as heresy and ordered copies to be burned. A monk said Marguerite should be sewn into a sack and thrown into the Seine. Students at the Collège de Navarre satirized her in a play as “a Fury from Hell.” However, Francis I forced the charges to be dropped and obtained an apology from the Sorbonne.[183]
Henry II’s sister, Margaret of Valois married Philibert of Savoy (1528 – 1580), a knight of the Order of the Garter, and a claimant of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Amadeus VIII (1383 – 1451) of Savoy, Antipope Felix V, was elevated by Emperor Sigismund to the Duke of Savoy in 1416. Amadeus VIII’s mother was Bonne of Berry, the daughter of John, Duke of Berry. Amadeus VIII married, Mary of Burgundy, the daughter of John of Berry’s brother, Philip the Bold, who was the grandfather of Philip the Good, founder of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Amadeus VIII and Mary’s son Louis, Duke of Savoy (1413 – 1465) married Anne de Lusignan. Their grandson, Charles III of Savoy (1486 – 1553), Emmanuel Philibert’s father, became head the Savoy dynasty, which had now also received the titles of the kingdoms of Cyprus, Jerusalem and Armenia. When Emmanuel Philibert and his wife, Margaret of Valois, asked Nostradamus’ help to produce an heir for the throne, he assured the princess to rejoice, because the child with whom she was pregnant, “Would be a Son, who would be called Charles, and who would become the greatest Captain of his century.”[184] Their son was Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy (1562 – 1630), known as the Great, Marquis of Saluzzo, Duke of Savoy, Prince of Piedmont and Count of Aosta, Moriana and Nice and also Titular King of Cyprus and Jerusalem.
Charles Emmanuel’s son, Victor Amadeus I, Duke of Savoy (1587 – 1637) married Princess Christine Marie of France, the daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici. The artist Bronzino (1503 – 1572) painted the young Marie gesturing the Marrano hand-sign, just as he had of her grandparents, Cosimo I and Eleanor of Toledo. Marie’s father, Francesco I de Medici, was also passionately interested in alchemy and spent many hours in his private laboratory, the Studiolo in the Palazzo Vecchio, which held his collections small, precious, unusual or rare objects and where he conducted alchemical experiments. The Studiolo was completed from 1570-1572, by teams of artists under the supervision of Vasari and the scholars Giovanni Batista Adriani and Vincenzo Borghini. The walls were covered with paintings representing mythological themes or representing trades. In the center is a fresco of Prometheus receiving jewels from nature.
Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) was sponsored by Marie de Medici’s uncle, Cosimo II de Medici (1590 – 1621), the son of Cardinal Ferdinando, whose father was Cosimo I de Medici. Cosimo II’s mother was Christina of Lorraine, the daughter of Charles III of Lorraine (1543 – 1608) and the favorite granddaughter of Catherine de Medici. Christina’s brother, Henry II, Duke of Lorraine, married Margherita Gonzaga, daughter of Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and nephew of Louis Gonzaga, another purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Vincenzo I Gonzaga’s wife was Eleonora de Medici, the sister of Marie de Medici.
During and after the regency, Marie de Medici played a major role in the development of Parisian artistic life by focusing on the construction and furnishing of the Luxembourg Palace, which she referred to as her “Palais Medici’s.” Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577 – 1640), then court painter to the Duchy of Mantua under Vincenzo I Gonzaga, had first met Marie at her proxy wedding in Florence in 1600. She commissioned Rubens to create a 21-piece series glorifying her life and reign to be part of her art collection in the palace. This series is now known as the “Marie de’ Medici cycle,” currently housed in the Louvre Museum, and employs iconography throughout to depict Henry IV and Marie as Jupiter and Juno and the French state as a female warrior.
Cosimo Ruggeri, who had been the trusted sorcerer of Catherine de Medici, was a personal friend of Marie de Medici’s favorites, Concino Concini (1569 – 1617) and his wife Leonora Dori.[185] Leonora Dori suffered from debilitating depressions and paralyzing spasms, which the queen and her courtiers believed to be due to demonic possession. Dori was arrested, imprisoned in Blois and accused of sorcery and subsequently burned at the stake. She had been treated by the court Marie’s court physician, a Marrano named Elijah Montalto (1567 – 1616), who had been raised as a Christian in Portugal and openly returned to Judaism on settling in Venice.[186]
Montalto was one of the teachers of Rabbi Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591 – 1655). Delmedigo’s only known works are Sefer Elim (Palms), published in 1629 by Menasseh ben Israel, dealing with mathematics, astronomy, the natural sciences, and metaphysics, as well as some letters and essays. As Delmedigo writes in his book, he followed the lectures by Galilei, during the academic year 1609–1610, and often referred to Galilei as “rabbi Galileo.” Delmedigo declared in Sefer Elim, that the proofs of Copernicus’ theory are convincing, and that “anyone who refuses to accept them can only be classed among perfect imbeciles.”[187] Galileo was also a friend of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte (1549 – 1627), a member of the court of Christina’s husband, Cardinal Ferdinando. Del Monte, who was reputed to be a homosexual, was a sponsor of Caravaggio, and his interests also included alchemy.[188] Together with his brother, del Monte helped Galileo win a lectureship in mathematics in Pisa in 1589 and in Padua in 1592. Ferdinando also supported the education of his niece, Marie de Medici.
In 1605, Christina of Lorraine invited Galileo to tutor her son Cosimo II de Medici, who would eventually become his most important patron. Galileo was generously welcomed to the Medici court after his discovery of the four largest moons of Jupiter—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto in the summer of 1609, which Galileo called the Medicea Sidera (“the Medician stars”), honoring all four Medici brothers, Cosimo II, Francesco, Carlo, and Lorenzo. Since Cosimo I established the dynasty in the middle of the sixteenth century, in the mythology articulated by the Medici, Jupiter was regularly associated with Cosimo I, the founder of the dynasty and the first of the “Medicean gods,” as Vasari, who painted the mythological themes of the Pallazo Vecchio, referred to them. Galileo asserted in the dedication of the Sidereus nuncius that these celestial bodies were monuments to the Medici dynasty.[189] Galileo used the Medici court to advance his claims and the theories of Copernicus.
According to legend, Christine Marie herself was interested in the occult, and rebuilt Palazzo Madama, following the advice of master alchemists. Apparently, when she became regent after Victor Amadeus I’s death in 1637, the alchemists divulged the secret of the locations of the cave entrances to her.[190] The Savoy family is said to have been quite interested in alchemy. Emmanuel Philibert moved the capital of the recovered Savoyard state to Turin, which is associated with numerous occult legends. It is said that Apollonius of Tyana hid one of his powerful talismans in the most secret of three secret caves. The caves are said to exist in an underground labyrinth in the vicinity of Palazzo Madama and Piazza Castello, where the Savoy family allowed alchemists to undertake secret experiments. Palazzo Madama was begun at the end of the fifteenth century and completed in 1505, for the Medici family. It housed two Medici cardinals and cousins, Giovanni and Giulio, who both later became popes as Leo X and Clement VII. Catherine de Medici also lived here before she was married to Henry II. Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, patron of Caravaggio with an interest in alchemy, lived there until his death in 1627.
In 1546, The famous German painter Lucas
Cranach the Elder (c. 1472 –1553), painted his close friend Martin Luther (1483 – 1546)
gesturing the Marrano hand-sign. In his earlier career, Luther wanted to convert Jews to Lutheranism. In his
later period, however, when he wrote Von den Jüden und iren Lügen (“On
the Jews and Their Lies”), written in 1543, he denounced them and called for
their persecution. In the treatise, Luther argues that synagogues and Jewish schools
be burned, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes set
on fire, property and money confiscated. Luther demanded that no mercy or
kindness be show toward them, and afforded no legal protection, and “these
poisonous envenomed worms” should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for
all time. He even advocated their murder, writing “[W]e are at fault in not
slaying them.”[191]
And yet, Luther nevertheless admitted that his “justification by faith alone,”
one of his most controversial doctrines, was the “true Cabala” in his Commentary
on Galatians.[192]
Luther’s interest in the subject, related Louis I. Newman, likely derived from the
works of the Christian Kabbalist Johann Reuchlin (1455 – 1522), whose nephew
was Luther’s friend and collaborator, Philipp Melanchthon (1497 – 1560). During his second
visit to Rome in 1490, Reuchlin became acquainted with Pico della Mirandola at Florence,
and, learning from him about the Kabbalah, he became interested in Hebrew.[193]
At first, Luther’s challenge to Catholicism was welcomed by Jews who had been victimized by the Inquisition, and who hoped that breaking the power of the Church would lead to greater tolerance of other forms of worship. Abraham Farissol (c. 1451 – 1525 or 1526), attendant at the court of Lorenzo de Medici, regarded Luther as a Crypto-Jew, a reformer bent on upholding religious truth and justice, and whose iconoclastic reforms were directed toward a return to Judaism.[194] Some scholars, particularly of the Sephardi diaspora, such as Joseph ha-Kohen (1496 – c. 1575), were strongly pro-Reformation.[195] As explained by Samuel Usque, since so many Marranos left Spain for England, France and Germany, as well as the Low Countries,
…that generation of converts has spread all over the whole realm, and though a long time has elapsed, these converts still give an indication of their non-Catholic origin by the new Lutheran beliefs which are presently found among them, for they are not comfortable in the religion which they received so unwillingly.[196]
The role of Jewish converts in the spread of the doctrines behind the Reformation has been pointed out on several occasions. During the Middle Ages, Jewish converts who attacked their former faith included Nicholas Donin, Paul Christian, Abner-Alphonso of Burgos (c. 1270 – c. 1347), John of Valladolid (b. 1335), Paul of Burgos (c. 1351 – 1435) and Geronimo de Santa Fe (fl. 1400 – 1430). Impelled by his hatred of Talmudic Judaism, Paul of Burgos, an erudite scholar of Talmudic and rabbinical literature, composed the Dialogus Pauli et Sauli Contra Judæos, sive Scrutinium Scripturarum, which was a source for Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies. Victor von Carben, who was involved in the Pfefferkorn controversy, Emmanuel Tremellius, who published a Latin version of the Hebrew Bible, Jochanan Isaac, the author of two Hebrew grammars, and his son Stephen, all became Protestants and wrote polemics against Catholicism.
According to Rabbi Abraham ben Eliezer Halevi (c. 1460 - after 1528), a Sephardic rabbi and Kabbalist affiliated with Abraham Zacuto and Isaac Abarbanel, the Reformation was a crisis through which the world must pass before the arrival of the messiah, where Luther was God’s agent sent to destroy corrupt Rome before the end of the world. Halevi claimed to have referred to Luther, when foretold before the Reformation, as early as 1498, “that a man will arise who will be great, valiant, and mighty. He will pursue justice and loathe debauchery. He will Marshall vast armies, originate a religion, and destroy the house of the clergy.”[197] Halevi was aware of Luther’s treatise, written in 1523, titled That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew, where he argued that as Judaism was firmly founded in Scripture, to be a good Christian one had almost to become a Jew, and if the Catholic authorities persecute him as a heretic, they would prosecute him as a Jew.
Like many of his contemporaries, Halevi believed that the year 1524 would be the beginning of the messianic era and that the Messiah himself would appear in 1530–31. About 1524, Jews coming from Europe described with joy to Halevi in Jerusalem the anti-clerical tendencies of the Protestant reformers. On the basis of this report, the Kabbalists regarded Luther as a kind of crypto-Jew who would educate Christians away from the bad elements of their faith.[198] Halevi related that a great astrologer in Spain, named R. Joseph, wrote in a forecast on the significance of the sun’s eclipse in the year 1478, as prophesying a man who would reform religion and rebuild Jerusalem. Halevi adds that “at first glance we believed that the man foreshadowed by the stars was Messiah b. Joseph [Messiah]. But now it is evident that he is none other than the man mentioned [by all; i.e., Luther], who is exceedingly noble in all his undertakings and all these forecasts are realized in his person.”[199]
The several Jewish converts to Lutheranism, whom Luther knew, influenced him in many directions. These included Matthew Adrian, a Spanish Jew, the teacher of Conrad Pellican, the grammarian, and Fabritius Capito, a friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 – 1536). Luther sought the advice of Jewish students and Rabbis on numerous occasions. Jews paid visits at his home to discuss with him difficult passages of the Bible, especially for the revision of his translation. On one occasion, three Jews, Shmaryah, Shlomoh and Leo visited him in Wittenberg, and expressed their joy that Christians were now busying themselves with Jewish literature and mentioned the hope among many Jews that the Christians would enter Judaism en masse as a result of the Reformation.[200]
Erasmus of Rotterdam witnessed the medical skills of the alchemists Paracelsus (1493/4 – 1541) at the University of Basel, and the two scholars initiated a letter dialogue on medical and theological subjects.[201] Paracelsus, like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486 – 1535), was a student of Johannes Trithemius (1462 – 1516), a German Benedictine abbot and a polymath, who was denounced as the “Devil’s abbot.” Trithemius acquired a diabolical legend of his own resembling that of Johann Georg Faust (c. 1480 or 1466 – c. 1541), an itinerant alchemist, astrologer and magician, whose story of selling his soul to the Devil inspired Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1604) and Goethe’s drama Faust (1808). Trithemius warned Johannes Virdung in a letter dated August 20, 1507, of a certain trickster and fraud styling himself Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior, fons necromanticorum, astrologus, magus secundus, etc. According to Trithemius, Sabellicus boasted of his powers, even claiming that he could easily reproduce all the miracles of Christ. Trithemius alleges that Sabellicus received a teaching position in Sickingen in 1507, which he abused by indulging in sodomy with his male students, though evading punishment by a timely escape.[202] According to Johannes Manlius, drawing on notes by Melanchthon, in his Locorum communium collectanea (1562), Johannes Faustus was a personal acquaintance of Melanchthon who described him as a “sewer of many devils.” Manlius recounts that Faust had boasted that the victories of the Emperor Charles V in Italy were due to his magical intervention.[203]
In his book De Occulta Philosophia (“On the Occult Philosophy”) published in 1531–1533, Agrippa, mentioned the Templars in connection with the survival of Gnosticism, and thus, according to Michael Haag, “thrust the order into the phantasmagoria of occult forces which were subject of the persecuting craze for which the Malleus Maleficarum was a handbook.”[204] Agrippa’s study of Reuchlin first inspired him in the project of a radical restoration of magic. In 1509-1510, he discussed the idea with Trithemius, to whom he dedicated the first draft of his De occulta philosophia, Agrippa’s most notorious work, his masterpiece, and the one which gave rise to his reputation as a black magician.
By the end of the Counter-Reformation, the period of Catholic resurgence initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation, all hope of conciliating the Protestants was lost and the Jesuits became a powerful force.[205] Marranos were also involved in the society’ founding. The Spanish theologian Ignatius of Loyola (1491 – 1556) had been a member of a heretical sect known as the Alumbrados, meaning “Illuminated,” which was composed mainly of Conversos.[206] Although there is no direct evidence that Loyola himself was a Marrano, according to “Lo Judeo Conversos en Espna Y America” (Jewish Conversos in Spain and America), Loyola is a typical Converso name.[207] As revealed by Robert Maryks, in The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews, Loyola’s successor Diego Laynez was a Marrano, as were many Jesuit leaders who came after him.[208] In fact, Marranos increased in numbers within Christian orders to the point where the papacy imposed “purity of blood” laws, placing restrictions on the entrance of New Christians to institutions like the Jesuits. Jesuits believed that Joachim of Fiore had prophesied the coming of their society.[209] By his own admission, Loyola, who was a nobleman who had a military background, modeled his new order on the Templars, resurrecting the ideals of the warrior-monk.[210] Seven years after papal approbation of the Society, the Inquisitor of Rome was still accusing Jesuits of being Illuminati, sodomites, heretics, and abusers of the confessional.[211] He expressed his hope that Loyola “unless worldly considerations interfered with a righteous judgment” would be burned at the stake.[212]
In 1554, Loyola named Francis Borgia (1510 – 1572), a great-grandson of Pope Alexander VI, commissary general of the Spanish provinces, who was also eventually chosen general of the society in 1565, and canonized in 1670 by Pope Clement X. Borgia became a caballero (“knight”) of the Order of Santiago in 1540, while some of his brothers were caballeros of Santiago and of the Valencian Order of Montesa, who regarded themselves as Templars.[213] Francis Borgia’s brother, Don Pedro Luis Galceran de Borgia, who was arrested on charges of sodomy in 1572, was a Grand Master of the Order of Montesa, whose members considered themselves Templars.[214] Francis’ successes during the period 1565-1572 were such that he has been called the society’s second founder.[215] He established a new province in Poland, new colleges in France and initiated Jesuit missionary work in the Americas. In 1565 and 1566 he founded the missions of Florida, New Spain, and Peru. His emissaries visited Brazil, India and Japan.
In 1565, Borgia, as the newly elected Superior General, sent a group of Jesuits with the army that was put together to relieve Malta from the Great Siege. As Emanuel Buttigieg indicated, the Jesuits and the military-religious Order of Malta, held “a relationship characterized by shared aims and extensive co-operation, as well as by highly critical voices from within the Order of Malta at the perceived over-bearing influence.”[216] Originally known as the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, or Knights Hospitaller, they were a medieval Catholic military order, who inherited the wealth and properties of the Templars after that order was disbanded. It was headquartered variously in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, until it became known by its current name. After seven years of moving from place to place in Europe, the knights gained fixed quarters in 1530 when Charles I of Spain, as King of Sicily, gave them Malta.
Despite intense opposition in the Curia, it was Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483 – 1542) who succeeded in convincing Pope Paul III to approve the Society of Jesus, and he is in part responsible for the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae.[217] In Italy, Loyola and his followers were most warmly welcomed by a group influenced by the humanistic movement, who are sometimes referred to as “the Catholic evangelicals” or the Spirituali, of which Contarini was a member.[218] The Spirituali were the leaders of the movement for reform within the Roman church, who took many of their ideas from older Catholic texts, but certainly found inspiration in the Protestant Reformation, especially Calvinism. The Spirituali included Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto (1477 – 1547), Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500 – 1558), Italian poet Vittoria Colonna, and her friend, the artist Michelangelo. Pietro Bembo, Luigi Alamanni, Baldassare Castiglione and Marguerite de Navarre were among Colonna’s literary friends. Pietro Bembo (1470 – 1547) was an Italian scholar, poet who had a love affair with Lucrezia Borgia. Bembo accompanied Giulio de’ Medici to Rome, where he was soon after appointed Latin secretary to Pope Leo X. In 1514, he became a member of the Knights Hospitaller.[219] In 1542, Bembo become a cardinal after being named by Pope Paul III.
Reginald Pole was an English cardinal of the Catholic Church and the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, then papal legate to Mary Tudor’s England. Assisted by Bishop Edward Foxe (c. 1496 – 1538), Pole represented Henry VIII in Paris in 1529, researching general opinions among theologians of the Sorbonne about the annulment of Henry’s marriage with Catherine of Aragon, so he could marry his mistress Anne Boleyn.[220] Cranmer, who was Pole’s successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, along with Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the king’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, Richard Rich, and Thomas More, the author of Utopia, all figured prominently in Henry VIII’s administration.
Towards the end of 1529, an Englishman, Richard Croke (c. 1489 – 1558), a follower of Erasmus of Rotterdam, travelled to Venice on a secret mission, which seems to have been the idea of Cranmer, who had proposed to Henry VIII that he should consult canonist lawyers and leading Jewish rabbis as to the legality of his proposed divorce.[221] Croke consulted the leading theologian of Venice, expert in Hebrew studies and in touch with Jewish scholars, the Franciscan friar Francesco Giorgi (1466 – 1540), one of the most famous of the Italian Christian Cabalists, as the author of De harmonia mundi. As a member of the patrician Zorzi family, Giorgi had contacts with Venetian government circles as Contarini, and was entrusted with missions of number of delicate missions.[222]
“Giorgi’s Cabalism,” explained Frances
Yates, “though primarily inspired by Pico, had been enriched by the new waves of
Hebrew studies of which Venice, with its renowned Jewish community was an important
centre.”[223]
Like Pico, he saw correspondences between the Kabbalah and the teachings of the
Hermes Trismegistus, which he lent a Christian interpretation. These influences
were integrated into Giorgi’s Neoplatonism in which was included the whole tradition
of Pythagoro-Platonic numerology, even of Vitruvian theory of architecture, which,
for Giorgi was connected with the Temple of Solomon.[224]
Giorgi was also briefly in contact with the famous sorcerer Heinrich Cornelius
Agrippa.[225]
As Yates pointed out, the mission to Venice to consult with its Jewish rabbis and Kabbalists was an odd maneuver considering that Jews were not allowed in England at the time.[226] The affair ultimately led to the English Reformation and the establishment of the Church England, which separated itself from the Catholic Church in Rome. Garter knight Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485 – 1540), whom Pole regarded as an emissary of Satan, was one of the strongest and most powerful advocates of the English Reformation. He helped to engineer an annulment of the king’s marriage to Queen Catherine so that Henry could lawfully marry Anne Boleyn. Henry failed to obtain the Pope Clement’s approval for the annulment in 1534. In response, Parliament endorsed the king’s claim to be Supreme Head of the Church of England, giving him the authority to annul his own marriage.
Before he became King James I of England, James the “Mason King,” was preceded by Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603), during whose reign occult philosophy was a dominant influence.[227] It is known that later German Rosicrucian authors associated the Faerie Queene—Spenser’s poem dedicated to Elizabeth I and featuring the Redcrosse Knight—with their movement.[228] The legendary Christian Rosencreutz is not only a Red Cross knight, but also a knight of the Golden Fleece.[229] The alchemical symbolism of the dragon and the Golden Fleece was alluded to by Ben Johnson in The Alchemist (1610), a satiric play where Sir Epicure Mammon utters the following lines:
I have a piece of Jason’s fleece, too,
Which was no other than a book of alchemy,
Writ in large sheep-skin, a good fat ram-vellum.
Such was Pythagoras’ thigh, Pandora’s tub,
And, all that fable of Medea’s charms,
The manner of our work; the bulls, our furnace,
Still breathing fire; our argent-vive, the dragon:
The dragon’s teeth, mercury sublimate,
That keeps the whiteness, hardness, and the biting;
And they are gathered into Jason’s helm,
The alembic, and then sow’d in Mars his field,
And thence sublimed so often, till they’re fixed.
Both this, the Hesperian garden, Cadmus’ story,
Jove’s shower, the boon of Midas, Argus’ eyes,
Boccace his Demogorgon, thousands more,
All abstract riddles of our stone.[230]
Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his second wife. Henry VIII famously had Anne beheaded for treason when Elizabeth was two years old. Anne’s marriage to Henry VIII was annulled, and Elizabeth was declared illegitimate. In 1544, when she was eleven, Elizabeth gave her step-mother Catherine Parr, the last of Henry VIII’s six wives, a manuscript book titled The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul. Elizabeth translated the poem into English from the French work Miroir de l'âme pécheresse by Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of Francis I, and wrote the manuscript with her own hand, dedicating it with the words, “From Assherige, the last daye of the yeare of our Lord God 1544… To our most noble and vertuous Quene Katherin, Elizabeth her humble daughter wisheth perpetuall felicitie and everlasting joye.”
As demonstrated by Frances Yates in The Occult of the Elizabethan Age, Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi exercised a very great influence on the era of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603), which was “was populated, not only by tough seamen, hard-headed politicians, serious theologians. It was a world of spirits, good and bad, fairies, demons, witches, ghosts, conjurors.”[231] According to Yates, Giorgi’s influence might have had its roots when he was consulted along with the Jewish Rabbis of Venice by Richard Croke, in support of Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, an affair that ultimately led to the English Reformation and the establishment of the Church England, which separated itself from the Catholic Church in Rome.
In 1588, in his capacity as royal astrologer, the infamous sorcerer John Dee (1527 – 1608 or 1609), who possessed copies of Giorgi’s works, was asked to choose the most favorable date for the coronation of Elizabeth, and subsequently tutored the new queen in the understanding of his mystical writings. In his own time, Dee was one of England’s most sought-after scholars, recognized for his opinions on a wide range of topics. Dee was influenced not only by Giorgi but also by Llull, Pico, Reuchlin and Agrippa. Dee immersed himself in the worlds of magic, astrology and Hermeticism, and believed that he found the secret of conjuring angels by numerical configurations in the tradition of the Kabbalah. Dee and his pupil Edward Kelley’s acquaintances included Sendivogius.
Historians often depict the period is as the golden age in English history, representing the height of the English Renaissance with the flowering of poetry, music and literature.[232] It is famous for the flourishing of English drama, led by playwrights such as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser, who was heavily influenced by Giorgi.[233] Spenser inherited not only Neoplatonic influence from the Renaissance magicians Ficino and Pico, but the Christian Kabbalism of Reuchlin, Giorgi, Agrippa.[234] Spenser was also in contact with Philip Sidney and Edward Dyer, pupils of John Dee.
As Yates has indicated, “Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi, with its ‘Judaising’ tendency, might have provided a bridge to conversion for the English Marrano.”[235] Although there is little evidence for the existence of Marranos in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, as elsewhere, their surreptitious presence was felt through the influence of the Christian Kabbalah.[236] Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593) wrote Doctor Faustus (1592), a play developed from the Faust legend in which a man sells his soul to the devil for power and knowledge. Marlowe’s Faustus says, possibly referring to Giorgi, as Yates suggests, “Go and returne an old Franciscan Frier; That holy shape becomes a devill best.” After the appearance of the diabolical Franciscan Friar, Faustus rejects Christ and the Trinity, as Mephistopheles has demanded. Some critics argue that Marlowe’s play inspired Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, dated to the 1588–92 period, a fictional story about the feats of magic performed by the Franciscan friars Roger Bacon (1219/20 – c. 1292) and Thomas Bungay (c. 1214 – c. 1294).
As she grew older, Elizabeth became celebrated for her virginity. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the last of the five monarchs of the House of Tudor. A cult grew around her which was celebrated in the portraits, pageants, and literature of the day. As Elizabeth aged her image gradually changed, and she was portrayed as characters from Spenser’s magical and Neoplatonic poem The Faerie Queene, including Belphoebe or Astraea, and after the Armada, as Gloriana, the eternally youthful Faerie Queene. Spenser’s poem and his Neoplatonic hymns in Elizabeth’s honor, published in the 1590’s, were a direct challenge to the Counter Reformation and their attitude to Renaissance philosophy. The poem, inspired by the Order of the Garter, describes the allegorical presentation of virtues through Arthurian knights in the mythical “Faerieland,” and follows several knights, like the Redcrosse Knight, the hero of Book One who bears the emblem of Saint George.
During the reign of Elizabeth I, Gray’s Inn rose in prominence, and that period is considered the “golden age” of the Inn, with Elizabeth serving as the Patron Lady.[237] Gray’s Inn is one of the four Inns of Court, professional associations for barristers in England and Wales. The four Inns, established between 1310 and 1357, are Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple. The Temples takes their name from the Knights Templar, who originally leased the land to the Temple’s inhabitants (Templars) until their abolition in 1312.[238] After the Templars were dissolved in 1312, their land was seized by the king and granted to the Knights Hospitaller. With the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, the Hospitallers’ properties were confiscated by the king, who leased them to the Inner and Middle Temples until 1573. King James granted the land to a group of noted lawyers and Benchers, including Sir Julius Caesar and Henry Montague, and to “their heirs and assignees for ever.”[239]
The intellectual development of dramas in schools, universities, and Inns of Court in Europe allowed the emergence of the great playwrights of the late sixteenth century.[240] Academic drama stems from late medieval and early modern practices of miracles and morality plays as well as the Feast of Fools and the election of a Lord of Misrule, a role inherited from the Saturnalia, dedicated to Saturn, or Satan, believed to be the origin of the twelve days of Christmastide and modern Christmas.[241] The Feast of Fools includes mummer plays, folk plays performed by troupes of amateur actors, traditionally all male, known as mummers or guisers. Early scholars of folk drama, influenced by James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, tended to view these plays as survivals of pre-Christian fertility ritual.[242]
Gray’s Inn, as well as the other Inns of Court, became noted for the parties and festivals it hosted. The entertainment would have included drinking the health of the Prince of Purpoole, usually a student elected Lord of Misrule for the duration of the Festival.[243] The Lord of Misrule, who presided over the festivities in grand houses, university colleges and Inns of Court, was sometimes called “Captain Christmas,” “Prince Christmas” or “The Christmas Lord,” being the origin of Father Christmas, and later Santa Claus.[244] The Lord of Misrule to John Milton, in a masque of the same name, was the pagan god Comus. In Greek mythology, Comus is the god of festivity and revelry, and the root of the word “comedy.” Ben Jonson associated Comus with Bacchus in Poetaster (1602): “we must live and honor the Gods sometimes, now Bacchus, now Comus, now Priapus.”[245] The pagan fertility god Priapus was the ugly son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, whose symbol was a huge erect penis, and the Greek, half man—half goat god, Pan. According to Henry Cornelius Agrippa in Chapter 39 of his book De Occulta Philosophia published in 1531–1533:
Everyone knows that evil spirits can be summoned through evil and profane practices (similar to those that Gnostic magicians used to engage in, according to Psellus), and filthy abominations would occur in their presence, as during the rites of Priapus in times past or in the worship of the idol named Panor to whom one sacrificed having bared shameful parts. Nor is any different from this (if only it is truth and not fiction) what we read about the detestable heresy of the Knights Templar, as well as similar notions that have been established about witches, whose senile womanish dementia is often caught causing them to wander astray into shameful deeds of the same variety.
Under Elizabeth’s successor, King James I of England, the “Golden Age” of Elizabethan literature and drama continued, with writers such as William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) contributing to a flourishing literary culture, who laid the groundwork for the advent of Freemasonry. Francis Bacon is typically celebrated by Masonic and occult historians as having been a Rosicrucian and as the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Bacon was the first recipient of the Elizabeth’s counsel designation, which was conferred in 1597 when she reserved Bacon as her legal advisor. There are also theories that Bacon was the illegitimate son of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, the First Earl of Leicester, a Knight of the Garter.[246]
Bacon studied law at Gray’s Inn, where he became a prominent member. On 28 January 1594, Bacon took over the role of Treasurer of Gray’s Inn, where he was responsible for the revels. Printed in 1688 from a manuscript apparently passed down from the 1590s, the Gesta Grayorum is an account of the Christmas revels by the law students at Gray’s Inn in 1594. It was decided that the Inn was to be turned into a mock royal court and kingdom, ruled by a “Prince,” in jesting imitation of the royal court of Queen Elizabeth, complete with masques, plays, dances, pageants, ceremonial. The revels, which took place over the Twelve Days of Christmas, were called The Prince of Purpoole and the Honourable Order of the Knights of the Helmet. The title referred to the Manor of Purpoole or Portpoole, the original name of Gray’s Inn. Like the mummers, the theme of these revels centered around the idea of errors being committed, disorder ensuing, and a trial held of the “Sorcerer” responsible, who then restores order.[247]
Dame Frances Yates observed in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, “Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the occult, with ghosts, witches, fairies, is understood as deriving less from popular tradition than from deep-rooted affinity with the learned occult philosophy and its religious implications.”[248] A Midsummer Night’s Dream is replete with occult symbolism. The play also intertwines the Midsummer Eve, referring to the traditional pagan holiday of the summer solstice, and May Day. Both David Wiles of the University of London and Harold Bloom of Yale University have strongly endorsed the reading of this play under the themes of Carnivalesque, Bacchanalia, and Saturnalia.[249] The idea of the mischievous Puck, like Comus, also inspired the archetype of the wise fool, which Shakespeare greatly helped popularize. The paradox of the wise fool is famously demonstrated through the jester in Shakespeare’s King Lear, who works in the royal court and remains the only character who Lear does not severely punish for speaking his mind about the king and his precarious situations. Early editors of Shakespeare also saw echoes of Rabelais in As You Like It, which features many of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches such as “All the world’s a stage,” “too much of a good thing” and “A fool! A fool! I met a fool in the forest.”[250]
It had long been believed that Freemasonry derived from “operative” masonry, or craft guilds of masons, and then evolved into “speculative” masonry or a secret society, with the formation of the of Lodge of London in 1717. However, in 1988, the Scottish historian David Stevenson established the connection between the birth craft of stonemasonry in Scotland and modern Freemasonry, in The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590 to 1710. It was King James IV of Scotland (1566 – 1625)—from the Stuart dynasty often accused of Jewish descent—who in 1603 became King James I of England, of the King James Bible, who brought the Scottish heritage of Freemasonry to his new kingdom.
James II of Scotland (1430 – 1460) made the St Clairs of Roslin the hereditary Grand Masters of Scotland.[251] In 1128, soon after the Council of Troyes, Hugh de Payens, the Templars’ first Grand Master, met with David I of Scotland. According to a contemporary chronicler, David “surrounding himself with very fine brothers of the illustrious knighthood of the Temple of Jerusalem, he made them guardians of his morals by day and by night.”[252] David granted the Templars the lands of Balantrodach, by the Firth of Forth, but now renamed Temple, near the site of Rosslyn, where the order established a seat. Balantrodach became their principal Templar seat and preceptory in Scotland until the suppression of the order between 1307 and 1312. The Templars in Scotland were also to have assisted the excommunicated King of Scotland, Robert the Bruce (1274 – 1329), at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, which resulted in a significant victory against the army of Edward and Eleanor’s son, King Edward II of England (1284 – 1327), in the First War of Scottish Independence, establishing Scotland’s de facto independence. Robert the Bruce claimed the Scottish throne as a direct descendant of David I.
According to M. Thory, the French annalist of Freemasonry, Robert the Bruce founded the Masonic Order of Heredum de Kilwinning after the battle of Bannockburn, reserving to himself and successors on the throne of Scotland the office and title of Grand Master.[253] Lodge Mother Kilwinning is a Masonic Lodge in Kilwinning, Scotland, under the auspices of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, and is reputed to be the oldest Lodge in the world. The Abbey of Kilwinning was supposedly constructed by foreign free Masons, assisted by Scottish masons.[254] In Born in Blood, American historian John J. Robinson found evidence that the Knights Templar sought refuge with the monks of Kilwinning who lived in the Abbey, a ruined abbey located in the center of the town of Kilwinning, North Ayrshire.
Walter Stewart, the 6th High Steward of Scotland (c. 1296 – 1327), who played an important part in the Battle of Bannockburn, married Marjory, daughter of Robert the Bruce. Thus was founded the House of Stuart, when their son Robert II of Scotland eventually inherited the Scottish throne after his uncle David II of Scotland died. It has often been asserted that the Stuarts and Sinclairs, who became hereditary Grand Master of Freemasonry, were descendants from Jews who escaped the Edict of Expulsion issued in 1290 by King Edward I.[255] As Marsha Keith Schuchard has also pointed out, there were persistent claims that not only Templars, but Jews as well were expelled to Scotland. The first significant Jewish communities had come to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. Only sixteen years after being expelled from England by Edward I, France likewise expelled its Jewish population in 1306 AD, a year before the arrest of the Templars. According to James Howell’s History of the Latter Times of the Jews, published in 1653:
The first Christian Prince that expelled the Jews out of his territories, was that heroic King, our Edward the First, who was such a scourge also to the Scots; and it is thought diverse families of the banished Jews then fled to Scotland, where they have propagated since in great numbers; witness the aversion that nation hath above all others to hogs-flesh.[256]
The chiefs of Clan Sinclair, the Earls of Caithness, descend from William St. Clair, 6th Baron of Rosslyn (d. 1297), who was sheriff of Edinburgh and who was granted the barony of Rosslyn in 1280.[257] William St. Clair, 6th Baron of Roslin was the grandfather of Sir William St Clair, who was supposedly the leader of the Templar force at the Battle of Bannockburn. Sir William St Clair’s grandson was Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney (c. 1345 – c. 1400), who is known for legend of explorations of Greenland and North America a century before Columbus. The most sacred site in Freemasonry, Rosslyn Chapel, was famously designed by Henry’s grandson, William Sinclair (1410 – 1480), the third Earl of Orkney, first Earl of Caithness, High Chancellor of Scotland, and knight of the Order of Santiago and the Order of the Golden Fleece.[258] The Da Vinci Code, following on the Holy Blood Holy Grail, popularized the legend that Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland was a repository of occult wisdom, and built by William Sinclair, whose sacred descent from Jesus and Mary Magdalene was symbolized by the Holy Grail, and recognized by their red hair, and whose descendants became for a long time hereditary Grand Masters of Freemasonry in Scotland.
King Robert II Stewart (1316 – 1390), the son of Walter Stewart and of Marjorie Bruce, granted the Abbey of Kilwinning a charter, which was ratified by Robert II’s son, Robert III (c.1337/40 – 1406).[259] King James I (1394 – 1437) of Scotland, the youngest son of Robert III, was a patron of the mother lodge of Kilwinning and presided as Grand Master while staying at the abbey.[260] James I married Joan Beaufort (d. 1445), a daughter of John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, a legitimated son of John of Gaunt by his third wife Catherine Swynford, Their descendants were members of the Beaufort family, which played a major role in the Wars of the Roses. Joan’s mother was Margaret Holland, a member of the Order of the Garter, and the granddaughter of Joan of Kent, wife of Edward the Black Prince and mother of Richard II of England.
Two of the children of James I and Joan included Eleanor and James II of Scotland. Eleanor married Sigismund (1427 – 1496), Archduke of Austria of the House of Habsburg, grandson of Ernest the Iron, a member of the Order of the Dragon. Sigismund’s uncle was Emperor Frederick III, whose son Maximilian I became Grand Master of the Oder of the Golden Fleece after he married Mary of Burgundy, the granddaughter of the Order’s founder, Phillip the Good. James II married Philip the Good’s great-niece, Marie of Guelders, from among the families who claimed descent from the Knight Swan. James II’s wife Marie was the daughter of Adolph I, Duke of Cleves, who was raised by Emperor Sigismund as duke and a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire in 1417, and Catherine of Cleves, who commissioned the Hours of Catherine of Cleves. Marie’s brother, Adolf, Duke of Guelders, was the father of Phillipa of Guelders, the second wife of René II of Lorraine.
James II and Marie’s son, James III of Scotland (1452 – 1488) married Margaret of Denmark. Their son, James IV of Scotland (1473 – 1513), married Margaret Tudor, the daughter of Henry VII of England, a knight of the Golden Fleece, and Elizabeth of York. daughter of Elizabeth Woodville, whose mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, was a fourth cousin twice removed of Emperor Sigismund. Elizabeth Woodville was a key figure in the Wars of the Roses, a dynastic civil war between the Lancastrian and the Yorkist factions between 1455 and 1487. Elizabeth Woodville was widely believed to have been a witch and Edward IV’s brother Richard III of England tried to show there had never been any valid marriage between her and Edward, and that it was the result of love magic perpetrated by Elizabeth and her mother Jacquetta.[261]
According to the order’s own history, an important event in the history of the Order of the Fleur de Lys was the marriage of Marie de Guise to James V of Scotland (1512 – 1542), a member of the Order of the Garter and knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Marie’ father, Claude, Duke of Guise (1496 – 1550), was the founder of a cadet branch of the House of Lorraine, the House of Guise. Claude was the second son of René II of Lorraine, grandson of René of Anjou, and became Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys. Claude of Guise’s brother was Jean, Cardinal of Lorraine (1498 – 1550), who was named Abbot Commendatory of the Abbey of Cluny by his friend Francis I of France. Jean was also a friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam and François Rabelais, author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. It has been argued that the character of Panurge in Rebelais’s most famous work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, is based on Jean, Cardinal of Lorraine, and his residence at Cluny.[262] Jean was succeeded by Claude’s son and Marie’s brother, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine (1524 – 1574), who was Rabelais’ protector.
Their brother, Francis, Duke of Guise (1519 – 1563), married Anna d’Este, daughter of the Ercole II d’Este and Renée. In L’Auguste Maison de Lorraine, by J. de Pange, with introduction by Otto von Habsburg, whose ancient titles included Duke of Lorraine and King of Jerusalem, records that Francis’s and Anna d’Este’s son Henry I, Duke of Guise (1550 – 1588), was welcomed by cries of Hosanna filio David (“Hosanna the son of David”) on entering the town of Joinville in Champagne.[263] In 1548, Marie de Guise had been brought to France under the escort of the Scots Guard, whose captain, Gabriel de Montgomery (1530 – 1574), a senior member of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, was a close friend of Henry II of France, the son of Francis I and husband of Catherine de Medici.[264] Revealing her affiliation to the bloodline, in 1546, Marie de Guise had signed an unusual Bond and Obligation to Sir William Sinclair: “In likewise that we sall be Leal and trew Maistres to him, his Counsill and Secret shewn to us we sall keep secret, and in all mattres gif to him the best and trewest Counsell we can as we sall be requirite thereto… and sall be reddy att all tymes to maintain and defend him…”[265]
Upon Henry II’s death in 1559, Catherine de Medici became regent of their sons in succession, Francis II, and King Charles IX, and she played a key role in the reign of her third son, Henry III of France (1551 – 1589). During Francis II’s reign, the House of Guise attained supreme power, and sought to convert it to true kingship by eradicating the House of Bourbon. Although Francis II was then only fifteen years old, the House of Guise had an advantage in his marriage to Mary, Queen of Scots, who was their niece, as the daughter of James V and Marie Guise. Within days of the Francis II’s accession, the English ambassador reported that “the house of Guise ruleth and doth all about the French King.”[266]
Francis II’s ascension to the throne began a period of political instability that ultimately led to the French Wars of Religion, a prolonged period of war and popular unrest between Catholics and Huguenots in the Kingdom of France between 1562 and 1598. It is considered the second deadliest religious war in European history, after the Thirty Years’ War. Foreign allies provided financing and other assistance to both sides, with Habsburg Spain and the Duchy of Savoy supporting the Guises. Much of the conflict took place during the long regency of Catherine de Medici, widow of Henry II, for her minor sons, the last Valois kings: Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III. Catherine, who was initially lenient towards the Protestants, later hardened her stance and, at the time of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, sided with the Guises. Modern estimates for the number of dead across France vary widely, from 5,000 to 30,000.
Marie de Guise’s father, Claude, Duke
of Guise was made a duke by Francis I of France. The Christian Kabbalist
Guillaume Postel (1510 – 1581), who would become an important influence on the
Rosicrucian movement, came
to the attention of Francis I, and especially to his sister Marguerite of
Navarre, a patron of Rabelais. Postel was introduced to Marguerite and to the
French court by the famous Byzantine scholar John Lascaris (1445 – 1535) who
had escaped the fall of Constantinople as a child in 1453.[267] When still quite young, he came to Venice where Bessarion (1403 –
1472), the titular Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, became his patron, and
sent him to learn Latin at the University of Padua. Before becoming a cardinal,
Bessarion was educated by Gemistus Pletho, who influenced Cosimo the Elder de
Medici to found a new Platonic Academy.
In 1536, when Francis I sought a Franco-Ottoman alliance with the Ottoman Turks, he sent Postel as the official interpreter of the French embassy of Jean de La Forêt to the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople. Postel’s mission was to collect oriental manuscripts to enrich the library al Fontainebleau. Postel is believed to have spent the years 1548 to 1551 on a trip to the East, traveling to the Holy Land—during the period when Isaac Luria was still a young man living in Jerusalem—and Syria to collect manuscripts. Postel’s trip was sponsored by Daniel Bomberg (c. 1483 – c. 1549), the famous printer of Hebrew books who employed rabbis, scholars and apostates in his Venice publishing house.[268] Bomberg befriended Felix Pratensis (Felice da Prato), an Augustinian friar who had converted from Judaism, who encouraged Bomberg to print Hebrew books.[269] Probably Bomberg’s most impressive accomplishment is his publication of the first printed edition of the complete Babylonian Talmud, with the Talmud text in the middle of the page and the commentaries of Rashi and Tosfot surrounding it. Published with the approval of the Medici Pope, Leo X, with editing was overseen by Pratensis, this edition became the standard format, which all later editions have followed.[270] Rashi’s commentary has been included in every edition of the Talmud ever since.
Through his efforts, Postel brought many Greek, Hebrew and Arabic texts into European intellectual discourse in the Late Renaissance and Early Modern periods. Among them were Euclid’s Elements, astronomical works by al-Tusi and other Arabic astronomers, and Latin translations of the Zohar, the Sefer Yetzirah, and the Sefer ha-Bahir, even before they had been printed in the original, and accompanied his translations with a lengthy exposition of his own views.[271]
Guillaume Postel identified himself with the prophet Elijah, or Elias Artista.[272] Like, the medieval millenarian Joachim di Fiore, Postel believed in the coming of the third Elijah mentioned in the Talmud and its exposition of Daniel 12:7, the times, time, and half a time before the end.[273] According to scripture, Enoch was joined in Paradise by another figure prominent in the angel conversations: the prophet Elias (also known as Elijah), whose story was told in 1 Kings 17-19. Elias, like Enoch, was transported to heaven prior to death.[274] He was especially revered in the Jewish tradition, because references in Malachi 4:5-6 suggested that Elias would return from heaven before the Final Judgment to bring the Israelites to repentance.[275]
While studying at the Collège
Sainte-Barbe, Postel became acquainted with Ignatius of Loyola, and held a
lifelong affiliation with the Jesuits. One of Postel’s disciples, Guy Lefèvre de La Boderie (1541 – 1598) translated Giorgi’s De Harmonia Mundi into French. Postel was also associated with the
press of Christophe
Plantin (1568 - 1571), one of the focal centers of the
fine printed book in the sixteenth century. Many historians have argued that Plantin Press
operated as a front for a kind of “pre-Freemasonry.”[276] Plantin named the press “The Golden Compasses,” and his
publications featured the motto Labore e
Constantia, represented by a compass. Plantin published works
by the Family of Love, an international secret society that included
Protestants, Catholics, and Marranos, and which maintained strong Llullist
interests.[277]
While Plantin published
many heretical works, including Kabbalistic treatises, he was also protected by
a network of wealthy Marranos and Calvinists.[278]
Plantin’s most important work is considered to be the Biblia Regia (“King’s Bible”), also known as the Plantin Polyglot. Having faced increasing pressure in the Netherlands, Plantin needed to find a patron who would not be at risk of accusations of heresy or being a Protestant sympathizer. Through the Familist connections, Plantin learned of the Llullist interests of the Spanish king Philip II, Grand Master of the Order of Santiago. In spite of opposition from clerics, Plantin received the support of Philip II, who sent him the learned Benito Arias Montano (1527 – 1598), a fellow member of the Order of Santiago, to lead the editorship. Postel’s disciples, La Boderie participated in the publication of Plantin’s most important work, the Biblia Regia (King’s Bible), also known as the Plantin Polyglot Bible. For printing the Hebrew text, Plantin used among others Daniel Bomberg’s Hebrew type, which he had received from his friends, Bomberg’s two grand-nephews.[279] Postel’s role in the publication of the Bible was kept secret due to his reputation as a revolutionary Kabbalist.[280] As explained by Marsha Keith Schuchard:
Among later Freemasons, the sections written by Montano on the architecture of the Tabernacle and Temple were of particular interest, for they believed that the distinctive Plantin images on the title-pages (hand with compass emerging from cloud to draw a three-quarter circle, square, glove, astrolabe, etc.) were fraught with Masonic import.[281]
In 1591, Joseph Scaliger (1540 – 1609) took a position at the University of Leiden and utilized Plantin Press.[282] In 1531, Nostradamus was invited by Joseph’s father, Italian scholar and physician Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484 – 1558), to come to Agen, France.[283] Scaliger was a classical scholar and philologist, who is regarded by many of his time as the most learned man in Europe. Scaliger was inspired by his meeting with Postel to learn Hebrew and discussed mystical topics with various rabbis. Scaliger considered Postel the most learned man in Europe..[284]
Scaliger owned a copy of the Sefer Hasidim, the foundation work of the Ashkenazi Hasidim.[285] The “Hasideans” of the Bible, also known as Kasideans, are identified by the Freemasons with the Essenes, who hold a particular place of importance in the order. Scaliger asserted that the ancient Hasidaeans (Hasidim) became the Essenes.[286] Citing Scaliger, in The History of Free Masonry, published in 1804, Alexander Lawrie, who is regarded as an excellent authority on Scottish Freemasonry, writes:
The Kasideans were a religious Fraternity,
or an Order of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem, who bound themselves to
adorn the porches of that magnificent structure, and to preserve it from injury
and decay. This association was composed of the greatest men of Israel, who
were distinguished for their charitable and peaceful dispositions, and always
signalized themselves by their ardent zeal for the purity and preservation of
the Temple. From these facts it appears, that the Essenes were not only an
ancient fraternity, but that they originated from an association of architects,
who were connected with the building of Solomon’s temple. Nor was this order
confined to the Holy Land. Like the fraternities of the Dionysiacs, the Free
Masons, it existed in all parts of the world; and though the lodges in Judea
were chiefly, if not wholly, composed of Jews, yet the Essenes admitted into their
order men of every religion, and every rank in life. They adopted many Egyptian
mysteries; and, like the priests of that country, the Magi of Persia, and the
Gymnosophists in India, they united study of moral, with that of natural
philosophy. [287]
Later Plantins were friends of the Dutch painter Peter Paul Rubens—who was also commissioned by Marie de Medici—who did drawings for illustrations and also some portraits of the Plantin-Moretus family. Margaretha Plantin married Franciscus Raphelengius, who led the Leiden branch of the house. They stayed printers in Leiden for two more generations of Van Ravelinge, until 1619. A great-granddaughter of the last Van Ravelinge printer married in 1685 Jordaen Luchtmans, founder of what would become later the still existing Brill Publishers. Christophe’s daughter Margaretha married Franciscus Raphelengius, who led the Leiden branch of the house. They stayed printers in Leiden for two more generations of Van Ravelinge, until 1619. A great-granddaughter of the last Van Ravelinge printer married in 1685 Jordaen Luchtmans, founder of what would become later the still existing Brill Publishers, who had published extensively on Rosicrucian history.
The presence of Scottish Freemasonry had begun in Ulster when William Sinclair of Roslin, hereditary patron of the Scottish Masons, had emigrated there in 1617.[288] Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), author of Gulliver’s Travels, drew upon his experiences in Dublin and Ulster to describe the Kabbalistic, Llullist, and Rosicrucian interests of Scots-Irish Freemasonry. While he conversed with Muslim Sufis and Jewish Kabbalists, Llull also studied the writings of John Scotus Erigena (c. 815 – c. 877), whom medieval commentators believed to be Scottish, considered the greatest Christian philosopher of the Dark Ages. Fascinated by mathematics and geometry, Erigena developed “a mystic sense of the building of the Temple of Solomon,” which contains “the measure by which all things (in the eschaton) are measured.”[289] Erigena’s theosophy influenced Azriel of Gerona 1160 – c. 1238) and other Jewish Kabbalists, who perceived similarities between his Temple mysticism and that of the Sefer Yetzirah.[290] In A Letter from the Grand Mistress, Swift revealed the developments in an “ancient” Masonic tradition in the 1690s:
The Branch of the Lodge of Solomon’s
Temple, afterwards call’d the Lodge of St. John of Jerusalem… is… the
Antientest and Purest now on Earth. The famous old Scottish lodge of Kilwinnin
of which all the Kings of Scotland have been from Time to Time Grand Masters
without Interruption, down from the days of Fergus, who Reign’d there more than
2000 Years ago, long before the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem or the Knights
of Maltha, to which two Lodges I must nevertheless allow the Honour of having
adorn’d the Antient Jewish and Pagan Masonry with many Religious and Christian
Rules.
Fergus being the eldest Son to the chief
King of Ireland, was carefully instructed in all the Arts and Sciences,
especially in the natural Magick, and the Caballistical Philosophy (afterwards
called the Rosecrution)…[291]
Joseph Scaliger paid an influential visit to Scotland, in which he reinforced the interests in Jewish learning of George Buchanan (1506 – 1582) and other courtiers. George Buchanan was the chief tutor of James VI of Scotland (1566 – 1625), and would subsequently influence the Judaizing trend of James’ studies and religious practices.[292] The daughter of James V and Marie Guise was Mary Queen of Scots (1542 – 1587), who married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley (1545 – 1567), to father James VI, later King James I of England.
Plantin Press also published Buchanan’s Judaized drama of Jephtes and his paraphrases of the Hebrew psalms in 1566. In “British Israel and Roman Britain,” Arthur H. Williamson argues that Buchanan was influenced by his Parisian contacts with Iberian Marranos. As Williamson observed, Buchanan experienced a “significantly crypto-Jewish” environment, which appeared publicly as “faultlessly Catholic” but was privately “informed by elements of Jewish religion and identity.”[293] When Buchanan urged the king to eat “the paschal lamb,” critics charged that he wanted James “to become a Jew and live as Jews do.”[294] Throughout this period, explains Schuchard, many important Scots studied in Paris and participated in the “tremendous revival of Lullism” led by Buchanan’s teacher, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (c. 1450 – 1536), who established a chair of Llullist studies at the Sorbonne.[295] Lefèvre had met in Italy with Pico della Mirandola, who argued that Llullism was a form of Kabbalah.[296]
David Seton of Parbroath (d. 1601), Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, was made Chamberlain of Dunfermline for James VI’s wife Anne of Denmark, an office which passed to William Schaw (c. 1550 – 1602), a founding figure in the development of Freemasonry in Scotland. The Setons were at one time considered one of the most influential families in Scotland. In 1345, Alexander de Seton is mentioned in a charter as a Templar knight. When the Templars were deprived of their patrimonial interest by their last Grand Master, Sir James Sandilands (c. 1511 – c. 1579 or c. 1596), they parted as a separate body, with David Seton, Grand Prior of Scotland at their head.[297] James VI appointed Schaw, as King’s Master of Works, and he worked closely with him in architectural, political, and diplomatic affairs.[298]
Since his youth at Marie de Guise’s court, Schaw was familiar with the works of astrologer Girolamo Cardano (1501 – 1576) and his advocacy of the importance of the work of Llull.[299] Marie de Guise had recruited the chemist and astrology Cardano, hoping to make use of his expertise in Hermetic medicine, military engineering, and masonic fortification in her struggle against England.[300] Cardano was one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance. He was born in Pavia, Lombardy, the illegitimate child of Fazio Cardano, a close personal friend of Leonardo da Vinci. Cardano met Nostradamus and was aware of his Jewish ancestry and of his boast that he inherited the prophetic powers of the “tribe of Issacher.”[301] Cardano himself explored Kabbalistic theosophy, which he utilized for magical experiments.[302] In the nineteenth century, Masonic historian J.M. Ragon, would claim that Cardano made a significant contribution to Masonic “science.”[303]
In 1583, Schaw had accompanied the Scottish alchemist Alexander Seton (1555 – 1622) on his father’s embassy to France. Seton’s assistant was William Hamilton, whose red hair provoked attention because of the European tradition that red hair and freckles were signs of Jewishness.[304] Seton’s fame led to his imprisonment and torture by Christian II, Elector of Saxony (1583 – 1611), who was determined to acquire the secret of his alchemical powder. After the frightened Hamilton escaped and returned to Scotland, Seton was rescued by the famous alchemist Michael Sendivogius (1566 – 1636), who carried him off to Krakow. It was thanks to their acquaintance with Sendivogius that Stephen Bathory agreed to finance the experiments of John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley.[305] Sendivogius married Seton’s widow, who handed over her husband’s alchemical manuscript, which Sendivogius published as Novum Lumen Chymicum.
Sir William Sinclair, who was Lord Justice General of Scotland at the time, did not agree with persecutions meted against the Gypsies, and defied a ban and allowed their plays to continue in Roslin Glen. The connection would later fuel speculation of the Gypsies’ association with the Tarot, first examples of which were the Visconti-Sforza deck. As noted by Marsha Keith Schuchard, “It is perhaps relevant that the gypsies were believed to possess the occult secrets of the ancient Egyptians, which they preserved through the Middle Ages.”[306] It is well documented that the Sinclairs allowed gypsies to live on their land in Midlothian at a time when they were outlawed elsewhere in Scotland.[307] Sinclair was documented to have “delivered once ane Egyptian from the gibbet.”[308]
Today a permanent exhibition at Rosslyn is devoted to this unusual relationship. In May of each year, until the Protestant Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century, the Sinclairs sponsored an annual festival held in Roslin Glen. A variety of plays, in particular, Robin Hood and Little John, were performed by Gypsies. Rosslyn Castle had two towers, one named Robin Hood and the other Little John. In 1555, the Scottish Parliament passed severe legislation against the gypsies, including a ban on the play Robin Hood and Little John. On Corpus Christi Day in 1584, a number of Gypsies, fleeing persecution, sought refuge with the knights of the Order Santiago, of which Rosslyn Chapel’s founder, Sir William St. Clair, was a member.[309]
In 1599, two lodges, Aitchison’s Haven and Edinburgh were incepted and the Lodge of Haddington appears on records. In the same year, a second code of statues by Schaw was issued partly addressed to the Kilwinning Lodge and mentioning also the lodges of Edinburgh and Stirling. In 1600 or 1601, Schaw and representatives of the five lodges confirmed the position of William Sinclair of Roslin as hereditary patron of the craft. After presiding over the order for many years, William Sinclair went to Ireland, and in 1630 a second charter was issued, granting to his son, Sir William Sinclair, the same power with which his father had been invested. James VI was initiated in the lodge at Perth around 1600, and brought Scottish Masonic interests to London.[310]
Joseph Scaliger’s subsequent studies of ancient Jewish mystical fraternities and masonic guilds, explains Schuchard, would have a significant influence on James VI when he undertook the revival of royalist masonry.[311] After becoming king, James proclaimed himself “Great Britain’s Solomon.” Many of James’ new English subjects openly ridiculed his Jewish identification and mocked his aversion to pork; and his natural magic and second sight.[312] James VI had translated the poetry of Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur de Bartas (1544 – 1590, a French Protestant, who included the Solomonic themes and terminology of operative masonry in his magnum opus, the Semaines (“Weeks”), two epic poems which freely expand on the account in the Book of Genesis of the creation of the world and the first eras of world history. James VI translated Du Bartas’ Uranie, which reinforced for his conceptions of architectural and masonic revival:
...Hirams holy help it war unknowne
What he in building Izraels Temple had showne,
Without Gods Ark Beseleel Jewe had bene
In everlasting silence buried clene.
Then, since the bewty of those works most rare
Hath after death made live all them that ware
Their builders; though them selves with tyme be failde,
By spoils, by fyres, by warres, and tempests quailde.[313]
Of particular relevance was the section of Semaines called “The Columnes,” in which Du Bartas argued that the masonic traditions of Seth’s two pillars were preserved by the Jewish Kabbalists. Drawing on the Sefer Yetzirah, Du Bartas described the number mysticism which could produce great architecture. In 1587, James VI invited Du Bartas to Scotland, where they translated each other’s works and exchanged ideas about God as Divine Architect, Solomon as visionary architect, and Kabbalists as masonic word-builders.[314] James VI was at the time reading French editions of the Book of Maccabees, Philo, Josephus, and Leo Hebraeus, or Judah Leon Abravanel (c. 1460 – c. 1530), the son of Isaac Abarbanel.[315] When Du Bartas returned to France, he praised James VI as the embodiment of the great Jewish kings, referring to him as “the Scottish, or rather th’ Hebrew David,” whose religious poetry “shal sound in high-built Temples”:
For He (I hope) who no lesse good then wise,
First stirr'd us up to this great Enterprise,
And gave us hart to take the same in hand,
For Levell, Compasse, Rule, and Squire will stand;
And will not suffer in this pretious Frame
Ought that a skilfull Builders eye may blame...[316]
James was defended by John Gordon (1544 – 1619), a Scottish Hebraist and friend of Du Bartas, who was named Dean of Salisbury by the king.[317] In 1565, Gordon had been sent to pursue his education in France, having a yearly pension granted him by Mary, Queen of Scots. In June 1565 he was sent to pursue his education in France, having a yearly pension granted him by Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary commended him to the French king, and he enjoyed the post of gentleman ordinary of the privy chamber to Charles IX, Henry III, and Henry IV. In 1574, he exhibited his Hebrew learning in a public disputation at Avignon with the chief rabbi Benetrius. His second wife Genevieve Petau de Maulette taught French to James’ daughter Princess Elizabeth.
In Enotikon, or a Sermon on Great Britain (1604), Gordon explained how “the order Architectonicke of building” is based on Hebrew traditions of Kabbalistic word-building, which justify the king’s building projects and ceremony.[318] A critic complained that “Deane Gordon, preaching before the king,” used “certain hebrue characters, and other cabalisticall collections” to approve Papist-style art and ceremonies.[319] The “Judaizing” Gordon devoted much and time expense to the masonic repair of the Gothic cathedral at Salisbury. Further support came from Joshua Sylvester, who dedicated to James his English translation of Du Bartas’ Divine Weeks (1605), which featured an architectural poem in the shape of two pillars that form a temple and another that forms a pyramid--both emblematic of the Temple of Jerusalem.[320]
James was a knowledgeable scholar in his own right, being the author of works such as Daemonologie (1597), The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598), and Basilikon Doron (1599). James’ interest in witchcraft, which he considered a branch of theology, was sparked by his visit to Denmark, which was rife with witch-trials.[321] James’ obsession with the subject was revealed in his Daemonologie, a tract inspired by his personal involvement in Scottish. Daemonologie is a philosophical dissertation on contemporary necromancy and the historical relationships between the various methods of divination used from ancient black magic. Included is a study on demonology and the methods demons used to harass human beings, also touching on topics such as werewolves and vampires. Its intended purpose was to educate Christian society on the history, practices and implications of sorcery and the reasons for persecuting witches under the rule of canonical law.
As Elizabeth did not marry, and as she had no direct heir she was therefore succeeded by King James VI of Scotland, who became King James I of England in 1603, the first Stuart king of England. King James continued to reign in all three kingdoms for twenty-two years, a period known after him as the Jacobean era, until his death in 1625. James’ Daemonologie is believed to be one of the main sources used by Shakespeare’s Macbeth.[322] Shakespeare attributed many quotes and rituals found within the book directly to the Weird Sisters, yet also attributed the Scottish themes and settings referenced from the trials in which King James was involved. A commentary on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice by Daniel Banes, published in 1975–6, suggests the play was written with full knowledge of Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi and other Kabbalistic works.[323]
The Rosicrucian movement, which was
influenced by the occult philosophies of John Dee and Francis Bacon, emerged
between 1610 and 1615,
when Johann Valentin Andreae (1586 – 1654) published
his Rosicrucian manifestos, based on a combination of “Magia, Cabala, and
Alchymia.” The
Rosicrucian manifestos appeared around the same time that the German prince
Frederick V of the Palatinate (1574 – 1610) began to be seen as the ideal
incumbent to take the place of leader of the Protestant resistance against the
Catholic Hapsburgs, to be achieved through his dynastic union with Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of the “Mason King,” James I of
England. The perceived
occult importance of their marriage was enshrined in a Rosicrucian tract called
The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, published in 1616, which
contains allusions to the Order of the Golden Fleece. The word “chymical” is an
old form of “chemical’ and refers to alchemy, for which the “Sacred Marriage”
was the goal.
Through the teachings of mystical Protestant theologian Jacob Boehme (1575 – 1624), the Rosicrucian movement was influenced by the messianic movement of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, a leading rabbi and Jewish mystic of the community of Safed in the Galilee region of Ottoman Syria, now Israel.[324] According to Gershom Scholem, the popular reception of messianism amongst the Jews of the Middle Ages was prepared by the tragedy of the expulsion from Spain. Following the Expulsion, Jews migrated not only to the New World, but many other parts of the world as well, such North Africa, or, like Abarbanel, to the Italian states, where members of his family became closely associated with the de Medicis. Others found their way to Northern Europe, including England and Flanders, contributing to the “Northern Renaissance,” especially the city of Amsterdam, which became known as the “Dutch Jerusalem.” Those who fared best settled in the territories of the Ottoman Empire, such North Africa, Turkey, and the Balkans, at the invitation of the sultan. His successor, Suleiman the Magnificent (1494 – 1566), exclaimed on one occasion, referring to King Ferdinand of Spain: “You call him king who impoverishes his states to enrich mine?” Suleiman commented to the ambassador sent by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500 – 1558), who marveled that “the Jews had been thrown out of Castile, which was to throw away wealth.”[325]
As detailed by Scholem, the Expulsion from Spain created a longing among Marranos for messianic expectations, fueling millenarian aspirations which set the stage for the onset of Luria’s ideas. These ideas, which shaped the subversive activities of the crypto-Jews, found expression in the Kabbalah. As explained by Yvonne Petry, “Because they often found themselves caught between two faiths, Kabbalah served as a useful bridge between Judaism and Christianity.” [326] In fact, points out Petry, the Kabbalah experienced a revival in the sixteenth century among the émigrés from Spain and Portugal. The most important center of Kabbalistic study was Safed in Ottoman Palestine, where many Spanish Jews and Marranos had settled, where they were welcomed by the Muslim ruler.[327]
Luria is regarded as the father of Lurianic Kabbalah, also referred to as the New Kabbalah, derived from his supposed contact with the Prophet Elijah. Elijah is an important figure of the Kabbalah, where numerous leading Kabbalists claimed to preach a higher knowledge of the Torah directly inspired by the prophet through a “revelation of Elijah” (gilluy ‘eliyahu). Elijah, like Enoch, did not die but is believed to have ascended directly to Heaven, where he was known as the archangel Metatron. The name Metatron is not mentioned in the Bible, nor in the early Enoch literature. Although Metatron is mentioned in a few brief passages in the Talmud, he appears mainly in Kabbalistic literature.
The Lurianic Kabbalah is radically different from earlier Kabbalist thought. Although based on early Jewish Gnostic traditions, the Kabbalah appeared in Southern France in the twelfth century, incorporating motifs from Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. After spreading to Northern Spain in the thirteenth century, it culminated with the Zohar, the main text of the Kabbalah. The sixteenth century renaissance of Kabbalah in Safed, which included Luria and other mystically-inclined rabbis, was shaped by their particular spiritual and historical outlook. In Luria’s theology, messianism was fundamental. He was preoccupied not with the world’s creation but with its end: with the salvation of souls and the arrival of the millennium. However, according to Luria, salvation would be achieved not by divine grace but by collective human effort, or what he referred to as tikkun (repair), a concept derived from his interpretation of classic references in the Zohar.
The symbol of the five-petaled rose, which also became the personal symbol of Martin Luther, whose chief supporters also claimed descent from the Knight of the Swan, was later adopted by the Rosicrucians. Luther escaped to Wartburg castle, site of Elizabeth of Hungary’s Miracle of the Roses, and according to von Eschenbach, the Grail castle Munsalvaesche, visited by the Knight Swan Lohengrin. There, Luther devoted his time to translating the New Testament from Greek into German and other polemical writings. The symbol of the swan, which became associated with Luther, derives from a prophecy reportedly made by the heretic Jan Hus, the founder of the Hussite movement—who was supported by Barbara of Cilli, who founded the Order of the Dragon with her husband, Emperor Sigismund—whose teachings had a strong influence on Luther.[328]
The name “Hus,” means “goose” in Bohemian, now called Czech, and he was a century later referenced as a “Bohemian goose” in a dream given to Frederick III, Elector of Saxony (1463 – 1525), one of the most powerful early defenders of Martin Luther, hiding him at Wartburg Castle. Frederick III was the son of Ernest, Elector of Saxony (1441 – 1486), founder of the Ernestine branch of the House of Wettin, which like the houses of Savoy, Gonzaga, Cleves, Lorraine and Montferrat, all began their ascent after they were recognized by Emperor Sigismund. In The Book of Abramelin, Abraham of Worms boasted of using Kabbalistic magic to summon 2000 “artificial cavalry” to support Ernest’s grandfather, Frederick I, Elector of Saxony (1370 – 1428), an ally of Emperor Sigismund, in his war against the Hussites. For his victory at the Battle of Brüx in 1421, Frederick I received the Saxon Electorate from Sigismund.
Frederick III the Wise appointed Luther and Philipp Melanchthon to the University of Wittenberg, which he had established in 1502. In his time at Wittenberg, Melanchthon and his son-in-law Caspar Peucer (1525 – 1602) were of the main promoters of the astrological department.[329] Peucer and Melanchton collaborated closely on a book about divination, indicating that magic, incarnations and other practices that appeal to the devil are illicit, while three are permitted. These are oracles, divination from natural causes and, most importantly, astrology.[330] In a few instances, Peucer worked with the Danish astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe—a friend of John Dee.[331]
Frederick III’s brother, John, Elector of Saxony (1468 – 1532), is known for organizing the Lutheran Church in the Electorate of Saxony with Luther’s help. John helped Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse (1504 – 1567), who claimed descent from Elizabeth of Hungary, to found the League of Gotha. Philip I also founded the Schmalkaldic League with John’s son, John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony (1503 – 1554), who commissioned the Luther Rose, which became Luther’s personal seal. Frederick III’s court painter, Lucas Cranach the Elder, a close friend of Luther’s, signed his works with his initials until 1508, when John Frederick I, Frederick III’s nephew, granted him the use of the serpent with bat wings, which bears a red crown on the head and holds a ring studded with a ruby in its mouth, an evident alchemical symbol.[332]
John Frederick I was married to Sibylle of Cleves, from a family who like the houses of Brabant and Brandenburg, also laid particular claims as the descendants of the Knight Swan.[333] Sibylle was the great-granddaughter of Albert III Achilles (1414 – 1486), Elector of Brandenburg, who was a member of the Order of the Swan, founded by his brother, Frederick II, Elector of Brandenburg (1413 – 1471. Their brother was John, Margrave “the Alchemist” of Brandenburg-Kulmbach (1406 – 1464). Albert III married Anna of Saxony, the granddaughter of Ernest, Duke of Austria (1377 – 10 June 1424) of the House of Habsburg and a member of the Order of the Dragon. Albert’s son, Frederick I, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1460 – 1536), married Sophia of Poland, the sister of Sigismund I the Old (1467 – 1548), the grandson of Sigismund of Luxembourg.
Sigismund I the Old married Bona Sforza, the great-granddaughter of Francesco I Sforza. Bona’s father, was Gian Galeazzo Sforza (1469 – 1494), was a first cousin of Charles III, Duke of Savoy, grandfather of Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, whose birth was prophesied by Nostradamus. Bona’s mother, Isabella of Naples, the granddaughter of Alfonso V of Aragon (1396 – 1458), a member of the Order of the Dragon. At Gian and Isabella’s wedding, a masque or operetta was held, entitled Il Paradiso, with words by Isabella’s cousin, Bernardo Bellincioni (1452 – 1492), and sets and costumes by Leonardo da Vinci. Bellincioni, who had begun his career in the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, was also a court poet of Gian’s uncle, Ludovico Sforza. Sigismund and Bona’s son, Sigismund II Augustus married Barbara Radziwiłł who was accused of promiscuity and witchcraft. Sigismund I’s daughter Anna Jagiellon married Stephen Bathory (1533 – 1586), a sponsor of the famous English sorcerer John Dee, and uncle of Elizabeth Bathory, known as the “Blood Countess,” and the worst female serial killer in history, who bathed in the blood of virgins.
Frederick I son, and Anna of Cleves’ cousin, was Albert, Duke of Prussia (1490 – 1568), Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, founder of the Duchy of Prussia. In 1522, Albert journeyed to Wittenberg, where he was advised by Martin Luther to abandon the rules of his order, to marry, and to convert Prussia into a hereditary duchy for himself. Luther worked to spread his teaching among the Prussians, while Albert's brother George presented the plan to their uncle, Sigismund I the Old.[334] Albert converted to Lutheranism and, with the consent of Sigismund, turned the State of the Teutonic Order into the first protestant state, Duchy of Prussia, according to the Treaty of Kraków, which was sealed by the Prussian Homage in Kraków in 1525. When Albert died in 1568, his teenage son Albert Frederick (1553 – 1618) inherited the duchy. This Order of the Swan disappeared when the house of Brandenburg adopted Protestantism in 1525, but the marriage of Albert Frederick to Mary Eleanor, sister and heir of John William, duke of Cleves, who died in 1609, introduced the Hohenzollerns a new and more prestigious descent from the Swan Knight, from whom would descend the later famous Kings of Prussia.[335]
The manifestos appeared around the same time that the German prince Frederick V of the Palatinate began to be seen as the ideal incumbent to take the place of leader of the Protestant resistance against the Catholic Hapsburgs, to be achieved through his dynastic union with Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England, the “Mason King,” to Frederick V of the Palatinate (1574 – 1610). As the daughter of a reigning monarch, the hand of the young Elizabeth was seen as a highly desired prize. Many suitors from Europe’s most powerful families offered their sons in marriage, including Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Frederic Ulric, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Prince Maurice of Orange, Otto, Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Kassel, son of Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, Victor Amadeus I, Duke of Savoy, the son of Charles I Emmanuel, whose birth was prophesied by Nostradamus, and Emperor Philip III of Spain, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece.
Frederick V, the man chosen, was of undeniably high lineage, belonging to a heritage of most of those families combined. Frederick V was the great-grandson of Philip I Landgrave of Hesse married Christine of Saxony, the daughter of Sophia of Poland’s sister Barbara Jagiellon, the sister of Sophia of Poland. Their daughter, Anna of Saxony, married William the Silent (1533 – 1584), the main leader of the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs that set off the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) and resulted in the formal independence of the United Provinces in 1581. William was encouraged to revolt against Spain, a major adversary of the Ottoman Empire, by the Portuguese Marrano, Joseph Nasi (1524 – 1579). Nasi was member of the influential Benveniste, who traced their descent back to Narbonne where they were in contact with the Kalonymous, who traced their descent from Rabbi Makhir and shared the title of Nasi.[336] Nasi escaped to Antwerp and founded a banking house, before finally deciding to settle in a Muslim land. After two troubled years in Venice, Nasi left for Constantinople in 1554, where he became an influential figure in the Ottoman Empire during the rules of both Sultan Suleiman I and his son Selim II.
In around 1563, Joseph Nasi secured
permission from Sultan Selim II to acquire Tiberias in Israel to create a
Jewish city-state and encourage industry there. The scheme to restore Tiberias had messianic
significance as there was a tradition that the Messiah would appear there.
Already while he was still a nominal Christian in Italy, Nasi had proposed the
idea of a Jewish commonwealth that would be a refuge for persecuted Jews.[337]
In 1566 when Selim ascended the throne, Nasi was made duke of Naxos. He had
conquered Cyprus for the sultan. Nasi’s influence was so great that foreign
powers often negotiated through him for concessions which they sought from the
sultan. Thus, the emperor of Germany, Maximilian II, William of Orange,
Sigismund August II, King of Poland, all conferred with him on political
matters.[338]
William the Silent’s daughter by another marriage, Louise
Juliana of Nassau, married Frederick IV, Elector Palatine (1574 – 1610), the
grandson of Philip I of Hesse, and the father of Frederick V.
Both manifestos were published by an official printer to Maurice of Hesse-Kassel (1572 – 1632), Frederick V’s cousin, and one of Elizabeth’s early suitors. Maurice’s court in Kassel was a flourishing center for alchemy and Paracelsian medicine, including occultists such as Michael Maier. The Rosicrucian movement was centered around the perceived importance of the marriage of Maurice’s friend Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of the “Mason King,” King James I of England, celebrated in Andreae’s work, the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, published in 1616. The word “chymical” is an old form of “chemical’ and refers to alchemy, for which the “Sacred Marriage” was the goal. Elaborate celebrations were organized by Francis Bacon. Maier composed a wedding song for the marriage, and in 1619 he became Maurice’s physician.
The chief advisor to Frederick V of the Palatinate, and architect of the political agenda of the Rosicrucian movement, was Christian of Anhalt (1568 –1630), of the House of Ascania, also known as the House of Anhalt, who succeed the House of Welf as Dukes of Saxony. The House of Anhalt traced their descent to Ascanius, legendary king of Alba Longa and the son of the Trojan hero Aeneas, whom they equated with Ashkenaz, grandson of Japhet, the son of Noah, whose descendants were reputed to have migrated from the marches of Ascania in Bithynia, in northwest of Asia Minor, and at last to have settled in Germany.[339]
The legend of Rosenkreutz may have been inspired by Balthasar Walther (1558 – c. 1631) who served as personal physician to Christian of Anhalt’s brother, Prince August of Anhalt-Plötzkau (1575 – 1653), whose court was a center for occult, alchemical and Rosicrucian thought during the opening decades of the seventeenth century. Walther’s travels to the Middle transmitted the knowledge of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria to his pupil Jacob Boehme.[340] Walther composed a Latin language biography of Prince Michael “the Brave” of Walachia (1558 – 1601), who was of the Draculesti branch of the House of Basarab, which began with Vlad II Dracul, father of Vlad the Impaler, lather popularized as Dracula, who was made a member of the Order of the Dragon by Emperor Sigismund. Walther’s collaborator Paul Nagel transcribed a copy of the Fama, which also contains Kabbalistic explications of the Book of Revelation and Daniel. In 1611, Prince August of Anhalt-Plötzkau proposed publishing the two Rosicrucian manifestos together, but was unable to locate a copy of Confessio.[341]
In
1618, the largely Protestant estates of Bohemia rebelled against their Catholic
King Ferdinand, triggering the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Expecting
that King James would come to their aid, in 1619, the Rosicrucians granted the
throne of Bohemia to Frederick in direct opposition to the Catholic Habsburg
rulers. Christian of Anhalt was appointed to command the Protestant forces to
defend Bohemia against Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II—a knight of the Order of
the Golden Fleece—and his allies when that country’s nobles elected Frederick
as their king in 1619. However, King James opposed the takeover of Bohemia, and
Frederick’s allies in the Protestant Union failed to support him militarily by
signing the Treaty of Ulm in 1620. Frederick’s brief reign as King of Bohemia
ended with his defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in the same year.
Imperial forces invaded the Palatinate and Frederick had to flee to Holland in
1622, where he lived the rest of his life in exile with Elizabeth and their
children, mostly at The Hague, and died in Mainz in 1632. For his short reign
of a single winter, Frederick is often nicknamed the “Winter King.” Frederick’s
supporters issued pamphlets in response, calling him the Winter Lion, or
otherwise still, the Summer Lion.[342]
In the years following the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, the combination of Hapsburg power with Catholic Counter Reformation came near to complete victory. However, after ten years of war, the victories of Gustavus Adolphus (1594 – 1632), King of Sweden, of the House of Vasa, saved the Protestant cause. Through his mother, Catherine Jagiellon, Gustavus Adolphus was the grandson of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse. Gustavus Adolphus married Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, the granddaughter of Albert, Duke of Prussia, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, and founder of the Duchy of Prussia. Gustavus Adolphus’s mother was Christina of Holstein-Gottorp, whose mother, Christine of Hesse, was the daughter of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse and his spouse Christine of Saxony. Christine of Hesse was also the aunt of Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, Frederick V’s close friend.
When Frederick V died in 1632, his widow, the Queen of Bohemia, Elizabeth Stuart, living in refuge in The Hague, represented for sympathizers in England the policy of support for Protestant Europe which, in their opinion, should have been the policy of James I towards his daughter and son-in-law.[343] Of thirteen children and eldest daughter of Frederick V and Elisabeth Stuart was Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia (1618 – 1680). It is reported that her intellectual accomplishments earned her the nickname “La Greque” from her siblings, and might well have been tutored by Constantijn Huygens.[344] French philosopher René Descartes (1596 –1650)—who had become interested in the Rosicrucian movement—dedicated his Principles of Philosophy to her, and wrote his Passions of the Soul at her request. She seems to have been involved in negotiations around the Treaty of Westphalia and in efforts to restore the English monarchy after the English civil war.
While Frederick V was seen by the Rosicrucians as the Winter Lion, Gustavus Adolphus, a second cousin of Frederick V, was seen as the incarnation of “the Lion of the North,” or as he is called in German Der Löwe aus Mitternacht (“The Lion of Midnight”). This image of an all-conquering mystical hero descending from the North to inflict God’s wrath on his opponents had roots in Old Testament prophecy, foretold by Jeremiah, with new life breathed into it in the sixteenth century through an apocalyptic vision attributed to Paracelsus and Tycho Brahe that foresaw the northern hero laying low the eagle, the symbol of the Habsburgs and returning peace to the world after an era of unprecedented suffering and preparing the way for the second coming.[345]
The symbolism of the “Lion of the North,”
was advanced for propaganda purposes by Gustavus’ renowned teacher, the Runic
Swedish scholar and Rosicrucian, Johannes Bureus (1568-1652), who was in
frequent contact with the German Kabbalist Abraham von Franckenberg (1593 – 1652),
a close friend and biographer of Balthasar Walther, who inspired the legend of
Christian Rosenkreutz.[346]
Bureus highlighted the affinities among the early Rosicrucians to the doctrine
of a universal human restitution set out by Guillaume Postel. Bureus was
inspired by Postel’s ideas on a revival of Celtic Europe with an accompanying
revolution of arts and sciences, to which he added ideas on the northern spread
of the Hyperborean peoples. Bureus’ copy of Postel’s Panthenousia is marked up with comments, especially in the sections
on Arabic and on a possible concordance between the Hebrews, the Christians,
and the Ismailis. Postel's scheme employed rhetoric about the redemptive role
to be played for mankind by the sons of Japheth, particularly Gomer and his
youngest brother Ashkenaz.[347]
For his diary, Bureus used the yearly almanacs of Finnish astronomer Sigfrid Aronius Forsius, who wrote that an age of great reform was soon to commence. Forsius appealed to the tradition of Arabic astrology, to the medieval authors Abu Ma’shar, Abraham the Jew, and John of Seville.[348] In June 1619, the ecclesiastical council in Uppsala seized Forsius’ controversial tract, which referred to the comet in the Swan of 1602, and a great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn appeared in Serpentario in 1603/04. Forsius explained that these signs reproduced the saying made popular during the radical reformation, “after the burning of the Goose there will follow a Swan,” a saying fulfilled by the burning of the founder of the Moravian Brethren, Johan Hus (meaning goose) in 1417 and by Luther a hundred years later. While Hus, the founder of the Hussites who were to become the Moravian Brethren, was the second Noah, Luther was the third Elijah.[349]
Addressing himself to the Rosicrucians, Bureus proclaimed in his FaMa e sCanzIa reDUX (1616) that the north belonged to a distinct Hyperborean tradition that was preserved in the Gothic-Scandinavian Runes. Bureus is primarily known as an exponent of early modern “Gothicism,” the idea that the ancient Goths of Scandinavia were the first rulers of Europe, and Sweden the true origin of Western culture. Influenced by the Renaissance notion of a prisca theologia, Bureus also claimed that all ancient knowledge originally stemmed from the Goths, who had taught the Greeks and the Romans. This idea was intimately tied to Bureus’ theory that the old Scandinavian alphabet, the runes, which constituted a “Gothic Cabala.”[350] In his Rosicrucian writings, Bureus advanced the idea of the ancient Goths as the original rulers of Europe, from Italy and Spain in the south to England in the north, which provided justification to Sweden’s political ambitions, a theory which was to remain the officially endorsed version of Sweden’s history until well into the eighteenth century.[351]
In 1646, Franckenberg listed Bureus among the great Christian Kabbalists of history, alongside Joachim of
Fiore, Pico, Reuchlin, Agrippa, Giordano Bruno and Rosicrucians like Petrus
Bongus, Julius Sperber, and Philip Ziegler. The list was appended to a new edition
of Guillaume Postel’s Absconditomm a
Constitutione Mundi Clavis, a mystical text on the seven ages presented by
Franckenberg to the court of Wladislaus IV in Poland (1595 – 1648).[352]
Wladislaus IV’s father was Sigismund III Vasa, the grandson of Sigismund I
the Old, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and Bona Sforza. Sigismund
III’s mother Catherine Jagiellon was the sister of Sigismund II Augustus who
Barbara Radziwiłł, who was accused of promiscuity and witchcraft, and
the sister of Anna Jagiellon, who married Stephen Báthory, sponsor of John Dee
and uncle of Elizabeth Báthory, the “Blood Countess.” Sigismund III’s father
was John III of Sweden, whose brother Charles IX of Sweden, was the father of Gustavus Adolphus (1594 – 1632).
Bureus’ manuscript Adulruna Rediviva, a first version of which was given to Gustav Adolphus on his assumption to the Swedish throne in 1611, was given as a gift to his daughter, Queen Christina (1626 – 1689) in 1643. Christina’s grandmother, Christine of Hesse, was the great-granddaughter of Philip I Landgrave of Hesse. Her Grandfather, Charles IX of Sweden, had first been married to Maria of the Palatinate, whose nephew was of Frederick V of the Palatinate of the Alchemical Wedding. Known as the “Minerva of the North,” Christina is remembered as one of the most learned women of the seventeenth century.[353]
As detailed by Susanna Åkerman, Christina’s library contained approximately 4500 printed books and 2200 manuscripts on the subjects of Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, alchemy, Kabbalah and prophetic works. Christina had been approached by the alchemist Johannes Franck (1590 – 1661), a professor of pharmacology at Uppsala University, where he was part of the introduction of “the doctrines of Theophrastus and Trismegistos.” The Polish adept Michael Sendivogius, explained Åkerman, had a definite Influence in Christina’s Sweden through Franck’s alchemical allegory Colloquium with Mountain Gods (1651). It describes the genealogy of a royal family that finally bring forth the daughter Aurelia áurea, the perfect gold. Franck saw Christina’s reign the fulfillment the Polish adept Michael Sendivogius’ prophecy of a new alchemical monarchy in the North, and Paracelsus’ prophecy concerning the alchemical adept Elias Artista.[354]
In 1649, Christina invited Descartes to Stockholm to start an academy. According to his biographer Baillet, one of Descartes’ reasons for accepting the invitation was to plead on behalf of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the daughter of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V of the Palatinate, at the Swedish court. The plan failed however, because Descartes and Queen Christina turned out to ultimately dislike one another. Finally, the cold climate led Descartes to catch a chill that turned into pneumonia and killed him.[355]
Christina was in secret contact with the Roman Jesuit and polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602 – 1680). He was taught Hebrew by a rabbi in addition to his studies at school.[356] Kircher cited as his sources Chaldean astrology, Hebrew Kabbalah, Greek myth, Pythagorean mathematics, Arabian alchemy and Latin philology. In 1646, von Franckenberg had also sent a copy of Bureus’ FaMa e sCanzIa reDUX to Kircher.[357]
Andreae was influenced by Tommaso Campanella (1568 – 1639), who was, like Giordano Bruno, a revolutionary ex-Dominican friar. In 1600, he led a revolt in southern Italy against the Spanish occupying powers. Campanella was however captured, tortured, and imprisoned for most of the rest of his life in the castle at Naples, where he was visited by Tobias Adami and Wilhelm Wense, both close friends of Andreae. While in prison, he wrote his City of the Sun, which was influenced by the Asclepius and the Picatrix, and profoundly influenced Andreae.[358] Campanella’s aim was to establish a society based on the community of goods and wives, on the basis of the prophecies of Joachim of Fiore and his own astrological observations, by which he foresaw the advent of the Age of the Spirit in the year 1600.[359] In 1634, a new conspiracy in Calabria, led by one of his followers, forced Campanella to flee to France, where he was received at the court of Louis XIII, where he was protected by Cardinal Richelieu. Campanella prophesied at court that Louis XIV’s infant son, Louis XIV of France (1638 – 1715), le Roi Soleil (“the Sun King”), would build the Egyptian “City of the Sun.”[360]
King Louis XIII surrounded himself with a
variety of significant political, military, and cultural figures, such as Louis,
Grand Condé (1621 – 1686), the Jesuit-educated Cardinal Mazarin (1602 – 1661),
and his Chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu (1585 – 1642), Abbot of Cluny. After
Henry IV was assassinated in 1610, Marie was confirmed as Regent on behalf of
her son and new King, Louis IV’s father, the eight-year-old Louis XIII (1601 –
1643). Louis XIII married Anne of Austria, the daughter of Philip III of Spain, Grand Master of
the Order of the Golden Fleece. Louis XIII’ sister, Henrietta Maria married Charles I of England, the son of King James. Louis
XIII’s other sister, Christine Marie, married Victor
Amadeus I of Savoy, the son of Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy. Christine Marie
rebuilt Palazzo Madama in Turin following the advice of master alchemists.[361]
Louis XIII’s wife was Anne
of Austria, the daughter of Philip III of Spain, Grand Master of the Order of
the Golden Fleece.
Louis II de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, who was known as le Grand Condé for his military exploits, was a French general and the most illustrious member of the Condé branch of the House of Bourbon, that was originally assumed around 1557 by the French Protestant leader Louis de Bourbon (1530 – 1569), uncle of Henry IV of France, the husband of Marie de Medici. In 1610, Marie de Medici gave the Hôtel de Condé in Paris to the Grand Condé’s father, Henri as part of a recompense for his agreeing to marry Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency, who was being pursued by her husband Henry IV. Charlotte was the daughter of Henri de Montmorency (1534 – 1614), a purported Grand Master of the Order of the Temple, which claimed direct descent from the Templars, according to the Larmenius Charter. Henri was succeeded as Grand Master by Charles de Valois, Duke of Angoulême (1573 – 1650), an illegitimate son of Charles IX of France. Charles de Valois was inducted into the Knights of Malta, and inherited large estates from his paternal grandmother Catherine de Medici. Th Grand Condé’s aunt, Éléonore de Bourbon, married Philip William, Prince of Orange (1554 – 1618), the son of William the Silent and Anna of Egmond.
The Grand Condé’s brother, Armand, Prince of Conti, married Anne Marie Martinozzi, the sister of Queen Christina’s ally Cardinal Mazarin, successor to Cardinal Richelieu as chief minister to Louis XIII. Richelieu, also known by the sobriquet l'Éminence rouge (“the Red Eminence”), advanced politically by faithfully serving the most powerful minister in the kingdom, Concino Concini, favorite of Marie de Medici, and husband of the witch Leonora Dori. Like Concini, Richelieu was one of Marie’s closest advisors. In 1616, Richelieu was made Secretary of State, and was given responsibility for foreign affairs. Cardinal Richelieu sought to consolidate royal power and crush domestic factions. By restraining the power of the nobility, he transformed France into a strong, centralized state. His chief foreign policy objective was to check the power of the Austro-Spanish Habsburg dynasty, and to ensure French dominance in the Thirty Years’ War that engulfed Europe. Although he was a cardinal, he did not hesitate to make alliances with Protestant rulers in an attempt to achieve his goals.
Campanella’s last work was a poem
celebrating the birth of the future Louis XIV, Ecloga in portentosam Delphini nativitatem. The third version of
Campanella’s Civitas Solis, published
in France in 1637, adapted the Sun City with Richelieu’s ambitions for the
French Monarchy in mind. In the dedication to Richelieu of his De sensu rerum et magia, Campanella
appeals to the cardinal to build the City of the Sun. Richelieu did not receive
the Rosicrucians, but when eleven years later Campanella came to Paris he had
the powerful cardinal’s support.[362]
Mismanagement of the kingdom and ceaseless political intrigues by Marie and her
Italian favorites led the young king to take power in 1617 by exiling his
mother and executing her followers, including Concino Concini.
Cardinal Mazarin succeeded his mentor, Cardinal Richelieu. Mazarin’s father, Pietro Mazzarino (1576 – 1654), had moved to Rome from Sicily in 1590 to become a chamberlain in the family of Filippo I Colonna (1578 – 1639), the Grand Constable of Naples, a nephew of Carlo Borromeo and grand-nephew of Gian Giacomo Medici (1554 – 1618), and a bodyguard to Francesco II Sforza, and a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. The Colonna, along with the Sforza, were sponsors of the artist Caravaggio, including Costanza Colonna, the widow of Francesco I Sforza di Caravaggio (1550 – 1583). Filippo I offered Caravaggio asylum as well.[363] Mazarin served as the chief minister to the kings of France Louis XIII and Louis XIV from 1642 until his death in 1661.
Following Richelieu’s death in 1642, Mazarin took his place as first minister, and after the death of Louis XIII in 1643, he acted as the head of the government for Anne of Austria, the regent for the young Louis XIV, and was also made responsible for the king’s education. Louis XIV reigned over a period of unprecedented prosperity in which France became the dominant power in Europe and a leader in the arts and sciences. An adherent of the concept of the divine right of kings, Louis continued his predecessors’ work of creating a centralized state governed from Paris, the capital. His most famous quote is arguably L’Etat, c’est moi (“I am the State”). In 1682, he moved the royal Court to the Palace of Versailles, the defining symbol of his power and influence in Europe. At the start of his reign, before turning to more political allegories, Louis XIV chose the sun as his royal insignia. The sun is the symbol of Apollo, god of peace and the arts. The Palace of Versailles is replete with representations and allegorical allusions to the sun god, and there was a famous ballet where he performed as Apollo.
The Grand Condé’s son, Henri Jules, Prince of Condé (1643 – 1709), married Anne Henriette of Bavaria, the daughter of Edward, Count Palatine of Simmern—the son of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart—and Anna Gonzaga, making her a cousin of George I of England. Their son, Louis III, Prince of Condé (1668 – 1710), married Louise Françoise, the daughter of Louis XIV and his mistress Madame de Montespan (1640 – 1707). Montespan was involved in a scandal known as L’affaire des poisons (“Affair of the Poisons”), which took place between 1677 and 1682, when Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, and the priest Étienne Guibourg performed Black Masses for human sacrifice for her.[364] Authorities rounded up a number of fortune tellers and alchemists who were suspected of selling divinations, séances, aphrodisiacs, and “inheritance powders,” a euphemism for poison. Some confessed under torture and provided authorities lists of their clients. La Voisin was arrested in 1679 and implicated several important courtiers, including Olympia Mancini, the Countess of Soissons, her sister, the Duchess of Bouillon, François Henri de Montmorency, Duke of Luxembourg and Madame de Montespan. La Voisin claimed that the Marquise bought aphrodisiacs and that she performed black masses with her in order to keep the king’s favor over rival lovers. The rituals were a mockery of the Catholic Mass, featuring the Marquise lying nude as an altar, with the chalice on her bare stomach, and holding a black candle in each of her outstretched arms. The witch and the Marquise would call on the devil (Astaroth and Asmodeus), and pray to him for the King’s love. They sacrificed a newborn by slitting its throat with a knife. The baby’s body was crushed, and the drained blood and mashed bones were used in the mixture. Louis’ food was tainted in this way for almost thirteen years, until La Voisin was captured after a police investigation where they uncovered the remains of 2,500 infants in her garden.[365] It was alleged that La Voisin paid prostitutes for their infants for use in the rituals.[366]
It was through its promotion of the “Great Instauration” initiated by Francis Bacon, that the Royal Society provided the philosophical underpinnings of the Scientific Revolution, which marked the emergence of modern science in Europe towards the end of the Renaissance and continued through the late eighteenth century, influencing the Enlightenment. The expression “knowledge is power” is commonly attributed Bacon, occurring as scientia potestas est (“knowledge itself is power”) in his Meditationes Sacrae (1597). Paradoxically, the Scientific Revolution begins with the study of magic as “natural philosophy” initiated by Bacon, who was believed to represent the advent of Elias Artista. “This transformation of both Elias and Elisha from prophets into magi and natural philosophers,” observed Allison P. Coudert, “reveals the way apocalyptic and messianic thought contributed to the emerging idea of scientific progress.”[367] As explained by Herbert Breger, in “Elias artista—a Precursor of the Messiah in Natural Science”:
A common association in the 19th century and one which has persisted into the 20th century, was to link the development of natural science with the improvement of the human condition. Thus, it would appear that the figure of Elias artist a was a forerunner of the liberal definition of progress in natural science: scientific advancement as vehicle of social advancement, individual well-being and as a means of attaining a more humane society.[368]
The Oxford scholar Richard Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), documented that the early Rosicrucians expected the coming of the master alchemist Elias Artista (Elijah the Artist), advanced by Kabbalist Guillaume Postel. Paracelsus, one of the most famous figures in the history of alchemy, made a famous prophecy based upon his knowledge of the special planetary conjunctions and configurations that were due to occur in 1603: namely, that they would mark the advent or appearance of Elias Artista (“Elias the Artist”), a master alchemist and a “great light” who would revive the arts and sciences, teach the transmutation of all the metals, and reveal many things. The Rosicrucians’ announcement of themselves to the world in 1623, was timed with the Great Conjunction, which in astrology was associated with the advent of the Messiah, including the star of the Magi that signaled the birth of Jesus. According to their calculations, the next date of great significance would be the year 1666, which was the year that Shabbetai Zevi proclaimed himself the messiah expected by the Jews, and succeeded in duping, by some estimates, half of the world’s Jewish population.
As reported by Richard Popkin, in “The religious background of seventeenth-century philosophy,” recent discoveries have pointed out that Louis de Bourbon, the Great Condé—one of the pre-eminent generals of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” working with cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin—Oliver Cromwell and Queen Christina were negotiating to create a world government of the Messiah, with Prince Condé as his regent, based in Jerusalem, after assisting the Jews in liberating the Holy Land rebuilding the Temple.[369] Before he travelled to England in 1655, to plead with Cromwell for the readmittance of the Jews, who had been banned from the country by Edward I in 1290, Menasseh ben Israel (1604 – 1657), a leader of the Jewish community of Amsterdam, first made a stop in Belgium, where he met with Queen Christina and with Isaac La Peyrère (1596 – 1676), the secretary of the Prince of Condé, one of Louis XIV’s pre-eminent generals. La Peyrère is best known for his Pre-Adamite hypothesis, which argued that there had been two creations: first the creation of the Gentiles and then that of Adam, who was father of the Jews. La Peyrère is also considered an early proponent of Zionism, for advocating a Jewish return to Palestine. As Richard Popkin noted:
Recent findings indicate that Conde, Cromwell, and Christina were negotiating to create a theological-political world state, involving overthrowing the Catholic king of France, among other things. La Peyrère had been proclaiming that the Jewish Messiah would soon arrive and would join with the king of France (the prince of Conde), and with the Jews to liberate the Holy Land, to rebuild the Temple, and to set up a world government of the Messiah and his regent the king of France.[370]
As he was married to Rachel Soeiro, a descendant of the Abarbanel family, Menasseh was proud of his children’s ancestry from the line of King David, from which the messiah was expected to arise.[371] In his 1650 Hope of Israel (“Mikveh Israel”), Menasseh proclaimed the necessary dispersal of the Jews to all countries of the world, including America, before their final return to the Holy Land as a fulfillment of the prophecies of the Last Days. But he also saw the Jews as bringing “profit” to the lands in which they live: “they do abundantly enrich the Lands and Countrys of strangers, where they live.” It was for that purpose that Menasseh worked towards the readmittance of the Jews to England, who had been banned from the country in 1290 by Edward I of England.
The spread of the fervor of the movement Sabbatean was coordinated by the Rosicrucian followers of Menasseh ben Israel, also teacher of Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677), who was excommunicated for heresy in 1655. Known as the Hartlib Circle, they included a group of millenarians active in England, including Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600 – 1662), John Dury (1596 – 1680) and John Amos Comenius (1592 – 1670), referred to as the “three foreigners,” whose chief sponsor was Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V of the Palatinate, of the Alchemical Wedding.[372] Hartlib had been the head of a mystical group like Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christian Unions, a cover for the Invisible College, which pursued Rosicrucian idea.[373] All three “millenarian Baconians” and members of a Rosicrucian “Invisible College,” they were responsible in fanning millenarian ideas among the English Puritans about the approach of the Messianic time that became popular in the seventeenth century.[374]
Gerardus Vossius, Hugo Grotius, Petrus Serrarius, António Vieira and Pierre Daniel Huet and other men of the so-called “Republic of Letters,” were part of Menasseh’s circle of contacts, showing the great reputation he benefitted among non-Jewish intellectuals.[375] Gerardus Vossius (1577 – 1649) was the son of Johannes (Jan) Vos, a Protestant from the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Electorate of the Palatinate. Vossius became the lifelong friend of Hugo Grotius (1583 – 1645), who helped lay the foundations for international law, based on natural law. Grotius studied with some of the most acclaimed intellectuals in northern Europe, including Joseph Scaliger.[376] Christina’s scholarly gatherings in Stockholm were originally arranged in 1649 by Vossius.[377] Also among Menasseh’s circle was Abraham von Franckenberg, a close friend and biographer of Balthasar Walther, who inspired the legend of Christian Rosenkreutz.[378]
Vossius was acquaintances of the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt (1606 – 1669). The art historian Frits Lugt described Menasseh as “Rembrandt’s intimate and highly regarded friend.”[379] Rembrandt moved to the Jewish quarter of Vlooienburg in Amsterdam “to steep himself in local [Jewish] color.”[380] He was apparently so fond of his Jewish neighbors that it changed his art forever. Rembrandt is often said to have had a profound “affinity” and “tenderness” for the Jews, and that, more than was common for other artists, had a genuine interest for the characters of the “Old Testament.”[381] For his Belshazzar’s Feast, which depicts the story of Belshazzar and the writing on the wall from the Old Testament Book of Daniel, Rembrandt derived the form of Hebrew inscription from a diagram in a book by Manasseh with extensive discussions on its prophecies.[382]
The Rosicrucians hoped for the Golden Age foretold by Joachim of Fiore. Nearly a hundred years after Joachim’s predicted date of 1260, the Rosicrucians finally announced themselves in 1623, setting off the “Rosicrucian furor,” timed with the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, which according to Kabbalists was believed to signal the arrival of the messiah.[383] A great conjunction occurred every twenty years when the two planets conjoined in a new sign within a given triplicity. A greater conjunction, which recurred every 200 or 240 years occurred when they moved into a new triplicity, or trigon, which in astrology refers to a group of three signs belonging to the same of one of the four elements. A greater conjunction, which recurred every 200 or 240 years occurred when they. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), who was also associated with the Rosicrucians, speculated that the Star of Bethlehem followed by the Magi was the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC. According to Isaac Abarbanel:
Since the effect of the great conjunction is to transfer the nation or subject that receives its influence from one extreme to the other…, its activity will not affect a nation of average standing and size to enhance it. Of necessity, however, its influence will affect a nation that is at the extreme of degradation, the extreme of abasement, and enslaved in a foreign land. The result is that the conjunction is then able to carry them to the [opposite] extreme of high stature. The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces of 1464 had, then, ushered in an era that, barring divine intercession, would culminate in the Jewish people’s deliverance fifty years later as millennia earlier this same astral configuration had inaugurated the redemption of their ancestors from Egypt.[384]
According to the calculations of the Rosicrucian Paul Nagel, the Great Conjunction of 1623 was associated with the year 1666, the same year that Shabbetai Zevi, inspired by the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, declared himself “messiah.”[385] The city of Salonika (Thessaloniki), in Ottoman Greece, whose population was majority Jewish, became among the major centers for Conversos and Marranos who converted back to Judaism—after Amsterdam and the Italian cities. According to Gershom Scholem, it was there, due the collective trauma of the Expulsion and their experience as Marranos, combined with the messianic expectations fired by the Kabbalist Isaac Luria, that contributed to the fervor that supported rise of the mission of the false prophet Shabbetai Zevi (1626 – 1676).[386] Through their rejection of traditional Judaism, in favor of the mystical interpretations of the Kabbalah, the Sabbatean movement ultimately inspired the rise of Reform and Conservative Judaism, and finally the Zionist movement.
Shabbetai’s name literally meant the planet Saturn, and in Jewish tradition “The reign of Sabbatai” (The highest planet) was often linked to the advent of the Messiah, a connection which was advanced by him and his followers.[387] That the coming of the Messiah will have a special relationship with Saturn, claims Moshe Idel in Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism, is one of the factors explaining both the character and the success of Zevi’s mission. As noted by Idel, during the witch craze some Christians argued that witchcraft had a Jewish origin, and connected the witches’ Sabbat with the Jewish holy day, the Sabbath, both of which started on a Friday. Both Hellenistic and Arab astrologers believed that the planet of the Jews was Saturn, which was associated with the dark arts and witchcraft, and numerous Jewish Kabbalists also associated Saturn with Israel.
The unique feature of the Sabbatean movement was its antinomianism, based on the belief that with the arrival of the messiah, the rules of the Torah no longer applied. This meant that the followers of Zevi believed they were permitted to upturn its moral prescriptions and violate Jewish laws and customs, including engaging in sexual orgies involving adulterous and incestuous relations. Zevi, by some estimates, duped up to half of the world’s Jewish population with his messianic claims, until he converted to Islam. Viewing Zevi’s apostasy as a sacred mystery, some of his followers in Ottoman Turkey imitated his conversion. Sarah, his harlot bride, and a number of his followers, also converted to Islam. About 300 families converted and came to be known as Dönmeh, from a Turkish word meaning “convert.” They practiced Islam outwardly though secretly keeping to their Kabbalistic doctrines. Zevi incorporated both Jewish tradition and Sufism into his theosophy and, in particular, was to have been initiated into the Bektashi Sufi order, which would long had associations with the Dönmeh.[388]
Dury arranged for an English translation and publication of Menasseh’s work, with a dedication to the English Parliament. Dury and others then convinced Cromwell’s government to invite Menasseh to England to negotiate on behalf of world Jewry on the terms for the re-admission. Cromwell had led the forces of Parliament against Charles I of England (1600 – 1649), brother of Elizabeth Stuart, in the English Civil Wars, which challenged his attempts to negate parliamentary authority, while simultaneously using his position as head of the English Church to pursue religious policies which generated the animosity of reformed groups such as the Puritans. Charles was defeated in the First Civil War (1642 – 45), after which Parliament expected him to accept its demands for a constitutional monarchy. Charles I had remained defiant by attempting to forge an alliance with Scotland and escaping to the Isle of Wight. Cromwell then ordered Colonel Pryde in 1648 to purge Parliament of those members who had voted in favor of a settlement with the King, known as “Pryde’s purge.” The remaining members were known as the “Rump Parliament.”
Lord Alfred Douglas, who edited Plain English, in an article of September 3, 1921, explained how his friend, Mr. L.D. Van Valckert of Amsterdam had come into possession of a letter written to the Directors of the Synagogue of Muljeim, dated June 16, 1647, had stated:
From O.C. [Olivier Cromwell] to Ebenezer Pratt: In return for financial support will advocate admission of Jews to England. This however impossible while Charles living. Charles cannot be executed without trial, adequate grounds for which do not at present exist. Therefore advise that Charles be assassinated, but will have nothing to do with arrangements for procuring an assassin, though willing to help in his escape.[389]
On July 12, 1647, Ebenezer Pratt replied, “Will grant financial aid as soon as Charles removed, and Jews admitted. Assassination too dangerous. Charles should be given an opportunity to escape. His recapture will then make trial and execution possible. The support will be liberal, but useless to discuss terms until trial commences.”[390] Eventually Charles I surrendered and finally, in 1649, he was tried and beheaded. With no king to consider, Parliament established an interim period of Commonwealth. In 1653, Oliver Cromwell terminated both his Parliament and the Commonwealth and, appointing himself Lord Protector, ruled by military force alone.
In pursuit of his reforms, as reported by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Cromwell based his policies on the ambitions of the “three foreigners,” Hartlib, Dury and Comenius.[391] The Cromwellian government was commonly regarded as a Rosicrucian circle. Samuel Butler (1612 – 1680), in his satire of the Restoration, Characters, tells of “the Brethren of the Rosy-Cross” as having attempted a misguided reformation of “their government.” A character in Butler’s other work Hudibras explains: “The Fraternity of the Rosy-Crucians is very like the Sect of the antient Gnostici who called themselves so, from the excellent Learning they pretend to, although they were really the most ridiculous Sots of all Mankind.”[392] According to Paul Benbridge, Cromwellians also referred to themselves as Rosicrucians, such as Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678), a metaphysical poet who sat in the House of Commons.[393]
Menasseh ben Israel came to England in 1655 to petition Parliament for the return of the Jews to England. The result was a national conference held at Whitehall, which declared that “there was no law which forbade the Jews’ return to England.” Henry Jessey, a contact of both Menasseh and Serrarius (1600 – 1669), worked behind the scenes of the Whitehall Conference. Serrarius was also the man chiefly responsible for communicating the mission of Shabbetai Zevi, to the English millenarians and Rosicrucians of the Hartlib Circle.[394] In 1662, Serrarius had published a treatise claiming that the eighth conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, to occur in that same year, prodded the greatest event of all: the establishment of the millennium, where Christ would gather the dispersed Jews, abolish the man of Sin, and create his kingdom of Earth.[395] Serrarius had been able to convince both John Dury and Comenius of Sabbatai Zevi’s messiahship.[396]
Queen Christina’s tutor, Johannes Matthiae, was influenced by John Dury and Comenius. In 1642, Comenius was in Sweden to work with Queen Christina and the Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, Axel Oxenstierna, on reorganizing the educational system in Swedish. Queen Christina became so fascinated with the claims of Sabbatai Zevi that she nearly became a disciple. In late 1665, Christina, who abdicated her throne in Sweden, converted to Catholicism and had moved to Rome, went to see her Jewish banker, Diego Teixeira (1581 – 1666), in Hamburg, and she arrived just as the news of Zevi’s announcement reached the Jews of Hamburg. She was reported to have danced in the streets of Hamburg with Jewish friends in anticipation of the apocalyptic event.[397]
In 1656, after Cromwell granted the Jews permission to meet privately and lease a cemetery, Menasseh’s followers established the Creechurch Lane synagogue, which became known as Bevis Marks Synagogue, the oldest Jewish house of worship in London, which was often led by Sabbatean Rabbis, and became intimately connected with the early founders of the Royal Society, many of whom were Freemasons, inspired the work of Francis Bacon.[398] The Royal Society was founded in 1660, when it was granted a royal charter by Charles II of England (1630 – 1685), brother of Elizabeth Stuart of the Alchemical Wedding. In 1649, after the execution of Charles I (1600 – 1649) and the establishment of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, his exiled son Charles II was initiated into Freemasonry.[399] As “Mason Kings,” explains Schuchard, James and his son Charles I and grandson Charles II, considered themselves Solomonic monarchs and employed Jewish visionary and ritual themes while they sought to rebuild the “Temple of Wisdom” in their kingdoms.[400] In 1665, the identification of Stuart Masons with Jews was expressed in a rare manuscript, “Ye History of Masonry,” written by Thomas Treloar.[401] Treloar portrayed Charles II as the restored and anointed king who now reigned over “the Craft.”[402]
Charles II’s mother, Henrietta Maria of France, the daughter of Marie de Medici, and widow of Charles I, patronized Jewish scholars who “practised divination through the medium of the Cabbalah.”[403] Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of John IV of Portugal (1604 – 1656), whose accession established the House of Braganza on the Portuguese throne.[404] Catherine’s mother as Luisa de Guzmán, who was from the ducal house of Medina-Sidonia of allegedly crypto-Jewish background. According to the genealogical studies of Edward Gelles, The Jewish Journey:
There was some Jewish admixture in the earlier Stuart line as in most European ruling houses. Some goes back to the descendants of Davidic Exilarchs. Mary of Guise and the ducal house of Lorraine have such a David-Carolingian connection and so did the d’Este of Ferrara and Modena. The mother-in-law of Charles II was from the ducal house of Medina-Sidonia of allegedly crypto-Jewish background.[405]
In 1641, Henrietta Maria, accompanied by her daughter Mary, left England for The Hague, where her sister-in-law Elizabeth Stuart, widow of Frederick V of the Palatinate—whose marriage to Elizabeth Stuart was the basis of the Alchemical Wedding of the Rosicrucians—and mother of her old favorite, Prince Rupert (1619 – 1682), had been living for some years already. The Hague was the seat of William II, Prince of Orange (1626 – 1650), Mary’s first cousin, which she was to marry shortly afterwards. William II’s father was Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange (1584 – 1647), the son of William the Silent. Frederick Henry’s step-sister, Countess Louise Juliana of Nassau, was the mother of Frederick V.
While the English Royal Family was in exile on the Continent, they had ample opportunity to meet members of the local Jewish community. Henrietta Maria had long enjoyed good relations with Jews. As explained by A.L. Shane, “the support of the Jewish merchants extended throughout the Royal Family’s exile and it was the Jewish merchants of Amsterdam who provided the money which the English Royal Family needed to finance their return to England, a fact which was gratefully acknowledged by Charles II, who promised to extend his protection to the Jews when he was restored to his kingdom.”[406] But the best demonstration of the Henrietta Maria’s interest in the Jewish community was her Royal visit to the Amsterdam Synagogue in 1642, accompanied by Frederick Henry, William III and new daughter-in-law. The visit was the occasion of the famous Address of Welcome of Menasseh ben Israel, which included a eulogy of the Queen, who was described as the “Worthy consort of the Most august Charles, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland.”[407]
Soon after, Henrietta Maria visited the residence of Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon Templo (1603 – after 1675), a close friend of Rabbi Jacob Abendana (1630 – 1685), the first head of Creechurch. Rabbi Templo was a Jewish Dutch scholar, translator of the Psalms, and expert on heraldry, of Sephardic descent, who was famous for his design of the Temple of Jerusalem.[408] His fascination with the Temple gained him the appellation, “Templo.” Templo was assisted in his design by Adam Boreel (1602 – 1665), a Dutch theologian and Hebrew scholar, counting among his close associates the Peter Serrarius, Baruch Spinoza, John Dury, and Dury’s son-in-law Henry Oldenburg (c. 1618 – 1677), an original member of the Hartlib Circle, and the first secret of the Royal Society.[409] Oldenburg was painted in 1668 by Jan van Cleve (1646 – 1716) gesturing the Marrano hand-sign.
According to Willem Surenhuis (c.1664 – 1729) a Dutch Christian scholar of Hebrew, Templo “won the admiration of the highest and most eminent men of his day by exhibiting to antiquaries, and others interested in such matters, an elaborate model of the Temple of Jerusalem, constructed by himself.”[410] Templo’s last work, a Spanish paraphrase of the Psalms, was dedicated to Isaac Senior Teixeira, financial agent of Menasseh ben Israel’s co-conspirator, Queen Christina of Sweden.[411] Templo’s renown inspired Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1579 – 1666)—a close friend of Johann Valentin Andreae—to have his Hebrew treatise on the Temple translated into Latin, and to have Leon’s portrait engraved.[412] Augustus married Dorothea of Anhalt-Zerbst, the niece of Christian of Anhalt (1568 – 1630), a German prince of the House of Ascania, and the chief sponsor of the Rosicrucian movement. Christian’s brother, Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Plötzkau, led a Rosicrucian court, that included the millenarian Paul Nagel, a collaborator of Baltazar Walther.[413]
Templo’s model was exhibited to public view at Paris and Vienna and afterwards in London. According to Jewish and Masonic historians in the eighteenth-century, Templo was welcomed by Henrietta Maria’s son, Charles II of England, as a “brother Mason,” and he designed a coat of arms featuring Kabbalistic symbols for the restored Stuart fraternity.[414] Henrietta Maria herself examined Templo’s model of the Temple and studied his explanatory pamphlet.[415] Laurence Dermott (1720 –1791), who founded the Ancient Grand Lodge of England, now called the “Antients,” in 1751, as a rival Grand Lodge to the Premier Grand Lodge of England, called the “Moderns,” took the coat of arms designed by Rabbi Templo as the basis for the coat of arms of the Antients.
In 1656, a delegation of prominent Jews in Amsterdam called on the Scottish agent John Middleton to pledge their secret financial and organizational assistance for the restoration effort.[416] In turn, Charles II promised them freedom to live and worship as Jews in Britain. To consolidate Jewish financial support, Charles called upon Sir William Davidson (1614/5 – c. 1689), a Scottish merchant and spy based in Amsterdam, who collaborated with Jewish trading partners.[417] Davidson’s tolerance was greatly admired by Abendana.[418] Davidson worked closely with Sir Robert Moray (1608 or 1609 – 1673), Alexander Bruce (1629 –1681).[419] Moray was also well known to the cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. Moray was probably familiar with Abendana’s work on Judah Halevi’s Kuzar (“Book of the Khazars”), for he praised the writings of medieval Jews on mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology in his letters to his Masonic protégé, Alexander Bruce.[420]
As early as 1638, a hint as to a connection between Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry was published, with the earliest known reference to the “Mason Word,” in a poem at Edinburgh in 1638:
For what we do presage is not in grosse,
For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse:
We have the Mason word and second sight,
Things for to come we can foretell aright…[421]
In 1689, a Williamite bishop, Edward Stillingfleet (1635 – 1699), asked his Scottish visitor, Reverend Robert Kirk, about the Scottish phenomenon of second sight and the Mason Word. Rejecting Kirk’s explanation of second sight, Stillingfleet called it “the work of the devil” and then scorned the Mason Word as “a Rabbinical mystery.”[422] Provoked by this conversation, Kirk visited the Bevis Marks synagogue in London order to observe the ceremonies, which were led by its Haham or Chief Rabbi, Solomon Ayllon (1660 or 1664 – 1728), a follower of Sabbatai Zevi from Salonika.[423] After returning to Scotland, Kirk published his findings in 1691:
The Mason-Word, which tho some make a Misterie of it, I will not conceal a little of what I know; it’s like a Rabbinical tradition in a way of comment on Jachin and Boaz the two pillars erected in Solomon’s Temple; with an addition of some secret signe delivered from hand to hand, by which they know and become familiar with another.[424]
Among the first Freemasons on record were Moray and Elias Ashmole (1617 – 1692) who became original members of the Royal Society. His diary entry for October 16, 1646, reads in part: “I was made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire, with Coll: Henry Mainwaring of Karincham [Kermincham] in Cheshire.”[425] In 1652, Ashmole befriended Solomon Franco, a Jewish convert to Anglicanism who combined his interest in Kabbalah and the architecture of the Temple with support for the English monarchy.[426] Franco instructed Ashmole in Hebrew and was probably the source for his manuscript “Of the Cabalistic Doctrine.”[427] Also Stuart supporter, Franco believed in the Hebrew traditions of anointed kingship, and he looked for spiritual portents in the life of Charles II, with whose eventual restoration he was greatly pleased.[428] After the Restoration, Franco converted to Christianity, persuaded by his belief that God had a divine plan for Charles II. He gave a copy of his book to Ashmole.
Ashmole copied in his own hand an English translation of the Fama and the Confessio, and added a letter in Latin addressed to the “most illuminated Brothers of the Rose Cross,” petitioning them to be allowed him to join their fraternity. Ashmole had a strong Baconian leaning towards the study of nature.[429] He was an antiquary with a particular interest in the history of the Order of the Garter. Ashmole revered John Dee, whose writings he collected and whose alchemical and magical teachings he endeavored to put into practice. In 1650, he published Fasciculus Chemicus under the anagrammatic pseudonym James Hasolle. This work was an English translation of two Latin alchemical works, one by Arthur Dee, the son of John Dee.
Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691), a friend
of Samuel Hartlib, was one of the founding members of the Royal Society, which was
influenced by the “new science,” as promoted by Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis.[430] Bacon
suggests that the continent of America was the former Atlantis where there
existed an advanced race during the Golden Age of civilization. Bacon tells the
story of a country ruled by philosopher-scientists in their great college
called Solomon’s House. Hartlib specifically mentions Solomon’s House with
reference to the kinds of institutions he would like to see created, such as
his Invisible College, which inspired the founding of the Royal Society.[431] In 1647, Robert
Boyle had written to Samuel Hartlib mentioning his “Invisible College” and that
he wished to support “so glorious a design.”[432] In 1663,
the Invisible College became the Royal Society and the charter of incorporation
granted by Charles II named Boyle a member of the council. Alexander Bruce was
one those making up the 1660 committee of 12, also attended by fellow freemason
Sir Robert Moray, that led to formation of the Royal Society, which also
included Freemason Elias Ashmole.
The first secretary of the Royal Society was Henry Oldenburg, who forged a strong relationship with John Milton (1608 – 1674) and his lifelong patron, Robert Boyle. Dury was connected to Boyle by his marriage to Dorothy Moore, an Irish Puritan widow. Their daughter, Dora Katherina Dury, later became the second wife of Henry Oldenburg. When Menasseh ben Israel arrived in London in 1650, Cromwell appointed a committee of important millenarian clergymen and government officials to receive him. Lady Ranelegh, Robert Boyle’s sister, had dinner parties for Menasseh, and Oldenburg met with him as well.[433]
Milton, who was among the extensive network of the Hartlib Circle, was painted by Flemish painter Pieter van der Plas (c.1595 – c.1650) gesturing the Marrano hand-sign. In addition to his famous Paradise Lost, Milton was author of the masque titled Comus, featuring the Lord of Misrule. According to Matthews in Modern Satanism, “Shorn of all theistic implications, modern Satanism’s use of Satan is firmly in the tradition that John Milton inadvertently engendered—a representation of the noble rebel, the principled challenger of illegitimate power.”[434] Lucifer’s statement in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n,” became an inspiration for those who embraced the rebellion against God. As noted by Frances Yates, that there was an influence of Kabbalah on Milton is now generally recognised. Denis Saurat believed that he had found traces of Lurianic Kabbalah in Paradise Lost.[435] In 1955, the eminent Hebrew scholar Zwi Werblowsky stated that, although the influence of Lurianic Kabbalah on Milton could not be proved, there was decidedly an influence of Christian Kabbalah upon him: “Milton is influenced not by the Lurianic tsimtsum, still less by the Zohar, but by Christian post-Renaissance Cabala in its pre-Lurianic phase.”[436]
According to Laursen and Popkin, “The publication of Henry Oldenburg’s and Robert Boyle’s correspondence has made it clear that millenarianism was at the center of the concerns of the Royal Society in its founding years.”[437] Oldenburg, first secretary of the Royal Society, had kept a close watch on Shabbetai Zevi’s mission, due to his interest in the restoration of the Jews.[438] Petrus Serrarius had been able to convince both Dury, Oldenburg’s father-in-law, and Comenius of Sabbatai Zevi’s messiahship.[439] Oldenburg had probably heard of Spinoza through their common friend, Serrarius.[440] By the beginning of the 1660s, Spinoza’s name became more widely known, and he was eventually paid visits by Gottfried Leibniz, Hobbes and Oldenburg.[441] Spinoza was also aware of Shabbetai’s mission, and entertained the possibility that with these events the Jews might reestablish their kingdom and again be the chosen of God.[442] When he heard of the excitement about Sabbatai Zevi, Oldenburg wrote to Spinoza to enquire if the King of the Jews had arrived on the scene: “All the world here is talking of a rumour of the return of the Israelites… to their own country… Should the news be confirmed, it may bring about a revolution in all things.”[443]
Adam Boreel—whose associates included Serrarius, the Hartlib Circle and Rabbi Templo—was also the founder of the Collegiants, which included Spinoza and was closely associated with the movement of the Quakers, founded by George Fox (1624 – 1691) and his wife, Margaret Fell, popularly known as the “mother of Quakerism.” Lady Anne Conway (1631 – 1679), whose work was an influence on Leibniz, became interested in the Lurianic Kabbalah, and then was introduced by the Rosicrucian alchemist Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614 ‑ 1699) to Quakerism, to which she converted in 1677.[444] Van Helmont and Christian Kabbalist Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636 – 1689) were also both in contact with Serrarius.[445] Rosenroth is famous for his Kabbala Denudata (“Kabbalah Unveiled”), whose editors included Henry Oldenburg.[446]
Van Helmont and Knorr von Rosenroth led a
Kabbalistic group that gathered at the court of Count Christian August von
Pfalz-Sulzbach (1622 – 1708), whose mother, Anna of Cleves, was the niece of Martin
Luther’s friend, John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony,[447] who commissioned the Luther Rose.
That group was connected to the circle around Rotterdam
merchant Benjamin Furly (1636 – 1714), a Quaker and a close supporter of George
Fox known as the Lantern, which included Lady Conway, Henry More, Adam Boreel
and John Locke.[448]
John Locke, (1632 – 1704), a prominent member of the Royal Society and a
Freemason,[449]
is the person normally considered as the founder of empiricism, a theory that
states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.[450]
Locke is regarded as the “Father of Liberalism.”[451] Locke,
who also spent time in Amsterdam, was influenced by Spinoza.[452]
Most scholars trace the phrase “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” in
the American Declaration of Independence, to Locke’s theory of rights.
Jacob Abendana’s brother Isaac who taught Hebrew at Cambridge and knew Locke, as well as Henry More and Robert Boyle.[453] Charles Cudworth’s daughter Damaris Cudworth (1659 – 1708), was a friend of Locke, and also a correspondent of Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716).[454] Van Helmont was a friend of Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716), who wrote his epitaph and introduced him to von Rosenroth in 1671.[455] Leibniz had visited Queen Christina shortly before her death in 1689, and subsequently became a member of her Accademia fisico-matematica in Rome, which included many Rosicrucian elements.[456]
Allison Coudert proposed that van Helmont
and von Rosenroth, and to varying extents seventeenth-century natural
philosophers who knew them or their work, including Leibniz and Locke’s friend
Isaac Newton (1642 – 1726/27), took a keen interest in Lurianic Kabbalah.[457]
Newton, a president of the Royal Society, was painted by the English painter Sir James
Thornhill (1675 or 1676 – 1734) gesturing the Marrano hand-sign. Newton was
committed to interpretations of the “Restoration” of the Jews to their own land
of Palestine and spent the remaining years of his intellectual life exploring
the Book of Daniel. In his library, Newton kept a heavily annotated copy
of The Fame and Confession of the
Fraternity R.C., Thomas Vaughan’s English translation of The Rosicrucian Manifestos. Newton also
possessed copies of Themis Aurea and Symbola Aurea Mensae Duodecium
by the alchemist Michael Maier. As a Bible scholar, Newton was initially
interested in the sacred geometry of Solomon’s Temple, dedicating an entire
chapter of The Chronology of Ancient
Kingdoms Amended.[458]
Columbus as well was in search of the lost continent of Atlantis.[459] Through his marriage to Felipa Perestrello, Columbus had access to the nautical charts and logs that had belonged to her deceased father, Bartolomeu Perestrello, a Knight of the Order of Santiago, who had served as a captain in the Portuguese navy under Prince Henry the Navigator (1394 – 1460), Grand Master of the Order of Christ.[460] Prince Henry was the son of King John I of Portugal and Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III of England, founder of the Order of the Garter. Henry’s brother was Edward, King of Portugal, also a Knight of the Garter, who married Eleanor of Aragon, Queen of Portugal. Their son was Afonso V of Portugal, also Knight of the Garter and of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Alfonso V’s sister Eleanor of Portugal married Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, successor to Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, and fellow member of the Order of the Dragon. Frederick III and Eleanor’s son was Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, a Garter Knight and Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, founded in 1340 by Philip the Good to celebrate his marriage to Prince Henry’s sister, Isabela of Portugal.
Tragically, according to David Brion Davis—the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian—Columbus’ sponsor, Don Isaac Abarbanel also played a key role in providing the justification for enslavement of black Africans, based on the so-called “Curse of Ham”:
[…] the great Jewish philosopher and statesman Isaac ben Abarbanel, having seen many black slaves both in his native Portugal and in Spain, merged Aristotle’s theory of natural slaves with the belief that the biblical Noah had cursed and condemned to slavery both his son Ham and his young grandson Canaan. Abarbanel concluded that the servitude of animalistic black Africans should be perpetual.[461]
The earliest Christian formulation of the Curse of Ham was articulated in the mid-fifteenth-century Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea of Gomes Eannes de Zurara (c. 1410 – c. 1474), to Prince Henry the Navigator.[462] According to Zurara, the claim was advanced by Archbishop Don Roderic of Toledo, who has been identified as Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (c. – 1247), who, at the helm of the Archdiocese of Toledo, held an important religious and political role in the Kingdom of Castile during the reigns of his friend Alfonso VIII, a patron of the Order of Santiago, and Ferdinand III of Castile, the father of Alfonso X.[463]
Some writers have pointed out that, as the Western world began the profit increasingly from the slave trade, the image of the Negro deteriorated in direct proportion to his value as a commodity, and scholars began to search for definitive proof the Negro’s inferiority.[464] Despite the prohibition against Jewish participation in slave trading during the Middle Ages, Jews were the chief traders of Christian slaves and played a significant role in the slave trade in Europe and other regions.[465] The Babylonian Talmud, which appeared in the sixth century AD, asserted that the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black, and depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates.[466] Talmudic or Midrashic explanations of the myth of Ham were well known to Jewish writers in the Middle Ages, such as Benjamin of Tudela (1130 – 1173). By the year 1600, the notion was generally accepted. In one of the earliest post-medieval references found, Leo Africanus, the great Arab traveler and one-time protégé of Pope Leo X, wrote about Negro Africans as being descended from Ham. His translator, the Englishman John Pory, followed the text with his own commentary.
According to Henri Pirenne, though many merchants were engaged in the slave-trade, they seem to have been principally Jews.[467] In his book, A History of the Jews, Solomon Grayzel states that “Jews were among the most important slave dealers” in European society.[468] Lady Magnus writes that during the Middle Ages, “The principal purchasers of slaves were found among the Jews… [T]hey seemed to be always and everywhere at hand to buy, and to have the means equally ready to pay.”[469] According to Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, author of The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics, “The golden age of Jewry in Spain owed some of its wealth to an international network of Jewish slave traders. Bohemian Jews purchased Slavonians and sold to Spanish Jews for resale to the Moors.”[470] Seymour Drescher concludes that “New Christian” or “Converso” merchants managed to gain control of a sizeable share of all segments of the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade.[471]
As the Counter-Reformation advanced in Europe, Hartlib looked to England to advance his project. To ensure co-operation, Hartlib advocated a union of all good men, bound together in an “invisible college” by religious pacts and devoting themselves to the advancement of science and the study of the Apocalypse.[472] Ever since 1620, the year of collapse of the Rosicrucian movement, Hartlib and his friends had dreamed of establishing “models” of Christian society, based in Andreae’s Christianopolis. They called it “Antilia” or “Macaria.” The former name came from Andreae’s work, the latter from More’s Utopia.[473] In Hartlib’s A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria, published in 1641, that ideal “model” was the first step to “the reformation of the whole world.”[474]
Andreae’s Christianopolis was influenced by Tommaso Campanella the City of the Sun, which was also inspired by Plato’s Republic and the description of Atlantis in Timaeus, a Genoese sea-captain who has wandered over the whole earth carries on a dialogue with his host, a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitallers, for whom he relates his experiences in the City of the Sun, in Taprobane, “immediately under the equator,” which he describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held in common. In the final part of the work, Campanella provides a prophesy in the veiled language of astrology that the Spanish kings, in alliance with the Pope, are destined to be the instruments of a Divine Plan: the final victory of the True Faith and its diffusion in the whole world.
Bacon’s New
Atlantis, which inspired the founding of America, significantly resembles Johann Valentin
Andreae’s Description of the Republic of Christianopolis. The island on
which the utopian city of Christianopolis stood was discovered by Christian
Rosenkreutz on the voyage on which he was starting at the end of The Chymical
Wedding. In Christianopolis spiritual fulfilment was primary goal of each
individual where scientific pursuits were the highest intellectual calling.
Andreae’s island also depicts great technological innovations, with many
industries separated in different zones which supplied the population’s needs,
which shows great resemblance to Bacon’s scientific methods and purposes.
Ben Jonson referenced the idea related to Solomon’s House in his masque, The Fortunate Isles and Their Union, which satirized the Rosicrucians. The Fortunate Isles were semi-legendary islands in the Atlantic Ocean and were one of the most persistent themes in European mythology. Later on the islands were said to lie in the Western Ocean near the encircling River Oceanus, as well as Madeira, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Cape Verde, Bermuda, and the Lesser Antilles. The Antilles were named after Antilia, an alternate name, along with Macaria, used by Samuel Hartlib for his Invisible College and related to the college described by Andreae in his Christianae Societatis Imago.[475]
According to Nicholas Hagger in The Secret Founding of America: The Real Story of Freemasons, Puritans, & the Battle for The New World, “Indeed, so close were Puritanism and Rosicrucianism in essence that it can be said that the Puritan philosophy was actually Rosicrucian.”[476] A group dissatisfied with the efforts of the Puritans, decided they would sever all ties, and became known as Separatists, led by John Robinson (1576 – 1625) and William Brewster (1560 – 1644). However, in 1608, shortly after James I declared the Separatist Church illegal, the congregation emigrated to Leiden where they were joined by Rosicrucian circles. It was here that Brewster set up a new printing company in order to publish leaflets promoting the Separatist aims and pamphlets supporting the Rosicrucian cause.[477]
In November 1620, following the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, which erupted after the Habsburgs set out to crush the Rosicrucian movement, Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart fled into exile to The Hague in the Netherlands, and numerous Rosicrucians migrated with them. Frederick and Elizabeth sought refuge in the Netherlands with Frederick’s uncle, Maurice, Prince of Orange (1567 – 1625), the son of William the Silent, who was a strong supporter of their cause and sympathized with the Rosicrucians. During the first two decades of the seventeenth century, and until his death in 1625, Maurice was the Stadtholder of the Netherlands provinces of Holland and Zeeland, the southern coastal states, which included the towns of Amsterdam, Leiden, and The Hague. It was Maurice, in fact, who had offered the English Separatists a safe haven in Leiden in 1608.[478] The last known Rosicrucian document, published in Latin by Brewster in Leiden in 1615, was called the Confessio Fraternitatis, or “Confession of the Fraternity,” and was written under a pseudonym, Philip A Gabella (Philip the Cabalist), while some scholars have proposed that its true author was Pierre Du Gua.[479]
It was to Brewster’s home in Leiden in 1615 where fled Pierre Du Gua, Sieur de Monts (c. 1558 – 1628), a French merchant, explorer and colonizer with Rosicrucian connections.[480] Du Gua, a Calvinist, founded the first permanent French settlement in Canada. He travelled to northeastern North America for the first time in 1599 with Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit. He sent Samuel de Champlain to open a colony at Quebec in 1608, thus playing a major role in the foundation of the first permanent French colony in North America.
When the Fama Fraternitatis publicly announced the existence of the Rosicrucian fraternity in 1610, the document was circulated in Paris, and one of the first to publicly respond to it was Du Gua.[481] Du Gua was also a member of the School of Night, a modern name for a group of men centered on Sir Walter Raleigh that was once referred to in 1592 as the “School of Atheism.”[482] The group supposedly included poets and scientists Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman and Thomas Harriot. It was alleged that each of these men studied science, philosophy, and religion, and all were suspected of atheism. Marlowe was the author of Doctor Faustus, which is the most controversial Elizabethan play outside of Shakespeare. It is based on the German story of Faust, a highly successful scholar who is dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil, and exchange his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. There is no firm evidence that all of these men were known to each other, but speculation about their connections features prominently in some writing about the Elizabethan era.
John Winthrop (1587 – 1649) a wealthy English Puritan lawyer sailed across the Atlantic on the Arbella, leading to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[483] Winthrop’s arrival signaled the beginning of the Great Migration. The term Great Migration usually refers to the migration in this period of English settlers, primarily Puritans to Massachusetts and the warm islands of the West Indies, especially the sugar rich island of Barbados, 1630–40. From 1630 through 1640 approximately 20,000 colonists came to New England. They came in family groups (rather than as isolated individuals) and were motivated chiefly by a quest for freedom to practice their Puritan religion. Winthrop’s noted words, a “City upon a Hill,” refer to a vision of a new society, not just economic opportunity.
On 12 June 1630, the Arbella led the small fleet bearing the next 700 settlers into Salem harbor. Salem may have inspired the city of Bensalem in Bacon’s New Atlantis, which was published in 1627. The settlement of Salem by Rosicrucians would explain the existence of witchcraft in the city, which would have given cause to the famous witch trials of 1692. Frances Yates notes that Dee’s influence later spread to Puritanism in the New World through John Winthrop’s son, John Winthrop, Jr., an alchemist and a follower of Dee. Winthrop used Dee’s esoteric symbol, the Monas Hieroglyphica, as his personal mark.[484] In 1628, to acquire the alchemical knowledge of the Middle East, Winthrop sailed to Venice and Constantinople, further extending his abilities and chemical contacts. Winthrop was famously eulogized Cotton Matther as “Hermes Christianus,” and praised as one who had mastered the alchemical secret of transmuting lead into gold.[485]
In Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture (1606–1676), believes that, although less famous than his father, John Winthrop, Jr. was one of the most important figures in all of colonial English America, and describes how he used alchemy to shape many aspects of New England’s colonial settlement, and how that early modern science influenced an emerging Puritanism. Winthrop joined his father in New England in 1631. Following the collapse of New England’s economy at the outbreak of the English Civil War, Winthrop returned to Europe from 1641 to 1643. While there, he was influenced by Samuel Hartlib and members of his circle, including John Dury and Jan Comenius. Dury as well was an active advisor and fundraiser for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, having also attempted to get Comenius appointed the first President of Harvard.[486]
Winthrop was also reputed to be Eirenaeus
Philalethes, a pseudonymous author whose widely praised texts were then
circulating in English alchemical circles. These works have been conclusively
identified as the work of George Starkey (1628 – 1665), a young alchemist whom
Winthrop helped train, and a devoted follower of van Helmont. Starkey reported to
Hartlib that he was held under arrest in Massachusetts for two years under
suspicion of being a Jesuit or a spy. Starkey emigrated to England in 1650,
where he gained a significant reputation as an adept and influenced both Robert
Boyle and Isaac Newton. Winthrop’s
English connections to the Reverend John Everard (1584?
– 1641), a Christian alchemist who was in touch with Robert Fludd. Winthrop’s interest in Everard
was focused on determining whether or not he was a member of the Rosicrucians, with
Winthrop finally determining he was not. Everard’s antinomian beliefs have led some scholars to speculate that
Winthrop shared the same.[487]
Rev. George Phillips, the founder of the
Congregational Church in America, arrived on the Arbella in 1630 with Governor
Winthrop. In 1781, Phillips’s great-grandson, banker Dr. John Phillips, established
Exeter Academy, a prestigious American private prep school in New Hampshire, and
is one of the oldest secondary schools in the US. The Economist
described the school as belonging to “an elite tier of private schools” in
Britain and America that counts Eton and Harrow in its ranks. Exeter has a long
list of famous former students, including Arthur M. Schlesinger
Jr., Gore Vidal, Stewart Brand, Mark Zuckerberg,
founder of Facebook, novelist John Irving, and Dan Brown the author of The
Da Vinci Code and the Masonic-inspired The Lost Symbol.
In 1681, William Penn (1644 – 1718), a Quaker and member of Furly’s Lantern, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.[488] In 1682, Penn founded the city of Philadelphia, named after one of the “Seven Churches of Asia” mentioned in the Book of Revelation 3:10, as “the church steadfast in faith, that had kept God’s word and endured patiently.” Another possible reason for the use of the name was the Society of the Philadelphians. Both George Fox and William Penn knew its founder, Jane Lead (1624 – 1704), who was influenced by Jacob Boehme. Central to the founding of the society were visions Lead received of the “Virgin Sophia,” the Feminine Aspect of God, who promised to unfold the secrets of the universe to her. Lead declared herself a “Bride of Christ.” The society made many proselytes in England and on the Continent of Europe, in Holland, Belgium, and Germany.[489]
Penn was personally acquainted with several
members of the Royal Society, including John Wallis, Isaac Newton, John Locke,
John Aubrey, Robert Hooke, John Dury and William Petty.[490] As explained by Dr. John Palo, in New
World Mystics, after Penn’s first trip to America in 1681, on several trips
he made back to Europe, he had come into contact with individuals in England,
Holland and Germany, who were playing an important role in executing a plan to
establish a Rosicrucian colony in America by 1694. Notable among them were
William Markham of the Philadelphian Society in London, who would serve later
as Penn’s Deputy Governor of Pennsylvania, and Jacob Isaac Van Bebber, a German
Rosicrucian, who later purchased a thousand acres of land from Penn for the
purpose of establishing a colony in America. [491]
According to Rosicrucian legend, Bacon’s The New Atlantis inspired the founding of a colony of Rosicrucians in America in 1694 under the leadership of Grand Master Johannes Kelpius (1667 – 1708), who was a friend of Lead’s secretary, Heinrich Johann Deichmann. Born in Transylvania, Kelpius was a follower of Johann Jacob Zimmerman, an avid disciple of Jacob Boehme, who was also “intimately acquainted” with Benjamin Furly, who was Penn’s agent in Rotterdam.[492] Zimmerman was referred to by German authorities as “most learned astrologer, magician and cabbalist.”[493] Kelpius came to know the Kabbalist Knorr von Rosenroth, and later used many of his hymns as the inspiration for his own.[494] According to Elizabeth W. Fisher, his later writings indicate that he was well acquainted with the Rosicrucian manifestos.[495]
With his followers in the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, Kelpius came to believe that the end of the world would occur in 1694. This belief, based on an elaborate interpretation of a passage from the Book of Revelation, anticipated the advent of a heavenly kingdom somewhere in the wilderness during that year. Answering Penn’s call to establish a godly country in his newly acquired American lands, Kelpius felt that Pennsylvania, given its reputation for religious toleration at the edge of a barely settled wilderness, was the best place to be. With the help of Furly, Kelpius and his followers crossed the Atlantic and settled in the valley of the Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia from 1694 until his death in 1708. After Kelpius died, the brotherhood greatly diminished, and the few remaining members lived out their days as solitary holy men who were associated with the Ephrata Cloister and the Moravian Church.[496]
Ben-Zion Katz, in another Hebrew-language book, Rabbinate, Hassidism, Enlightenment: The History of Jewish Culture Between the End of the Sixteenth and the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, explained that the same racist ideas found in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria also became part of the Hasidic movement, born in late eighteenth-century Poland.[497] According to Gershom Scholem, the twentieth century’s leading authority on the Kabbalah, as explained by Elisheva Carlebach, “Sabbateanism is the matrix of every significant movement to have emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, from Hasidism, to Reform Judaism, to the earliest Masonic circles and revolutionary idealism.”[498] Judah Leibes raises the possibility that Israel ben Eliezer (1698 – 1760), known as Besht, an acronym for Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, died in 1760 of sorrow over the conversion to Christianity of the Sabbatean sect known as the Frankists a year earlier, since he viewed them as an organ of the mystical body of Judaism.[499]
Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697 – 1776), a leading German rabbi and champion of Orthodox Judaism, described a violent altercation that took place at his home with two defenders of the Sabbatean sect known as the Frankists, one of them being named as Jacob Rothschild.[500] The Rothschild dynasty was founded by Amschel Mayer Bauer (1744 – 1812), who took on the name “Rothschild,” for “red shield” in German. Rothschild has been referred to as a “founding father of international finance,” and ranked seventh on the Forbes magazine list of “The Twenty Most Influential Businessmen of All Time” in 2005.[501] Emden, a fierce opponent of the Sabbateans, is well known as a protagonist in the Emden-Eybeschütz Controversy, a momentous incident in Jewish history of the period, that followed the accusations against Rabbi Eybeschütz (1690 – 1764). In 1751, Emden accused Eybeschütz of being a secret follower of Shabbetai Zevi, citing the evidence of some amulets written by Eybeschütz which contained Sabbatean formulas. In 1753, Eybeschütz was exonerated by the Council of the Four Lands in Poland, and his halakhic works remain in use today, despite strong suspicions among modern historians that Emden’s accusation may have been justified.[502]
The founder of the Frankists was a self-proclaimed successor of Zevi, named Jacob Frank (1726 – 1791), who rejected the Talmud in favor of Zohar, a foundational work in the literature of the Kabbalah, written in thirteenth-century Spain. Frank claimed to come to rid the world of the Talmud and Jewish law, a law he regarded as oppressive. Frank claimed instead that the Redemption would be fulfilled through a reversal of the Torah, affirming that for the “Good Lord” to appear, it would be necessary to precipitate chaos.[503] As summarized by Abba Eban, Frank “taught a strange idea that God would not send a Messiah until the world had become as evil as it could possibly be. So, said Frank, it was his duty as a follower of Shabbetai Zevi to bring about a time of pure evil.”[504] Frank taught a doctrine of the “holiness of sin,” claiming that with the arrival of the messiah, everything was permitted. Among the more radical Frankists, explains Gershom Scholem, there developed a “veritable mythology of nihilism,” in which the new messianic dispensation “entailed a complete reversal of values, symbolized by the change of the thirty-six prohibitions of the Torah… into positive commands.”[505]
As Abraham Duker has pointed out, anti-Semitism was also characteristic among the Frankists, who rejected orthodox Jews, whom they resented for the persecution they were made to endure as heretics:
The Frankists were also united by less positive aspects, namely dislike of the Jews who forced them into conversion and thus cut them off from their near and dear ones as well as hatred of the Catholic clergy which had its share in this drastic step… The task of raising a new generation under such condition of double Marranoism was indeed a difficult one and required much cooperation and close-mouthedness. Kinship and the close social relations have made Frankism to a large extent a family religion, that has continually been strengthened by marriage and by economic ties through concentration in certain occupations.[506]
As a consequence, the congress of rabbis in Brody excommunicated the Frankists, and made it obligatory upon every pious Jew to seek them out and expose them. The Sabbateans informed Dembowski, the Catholic Bishop of Kamieniec Podolski, Poland. The bishop took Frank and his followers under his protection and in 1757 arranged a religious disputation between them and the orthodox rabbis. The bishop sided in favor of the Frankists and also ordered the burning of all copies of the Talmud in Poland. Most controversially, Frank denounced his fellow Jews as guilty of the infamous blood libel.[507]
At this critical juncture Frank proclaimed himself as a direct successor to Sabbatai Zevi, and assured his followers that he had received revelations from Heaven, which called for their conversion to Christianity. The conversion, however, was to serve as a means to achieve Christianity’s ultimate defeat. As revealed in The Sayings of Jacob Frank, Frank warned his followers of immanent and violent persecution, and advised them of the need to adopt the “religion of Edom,” by which he meant Christianity, leading eventually to the adoption of a future religion called das (“knowledge”), to be revealed by Frank.
However, the Frankists continued to be viewed with suspicion, and Frank was arrested in Warsaw on February 6, 1760, and delivered to the Church’s tribunal who convicted him of heresy, and imprisoned in the monastery of Częstochowa. When Czestochowa was captured by the Russians in 1772, after the first partition of Poland, Frank was freed and journeyed to Brünn in Moravia, to the home of his cousin Schoendel Dobrushka. Frank left Brünn in 1786 or 1787, and he and his followers settled in the unused castle in Offenbach belonging to the Prince Wolfgang Ernst II of Isenburg-Birstein (1735 – 1803). It likely through Masonic channels that Frank met the prince, who was a Rosicrucian, and had numerous connections with Freemasons and Illuminati in Brünn.[508] No one could understand the nature of Frank’s relationship with the prince. According to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836 – 1895), the literary source for the term “masochism,” who won a wide audience for his pornographic tales, some pointed to Rosicrucian or Illuminati connections.[509] Sacher-Masoch was familiar with Frank’s biography and even wrote a story based on it entitled “Der Prophet von Offenbach.”[510] Goethe described the ostentatious pageantry put on by Frank and his entourage in Offenbach as a “masquerade.”[511]
Frank died in 1790. The Frankists dispersed throughout Poland and Bohemia, eventually mixing with the aristocracy and the middle class. According to Gershom Scholem, “In the period between Frank’s apostasy and his death the converts strengthened their economic position, particularly in Warsaw where many of them built factories and were also active in masonic organizations.”[512] Scholem then adds:
The sect’s exclusive organization continued to survive in this period through agents who went from place to place, through secret gatherings and separate religious rites, and through the dissemination of a specifically Frankist literature. The “believers” endeavored to marry only among themselves, and a wide network of inter-family relationships was created among the Frankists, even among those who remained within the Jewsh fold. Later Frankism was to a large extent the religion of families who had given their children the appropriate education.[513]
The greatest men of Poland Frédéric Chopin, Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki, were also reportedly descendants of the Frankist sect.[514] The mother of Mickiewicz’s wife Celina, the polish composer Maria Szymanowska, was a member of the Wolowski family of Frankists. One of her ancestors was Jacob Leibowicz, the personal assistant of Jacob Frank.[515] Maria toured extensively throughout Europe, especially in the 1820s, where he impressed Goethe, Humboldt, Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn, and Bartel Thorwardsen, who sculpted her statue.[516] Maria met Tsar Alexander I in Vienna and Warsaw, who appointed her as first court pianist and piano tutor to his daughter. Maria eventually settled permanently in St. Petersburg, where she hosted a salon that attracted influential politicians and intellectuals. Among them was Mickiewicz who composed poems dedicated to her.[517] Celina’s sister Helena married Polish lawyer Franciszek Malewski (1800 – 1870), who together with his friend Mickiewicz founded the Philomath Society, a secret student organization at the Imperial University of Vilnius. Philomaths contributed to establishing contacts with the older generation of conspirators, especially with Freemasonry, and conspiratorial organizations in the Kingdom of Poland and in Russia, such as the Decembrists.[518] After being convicted of membership in the Philomaths and exiled into Russia, Mickiewicz later described his experiences in Dziady (“Forefathers’ Eve”). Father Hieronim Kajsiewicz (1812 – 1873), a Polish preacher, co-founder of the Order of the Resurrection, who knew Mickiewicz well, maintained that while in Russia, Mickiewicz had been in close contact with Martinists and was frequently in the “company of dreamers of various sorts, even with Jewish Cabbalists.”[519]
The modern Hasidic movement began in Ukraine with the Baal Shem Tov, whose philosophy drew heavily on the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. The name the movement adopted was apparently first employed by the hasidim in Second Temple period Judea, known as Hasideans, who according to Heinrich Grätz later became known as the Essenes.[520] The title continued to be applied as an honorific for those considered devout, and was adopted by the Ashkenazi Hasidim. The title also became associated with the spread of the Kabbalah in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, Jacob ben Hayyim Zemah wrote in his glossa on Luria’s version of the Shulchan Aruch (Set Table”) that, “One who wishes to tap the hidden wisdom, must conduct himself in the manner of the Hasidim [“Pious”].”
The Besht’s disciple and successor, Rabbi Dov Baer ben Avraham of Mezeritch (d. 1772), also known as the “Great Maggid,” is regarded as the first systematic exponent of the mystical philosophy underlying the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, and through his teaching and leadership, the main architect of the movement.[521] As the Besht taught that traditional forms of Jewish worship were not only unnecessary, but even harmful, he incurred the opposition of traditional Jewish scholars, led by the famous rabbi Elijah ben Solomon (1720 – 1797), known as the Vilna Gaon and his followers, known as Mitnagdim. One decree of excommunication (herem), declared that the Hasidim “must leave our communities with their wives and childre… they should not be given a night’s lodging… It is forbidden to do business with them, or do assist at their burial.”[522]
When Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745 – 1812), a member of the Maggid’s inner circle of disciples, known as the Chevraia Kadisha (“Holy Brotherhood”), travelled to Lithuania to affirm that the Hasidim respected the Jewish law, Vilna Gaon would not even speak to him.[523] Zalman, an adept in Isaac Luria’s system of Kabbalah, and the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidism, was accused by contemporaries of being a Sabbatean.[524] The name “Chabad” is an acronym formed from three Hebrew words—Chokhmah, Binah, Da’at, the first three sefirot of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, meaning “Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge.” The name Lubavitch derives from the village of Lyubavichi, or Lubavitch in Yiddish, in current-day Russia, where Rabbi Dovber Shneuri (1773 – 1827), the Second Rebbe, moved in 1813, and from which the now-dominant line of leaders resided for a hundred years.
The origins of Evangelical Christians are usually traced to 1738, with various theological streams contributing to its foundation, including English Methodism, German Lutheran Pietism and the crypto-Sabbatean Moravian Church of Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf (1700 – 1760).[525] Formally named the Unitas Fratrum (Latin for “Unity of the Brethren”), was derived from the Hussite heretical movement started by Jan Hus, and to which had belonged Comenius, a core member of the Hartlib Circle. Zinzendorf was raised by a grandmother who corresponded with Leibniz in Latin, read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, and studied Syrian and Chaldean, and exposed him to themes of Jacob Boehme and Christian Kabbalism.[526] This would bring Zinzendorf into contact with heterodox Jews, whose sympathies for the teachings of Sabbatai Zevi led them to positions close to Christian students of Kabbalah, seen by many Pietists as a medium between the two religions.[527]
Zinzendorf was the pupil and godson of the direct originator of Pietistm, Philipp Jakob Spener (1635 – 1705). Pietism was a movement within Lutheranism that began in the late seventeenth century, whose forerunners were Jakob Boehme and Johann Valentin Andrea, the author of the Rosicrucian manifestos.[528] Spener was an intimate friend of Johann Jakob Schütz (1640 – 1690), a cousin of Andreae, Both Spener and Schütz very much admired Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata. In 1672, Schütz, who was also a close friend of von Rosenroth, wrote the foreword to his Harmonia Evangeliorum.[529] Spener was powerfully influenced by the preaching of the converted Jesuit preacher Jean de Labadie (1610 – 1674). Originally a Jesuit priest, Labadie became a member of the Reformed Church in 1650, before founding the community which became known as the in 1669. Labadie was among those who had been kept informed on the progress of Zevi’s mission by Peter Serrarius, and spoke about the Sabbateans in his sermons.[530]
According to Glenn Dynner, it was possibly at this time that the Moravians and Rabbi Eybeschütz, then denounced as a crypto-Sabbatean in the Emden- Eybeschütz controversy, discovered their mutual interests.[531] Zinzendorf was so fascinated by Jacob Frank’s mission, that after thousands of Frankists converted to Catholicism in Poland, he sent missionaries among this Jewish followers who converted to Moravianism to meet with Frank’s disciples.[532] Zinzendorf then adopted the antinomianism of the Frankists by elaborating Kabbalistic sex rites into bizarre Christian teachings. According to the Kabbalistic theories of Zinzendorf, God and the universe are comprised sexual potencies, the Sephiroth of the Kabbalah, which interact with each other and produce orgasmic joy when in perfect equilibrium, recalling the union of the cherubim in the Holy of Holies.[533]
It was through a Moravian friend that the famous Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) apparently met Samuel Jacob Falk (1708 – 1782), a Kabbalist known as the Baal Shem of London, and over the next decades, their mystical careers would be closely intertwined.[534] Rabbi Jacob Emden accused Falk, of being a Sabbatean, as he invited Moses David of Podhayce, a known Sabbatean with connections to Jonathan Eybeschütz, to his home.[535] Falk collaborated with a Sabbatean Frankist network in England, Holland, Poland, and Germany, and who would exercise an important influence in Masonic and occult circles during the eighteenth century.[536]
From 1764 onward, Falk received the patronage of the wealthy Goldsmid brothers, who also became Masons.[537] Goldsmid is the name of a family of Anglo-Jewish bankers who sprang from Aaron Goldsmid (d. 1782), a Dutch merchant who settled in England about 1763 and was active in the affairs of the Great Synagogue of London. Two of his sons, Benjamin Goldsmid (c. 1753 – 1808) and Abraham Goldsmid (c. 1756 – 1810), became prominent financiers in the City of London during the French revolutionary wars.
Swedenborg was a Swedish pluralistic-Christian theologian and mystic, best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven and Hell (1758). A large number of important cultural figures have been influenced by his writings, including Robert Frost, Johnny Appleseed, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Daniel Burnham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Flaxman, George Inness, Henry and William James, Carl Jung, Immanuel Kant, Honoré de Balzac, Helen Keller, Czesław Miłosz, August Strindberg, D.T. Suzuki, and W. B. Yeats. His philosophy had a great impact on King Carl XIII of Sweden (1748 – 1818), nephew of Frederick the Great, who as the Grand Master of Swedish Freemasonry built its unique system of degrees and wrote its rituals.
Swedenborg had already become immersed in Sabbatean influences, which had made an important penetration in Sweden. At the University of Uppsala, Hebraists and Orientalists were familiar with Sabbatai Zevi’s mission through Abraham Texeira, Queen Christina’s confidant and Resident in Hamburg. Texeira kept informed the Christian Hebraist Esdras Edzard (1629 –1708) who had been a believer in Sabbatai Zevi, before exploiting the disillusionment with of Zevi’s apostasy. Swedenborg’s father, Bishop Jesper Swedberg, spent ten weeks in the home of Edzard, where he learned of his host’s Sabbateanism.[538]
Swedenborg was also exposed to Sabbateanism through the influence of his brother-in-law, the Swedish Scholar Eric Benzelius (1675 – 1743), his chief mentor for forty years, who founded the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala in 1739, of which Swedenborg became a member. Benzelius had visited Edzard and studied Kabbalah with Leibniz and Van Helmont, and worked closely with Rabbi Johann Kemper (1670 – 1716), formerly Moses ben Aaron of Cracow, who had been a follower of the Sabbatean prophet Zadoq before converting to Christianity.[539] From his study of Johannes Bureus’ “Nordic Kabbalah,” Kemper argued that Kabbalistic studies were central to Sweden’s national identity.[540]
In 1738, Peter Boehler, the London Moravian leader, and his followers, established the Fetter Lane Society in London, the first flowering of the Moravian Church in England. Also associated with Fetter Lane was Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, who exercised an enormous influence on the occult. In addition to influencing leaders and major figures of the Evangelical Protestant movement, such as English Puritans John Wesley (1703 – 1791), George Whitefield (1714 – 1770), and Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758) of the Great Awakenings in England and the United States, the Moravian Church was also responsible for another Evangelical sect, the Plymouth Brethren.[541] Zinzendorf was a student of Philipp Jakob Spener, the founder of Pietism, who was a close friend of Johann Jakob Schütz, a cousin of Johann Valentin Andreae, the author of the Rosicrucian manifestos. Schütz was also a friend of Johann Jacob Zimmermann, whose pupil, Johannes Kelpius, established the Rosicrucian colony in Philadelphia with the help of Benjamin Furly, leader of the Lantern, which included .[542]
Zinzendorf’s Moravian Church was a major influence in the Great Awakening, which refers to the first of a number of periods of religious revival in American Christian history. The First Great Awakening, which began in the 1730s and lasted to about 1740, was a rebellion against authoritarian religious rule which spilled over into other areas of colonial life.[543] Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, the sister synagogue of Bevis Marks in London, was founded with contributions from Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1705) who also played a leading role in the Great Awakening.[544] Franklin was closely associated with Whitefield and came to know Zinzendorf well.[545] Franklin met Zinzendorf after he and David Nitschmann, the first Bishop of the Moravian Church, led a small community to found a mission in the colony of Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve 1741. In 1735 in Berlin, Nitschmann had been consecrated the first Bishop of the Moravians by Daniel Ernst Jablonski, grandson of the Rosicrucian John Amos Comenius. Local settlers in Pennsylvania became alarmed at the presence of the Moravians. Zinzendorf was denounced in Pennsylvania as “the best of Revelation,” a “false prophet,” the leader of a ban of “devils” and “locusts” from “the bottomless pit.”[546]
Zinzendorf’s visit to Pennsylvania was partly in response to letters sent to him by George Whitefield.[547] By 1737, Whitefield had become a national celebrity in England where his preaching drew large crowds, especially in London where the Fetter Lane Society, had become a center of evangelical activity.[548] Whitefield, John Wesley and his brother Charles are credited with the foundation of the evangelical movement known as Methodism, which was heavily influenced by Moravian pietism. In 1735, John Wesley and his brother Charles sailed for Savannah, when he met with a group of Moravian Brethren led by August Gottlieb Spangenberg. After an unsuccessful ministry of two years at Savannah Wesley returned to England and aligned himself with Fetter Lane.[549] Wesley was initiated at a Masonic lodge at Downpatrick in Ireland in 1788.[550] Wesley later read and commented extensively on Swedenborg’s work.[551]
The First Great Awakening began in 1740, when Whitefield traveled to North America. Whitfield joined forces with Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758) to “fan the flame of revival” in the Thirteen Colonies in 1739–40. Edwards married Sarah Pierpont, the daughter of James Pierpont (1659 – 1714), the head founder of Yale College, and her mother was the great-granddaughter of Thomas Hooker (1586 – 1647), a prominent Puritan colonial leader, who founded the Colony of Connecticut after dissenting with Puritan leaders in Massachusetts. Jonathan Edwards’ son, Piermont Edwards (1750 – 1826), served as the first Grand Master of a Masonic lodge in New Haven, Connecticut.[552] His son, Henry W. Edwards, was Governor of Connecticut and his daughter, Harriett Pierpont Edwards, was married to inventor Eli Whitney. His nephew, who was only five years younger than himself, was Vice President Aaron Burr.
The Evangelical Christians were chiefly responsible for advancing the cause for the abolition of slavery. It was only when John Wesley became actively opposed to slavery that the small protest became a mass movement resulting in the abolition of slavery. In 1791, Wesley wrote to his friend, the English politician William Wilberforce (1759 – 1833), to encourage him in his efforts to end the slave trade. Wilberforce had become an evangelical Christian in 1785, and became a leader of the Clapham Sect, a group of influential Christian like-minded Church of England social reformers based in Clapham, London, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Members of the Clapham sect were chiefly prominent and wealthy evangelical Anglicans. They shared in common political views concerning the liberation of slaves, the abolition of the slave trade and the reform of the penal system. The Clapham sect have been credited with playing a significant part in the development of Victorian morality. In the words of historian Stephen Tomkins, “The ethos of Clapham became the spirit of the age.”[553] The sect is described by Tomkins as:
A network of friends and families in England, with William Wilberforce as its center of gravity, who were powerfully bound together by their shared moral and spiritual values, by their religious mission and social activism, by their love for each other, and by marriage.[554]
In 1783, when Wilberforce and his companions travelled to France and visited Paris, they met prominent Freemasons like Benjamin Franklin, General Lafayette as well as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.[555] Wilberforce headed the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade for twenty years until the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. In 1787, Wilberforce had come into contact with Thomas Clarkson, who called upon him to champion the cause to parliament. As the British abolitionists had been somewhat disappointed with their own campaign in Britain, Wilberforce, hoping that the ideals of the French Revolution would support the cause, entrusted Clarkson with the mission to France to gain the collaboration of the French abolitionists. Upon his arrival in Paris, in August 1789, Clarkson thus immediately contacted the French opponents to the slave trade, Condorcet, Brissot, Clavière, La Fayette and Illuminatus Comte de Mirabeau, with whom he was particularly impressed. Wilberforce made his last public appearance when he was named by Clarkson to serve as the chairman of the Anti-Slavery Society convention of 1830, at Freemasons’ Hall in London, the headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England and the Supreme Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons of England, as well as being a meeting place for many Masonic Lodges in the London area.[556] In 1833, the British government passed the Slavery Abolition Act, advocated by Wilberforce, which abolished slavery in the British Empire the following year.
Concerned with the political activism of the Frankist sect, Frederick William III of Prussia instructed his chargé d’affaires in Frankfurt, Councillor Formey, to conduct an investigation in Offenbach who reported that “The Frankist sect is rumored to be in close contacts with the Freemasons, Illuminati, Rosicrucians, and Jacobins.”[557] In his famous article, “Redemption Through Sin,” Gershom Scholem explained, “Toward the end of Frank’s life the hopes he had entertained of abolishing all laws and conventions took on a very real historical significance.”[558] As Frank’s own nephew, Moses Dobruschka, took part in the upheavals, as Scholem further noted, “as a result of the French Revolution the Sabbatian and Frankist subversion of the old morality and religion was suddenly placed in a new and relevant context, and perhaps not only in the abstract…”[559] Government officials who intercepted the communications among the Frankists led them to suspect that the many references to a man named “Jacob” were dealing with the Jacobins, who were intent on radicalizing the Jews of the ghetto.[560]
The Illuminati gave their name to the Age of Enlightenment, whose ideas played a major role in inspiring the French Revolution, and emphasized the rights of common men as opposed to the exclusive rights of the elites. The devil dupes humanity by disguising himself as an angel of enlightenment. Many European thinkers claimed to have been influenced by such British philosophers John Locke, Thomas Paine and Adam Smith, who served as a source of inspiration to many generations of European liberals.[561] According to Yirmiyahu Yovel, author of The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity, the Marrano experience contributed to the use of “dual language,” which deliberately employed equivocation, where terms and ideas had to be presented to appear to discuss one matter to outsiders, without disclosing their true meaning to for their intended audience, “set a linguistic pattern that played an indispensable role in the process of European modernization.” Thus, Jewish esoteric ideas could be disguised as “Christian” or even secular philosophy. Therefore, according to Yovel, explaining the sources of Enlightenment philosophy:
In perfecting the uses and modes of equivocation, the Marranos set a linguistic pattern that played an indispensable role in the process of European modernization… Hence we can say that some measure of marranesque element was indispensable in that evolution; the creators of modernity often had to act like quasi-Marranos. The Enlightenment in particular manifested this need—Hobbes and Spinoza, Hume and Shaftesbury, Diderot and Mandeville, Locke and Montaigne, the Deists, the materialists, possibly Boyle, even Kant (on religion) and Descartes (on his intended project), and a multitude of lesser figures and mediators found it necessary to revert to various techniques of masked writing.[562]
Leading Jewish statesmen and intellectuals, such as Heinrich Heine, Johann Jacoby, Gabriel Riesser, and Lionel de Rothschild, supported the general cause of freedom and liberty sweeping across Europe, as it was also a means to achieve emancipation for the Jews. John Locke, a member of Benjamin Furly’s society of Rosicrucians known as the Lantern, and regarded as the “father of liberalism,” is regarded as one of the prophets of the American and French revolutions.[563] The French Revolution hailed ideals borrowed from Freemasonry, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” essential prerequisites for Jewish emancipation. Inspired by the ideals of “liberty,” the first laws to emancipate Jews in France were enacted during the French Revolution, establishing them as citizens equal to other Frenchmen. The two authors at the time shared a conclusion that the Illuminati, founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt (1717 – 1753), were the source of the French Revolution. In 1797, the Abbé Augustin de Barruel (1741 – 1820), an ex-Jesuit who came to Britain following the September Massacre, published the first volumes of his four-volume account of the French Revolution, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. That same year, John Robison (1739 – 1805), professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, published his own history of the Revolution, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe. Like Robison, Barruel claimed that the French Revolution was the result of a deliberate conspiracy subvert the power of the Catholic Church and the aristocracy, hatched by a coalition of philosophes, Freemasons and the Order of the Illuminati.
In 1771, according to Barruel and Lecouteulx de Canteleu, a certain Jutland merchant named Kölmer, who had spent many years in Egypt, returned to Europe in search of converts to a secret doctrine founded on Manicheism that he had learned in the East. Lecouteulx de Canteleu suggests that Kölmer was Altotas, described by Figuier as “this universal genius, almost divine, of whom Cagliostro has spoken to us with so much respect and admiration.” On his way to France, Kölmer stopped at Malta, where he met the famous charlatan Count Cagliostro (1743 – 1795)—the notorious mystic widely regarded as a charlatan, and another important disciple of Jacob Falk—but he was driven away from the island by the Knights of Malta after he nearly brought about an insurrection amongst the people. Kölmer then travelled to Avignon and Lyons, where he made a few disciples amongst the Illuminés. In the same year, Kölmer went on to Germany, where he encountered Adam Weishaupt and initiated him into all the mysteries of his secret doctrine.[564] According to Cagliostro’s own admission, his mission “was to work so as to turn Freemasonry in the direction of Weishaupt’s projects,” and that the funds which he drew on were those of the Illuminati.[565]
As reported by Terry Melanson, in Perfectibilists, his history of the order, the Rothschild family had at least three important connections to the Illuminati. They were Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg (1744 – 1817), Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel (1744 – 1836), and the Thurn und Taxis family.[566] According to Niall Ferguson, Mayer Amschel Rothschild was acting as Dalberg’s “court banker.”[567] Dalberg was also a notable patron of letters, and was the friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805).[568] In 1780, Amschel Rothschild became one of the preferred bankers of Karl Anselm of Thurn and Taxis (1733 – 1805), Head of the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis, Postmaster General of the Imperial Reichspost. As explained by Amos Elon in Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time:
The Thurn and Taxis postal service covered
most of central Europe and its efficacy was proverbial…
Rothschild’s ties with the administration of the Thurn and Taxis postal service
were profitable to him in more than one way. He was a firm believer in the
importance of good information. The postal service was an important source of
commercial and political news. The Prince was widely thought to be paying for
his monopoly as imperial postmaster by supplying the Emperor with political
intelligence gained from mail that passed through his hands. He was not averse
to using this intelligence himself—perhaps in conjunction with Rothschild—to
make a commercial profit.[569]
It is reputed that the ground plan for the French Revolution was discussed at the Grand Masonic Convention in 1782 at Wilhelmsbad, at which Comte de Mirabeau (1749 – 1791), leader of the Jacobins, attended as an observer.[570] The congress was convoked by Wilhelm I of Hesse-Kassel (1743 – 1821), while his brother, Illuminatus Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel (1744 – 1836) was main organizer.[571] Both Prince Charles and his brother Wilhelm were members of a family descended the “Alchemical Wedding” and from Maurice of Hesse-Kassel, the chief supporter of the Rosicrucian cause, and was linked closely to the Rothschilds. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the dynasty, built his fortune as banker to Prince Charles’ brother, William I.
Of thirteen children and eldest daughter of Frederick V and Elisabeth Stuart was Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, who corresponded with Descartes, had no children. Their brother Rupert (1619 – 1682), gained fame for his chemical experiments as well as for his military and entrepreneurial exploits, including the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, and also played a role in the early African slave trade. Louise Hollandine (1622 – 1709), was an accomplished painter and student of Gerritt van Honthorst. Sophia, who became the Electress of Hanover, was renowned for her intellectual patronage, particularly of Leibniz and John Toland.[572] She was well-read in the works of Descartes and Spinoza.
The eldest son, Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine (1617 – 1680), and his younger brother Rupert spent much of the 1630s at the court of his maternal uncle, Charles I of England, hoping to enlist British support for his cause. Charles Louis was still in England in 1648 when the Peace of Westphalia restored the Lower Palatinate to him, and remained in England long enough to see the execution Charles I by the forces of Oliver Cromwell. He then returned to the devastated Palatinate in 1649. In 1650, he married Landgravine Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel, the granddaughter Maurice of Hesse-Kassel. Over the more than thirty years of his reign there, he strove with some success to rebuild his shattered territory. In foreign affairs, he pursued a pro-French course, and in 1671 married his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte to Philippe I, Duke of Orleans (1617 – 1680).
Philippe I was the great-great-grandfather of Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orleans (1747 – 1793), another friend of Jacob Falk, as well as an Illuminati member and Grand Master of the Grand Orient of France.[573] Philippe I was the younger son of Louis XIII of France, the son of Henry IV and Marie de Medici. Philippe I’s brother was Louis XIV of France, the “Sun King,” whose chief advisors included cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. Mazarin’s sister, Anne Marie Martinozzi, was married to Armand, Prince of Conti, the brother of Louis, Prince of Condé, who was involved in a conspiracy with Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrère and Queen Christina to create a world government of the Messiah based in Jerusalem. As Joscelyn Godwin explained in The Theosophical Enlightenment, “The whole Orleans family, ever since [Philippe I, Duke of Orléans], was notoriously involved in the black arts.”[574] Philippe I was close to Louis XIV’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, who was involved in the L’affaire des poisons (“Affair of the Poisons”), where Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, and the priest Étienne Guibourg performed Black Masses for human sacrifice for her.[575]
Through the influence of Swedenborg and his pupil Count Cagliostro, Falk had become revered as the Unknown Superior of revolutionary Freemasonry, and the convention was determined to learn more about him.[576] Some Masons believed that Falk was the “Old Man of the Mountain,” the traditional name of the leader of the Ismaili Assassins.[577] Falk was one of the “Unknown Superiors” of the Rite of Strict Observance, founded in the 1760s by Karl Gotthelf, Baron Hund (1722 – 1776).[578] Cagliostro was also a disciple of the most notorious figure of the era, the enigmatic Comte de St. Germain (c. 1691 or 1712 – 1784).[579] Prince Charles was preoccupied with a search for the “hidden superiors” and the “true secret,” and was also an ardent devotee of alchemy, possessing his own laboratory, and was a student of Comte St. Germain, whom he had hosted at his home.[580]
St. Germain claimed to be the son of Francis II Rakoczi (1676 – 1735), Prince of Transylvania, and knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and Charlotte Amalie of Hesse-Wanfried, the great-granddaughter of Maurice of Hesse-Kassel.[581] Francis II’s grandfather was George II Rakoczi (1621 – 1660) and Sophia Bathory, two families who employed the emblem of the Order of the Dragon. In 1639, Samuel Hartlib published a pamphlet dedicated to George II.[582] St. German was apparently educated by Gian Gastone de Medici (1671 – 1737), Grand Duke of Tuscany, and last of the Medicis.[583] Gian’s mother, Marguerite Louise d’Orléans, was the daughter of Gaston, Duke of Orléans, the son of Henry IV of France Marie de Medici, making her a first cousin of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” who married Madame de Montespan, and whose brother was Philippe I, Duke of Orleans. Gian married Anna Maria Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg, the granddaughter of Christian Augustus, Count Palatine of Sulzbach, at whose court were found the Kabbalists Mercurius van Helmont and Knorr von Rosenroth.[584]
After the death Charles II of England in 1685, his Catholic brother James and II of England (1633 – 1701) ascended to the throne. When James II issued a Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, allowing various opposing creeds to co-exist, the Parliament not only condemned the king but had him deposed for daring to acknowledge the alternative faiths. Seven prominent Englishmen wrote to William III, Prince of Orange (1650 – 1702), inviting him to invade England and accept the throne. William III’s father was William II, Prince of Orange (1626 – 1650) was the son Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, and grandson William the Silent. William III’s mother was Mary, Princess Royal, sister of Charles II and James II.
As recorded by William Thomas Walsh, William III joined the Freemasons and with their connivance, invaded England on November 5, 1688, in an action that ultimately deposed James II and won him the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, what became known as the “Glorious Revolution.” The expenses for the expedition, reported Walsh, were paid for by a Jewish banker of Amsterdam, Isaac Suaso, who in return was made Baron de Gras, while other Jews, particularly Sir Solomon de Medina and Alfonso Rodrigues, who provided the finances for the final conquest of Ireland.[585] The king was forced to leave the throne, bringing to an end the Stuart succession to the throne of England. The throne was then offered jointly to William III and his wife Mary, sister of Charles II and James II, known as the reign of “William and Mary.”
James II married the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, Mary of Modena, of the House of Este who had long-standing associations with the houses of the de Medici, Savoy, Gonzaga and Habsburgs. Their son, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688 – 1766), nicknamed The Old Pretender, married Maria Clementina Sobieska, whose family was related to Jacob Frank.[586] Princess Maria Klementyna Sobieska, granddaughter of the Polish King and Lithuanian Grand-Duke, John III Sobieski. Their sons included Charles Edward Stuart (1720 – 1788), known as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Young Pretender, and his brother Henry Benedict Stuart, the Cardinal York (1725 – 1807), the fourth and final Jacobite heir to claim the thrones of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland publicly, who was a great supporter of the Frankists.[587] In crypto-Jewish circles, it was thought that Henry Benedict had an affair with a Jewish woman named Reyna Barzillai of Venice.[588] Though William and Mary were of Stuart lineage, the Scots were disappointed at the loss of a Stuart monarch, and in 1689, the year of James II’s deposition, Bonnie Dundee led a force of Highlanders against government troops at Killiecrankie. The rebellion was called a Jacobite Rising, because of their support of James II, which is derived from the Latin Jacomus, or Jacob in Hebrew.
Parliament passed the Bill of Rights barred Roman Catholics from the throne of England, and gave the succession to Mary’s sister, Anne who inherited the throne when William III died in March 1702. However, Parliament had passed the Act of Settlement in 1701, to settle the succession to the English and Irish crowns on Protestants only, whereupon Sophia of Hanover—the daughter of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V of the Palatinate, of the Alchemical Wedding—as the next Protestant in line, was designated the next heir to the British throne. When Sophia died a few weeks before Anne, the Act of Settlement was responsible for the accession of Sophia’s son George I of Great Britain (1660 – 1727) in 1714, from whom all later British kings and queens would descend.
The Masonic Grand Lodge of England was founded shortly after George I ascended to the throne and the end of the first Jacobite rising of 1715. The federalization of four London lodges in the Grand Lodge of London and Westminster was founded in London on St. John the Baptist’s day, 24 June 1717, coinciding with the summer solstice. One of the first Grand Masters was followed Jean Theophilus Desaguiliers (1683 – 1744), scientist and, later, a cleric ordained into the Church of England. Desaguiliers was a British natural philosopher, clergyman, engineer who was elected to the Royal Society in 1714 as experimental assistant to Newton. In 1721, a Scottish Presbyterian pastor, Reverend James Anderson (c. 1679/1680 – 1739), was instructed by Grand Master Desaguiliers to revise and condense the Old Masonic Manuscripts observed by the English Lodges. This would lead to the 1721 Anderson’s Constitution. Anderson’s Constitution was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790), who was that year elected Grand Master of Masons in Pennsylvania.
The foundation of Grand Lodge in London had been followed by the inauguration of Masonic Lodges on the Continent, receiving their warrant from the Grand Lodge of England. However, the men who founded the Grand Lodge of Paris, whose leader was Charles Radclyffe (1693 – 1746), were Jacobites, a cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie. While English Freemasonry offered three degrees of initiation that became universal throughout the order about 1730, Radclyffe, who was eventually acknowledged grand master of all French lodges, became responsible for promulgating Écossais Freemasonry, which introduced higher degrees.
Amongst the Jacobites supporting Radclyffe was a member of the Royal Society, Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686 – 1743), known as Chevalier Ramsay, then living as an expatriate in Paris. In 1710, Ramsay was converted to the Roman Catholic faith by the Jesuit-educated Francois Fénelon (1651 – 1715), Archbishop of Cambrai. As a young man, Ramsay joined a quasi-Rosicrucian society called the Philadelphians, and studied with a close friend of Isaac Newton. He later associated with other friends of Newton, including John Desaguiliers. He was also a particularly close friend of David Hume. When he lived in Paris, he frequented the Parisian literary Club de l’Entresol in the company of Montesquieu. In 1715, during his stay in France, Ramsay also had formed a friendship with the Regent of France, Philippe II, Duke of Orleans (1674 – 1723), the son of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans and Elizabeth Charlotte, Madame Palatine. Philippe II married Françoise Marie de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Blois, a legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. Philippe II was Grand Master of the Ordre de Saint-Lazare, instituted during the Crusades as a body of Hospitallers, and inducted Ramsay into order, after which he known as “Chevalier.”[589]
After the resignation of Radclyffe as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Paris in 1738, Écossais Freemasonry “boldly came forward and claimed to be not merely a part of Masonry but the real Masonry, possessed of superior knowledge and entitled to greater privileges and the right to rule over the ordinary, i.e. Craft Masonry.”[590] It was after 1738, when Radclyffe was succeeded by Louis de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Duc d’Antin (1707 – 1743), great-grandson of Madame de Montespan, that the additional degrees were first heard of. The Rose-Croix degree first adopted by the Freemasons of France in about 1741, was so Catholic in character that is aroused suspicions that it was devised by the Jesuits.[591] However, on the death of the Duc d’Antin in 1743, he was replaced by Count of Clermont (1709 – 1771), becoming the fifth Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France.[592]
Clermont was also descended from Madame de Montespan, as his mother was the Duc d’Antin aunt. Clermont’s father was Louis III, Prince of Condé, the grandson of Louis, Grand Condé, the co-conspirator with Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrère and Queen Christina.[593] According to some sources, the Comte of Clermont retained the position of Grand Master until his death in 1771, and was succeeded by his cousin, Louis Philippe d’Orléans.[594]
The Royal Order of Heredom maintained links with the Count of Clermont, and his elite Rose-Croix rite, the Rite of Perfection.[595] The paternity into highly Christianized degrees within a special order of Freemasonry, the Royal Order of Heredom of Kilwinning, which claimed Bonnie Prince Charlie as its Grand Master, is generally attributed to Ramsay.[596] The degree the Scottish Rite known in modern Masonry as “Prince of the Rose-Croix of Heredom or Knight of the Pelican and Eagle” became the eighteenth and the most important degree in what was later called the Scottish Rite. According to the tradition of the Royal Order of Scotland this degree had been contained in it since the fourteenth century, and had been instituted by Robert Bruce in collaboration with the Templars after the battle of Bannockburn.[597] In answer to a question about the ritual term “Heredom,” Charles R. Rainsford (1728 – 1809), a British MP, Swedenborgian Freemason and a close friend of Falk, replied that it did not refer to an actual mountain in Scotland but rather to the Jewish symbol for Mons Domini or Malchuth, the tenth Sephira of the Kabbalah:
The word “Heridon” [sic] is famous in several degrees of
masonry, that is to say,
in some invented degrees (grades forges), or in degrees of masonry socalled. Apparently, the enlightened brethren who
have judged it proper to make
the law, that Jews should be admitted to the Society have received the word with the secrets (mysteres) which have
been entrusted to them.[598]
In 1741, Swedenborg and his Masonic colleagues in London assimilated the sexual practices of the Sabbateans within the Order of Heredom.[599] As Schuchard explained, the Kabbalistic belief that proper performance of Kabbalistic sex rites rebuilds the Temple and manifests the Shekhinah between the conjoined cherubim was particularly attractive to the initiates of the Order. One of the leaders of this rite, the French artist and engraver Lambert de Lintot, produced a series of hieroglyphic designs, which included phallic and vaginal symbolism, representing the regeneration the psyche and the rebuilding the Temple of the New Jerusalem.[600] In the Rite of Seven Degrees, to which belonged Falk and Swedenborg, de Lintot cited the Duke of Orleans as his Deputy Grand Master.[601]
From the activities recorded by Falk’s servant Hirsch Kalisch in his diary of 1747-51, evidence emerges in the journals, correspondence, and diplomatic reports of visitors to London which suggests, explains Schuchard, “that Falk became involved in a clandestine Masonic system that utilized Kabbalah and alchemy to support efforts to restore James Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender,’ to the British throne.”[602] From the first published report of his Kabbalistic skills, the Count of Rantzow’s Memoires (1741), reported that Falk also performed a magical ceremony with a black goat before the Duke of Richelieu (1696 – 1788), French ambassador in Vienna, and the Count of Westerloh, during which Westerloh’s valet had his head turned backward and died of a broken neck.[603] Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, was the Marshal of France and the lover of Marie Louise Élisabeth d’Orléans, Duchess of Berry, the eldest of the surviving children of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans.
The first high-degree “Scottish” lodge was started in 1756 with Carl Friedrich Eckleff (1723 – 1786), whose father had worked closely with Swedenborg, as Master. In 1759, Eckleff started the Chapitre Illuminé “L’Innocente,” which utilized the seven-degree system of the Royal Order of Heredom and the Clermont Rite.[604] Eckleff established his lodges of higher and lower degrees based on certain files received from abroad, dating from around 1750, referred to as Grand Chapitre de la Confraternité I'Illuminée, a chapter in Geneva that had received its knowledge from another in Avignon, where there was a high-level system of Illuminés.[605]
The Martinists, or French Illuminés, were a movement evidently more powerful and influential than the more infamous Illuminati. Martinism was founded by Martinez Pasqually (1727? – 1774) a Rose-Croix Mason who also showed an interest in Swedenborg, and founded the Ordre des Chevalier Maçons Elus-Coën de L’Univers (Order of the Knight Masons, Elected Priests of the Universe) in 1754. Pasqually knew Kabbalah, and legend has it that he travelled to China to learn secret traditions.[606] Pasqually had frequently been described as a Jew. A Martinist named Baron de Gleichen (1733 – 1807) wrote that, “Pasqualis was originally Spanish, perhaps of the Jewish race, since his disciples inherited from him a large number of Jewish manuscripts.”[607] Gershom Scholem has called attention to the contacts between the Ordre de Elus-Coën and the Sabbateans.[608] Pasqually’s system was derived from the philosophy of Swedenborg and his belief in the existence of supernatural beings. According to J. M. Roberts, the Elus-Coën philosophy “was expressed in a series of rituals whose purpose was to make it possible for spiritual beings to take physical shape and convey messages from the other world.”[609]
The first cover the Illuminati was the Amis Réunis and the Philadelphes, a secret core created within the Philalethes. In 1771 an amalgamation of all the Masonic groups was effected at the new lodge of the Amis Reunis. The society was founded by Savalette de Langes (1745 – 1797), State Treasurer of France under Louis XVI, was Grand Officer of the Grand Orient, under Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orleans, as its Grand Master. Before supporting the ideas of the French Revolution, de Langes was captain of the national guards of the battalion of Saint-Roch and aide-de-camp of the marquis de La Fayette (1757 – 1834). Like Savalette, many members of the Amis Réunis came from France’s financial establishment, as well as high-ranking officials, in addition to bankers, businessmen, landowners and the highest level of finance officials from the military.
A further development of the Amis Reunis was the Rite of the Philalethes, compounded by Savalette de Langes in 1773 out of Swedenborgian, Martinist, and Rosicrucian mysteries, and which investigated the theosophical claims of Falk, Swedenborg, and other gurus of illuminism.[610] The members of this rite—which some historians qualify as an “occult academy”—were dedicated to uncovering the “rapport of masonry with Theosophy, Alchemy, the Cabala, Divine Magic, Emblems, Hieroglyphs, the Religious Ceremonies and Rites of different Institutions, or Associations, masonic or otherwise.”[611] They were particularly interested in the Bohemian Brethren of Comenius, which evolved into the Moravian Church of Zinzendorf.[612] Their ultimate aim was a “total synthesis of all learning,” towards the creation of a “world religion that all the devout of whatever persuasion can embrace.”[613] A modified form of the Rite of the Philalethes was instituted at Narbonne in 1780 under the name of Free and Accepted Masons du Rit Primitif, by the Marquis de Chefdebien d’Armisson, a member of the Strict Observance as well as the Amis Réunis.
The Philalethes attracted the higher initiates of the Amis Reunis, Court de Gebelin, the Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel, Condorcet, the Vicomte de Tavannes, Jean-Baptiste Willermoz (1730 – 1824), and others. At the time of the congress, both French and German Freemasons were very unclear with regard to the whole subject, purpose and conflicting accounts of the origins of Masonry. As Savalette de Langes, royal treasurer in Paris, reported in his correspondence with the Marquis de Chefdebien:
Dr. Falc, in England. This Dr. Falc is known to many Germans. From every point of view he is a most extraordinary man. Some believe him to be Chief of All the Jews, and attribute all that is marvelous and strange in his conduct and in his life to schemes which are entirely political… There has been a curious story about him in connection with Prince de Guemene and the Chev. de Luxembourg relating to Louis XV. whose death he had foretold. He is practically inaccessible. In all the higher Sects of Adepts in the Occult Science, he passes as a man of higher attainments…[614]
By the third quarter of the eighteenth
century, there were a number of different Masonic authorities operating in
Germany. In Berlin
there was the lodge Zu den drei Weltkugeln (“Three Globes”), which
adopted the Strict Observance. Another
Berlin grand lodge, the Grosse Landesloge, founded in 1770, worked the
multi-degree Swedish Rite, whose Grand Masters were nephews of Frederick the
Great, the brothers Charles XIII of Sweden (1748 – 1818)
and Gustav III of Sweden (1746 – 1792), Grand Masters of Swedish Freemasonry
and patrons of Swedenborg. The Swedish lodges claimed to possess precious
documents that contained the Masonic secrets embedded in “the hieroglyphic
language of the old Jewish wisdom books,” a reference to De Lintot’s engravings
and Falk’s revelations.[615]
Another group of lodges practicing French high-degree Masonry, the best known of which was the Grand Lodge of Prussia called the Royal York for Friendship.[616] The Lodge L’Amitié (“Friendship Lodge”), founded in 1752 by the French Freemasons in Berlin, became in 1761, by merger with the Lodge Three Globes, the Lodge Friendship of Three Doves, then in 1765, the Royal York of Friendship Lodge, after having initiated Prince Edward, Duke of York and Albany (1739 –1767), brother of King George III, and the second son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, whose nephew was Illuminatus Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Alternburg (1745 – 1804), a friend of Adam Weishaupt, who was the great-grandfather of Prince Albert the husband of Queen Victoria. Prince Edward’s godparents were Frederick William I of Prussia. The lodge then separated from the Three Globes after it joined the Strict Observance in 1767, in order to become in turn a Mother Lodge, and was affiliated with the Grand Lodge of England.[617] When London recognized the Grand National Lodge of the Freemasons of Germany in 1773, it was joined by the Royal York following year, but fundamental differences in views on the rituals and degrees would lead to a break in 1778.
Weishaupt had decided to infiltrate the Freemasons to acquire material to expand his own ritual and establish a power base towards his long-term plan for political change in Europe. In early in February 1777, he was admitted to the Rite of Strict Observance. Weishaupt was persuaded by one of his early recruits, his former pupil Xavier von Zwack, that his own order should enter into friendly relations with Freemasonry, and obtain the dispensation to set up their own lodge. A warrant was obtained from the Grand Lodge of Prussia called the Royal York for Friendship, and the new lodge was called Theodore of the Good Counsel, which was quickly filled with Illuminati. By establishing Masonic relations with the Union lodge in Frankfurt, which was affiliated to the Premier Grand Lodge of England, lodge Theodore became independently recognized, and able to declare its independence. The lodge Theodore was named with the intention of flattering Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria (1724 – 1799).[618]
Although receiving a patent from the York Lodge, lodge Theodore formed a particular system of its own, by instructions from the Martinist Loge des Chevaliers Bienfaisants at Lyons, with which it was in correspondence.[619] Martinism was later propagated in different forms by Pasqually’ two students, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743 – 1803) and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz (1730 – 1824), who was a member of the Rite of the Philalethes. Saint-Martin was interested in Swedenborg and was the first to translate the writings of Jakob Boehme from German into French. In the 1770s, Willermoz came into contact with Baron Hund, founder of the Strict Observance, which he joined in 1773. Willermoz was the formulator of the “Inner Order” of the Rectified Scottish Rite, or Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cité-Sainte (CBCS), founded in 1778 as a variant of the Rite of Strict Observance, including some items coming from the Elus-Coën of his teacher Pasqually. The order oversaw numerous lodges, including the Strict Observance and the Lodge Theodore of Good Counsel in Munich.[620]
The main purpose of the Congress of Wilhelmsbad was to decide the fate of the Strict Observance, which claimed to be a revival of the Templar Order. The Grand Master of the order was Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick (1721 – 1792), whose great-great-grandfather as Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.[621] The Order of the Strict Observance was in reality a purely German association composed of men drawn entirely from the intellectual and aristocratic classes, and, in imitation of the chivalric orders of the past, known to each other under knightly titles. Thus, Prince Charles became Eques a Leone Resurgente, Illuminati member Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick was Eques a Victoria, the Prussian minister Johann Rudolph von Bischoffswerder (1741 – 1803) Eques a Grypho, Baron de Wächter Eques a Ceraso, Joachim Christoph Bode (1731 – 1793), Councillor of Legation in Saxe-Gotha, Eques a Lilio Convallium, Christian Graf von Haugwitz (1752 – 1832), Cabinet Minister of Frederick the Great Eques a Monte Sancto.
The Convent of Wilhelmsbad actually achieved was the demise of the Strict Observance. The lack of a coherent alternative to the two strains of mysticism allowed the Illuminati to present themselves as a credible option. It was as a result of their influence exercised at the Masonic congress at Wilhelmsbad of 1782 that the Illuminati came to wield enormous influence in the world of European secret societies. Many influential intellectuals, clergymen and politicians counted themselves as members of the Illuminati, including Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick, and the diplomat Xavier von Zwack, who became the order’s second-in-command. The Illuminati attracted literary men such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Gottfried Herder, the leading exponents of the Romantic movement and Weimar Classicism.
At Wilhelmsbad in 1782, Bode abandoned the Christian mysticism of Willermoz in favor of a radical interpretation of Enlightenment. He entered negotiations with Adolph Freiherr Knigge (1752 – 1796), a member of the Illuminati, and finally joined the order in 1783, acquiring the rank of Major Illuminatus. Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel joined the following month.[622] After the Illuminati was first outlawed in Bavaria in 1784, through edict by Charles Theodore, with the encouragement of the Catholic Church, Bode became the de facto chief executive officer after Knigge’s resignation and Weishaupt’s escape.[623]
At Barruel affirms in his writings that the Philalethes was constituted to fight the monarchy.[624] It was a secret congress of the Philalethes convened in 1785, attended by Bode, Baron de Busche, Cagliostro, Savalette de Langes and others, where the death of Louis XVI was decreed.[625] The congress brought together 120 deputies, most of whom were notorious occultists.[626] Among the topics discussed were the linkage between Jacob Falk and Jacob Frank.[627] Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick led the German delegation and the English one was led by a close friend of Falk, General Charles R. Rainsford (1728 – 1809), a British MP, Swedenborgian Freemason and a member of the Royal Society.[628] As a new cover for the order, Bode declared: “We agreed… for France, we would adopt the name Philadelphes instead of Illuminati.”[629] Chaillon de Jonville, deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge, the institution which preceded the Grand Orient, in a text which appeared in 1789, denounced the Philadelphes as responsible for the revolutionary disturbances.[630]
As explained by Terry Melanson, “Contrary to popular belief, most Masonic Lodges outside of Bavaria were not completely purged of their Illuminism; and the Order—at the very least, its members—merely went underground, only to resurface later under the guise of reading societies and Jacobin clubs.”[631] In 1790, Mirabeau would become the president of the most influential of the political “clubs” in French politics, the Jacobins, founded in 1789. When he returned to France, Mirabeau had introduced the philosophy of Illuminism into his Masonic lodge. In 1788, deputies of the Illuminati were sent upon Mirabeau’s request to inform the French lodges on strategy. Their first item of advice was the creation of a Political Committee in every lodge, from which arose the Jacobins. Soon, nearly every lodge in the Grand Orient was infiltrated by supporters of Weishaupt, who became active in spreading the political policies of terrorism against the state.[632]
The Illuminati conspiracy behind the French Revolution was orchestrated under the watch of the Duke of Orleans, at his Palais-Royal. In 1790, at the Palais-Royal was founded the French revolutionary organization, Amis de la Verité (“the Society of the Friends of Truth”), also known as the Social Club, by Nicolas de Bonneville (1760 – 1828) and Claude Fauchet (1744 – 1793). In 1787, Bonneville had been converted to the ideals of the Illuminati during the first of two visits to Paris by J.C. Bode.[633] An official diplomatic communiqué, dated 1791, containing a list of “Illuminati and Freemasons” was sent by Bavarian Foreign Minister Count Karl Matthäus von Vieregg (1719 – 1802), to Imperial Ambassador Ludwig Konrad von Lehrbach (1750 – 1805) at Munich, who then forwarded it to Vienna. Known as the Graf Lehrbachs Illuminaten-Liste, the list was only discovered in the Archives of Vienna by Sebastian Brunner in 1869. The list includes many known members who had not been confirmed elsewhere, such as the Duke of Orleans, Jacques Necker, Marquis de Lafayette, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Mirabeau, Fauchet and the English-born American revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737 – 1736).[634]
Bonneville was an influential political figure of the French Revolution and was among the first to propose the storming of the Bastille. The Social Club, whose prominent members included Camille Desmoulins, Marie-Jean Condorcet, Brissot, and Jean Baptiste Louvet, became a forum for revolutionary and egalitarian ideas, attracting Gracchus Babeuf (1760 – 1797) and Sylvain Maréchal (1750 – 1803), who wrote a manifesto in support of Babeuf’s goals, Manifeste des Egaux (“Manifesto of Equals”). Babeuf was the leader of the Conspiracy of the Equals, was a failed coup d’état of 1796 during the French Revolution. The French Revolution can be said to have been ignited in the gardens of the Palais-Royal on July 12, 1789, when Camille Desmoulins (1760 – 1794) rallied a crowd with “Aux armes!” (“to arms!”), calling for a response to the news that had just come from Versailles about the king’s dismissal of his finance minister, Jacques Necker (1732 – 1804). The mob burst forth carrying a bust of Necker and the Duke of Orleans. On July 14, they stormed the sparsely populated prison and armory known as the Bastille. When the Bastille was stormed, the Comte de Mirabeau, allegedly said, “the idolatry of the monarchy has received a death blow from the sons and daughters of the Order of the Templars.”[635]
The Duke of Orleans, who would go on to play a leading role in the French Revolution as Philippe Égalité, would be next in line to the throne should the main Bourbon line die out with the death of King Louis XIV. The duke’s purported primary motivation, besides his hatred of the King Louis XIV and his wife, Marie Antoinette, was to himself succeed as king. To ensure his succession to the throne, Jacob Falk is believed to have given him a talisman consisting of a ring, which Philippe Égalité, prior to his execution on November 6, 1793, is said to have sent to a Jewess, Juliet Goudchaux, who passed it on to his son, subsequently King Louis Philippe.[636] However, the year he was executed, Philippe Égalité had issued a manifesto repudiating his connection with Freemasonry, and he was now of the opinion that in a republic no secret society should be allowed to exist.[637] When Louis XIV, King of France was executed on January 21, 1793, a voice in the crowd cried out “De Molay is avenged!”[638]
In August 1789, Mirabeau and Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748 – 1836), a member of the Philalethes and Neuf Soeur, played a central role in conceptualizing and drafting the final Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Illuminatus Lafayette prepared the principal drafts in consultation with his close friend Thomas Jefferson. As a cryptic clue to their true origin, the declaration features several prominent occult symbols. First, is the Illuminati symbol of the All-Seeing Eye within a triangle, now found on the Great Seal of the United States. Underneath the title is an Ouroboros, an ancient Gnostic symbol of Satan, found in Western alchemy. Underneath it is a red Phrygian cap, derived from the pagan Mysteries of Mithras. The entire Declaration is guarded by the twin Masonic pillars.
The Masonic Grand Constitutions of 1762 declared that after Frederick II the Great’s death, his powers were to be vested in Supreme Councils of the Rite all over the world. It declared that there should be one such Supreme Council in each Empire, Kingdom or State in Europe, Africa and Asia, but two Supreme Councils in the continent of North America, and two similar Supreme Councils in the continent of South America. In 1761, the Council of Emperors of the East and the West had granted a patent to a French Jew named Stephen Morin, creating him “Grand Inspector for all parts of the New World,” and signed by officials of the Grand Lodge in Paris, under the authority of the Grand Master, the Count of Clermont (1709 – 1771), the great-grandson of Louis, Grand Condé, who with associates of Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrère and Queen Christina. Morin was invested with the title of “Grand Elect Perfect and Sublime Master” was sent to America by the “Emperors” with a warrant from the Grand Lodge of Paris to carry the “Rite of Perfection” to America.[639] American Masons recruited to this rite provided the network that helped bring about the American Revolution, the second of the major modern political success of the occult secret societies.
Philadelphia would play an instrumental role in the American Revolution as a meeting place for the Founding Fathers of the United States, who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 at the Second Continental Congress, and the Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Among the fifty-six American rebels who signed the Declaration of Independence, only six were not Masons. The signers were influenced by John Locke’s arguments concerning liberty and the social contract. At the time of his election in 1789, Washington was Grand Master of Alexandria Lodge no. 22 in Virginia.
As noted by Abba Eban, “Jews and Judaism played important roles in the success of the American Revolution and in the growth of religious freedom in the United States.”[640] Playing a leading role in these events was Mikveh Israel, the oldest Jewish congregations in Philadelphia, which was founded with contributions from Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse an American astronomer, inventor and member of the Royal Society of London.[641] Many of its members, along with sister synagogues of Shearith Israel in New York and Beth Elohim in Charleston, were important contributors to the cause of independence, and Freemasons responsible for the formation of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. At the time, the number of Jews living American in the colonies were estimated at less than 2,000 inhabitants.[642] However, because of their extraordinary wealth and international commercial networks, they were able to play a role in the coming political events that far outweighed their meager proportion relative to the overall population.
Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, was established by the new community that arrived in New Amsterdam, what would later become New York, in 1654, the first organized Jewish migration to North America. By the middle of the 1640s, approximately 1,500 Jewish inhabitants lived in the areas of northeastern Brazil controlled by the Dutch. There they established two congregations. These included the congregation of Zur Israel in Recife, headed by the first American rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca (1605 – 1693), a Kabbalist rabbi who had been replaced in Amsterdam by Menasseh ben Israel. In 1638, as he had found it difficult to provide for his wife and family in Amsterdam, Menasseh decided to send his brother-in-law, Ephraim Soeiro to the Dutch colony’s capital of Recife, to engage in commerce there, including the purchase of African slaves.[643] By the early 1630s, the Dutch, through the power of the West Indies Company, had conquered substantial portions of northeastern Brazil from the Portuguese. Having conquered the sugar-producing regions of Brazil from the Portuguese, the Dutch West India Company had appointed Maurice, Prince of Orange, in 1636 as governor and military commander of the Dutch colony of Pernambuco, Brazil. Maurice was the son of William the Silent and Anna of Saxony, eldest daughter of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse.
In 1654, a Portuguese expeditionary force recaptured Recife, forcing the Dutch to abandon Brazil. When the Dutch departed, the remaining Jewish population, approximately 650 in number, also left, some returning to Holland and others emigrating to the Dutch colony at New Amsterdam or to the English one in Barbados.[644] The first Jewish settler in New Amsterdam was Jacob Barsimson, who arrived in 1654, in the ship Pear Tree. He was followed in the same year by a party of 23 Sephardic Jews, refugees of families fleeing persecution by the Portuguese Inquisition after the conquest of Recife. According to account in Saul Levi Morteira and David Franco Mendes, they were then taken by Spanish pirates for a time, were robbed, and then blown off course and finally landed in New Amsterdam.[645] Some returned to Curaçao while others to Amsterdam, including two associates of Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, and Moses de Aguilar, who both went on to become followers of Sabbatai Zevi.[646]
Having been driven from Brazil, a number of Jews and their Rabbi, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, found their way to Jamaica which maintained regular trade with Newport. In 1658, a group of Jews settled in Newport due to the official religious tolerance of the colony as established by Roger Williams. They were fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal but had not been permitted to settle elsewhere. The Newport congregation is now referred to as Congregation Jeshuat Israel and is the second-oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. According to Samuel Oppenheim, “Jews may be said to have had the honor of being among the first, if not the first, to work the degrees of Masonry in this country, by bringing these with them on their arrival in Rhode Island in 1658.”[647]
Playing a leading role in the American Revolution was the Mikveh Israel synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregations in Philadelphia. Mikveh Israel was a sister congregation of Bevis Marks synagogue in London, and named after Mikveh Israel, Hebrew “Hope of Israel,” the title of Menasseh ben Israel’s book. Mikveh Israel was founded with contributions from Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse an American astronomer, inventor and member of the Royal Society of London.[648] Many of its members, along with sister synagogues of Shearith Israel in New York and Beth Elohim in Charleston, were important contributors to the cause of independence, and Freemasons responsible for the formation of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. At the time, the number of Jews living American in the colonies were estimated at less than 2,000 inhabitants.[649] However, because of their relative wealth and international commercial networks, they were able to play a role in the coming political events that far outweighed their numbers relative to the overall population.
According to James Arcuri, author of a biography titled For God and Country: A Spy and A Patriot, Haym Salomon gave his Fortune and his life for Liberty and The Cause, Haym Salomon (1740 – 1785), a Polish-born American Jewish businessman and member of Mikveh Israel who financed the American Revolution, was agent of the House of Rothschild, despite the fact that they were simultaneously supporting the British on the opposing side of the same conflict. There is a legend that during the design process of the Great Seal, President George Washington asked Haym Salomon what compensation he wanted in return for his important contribution. Washington apparently reported that “he wanted nothing for himself but that he wanted something for his people.” While there is no evidence, there is a theory that the thirteen stars representing the colonies on the seal were arranged in the shape of the Star of David in commemoration of Solomon’s contributions.[650]
Salomon joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty a secret society who were largely composed of Freemasons and who instigated the Boston Tea Party.[651] The Sons of Liberty planned their activities at the Green Dragon Tavern in Boston, known by historians as the “Headquarters of the Revolution.” The tavern was owned by the St. Andrews Lodge of Freemasons in 1766.[652] Masons used the first floor for their meeting rooms led by Grand Master Joseph Warren followed by John Hancock. The Freemason Paul Revere was sent from there to Lexington on his famous midnight ride midnight ride to alert the colonial militia in April 1775 to the approach of British forces before the battles of Lexington and Concord, when he is remembered to have announced, “The British are coming!”
In 1781, he began working extensively with Robert Morris (1734 – 1806), the newly appointed Superintendent for Finance for the Thirteen Colonies. Salomon’s brokerage business became so big that he was the largest depositor in Robert Morris’ Bank of North America. From 1781 to 1784, Salomon served as the Superintendent of Finance of the United States, becoming known as the “Financier of the Revolution.” He made private loans to prominent statesmen such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, General Arthur St. Clair and James Monroe, from whom he would not take interest.[653] Salomon also personally supported various members of the Continental Congress during their stay in Philadelphia, including James Madison and James Wilson. In all, Salomon is thought to have contributed $650,000 (more than $9.4 billion in 2017 dollars) to the Revolutionary War effort.[654]
Was one of the trustees of the lot on Mill Street where the Shearith Israel synagogue was built was Jacob Franks (1688 – 1769), who was born in London, and arrived in New York in 1708 or 1709. He became a freeman of New York in 1711. A year later he married Abigail Bilhah Levy, daughter of Moses Levy, a wealthy merchant, formerly a Marrano born in Spain.[655] As merchant, Franks had acted as agent of the king of England and furnished supplies to the British troops in New York and the Northern colonies.[656] Franks established himself in a variety of trades, including “the slave trade, privateering, general commerce, and shipping,” and became quite wealthy.[657] Moses Levy and Jacob Franks were co-owners of the slave-ship Abigail, and together with Adolphe Philipse and John Van Cortlandt, two of New York’s other successful merchants of Dutch heritage, they co-owned the ship Charlotte with John Van Cortlandt.[658] Moses Levy became the pumas, or president, of Shearith Israel. Jacob Franks succeeded his father-in-law as parnas of Shearith Israel, a position he held when the synagogue was dedicated in 1730.
Franks and Levy built relationships with several merchants including Thomas Hyam, a Philadelphia merchant who was the Penn family’s agent.[659] On September 1752, on the Myrtilla, a ship owned by Levy and Franks, docked in the port of Philadelphia and delivered one of the most important and recognizable symbols of American freedom and liberty, the Liberty Bell. The General Assembly in Philadelphia had decided to build a State House, which is now Independence Hall. In 1751, a letter was written to Robert Charles, the Colonial Agent for Pennsylvania who was working in London to purchase a bell for the State House. The bell was ordered to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges, which speaks of religious freedoms, liberal stances on Native American Rights, and in the inclusion of citizens in enacting laws.
Levy and Franks had business connections throughout the Atlantic world, and their partnership further entwined families that were already closely associated through marriage alliances that supported their commerce. The Mikveh Israel Cemetery was originally a private burial ground for the family of Moses’ son Nathan Levy (1704 – 1753), who came from a large and prominent Jewish family in England, and was the founder of the Jewish community of Philadelphia. Born in New York City, Levy moved to Philadelphia at a young age where he would engage in business with his nephew David Franks (1720 – 1794), under the firm name of Levy & Franks, the first Jewish business-house in Philadelphia. Moses’s daughter Abigail’s younger sister, Rachel, married Isaac Mendes Seixas (1709 - 1781), a former Marrano who had come to New York from Lisbon by way of Barbados.
David Franks’ sister Phila (Bilhah) married a Gentile, Major-General Oliver De Lancey (1718 – 1785), whose mother was Anne van Cortlandt (1676 – 1724), third child of Gertrude Schuyler (b. 1654) and Stephanus van Cortlandt (1643 – 1700), the Chief Justice of the Province of New York. The Schuyler family ancestry and ties were factors in several major American families, including the Livingston family, the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family, the Bayard family, the Bush family and the Kean family, among others. De Lancey was a merchant and Loyalist politician and soldier during the American Revolutionary War. De Lancey was a member of the provincial executive council from 1760 until the American Revolutionary War. In 1768, he allied himself with Isaac Sears and the Sons of Liberty.
Franks, along with his wife Margaret Evans (1720 – 1780) of one of Philadelphia’s Christian families, was socially prominent in the city. Franks had been a practicing Christian for several years before his marriage. During the conflict, Franks was conspicuous for his loyalty to the British cause, being the English agent in charge of the prisoners. Franks’ daughter, also named Abigail, married Andrew Hamilton (c.1676 – 1741), attorney-general of Pennsylvania in 1768, and nephew of Governor James Hamilton (1710 – 1783), son of the well-known American lawyer Andrew Hamilton, (c.1676 – 1741), who was close with the Penn family. Franks’ other daughter, Rebecca, married Sir Henry Johnson (1748 – 1835), then a lieutenant-colonel and later a general in the British Army, and took part in the “Mischianza,” the famous fête given in honor of General Howe, the commander-in-chief of the British forces in America, during the British occupancy of Philadelphia.
Michael Gratz (1740 – 1811) was Parnas of Mikveh Israel from 1784 to 1785. Michael arrived from Germany in 1758, following his older brother, Bernard, who was previously apprenticed to David Franks. Together they set up a coastal shipping service between New Orleans and Quebec. The French & Indian Wars interfered with shipping, and drove the brothers to western frontier trade in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Kentucky. They, along with David Franks, Mathias Bush and others, signed the Non-Importation Resolutions of 1765 to protest the Stamp Act. Later, the Gratz brothers supplied the Continental Army. During the British occupation of Philadelphia, the firm relocated to Lancaster, home of the father-in-law of Michael Gratz, Joseph Simon.
Morin, who had been involved in high-degree Masonry in Bordeaux, returned to the West Indies in 1762 or 1763, to Saint-Domingue, where he spread the high degrees throughout the West Indies and North America. Morin, acting under the authority of Frederick II of Prussia, appointed Henry Andrew Francken (1720 – 1795) as Deputy Grand Inspector General (DGIG), who was most important in assisting Morin in spreading the degrees in the New World.[660] Francken traveled to New York in 1767 where he granted a Patent for the formation of a Lodge of Perfection at Albany, which was called “Ineffable Lodge of Perfection.”[661] While in New York, Francken also communicated the degrees to Jewish businessman Moses Michael Hays (1739 – 1805), the leading figure among the Jews in connection with early Masonry in the United States.[662] The Hays family was one of the most important Jewish families in New York with connections to other wealthy Jewish families across the colonies through marriage. Hays was a prominent member of Shearith Israel, where he served as Second Parnas and as a Trustee.[663] In 1769, Hays organized King David’s Lodge of Freemasons in New York, the nation’s oldest Jewish Masonic lodge.[664] However, the next year, he and his family moved to Newport, and used the same warrant to transfer King David Lodge.[665]
For their first meeting, Moses Mendes Seixas and David Lopez served as the Senior and Junior Wardens.[666] The early Jewish community of Newport flourished before the American Revolution, and included such families as Rivera, Lopez, Hart, Seixas, Levy, Pollock, deToro (Touro), Gomez and Hays. Seixas, who organize the Bank of Rhode Island in 1796, helped Hays found the King David Lodge in Newport, and was Grand Master of the Masonic Order of Rhode Island.[667] Seixas became the president of the historic Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest synagogue building still standing in the United States. The Touro Synagogue was built from 1759 to 1763 for the Jeshuat Israel congregation in Newport under the leadership of Hays’ brother-in-law, Hazzan Isaac Touro (1738 – 1783), whose family came to America from Amsterdam via the West Indies, though originally from Spain where family name was “de Toro.” Touro Synagogue was designed by Peter Harrison (1716 – 1775), a colonial American architect credited with bringing the Palladian architectural movement to the colonies.
In June, 1776, Hays subscribed to a statement affirming his allegiance to the newly independent thirteen American colonies. The next month, July 12, 1776, Hays was summoned to appear before a committee of the Rhode Island General Assembly to sign an additional test of loyalty to the revolutionary regime, an oath requested only of those suspected of hostility to the new American government. Five days later, he sent the General Assembly a letter justifying his stand:
We, the subscribers, do solemnly and sincerely declare that we believe the war resistance and opposition in which the United American Colonies are now engaged against the fleets and armies of Great Britain is on the part of said colonies just and necessary and that we will not directly nor indirectly afford assistance of any sort or kind whatsoever to the said fleet and armies during the continuance of the present war, but that we will heartily assist in the defense of the United Colonies.[668]
On August 17, 1790, the day that President George Washington visited Newport, Moses Seixas, wrote to Washington, expressing the support of the Congregation for Washington’s administration and good wishes for him: “to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine.” Washington’s famous reply borrowed Moses’ exact words: “…happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”[669]
During the War of Independence, Jews from New York, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Lancaster and Easton fled to Philadelphia seeking refuge from the British. Among them was Moses’s younger brother, Gershom Mendes Seixas (1745 – 1816), Hazzan (Minister) of Shearith Israel, who also found his way to Philadelphia in 1780. Seixas became known for his civic activities as well as his defense of religious liberty, participating in George Washington’s inauguration as President and helping found King’s College, the precursor of New York City’s great Columbia University.[670] Gershom Seixas also helped establish Mikveh Israel, which built its first synagogue in 1782 at Third and Cherry Streets. On the completion of its construction, Seixas invited the governor of Pennsylvania to attend the dedication, during which he invoked the blessing of Almighty God on “the Members of these States in Congress assembled and on his Excellency George Washington, Commander-General of these Colonies.”[671] Gershom Mendes’s brother, Benjamin Seixas (1748 – 1817), who possessed the Masonic degree of Prince of Jerusalem, was Treasurer of Mikveh Israel in 1782, one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange in 1792, and served early in the Revolutionary War.[672]
Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris (1734 – 1806), the newly appointed Superintendent for Finance for the Thirteen Colonies, contributed to its building fund.[673] Morris was an English-born merchant and a Founding Father of the United States. Morris served as a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, the Second Continental Congress, and the United States Senate, and he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the United States Constitution. Morris was considered, though a civilian, second in power only to George Washington.
Mikveh Israel was founded with the financial support of Ephraim Hart (1747 – 1825), who was registered as an elector of Shearith Israel. By 1792, Hart had become one of the most successful merchants in Philadelphia, and helped to organize the Board of Stock-Brokers, now known as the New York Stock Exchange.[674] Ephraim’s son, Joel Hart (1784 – 1842), was well known in masonic circles in New York city.[675] In 1817, Joel would be appointed by President Madison United States consul at Leith, Scotland. The daughter of Jacob Hart (1746 – 1822), who served as parnas of Shearith Israel, married Haym Moses Salomon, son of Haym Salomon.[676]
Isaac Franks (1759 – 1822), was the son of a nephew of Jacob Franks, and whose sister married Haym Salomon, is said to have been an aide-de-camp to General Washington. Franks, on December 5, 1786, received the Masonic degree of Secret Master, and on February 21, 1788, was elected Steward.[677] In 1793, during the yellow fever epidemic that ravaged Philadelphia, Franks rented his house to Washington for use as a substitute for the White House. Washington met there with his cabinet until the epidemic passed and he returned to Philadelphia. Franks hosted the Washington and his wife again in 1794 while they were on vacation.[678]
Jonas Phillips (1736 – 1803), also a Mason and founder and President of Mikveh Israel, was a veteran of the American Revolutionary War and an American merchant in New York City and Philadelphia. On July 28, 1776, Phillips wrote in Yiddish to a relative and business correspondent, Gumpel Samson of the Netherlands, discussing the conflict and included an appendix of items he wanted to import for sale in America. Thrilled with the Revolution, Phillips enclosed a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Phillips’ use of Yiddish prevented most British from being able to read the letter who thought the letter was in code.[679]
Another Freemason associated with Mikveh Israel was Simon Nathan (1746 – 1822), a brother-in-law of Benjamin Seixas. Nathan was born in England, went to the colonies in 1773 by way of Havana. During the American Revolution, he helped ship supplies to the colonists from Jamaica where he was residing. After leaving the island, he proceeded to New Orleans and from there went to Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1779. He loaned large sums of money to the Virginia state government for which he was thanked by then governor, Thomas Jefferson. When these loans were not repaid he suffered great financial loss, and was involved in protracted litigation with Virginia for many years. In 1780, he met and married Grace Mendes Seixas, the daughter of Isaac Mendes Seixas. Nathan became a Freemason the following year, a trustee of the Mikveh Israel in 1782, and president in 1782 and 1783. He moved to New York, where he served as president of Shearith Israel in 1785, 1786, 1794, and 1796.[680]
After Gershom Mendes Seixas was recalled to Shearith Israel, Mikveh Israel elected the Rev. Jacob Raphael Cohen (1738 – 1811) in his stead. Cohen had served as Hazzan of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in Montreal and in a similar capacity in New York during the British occupation. In celebration of Pennsylvania's ratification of the United States Constitution on July 4, 1788, Cohen walked arm-in-arm with two ministers, one of whom was Reverend William White (1748 –1836) of Christ Church, bishop of Pennsylvania. White’s younger sister Mary was married to Robert Morris.
White was a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania as well as a member of the American Philosophical Society (APS), originally founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, James Alexander and others. The APS was an offshoot of an earlier club, the Junto, also known as the Leather Apron Club, established by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1727, and inspired by Benjamin Furly’s Lantern society. Another offshoot of Junto was the Library Company founded in 1731 also by Franklin. The Library Company of Philadelphia operated out of Library Hall, directly across Fifth Street from Philosophical Hall, the meeting place of the APS. David Franks became a member of the Library Company in 1754.[681] Also a member of the APS was Illuminatus Joseph von Sonnenfels.[682]
Although Moses Michael Hays had introduced the Scottish Rite to America in 1768, it is the Sublime Lodge of Perfection in Philadelphia that, through its membership, is given credit for popularizing it throughout the States.[683] Hays’ appointment by Morin’s emissary Francken was made with the view of establishing the Scottish Rite in America, and power was given to him to appoint others with similar authority. After the Revolution, Hays moved to Boston where he became involved in brokerage and insurance and owned a shipping office and counting house with his son Judah. Here he became the first Jewish benefactor of Harvard College. He is credited as being one of the founders of the Massachusetts Fire and Marine Insurance Co., which grew to become the Bank of Boston. Hays was accepted into the Massachusetts Lodge in Boston in November 1782. Hays was then elected Master with Paul Revere, a friend of Thomas Paine, as his deputy, a position which he served in for three years, and then became the “Most Worshipful Grand Master” from 1788 to 1793.[684]
At the first official meeting of the Rite of Perfection, recorded on October 23, 1782, of the eleven men listed as present, over half of them were Jewish, including the two top officials, Isaac da Costa (1721 – 1783) and Solomon Bush (1753 – 1795).[685] In 1781, Hays appointed Bush as Deputy Inspector-General for Pennsylvania and Barnard M. Spitzer as Deputy Inspector-General for Georgia.[686] Solomon Bush joined the Pennsylvania Militia in 1776 and the following year he was appointed Deputy Adjutant General of the Militia of the State of Pennsylvania. Solomon was made a Grand Master and is recorded as being “in the Chair” at almost every meeting of the Sublime Lodge of Perfection from 1782 to 1788.[687] Bush became instrumental in 1788 in bringing about fraternal relations between the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge and the two rival Grand Lodges of England, Ancients and Moderns.[688]
Along with Haym Salomon, Bush was a member of Philadelphia’s Masonic Lodge No. 2.[689] Numerous other members of Mikveh Israel had also members of Masonic Lodge No. 2 in Philadelphia. They included: Isaac Da Costa, Simon Nathan, Samuel Myers, Barnard M. Spitzer, Moses Cohen, Myer M. Cohen, Benjamin Nones, Isaiah Bush, Solomon Etting, Joseph M. Myers, Solomon M. Cohen, Solomon M. Myers, Michael Gratz and Isaac Franks. Spitzer was among four of eight Jewish Masons from Mikveh Israel that Hays appointed Deputy Inspectors General, and who later played important in the establishment of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in South Carolina, and which included Isaac Da Costa Sr. for South Carolina; Abraham Forst for Virginia and Joseph M. Myers for Maryland.[690] Forst was the son-in-law of Rabbi Jacob R. Cohen, minister of Mikveh Israel from 1784-1811, and was connected with it in a ritual capacity.[691]
After the end of the American Revolutionary War, many of these Jews moved back from Philadelphia to their original communities, such as Charleston, helping to spread Scottish Rite Masonry. Among those returning to Charleston was Isaac Da Costa, the Grand Warden, Grand Inspector General for the West Indies and North America of the Sublime Lodge of Perfection in Philadelphia. Da Costa was born in London, scion of an illustrious Spanish-Portuguese family, who played an important part in the Anglo-Jewish community during the early days after the Resettlement under Cromwell.[692] He received religious training from Isaac Nieto (1702 – 1774), who succeeded his father Rabbi David Nieto (1654 – 1728) as haham of the Bevis Marks synagogue of London, which was dominated by Jewish Freemasons who were early member of the Premier Grand Lodge of London.[693]
Da Costa, who is the earliest recorded Jewish Mason in South Carolina, arrived in Charleston in 1747, where he established himself as a merchant, shipping-agent, and slave-trader, who built a sizeable fortune bringing hundreds of slaves from Africa.[694] In 1749, he helped found Congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the United States, serving as ḥazzan. The driving force behind the founding of Beth Elohim was Moses Cohen (1709 – 1762), who was also Sublime Lodge of Perfection in Philadelphia and a member of Mikveh Israel. By 1753, Da Costa’s name appears in the records of King Solomon’s Lodge No. 1, the oldest constituted Masonic lodge in South Carolina.[695] An ardent partisan of the patriot cause, Da Costa was banished and his property seized by the British when Charleston fell in 1780. Da Costa returned to Charleston in 1782 where he organized his own Sublime Grand Lodge of Perfection.[696]
When first Supreme Council ever established under the new constitution of 1786 was organized in 1801, at Charleston, South Carolina, Isaac DaCosta, Hays was listed as an honorary member of the Sublime Grand Lodge of Perfection, and holder of the thirty-second degree.[697] In Charleston resided “the most cultured and wealthiest Jewish community in America.”[698] 1820, Charleston had a Jewish population numbering about 800. New York’s Jewish community by comparison was the second largest, numbering approximately 550. Philadelphia was third, with about 450 Jews. When the Marquis Lafayette made his famous visit to the United States. to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution, a Frenchman in his party commented on the prominence of Charleston’s Jews and remarked that in no other place in the country were the Jews a significant element.[699]
Under the authority he had received through Spitzer, Hyman Isaac Long, a Jewish physician from Jamaica, who settled in New York City, went to Charleston in 1796 to appoint eight French men who arrived as refugees from Haitian revolution of 1804. Long was the son of Isaac Long, a Dutch writer, one of the foremost members of the Moravian Church, and closely connected with Count Zinzendorf.[700] In 1796, in Charleston, Long issued a patent to Alexandre Francois Auguste de Grasse (1765 – 1845), the son of Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse, of the Society of the Cincinnati, making him and his father-in-law Jean-Baptiste Marie de La Hogue and six other French refugees from Saint-Domingue, each Deputy Grand Inspector General (DGIG).[701]
The Rite of Perfection changed its name and appearance in 1801, when Dr. Frederick Dalcho and Colonel John Mitchell, who was nominated Deputy Grand Inspector by Francken, arrived in Charleston with a document dated to 1786 granting the bearer the right to establish new chapters of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, allegedly under the authority of Frederick the Great.[702] In 1801, six years after his return from Europe, according to Domenico Margiotta, a former high-ranking Freemason, Long brought with him the Baphomet idol of the Templars and what he claimed was the skull of their Grand Master Jacques de Molay which they had purportedly manage to purchase from his executioner before fleeing to Scotland.[703]
The bodies already established in
Charleston accepted the new regime and adopted the new degrees, and in 1801 a
convention was held and preliminary steps inaugurated to form a Supreme Council
of the 33rd and Last Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of
Freemasonry, after which the Charleston lodge in became the Mother Council of
the World.[704]
The Founding Fathers of the Scottish Rite who attended became known as “The
Eleven Gentlemen of Charleston.” Five of the eleven founders were congregants
of Beth Elohim: Isaac Da Costa, Israel DeLieben, Abraham Alexander Sr., Emanuel
De La Motta and Moses Clava Levy.[705] The
others included John Mitchell, James Moultrie, Frederick Dalcho, Alexandre
Francois Auguste de Grasse, Jean-Baptiste Marie de La Hogue, Thomas Bartholomew
Bowen, and Isaac Auld. The Supreme Council, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite,
Southern Jurisdiction, USA, in Charleston—commonly known as the Mother Supreme
Council of the World—was the first Supreme Council of Scottish Rite
Freemasonry. It claims that all other Supreme Councils and Subordinate Bodies
of the Scottish Rite are derived from it.[706]
De Grasse continued his development work
with Masons in France and across Europe. In 1804, de Grasse formed a second
Grand Lodge to counter the Grand Orient, called the Supreme Council of France,
which marked the beginning of the international spread of the Scottish Rite.
The Scottish Rite adopted the double-headed eagle, or Reichsalder,
symbol of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors, which was the personal emblem of
Frederick the Great, who was the First Sovereign Grand Commander and who
conferred upon the Rite the right to use in 1786. It was introduced in France
in the early 1760s as the emblem of the Kadosh degree.[707] The
double-headed eagle represented the dual realms
of the Council
of Emperors of the East and West.[708]
The Knights of the East, according to Masonic tradition, represented the “Freemasons”
who remained in the East after the building of the First Temple, while the
Knights of the East and West represented those who traveled West and
disseminated the “Order” over Europe, but who returned during the Crusades and
reunited with their ancient Brethren. In obvious allusion to the Templars, they
were said to have organized the Order in the year 1118 upon the return of the
Holy Land.[709]
Albert Pike
cited several of alchemical works featuring the double-headed eagle as evidence for the
true meaning and significance of the symbol, which he equated
with the alchemical Stone of the Philosophers.[710]
The founding of the Scottish Rite dates back to 1786, when the Rite of Perfection was reorganized and rechristened the “Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite,” and it is said to have been Frederick the Great who conducted operations, drew up the new Constitutions of the Order. The signatories of the Grand Constitutions were D’Esterno, Starck, Wöllner and H. Willelm, and the initial letter D.... Wöllner was Minister of Justice to Frederick William II of Prussia, who led the Golden and Rosy Cross’ opposition to the Illuminati, and was a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[711] Johann August von Starck (1741 – 1816), another opponent of the Illuminati, claimed to be an emissary of the Clerici Ordinis Templarii, which was amalgamated to the Strict Observance.[712] Starck quarreled with Illuminati publisher Nicolai who accused him of Jesuitisms.[713] D’Esterno was the French Ambassador at Berlin, when Mirabeau went there, who referred to him in Histoire Secrete de la Cour de Berlin (“Secret History of the Court of Berlin”).[714]
Accompanied by his daughter Eve, Frank repeatedly traveled to Vienna and succeeded in gaining the favor of Empress Maria Theresa (1717 – 1780), the last of the House of Habsburg, who regarded him as a disseminator of Christianity among the Jews.[715] Maria Theresa’s husband, Emperor Francis I (1708 – 1765), the son of Leopold, Duke of Lorraine (1679 – 1729) and Élisabeth Charlotte d’Orléans, the daughter of Philippe I, Duke of Orleans and Elizabeth Charlotte, Madame Palatine. As the Duke of Lorraine and Bar, Francis inherited the title of King of Jerusalem from Charles I of Anjou, through René of Anjou, founder of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, and purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Francis also became the Grand Master of the Habsburg branch of the Order of the Golden Fleece, which split off from its Spanish branch after the War of Spanish Succession. Their marriage originated the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. Their youngest child, Archduke Maximilian Francis of Austria (1756 – 1801), in addition to being a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, was also Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, founded by René of Anjou, as well as a purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, having succeeded his uncle, Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine (1712 – 1780). Francis and Maria Theresa’s youngest daughter was Marie-Antoinette, who along with her husband Louis XVI of France, was executed in 1793, during the French Revolution.
Baron von Hund (1722 – 1776), the founder of the Strict Observance, was a Counselor of State to Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis I, as well as Intimate Counselor of the husband of Maria Theresa’s first cousin, Augustus III of Poland (1696 – 1763), of the Albertine branch of the House of Wettin, who was Jacob Frank’s godfather at his baptism.[716] It is even said that Maria Theresa and Francis’ eldest son Joseph II (1741 – 1790) had an affair with Eve.[717] It is also possible that Frank first met his patron Prince Wolfgang Ernst II of Isenburg-Birstein in Offenbach through Joseph II, to whom he served as an adjutant.[718]
The architect of the principles which guided the “benevolent despotism” of Emperor Joseph II was Joseph von Sonnenfels (1732 – 1817), who along with along with Ignaz Edler von Born (1742 – 1791) was a leader of the Illuminati lodge, the famous Masonic Lodge Zur wahren Eintracht, the oldest daughter Lodge of Mother Lodge Three Globes in Berlin, which in 1764 was merged with the Strict Observance.[719] In 1771, von Born, who was the leading scientist in the Holy Roman Empire during the 1770s in the age of Enlightenment, was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Sonnenfels was a member of a Sabbatean family from Moravia who had converted to Christianity. Sonnenfels’ grandfather was Rabbi Michael Chasid and Sonnenfels’ father Rabbi Lipman Perlin (1705 – 1768) was Rabbi Eybeschütz pupil in Prague.[720]
Johann Christoph von Wöllner (1732 – 1800), a member of the Strict Observance, along with Johann Rudolf von Bischoffwerder (1741 – 1803), was chiefly responsible for inducting Frederick William II into the Golden and Rosy Cross. The Golden and Rosy Cross was founded in 1747 or 1757 in Berlin, as a revival of the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians organized in 1710 by Sincerus Renatus. From 1766 to 1781, Wöllner worked as an employee of Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, founded by the Illuminati publisher Friedrich Nicolai (1733 – 1811). Wöllner became a member of the Lodge Zur Eintracht in 1768. Bischoffwerder was also a friend of Wolf Eybeschütz, the son of crypto-Sabbatean rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz.[721] Bischoffwerder became a member of the Golden and Rosy Cross in Berlin-Potsdam, and with the help of Wöllner, managed to get Frederick William II to be accepted into the order in 1781 under the name Ormerus Magnus.
The acquaintances of Rabbi Eybeschütz’ son Wolf, who was an open follower of the Frankists, also included members of the Dobruschka family.[722] Wöllner and von Bischoffwerder were also members of the Asiatic Brethren, founded by Moses Dobruschka (1753 – 1794), the cousin of Jacob Frank.[723] As Franz Thomas von Schoenfeld, Dobruschka entered into Austrian Freemasonry and became involved with Hans Heinrich von Ecker und Eckhoffen (1750 – 1790 who had been a leader of the Golden and Rosy Cross. Having been expelled in 1780 from the order, Eckhoffen created the Ritter des Lichts (“Knights of Light”) or Fratres Lucis (“Brothers of Light”), later reorganized in 1781 as the Asiatic Brethren.[724]
The full name of the order was the Knights and Brethren of St. John the Evangelist of Asia in Europe. The Asiatic Brethren’s meetings were called Melchizedek lodges, and unlike other Masonic orders, they allowed Jews to join, as well as Turks, Persians and Armenians. The Asiatic Brethren were influenced by the ideas of St. Martin, whom Ecker and Schoenfeld had met, and according to Gershom Scholem, mixed Kabbalistic and Sabbatean ideas with Christian theosophical ones.[725] According to Franz J. Molitor (1779 – 1860) member of the order, the Jewish initiates drew on the theurgic traditions of “Shabbetai Zevi, Falk (the Baal Shem of London), Frank, and their similar fellows.”[726]
According to G. van Rijnberk, based on archives of the family, Prince Charles Hesse-Kassel, who became a Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren, first introduced the Buddhist symbol of the swastika into the Asiatic Brethren—to represent the doctrine of reincarnation, as it was similar to a belief called Gilgul in the Kabbalah—alongside the Star of David, the Sabbatean symbol in the Order, introduced by Dobruschka.[727] Modern interpretations attributed the use of the Star of David to the influence of the Zohar through Isaac Luria, who identified it with the “Primal Man and the world of Emanations.”[728] However, as Scholem pointed out, the six-pointed star is not a true Jewish symbol, but is a magical talisman associated with the magic of the practical Kabbalah, where it is known as the Seal of Solomon.[729] The earliest identification of the symbol with David is found in the Book of Desire, which is an interpretation of the seventy magical names of Metatron, Prince of the Divine Presence, by Eleazar of Worms (c. 1176 – 1238) or one of his disciples.[730] Until the seventeenth century, the five-pointed pentagram and the six-pointed stars were called by one name, the “Seal of Solomon,” but slowly the Star of David became applicable only to the six-pointed star. The official use of the Star of David began in Prague and spread out from there to Moravia and Austria, strongholds of Sabbateanism. It was through the influence of Rabbi Eybeschütz that the Star of David finally became a messianic symbol.[731]
A protest
filed at the Wilhelmsbad congress of 1782 denounced Ecker as a false Christian and
as a magician dabbling in the occult. Prince Johann
Baptist Karl von Dietrichstein, the Grand Master of the Austrian lodges, and
Ignaz von Born, persuaded Joseph II to promulgate the Freimaurerpatent
(1785), which placed Freemasonry under the emperor’s protection, bringing an
end to the Asiatic Brethren in the Habsburg monarchy. Within a year, the brethren
relocated from Austria to Schleswig. Around that time, Moses Dobruschka left
the order, and settled in Vienna. However, he may also have switched allegiances
and joined the Illuminati, since from 1786 to 1790, former members of the order
were the dominant force in Moravian Freemasonry. There also is some evidence
that Moses’ older brother, Carl, was a member of the Illuminati.[732]
Though the term “classical music” includes all Western art music from the Medieval era to the early 2010s, the Classical Era was the period of Western art music from the 1750s to the early 1820s, the era of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791), his friend and mentor Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809), and his pupil Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827). Emperor Joseph II was a supporter of the arts, and most importantly of composers such as and Antonio Salieri (1750 – 1825) and Mozart, who also attended the Zur wahren Eintracht, led by Sonnenfels and von Born.[733] Mozart was also a close friend of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734 – 1815), a German Freemason and physician and associate of Count Cagliostro, who became widely popular for artificially inducing trance-like states, today known as hypnotism. Hans-Josef Irmen suspected that Mozart may have been a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[734] Also connected with the Asiatic Brethren was the patron of the notorious “womanizer,” Giacomo Casanova (1725 – 1798), who associated with European royalty, popes, and cardinals, along with luminaries such as Voltaire, Goethe and Mozart. Casanova’s Historie de ma vie refers to Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, and other adventurers. Casanova visited the Masonic lodge Zur aufgehenden Sonne im Orient (“The Rising Sun in the Orient”) in Brünn, of the Templar Strict Observance, who Grand Master was Count von Salm-Reifferscheidt, founder of the Golden and Rosy Cross, and who had been a representative for Austria at the Wilhelmsbad Masonic Congress in 1782.[735]
Casanova was also an avid practitioner of various occult disciplines and claimed to be highly proficient in the Kabbalah.[736] Casanova travelled to Brünn to meet with Frank, in context of the Habsburg Masonic scene.[737] In 1793, he wrote to Eve Frank: “[I have been] as diligent a student of this vast discipline as your late father.”[738] The lodge also included two members of the Frank family, who supported converted Jews and acted as patrons of the Dobruschka.[739] Casanova’s patron Count Joseph Carl Emmanuel Waldstein, was associated with Wolf Eybeschütz.[740] Casanova also had dealings with the Schönfeld family. It was Dobruschka’s godfather, Johann Ferdinand Edler von Schoenfeld, who published Casanova’s Soliloque d’un penseur and Historie de ma fuite des prisons de la Republique de Venise.[741] Casanova was also a friend of fellow Mason Count Karl von Zinzendorf und Pottendor (1739 – 1813), the nephew of Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf of the Moravian Church. Karl was privy finance minister to Emperor Joseph II.[742]
In Vienna, with the help of the composer Salieri, Casanova met Emperor Joseph II and subsequently Mozart, at the residence of Baron Wetzlar, a converted Jew. Wetzlar supported Mozart and wanted to help Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749 – 1838), who converted to Christianity with his family and was baptized in 1763.[743] Mozart immortalized his former patron by including a comedic reference to Mesmer in his opera Così fan tutte, or as it is subtitled, La Scuola Degli Amanti, or the school for lovers.[744] It is commonly held that Così fan tutte was written and composed at the suggestion of the Emperor Joseph II.[745] The libretto to Mozart’s Così fan tutte was written by Da Ponte, who also wrote Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, an opera based on a play by Pierre Beaumarchais (1732 – 1799), another Freemason. Both Da Ponte and Mozart were Masons. Together with da Ponte, Emanuel Schikaneder (1751 – 1812), who wrote the libretto to Mozart’s Masonic The Magic Flute, and numerous high-ranking members of the nobility and army, Mozart was a brother with equal rights in the Masonic lodge called Zur Wohltätigkeit.[746]
It has been theorized for some time that von Born, who was a close friend of Mozart, was the prototype behind the character Sarastro in his Masonic opera, The Magic Flute.[747] All the characters in The Magic Flute are symbolical: Sarastro, Hierophant and Dispenser of Light, is von Born, the Queen of the Night is Maria Theresa, the anti-Masonic Empress, Monostatos, the villain, is the clergy, Pamina is Austria, while the Neophyte is the Emperor Joseph II, who succeeded Francis I; and who, it was hoped at the time, entertained thoughts of becoming a Mason.[748]
Mozart himself was also a friend of Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Illuminati.[749] An entry in the autograph album of Mozart’s fellow lodge member Johann Georg Kronauer suggests that Mozart may himself have been a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[750] A number of members of the Asiatic Brethren were also friends and benefactors of Mozart, including Karl Hieronymus Paul von Erdod, Prince Wenzel Paar, Count Franz Joseph Thun und Hohenstein (1734 – 1800), and Baron Otto Heinrich von Gemmingen (1755 – 1836), who was also a member of the Illuminati.[751] In or before 1777, Gemmingen became a Hofkammerrat in Mannheim, assuming a set of duties from which Lessing had just resigned from, which extended to supervision of the National Theatre Mannheim. In 1778, the national theatre project became a reality when Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg, brother of high-ranking Illuminati member, Karl Theodor von Dalberg, was appointed intendant of the National Theatre in Mannheim. Friedrich Schiller, whose own later play Intrigue and Love was clearly influenced by Gemmingen’s Hausvater, wrote effusively to Dalberg, with praises to be passed to the author of the work.[752] Backed by other influential Freemasons, Gemmingen tried to support Joseph II’s reforms, using his contributions to the weekly political journals Weltmann and Wahrheiten for which he became editor in 1783. There were contributions from other Freemasons, and some of the ideas of the Illuminati were found in the journals.[753]
Count von Thun was listed among the number of contacts of Wolf Eybeschütz.[754] Count von Thun und Hohenstein, who was of one of the most celebrated alchemists and Rosicrucians in Vienna, served as the Grand Master of the Golden and Rosy Cross, practiced both as a mystic Mesmerist and a channeler of spirits.[755] Count von Thun, who later became an Imperial Chamberlain, married Countess Maria Wilhelmine von Thun und Hohenstein, née Countess von Ulfeldt, a Viennese aristocrat known as the hostess of a musically and intellectually outstanding salon. Emperor Joseph II often stayed incognito in the house.[756] Regarded as was a “fine pianist,” she was a patron of both Mozart and Beethoven.[757]
Countess Maria Wilhelmine’s daughter Maria Christiane Josepha married a Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky (1758 – 1814), an Imperial Court Chamberlain, musician and composer, and also a friend and patron to both Beethoven and Mozart. Lichnowsky was a member of the Viennese Lodges Zur Wohltätigkeit and Zur Wahrheit. With Mozart, Lichnowsky took a mysterious trip to Berlin in the spring of 1789, where they met with the Rosicrucian monarch Frederick William II. Mozart’s biographer Nicholas Till suggests that the “most likely explanation is that Lichnowsky and Mozart travelled to Berlin at Frederick William’s invitation as Rosicrucian emissaries from Vienna.”[758]
Beethoven, was deeply influenced by Mozart’s work, with which he was acquainted as a teenager.[759] According to Maynard Solomon, “Beethoven’s name does not appear on the surviving membership lists of any Masonic or other fraternal society; nor has it ever been claimed that he belonged to a specific lodge or order.”1 Nevertheless, Solomon judged there to be “abundant indications of Beethoven’s close associations with Freemasons and Illuminists,” and “a variety of remarks and allusions in Beethoven’s letters and other writings that may have Masonic overtones.”[760] Beethoven was associated with the Bonn Reading Society, which was exclusively controlled by former members of the Illuminati. Upon the death of Emperor Joseph II, the society commissioned Beethoven to compose a cantata in the emperor’s honor.[761] Joseph von Sonnenfels was also the dedicatee of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 15, Op. 28, which was published in 1801.[762] Joseph II’ brother, Maximilian of Lorraine, purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, had a keen interest in the arts especially music and among his protégés were Mozart, Hayden and Beethoven, who in his early formative years intended to dedicate his first symphony to Maximilian who unfortunately died before its completion.[763] Beethoven used the musical theme from the centuries-old Hebrew prayer Kol Nidre, for the sixth movement of his Quartet in C-sharp minor, which he composed the following year. Kol Nidre is the opening prayer on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year in the Jewish religion.
One of many aliases, Saltykoff was the name the Comte St. Germain assumed when he served as a Russian General, where he participated in a conspiracy when the Russian army assisted Catherine the Great (1729 – 1796) in usurping the throne from her husband Peter III of Russia (1728 – 1762), of the House of Romanov.[764] Before their rise to power in the seventeenth century, the Romanovs were accused by their enemies of practising magic and possessing occult powers.[765] Mikhail Romanov (1596 – 1645), the first Tsar of the Romanov dynasty, allegedly ascended the throne with the help of the British Secret Service and John Dee’s son Arthur (1579 – 1651).[766] Arthur had accompanied his father in travels through Germany, Poland, and Bohemia. In 1586, Tsar Boris Godunov (c. 1551 – 1605), whose career began at the court of Ivan the Terrible, had offered Arthur’s father John Dee, who was mathematical advisor to the Muscovy Company, to enter his service, an offer which Dee declined.[767]
Mikhail’s son, Alexis of Russia (1629 – 1676), was committed to the care of his tutor Boris Morozov, a corrupt, self-seeking boyar and was accused of sorcery and witchcraft.[768] There is a tradition in Russia that Alexis’s son, Peter the Great (1672 – 1725), was initiated by Sir Christopher Wren and introduced Freemasonry in his dominions.[769] Peter the Great’s son, Alexei Petrovich, Tsarevich of Russia (1690 – 1718), married Charlotte Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the great-granddaughter of Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a friend of Johann Valentin Andreae, purported author of the Rosicrucian manifestos, and of Rabbi Templo, who created the famous model of the Temple of Jerusalem, and whose design of the cherubim became the basis for the coat of arms of the Grand Lodge of Antients.
The direct male line of the Romanovs ended when Peter the Great’s daughter Empress Elizabeth of Russia died in 1762, thus the House of Holstein-Gottorp—a cadet branch of the German House of Oldenburg that reigned in Denmark—ascended to the throne in the person of Peter III of Russia. Peter’s second wife, was his second cousin, Catherine the Great, who succeeded him as Empress of Russia from 1762 until 1796. Their son Tsar Paul I (1754 – 1801) visited Jacob Frank in Vienna as he was developing strong connections there into the Masonic communities. Frank also deliberately fostered rumors that his daughter Eve was Catherine’s illegitimate daughter.[770] Catherine was also the author of a satire Obmanshchik (“The deceiver”), in which the protagonist Kalifalkzherston was an intentional conflation of Cagliostro and Rabbi Falk.
Catherine the Great is remembered as one of the “Enlightened Monarchs,” because she implemented several political and cultural reforms on behalf of the Illuminati. Catherine suspected the Freemasons of turning her son Paul against her, and of being a tool in the hands of her enemy, Frederick II the Great, the King of Prussia. In the 1780s, the teachings of the Order of Golden and Rosy Cross were brought to Russia from Germany by two Martinists, Nikolay Novikov (1744 – 1818) and Johann Georg Schwarz (1751 – 1784), and became an important movement of Russian Freemasonry. Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick invited Schwarz to take part in the Masonic Congress at Wilhelmsbad in 1782, where Russia was recognized as the Eighth Autonomous province of the Rite of Strict Observance, with Novikov as President and Schwarz as Chancellor. Schwarz had been sent to Germany the year before with the mission of to become affiliated with the Three Globe Lodge in Berlin, which during these years had become the center of the Golden and Rosy Cross, headed by Johann Christoph von Wöllner.[771] Soon afterwards, Schwarz met Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, Grand Master of all Scottish lodges in Germany, who agreed to the independence of the Russian lodges. Schwarz also came under the influence of Willermoz and he and Novikov joined his Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cité Sainte. Due in large part to Schwarz’s system, Martinism became widely fashionable in Russia.[772]
In addition to being a Freemason, Paul was also a Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem (SOSJ), part of the Russian Tradition of the Knights Hospitaller, which evolved from the Knights of Malta.[773] When Paul was assassinated in 1801, he was succeeded by his son Alexander I (1777 – 1825), during whose reign the secret societies exerted their greatest influence at the Russian court. Following his victory over Napoleon, who had attacked Russia in 1812, which he saw as divine intervention, Alexander developed an interest in mysticism, including the writings of Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin and Illuminatus Karl von Eckartshausen (1752 – 1803). It has been proposed that Alexander’s vision of the Holy Alliance was also inspired by his reading of Eckartshausen and by his contacts with Heinrich Jung-Stilling and with the Bavarian Christian mystic Franz von Baader (1765 – 1841).[774]
Alexander had come under the influence of Madame von Krüdener (1764 – 1824), a famous psychic who was a student of the Emmanuel Swedenborg, who helped him to understand Eckartshausen’s work.[775] She had an influence on the Swiss Réveil, a revival movement within the Swiss Reformed Church of western Switzerland and some Reformed communities in southeastern France initiated by earlier efforts missionaries of the Moravian Church.[776] Through her contact with Alexander, she and Henri-Louis Empaytaz, a member of the Réveil, were in part responsible for the religious aspects of the Holy Alliance, the coalition linking the monarchies of Russia, Austria and Prussia, created after the final defeat of Napoleon at the behest of Alexander I and signed in Paris in 1815.[777]
As the ideas of the Enlightenment swept across Europe and the United States, the period saw in the arts a shift to neoclassical standards of style away from baroque religiosity and rococo “decadence.”[778] Goethe, along with fellow Illuminati member Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803), was a leader of the literary and cultural movement known as Weimar Classicism, whose practitioners established a new humanism from the synthesis of ideas from Romanticism, Classicism, and the Age of Enlightenment. Goethe, like many others of the German Romantic period, including Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786)—the central figure in the development of the Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment”—and his friends Lessing and Herder, was an admirer of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717 – 1768), a German art historian and archaeologist who had a decisive influence on the rise of the Neoclassical movement. As explained by Bernd Witte, in “German Classicism and Judaism,” contrasting the secularizing trends of the Enlightenment with the emergence of the influence Mendelssohn, that “Jewish monotheism first entered into the realm of modern occidental culture at the precise historical moment that the German cultural memory became obsessed with Greek antiquity.”[779] As it cast away Christianity, the Enlightenment, or the Illuminati, replaced the icons of the past with a fraudulent religious experience based on contemplation of art and music, with the example of the ancient Greeks—a non-Christian or Jewish people—provided as the epitome, an epoch known as Romanticism.
The leading personalities of Weimar Classicism were admirers of Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786), the central figure in the development of the Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The post-modernist philosopher Michel Foucault proposed that the Enlightenment is bound up with the Jewish Question, the debate about the appropriate status of the Jews that began during the Age of Enlightenment and after the French Revolution. In a clear attack against religious authority, Kant published his famous answer to Was ist Aufklärung? (“What is Enlightenment?”) in the Berlinische Monatschrift in 1784:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is man’s inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”[780]
For Foucault, the Enlightenment, indeed the beginning of modernity itself, didn’t begin with Kant’s essay, but as a combination with Mendelssohn’s essay published a few months earlier, in the same publication, in answer to the very same question. Kant’s more famous answer, “marks” according to Foucault, “the discreet entrance into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering, but it has never managed to get rid of, either.” With the two essays, continues Foucault, “the German Aufklärung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history.”[781]
Sabbatean Illuminatus Joseph von Sonnenfels invited Mendelssohn to embrace Christianity, but when he was rebuked in Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem in 1783, he apologized in 1784 by making him a member of his German Scientific Society and the Vienna Academy of Sciences.[782] According to a list of ordination, in a certificate held in the Schiff Collection at the New York Public Library, Mendelssohn was a successor of Shabbetai Zevi.[783] The certificate, which was mentioned briefly by Jewish historian Jacob Katz in Out of the Ghetto, was preserved by Mendelssohn’s friend, the notorious Illuminati publisher Friedrich Nicolai. Mendelssohn was a close friend of another Illuminatus, the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781), who together with Bode in 1767 created the J.J.C. Bode & Co. publishing firm and store in Hamburg.[784]
First to succeed was Shabbetai Zevi’s mentor, Nathan of Gaza (1643 – 1680). Next was his disciple Solomon Ayllon, the Sabbatean rabbi of Bevis Marks. Ayllon’s successor was Nechemiah Chiyon (1655 – 1729), who was excommunicated in several communities and wandered over Europe and North Africa. Chiyon ordained his successor Judah Leib Prossnitz (c. 1670 – c. 1730/1750) in Moravia. Prossnitz was known as a Kabbalist and charlatan healer who confessed to sacrificing to the devil and demons, after which he was publicly banished into exile for several months. He had relations with Jonathan Eybeschütz and the Sabbatean Mordecai Eisenstadt (c. 1650 – 1729). Following his ordination as successor to Zevi, after first proclaiming himself the Messiah, Judah Leib then passed on the title to Rabbi Eybeschütz. In 1761, Mendelssohn met in Hamburg with Eybeschütz, who wrote an essay extolling him.[785] Mendelssohn’s teacher David Fränkel (c. 1704 – 1762) was a student of Rabbi Michael Chasid, the chief rabbi of Berlin and a Sabbatean.[786]
Lessing modeled Mendelssohn as the central figure of his drama Nathan the Wise, which features the Masonic theme of a universal religion. Set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, the book describes how the wise Jewish merchant Nathan, the enlightened sultan Saladin, and the initially anonymous Templar, bridge their gaps between Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The drama is also believed to have been in reference to Sabbatai Zevi’s patron, Nathan of Gaza. It has also been suggested that the inspiration for the character might also have been Jacob Falk, who was referred to in another work of Lessing, Ernst and Falk, his famous essay about Freemasonry.[787]
In 1762, Mendelssohn won the prize offered by the Berlin Academy for an essay on the application of mathematical proofs to metaphysics, On Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences. Among the competitors were Thomas Abbt (1738 – 1766) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), who came second. In the same year, Frederick the Great granted Mendelssohn the privilege of Schutzjude (“Protected Jew”), which assured him the right to live in Berlin undisturbed. As a result of Abbt introducing him to Plato’s Phaedo, Mendelssohn wrote Phädon oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (“Phaedo or On the Immortality of Souls; 1767”), published by Nicolai, which was an immediate success. In addition to being one of the most widely read books of its time in German, it was soon translated into several European languages, including English. Mendelssohn was hailed as the “German Plato,” or the “German Socrates.”[788] Kant criticized Mendelssohn’s argument for immortality in the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787).
Mendelssohn’s Phädon was the first philosophical work read by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), who is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. The artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, the friend of Martin Luther, who used the winged dragon as his seal, had three daughters, one of whom was Barbara Cranach, who was an ancestor of Goethe. Goethe, a member of the Illuminati, achieved fame as the author of several works that dealt with satanic themes, such as his poem Prometheus, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and of Faust, who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge, considered the greatest work of German literature. His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler. Beethoven, who idolized Goethe, declared that a Faust Symphony would be the greatest thing for art.[789] According to Magee, Goethe’s work “was a major conduit for the indirect influence of alchemy, Boehme, Kabbalah, and various other Hermetic offshoots.”[790] As a young man, he read Paracelsus, Basil Valentine, van Helmont, Swedenborg and the Kabbalah. In several instances, he used the imagery of the rose and the cross in Die Geheimnisse. In 1768, Goethe participated in alchemical experiments with Suzanna von Klettenberg, a follower of Count Zinzendorf.[791] Goethe cited Spinoza alongside Shakespeare and Carl Linnaeus as one of the three strongest influences on his life and work.[792]
Around
1770, explains Witte, “the young generation of German poets radically rejected
the traditional religious beliefs, propagating in its place the new religion of
the infinite productivity of man.”[793]
Within the aesthetics of Weimar classicism, Homer’s Iliad
and Odyssey became the paradigms of the literary work of genius. As Bernd Witte explains, in “German Classicism and Judaism”:
Moreover, the contemplation of Greek statues replaced the ritual of traditional religious services. It became the ultimate foundation and legitimation of the new anthropological discourse in Germany. The ideal of the human figure, the artistic representation of the human body now acquired a quasi-religious aura.[794]
Goethe first achieved international renown with the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). As Bernd Witte further explains:
The novel’s unprecedented European success rested not only on its introduction of the ideal of soulful love but also on the notion that literature is the medium in which fundamental existential issues are decided. It demonstrated that decisive stations in the life of an individual are no longer determined by metaphysical principles but by literary texts.[795]
With the advent of the Grand Tour, a fad of collecting antiquities began that laid the foundations of many great collections spreading a Neoclassical revival throughout Europe.[796] In 1755, Winckelmann published his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (“Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture”), which contained the first statement of the doctrines he afterwards developed, the ideal of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” and the definitive assertion that, “[t]he one way for us to become great, perhaps inimitable, is by imitating the ancients.” The work made Winckelmann famous, and was it was reprinted several times and soon translated into French and English. On the strength of the Gedanken, Augustus III of Poland—who was Jacob Frank’s godfather at his baptism, and for whom Baron von Hund, founder of the Strict Observance, served as Intimate Counselor[797]—granted him a pension so that he could continue his studies in Rome. His first task was to describe the statues in the Cortile del Belvedere: the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the so-called Antinous, and the Belvedere Torso, which represented to him the “utmost perfection of ancient sculpture.”
“By no people,” Winckelmann asserted, “has beauty been so highly esteemed as by the Greeks,” but by “beauty,” for Winckelmann was homoerotic titillation from depictions of the male nudes.[798] “From admiration I pass to ecstasy…,” he wrote of the Apollo Belvedere.[799] On further conveying his lustful feelings, Winckelmann wrote, “I should have been able to say more if I had written for the Greeks, and not in a modern tongue, which imposed on me certain restrictions.”[800] Susan E. Gustafson, in Men Desiring Men: The Poetry of Same-Sex Identity and Desire in German Classicism, noted how Winckelmann’s letters provide “a set of tropes that signal the struggle to express the male same-sex desire.”[801] The German term griechische Liebe (“Greek love”) appears in German literature between 1750 and 1850, along with socratische Liebe (“Socratic love”) and platonische Liebe (“Platonic love”) in reference to male–male attractions.[802]
In Rome, Winckelmann, who was an open homosexual, had an affair Franz Stauder, a pupil of Anton Raphael Mengs (1728 – 1779), who had been appointed the first painter to Augustus III of Poland.[803] Mengs, like Winckelmann, was supported by the nephew of Pope Clement IX (1649 –1721), Cardinal Albani (1692 – 1779), who commissioned his works. Beginning as librarian-companion to Cardinal Albani, Winckelmann became first Librarian and finally Controller of Antiquities in the Vatican. He was also named librarian to Cardinal Passionei (1682 – 1761), who was impressed by his Greek writing. “Cardinal Passionei, a jovial old man of seventy-eight years,” Winckelmann openly confessed, took him:
…for drives…
and he always escorts me home in person. When I accompany him to Frascati, we
sit down to table in slippers and night-caps; and if I choose to humour him, in
our night-shirts too. This may seem incredible, but I am telling the truth.[804]
Mengs’ pagan-themed fresco painting Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter.[805] The Villa Albani was built to house Albani's collection of antiquities, curated by Winckelmann. Albani developed into one of the most powerful and enterprising collectors of Roman antiquities and patron of the arts of his day.[806] Albani maintained a correspondence with Sir Horace Mann (1706 – 1786), the British envoy at Florence, whose duties included reporting on the activities of the exiled Stuarts, the Old Pretender and the Young Pretender.[807]
Albani also maintained a friendship with Philipp von Stosch (1691 – 1757), a Prussian antiquarian who lived in Rome and Florence. Jonathan I. Israel described von Stosch as “the legendary deist, freemason, and open homosexual.”[808] Stosch was a founder of a Masonic Lodge in Florence in 1733, which Pope Clement IX’s cardinal-nephew Neri Corsini accused of having become “corrupt,” leading to the ban on Catholics becoming Freemasons. As Stosch was employed by the Foreign Office in London and was likely using Freemasonry as a cover to spy on the exiled Stuart cause in Rome, as Pope Clement IX, who was sympathetic to the Jacobites, kept the Old Pretender as his guest in Rome.[809]
According to Karl H. Frick, the Masonic lodge, which Stosch founded with Charles Sackville, 2nd Duke of Dorset (1711 – 1769), and a further unnamed Jew, was allegedly the source for some of the key documents and books that were used in the Golden and Rosy Cross.[810] Along with Hellfire Club founder Sir Francis Dashwood (1708 – 1781), Sackville was member of the Society of Dilettanti, a British society of noblemen and scholars who, inspired by Winckelmann, sponsored the study of ancient Greek and Roman art, and influenced the rise of neo-Classicism.[811] Though the exact date is unknown, the Society is believed to have been established as a gentlemen’s club in 1734 by a group of people who had been on the Grand Tour. In 1743, Horace Walpole denounced the group and described it as “…a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk: the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood, who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy.”[812]
The name Hellfire Club is most commonly used to refer to the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, founded by Dilettanti Sir Francis Dashwood (1708 – 1781), the same year he was elected to the Royal Society. The first official Hellfire Club was founded in London in 1718, by Philip, Duke of Wharton (1698 – 1731), a Freemason, Grand Master of England, and an ardent supporter of the Jacobite cause.[813] Wharton also founded an offshoot of the Hellfire club based in Twickenham, called The Schemers, which inclined more towards debauchery than blasphemy. In 1721, these clubs were disbanded by King George I, who, influenced heavily by Wharton’s political rival Robert Walpole, announced a bill against immorality specifically aimed at the Hellfire Club.[814]
Wharton arranged to be elected the sixth Grand Master in 1722, and appointed Desaguiliers as his Deputy and James Anderson a Grand Warden. However, Wharton apparently abandoned Freemasonry in 1723, and then founded the Ancient Noble Order of the Gormogons, whose he first known Grand Master (or Oecumenical Volgi) was Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, then at Rome in attendance upon the Young Pretender. From the group’s few published articles it is thought that the society’s primary objective was to hold up Freemasonry to ridicule.[815] The Gormogons were first mentioned in the London Daily Post for September 3, 1724, which claimed that the order was “instituted by Chin-Qua Ky-Po, the first Emperor of China (according to their account), many thousand years before Adam, and of which the great philosopher Confucious was Oecumenicae Volgee.” The order was said to have been brought to London by a “Mandarin,” who in turn initiated several “Gentlemen of Honor” into its ranks.
In 1751, Dashwood, leased Medmenham Abbey, which incorporated the ruins of a Cistercian abbey founded in 1201. Dashwood had the abbey rebuilt, but to look like a ruin, and decorated with various pornographic scenes. Rabelais’ motto Fais ce que tu voudras (“Do what thou wilt”) was placed above a doorway in stained glass. After the Black Mass, club members entered the Abbey where were waiting professional prostitutes dressed as nuns and masked from whom they selected to participate in an orgy. However, a few of the participating women were wives or relatives of the club members. John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, inventor of the sandwich, boasted that he seduced virgins to enjoy the “corruption of innocence, for its own sake.”[816]
In addition to the prostitutes were amateurs known as “dollymops,” some of them prominent society women, such as a Jewess named Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston (1721 – 1788).[817] One of the duchess’s most infamous incidents took place in 1749, when she attended a masquerade ball during the King’s Jubilee Celebration dressed as the Greek mythological character Iphigenia, ready for sacrifice, in flesh-colored silk that made her appear virtually naked. Long known as an “adventuress” and sexual intriguer at royal court, the duchess is the only woman in British history to be tried and convicted of bigamy in an open trial before the House of Lords. Chudleigh was forced to leave the country and went to the continent where she had houses in Paris and Rome, befriended the Pope Clement XIV. She lived with Frederick the Great, and several of the French and Russian nobility, and bought a large estate outside St. Petersburg.[818]
The duchess was also the mistress of the James Hamilton, 6th Duke of Hamilton (1724 – 1758), a Freemason and cousin of another member of the Society of Dilettanti, British diplomat Sir William Hamilton (1730 – 1803).[819] Sir William Hamilton collaborated with Richard Payne Knight (1751 –1824) a classical scholar and archaeologist, on A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786/87). The central claim of the book was that an international religious impulse to worship “the generative principle” was articulated through phallic imagery, and that this imagery has persisted into the modern age. Knight’s Discourse originated in Hamilton’s report in 1781 on phallic rituals to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society and Secretary-Treasurer of the Dilettanti. Knight lead the Dilettanti to write the Society’s ultimate work, Specimens of Antient Sculpture, whose various homoerotic tributes to Greek works of art owed a debt to the influence of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art.[820]
Sir William Hamilton was the husband of the infamous Emma Hamilton (1765 – 1815). Also known as Lady Hamilton, she was an English model and actress, who is remembered as the mistress of Admiral Lord Nelson (1758 – 1805), regarded as one of the greatest naval commanders in history. Emma had also been a mistress of the politician Charles Greville (1749 – 1809). However, when Emma stood in the way of a search for a wealthy wife, Greville pawned her off on his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, from whom she derived her title.[821] Lady Hamilton became famous for a form of striptease she developed, what she called her “Attitudes,” or tableaux vivants, in which she portrayed semi-nude sculptures and paintings before British visitors. Emma’s performances were a sensation with visitors from across Europe and even attracted the attention of Goethe. In 1800, Emma became Dame Emma Hamilton, a title she held as a member of the Order of Malta, awarded to her by the then Grand Master of the Order, Tsar Paul I, in recognition of her role in the defense of the island of Malta against the French.[822]
Winckelmann’s major work, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764, “The History of Ancient Art”), which deeply influenced contemporary views of the superiority of Greek art, was translated into French in 1766 and later into English and Italian. Lessing, based many of the ideas in his Laocoön (1766) on Winckelmann’s views on harmony and expression in the visual arts. Reviewing the 1756 edition in the first issue of Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, the journal he had recently co-founded with Moses Mendelssohn, the young Friedrich Nicolai—who would later become the Illuminati publisher—praised “Herr Winckelmann, who has now embarked upon a voyage to Rome,” as a man “from whom the fine arts will undoubtedly derive great benefit.”[823]
Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717 – 1799), who studied with Mengs and Winckelmann, was the drawing teacher of Goethe, with whom he kept up friendly relations afterwards at Weimar. Winckelmann subsequently exercised a powerful influence over Goethe. For example, Goethe’s journey to the Italian peninsula and Sicily from 1786 to 1788 was of great significance on the development of his aesthetic and philosophy. During the course of his trip, Goethe met and befriended the Swiss Neoclassical painter Angelica Kauffman (1741 – 1807) and the German painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751 – 1829), as well as encountering Lady Hamilton and Cagliostro.[824] In 1783, upon the recommendation of Goethe, Tischbein had received a stipendium from Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1745 – 1804), a friend of Adam Weishaupt, who was the great-grandfather of Prince Albert the husband of Queen Victoria.[825]
In Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert (“Winkelmann and his Century”), Goethe claimed that literary classicism owed its ideal of beauty to Winckelmann who was able to develop to convey because of his homosexuality.[826] Goethe’s relationship with his male servant, Philipp Seidel, which was certainly described by Seidel as homoerotic.[827] Goethe also defended pederasty: “Pederasty is as old as humanity itself, and one can therefore say that it is natural, that it resides in nature, even if it proceeds against nature. What culture has won from nature will not be surrendered or given up at any price.”[828] Goethe published his famous poem about Ganymede (1789), the myth that was a model for the Greek social custom of paiderastia, the romantic relationship between an adult male and an adolescent male. It immediately follows Prometheus, and the two poems together should be understood as a pair, Ganymed—who is seduced by God (or Zeus) through the beauty of Spring—expressing the sentiment of “divine love,” and the other misotheism, the “hatred of the gods” or “hatred of God.”
In a letter to Johann Georg Zimmermann in 1784, Moses Mendelssohn pictured “the ideal man […] who would do for the cause of God what Winckelmann did for paganism.”[829] Winckelmann also posited the existence of an art tradition in ancient Israel, that would have preceded anything in Greece, recalling the wrought images in the Bible. As Winckelmann believed that artistic excellence was conditioned by climate and physiology, he speculated that the physical conformation of the ancient Jews would have been suitable for the expression of ideas of beauty. Hebrew art, Winckelmann surmised, must have achieved a degree of excellence, if not in sculpture, than in drawing and other art forms, taking note that Bible recorded that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar exiled from Jerusalem a thousand artists expert in inlaid work.[830]
About Egypt and Egyptian art, however, Winckelmann expressed only contempt. The opinion was therefore reciprocated in Mendelssohn. for similar reasons. According to Braiterman, “Although he never would have admitted it to others or seen it himself, Mendelssohn’s Jewish thought was part of the neoclassical rebellion against ‘tradition,’ which in this context means the fusion of parts in seventeenth-century baroque art and culture.” Braiterman notes that in his book on Mendelssohn, David Sorkin makes made reference to “baroque Judaism,” by which he meant Judaism of Talmud and Kabbalah, and that Gershom Scholem compared Sabbateanism to the contemporary European baroque. Mendelssohn’s interest in the neoclassicism of Winckelmann was, therefore, seen as a reform of ancient Judaism by proposing that there were new ways of interpretating the beauty it was capable of producing, that could compete with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on “reason” of its new artforms.[831]
It was
as a result of their influence exercised at the Masonic congress at Wilhelmsbad
of 1782 that the Illuminati came to wield enormous influence in the world of
European secret societies. Many influential intellectuals, clergymen and
politicians counted themselves as members of the Illuminati, including
Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick, Grand Master of the Order of Strict Observance,
and the diplomat Xavier von Zwack, who became the Illuminati’s
second-in-command. The Illuminati attracted literary men such as Goethe, Lessing
and Herder, the leading exponents of the Romantic
movement and Weimar Classicism. In their rejection of the Enlightenment and the imperial ambitions of
French under Napoleon, they helped shape the growing German nationalism and its
attended occult-based theories of race which exploded with catastrophic
consequences under the Nazis in the twentieth century.
In 1815, when his son was promoted to Journeyman in Weimar’s Masonic lodge, Goethe wrote a poem entitled Verschwiegenheit (“Secrecy”), in which he extolled the society’s practice of discretion:
No one should and will see
what we have confided in one another:
For upon silence and trust
the temple is built.
What was to become known as Weimar Classicism was established by Illuminati member Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1757 – 1828), a close friend of Frederick William III, notably by bringing his friend Goethe there.[832] Saxe-Eisenach was an Ernestine duchy ruled by the Saxon House of Wettin, which like the houses of Savoy, Gonzaga, Cleves, Lorraine and Montferrat, all began their ascent after they were recognized by Emperor Sigismund, founder of the Order of the Dragon. The town of Eisenach is the location of Wartburg Castle, site of the Miracle of the Roses performed by Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. In 1207, the legendary Sängerkrieg supposedly took place there, organized by Elizabeth’s father-in-law, Hermann I, Landgrave of Thuringia, and which involved Wolfram von Eschenbach, author of Lohengrin, the story of the Knight of the Swan. One of the most famous interpretations is Wagner’s Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (1845).
The union between Saxe-Weimar and Saxe-Eisenach became permanent when they were inherited by Karl August’s grandfather, Ernest Augustus I, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1688 – 1748), in 1741. Ernest Augustus I was the grandson of John VI, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, nephew of Christian of Anhalt, the chief advisor of Frederick V of the Palatinate of the Alchemical Wedding, and architect of the political agenda behind the Rosicrucian movement. Christian’s brother was Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Plötzkau, who headed Rosicrucian court that included the millenarian Paul Nagel, a collaborator of Baltazar Walther, whose trips to the Middle East inspired the legend of Christian Rosenkreutz and was the source of the Lurianic Kabbalah of Jacob Boehme. John VI’s sister, Dorothea of Anhalt-Zerbst, married Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a friend of Johann Valentin Andreae, the reputed author of the Rosicrucian manifestos, and of Rabbi Templo.
Also from the Ernestine branch the House of
Wettin, was John Frederick I of Saxony, who planned what would become the
University of Jena, in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. It was John Frederick
I who along with Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, was one of the main supporters
of Martin Luther, and who commissioned his rose seal. The plan was established
by his three sons in 1548 as the Höhere Landesschule at Jena. It was awarded
it the status of university in 1557 Emperor Ferdinand I, a knight of the Order
of the Golden Fleece.[833]
Ernest Augustus I’s son, Ernest Augustus II, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1737 – 1758), was Karl August’s father. Karl August’s mother was Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1739 – 1807). Anna Amalia was a distant cousin of Weishaupt’s friend, Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, former Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge located in Berlin, and the great-grandfather of Prince Albert the husband of Queen Victoria. Like Ernst II, Anna Amalia was a great-great-grandchild of Augustus the Younger and Dorothea of Anhalt-Zerbst. Anna Amalia’s mother, Princess Philippine Charlotte of Prussia, was a sister of Frederick the Great and Louisa Ulrika of Prussia, the mother of Charles XIII of Sweden and Gustav III of Sweden, Grand Masters of Swedish Freemasonry and patrons of Swedenborg.[834] Anna Amalia’s father, Charles I, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was the brother of Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick, Illuminatus, Grand Master of the Strict Observance and member of the Asiatic Brethren. Charles I and Ferdinand were first cousins of Empress Maria Theresa—Jacob Frank’s protector—and Peter II of Russia. Their sister, Duchess Luise of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was the mother of Frederick William II, a member of the Golden and Rosy Cross.
During Karl August’s minority, Anna Amalia administered the affairs of the duchy. A literate patron, pianist and composer, Anna Amalia held a famous literary salon, the Musenhof, and prepared Weimar to become a “New Athens.”[835] As a patron of the arts, Anna Amalia drew many of the most eminent people in Germany to Weimar. She gathered a group of scholars, poets and musicians, professional and amateur, for discussion and music at the Wittum palace. She succeeded in engaging Abel Seyler’s theatrical company, considered the best theatre company in Germany at that time.[836] She also established the Duchess Anna Amalia Library. Among its special collections is an important Shakespeare collection, as well as a sixteenth-century Bible connected to Martin Luther. One of the library’s most famous patrons was Goethe, who honored her in a work titled Zum Andenken der Fürstin Anna-Amalia.
In this Musenhof (“court of the muses”), as Wilhelm Bode called it, members included Herder, Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller.[837] As a boy, Schiller came to the attention of Charles Eugene, Duke of Württemberg (1728 – 1793), whose sister, Duchess Auguste of Württemberg, was married to Karl Anselm of Thurn and Taxis, and a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece, whose banker was Amschel Rothschild. Charles Eugene was educated at the court of Frederick II of Prussia and also studied keyboard with Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714 – 1788), who dedicated his “Württemberg” sonatas to him. C.P.E. Bach, who was born in Weimar, obtained an appointment in Berlin in the service of the future Frederick the Great. During his time there, Bach mixed with many accomplished musicians, including several notable former students of his father, and important literary figures, such as Illuminatus Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, with whom he would become close friends. In 1744, Charles Eugene ordered that the corpse of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (1698? – 1738), a German Jewish banker and court Jew for his father Charles Alexander, Duke of Württemberg (1684 – 1737), who was executed by the Duke of Württemberg-Neuenstadt, and whose decaying corpse had been suspended in an iron cage by Stuttgart’s Prag gallows for six years, be taken down and given a proper burial.
Although no official membership list of the Illuminati includes his name, Schiller was surrounded by members of the order all his life, including Goethe, Herder, Voigt, and J.C. Bode, who with Moses Mendelssohn was a mutual friend of Lessing, and who succeeded Weishaupt as the leader of the order in 1784 and would contribute to instigating the French Revolution on his trip to Paris in 1787. As a young man, Schiller attended Karlsschule Military Academy in Stuttgart, founded by Duke Charles Eugene of Württemberg, where he was taught in philosophy by Illuminatus Jacob Friedrich von Abel (1751 – 1829), who would remain a good friend his entire life. Even the theme of his famous play Don Carlos (1787), which was always suspected of being rife with allusions to the Illuminati, was suggested by his friend Baron Karl Theodor von Dalberg, a high-ranking Illuminatus.[838] In 1787, Schiller settled in Weimar and in 1789, he was appointed professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Jena. In the 1790s Schiller’s patron, the Danish Prince Friedrich Christian von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (1765 – 1814), aimed to reform the Illuminati. He financed Weishaupt, who at that time lived in exile in Gotha, and involved the Danish poet Jens Baggesen (1764 – 1826), who travelled throughout Europe as his emissary, in the project to revive the order. Schiller was invited to serve as a theoretical leader and was regularly updated.[839]
On
October 24, 1764, the birthday of its namesake, the Anna
Amalia zu den drei Rosen (“Anna Amalia of
the Three Roses”) Masonic lodge was founded by Jakob Friedrich von Fritsch
(1731 – 1814), with brothers from the previously dissolved Jena Lodge.[840]
Fritsch was a member of the Duchy’s governing Geheimes Conseil (“Privy
Council”), the highest political and judicial body in the Duchy, and was
responsible for all
important political decisions of the state. It reported directly to the Grand Duke
and was the central authority of the duchy, overseeing all other authorities as
well as the Duchess Anna Amalia Library.
As a tutor for her son Grand Duke Karl August, she hired a member of the Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733 – 1813), an important poet and noted translator of William Shakespeare, who would become one of the central figure of Weimar Classicism. Wieland’s novel Agathon, which was one of “the most widely read German novels of the period,” according to Nicholas Till, “made a huge impact on Adam Weishaupt… who frequently cited it as one of the most important influences upon his own conception of the meaning of Masonic initiation.”[841] Wieland’s work, along with that of Illuminati member Christoph Meiners (1747 – 1810) was recommended reading for members of the order.[842] German eighteenth-century homoerotic works about “Greek love” include the academic essays of Meiners and Alexander von Humboldt, and Wieland’s Comische Erzählungen of 1765, one of which was the tale Juno und Ganymede, omitted in later editions, and A Year in Arcadia: Kyllenion (1805), a novel about an explicitly homosexual love affair in a Greek setting by Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1772 – 1822), the son of Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg.[843]
Goethe, fresh from the success of his novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), settled in Weimar where he became advisor to Karl August. The relationship between Goethe and Karl August was unusually intimate and has been described by the psychoanalyst Kurt Eissler as latently homosexual.[844] As summarized by W. Daniel Wilson:
The sum of this evidence suggests a
homosexual subculture in classical Weimar, or, at the very least, demonstrable
fascination with homoerotic themes in this circle of men—none of whom, it might
be added, was conventionally and monogamously married at this time.[845]
The
following year, Goethe appointed his friend Herder, a Mason in Riga and a
member of the Strict Templar Observance, as general superintendent of the
Lutheran consistory and ecclesiastical advisor to the court.[846] In 1775, Karl
August reached his majority and assumed the government of his duchy. In that
same year he married Princess
Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, whose sister, Natalia
Alexeievna, was the wife of Paul I of Russia. Karl August’s only surviving
daughter, Caroline Louise, married Frederick Ludwig, Hereditary Grand Duke of
Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and was the mother of Helene, wife of Ferdinand Philippe,
Duke of Orléans, grandson of Illuminatus Philippe Égalité.
“The entire Weimarer school,” in the words of one scholar, “was a nest of Illuminati.”[847] Bode, who was Procurator Generalis for the Seventh Province of the Strict Observance, was private secretary of the widow of the former Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Countess Charitas Emilie von Bernstorff, who held a salon in Weimar.[848] Bode, who had been living in Weimar since 1778, recruited members of the Masonic lodge Anna Amalia as Illuminati, including Karl August, Goethe and Herder, who became a Mason in Riga and joined the Strict Observance. Goethe was initiated into the Anna Amalia lodge in 1780, and admitted into the Strict Observance in 1782. He was insinuated into the Illuminati in 1783, and attained the rank of Regent in 1784.[849] Karl August was initiated in 1782, in the presence of his brother, Prince Frederick Ferdinand Constantin of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1758 – 1793), and Weishaupt’s friend, Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, former Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge located in Berlin.[850] On February 25, 1777, Ernst II was initiated into the Strict Observance in the castle of Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick, where “a banquet table, brought in by the Duchesse and seven ladies of the court, had the shape of a T—‘a symbol noticeable on monuments of the old Knights Templar’”[851] Ernst II was initiated the Illuminati in 1783, appointed the inspector of upper-Saxony, and Coadjutor to the National Superior, Stolberg-Rossla in 1784, National Director of Germany, after helping Weishaupt escape.[852] Karl August became Regent in the Order in 1784. He took alias Aeschylus, named after the Greek playwright and tragedian of the sixth century BC, traditionally believed to have been the author of Prometheus Bound.[853] Bode was a regular guest of Karl August. At least fifteen members of the Illuminati lodge at Weimar represented the elite of Weimar, and among them are three of the four members of the Geheimes Conseil: Duke Karl August and Goethe, and Fritsch, as well as a future member of the Conseil, Christian Gottlob Voigt (1743 – 1819, President of the State Ministry.[854]
Just as the Bavarian state banned the
Illuminati, Weishaupt became a candidate for a philosophy chair at the
University of Jena. Goethe played a central role in determining Weishaupt’s
qualifications for Duke Karl August, who finally rejected his candidacy.[855]
According to W. Daniel Wilson, the reason would have been because of fears on
the part of Goethe and Karl August of attracting undue attention to their
on-going activities.[856]
Instead, Weishaupt ended up in the nearby duchy of Saxe-Gotha, headed by branch
of the same family as Karl August, Weishaupt’s friend Ernst II, Duke of
Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg.[857] As pointed out Wilson, just before the Weimar
Illuminati papers were confiscated during the Nazi persecution of Freemasonry
and then disappeared for half a century, they were viewed and partly published
by at least four scholars. After earlier studies had begun to highlight the
importance of Bode’s revival of the Illuminati following their suppression in
Bavaria, Hermann Schüttler, who had access to the newly-available Weimar
documents, concluded that Weimar and Gotha became the center of the reformed
Illuminati.[858] State
Councillor Clemens von Neumayr and a companion,
both former members of the Illuminati, set out to determine whether the order
had survived in Northern Germany by visiting Weishaupt in Gotha and Bode near
Weimar, and discovered that in the summer of 1789 student organization in Jena had as its goal “to
re-establish the Illuminati order.”[859] As Wilson concludes, “When we put
all these facts together, it seems clear that Bode was working through the
students in Jena to revive the Illuminati.”[860]
Ernst II figures prominently in the preservation of Volume X of the Schwedenkiste (“Swedish Box”), a collection of correspondences between members of the Illuminati from the estate of J.J.C. Bode. Upon his death at the end of 1793, Bode’s possessions became the property of Ernst II.[861] The collection was confiscated by the Nazis in 1933, brought to Moscow by Soviet commissioners in 1945, and returned to the State Archives of the German Democratic Republic at the end of the 1950s, with the exception of Volume X, which remained in Moscow, and now in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (“Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation”) in Berlin.[862] The agency represents archival work of the former states of Brandenburg-Prussia, including their main roots in the Teutonic Knights, which to cover “nine centuries of European history between Königsberg and Cleves.”[863]
In 1794, Schiller and Goethe became friends and allies in a project to establish new standards for literature and the arts in Germany. Initially, the Weimar Illuminati lodge brought together nobles and administrators of the duchy, including Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747 – 1822), private secretary to the duke. With Wieland, Bertuch founded the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung in 1785, which became the highest-circulation and most influential German-language newspaper of its kind during this period. The journal, whose editor was Illuminatus Gottlieb Hufeland (1760 – 1817), consisted “exclusively of book reviews, furnished anonymously and largely… by Jena professors.”[864] According to Goethe, it was the “voice and, so to speak, the Areopagus of the public.”[865] Its best-known contributors included Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Alexander von Humboldt, whose friends and benefactors included Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph and David Friedländer.[866]
Weimar Classicism was formed between 1786 and Schiller’s death in 1805, when he and Goethe worked to recruit to their cause a network of writers, philosophers, scholars, including Herder, Schiller and Wieland, as well as Alexander von Humboldt, came to form a part of the foundation of nineteenth-century Germany’s understanding of itself as a culture and the political unification of Germany.[867] Herder’s mentor was Johann Georg Hamann (1730 – 1788), a Kabbalist and Bohemian, known as the “the Magi of the North.” Hamann was, moreover, a mentor to and an admired influence on Goethe, Jacobi, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lessing, Schelling and Mendelssohn. Friedrich Schelling (1775 – 1854), like his mentor Fichte, was also associated with the Illuminati, and interested in Boehme, Swedenborg and Mesmer.[868] Another leading protégée of Hamann was Illuminati member Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743 – 1819).[869] Jacobi was converted to Hamann’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy, and became his most energetic advocate.[870] Jacobi maintained correspondences with the likes of Moses Mendelssohn, Wieland, Goethe, Lavater, Herder, the Humboldt brothers, Diderot, duchess Anna Amalia, National Superior of the Illuminati, Count Johann Martin zu Stolberg-Rossla (1728 – 1795), and the adept Masonic Rosicrucian, author and publisher, suspected Illuminatus Georg Forster (1754 – 1794). Forster was among the founders of the Jacobin Club in Mainz, the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Freiheit und Gleichheit (“Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality”), developed as a revival of the Illuminati in 1792.[871]
Moses Mendelssohn would eventually become engaged in the Pantheismusstreit [pantheism dispute], to defend Lessing against allegations made by Jacobi that Lessing had supported the pantheism of Spinoza. After a conversation with Lessing in 1780, concerning Goethe’s then-unpublished pantheistic poem Prometheus, Jacobi embarked on an intense study of Spinoza and partook in debates with other philosophers over the matter. This led to the publication of Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn [“On the Teaching of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn”] (1785), in which he criticized Spinozism as leading to atheism and rife with Kabbalism.
The entire issue, which Kant rejected, became a major intellectual and religious concern for European society at the time. Mendelssohn was thus drawn into an acrimonious debate, and found himself attacked from all sides, including former friends or acquaintances such Herder. Mendelssohn’s contribution to this debate, To Lessing’s Friends 1786, was his last work, completed a few days before his death. When Mendelssohn died in 1786, Nicolai continued the debate on his behalf. The effective result of the controversy was that Jacobi inadvertently contributed to a revival of Spinozism and pantheism. Frederick C. Beiser writes that “Spinoza’s reputation changed from a devil into a saint.” Novalis called Spinoza the “God-intoxicated man.” According to Glenn Alexander Magee, “the significance of the Pantheismusstreit [pantheism dispute] of the late eighteenth century cannot be overstated. Thanks to Jacobi’s revelations, pantheism became, as Heinrich Heine would put it in the next century, ‘the unofficial religion of Germany.’”[872]
Another disciple of Spinoza, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834), who had been educated among the Moravian Church of Count Zinzendorf, and sided with Jacobi and studied Spinoza, and took some ideas from Fichte and Schelling.[873] Schleiermacher was among the founders of the Zionites, created by members of the Philadelphian Society, who were inspired by Jacob Boehme.[874] In later years, although no longer officially a functioning group, many of the Philadelphian Society’s views and writings remained influential among certain groups of Behmenists, Pietists, and Christian mystics such as the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, led by the Rosicrucian Johannes Kelpius, the Ephrata Cloister, and the Harmony Society, among others.[875]
Herder was also a friend of Kant. In one of his letters to his friend Moses Mendelssohn, Kant expressed regret at having never met Swedenborg.[876] According to Paul Rose, despite his criticisms of Judaism, Kant’s public embrace of Moses Mendelssohn is explained by his belief that that only the most enlightened Jews are at present capable of being admitted into German intellectual life.[877] Because, according to Kant:
Certainly it seems strange to conceive of a nation of cheats, but it is just as strange to conceive of a nation of traders, most of whom—tied by an ancient superstition—seek no civil honor from the state where they live, but rather to restore their loss at the expense of those who grant them protection as well as from one another.[878]
Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793) announced that “the Jewish religion is not really a religion at all, but merely a community of a mass of men of one tribe [Stamm],” in other words, merely a national community shaped by an ad hoc set of pseudo-religious rules. To Kant, Judaism was not a religion founded by “pure moral belief,” but was based rather on obedience to an externally imposed law that was the result of the absence of an inner moral conscience, or what he would call, of “freedom.” As Rose explains:
The most sinister implication of Kant’s critique of Judaism was that it acknowledged no validity or even right to an independent existence of Judaism, which was seen not only as immoral, but obsolete in the modern world. “The euthanasia of Judaism,” he confidently affirmed, “is the pure moral religion!”[879]
Like Kant, Herder traced Jewish moral defects to an original and collective national character. But, Herder believed that emancipation was the solution to these errors:
We observe the Jews
here only as the parasitic plant that has attached itself to almost all the
European nations, and draws more or less on their sap. After the destruction of
old Rome, they were yet only few in Europe, but through the persecutions of the
Arabs they came in great crowds… During the barbarian centuries they were
exchange- men, agents, a n d imperial servants… They were oppressed cruelly…
and tyrannously robbed of what they had amassed through avarice and cheating,
or through hard work, cleverness, and diligence… There will come a time when in
Europe one will no longer ask who be Jew and who Christian. For the Jew too
will live according to European law and contribute to the good of the state.
Only a barbarian constitution may impede him from doing that or render his
ability dangerous.[880]
Herder sent Mendelssohn his treatise on the Book of Revelation in I779. “You see, my friend,” Herder wrote, “how holy and exalted these books are for me, and how much I (according to Voltaire’s scornful words) become a Jew when I read them.”[881] Herder added, “Israel was and is the most distinguished people of the earth; in its origin and continued life up to this day, in its good and bad fortune, in its merits and faults, in its humiliation and elevation so singular, so unique, that I consider the history, the character, the existence of the people the clearest proof of the miracles and the writings which we know and possess of it.”[882] Herder put forward that, to a large extent, the faults of the Jews were caused the cruel treatment they received from the nations who hosted them Herder argued that Jews in Germany should enjoy the full rights and obligations of Germans, and that the non-Jews of the world owed a debt to Jews for centuries of abuse, and that this debt could be discharged only by actively assisting those Jews who wished to do so to regain political sovereignty in their ancient homeland of Israel.[883]
It was Jacobi who transmitted Hamann’s thought to the Romantics, engaging with in further philosophical arguments with Goethe, Herder, Fichte and Schelling.[884] The contemporaneous movement of German Romanticism was in opposition to Weimar and German Classicism, and especially to Schiller. With Johann Fichte (1762 – 1814), Friedrich Schelling and Novalis (1772 – 1801)—who were all active Masons—on the teaching staff, the University of Jena, under the auspices of Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, became the center of the emergence of German idealism and early Romanticism.[885] The best-known thinkers of German idealism, which developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, are Fichte, Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831).
Many in this circle were identified by the
French imperial police as members of the Illuminati, based on anonymous work
titled a Mémoire sur les Illuminés et l’Allemagne (“Memoirs about the
Illuminati and Germany”), written around 1810. The author recounted the confidences given to him by a certain Corbin,
inspector of supplies during Napoleon’s campaigns of in Germany, and a
Freemason who had been initiated into écossais degrees in
Scotland. Based on these facts, the police arrived at the idea of Illuminism as
a vast association, with main centers in Gotha, Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen,
Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Constantinople, Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart
and St. Gallen. All these locales communicate with each other through various
channels, notably through the members of the association, who are part of the
Masonic lodges of the Scottish Rite, and the Berlin lodge, the Grand Lodge of
Prussia, called Royal York of Friendship, and considered one of the main
intermediary points for the communications with Denmark, Sweden and Russia, as
far as Moscow. From there, the correspondence passes to the Tauride Palace in
St. Petersburg, then through Constantinople and enters Germany, through Hungary
and Austria.[886]
The Royal
York of Friendship, or Grand Lodge of Prussia, had provided a patent for the
founding of the Illuminati lodge, Theodore of Good Counsel, by instructions
from the Willermoz’s Chevaliers Bienfaisants at Lyons.[887] In 1765, the lodge Royal York of
Friendship initiated Prince Edward, Duke of York and Albany, brother of King
George III, and the second son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Princess
Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, whose nephew was Illuminatus Ernst II, Duke of
Saxe-Gotha-Alternburg. Prince Edward’s godparents were Frederick William I of
Prussia and Duchess Anna Amalia’s father, Charles I, Duke of
Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. In his commentary on Le Livre fait par force, a
book by Claude-Etienne Le Bauld-de-Nans (1735 – 1792), Grand Master of the
Royal York lodge, François Labbé, in Le message maçonnique au XVIIIe siècle (“The
Masonic Message in the 18th Century”), points out that the lodge
represents the enduring rationalist trend in Germany, showing an interest in
the Illuminati, and thus positioned itself in opposition to the esoteric Three
Globes.[888]
Le Bauld was an actor, director and French teacher at the court of the Prussian
princess and later Queen Frederica Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, the wife of Frederick
William II of Prussia, and sister of Princess Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, the
wife of Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. He also taught the von Humboldt
brothers.[889]
According to the anonymous report, “These dreamers, referred to as Idealists, basically have the same goal as the Illuminati, with whom they have close ties,” and “They preach a moral and political regeneration that will ensure the independence of the German people and the reign of the Ideas.” Aiming at the same goal as the Illuminati, their allies are all those personalities in Germany known for their hostile sentiments against France. A list of some 140 names, which included not only a few genuine Illuminati such as Sonnenfels and Maximilian von Montgelas (1759 – 1838), but also well-known enemies of Illuminism such as Starck, and in which von Dalberg—who was served by Mayer Amschel Rothschild as “court banker”—was depicted as its most ruthless enemy. Included as well was Baron Franz Karl von Hompesch-Bollheim (1735 – 1800), the Bavarian Minister of Finance from 1779 until his death, and the brother of the 71st Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim (1744 – 1805), and the first German elected to that office.
Among the Illuminati listed were Jacobi, Schelling, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach (1775 – 1833). In 1801, Feuerbach was appointed extraordinary professor of law without salary, at the University of Jena, and in the following year accepted a chair at Kiel, where he attended the lectures of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and fellow Illuminati member Gottlieb Hufeland (1760 – 1817). In 1780, Reinhold was ordained as a priest, and in 1783 he became a member of the Illuminati lodge, the famous Masonic Viennese lodge Zur wahren Eintracht, which was led by the Sabbatean Joseph von Sonnenfels and Ignaz Edler von Born.[890] In 1784, after studying philosophy for a semester at Leipzig, he settled in Weimar, where he became Christoph Martin Wieland’s collaborator on Der Teutsche Merkur, and married Wieland’s daughter Sophie, with Herder officiating at the wedding.[891] As a result of publishing his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (“Letters on the Kantian Philosophy”) in Der Teutsche Merkur, which were important in making Kant known to a wider audience, Reinhold received a call to the University of Jena, where he taught from 1787 to 1794. Schiller himself reported that one of the major sources for his essay, “The Legation of Moses,” which belongs in Schiller’s series of lectures on Universal History from the summer of 1789 at Jena University, first published in Thalia, Schiller’s journal of original poetry and philosophical writings, was Reinhold The Hebrew Mysteries, or the Oldest Religious Freemasonry.
The list of Idealists included the two Schlegel brothers, Jean Paul, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, Fichte, Zacharias Werner, Tieck and Madame de Staël.[892] Achim von Arnim (1781 – 1831) is considered one of the most important representatives of German Romanticism. In Halle, Arnim associated with the composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt, in whose house he became acquainted Ludwig Tieck. From 1800, Arnim continued his studies at the University of Göttingen, though, having met Goethe and Clemens Brentano (1778 – 1842), he opted from natural sciences towards literature. Brentano’s maternal grandmother was Sophie von La Roche (1730 – 1807), who had been engaged to friend of Christoph Martin Wieland. La Roche held a literary salon in their home in the borough of Koblenz, mentioned by Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit (“Fiction and truth”), and attended by Lavater and the Jacobi brothers. In the eighth volume of Dichtung und Wahrheit, written in 1811, Goethe reconstructed from memory how he had constructed an entire theogony and cosmogony from the most diverse alchemist and Gnostic manuals and Jewish and Christian esoteric works, to which “Hermeticism, mysticism and Kabbalah” made their contribution.[893] Arnim married Brentano’s sister, Bettina, the Countess of Arnim.
Brentano studied in Halle and Jena, and was close to Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte and Tieck. In Berlin in 1794, Ludwig Tieck (1773 – 1853) contributed a number of short stories to the series Straussfedern, published by Illuminati publisher Friedrich Nicolai and originally edited by Johann Karl August Musäus (1735 – 1787). A member of her Musenhof, Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Einsenach appointed Musäus professor of classical language and history at the Wilhelm-Ernst-Gymnasium in Weimar. Musäus was initiated into Freemasonry in 1776 at Anna Amalia lodge in Weimar, and insinuated into the Illuminati by Bode in 1783.[894] In Weimar, Musäus cultivated friendships with Duke Karl August, Bertuch, Herder, Lavater, Nicolai, and Christoph Martin Wieland. Also listed in the Mémoire was the German dramatist who also worked as a consul in Russia and Germany, August von Kotzebue (1761 – 1819), the nephew of Musäus, whose Nachgelassene Schriften he edited.[895]
According to historian of philosophy Karl Ameriks, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel all developed their thought in reaction to the interpretation of Kant from Reinhold. [896] In 1792, Jacob Friedrich von Abel, a member of the Illuminati and close friend of Schiller, was a pedagogue of the Latin Schulen ob der Staig, during which time, according to Hegel’s sister, he adopted Hegel as his protege.[897] In 1788, Hegel had entered the Tübinger Stift, a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen, where he was roommates with Schelling and the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843). The three became close friends and mutually influenced each other’s ideas. As Laura Anna Macor has shown, Hölderlin’s personal contacts with former Illuminati are a constant feature of his life, from his education at Tübingen University, through his stays in Waltershausen, Jena and Frankfurt am Main, up to the later stays in Homburg vor der Höhe and Stuttgart. In 1792, Hölderlin’s sister married the former Illuminatus Christian Matthäus Theodor Breunlin (1752 – 1800).[898] Schelling visited his friend Hölderlin in Frankfurt in the late Spring of 1796 after meeting the Illuminatus Johann Friedrich Mieg (1744–1811), who had recruited Abel in the early 1780s, and the Illuminatus Jacobin Georg Christian Gottfried Freiherr von Wedekind (1761–1831) in Heidelberg.[899] Wedekind was also one of the founding members of the Jacobin Club of Mainz.[900]
Also in the list was Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769 – 1860), a German nationalist historian, writer and poet. Early in his life, he fought for the abolition of serfdom, later against Napoleonic dominance over Germany. Arndt had to flee to Sweden for some time due to his anti-French positions. He is one of the main founders of German nationalism during the Napoleonic wars and the nineteenth-century movement for German unification. After an interval of private study he went in 1791 to the University of Greifswald as a student of theology and history, and in 1793 moved to Jena, where he came under the influence of Fichte.[901]
Fichte was accused of being a member of the Illuminati, and while the claim cannot be substantiated, a good many of his friends were indeed members of the order, and he was also active as a Mason in the 1790s.[902] Fichte became a Mason in Zurich in 1793 and wrote two lectures on the “philosophy of Masonry.”[903] Although there is no record of his membership in the order of the Illuminati, Schiller regularly socialized with Bode and Herder. In Der Geisterseher (“The Ghost Seer”), a fragment of a novel which appeared in several sequels between 1787 and 1789, Schiller describes the conspiracy of a Jesuit secret society that wants to convert a Protestant prince to Catholicism and at the same time secure the crown for him in his homeland in order to expand its own power base there. Combining elements such as necromancy, spiritualism and conspiracies, the text brought Schiller the greatest public success during his lifetime.[904]
The Prussian
Grand Lodge was decisively shaped by Ignaz Aurelius Fessler (1756 – 1839), Capuchin
monk from Hungary who was ordained a priest in 1779, but whose liberal views
brought him into frequent conflict with his superiors. In 1796 he went to
Berlin, where he founded a humanitarian society. In April 1800, through his
introduction, Fichte was initiated into Freemasonry in the Royal York lodge.
Fessler was commissioned by the Freemasons to assist Fichte in reforming the
statutes and ritual of the lodge.[905] It is in this lodge that in 1800 Fichte delivered his lectures on
the Philosophy of Masonry.[906] In 1815, Fessler went with his family to
Sarepta, where he joined the Moravian Church, who founded the community in 1765
when Catherine the Great sought to attract German settlers to the area and
expand crop production in southern Russia.[907]
In 1798, Tieck married and in the following year settled in Jena, where he, the Schlegel brothers and Novalis, became the leaders of the Jena Romanticism. The early period of German Romanticism, roughly 1797 to 1802, is referred to as Frühromantik or Jena Romanticism. Jena became a second center of literature and philosophy with Alexander von Humboldt, Fichte, Novalis, Hegel, Schelling and Ludwig Tieck as well as the brothers Friedrich Schlegel (1772 – 1829) and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767 – 1845), loosely based on Goethe’s motto: “Weimar–Jena a great city, which has a lot of good on both ends.” The Schlegel brothers laid down the theoretical basis for Romanticism in the circle’s organ, the Athenaeum, considered to be the founding publication of German Romanticism. In July 1797, Friedrich von Schlegel met Dorothea, the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, who was them married to her Jewish husband, Simon Veit (1716 – 1786). In. 1799, Dorothea divorced Veit, and after obtaining custody of their younger son, Philipp, lived with him in an apartment in Jena, which became a salon frequented by Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis and Tieck.
Dorothea first converted to Protestantism and then Catholicism after she divorced Veit, and then married Schlegel in 1804, in the Swedish embassy in Paris. The publication in 1799 of Schlegel’s novel Lucinde, subtitled Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten (“Confessions of an Improper Man”), with an open portrayal of an adulterous sexual liaison based on himself and Dorothea became for Schlegel a major scandal.[908] The novel was, according to Schlegel, an attempt at “shaped, artistic chaos,” meant to be “chaotic and yet systematic.” According to George Pattison, speaking of the liberal mindset of the women in the world of the Romantics, “It was because women like Dorothea Veit were bold enough to break with established custom that a book such as Lucinde could be written at all.” Pattison adds:
Even its initial impact was due not so much to its intrinsic worth as to the fact that it functioned as an almost programmatic assertion of the unconventional life-style of that circle of Frühromantik [“early Romantic”] writers and thinkers of which Schlegel was a leading figure. A key element in this life-style was a relaxed attitude to conventional standards of sexual morality. It was in the sphere of what we tend to call “private” or “personal” morality that the Early Romantics were at their most “advanced.”[909]
One of the few people to come to Schlegel’s defense was his friend Friedrich Schleiermacher. Among the works most famously associated with Schlegel’s name from this period is the project of the journal Athenaeum, which published in the years 1798–1800 a set of fragments written by both Schlegel brothers, Novalis and Schleiermacher. It was during his time in Berlin that Schlegel also began a relationship with Dorothea. At Christmas 1797, Schlegel moved in with Schleiermacher, who revealed the level of their intimacy in a letter to his sister: “Our friends amuse themselves by describing our life together as a marriage, and they all agree that I must be the wife, and the jokes and more serious comments made about this are quite sufficient.”[910] Lucinde contributed to the failure of Schlegel’s academic career in Jena. In September 1800, he met four times with Goethe, who would later stage his tragedy Alarcos (1802) in Weimar, though with limited success. Schlegel remained in Jena until December 1801, and his departure on this occasion came at a time which marks a significant turning point in the history of Romanticism: the end of the “Jena circle” and its collaborations. In later years, Tieck also edited the translation of Shakespeare by August Wilhelm Schlegel, who was assisted by Tieck’s daughter Dorothea (1790 – 1841)
In 1806, Schlegel and Dorothea went to visit Aubergenville, where his brother lived with Madame Germaine de Staël (1766 – 1817), the daughter of Illuminati member Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a leading salonnière. Madame de Staël’s intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant (1767 – 1830) between 1795 and 1811 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time. Constant’s mentor was Jakob Mauvillon (1743 – 1794), a member of the Illuminati and a close friend of the Comte de Mirabeau. Madame de Staël held a salon in the Swedish embassy in Paris, where she gave “coalition dinners,” which were frequented by Thomas Jefferson and Illuminatus Marquis de Condorcet.
Madame de Staël was present at critical events such as the Estates General of 1789 and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her association with revolutionary Freemasonry was mentioned by Charles-Louis-Cadet de Gassicourt, son of the illustrious chemist of that name, who as a lawyer and journalist, had closely followed the early developments of the French Revolution. Cadet Gassicourt recounts in great detail a solemn meeting at the time of the convocation of the Estates General, where all the venerable members of the Masonic lodges were to meet under the presidency of the Duke of Orléans, and which was to serve to unite his supporters with those of Necker. There were Mirabeau and other leaders of the revolution, like Duke of Aiguillon, Jean-Jacques Duval d’Eprémesnil and Gérard de Lally-Tolendal, an ally of Voltaire. The purpose was the reception of Madame de Staël as a Freemason.[911]
Madame de Staël found mysticism “so attractive to the heart,” saying that it “united what was best in Catholicism and Protestantism” and that it was the form of religion that best suited, and served, a liberal political system.[912] She hosted noted mystics such as Madame de Krüdener, who exerted influence on the Moravian Church and Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Madame de Staël, who was to become her close friend, described von Krüdener as “the forerunner of a great religious epoch which is dawning for the human race.”[913] In a much-quoted letter, one friend commented to another about this circle: “these people will all be turning Catholic, Böhmians, Martinists, mystics, all thanks to Schlegel; and on top of all that, everything is turning German.”[914] When Kant inquired with a friend about the truth of Swedenborg’s psychic abilities, he was told that “Professor Schlegel also had declared to him that it could by no means be doubted.”[915]
Napoleon is to have said, “I have four enemies: Prussia, Russia, England and Madame de Staël.”[916] In 1803, Napoleon had finally decided to exile de Staël without trial. De Staël, ultimately disappointed by French rationalism, became interested in German romanticism. She and Constant set out for Prussia and Saxony and travelled with her two children to Weimar. They arrived in 1803, where she stayed for two and a half months at the court of the Grand Duke Karl August and his mother Anna Amalia. In Weimar, de Staël and Constant met Schiller and Goethe, and in Berlin they met the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel. Goethe, de Staël and Constant, shared a mutual admiration.[917]
According to Mémoire sur les Illuminés
et l’Allemagne, de Staël’s “close
ties with the Schlegel brothers, especially William, gave her great influence
among the Idealists.”[918] Together with brother-in-law Brentano,
Achim von Arnim visited Madame de Staël in Coppet, and Friedrich Schlegel and
his wife Dorothea in Paris. In 1804, de Staël returned to her family residence,
the Château Coppet, an estate on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where she
established what is known as the Coppet Group, which continued the activities
of her previous salons, and included Constant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jean de
Sismondi, Charles Victor de Bonstetten, Prosper de Barante, Henry Brougham,
Lord Byron, Alphonse de Lamartine, Sir James Mackintosh, Juliette Récamier and
August Wilhelm Schlegel. The unprecedented concentration of European thinkers in
the group was to have a considerable influence on the development of
romanticism, but also the development of modern liberalism from classical
liberalism. Constant, who looked to the Britain rather than to ancient Rome for
a practical model of freedom in a large mercantile society, distinguished
between the “Liberty of the Ancients” and the “Liberty of the Moderns,” based
on the possession of civil liberties, the rule of law, and freedom from
excessive state interference.[919]
Madame de Staël had in mind Lady Hamilton, another member of the group, when she composed Corinne, which Dorothea Schlegel translated into German.[920] The exchange of ideas with Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland had inspired de Staël to write De l’Allemagne (“On Germany”), one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century on Germany.[921] Like Friedrich Schlegel, de Staël viewed Romanticism as modern, because its roots are in the chivalric culture of the Middle Ages, and not in the classical models of ancient Greece and Rome.[922] Madame de Staël presented German Classicism and Romanticism as a potential source of spiritual authority for Europe, and identified Goethe as a living classic.[923] She praised Goethe as possessing “the chief characteristics of the German genius” and uniting “all that distinguishes the German mind.”[924] Her portrayal helped elevate Goethe over his more famous German contemporaries and transformed him into a European cultural celebrity.[925] The book was published in 1813, after the first edition of 10,000 copies, printed in 1810, had been destroyed by order from Napoleon.
“The similarities between the Jewish political messianic trend and German Nazism,” conclude Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, “are glaring.”[926] As explained by Gordon R. Mork, “Among the greatest and most tragic ironies of the history of Western civilization is that of the Jews and Germany. As German nationalism grew in strength during the ninetieth century, Jews were among its leading advocates.”[927] What would become Weimar Classicism, a cultural and literary movement based in Weimar that sought to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical and Enlightenment ideas. It was not until the concept of nationalism itself—and the notion of the Volk—was developed by German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803), a member of the Illuminati and a great admirer of Mendelssohn, that German nationalism began.[928] The concept of Volk then became intertwined with the myth of the “Aryan,” a term first coined by Freemason Friedrich von Schlegel, the husband of Mendelssohn’s daughter Dorothea Veit, and who, Leon Poliakov explained, in The Aryan Myth: The History of Racist and Nationalistic, was the chief promoter of the myth of an Aryan race at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Paradoxically, it was Frankist anti-Semitism and Kabbalistic theories of heredity which contributed to the theory of the “Aryan” race, developed by European scholars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While they have been dismissed as unscientific, the academic community has failed to recognize the true origins of the absurd theories. Ultimately, based on occult legend, the so-called Aryan race were supposedly descendants of a race of semi-divine beings, the Anakim of Genesis, who resulted from the breeding of the Bani Elohim, the “Sons of God,” or Fallen Angels, with human beings on Atlantis, whose sinking was equated with the time of the Flood, and whose descendants were found among the Canaanites of ancient Palestine.
To be
explained is how could Kabbalists construct an anti-Semitic myth that traced
their pedigree to the Canaanites, a non-Jewish people who were the historical
enemies of the ancient Israelites. Amongst Jewish
scholars of the Middle Ages, as Evyatar Marienberg has pointed out, Canaanites
settled not in Africa, but in Europe. Ibn Ezra, an important influence on the
Ashkenazi Hasidim, in his commentary on Obadiah 1:20, wrote: “Who are [among]
the Canaanites. We have heard from great men that the land of Alemania (“Germany”)
they are the Canaanites who fled from the children of Israel when they came
into the country.”[929]
Similarly, Rabbi David Kimchi (1160 – 1235), in his commentary on same verse, wrote:
Now they say by way of tradition that the people of the land of Alemania were Canaanites, for when the Canaanite [nation] went away from Joshua, just as we have written in the Book of Joshua, they went off to the land of Alemania and Escalona, which is called the land of Ashkenaz, while unto this day they are called Canaanites.[930]
Ivan Hannaford, in Race: The History of an Idea in the West, followed the evolution of racist thinking in scientific circles, and links much of its influence to pseudo-scientific occult theories, and in particular, the Jewish Kabbalah. As Shahak and Mezvinsky clarify, the Halakha—the collective body of Jewish religious laws that are derived from the Written and Oral Torah—although discriminating against them in some ways, treat converts to Judaism as new Jews, a notion rejected in the Kabbalah because of its emphasis upon the cosmic difference between Jews and non-Jews. As the authors indicate, most Jewish authors that have written about the Kabbalah in English, German and French have avoided this topic, and it is only in books written in Hebrew where readers can find a more accurate depiction of the fact that the Kabbalistic texts, as opposed to Talmudic literature, emphasize salvation for the Jews alone.[931] This point, the authors highlight, is well illustrated in studies of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. As Shahak and Mezvinsky state, “One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”[932] As an example, Yesaiah Tishbi, an authority on the Kabbalah who wrote in Hebrew, in his scholarly work, The Theory of Evil and the (Satanic) Sphere in Lurianic Cabbala, cited Rabbi Hayim Vital (1542 – 1620), the chief interpreter of Luria, who wrote in his book, Gates of Holiness: “Souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the satanic sphere. For this reason, souls of non-Jews are called evil, not good, and are created without [divine] knowledge.”[933]
As explained by Charles Novak, in his history of Jacob Frank, the Frankists’ conception of the unfolding of history, following the Sabbatean concept of “defeating evil from within,” conforms to a perception that one of the secrets of the Bible is that it’s true history should be read in reverse: the banished are the true heroes, and the false heroes are the banished of future times. The Frankists could therefore identify with Esau, instead of his brother Jacob, the ancestor of the Jews:
It goes without saying, therefore, that the Frankist ideal—anti-Talmudist—fights for the rehabilitation of Esau at the expense of Jacob, and this rehabilitation is part of an even wider field, for it concerns Leah and Rachel, Melchizedek, Hagar banished by Sarah and above all Ishmael, the ancestor of Islam, expelled in favor of Isaac, son of Sarah. And finally, the supreme extrapolation, the Serpent, Samael and Lilith expelled from paradise, then opposing Adam and Eve and in this case, I come back to the redemption of Evil, Evil that will be forgiven one day.[934]
Thus the Frankists who has converted to Christianity, or the fully assimilated Jew, becomes a true “Aryan,” and superior to the primitive Jew who has failed to transcend his archaic Jewish heritage. When the Frankists were chastised by the rest of the Jewish community, they were denounced as remnants of the “mixed multitude” (erev rav), mentioned in Exodus. Jewish tradition interpreted the phrase erev rav as referring to a group of foreigners who joined Moses and the Israelites in their exodus from Egypt.[935] The majority of rabbinic scholars saw in the erev rav the source of corruption: they were to have enticed Israelites to worship the Golden Calf and angered God by demanding the abolition of the prohibition of incest.[936] As recounted in the Zohar, the erev rav were the impurity that the serpent imparted to Eve. They were offspring of the demonic rulers, Samael and Lilith. They were the Nefilim or “sons of God” who intermarried with the female descendants of Cain prior to the Flood, and produced a race of giants known as Anakim or Rephaim, from whom descended the Canaanites and Amalekites, the traditional enemies of the early Israelites. They practiced incest, idolatry, and witchcraft. They contributed to the building of the Tower of Babel and caused the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem.[937] According to the Zohar:
It is them [the mixed multitude] who cause the world to revert to the state of waste and void. The mystery of this matter is that because of them the Temple was destroyed, “and the earth was waste and void” [Gen. 1:2], for [the Temple] is the center and foundation of the world. Yet as soon as the light, which is the Holy One, blessed be He, comes, they will be wiped off the face of the earth and will perish.[938]
As pointed out by Yaakov Shapiro in The
Empty Wagon, according
to the Zohar, at the end of the fourth and last galus (“period
of exile”), before the arrival of the Messiah, many Jewish
leaders will be reincarnations of the erev rav. They will
include Amalekites, the ancient enemies of the Israelites, who will be
reincarnated as Jews. As Yaakov explains, according to these interpretations, a Jew can be part
of erev rav, even though he was born ethnically Jewish, because his soul
can change from a Jewish one to one of the erev rav, depending on his
actions. There are five types of these imposters who will appear in the
last galus: Amalekim,
Giborim, Nefilim, Anakim, and Refaim. As explained in the Zohar, “The
Erev Rav… among them are apostates (meshumadim), heretics (minim),
unbelievers (apikorsim)… and about the Jews it is stated in this
respect, “And they mingled with the gentiles and they learned their ways (Tehillim
106:35).”[939]
It was to this same line of descent, back to the “Sons of God,” that European scholars of the early nineteenth century traced the ancestors of the so-called “Aryans.” As explained by Poliakov, as European scholars began discovering the civilization of India, they recognized certain similarities Sanskrit and Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic languages. For convenience, these languages were referred to as Indo-German by most German authors, while other countries preferred the term Indo-European. Though initially asserted as merely a linguistic relationship, it was eventually theorized that, if there had once existed an “original” Indo-European language, there must also have been an “original” Indo-European race. As Robert Drews summarizes:
It is an unfortunate coincidence that studies of the Indo-European language community flourished at a time when nationalism, and a tendency to see history in racial terms, was on the rise in Europe. There was no blinking the fact, in the nineteenth century, that most of the world was dominated by Europeans or people of European descent. The easiest explanation for this was that Europeans, or at least most members of the European family, were genetically superior to peoples of darker complexion. It was thus a welcome discovery that the ancient Greeks and Persians were linguistically, and therefore, one could assume, biologically, “related” to the modern Europeans. The same racial stock, it appeared, had been in control of the world since Cyrus conquered Babylon. This stock was obviously the white race. India, it is true, presented a problem and required a separate explanation. Aryans had invaded India no later than the second millennium BC, and successfully imposed their language on the aboriginal population, but the Aryan race had evidently become sterile in that southern clime and was eventually submerged by the aboriginal and inferior stock of the subcontinent.[940]
In 1779, Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736 – 1793, a member, along with Benjamin Franklin, of the Masonic lodge called Neuf Soeurs in Paris, in his Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, based on astronomical calculations, concluded that Atlantis was Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean, from which originated a race of giants who migrated south to Mongolia and then the Caucasus and laid the foundations for all the ancient civilizations of Asia. In 1803, Bory de Saint-Vincent (1778 – 1846) published his Essais sur les iles fortunees et l’antique Atlantide, assumed that Atlantis was the original home of civilization, and when subjected to a cataclysm, its inhabitants were forced to conquer the known world in search of new territories.[941] Francis Wilford (1761 – 1822) equated the “Atala, the White Island,” mentioned in the Vishnu Purana, one of the oldest of the Hindu Puranas, with Atlantis.[942]
Voltaire considered that all occult knowledge was ultimately of Indian origin: “…I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.…”[943] The Encyclopedie of Diderot, in the article on India, suggested that the “sciences may be more ancient in India than in Egypt.” Kant placed the origin of mankind in Tibet, because “this is the highest country. No doubt it was inhabited before any other and could even have been the site of all creation and all science. The culture of the Indians, as is known almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India.”[944] Goethe referred to the “noble and pure” wisdom of the Parsees as a means of escaping the “narrow circle of Hebraic-Rabbinic thought and of reaching the depth and amplitude of Sanskrit.”[945] But, explains Poliakov, it was Herder, “above all who introduced the passion for India into the Germanic lands and who prompted the imagination of the Romantics to seek affiliation with Mother India.”[946]
Schlegel advanced a theory of Aryan origins that purported descent, typical to Gnosticism, from Cain, and which he connected to the “Mountain of the North” of an Indian flood legend found in the Rig-Veda, to be equated with Atlantis.[947] Schlegel supposed that, as a result of mingling, a new people had formed itself in northern India, and that this people, motivated “by some impulse higher than the spur of necessity,” had swarmed towards the West. Wishing to trace the origin of this people back to Cain, he then theorizes, “must not this unknown anxiety of which I speak have pursued fugitive man, as is told of the first murderer whom the Lord marked with a bloody sign, and have flung him to the ends of the earth?”[948] To Schlegel, “everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin.” He carried his conviction a step further, suggesting that even the Egyptians were educated by Indian missionaries. In turn, Egyptians founded a colony in Judea, though, the Jews were only partially indoctrinated with the Indian truths, since they seemed to have been ignorant of a significant doctrine of the occult tradition, the theory of reincarnation, and especially, of the immortality of the soul.[949]
Herder was among those chiefly responsible for the rise of romantic nationalism, which fundamentally influenced the formation of the myth of the Aryan race.[950] Herder developed the conception that a nation was not defined by a shared ideology or religion—which a citizen could choose of their own free-will—but rather by inherited factors such as language, race, ethnicity, culture and customs, which came to be associated with the Aryan race, supposed ancestors of the German Volk (“people”). According to Herder: “The most natural state is one nationality with one national character… Nothing therefore appears so indirectly opposite to the end of government as the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixing of all kinds of people and nationalities under one scepter.”[951] Fichte called on Germans to revere the German Volksgeist (“national spirit”) as the foundation of all good culture and civilization, and warned against the evils of Jewish emancipation and suggested the return of the Jews to Palestine.[952]
Thus, Jacob Grim (1785 – 1863) and his brother Wilhelm (1786 – 1859) compiled the famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a collection of volk tales thought to represent the occult lore of the German people, which included Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel. Inspired by their law professor, Friedrich von Savigny (1779 – 1861), who aroused in them an interest in history and philology, the brothers studied medieval German literature.[953] In 1804, Savigny married Kunigunde Brentano, sister of Bettina von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. It was under direction of Clemens Brentano that the brothers Grimm began collecting fairytales.[954] During Napoleon’s rule over Germany, Brentano, and fellow Illuminati member Achim von Arnim, published the most famous German folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boys Magic Horn”). Through Savigny and his circle of friends, including Brentano and Ludwig Arnim, the Grimms were introduced to the ideas of Herder, who thought that German literature should revert to simpler forms, which he defined as Volkspoesie (“natural poetry”)—as opposed to Kunstpoesie (“artistic poetry”).[955]
Grimm, according to Poliakov was most
influential promoter of the Indo-German or Aryan myth.[956]
Grimm wrote the classic
History of the German Language (1848) which Grimm described as a “political
work to the marrow of its bones.” It contains a chapter
entitled Einwanderung (“Immigration”), where he explains:
All the people of Europe and, to begin with, those which were originally related and which gained supremacy at the cost of many wanderings and dangers, emigrated from Asia in the remote past. They were propelled from East to West by an irresistible instinct (unhemmbarer Trieb), the real cause of which is unknown to us. The vocation and courage of those peoples, which were originally related and destined to rise to such heights, is shown by the fact that European history was almost entirely made by them.[957]
Driven by
the völkisch movement, Pan-Germanism
was influenced by the notion of a German “volk”
expressed by Romantic nationalists like the brothers Grimm, Herder and Fichte. According to Arash Abizadeh, “If only a handful of texts can rightly
claim to rank amongst the foundation texts of nationalist political thought,
Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation)
is surely is surely one of them.”[958]
Fichte write in the Addresses: “This then is a Volk in a higher
meaning of the word, as from the point of view of a spiritual world: the
totality of men continuing to live with each other in a society and un-
endingly creating themselves naturally and spiritualty out of themselves—that
totality arises from and is guided by a certain special law of the Divine
evolution.”[959]
As a young man, explained Michael Baur, Hegel aspired to be a Volkserzieher (“educator of the volk”), in the tradition of thinkers such as Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Schiller, who were all admirers of Winckelmann.[960] It was largely under the appeal of Winckelmann that many German philosophers began to develop an appreciation for the ancient Greeks, including those who went on to influence of Hegel, who had numerous associations with the Illuminati. In his essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”) of 1796/1797, Schiller not only conceived of ancient Greece as the preeminent cultural paradigm for advancement of humanity. The works of Friedrich Schlegel, Vom Wert des Studiums der Griechen und Römer (“On the Value of the Study of the Greeks and Romans,” 1795/1796) and Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (“On the Study of Greek Poetry,” 1797), emphasizes the merit of a return to the classical ideal. Studying Greek and Roman antiquity essentially leads to an understanding of everything that is “grand,” “noble,” “good,” and “beautiful,” and therefore it also establishes an ideal of humanity to which modern society should aspire.[961] Hölderlin believed that Greece was the birthplace of all positive revolutions of mankind, and saw Ancient Greece as reborn in the Germany of his time.[962]
Hegel, a friend of Hölderlin and a colleague of Friedrich Schlegel at the University of Jena, admitted it was Winckelmann who opened “a whole new way of looking at things.”[963] Thus, combined with the theory of the Aryan race, the notion of inevitable progress, derived from the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria through Hegel, led to the development of the Eurocentric history of Western Civilization, which celebrates Europeans and the vanguards of human intellectual progress. It was due to Hegel, that Greece’s debt to the Ancient Near East was minimized, favoring its society as a “miracle,” and as the so-called “cradle” of Western Civilization. As demonstrated by Glenn Alexander Magee in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Hegel’s philosophy was derived from the Luria’s Kabbalah—mediated through the thought of Jacob Boehme—positing that history was the unfolding and progression of “Spirit” (Geist). According to Hegel:
World history is the record of the spirit’s efforts to attain knowledge of what it is in itself. The Orientals do not know that the spirit or man as such are free in themselves. And because they do not know that, they are not themselves free. They only know that One is free… The consciousness of freedom first awoke among the Greeks, and they were accordingly free; but, like the Romans, they only knew that Some, and not all men as such, are free… The Germanic nations, with the rise of Christianity, were the first to realize that All men are by nature free, and that freedom of spirit is his very essence.[964]
Hegel was introduced to the ideas of Boehme
through his reading of Illuminati member Franz von Baader (1765 – 1841), who
was also influenced Franz Joseph Molitor of the Asiatic Brethren. Hegel was
also influenced by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 – 1782), a follower of
Boehme, who was in contact with Kabbalists who introduced him to Knorr von
Rosenroth’s Cabala Denudata and the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. This
knowledge helped him attempt a synthesis of Boehme and Kabbalah.[965]
In 1730, Oetinger visited the Moravian Brethren and their founder Count
Zinzendorf, and remaining there some months as teacher of Hebrew and Greek.[966]
Oetinger was also in contact with Hermann Fictuld (1700 – c. 1777), one of the leaders of
the Golden and Rosy Cross.[967]
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, “Hegel is important for Jewish history for two reasons: first, for his attitude to Judaism, which, because of his importance, was of major interest for many Jews throughout the first half of the 19th century; second, for his philosophy of history and religion in general, which influenced Jewish and other thinkers for an even longer period.”[968] Hegel had a lifelong interest in Judaism and supported Jewish emancipation. Hegel nevertheless conformed to a Kantian critique of Judaism. According to Hegel:
All the conditions of the Jewish people, including the wretched, abjectly poor, and squalid state they are still in today, are nothing more than the consequences and developments of their original destiny—an infinite power that they desperately sought to surmount—a destiny that has maltreated them and will not cease to do so until this people conciliates it by the spirit of beauty, abolishing it as a result of this conciliation?[969]
According to Paul Rose, “It was Hegel’s historical philosophy that provided revolutionary antisemitism with one of its theoretical pillars…” Hegel espoused Kant’s philosophical denunciation that Judaism was not truly moral because it entailed obedience to the external commandments of a remote God, rather than to man’s inner inclinations to love, freedom, and morality like Christianity. Judaism, according to Hegel, was superseded by the movement of the “world spirit” from the ancient to the modern Christian world, and in the process the Jewish people mere marginalized outside the current of world history. Thus the Jews were seen as incapable of historical development, a “fossil nation,” a “ghost-race.” Being outside of the normal course history, the Jews became a “parasite race,” whose only access to freedom and redemption would be in their disappearance from a historical stage on where they no longer had a role.[970]
It was precisely during the years of the Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums, according to Christoph Schulte, that Christian Romantics appropriated the Kabbalah. Their interest was in reaction to, as Hegel wrote, “the ‘religious’ aridity of the proponents of rationalism.” Their attraction, as noted Schulte, “to the philosophy of nature, to magic, to myth and to pantheism, or even to cosmogony and theogony, all of this is attracted and inflamed by Kabbalah.”[971] As explained by the editors of Kabbala und die Literatur der Romantik (“Kabbalah and the literature of Romanticism”):
At the transition from the late Enlightenment to early Romanticism, a new interest in the Kabbalah arose: while knowledge of Jewish mysticism was still widespread even among enlightened Jews such as Mendelssohn or Salomon Maimon, elements of the Kabbalah now also fascinated Christian Romantic authors such as Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim and E.T.A. Hoffmann.[972]
In the eighteenth century, the goal of art and literature was to imitate nature. Romantics, on the other hand, asserted that art should not imitate nature but rather shed light upon its dark, irrational, supernatural secrets, in order to obtain insights into the depths of human spiritual existence.[973] The Romantics praised the world of the Renaissance, which regarded art, magic, science, and philosophy as fundamentally harmonious. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries changed this perception, introducing the idea of rational materialism, which was opposed to mysticism and magic. Impressed by the rapid scientific development of their day, but simultaneously disappointed with rational materialism, the Romantics argued for the need to establish a different type of scientific philosophy that would not distinguish the material and the spiritual, and unite science, philosophy, art, religion and beauty.
According to Marina Aptekman, “This worldview reflects the idealist utopian thinking of German Romantics, which largely echoed the messianic and utopian beliefs of the seventeenth-century Rosicrucian mystics.”[974] The reason why poetic language suddenly began to play such an important role in the literary philosophy of the early nineteenth century, explains Aptekman, can be found in the Romantic conception of the Golden Age, which had its source in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mystical texts. Rosicrucian tradition praised Kabbalah because it regarded it as “a mystical science” that served as a means to allow humans to recover the knowledge, dealing with the mystical significance of letters and numbers, lost after Adam’s fall. Thus, according to Aptekman, “Of all the spiritual knowledge lost by Adam as a result of his fall, the German Romantics were interested primarily in the recovery of the divine language. They believed that obtaining it anew would help to restore lost correspondences between man and nature and would thus bring back the Golden Age.”[975]
German Romantics singled out Kabbalah, and especially its linguistic mysticism, as a basis for their poetic ideology. As explained by Wolfgang Neuser, in Theoretischer Hintergrund für die Rezeption der Kabbala in der Romantik (“Theoretical background for the reception of the Kabbalah in Romanticism”), “Common and formative for the overlapping traditions (Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah) is the idea that the whole world, which is the divine in creation, must be the starting point of all thought.”[976] It was that endeavor that led Romantics to revive alchemical interpretations of Kabbalistic philosophy and place it in the center of their own concept of “scientific mysticism.” This interpretation of the Kabbalah, explains Aptekman, “had previously been widely used by mystics or magicians but had never, prior to German Romanticism, been placed at the center of an aesthetic theory.”[977]
Effectively, according to Schulte, the Kabbalah represents the original tradition in the language of God and the language of Hebrew origin. Hamann’s phrase, in a letter to Jacobi, according to which language is “the mother of reason and revelation, its alpha and omega,” explains Schulte, marks the point of convergence of the Romantics in the face of the pure reason of Enlightenment.[978] This new relationship to language and in particular to Hebrew as being the language of God and the original language of humanity, the language of “Hebrew poetry” and of the Jewish Volksgeist, according to Herder, became the starting point of the Romantic diffusion of Kabbalah. The reason being, as Schulte again notes, that the reference to language and writing as a medium of revelation constitutes the basis of religious opposition to Enlightenment theism.[979]
The idea of the inseparability of the material and the spirit world became the cornerstone of German Romanticism, particularly of Schelling, according to whom these two worlds should be united in one whole Absolute, and all knowledge should be poeticized and spiritualized. For Schelling, the ideal scientist was an alchemist, yet at the same time also a philosopher, often a musician, and usually a poet or an artist. Paracelsus, Agrippa, and other Renaissance alchemists played a significant role in Schelling’s philosophy. Schelling’s work was also influenced by Saint-Martin, and probably by Martines de Pasqually as well.[980]
This belief in the union of art and science,
but also in the union of all the sciences, is especially evident in the works
of Novalis. This notion of Magischer Idealismus (“Magical Idealism”), which permeates
Novalis’ literature and philosophy, is a central element of early romanticism. Between fall 1798 and spring 1799, Novalis wrote a project entitled Encyklopaedistik.
In the notes to it, generally called Brouillon, he pursued the plan of
combining all the sciences into a “universal science.” In service of the Romantic
project of restoring the lost primordial linguistic identity, Novalis employs
the language of semiotics, in identifying sign and referent to the magical
language concept of the Kabbalah. In the context of a “doctrine of signifiers”
and a “grammatical mysticism” of writing as “magic,” he notes under the keyword
“MAGIC, (mystical linguistics)” in Das Allgemeine Brouillon, “Sympathy
of the sign with the signified (One of the basic ideas of Kabbalists.)”[981]
According to Novalis, Kabbalah “is a language of mystical signs, which prove to
us that there are mystical correspondences between man, universe, and
language.”[982] Similarly,
Schlegel called Kabbalah “mystical grammar, a combinatory art that takes ideas
through language out of Chaos.”[983]
In a note from 1800, Friedrich Schlegel wrote, “The true poetic aesthetic is
Kabbalah.”[984] In
the previous year, Schlegel had scribbled the following formula: “poetry =
absolute science + absolute art = magic = alchemy + Kabbalah.”[985]
To Schlegel, “The purpose of the Kabbalah is to create the new language, for
this will be the organ to control the spirits.”[986]
Die Serapionsbrüder was named after a circle of writers who met regularly to discuss the arts in the apartment in Berlin of E.T.A Hoffman (1776 – 1822)—a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. In addition to Hoffmann himself, this circle, called the Serapionsbrüder, after St. Seraphin of Montegranaro (1540 – 1604), included Adelbert von Chamisso, David Ferdinand Koreff, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, Karl Wilhelm Salice-Contessa, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and his future biographer, a neighbor and fellow jurist called Julius Eduard Hitzig (1780 – 1849), the grandson of Daniel Itzig (1723 – 1799), a court Jew of Kings Frederick II the Great and Frederick William II of Prussia and a leading member of the Asiatic Brethren.
As a young writer, Hoffmann made the acquaintance of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763 – 1825), known as Jean Paul, who was long an important influence.[987] Paul was also listed among the Idealists associated with the Illuminati by the French imperial police.[988] In 1796, Paul settled in Weimar, where he became friends with Herder and came across Goethe and Schiller. In 1800, he went to Berlin where he developed friendships with the Schlegel brothers, Tieck and Fichte. Paul had a considerable influence on the composer Robert Schumann, as well as on Gustav Mahler’s first symphony. In France, he was popularized in particular by Le songe, an approximate translation made by Madame de Staël of the Discourse of the Dead Christ taken from the Siebenkäs, published between 1796 and 1797. Paul was the first to name the literary motif of the Doppelgänger, which he utilized in Siebenkäs. The motif was also adopted by Hoffmann, for his The Devil’s Elixirs (1815), described by some literary critics as fitting into the Gothic novel genre, called Schauerroman in German.[989]
Hoffmann was a friend of Zacharias Werner (1768 – 1823), a German poet, dramatist, and preacher, who became acquainted with Goethe at Weimar and Madame de Staël at Coppet. Several of Werner’s dramatic poems were designed to evangelize Freemasonry. His dramatic duology published in English as The Templars in Cyprus and The Brethren of the Cross was based on the idea that some survivors of the Templar suppression escaped to Scotland and founded Freemasonry. Beethoven considered the first part as a possible opera project.[990]
Although Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777 – 1843) gave up his university studies at Halle to join the army, and took part in the Rhine campaign of 1794, the rest of his life was devoted mainly to literary pursuits. Fouqué was connected to Achim von Arnim, who along with his brother-in-law Clemens Brentano, was part of Madame de Staël’s Coppet Group and who were identified with her by the French imperial police as a member of the Illuminati.[991] Fouqué was introduced to Wilhelm August Schlegel, who deeply influenced him as a poet and who published his first book, Dramatische Spiele von Pellegrin, in 1804. Frederick William IV of Prussia who granted him a pension which allowed him to spend his later years in comfort.[992] Fouqué’s Sigurd der Schlangentödter (“Sigurd the Snake Killer”), from 1808, was the first modern German dramatization of the Nibelung legend combining Icelandic sources such as the Volsunga Saga and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied. In 1828, Fouqué published his play, Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg (“The Song Contest on the Wartburg”).
Hoffmann was a pioneering writer of horror stories, making him an early example of Dark Romanticism, and influenced writers such as Richard Wagner, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Baudelaire, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka and Freud.[993] Hoffmann was deeply interested in Mesmerism, Kabbalah and the occult.[994] His story Der Sandmann (“The Sandman”) involves the Kabbalistic legend of the golem. Hoffmann’s stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which a heavily fictionalized Hoffmann appears as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia was based upon Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann, while Schumann’s Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann’s character Johannes Kreisler. Freud’s famous essay, Das Unheimliche (“The Uncanny”) of 1919, used The Sandman as its central focus.
Der Kampf der Sänger (“The Battle of the Singers”), commemorating the Wartburg Sängerkrieg,
is a story by Hoffmann, in the third section of the second volume of the cycle of stories and fairy tales, Die Serapionsbrüder (“Seraphin
Brothers”), published between 1819 and 1821, which also represented a summary
of his literary work. Hoffmann was inspired by Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s
history and Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a fragmentary novel
posthumously by Friedrich Schlegel in 1802. Although Novalis had to give up
completing the work, his numerous surviving notes, and Ludwig Tieck’s report,
make it quite easy to follow the planned continuation of the novel. The
well-known symbol of the blue flower, which has become emblematic of
Romanticism, symbolizing desire, love, and the
metaphysical striving for the infinite, also derives from the novel.
Ludwig Tieck also published the tale of Venusberg in his Romantische Dichtungen collection of 1799. The earliest version of the narrative of the Venusberg legend, without the mention of the name of Tannhäuser, is first recorded in the form of a ballad by the Provençal writer Antoine de la Sale (1385/86 – 1460/61). In 1434, René of Anjou, made La Sale tutor to his son, John II, Duke of Lorraine, to whom he dedicated, between the years 1438 and 1447, his La Salade, a textbook of the studies necessary for a prince.
Tannhäuser was a German Minnesinger and traveling poet who lived between 1245 and 1265. The illustrated Codex Manesse fourteenth-century manuscript depicts him clad in the Teutonic Order habit, suggesting he might have fought in the Sixth Crusade led by Emperor Frederick II in 1228/29. Based on a legendary account in his Bußlied, Tannhäuser found the Venusberg, the subterranean home of Venus, and spent a year there worshipping the goddess. After leaving the Venusberg, Tannhäuser is filled with remorse, and travels to Rome to ask Pope Urban IV (c. 1195 – 1264) if it is possible to be absolved of his sins. Urban replies that forgiveness is impossible, as much as it would be for his papal staff to blossom. Three days after Tannhäuser’s departure, Urban’s staff bloomed with flowers. Messengers are sent to recall the knight, but he has already returned to Venusberg, never to be seen again. Having refused a penitent, the Pope was punished with eternal damnation.[995]
In German folklore of the sixteenth century, the narrative of Venusberg, a motif of European folklore rendered in various legends and epics since the Late Middle Ages, became associated with the minnesinger Tannhäuser who becomes obsessed with worshipping the goddess Venus. Venusberg as a name of the otherworld or fairyland is first mentioned in German in Formicarius by Johannes Nider (c. 1380 – 1438) prior of the Dominican convent at Nuremberg. Nider gained a wide reputation in Germany as a preacher and was active at the Council of Constance. He became identified with the Council of Basle as theologian and legate, making several embassies to the Hussites. The most important among his many writings is the Book Five of the Formicarius, the second book ever printed to discuss witchcraft after Alphonso de Spina’s Fortalitium Fidei. Sections on witches would be published later as part of the Malleus Maleficarum, usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, the best known treatise purporting to be about witchcraft, written by the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer and first published in 1486. The version by Praetorius (1630 – 1680) was included in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano.
Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs includes a gamekeeper who claims to have a feud with Freischützen, who are unable to kill him due to his faith. When the gamekeeper’s apprentice, Franz, fails to shoot what he thinks is the devil, a rumor begins that the devil had approached Franz and offered him magic bullets.[996] Der Freischütz was based on a story by Johann August Apel (1771 – 1816) and Friedrich Laun (1770 – 1849), from their 1810 collection Gespensterbuch, a collection of German ghost stories. Both Apel and Laun knew Goethe, whose play Claudine von Villa Bella (1776) may have influenced Laun’s Die Todtenbraut (“The Dead Bride”). Robert Stockhammer had noted that Laun’s Der Todtenkopf (“The Skull”) contains characters inspired by Cagliostro, who Goethe had written about, and who may have been discussed when Laun visited Goethe in 1804.[997] Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782), which depicts the death of a child assailed by a supernatural being, the Erlking, a king of the fairies, also inspired Apel’s poem Alp.[998]
Most of the stories for Fantasmagoriana, a French anthology of German ghost stories, translated anonymously by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès and published in 1812, are from the first two volumes of Apel and Laun’s Gespensterbuch, with other stories by Johann Karl August Musäus, a member of the Illuminati and the Anna Amalia lodge of Weimar. Musäus was one of the first collectors of German folk stories, most celebrated for his Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1782–1787). Musäus’ Nachgelassene Schriften (1791), continued to be published by the Illuminati publisher Nicolai—a friend of Moses Mendelssohn—with contributions by Ludwig Tieck.[999] After Musäus’ death in 1787, his widow requested Christoph Martin Wieland publish a re-edited version of the tales, which he did as Die deutschen Volksmährchen von Johann August Musäus (1804–1805).
Julius Eduard Hitzig was friendly with Hoffmann, de la Motte Fouqué, and Adelbert von Chamisso (1781 – 1838), who joined the circle of Madame de Staël, and followed her in her exile to Coppet in Switzerland.[1000] Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (“Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story”), written in 1813, is a fairy tale of a man who sells his shadow to the devil for a sack full of gold that never runs out. Late in the text, it is mentioned that Schlemihl is a Jew since the name is taken from Jewish folklore.[1001] Chamisso’s work served to popularized the word Schlemiel, a Yiddish term referring to an “inept/incompetent person” or “fool.”[1002] In Hoffmann’s Die Abenteuer der Sylvester-Nacht (“The Adventures of New Year’s Eve”), Schlemihl appears as a supporting character and thus illustrates the fate of the protagonist in Die Geschichte vom verlorenen Spiegelbild (“The Story of the Lost Mirror Image”). Hans Christian Andersen used the motif of the lost shadow in his fairy tale The Shadow in 1847.
Hoffmann also wrote an opera based on Fouqué’s Gothic story Undine (1816), for which Fouqué wrote the libretto. Undine is a fairytale novella (Erzählung) by in which Undine, a water spirit, marries a knight named Huldbrand in order to gain a soul. In Book on Nymphs, the alchemist Paracelsus coined the term “undine,” who can gain an immortal soul by marrying a human, and mentions the story of Melusine as an example, and the story of Peter von Staufenberg, which can be classed as a variation of Melusine legend or as belonging to the Knight of the Swan tradition.[1003] A more direct influence on Fouqué would have been the Comte de Gabalis (“Count of Cabala”), a Rosicrucian novel published in 1670 by the Abbe Montfaucon de Villars, which adapted Paracelsus’ ideas.[1004]
Both Achim von Arnim and Fouqué wrote stories about the Medieval superstition that the humanoid-shaped mandrake root was produced by the semen of hanged men under the gallows. Mandrakes contain hallucinogenic properties and since ancient times, were believed to possess aphrodisiacal virtues. The root is associated with fertility in the Bible in the Book of Genesis and the Song of Songs. In one superstition, the mandrake root would scream and cry as it was pulled from the ground, killing anyone who heard it. This reference is incorporated into the fictional mandrake described in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Alchemists claimed that hanged men ejaculated after their necks were broken and that the earth absorbed their final “strengths.” The root itself was used in love philtres and potions while its fruit was supposed to facilitate pregnancy. Witches who “made love” to the Mandrake root were said to produce offspring that had no feelings of real love and had no soul.[1005]
In Arnim’s story, titled Isabella von Ägypten, Kaiser Karl des Fünften erste Jugendliebe (“Isabella of Egypt, Emperor Charles the Fifth’s First Childhood love”), Duke Michael, ruler of all the Gypsies of Egypt, is wrongly hanged in Ghent as a thief. After her father’s death, his only daughter Isabella discovers occult books among her father’s possessions, which she uses Isabella produces an Alraun, a miniature man, from a mandrake root, who calls himself Cornelius Nepos. Isabella falls in love with the young prince Charles, later Emperor Charles V. In order to get the Alraun out of the picture, Charles enlists the help of a Jewish magician who creates a golem, Bella, a close of Isabella clone. The golem Bella attacks Isabella, but Charles erases the first syllable Ae of the word Aemeth inscribed on the forehead which turns her back into a pile of clay. Charles V and Isabella have a son, but she leaves him to bring her people scattered across Europe back to Egypt. Gypsies would make use of mandrakes as love amulets.[1006]
Hoffmann is another Romantic who deals with the golem motif. In his novella Die Geheimnisse (“The Secrets”), published in 1822 in the Berliner Taschenkalender, Hoffmann links the golem with the figure of the teraphim. In the Bible, the teraphim are originally Semitic idol or household gods. According to Ibn Ezra, they are described as human figures designed under certain signs of the zodiac or as human heads that have been prepared and under whose tongue a metal plate is placed on which magical words are engraved so that they then give oracles. In Die Geheimnisse, the teraphim are assigned the role of an “artificial image which, by awakening secret powers of the spirit world, deceives through apparent life.” A Kabbalistic magician sculpts a beautiful youth from clay, who is presented to a princess in place of a real person. However, the princess herself possesses magical powers and when she touches her “beloved,” he crumbles into dust.[1007]
The Grimm
brothers, who were directed to collect fairy tales by Brentano, also published
a tale of the Jewish legend of the golem, a being said to be created from mud
or clay through Kabbalistic magic, which was later adopted by Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851) as a model for her story of Frankenstein.[1008] Dark Romanticism, which arguably began in Germany, with writers such
as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Fouqué, von Arnim and Chamisso, also developed in England
with authors such as Shelley, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824), and John William
Polidori (1795 – 1821), who are frequently linked to Gothic fiction. In London,
de Staël met Lord Byron and William Wilberforce the abolitionist. Byron, at
that time in debt, left London and frequently visited de Staël in Coppet in
1815, where she headed the Coppet Circle. For Byron, de Staël was Europe’s
greatest living writer, but “with her pen behind her ears and her mouth full of
ink.”[1009]
In 1815, Byron published his Hebrew Melodies, a poem considered to is
one of the first literary works of Jewish nationalism.[1010]
They were largely created by Byron to accompany music composed by Isaac Nathan
(c. 1791 – 1864), who played the poet melodies which he claimed
(incorrectly) dated back to the service of the Temple in Jerusalem. Nathan was
born in Canterbury to a hazzan (Jewish cantor) from Poland, Menahem
Monash, and his English Jewish wife, Mary (Lewis) Goldsmid. Many composers
wrote settings of translations of Byron’s words, including Moses’s
grandchildren Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Max Bruch,
Mily Balakirev and Modest Musorgsky.
Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822), were also closely associated with Byron. Mary’s parents, William Godwin (1756 – 1836) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797), were part of a circle of radical artists known as Romantic Satanists, for their having the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a heroic figure who rebelled against “divinely ordained” authority.[1011] Influenced by Milton’ work, Byron wrote Cain: A Mystery in 1821, provoking an uproar because the play dramatized the story of Cain and Abel from the point of view of Cain, who is inspired by Lucifer to protest against God. Among Percy Shelley’s best-known works were The Rosicrucian, A Romance and Prometheus Unbound, equating the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost with Prometheus, the Greek mythological figure who defies the gods and gives fire to humanity.
In 1816, at the Villa Diodati, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Mary, Percy and Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story, which resulted in Mary’s Frankenstein, inspired by the Kabbalistic legends of the golem. Two short stories from Apel and Laun’s Gespensterbuch and Die schwarze Kammer (“The Black Chamber”) were included in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès’ Fantasmagoriana (1812), were read by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Polidori and Claire Clairmont at the Villa Diodati, inspiring them to write their own ghost stories, including The Vampyre and Frankenstein, both of which went on to shape the Gothic horror genre.[1012] Another story they were inspired by from the Fantasmagoriana was the Stumme Liebe, translated into French as L’Amour Muet (“Mute Love”) from the Volksmärchen der Deutschen by Illuminati member J.K.A. Musäus.[1013]
Polidori was an English writer and physician, known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story The Vampyre (1819), produced by the same writing contest, and the first published modern vampire story. The children of Polidori’s sister Frances and Gabriele Rossetti (1783 – 1854), an Italian poet and a political exile, included Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) and William Michael Rossetti (1829 – 1919), who were founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English painters, poets, and critics, established in 1848 along with William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais. The Pre-Raphaelites were championed by John Ruskin (1819 – 1900), who was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era. Ruskin’s gravestone at Coniston where he is buried betrays his occult beliefs, featuring Celtic triskele symbols, a swastika within a Maltese Cross, and St. George slaying a dragon.
Shelley had also been romantically infatuated with American short-story writer Washington Irving (1783 – 1859).[1014] Irving was one of the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and he encouraged other American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. He was also admired by some British writers, including Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Charles Dickens, Francis Jeffrey, and Walter Scott. Irving was a close friend of the Gratz family, who were congregants of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. It was through Irving that, Rebecca Gratz (1781 – 1869), the daughter of Michael Gratz, the Parnas of the synagogue, was brought to the attention of Walter Scott (1771 – 1832), inspiring to develop the character of Rebecca, the daughter of the Jewish merchant Isaac of York, who is the heroine in his novel Ivanhoe.[1015] Brian de Bois-Guilbert, the Grand Master of the Templars, becomes infatuated with the beautiful Rebecca, and when he fails to win her heart. When she is accused of witchcraft, Ivanhoe takes Bois-Guilbert in combat, who is killed, but not by Ivanhoe. Gratz was part of a group of women from Mikveh Israel who founded the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society of Philadelphia in 1819, the the “oldest Jewish charitable organization in continuous existence in the U.S.”[1016]
Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. also included the short stories for which he is best known, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), which was especially popular during Halloween because of a character known as the Headless Horseman believed to be a Hessian soldier who was decapitated by a cannonball in battle. One particularly influential version of the folktale was the last of the Legenden von Rübezahl (“Legends of Rübezahl”) from the Volksmärchen der Deutschen by Illuminati member J.K.A. Musäus.[1017] In 1824, Irving published the collection of essays Tales of a Traveller, including the short story “The Devil and Tom Walker,” a story very similar to the German legend of Faust. The story first recounts the legend of the pirate William Kidd, who is rumored to have buried a large treasure in a forest in colonial Massachusetts. Kidd made a deal with the devil, referred to as “Old Scratch” and “the Black Man” in the story, to protect his money.
At the intersection of literary imagination and magic, Friedrich Schlegel noted: “Aesthetics = Kabbalah – there is no other.”[1018] According to Aestheticism, which has its roots in German Romanticism, art and typography should be produced to be beautiful, rather than to teach a lesson, create a parallel, or perform another didactic purpose, a sentiment best illustrated by the slogan “art for art’s sake.” Winckelmann, whose open homoeroticism formed his writings on aesthetics, followed the lectures of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714 – 1762), who coined the term in his Aesthetica (1750).[1019] In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant conformed to Baumgarten’s new usage and employed the word aesthetic to mean the judgment of taste or the estimation of the beautiful. For Kant, an aesthetic judgment is subjective in that it relates to the internal feeling of pleasure or displeasure and not to any qualities in an external object. Kant, in turn, influenced Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters (1794) and his concept of art as Spiel (“Play”): “Man is never so serious as when he plays; man is wholly man only when he plays.” In the Letters, Schiller proclaimed salvation through art:
Man has lost his dignity, but Art has saved it, and preserved it for him in expressive marbles. Truth still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original will be restored.
In “The Emergence of Modern Religion: Moses
Mendelssohn, Neoclassicism, and Ceremonial Aesthetics,” Zachary Braiterman
explained the growth in the perceived value of aesthetics with the decline of
the role of religion during the Enlightenment: “Historically, at that very
moment in eighteenth-century Europe when art acquires its own autonomy and
begins to resemble religion, religion turns into art, a peculiar type of
ceremonial art.”[1020]
Therefore, Braiterman adds:
The Jewish style developed by Mendelssohn in the eighteenth century drew on the reworking of an antique idyll common at the time. Particularly in its appeal to Scripture, especially to the poetry of psalms, the invention of modern Judaism shared the free and creative innovation and transformation of ancient classical models of Greek and Roman art by European artists, sculptors, and poets.[1021]
“The classic ideal embodied in Greek sculpture,” explained Braiternan, would soon be displaced in nineteenth-century German philosophy (Schelling’s Philosophy of Art and in Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Arts) by the so-called romantic arts of painting, poetry, and especially music.”[1022] The Romantic movement was embodied most strongly in literature, the visual arts as well as music. One of the first significant applications of the term “romanticism” to music was in 1789, in the Mémoires by the Frenchman André Grétry (1741 – 1813), but it was E.T.A. Hoffmann who established the principles of musical romanticism, in a lengthy review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony published in 1810, and in 1813, in article on Beethoven’s instrumental music, where he traced the beginnings of musical Romanticism to the later works of Haydn and Mozart. Hoffmann named Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the last two of whom were connected with the Asiatic Brethren, as “the three masters of instrumental compositions” who “breathe one and the same romantic spirit.”[1023]
Hoffmann was a member of the Die Serapionsbrüder along with his friend and biographer, of Julius Eduard Hitzig, grandson of Daniel Itzig of the Asiatic Brethren, whose family intermarried with that of Moses Mendelssohn. Both families had kinship with the families of Heine, Ephraim, Oppenheimer, Beer, Meyerbeer, the Counts Wimpffen and Fries, the Barons Pereira, Rothschild, and Pirquet.[1024] As explained by Michael A. Meyer, in The Origins of the Modern Jew:
The image of the post-Mendelssohn generation in Germany would be grossly distorted if David Friedländer, the Mendelssohn children, and the salon Jewesses of Berlin were taken as typical. These exceptional individuals represented but a small segment of German Jewry, characterized by extraordinary intellect, beauty, or wealth. Either on the very fringe of the Jewish community or beyond it entirely, they bear witness to the fate of a Jewish self-awareness forced into the mold of a rigid rationalism or rejected in the intense introspection of an antinomian romanticism. They were the few who chose the extreme paths that led away from Judaism in opposite directions.[1025]
One of the daughters of Daniel Itzig, Bluemchen, married David Friedländer (1750 – 1834), Moses Mendelssohn’s favorite disciple. Another of Itzig’s daughters, Franziska (Fanny) married the Austrian banker, Baron Nathan von Arnstein (1748 – 1838), another member of the Asiatic Brethren.[1026] Arnstein was ennobled by Emperor Francis I, and the first non-converted Jew in Austria to be granted the title of baron.[1027] Fanny’s sister, Caecilie married Baron Bernhard von Eskeles (1753 – 1839), also a member of the Asiatic Brethren, who with Arnstein founded the Arnstein & Eskeles, one of the most prominent banking houses in Vienna. Their other sister Babette (Bella) Levi Salomon.[1028] Their son was Jacob Salomon Bartholdy (1774 – 1825), who converted to Reformed Christianity.
Several of Mendelssohn’s own children, took the ultimate step of assimilation, converting to Christianity. Mendelssohn had six children, of whom only two remained in the Jewish faith: his second-oldest daughter, Recha, and his eldest son, Joseph Mendelssohn (1770 – 1848), founder of the Mendelssohn banking house, one of the leading banks in the nineteenth century. Moses’ son Abraham Mendelssohn (1776 – 1835), married Lea Salomon, the sister of Jacob Salomon Bartholdy and a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig. On the advice of Lea’s brother Jacob, Abraham took the name Bartholdy, which Jacob had adopted after a property which he had acquired. Both Abraham and Lea converted to Christianity, and didn’t circumcise their children, but had them baptized, including the composers Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809 – 1847), who converted to Christianity, and became the famous composer. Fanny and Caecilie became leading salonnières, or “salon hostesses,” in Vienna, holding “large musical parties,” with Fanny entertaining celebrities such as Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, and at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 hosting the foremost statesmen of Europe, including Talleyrand, the Duke of Wellington, Viscount Castlereagh, and Karl August von Hardenberg (1750 – 1822).[1029] Hardenberg, who served under Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick, and later become Chief Minister of Prussia, had been a founding member of the Masonic lodge Zur Wahrheit und Freundschaft (“Truth and Friendship”), with a patent from Prussian Grand lodge in Berlin, the Royal York of Friendship.[1030] The Duke of Wellington had developed a close friendship with Madame de Staël, who had Lady Hamilton in mind when she composed Corinne, which Dorothea Schlegel translated into German.[1031]
As explained by Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger, in “Berlin Salons: Late Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Century,” Moses Mendelssohn “changed the life of some Jews in Berlin by encouraging them to take part in secular (German) education and literature. The ultimate aim was to demonstrate their fitness for civil rights.”[1032] By the mid-eighteenth-century, the salons of Paris had become a traditional social institution, the institution did not develop in Berlin until the later nineteenth-century, where salons held by Jewish were an important part. Most important were the Itzig daughters, Sara Itzig Levy in Berlin and Fanny von Arnstein in Vienna. Enthusiasm for Goethe was a constant feature of these salons.[1033] Fanny von Arnstein was joined in Vienna by two of her sisters, Caecilie von Eskeles and Rebekka Ephraim, became champions of a revival of German culture. In letters to Caecilie and Fanny, Goethe expressed gratitude for their tireless efforts to popularize his works in Vienna.[1034]
As a young man, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) and his family had visited Fanny’s home.[1035] In 1805, a year after her husband’s death, Arthur’s mother Johanna Schopenhauer and his sister Adele moved to Weimar. After the war, Johanna gained a high reputation as a salonnière whose semiweekly parties were attended by Martin Wieland, the Schlegel brothers Tieck, and Goethe. A close friend of Goethe’s daughter-in-law Ottilie, Adele often visited Goethe’s house in Weimar and was known to have called Goethe “father” who praised her abilities.[1036] In 1810, Johanna published her first book, a biography of her friend Karl Ludwig Fernow, the librarian to duchess Anna Amalia of Weimar. Winckelmann’s works were re-edited in Weimar by Fernow, who worked on them until his death in 1808, and which were then completed between 1808 and 1825 by Johannes Schulze.[1037] Schopenhauer was also captivated by the beautiful Karoline Jagemann, the major German actress, singer and mistress of Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and he wrote to her his only known love poem.[1038] Schopenhauer was also a friend of Friedrich Laun, author of the Gespensterbuch collection with August Apel.
The first salonnière in Berlin was Henriette Herz, who had apparently shared tutors with Mendelssohn’s daughters. At age fifteen, Herz married German-Jewish physician, seventeen years her senior, Markus Herz (1747 – 1803), who had studied with Kant and was also a friend and pupil of Mendelssohn, as well as acquainted with Lessing. Among her friends and acquaintances were Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Mirabeau, Fanny von Arnstein, and Madame de Genlis, the mother of the Duke of Orleans, Philippe Égalité. After the death of her husband, she came under the powerful influence of Schleiermacher, another frequent visitor to her salons, and converted to Protestantism. Considered one of the “Salon Jewesses,” Henriette described her home as one “that with no exaggeration could be reckoned among the most respected and fashionable houses in Berlin. For many years, all of Berlin’s prominent people frequented us.”[1039]
Dorothea met Friedrich Schlegel at the salon of Henriette Herz, who with the assistance of Schleiermacher helped Dorothea secure a divorce from Simon Veit.[1040] Through Dorothea and Henriette Mendelssohn, Henriette was introduced to another famous salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, with whom she would become intimately associated throughout her life. As Dorothea came under the influence of Schlegel, and Henriette under that of Schleiermacher, Rahel was drawn particularly to the philosophy of Fichte.[1041] Together with Herz and her cousin, Sara Grotthuis née Meyer, she hosted one of the famous Berlin salons of the 1800s. Her home became the meeting place for same personalities, including Schlegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ludwig Tieck, Jean Paul, and Friedrich Gentz. Their salon gained influence through their friendship with Goethe.[1042] Rahel is the subject of a famous biography, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1957), by Hannah Arendt.
In 1814, Rahel Varnhagen married the biographer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785 – 1858) in Berlin, after having converted to Christianity, and established her “second salon,” which attracted even more guests than her first.[1043] Ense carried on an extensive correspondence with Alexander von Humboldt. Ense’s sister was the poet Rosa Maria Assing, whose friends included Amalie Schoppe, German author Fanny Tarnow, and banker David Veit (1771 – 1814), brother of Simon Veit. In 1805, Fanny Tarnow began publishing her journals anonymously and made contact with cultural figures including Julius Eduard Hitzig, and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. From 1816 to 1818, Fanny lived with a childhood friend in Saint Petersburg, where she met Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger (1752 – 1831) was a German dramatist and novelist, and a childhood friend of Goethe.[1044] Klinger’s play Sturm und Drang (1776) gave its name to the Sturm und Drang artistic epoch. Klinger was the cousin of Heinrich Philipp Bossler, who is known as the authorized original publisher of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Klinger often closely associated with Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751 – 1792), a Baltic German writer of the Sturm und Drang movement. Goethe became Lenz’s literary idol, and through him he made contact with Herder and Lavater, with whom he corresponded.
Julius Eduard Hitzig was much involved in the Berlin literary life of his period, notably in connection with the salon of Rahel Varnhagen. In collaboration with Varnhagen von Ense, in 1803 he founded the Berliner Musenalmanach, the publication in which his first verses appeared. From 1816 to 1818, Rahel Varnhagen’s sister Rosa Maria Assing, who was a friend of Fanny Tarnow, who, lived with a childhood friend in Saint Petersburg, where she met August von Kotzebue, who was also a friend of Hitzig and E.T.A. Hoffmann.[1045] In 1776, the young Kotzebue acted alongside Goethe in the latter’s play Die Geschwister when it premiered in Weimar. The following year, he enrolled at the University of Jena to study legal science. Kotzebue was linked with the publication of a controversial dramatic satire, Doktor Bahrdt mit der eisernen Stirn (“Doctor Bahrdt with the Iron Brow”), which appeared in 1790, under the name of Knigge, a leading member of the Illuminati. The principal characters, including Bahrdt, Joachim Heinrich Camp, Georg Lichtenberg and Nicolai, plot to destroy the career of J.G. Zimmerman, a friend of Moses Mendelssohn, and engage in various obscene sexual acts. Kotzebue denied authorship, even when the police began to investigate the matter.[1046] Kotzebue’s uncle was Illuminati member Johann Karl August Musäus, whose Nachgelassene Schriften he edited.[1047]
The Mendelssohns and the Itzigs, including members of the Hamburg Temple and the Asiatic Brethren, contributed to reviving the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750)—who was born in Eisenach—and to further the work of the masters of German Classical music composition, including Beethoven. At the time, Bach’s music was rarely performed in public, and very few of his works had been printed during his lifetime. Bach was court composer to Augustus III of Poland, who was Jacob Frank’s godfather at his baptism, and for whom Baron von Hund, founder of the Strict Observance, served as Intimate Counselor.[1048] Moses Mendelssohn, who was a passionate lover of music, studied piano with Johann Philipp Kirnberger (1721 –1783), one of Bach’s close disciples, who was then the court musician of Princess Amalia of Prussia, the sister of Frederick the Great. Leah Mendelssohn received piano lessons from Kirnberger, and taught her son Felix Mendelssohn, who converted to Christianity, and became one of the principal composers of the first phase of Romanticism, along with Berlioz, Chopin and Liszt.
One of the hymns of Johann Jakob Schütz, cousin of Andreae, author of the Rosicrucian manifestos, was reworked by Johann Sebastian Bach as a movement in BWV 117.[1049] Schütz was a close friend of the Kabbalist Knorr von Rosenroth, and of Johann Jacob Zimmermann, whose pupil, Johannes Kelpius, established the Rosicrucian colony in Philadelphia with the help of Benjamin Furly.[1050] Furly was the leader of the Lantern, which included Lady Conway, John Locke, and Adam Boreel, a friend of Rabbi Templo, Menasseh ben Israel and Peter Serrarius, who kept the members of the Hartlib Circle of Rosicrucians informed on the mission of Shabbetai Zevi.[1051] Schütz was also a close friend of Philipp Jakob Spener, the founder of Pietism and the teacher of Count Zinzendorf.[1052]
As a young girl, Itzig’s daughter Sara
Itzig Levy was a highly talented harpsichordist and the favorite student of Bach’s
eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710 – 1784), and later became his most
significant patron. Sarah was also a student of Moses Mendelssohn and, after
her marriage to the banker Samuel Salomon Levy (1760 – 1806) in 1783, an
admirer and patron of Wilhelm’s brother Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and became
the patron of his widow. Bach’s influential “Essay on the true art of playing
keyboard instruments,” would be studied by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, among
others.[1053]
Sara commissioned a bust of C.P.E. Bach which was placed in the concert hall of
the Royal Theater in Berlin. Berlin’s most important musicians and scholars frequented her salon,
including Friedrich Schleiermacher, August Adolph von Hennings, Heinrich
Steffens and Bettina von Arnim, who had an affair with Franz
Liszt.[1054] Bettina was the sister of Clemens Brentano, who along with her husband Achim von Arnim, was
part of Madame de Staël’s Coppet Group and who were identified with her by the
French imperial police as a member of the Illuminati.[1055] At the soirées in her salon, the music of
Johann Sebastian Bach was played, which was no longer fashionable in those
years. She herself sat at the piano and, accompanied by an orchestra, only
played works by the Bach family.[1056]
Bettina was aware of the Frankist sect in Offenbach and wrote of its peculiar spectacle in a letter.[1057]
In 1791, Karl Friedrich Christian Fasch (1736
– 1800), began service at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, where he
served as deputy to Court harpsichordist C.P.E. Bach, founded the Berliner Sing-Akademie,
which for several decades was supported financially by the Mendelssohns and
Itzigs, and played a crucial role in reviving Bach’s music. In honor of Moses
Mendelssohn, Fasch composed musical settings of Mendelssohn’s texts and
translations. Both Kirnberger and Fasch were the music teachers of Karl
Friedrich Zelter (1758 – 1832), a friend
of Goethe. From Sara, Zelter
received some valuable manuscripts of Bach family compositions as a gift. Sara’s sister, Fanny von Arnstein gave Mozart a copy of
Mendelssohn’s Phädon while he was writing The Abduction from the
Seraglio. At the time, Mozart was lodging in the same house in Vienna as
the Arnsteins. Fanny’s sister Cecilia Eskeles maintained close friendship to
the Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and Goethe.
Like her sister Sara, Fanny also promoted classical music. In 1811, she was the creator of the “Society of Music Lovers,” a charitable organization which regularly sponsored public Classical music concerts. The society included the financial support and collaboration of several women members of the nobility, including Princess Maria Theresia of Thurn and Taxis (1794 – 1874), the granddaughter of Karl Anselm of Thurn and Taxis, and a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece, whose banker was Amschel Rothschild, and Countess Dietrichstein. Beethoven was commissioned to write the “Mass in C,” in Princess Maria Theresia’s honor. Countess Dietrichstein’s husband, Count Moritz von Dietrichstein (1775 – 1864), was “Music Count to the Court,” the director of the imperial court musical organization, and a close friend of Beethoven’s friend Count Moritz Lichnowsky. Bernhard Eskeles, was Beethoven’s friend and banker. As a mark of their friendship, in 1823, Beethoven composed a lied (“art song”) for Cecilia. The composition for voice and pianoforte was set to the beginning of the last stanza of their mutual friend Goethe’s Das Göttliche (“The Divine”)—Edel sei der Mensch, Hulfreich und gut! (“Let man be noble, helpful, and good!”).
It was Sara Itzig Levy who recommended to
her niece, Leah Mendelssohn, that Zelter become her son Felix’s music teacher. Leah
was committed to new
performances of the music of J.S. Bach and his sons and was committed to
disseminating the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven and supporting musicians
who played their works. From 1819 onwards, under her direction, the so-called musikalischen Winterabenden (“musical winter evenings”), and the family tradition of celebrating
birthdays with music, developed into larger musical events, or soirées,
in the Mendelssohns’ house. From 1821, the Sonntagsmusiken (“Sunday music”) were also introduced. They
offered her son Felix the opportunity to perform his Singspiele,
symphonies and concerts together with the music of Mozart and Beethoven with
the Royal Court Orchestra.
The musical experiences and events in the Mendelssohns’ house found their way into Leah’s extensive correspondence with her cousin, Fanny’s daughter Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein (1780 – 1859), which also influenced Viennese musical life. After her mother’s death, Henriette Pereira continued the tradition of literary-musical salons introduced by her mother on a smaller scale. She was in contact with Joseph Haydn.[1058] She hosted important artists such as Beethoven, Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Grillparzer, Stifter, Brentano and Theodor Körner (1791 – 1813), a friend of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote the song cycle Leier und Schwert (“Lyre and Sword”) for her. Theodor’s father, Gottfried Körner (1756 – 1831), was a friend of Schiller. Henriette Herz spent much time in the Körner household in Dresden,[1059] which according to Robert Riggs:
…became a literary and musical salon. Plays and essays were read; Singspiele and chamber music were performed; and lectures on art were given. Guests and participants included Johann Gottfried von Herder, Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Schlegel brothers, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, and the musicians Johann Naumann, Johann Hiller, Karl Zelter, Mozart, and Weber.[1060]
In 1821, Zelter introduced his friend Goethe to the twelve-year-old Felix. Goethe, now in his seventies, was very impressed with the child, comparing him with Mozart.[1061] In 1823, Felix gained a complete manuscript of the Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which grand-mother Babette Itzig Solomon was able to secure from Zelter. Felix’s 1829 performance of St Matthew Passion at the Sing-Akademie, under Zelter’s auspices, sparked a general revival of Bach’s works. Mendelssohn’s two large biblical oratorios, St. Paul in 1836 and Elijah in 1846, are greatly influenced by J. S. Bach. The libretto for St. Paul was written by Julius Schubring (1806 – 1889), a student of Friedrich Schleiermacher. According to Melvin Berger, although raised a Protestant, Felix “was never fully accepted as a Christian by his contemporaries, nor was he ever fully cut off from his Judaic heritage.”[1062] Therefore:
Musicians have long debated whether
Mendelssohn’s three major choral works reflect his religious duality—born into
what had been a Jewish family, but living as a Lutheran. The main subject of
St. Paul is a figure from the New Testament who, although born as a Jew, became
an early leader of Christianity. The First Walpurgis Night sympathetically
describes pagan rituals and presents Christians in a poor light. And Elijah
probes the wisdom of an Old Testament prophet from Israel.[1063]
Felix’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht (“The First Walpurgis Night”), a setting for chorus and orchestra of a ballad by Goethe described pagan rituals of the Druids in the Harz mountains involving a masquerade of the Devil, spirits, and demons to frighten the occupying Christians. This score was described by the scholar Heinz-Klaus Metzger as a “Jewish protest against the domination of Christianity.”[1064] Felix completed an initial version of the work in 1831, which was first performed at his parents’ home after Goethe’s death the following year, and then publicly in 1833 at the Sing-Akademie in Berlin with himself conducting.
Jewish emancipation ensued after the Age of Enlightenment and the concurrent Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. Two important edicts contributed to the emancipation of the Jews. The first was the 1782 Edict of Tolerance, when Joseph II, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece from the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, extended religious freedom to the Jewish population, ordering Jews in the Austrian Empire to learn German and to obtain a secular education, either in Christian schools or in German Jewish ones. The other was the Emancipation Edict of 1812, the result of a thesis to Frederick William II of Prussia, a member of the Berlin Illuminati and knight of the Golden and Rosy Cross and also a knight of the Golden Fleece.[1065] Exercising an influence in the outcome of the Emancipation Edict of 1812, Israel Jacobson (1768 – 1828), who confessed to have been influenced by Moses Mendelssohn, and his Illuminati friend Lessing, and who would go on to found the Jewish Reform movement in Hamburg, Germany, and which and was associated with the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite in Charleston, North Carolina.
In countries that Napoleon Bonaparte’s ensuing Consulate and French Empire conquered during the Napoleonic Wars, he emancipated the Jews and introduced other ideas of freedom from the French Revolution. With the assistance of Sieyès, Napoleon orchestrated a coup in 1799 and became First Consul of the Republic.[1066] Napoleon’s power was confirmed by the new Constitution of the Year VIII, originally devised by Sieyès to give Napoleon a minor role, but rewritten by Napoleon, and accepted by direct popular vote. The constitution preserved the appearance of a republic but in reality established a dictatorship.[1067] The date and location of Napoleon’s initiation into Freemasonry is disputed. According to one account, it took place in Malta. Although as Emperor Napoleon did not specifically recognize Freemasonry, he made use of the order for maintaining loyalty towards him.[1068]
Hegel famously referred to Napoleon as the Weltgeist (“World Soul”) on horseback. The phrase is a shortened version taken from the words Hegel’s wrote in a letter written on October 13, 1806, the day before the Battle of Jena, to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer:
I saw the Emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.[1069]
In 1806, Napoleon convened a Grand Sanhedrin of Jewish notables to answer twelve questions submitted to it by the government. In countries conquered during the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon emancipated the Jews and introduced other ideas of freedom from the French Revolution. As explained by the historian Jacob Katz:
It is astonishing how many Jews who experienced emancipation from the ghetto almost instinctively described the event in terms drawn from the vocabulary of traditional Jewish messianism. Such emancipating rulers as Napoleon and the Emperor Joseph II of Austria were compared explicitly with the biblical Cyrus, and the dawning of the Enlightenment was frequently portrayed as the equivalent of the messianic age.[1070]
The Sabbateans’ veneration of Napoleon,
which survived beyond his death, was related to Jacob
Frank’s messianic prophecies. Frank had been prophesying a “great war” to be
followed by the overthrow of governments and foretold that the “true Jacob will
gather the children of his nation in the land promised to Abraham.”[1071] Wenzel Zacek cited an anonymous
complaint against Frank’s cousin, Moses Dobruschka—founder of the Asiatic
Brethren—and his followers, which stated:
The overthrow of the papal throne has given their [the Frankists] day-dreams plenty of nourishment. They say openly, this is the sign of the coming of the Messiah, since their chief belief consists of this. [Sabbatai Zevi] was saviour, will always remain the saviour, but always under a different shape. General Bonaparte’s conquests gave nourishment to their superstitious teachings. His conquests in the Orient, especially the conquest of Palestine, of Jerusalem, his appeal to the Israelites is oil on their fire, and here, it is believed, lies the connection between them and between the French society.[1072]
The Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815, which remade Europe after the downfall of Napoleon, and subsequent Concert of Europe system, several major empires took control of European politics. Among these were the Russian Empire, the restored French monarchy, the German Confederation, under the dominance of Prussia, the Austrian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. German nationalists tried but failed to establish Germany as a nation-state, instead the German Confederation was created that was a loose collection of independent German states that lacked strong federal institutions.
Salomon Mayer Rothschild (1774 – 1855), the third son of Amschel Mayer, and the founder of the Austrian branch of the dynasty, retained strong ties with the famous Austrian statesman and diplomat, Prince Metternich (1773 – 1859), who according to the French imperial policy was suspected to be a member of the Illuminati, while his father, Franz Metternich (1746 – 1818), had been certainly a member of the order.[1073] Metternich was the chairman of the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815, which remade Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, and several major empires took control of European politics. The Congress gave birth to the Concert of Europe system, by which the Great Powers aimed to maintain the European balance of power, political boundaries, and spheres of influence. While Britain was benefitting from the Rothschild’s finances, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, then grouped together as the “Holy Alliance,” were also resorting to their financial help.[1074] Salomon’s older brother Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777 – 1836) set up his London business, N. M. Rothschild and Sons, which also had branches with his brothers in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Naples. In the nineteenth century a legend began to circulate which accused Nathan of having used his prior knowledge of Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 to speculate on the Stock Exchange and amass a vast fortune. The Congress of Vienna’s “final act” was signed nine days before his final defeat at Waterloo.
Leading the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna were the Rothschild debtors, the Big Four, the Coalition of Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia. France had to give up all its recent conquests, while the other three main powers making major territorial gains. Prussia added Swedish Pomerania, much of the Kingdom of Saxony and the western part of the former Duchy of Warsaw, while Russia gained the central and eastern part. Austria obtained Venice and much of northern Italy. All agreed on ratifying the new Kingdom of the Netherlands which had been created just months before from the formerly Austrian territory. One of the states to which regained sovereignty was the Papal States, under the rule of the Pope, whose official banker became James Rothschild.[1075]
Jewish emancipation, implemented under Napoleonic rule in French occupied and annexed states suffered a setback in many member states of the German Confederation following the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, following Napoleonic defeat and surrender in May 1814. While assimilation had set in earlier in other countries of Western Europe, such as France or Italy, in Germany it was given more significance because of the cultural prominence of the German Jews, who represented the largest Jewish group in Western Europe at that time.[1076] Germany was one of the first countries which introduced the principle of legal equality for Jews. In fact, German Jews are seen as having been instrumental in paving the way for the “return of Jewry to Society.”[1077] According to Jacob Katz, Germany has been considered as the “classic land of assimilation.”[1078]
The edict of 1812 was the result of efforts of Moses Mendelssohn’s favorite disciple, David Friedländer, in a thesis to Frederick William’s father, Frederick William II of Prussia, of the Golden and Rosy Cross, in 1787.[1079] Friedländer’s father-in-law Isaac Daniel Itzig was a member of the Berlin Asiatic Brethren. Friedländer kept close contacts with Mendelssohn and the circle of the Haskalah, who shared his emancipatory ambitions. Friedländer occupied a prominent position in both Jewish and non-Jewish circles of Berlin. As noted by Gordon R. Mork, “After Mendelssohn and under the stimulus of the Napoleonic period, Western and Central German Jews rapidly began to acculturate themselves to their German environment.”[1080]
Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism, first published in 1783, can be regarded as his most important contribution to Haskalah. The basic thrust of Jerusalem is that the state has no right to interfere with the religion of its citizens, Jews included. As described by the German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine: “as Luther had overthrown the Papacy, so Mendelssohn overthrew the Talmud; and he did so after the same fashion, namely, by rejecting tradition, by declaring the Bible to be the source of religion, and by translating the most important part of it. By these means he shattered Judaism, as Luther had shattered Christian, Catholicism; for the Talmud is, in fact, the Catholicism of the Jews.”[1081]
The first of the Jerusalem’s two parts discusses “religious power” and the freedom of conscience in the context of the philosophies of Spinoza, Locke, and Hobbes, while the second part discusses Mendelssohn’s conception of the new secular role of any religion within an enlightened state. Mendelssohn was a proponent of the thought of Spinoza, who is regarded to have been the first to consider the issue of the “Jewish Question.” Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, one of the few books to be officially banned in the Netherlands at the time, put forth his most systematic critique of Judaism, and all organized religion in general. The treatise also rejected the Jewish notion of Jewish “chosenness,” and also claimed that the Torah was essentially a political constitution of the ancient Israelites, and since the state no longer existed, its constitution was no longer valid. In his view, the Jews were not a community shaped by a shared theology, but a nationality that had been shaped by historical circumstances, and their common identity developed due to their separatism. Spinoza also made what was later taken to be the earliest statement in support of the Zionist goal of creating a state in Israel.[1082] In Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he wrote:
Indeed, were it not that the fundamental principles of their religion discourage manliness, I would not hesitate to believe that they will one day, given the opportunity—such is the mutability of human affairs—establish once more their independent state, and that God will again choose them.[1083]
Mendelssohn’s prescription for to the age-old “Jewish Question” was to call for Jews to leave the ghettos and assimilate themselves to European culture. The Haskalah inspired a similar reinterpretation of orthodoxy by contributing to the emergence of the Reform and the Conservative Jewish movements. Reflecting the Frankist rejection of the Torah, according to Reform Judaism, almost everything connected with traditional Jewish ritual law and custom is of the ancient past, and thus no longer appropriate for Jews to follow in the modern era.
The formation respectively of the Gesellschaft der Freunde (1792) and the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Judenthums (1821), in Berlin, marked the passing of a large proportion of intellectual German Jews from Haskalah to assimilation, and, in many instances, to Christianity.[1084] The Gesellschaft der Freunde (“Society of Friends”) was founded by several leaders of the Haskalah in 1792, including Moses Mendelssohn’s son, Joseph Mendelssohn, as well as Isaac Euchel (1756 – 1804) and Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn (1756 – 1835). Euchel was a tutor to the children of Meyer Friedländer (1745 – 1808), one of the brothers of David Friedländer. Meyer’s son Michael Friedländer (1767 – 1824), was Madame de Staël’s personal physician.[1085] Halle-Wolfssohn was the private tutor of the children of the banker Jacob Herz Beer and Amalie Beer, including the later composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, and his siblings, the later businessman Wilhelm Beer and the later writer Michael Beer.[1086] Beer’s wife, Amalie Beer, achieved fame with her literary salon at Tiergartenstraße, which was occasionally honored by the presence of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia (1783 – 1851), the son of Golden and Rosy Cross member Frederick William II.[1087] Around 1820, the society became the cultural center of the Jewish community and the most important association of Berlin Jewry, led by respected and economically successful personalities.[1088]
The Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Judenthums (“Society for Jewish Culture and Jewish Studies”) was founded in 1819 in the wake of the Hep-Hep riots, and brought together young, assimilated Jews who were all looking for of a Jewish identity that was worth defending to the outside world. Founding members were Joseph Hilmar, who was elected chairman, Joel Abraham List, Isaac Marcus Jost, and Gesellschaft der Freunde members Moses Moser, Isaac Levin Auerbach, Leopold Zunz, and the Hegel student Eduard Gans. Its principal objective, as it was then defined in 1822 in the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (“Journal for the Science of Judaism”), was the study of Judaism by subjecting it to criticism and modern methods of research.[1089] Drawing on Herder and the German concept of Kulturnation (“culture-nation”), Leopold Zunz classified Judaism as a Kulturvolk (“culture-community”). Rachel Livneh-Freudenthal, “By historicizing Judaism and defining it as a Kulturvolk, the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums sought to impart the Jews with a national narrative that would dovetail neatly with universal values and categories.”[1090]
The Edict of 1812 was the result of a long reflection since 1781 begun by Christian Wilhelm von Dohm (1751 – 1820), a prominent member of the Wednesday Society, and a staunch advocate for Jewish emancipation.[1091] The Berlinische Monatsschrift functioned as the public organ of the Mittwochsgesellschaft (“Wednesday Society”), a secret society of “Friends of the Enlightenment” founded in 1783, which included Mendelssohn and his friend, the Illuminati publisher Friedrich Nicolai. The Wednesday Society, which was a who’s who of Berlin Aufklärer, was one of several reading societies established by former members of the Illuminati, following Adam Weishaupt’s command:
The great strength of our Order lies in its concealment: let it never appear in any place in its own name, but always covered by another name, and another occupation… Next to [the first three degrees of Masonry] the form of a learned or literary society is best suited to our purpose, and had Free Masonry not existed, this cover would have been employed; and it may be much more than a cover, it may be a powerful engine in our hands. By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labours, we may turn the public mind which way we will.[1092]
While working as a French ambassador in
Berlin, the comte de Mirabeau associated with Nicolai’s circle and was privy to
the operations of the Wednesday Society’s Berlinische Monatsschrift and
Nicolai’s Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek.[1093] Five years after Mendelssohn’s death in
September 1791, France would grant full citizen rights to the Jews, being the first
European nation to do so. Mirabeau, who with Sieyès
played in a central role in the drafting the final Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen in 1789, was so taken with Mendelssohn’s ideas that, in
1787, in the immediate aftermath of Mendelssohn’s death, before he put forward
his own case for the emancipation of the Jews, wrote Sur Moses Mendelssohn,
sur la réforme politique des Juifs (“On Moses Mendelssohn and the Political
Reform of the Jews”), proclaiming him as “A man thrown by nature into the midst
of a degraded horde… has risen to the rank of the greatest writers this century
has seen in Germany.” Mirabeau maintained that in Mendelssohn “humanity and
truth” seemed much clearer to him than “the dark phantoms of the Talmudists,”
and that if all Jews were granted rights that Mendelssohn was able to avail
himself of, they too would become a benefit to the society that had so
mistreated them.[1094]
Dohm was also a friend of the famous salonnière Henriette Herz.[1095] The prominent Prussian minister Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of Alexander von Humboldt, and a friend and student of Dohm’s, had been asked to comment on a proposed Prussian edict of emancipation, and did so by appealing to the value that emancipation would bring in helping to eliminate the vices of the Jews that were mostly the result of their current oppression:
…oppression is breeding now a really appreciable immorality among a number of Jews. . . . [This oppression] evinces a lack of moral esteem for Jews… and expresses a moral depreciation of them in an almost repelling fashion… It robs them of all reliance on their probity, loyalty, and truthfulness.[1096]
A similar approach was adopted by Dohm. When Mendelssohn was asked by the Alsatian Jewish community to present the case for Jewish emancipation, but thought that such a work would produce better results if written by a Christian, he requested Dohm to complete the task. Dohm, who wrote Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews in 1781, asserted that the Jewish character had been corrupted by centuries of persecution, but that emancipation and assimilation into European society would improve them and eliminate known Jewish vices. On critical points, Dohm’s was the same strategy of argumentation adopted by Herder.[1097] According to Dohm, examples of Jewish corruption included “the exaggerated level… for every kind of profit, usury and crooked practices.” As a result, Jews were “guilty of a proportionately greater number of crimes than the Christians.” Such vices were “nourished” by Judaism, which was “antisocial and clannish” and nurtured “antipathy” towards gentiles.[1098] Using an argument that was repeated by Mirabeau, Dohm claimed, “the Jew is more of a man than he is a Jew.”[1099]
Members of Mendelssohn’s entourage became involved in the Asiatic Brethren. Rothschild banking house’s head clerk, Illuminati member Siegmund Geisenheimer (1775 – 1828), aided by Daniel Itzig, founded the Masonic Judenloge in Frankfurt in 1807, which became the headquarters of leaders of the early Jewish Reform movement.[1100] When Frankfurt was occupied by Napoleon, a number of Jews petitioned the Grand Orient for a charter since they could not gain entry into the anti-Semitic German lodges of the day. The lodge was chartered as the Loge de St. John de L’aurore Naissante (“Loge zur aufgehenden Morgenrothe”), Lodge of St. John of the Rising Dawn. The Judenloge admitted both Jews and Gentiles, raising the Jewish members up to the degree of Master Mason, but the Christian members were permitted to progress through the ‘higher degrees’ of the Scottish Rite, which barred Jewish members due to their Christian nature.[1101]
Justus Hiller (1760 – 1833), who participated in Napoleon’s Sanhedrin, was also a member.[1102] Historians Jacob Katz and Paul Arnsberg have shown that its members included almost all the leading families of the old Jewish community in Frankfurt, such as the Hanau, Goldschmidt, and Rothschild families.[1103] Salomon Mayer Rothschild, the third son of Amschel Mayer, and the founder of the Austrian branch of the dynasty, joined the lodge for a short time.[1104] According to Jean-Philippe Schreiber:
It was this Jewish Masonic bourgeoisie in Frankfurt that managed the affairs of a community increasingly attracted to a liberal, reforming vision of Judaism, and thus played a key role in the cultural and religious history of nineteenth-century German Judaism. All of its leading figures were Masons from 1817 to 1832, a period of significant community change—raising the question of the influence of their membership of the Masons on this reforming attitude. Far from being short-lived, the Jewish presence continued into the second half of the century, when the Creizenach, Goldschmidt, Hahn, and Lehberger families, for example, were both community leaders and members of several Frankfurt lodges.[1105]
The Christian Kabbalist Franz Joseph Molitor, who was active in the Asiatic Brethren, became the Grand Master of the Judenloge. Molitor’s friend, Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld (1755 – 1820), a Frankist and activist in Mendelssohn’s circle, and also a member of the Asiatic Brethren. Hirschfeld was also close to Johann Georg Schlosser, the brother-in-law of Goethe. Hirschfeld and Moses Dobruschka met with Louis Claude de Saint Martin in 1793.[1106] In 1784, Ecker und Eckhoffen took up residence in Vienna and he and Hirschfeld reorganized the Asiatic Brethren. Hirschfeld wrote of the Masonic Magic Flute by “the immortal Mozart,” a suspected member of the Asiatic Brethren, that it “will remain in all eternity: the canticum canticorum or the Sanctum sanctorum.”[1107]
Hirschfeld maintained connections with Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel, who had succeeded the Duke of Brunswick as the head of all German Freemasons, and became a Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren.[1108] Hirschfeld arranged for Molitor to meet Prince Charles, who travelled to Schleswig to obtain a new constitution and authorization for the lodge. Molitor returned him the constitution for a lodge of the first three degrees to be named after Saint John, and authorizing the formation of a lodge subordinate to it conducted according to the Scottish rite. To permit the Jewish members to avoid having to swear allegiance on the Gospel of John, Prince Charles allowed it to be substituted for with Genesis 14, which mentions the name of Melchizedek, the name adopted by the lodges of the Asiatic Brethren.[1109]
Despite the
stipulation that the office of “Grand Master of the Chair” be reserved for
Christians, a Jew, Carl Leopold Goldschmidt (1787 –
1858), of the influential Goldschmidt family of bankers and merchants, was elected to it. Prince Charles then withdrew his authorization and ordered the lodge
to disband. Goldschmidt
succeeded in communicating with the Mother Lodge of
London. On May 22, 1817, he reported having received a letter of authorization signed
by August Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773 – 1843)—the sixth son of King George
III of England, another descendant of the Alchemical Wedding, and godson of
Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel—which empowered the Frankfurt Judenloge to
operate as a Masonic lodge without any restriction.[1110]
Another of August Frederick’s godparents was Ernst II, Duke of
Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1745 – 1804), an Illuminatus and protector of Weishaupt,
and the great-grandfather of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of
Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.[1111]
August Frederick’s uncle, Prince Edward, Duke of York and Albany, who was initiated into the Grand Lodge of Prussia
called the Royal York for Friendship.[1112]
As the process of assimilation advanced, traditional rabbinical courts and elders lost their means to enforce Jewish law (Halakha), like imposing the herem (“excommunication”), which allowed the new tendencies to gain wider acceptance, and for non-traditional approaches to Judaism to become perceived as equally legitimate. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808 – 1888), who had a considerable influence on the development of modern Orthodox Judaism, commented in 1854:
It was not the “Orthodox” Jews who introduced the word “orthodoxy” into Jewish discussion. It was the modern “progressive” Jews who first applied this name to “old,” “backward” Jews as a derogatory term. This name was at first resented by “old” Jews. And rightly so. “Orthodox” Judaism does not know any varieties of Judaism. It conceives Judaism as one and indivisible. It does not know a Mosaic, prophetic and rabbinic Judaism, nor Orthodox and Liberal Judaism. It only knows Judaism and non-Judaism. It does not know Orthodox and Liberal Jews. It does indeed know conscientious and indifferent Jews, good Jews, bad Jews or baptised Jews; all, nevertheless, Jews with a mission which they cannot cast off. They are only distinguished accordingly as they fulfil or reject their mission.[1113]
The Jewish Reform movement, that began in Hamburg, was inspired by the activities of Israel Jacobson, a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde. At the age of eighteen, after having accumulated a small fortune, Jacobson married into the Samson family, through whom he became friends with Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick (1735 – 1806), a favorite nephew of Frederick the Great and nephew of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, Grand Master of the Strict Observance and Illuminati member.[1114] Charles William Ferdinand was the brother of Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who welcomed Benjamin Constant husband of Madame de Stäel in Weimar, and who was the mother of Illuminatus Grand Duke Karl August, who was the sponsor of Weimar Classicism and patron of Goethe. Charles William Ferdinand’s first cousin was Frederick William II of Prussia. He married Princess Augusta of Great Britain, granddaughter of George II of England. Their daughter, Caroline of Brunswick, married George IV of England. Like many others, Charles William Ferdinand had been impressed by Mendelssohn’s Phädon. When he came to Berlin in 1769, he sought out Mendelssohn’s company and treated him with a great deal of respect.[1115]
When, under Napoleon’s rule, the Kingdom of Westphalia was created, and the emperor’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte was placed at its head, and granted equal citizenship to all the Jews of his kingdom and Jacobson was appointed president of the Jewish consistory, the Royal Westphalian Consistory of the Israelites, established in 1808. Jacobson played an influence in the outcome of the Emancipation Edict of 1812, issued by Frederick William III, which gave the Jews of Prussia partial citizenship, and after Jews served as soldiers for the first time.
The first permanent Reform synagogue was the Hamburg Temple in Germany, where the New Israelite Temple Society (Neuer Israelitischer Tempelverein) was founded in 1817, founded by Israel Jacobson. While the Jewish reform movement emerged in the nineteenth century, its beginnings lay really through the secular schools that began to be founded among the Jews in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.[1116] The cause was advanced by a leader of the Haskalah, Naphtali Herz Wessely (1725 – 1805), a student of Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz, who greatly influenced him.[1117] Wessely was an alumnus of one of Eybeschütz’s seminaries, which as early as 1726 had been placed under a Rabbinical ban for their Sabbatean teachings.[1118] In Berlin, Wessely met Mendelssohn and contributed a commentary on Leviticus to the Biur, Mendelssohn’s translation of the Bible into German. Wessely is mainly known as a poet and advocate of the Enlightenment through his Divrei Shalom ve-Emet (1782), a call for support of Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance. Wessely advised Jews to educate their children in secular branches and in the German language along the lines laid down in the Edict.[1119]
The first of these schools was the Jewish Free School of Berlin, founded in I778 by David Friedländer and Isaac Daniel Itzig. In I791, the Wilhelmsschule was instituted in Breslau, which similar schools were founded in Dessau, in Seesen by Israel Jacobson, the Philanthropin in Frankfurt, and the Samson school in Wolfenbüttel, and another in in Cassel. The Free School of Berlin and adjacent printing house later became one of the main institutions of the Haskalah movement. It inspired other schools, such as the Philanthropin in Frankfurt, founded in 1804 by Geisenheimer. Fellow Judenloge member Michael Hess (1782 – 1860) became headmaster of Philanthropin. Philanthropin also received substantial financial support from high-ranking Illuminati member, Baron Karl Theodor von Dalberg, whose “court banker” was Mayer Amschel Rothschild.[1120]
It was through the influence exerted by the instruction given in such schools that the first reform of the ritual and the public worship developed. It was Israel Jacobson, who was involved in the foundation of the school at Seesen, who inaugurated the reform movement in Judaism. In 1808, the Royal Consistory of the Israelites in the Kingdom of Westphalia, headed by Jacobson, was created by the government of Jerome Napoleon I (1784 – 1860), the youngest brother of Napoleon I, and who was King of Westphalia between 1807 and 1813, to facilitate a civic betterment of the Jews. In 1810, Jacobson opened a prayer house in Seesen, to serve the modern Jewish school he founded earlier. He named it “temple,” a rather common designation at the time, borrowed from the French and used also by traditional Jewish houses of prayer.[1121]
The Royal Consistory closed in 1813, and Jacobson moved to Berlin, where he opened a private prayer association in Palais Itzig, the residence of Daniel Itzig, and considered one of the most elegant and largest residential buildings in the eighteenth-century Berlin.[1122] The room being too small to accommodate all who wished to attend, Jacob Herz Beer of the Gesellschaft der Freunde instituted a similar service in his home.[1123] The sermons were delivered by Eduard Kley, Isaac Noah Mannheimer, and Karl Siegfried Günsburg, and two other members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, Isaac Auerbach and Leopold Zunz. Three of them became commanding figures in later years, Kley as one of the founders and preachers of the reform congregation of Hamburg.[1124] Kley was also the founder of the Israelitische Freischule (“Israelite Free School”) in Hamburg, founded in 1815 with support from Baruch Abraham Goldschmidt.
David Friedländer had dared to use Classical music and the organ during the prayer service in the Hamburg Temple. In 1808, the Temple’s founder, Israel Jacobson, used J.S. Bach’s leading hymn, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (“O head, covered with blood and wounds”) from the St. Matthew Passion, and other German hymns, for his synagogue in Seesen. In 1825, Beethoven was asked by Rabbi Izaak Noah Mannheimer (1793 – 1865), the protégé of David Friedländer, to write the dedication cantata for the opening of the new Hamburg Temple, which was then under construction. Instead, however, it was written by the composer Ignaz von Seyfried (1776 – 1841), and performed at the inaugural service in 1826. Seyfried was a pupil of Mozart and a friend of Haydn, and a close associate of Beethoven. Beethoven had personally called upon Seyfried to conduct the premiere of the last version of his opera Fidelio, whose theme is Freiheit (“universal freedom”).[1125]
The enduring legacies of the two new tendencies of Reform and Conservative Judaism were shaped by the Hamburg Temple disputes, two controversies which erupted around the Hamburg Temple, first between 1818 and 1821, and then from 1841 to 1842. Israel Eduard Kley, a member of Jacobson’s circle who served as preacher, left Berlin to assume the management of the new Jewish school in Hamburg. Kley was joined by fellow members of the Hamburg Temple, Seckel Isaac Fränkel (1765 – 1835), Meyer Israel Bresselau (1785 – 1839), and Gotthold Salomon (1784 – 1862). Following on the work of Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon was the first Jew to translate the complete Old Testament into High German, under the title Deutsche Volks- und Schulbibel für Israeliten (“German People’s and School Bible for Israelites”). In 1817, 65 Jewish households founded the New Temple Association, who a years later founded its synagogue, Qahal Bayit Chadash (“Congregation New House”), better known by its German name, Neuer Israelitischer Tempel, (“New Israelite Temple”).[1126]
Fränkel and Bresselau published a new prayerbook for the Temple, Seder ha-Avodah (“Order of Devotion”), considered the first Reform liturgy. The new prayerbook omitted or changed several of the formulas anticipating a return to Zion and restoration of the sacrificial cult in the Jerusalem Temple. These changes evoked widespread denunciation from Rabbis across Europe, who condemned the new synagogue as heretics. The Hamburg rabbinical court, headed by the judge Baruch ben Meir Oser of Prague, immediately proclaimed a ban on the new synagogue.[1127] Some forty responsa condemning the New Israelite Temple were received and edited into a single compendium, Ele divrei ha-brit (“These are the Words of the Covenant”), which was published in Hamburg in May 1819.[1128]
The New Israelite Temple’s congregants nevertheless continued to attend it, little affected by the massive protest. The religious service of the Hamburg Temple was disseminated at the 1820 Leipzig Trade Fair, where Jewish businessmen from German states, many other European countries, and the United States met. As a consequence, several Reform communities, including New York and Baltimore, adopted the Hamburg Temple’s prayer book.
But the dispute in Hamburg itself was yet to be resolved. After the community was almost torn apart by in-fighting, and nearly three years in which the New Temple attracted large crowds, the board of elders finally decided to accept a solution promulgated by Lazarus Jacob Riesser (1763 – 1828), a member of the Frankfurt Judenloge, from the first days of the crisis.[1129] In 1921, they dismissed three elderly rabbinic judges, and a permanent new chief rabbi, they chose young Isaac Bernays (1792 – 1849), one of the first rabbis who also went to university. But the community assigned to him the title “clerical functionary” or Hakham, as the usual titles, instead of the traditional “moreh Tzedek” or “rabbi.”
In the two decades that followed the end of the first controversy, the social and cultural circumstances which led to the establishment of the Israelite Temple intensified, engulfing most of German Jews. A new generation had attended modern schools, while levels of personal observance, which had been in steady decline, now reached a critical turning point. In the 1840s, the majority of Jews could be classified a non-Orthodox. The last traditional yeshiva, in Fürth, closed in 1828. Higher education became required for rabbis, both by government decree and popular expectation. Young university graduates began to replace the old guard. Reform tendencies, that had until then been limited to an upper crust of an assimilated Jewish population, now permeated the rabbinate itself.
Many members of the Israelite Temple succumbed to the social pressures of a public losing interest in Judaism and the intellectual challenge of Judaic studies Wissenschaft des Judentums, pioneered by Leopold Zunz and his circle. The most radical exponent of Wissenschaft was the young Rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810 – 1874), considered the founding father of Reform Judaism. Geiger launched the journal Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für Jüdische Theologie, where Judaism was critically analyzed. Emphasizing Judaism’s constant development over time, Geiger sought to re-formulate traditional interpretations and design what he regarded as a religion compatible with modern times.
In April 1839, the leadership of the Hamburg Temple therefore decided to draft a second edition of its prayerbook. The commission in charge comprised Salomon, Kley, Bresselau and Fränkel. In 1841, Bernays issued an announcement that the new prayerbook did not fulfill the minimal requirements under religious law, and those who used it were not meeting the obligation of worship. In imitation of the dispute of 1819, the Temple directorate published twelve responsa from liberal rabbis and preachers that, while not all in favor of the volume, lambasted Bernays for placing a ban and refuting his halakhic arguments.
A Frankist from Dresden by the name of Rabbi Zecharias Frankel (1801 – 1875)—a member of the Wissenschaft des Judentums—took a middle position between the Reform and the Orthodox, and dismissed the ban, demonstrating that the prayerbook contained all obligatory prayers. But he also declared himself opposed to the book. The belief in a personal Messiah, wrote Frankel, was ancient and hallowed. Neither did Frankel base his argument on rigid Orthodox notions, but on the sanctity of collective sentiment. According to Frankel, considered the founder of Conservative Judaism, Jewish law was not static, but had always developed in response to changing conditions.
However, Frankel also clashed with Geiger, who along with Jacobson and Zunz, came to be recognized as one of the founding fathers of Reform Judaism. While the Temple congregation enlisted massive support, Bernays only received aid from his close associate Jacob Ettlinger (1798 – 1871). Bernays and Ettlinger are regarded by historians as the founding fathers of “Neo-Orthodoxy,” or Torah im Derech Eretz, the ideology which sought to modernize traditional religious attitudes. Their most famous and prominent pupil was Samson Raphael Hirsch. A vocal opponent of Reform Judaism, Zionism, and similarly opposed early forms of Conservative Judaism, Hirsch wrote his Neunzehn Briefe über Judenthum (“Nineteen Letters on Judaism”), a defense of traditional Judaism. One of the young intellectuals strongly influenced by the “Nineteen Letters” was Heinrich Graetz (1817 – 1891) who was amongst the first historians to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from a Jewish perspective. In 1839, Hirsch published Erste Mittheilungen aus Naphtali’s Briefwechsel, a polemical essay against the reforms in Judaism proposed by Geiger and the contributors to his Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie. The polemic eventually subsided. The defeat of the Orthodox effectively demonstrated the growing power of their rivals, paving the way for the Reform rabbinical conferences of 1844-6, led by Geiger, which were a key event in the formation of Reform Judaism.[1130]
Lazarus’ son was Gabriel Riesser (1806 – 1863)—a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde and the Frankfurt Judenloge—became chairman of the Hamburg Temple Association from 1840–43, and a leading advocate of Jewish emancipation. New Israelite Temple had insisted in 1840 to get a license to build their own synagogue. Bernays, however, intervened at the Senate of Hamburg in order to have it deny the application. Nevertheless, the senate granted the license on April 20, 1841 and the cornerstone was laid on October 18, 1842. The New Temple Society invited the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn and Daniel Itzig, the Hamburg-born Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, to set Psalm 100 to music for a choir for playing it at the inauguration of the new Temple on September 5, 1844.[1131] However, disputes on which translation should be used, Luther’s, as preferred by Felix, or that of his Jewish grandfather Moses, as preferred by the Society, prevented it from happening.[1132]
In 1844, Felix Mendelssohn wrote a cantata based upon Psalm 100 for the dedication service of the new Hamburg Temple. Mannheimer, who preached in German and recited the poetry of Schiller, Lessing, and Goethe in his sermons, recruited as his cantor for the new synagogue, Salomon Sulzer (1804 – 1890). Sulzer published Schir Zion, his liturgical compositions for the services of an entire year, in 1839. For the first edition, Sulzer sought Christian collaborators, including Joseph Drechsler (1782 – 1852), the choral director of St. Stephen’s Church, and his friend Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828). At Sulzer’s request, Schubert wrote a cantata, using the Hebrew text of Psalm 92, for the Sabbath service. In later years, Schubert set other psalms for voice and piano, using the German text of Moses Mendelssohn’s translation of the Old Testament. Sulzer’s performances attracted aristocracy, leading composers such as his friends Schubert and Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856), and other leading intellectuals, to regularly attend Sabbath services in the Vienna Reform synagogue.[1133] In 1846, Felix collaborated with Geiger on the text of the oratorio Elijah, depicting events in the life of the Prophet Elijah as told in the Old Testament, and inspired by Bach and Handel.[1134]
The influence of the Haskalah
in France resulted in the creation the masonic-style order, Alliance Israëlite Universelle, which
had for its aim, “The
promotion everywhere of the emancipation and moral progress of the Jewish
people.”[1135]
A leading exponent of the organization was Moses Hess (1812
– 1875), the grandson of Rabbi David T. Hess who succeeded to the Rabbinate of
Manheim, after it had been seized by the Sabbatean followers of Rabbi Eybeschütz.[1136]
According to Hess, Baruch Spinoza, the excommunicated student of Menasseh ben
Israel, was “latest expression of the Jewish genius,” and the true prophet of
the messianic movement of Shabbetai Zevi.[1137]
Hess was a great admirer of Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic rabbis, who according to
him lived in a “socialistic fashion,” and whose philosophical aspect, from the
point of view of the theoretical Kabbalah, he explained, is developed in the Tanya,
of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Hess observed:
The great good which will result from a combination of Hasidism with the national movement (secular Zionists) is almost incalculable… Even the rabbis, who heretofore have declared Chasidism a heresy, are beginning to understand that there are only two alternatives for the great Jewish masses of Eastern Europe; either to be absorbed along with the reformers, by the gradually penetrating external culture, or to avert this catastrophe by an inner regeneration of which Hasidism is certainly a forerunner.[1138]
The Alliance was a Paris-based international Jewish organization founded in 1860 by five French Jews and Adolphe Crémieux (1796 – 1880), Grand Master of the Masonic Rite of Misraïm and Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of France, responsible for managing the high degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite within the Grand Orient of France.[1139] The Alliance Israëlite Universelle had as its ultimate goal, “the great work of humanity, the annihilation of error fanaticism, the union of human society in a faithful and solid fraternity.”[1140]
Although Carsten Wilke’s article about the Alliance Israélite Universal, “Who is Afraid of Jewish Universalism?” for Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, was intended to dismiss the characterizations of the conspiracy theorists, he nevertheless concedes that the order’s members “frequently interpreted Judaism as a visionary cosmopolitan faith not unlike contemporary freemasonry,” which “underwent a kind of reconversion,” according to which “a world order based on the rule of law was imagined and fought for.”[1141] The Alliance, Wilke explained, “pursued the vision of European nations living side by side in peace and respect,” constituting a kind of liberal universalism.[1142] Effectively, the Alliance pursued the establishment of a “universal brotherhood,” or as Crémieux defined it, “the unification of all creeds under the common banner of Unity and Progress, which is the maxim of humanity.”[1143]
Crémieux collaborated with Moses Montefiore (1784 –1885), a British financier and banker, activist, philanthropist and Sheriff of London, and also a Freemason. He was born in Livorno, Italy, a stronghold of the Sabbatean sect. Henriette (or Hannah), the sister of his wife Judith, married Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who headed the family’s banking business in Britain, for whom Montefiore’s firm acted as stockbrokers. Montefiore was a member of Bevis Marks Synagogue, which was Sephardic, and by marrying Judith, who was Ashkenazi, he deliberately broke the tradition according to which marriages between Sephardim and Ashkenazim were disapproved by the synagogue. Montefiore was president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1835 to 1874, the longest tenure ever, and member of Bevis Marks Synagogue.
Amongst other notable members of the Bevis
Marks Synagogue’s congregation was Isaac D’Israeli (1766 – 1848). His son Benjamin
Disraeli (1804 – 1881), the only British prime minister to have been of Jewish birth,
was also Grand Master of Freemasonry,
as well as knight of the Order of the Garter. As noted by Ivan Poliakov, in The
Aryan Myth, D’Israeli’s philosophy of history might be summed up in
the formula: “All is race; there is no other truth.”[1144] But he also included the
Jews in the “Caucasian race.” In Coningsby, published in 1844, D’Israeli declared:
The fact is, you cannot destroy a pure race of the Caucasian organization. It is a physiological fact… And at this moment, in spite of centuries, of tens of centuries, of degradation, the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs of Europe. I speak not of their laws, which you still obey; of their literature, with which your minds are saturated; but of the living Hebrew intellect. You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews; that mysterious Russian Diplomacy which so alarms Western Europe is organized and principally carried on by Jews; that mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany, and which will be, in fact, a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is as yet known in England, is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews, who almost monopolise the professorial chairs of Germany…[1145]
It was also in Coningsby that he confessed, through a character named Sidonia, modeled on his friend Lionel de Rothschild (1808 – 1879), eldest son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, that, “the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Of the influence of the secret societies, Disraeli also remarked, in Parliamentary debate:
lt is useless to deny… a great part of Europe—the whole of Italy and France, and a great portion of Germany, to say nothing of other countries—are covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads. And what are their objects? They do not attempt to conceal them. They do not want constitutional government. They do not want ameliorated institutions; they do not want provincial councils nor the recording of votes; they want… an end to ecclesiastical establishments…[1146]
Correspondence in 1851 between Lord Stanley (1826 – 1893, whose father became British Prime Minister the following year, and Disraeli, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer alongside him, records Disraeli’s proto-Zionist views:
He then unfolded a plan of restoring the nation to Palestine – said the country was admirably suited for them – the financiers all over Europe might help—the Porte is weak— the Turks/holders of property could be bought out—this, he said, was the object of his life… Coningsby was merely a feeler—my views were not fully developed at that time—since then all I have written has been for one purpose. The man who should restore the Hebrew race to their country would be the Messiah—the real saviour of prophecy!” He did not add formally that he aspired to play this part, but it was evidently implied. He thought very highly of the capabilities of the country, and hinted that his chief object in acquiring power here would be to promote the return.[1147]
As president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Montefiore’s correspondence in 1841–42 with Charles Henry Churchill (1807 –1869), who as British consul in Damascus responsible for Ottoman Syria under Foreign Office of Lord Palmerston (1784 – 1865), the Grand Patriarch of Freemasonry, proposed the first political plan for Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel in the region of Ottoman Palestine. The correspondence came in the wake of the Damascus affair of 1840, which drew widespread international attention when thirteen notable members of the Jewish community of Damascus were arrested and accused of murdering Father Thomas, a Christian monk and his Muslim servant for the purpose of using their blood to bake matzo, an antisemitic accusation also known as the blood libel. Backed by Palmerston and Churchill, Montefiore and Crémieux led a delegation to the ruler of Syria, Muhammad Ali (1769 – 1849), and eventually secured the release of the captives. They also persuaded the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to issue an edict forbidding any further circulation of blood libel accusations.[1148]
The two authors at the time shared a
conclusion that the Illuminati, founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt (1717 – 1753),
were the source of the French Revolution. In 1797, the Abbé Augustin de Barruel
(1741 – 1820), an ex-Jesuit who came to Britain following the September
Massacre, published the first volumes of his four-volume account of the French
Revolution, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. That same
year, John Robison (1739 – 1805), professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh,
published his own history of the Revolution, Proofs of a Conspiracy against
all the religions and governments of Europe. Like Robison, Barruel claimed
that the French Revolution was the result of a deliberate conspiracy subvert
the power of the Catholic Church and the aristocracy, hatched by a coalition of
philosophes, Freemasons and the Order of the Illuminati. About the higher mysteries of the
Illuminati, which were shared only by Weishaupt himself, Robison related that the publisher of the Neueste Arbeitung reported:
…that in the first degree of Maous or
PHILOSOPHUS, the doctrines are the same with those of Spinoza, where all is
material, God and the world are the same thing, and all religion whatever is
without foundation, and the contrivance of ambitious men.[1149]
Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856), a Freemason and a close friend of Marx and the Rothschilds, and also born Jewish, pronounced the same observations usually denounced as among the worst examples of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories when he declared, “money is the God of our time and Rothschild is his prophet.”[1150] Heine listed Nathan Mayer Rothschild as one of the “three terroristic names that spell the gradual annihilation of the old aristocracy,” alongside Cardinal Richelieu and Maximilien Robespierre.[1151] According to Heine:
No one does more to further the revolution than the Rothschilds themselves… and, though it may sound even more strange, these Rothschilds, the bankers of kings, these princely pursestring-holders, whose existence might be placed in the gravest danger by a collapse of the European state system, nevertheless carry in their minds a consciousness of their revolutionary mission.[1152]
In 1806, Barruel received a letter from Jean-Baptiste Simonini, captain in the Piedmontese, which first congratulated him for having “unmasked the hellish sects which are preparing the way for Antichrist,” but then criticized him for sparing the “Judaic sect” from his study, who he claimed were the real “Unknow Superiors,” behind the conspiracy. Realizing this must seem like an exaggeration, Simonini related a personal account, where explained that during the revolutionary years he had impersonated a Jew while living in Turin. The Jews showed him “sums of gold and silver for distribution to those who embraced their cause,” and promised to make him a general on the condition that he become a Freemason.[1153]
The
Simonini letter, explains Norman Cohn, “seems to be the earliest in the series
of antisemitic forgeries that was to culminate in the Protocols.”[1154]
After presenting Simonini with three
weapons bearing Masonic symbols, his Jewish confidants revealed their greatest
secrets: Mani (216 – 277), the prophet of the Gnostic sect of the anaeism was
Jewish, as was Hasan-i Sabbah, also known as the “Old Man of the Mountain,”
cult leader of the Ismaili Assassins, who are reputed to have imparted their
occult knowledge to the Templars. Some Masons believed that Falk was the “Old
Man of the Mountain.”[1155]
The Freemasons and the Illuminati were both founded by Jews. They would use
money to take over governments and usury to rob Christian populations. In less
than a century, they would be masters of the world. More immediate goals were full emancipation and
the annihilation of the Jews’ worst enemy, the House of Bourbon.[1156]
The Jews also boasted that they had already infiltrated the Catholic clergy, up to the highest echelons, and aimed to someday succeed in having one of their own elected pope.[1157] A similar plot was revealed when Pope Leo XIII (1810 – 1903) requested the publication of the Alta Vendita. It was first published by Jacques Crétineau-Joly (1803 – 1875) in The Church and the Revolution. The pamphlet was popularized in the English-speaking world by Monsignor George F. Dillon in 1885 with his book The War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization. Astoundingly, the document exposes the details a Masonic plot to infiltrate the Catholic Church and ultimately install a Masonic pope.[1158] According to the document:
Our ultimate end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution—the final destruction of Catholicism, and even of the Christian idea…
The Pope, whoever he is, will never come to the secret societies; it is up to the secret societies to take the first step toward the Church, with the aim of conquering both of them.
The task that we are going to undertake is not the work of a day, or of a month, or of a year; it may last several years, perhaps a century; but in our ranks the solider dies and the struggle goes on.[1159]
The Alta Vendita, a text purportedly produced by the highest lodge of the Italian Carbonari and written by Giuseppe Mazzini (1807 – 1872)—who was widely reputed to have succeeded to leadership of the Illuminati after Weishaupt’s death—leader of the Risorgimento, the revolutionary movement that led to the Unification of Italy and the end to more than a thousand years of the reign of the Papal States by the papacy. Mazzini held a high position among the Florentine Masons, and served as Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, as did Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807 – 1882), who are both considered among of Italy’s “fathers of the fatherland,” along with Count of Cavour (1810 – 1861) and Victor Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy (1820 – 1878). The House of Savoy descended from Charles Emmanuel I, whose birth was prophesied by Nostradamus, and had links with the House of Habsburg and the Order of the Golden Fleece, and who claimed the hereditary title of Kings of Jerusalem. [1160] Victor Immanuel II’s mother was Maria Theresa of Austria (1801 – 1855), who was the double granddaughter of Empress Maria Theresa and Francis I. Like his father, Victor Emmanuel II was a knight of the Order of the Garter as well as knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. In 1904, when Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, met with of Victor Emmanuel II’ grandson, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (1869 – 1947), he revealed that one of his ancestors had been a co-conspirator of Shabbetai Zevi.[1161]
Mazzini worked closely with Lord Palmerston, who was twice Prime Minister, holding office continuously from 1807 until his death in 1865, and dominated British foreign policy during the period 1830 to 1865, when Britain was at the height of its imperial power. “In his time,” as noted by Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati, Mazzini “ranked among the leading European intellectual figures, competing for public attention with Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville.”[1162] Mazzini argued for a reorganization of the European political order on the basis of two primary principles: democracy and national self-determination. To him, the nation was a necessary intermediary step in the progressive association of mankind, the means toward a future international “brotherhood” of humanity. Mazzini even conceived that Europe’s nations might one day be able to join together in a “united States of Europe.”[1163]
In response, in 1884, Pope Leo XIII published his condemnation of Freemasonry, the encyclical Humanum genus. Leo Taxil (1854 – 1907), who published his notorious hoax, Le Diable au XIXe siècle (“The Devil in the 19th Century”) in 1892, and even succeeded in gaining the Leo XIII’s endorsement for his anti-Masonic writings. Taxil, whose real name was Gabriel Jogand-Pagés, was a swindler and the author of various screeds against the Catholic Church, but who later claimed to have repented and converted to Catholicism. In Le Diable au XIXe siècle, writing under the name of Dr. Bataille, and in collaboration with Domenico Margiotta, a former high-ranking Freemason, Taxil revealed the existence of the so-called Palladian Rite, a Luciferian rite that was the pinnacle of Masonic power. However, in 1897, Taxil finally confessed that the revelations about the Palladian Rite were a hoax, causing quite a scandal. Margiotta too confessed, declaring that he invented all such stories after he signed a “barbarous contract” with Taxil. Afterwards, Margiotta was never seen or heard from again.[1164]
Curiously, however, Taxil was close to Giuseppe Garibaldi, Mazzini’s co-conspirator, who also was supposedly a founding member of the Palladian Rite that Taxil originally claimed to expose.[1165] Mazzini, along with Otto von Bismarck (1815 – 1898), and Albert Pike (1809 – 1891), all thirty third degree Scottish Rite Masons, supposedly completed an agreement to create a supreme universal rite of Masonry that would arch over all the other rites. Civil War General Albert Pike was Sovereign Commander Grand Master of the Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in Charleston, South Carolina, and the reputed founder of the notorious Ku Klux Klan (KKK).[1166] Pike, in honor of the Templar idol Baphomet, named the order the New and Reformed Palladian Rite or New and Reformed Palladium. The Palladian Rite was to have been an international alliance to bring in the Grand Lodges, the Grand Orient, the ninety-seven degrees of Memphis and Misraïm of Cagliostro, also known as the Ancient and Primitive Rite, and the Scottish Rite, or the Ancient and Accepted Rite. Also according to Margiotta, Rothschild agent Gerson von Bleichröder—a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, founded by leading members of the Haskalah in the circle of Moses Mendelssohn and the Hamburg Temple—also financed Otto von Bismarck’s plans for the unification of Germany.[1167]
Barruel was irritated that he hadn’t discovered this connection himself. He tried to verify the authenticity of the letter by writing to various authorities, including important bishops. After being told that Simonini could be trusted, Barruel began to study the Jewish history of his conspiracy theory intensely. Barruel chose not to publicize the letter, fearing it might incite violence against the Jews, but nevertheless circulated it among influential circles in France. Barruel confessed on his deathbed that he had written a new manuscript incorporating the Jews into his Masonic conspiracy theory. Although Barruel had been more convinced that a Masonic conspiracy led the revolution, and although many Jews were Freemasons, they did not act alone. The current leadership of the conspiracy, he reported, was a council of 21, 9 of whom were Jews. However, he burned this manuscript two days before his death. He wrote that he wanted to prevent a massacre against Jews.[1168]
Many Jews joined Giovane Italia (“Young Italy”), which was founded by Mazzini in 1831 and soon supplanted the Carbonari.[1169] Sarina Nathan, or Sara Levi Nathan (1819 – 1882), was the financier and confidant of Mazzini and promulgator of his ideas and works. The secretary and faithful friend of Count Cavour was Isaac Artom (1829 – 1900), a Jewish Italian diplomat and politician, while Salomon Olper, later rabbi of Turin, was the friend and counselor of Mazzini. The patriotism of the Jews soon won them the support of the leading liberals and served to popularize among them the cause of Jewish emancipation. Later, in 1834, Count Cavour began a campaign in favor of Jewish emancipation in the newspaper II Risorgimento. A similar campaign was undertaken by Mazzini, who in Jeune Suisse of November 4, 1835, he wrote:
We claim that the best way of making good citizens of the Jews, whenever they may not meet the standard, is to make brothers of them, equal to everybody else under the law; we claim that wherever this has been done, the religious sect that has given Europe men of such intelligence as Spinoza and Mendelssohn, has rapidly improved.[1170]
As pointed out by R. John Rath, because of a various similarities like their means of correspondence, some recent scholars like Carlo Francovich and Arthur Lehning have argued that the Carbonari were organized by the Illuminati.[1171] The Carbonari were formed through the influence of Philippe Buonarroti (1761 – 1837), a descendant of Michelangelo’s brother, who attended the University of Pisa and studied law. Historian Carlo Francovich asserted that in 1786 Buonarroti also joined an Illuminati lodge in Florence.[1172] Buonarroti became editor of the revolutionary Corsica paper, Giornale Patriottico di Corsica (1790), operated by Illuminatus Baron de Bassus, who referred to him by the Jewish alias of Abraham Levi Salomon.[1173] According to historian James H. Billington, its first issues specifically identified the French Revolution with the Illuminati, and praised all the social upheavals taking place in Europe.[1174] By March of 1793, Buonarroti made his way to France, where he joined meetings of the Jacobins, and befriending Robespierre, “for whom he kept a great veneration all his life.”[1175]
Buonarroti was a leader of the Illuminati cover, the Philadelphes.[1176] According to Wit von Dörring, a former member who became a police informer, the aims of the Carbonari were the same as the Illuminati, to “destroy every positive religion and every form of government, whether unlimited despotism or democracy,” and were revealed in the final grade.[1177] It has long been assumed that members of the Philadelphes and the Adelphes of Italy, or the Sublimes Maîtres Parfaits, had founded the Carbonari.[1178] Arrested on March 5, 1794, Buonarroti was sentenced to serve time at Du Plessis prison in Paris, where he had met and befriended François-Noël (Gracchus) Babeuf, a member of the revolutionary Social Circle established by Bode’s disciple, Nicholas Bonneville.[1179] Buonarroti was freed after nine years, when he began to organize a multitude of revolutionary secret societies. The High Court at Vendome sentenced Buonarroti to deportation, and he sent to the Island of Re before finally being permitted by Napoleon to move to Geneva in 1806. Soon after settling in Geneva, Buonarroti was initiated into the Grand Orient Lodge Des Amis Sincères, and is recorded as being its Venerable Master in 1811, under the alias Camille.[1180] As soon as Buonarroti became a member, he immediately formed an inner circle within the Lodge, a “secret group of Philadelphes,” the same name assumed by the Illuminati in Paris.[1181] Shortly after, Buonarroti founded his most important secret society: the Sublimes Maîtres Parfaits (“Sublime Perfect Masters”), which represented a merging of the Philadelphes from France and Switzerland and its Italian branch, the Adelphes, formed around 1807, headed by Buonarroti’s friend Luigi Angeloni (1758 – 1842).[1182] The aim was no longer exclusively to fight Napoleon in France and Italy and the establishment of a republican regime,” explains Lehning. “It now became an international society of European revolutionaries with the purpose to republicanise Europe.”[1183]
In 1833–34 the first abortive Mazzinian uprisings took place in Piedmont and Genoa. The latter was organized by Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had joined Young Italy, then fled to France. After an attempt to instigate insurrection in Savoy in 1834 without the blessing of Buonarroti, Mazzini and his followers were summarily excommunicated by a circular from Buonarroti’s Charbonnerie Démocratique Universelle.[1184] In 1836, Mazzini left Switzerland and settled in London. Under Lord Palmerston’s guidance, Mazzini had organized all his revolutionary sects: Young Italy, Young Poland, Young Germany which were under the aegis of Young Europe.[1185] He spent most of the next two decades in exile or hiding, expanding the organization into his series of national liberation guerrilla movements. Young Europe was the culmination of these groups, which led to him being called by Metternich, “the most dangerous man in Europe.”
The revolutionaries spoke of Buonarroti as “an occult power whose shadowy tentacles extended… over Europe.”[1186] The Philadelphes were eventually affiliated with the Rite of Memphis, a brand of Egyptian Freemasonry closely associated with the Rite of Misraïm, which had its origins with Cagliostro and Jacob Falk.[1187] A great number of Frankists who had joined the Rite of Memphis participated in a spree of Marxist-inspired subversive movements, known as the Year of Revolutions of 1848.[1188] In discussing the fallout of 1848, Karl Marx (1818 – 1883), remarked: “[E]very tyrant is backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit.”[1189]
Buonarroti’s work became a bible for revolutionaries, inspiring such leftists as Marx. Indeed, Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895), a half-century later in their first joint work The Holy Family (1844), were eager to concede their debt to Bonneville’s enterprise:
The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf’s conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf’s friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.[1190]
Marx was tutored in communism by Moses Hess, an ardent admirer of Mazzini.[1191] Moses Hess also befriended the “ingenious, prophetic Heine,” as he called him in his unpublished diary of 1836.[1192] Heine, who was born in Dusseldorf was called “Harry” in childhood but became known as “Heinrich” after his conversion to Lutheranism in 1825. Heine referred to baptism as the “admission ticket” to European culture, which, as noted David Bakan, was typically associated with Sabbateanism.[1193] Heine was also a relative of Isaac Bernays, the neo-Orthodox Hakham involved in the Hamburg Temple disputes, and refers to him repeatedly in his letters.[1194] Together with Leopold Zunz, a preacher from the Hamburg Temple, other young men, Heine founded the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (“The Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews”) in Berlin in 1819. Heine and his fellow radical exile in Paris, Ludwig Börne (1786 – 1837), a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, were leading members of Mazzini’s Young Germany. Börne was a close friend of Mark Herz, a close friend of Moses Mendelssohn and David Friedländer, and husband of the salonnière Henriette Herz, and was also a member the Masonic Judenloge.[1195] Heine also made he acquaintances in Berlin, of Karl August Varnhagen and his Jewish wife, and a friend of Henriette Herz, the famous salonnière Rahel. Heine was also a member of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Judenthums.
Among the many causes they advocated were, separation of church and state, the raising of the political and social position of women, and the emancipation of the Jews. Explaining the motivations for the liberal German nationalism as a Frankist Jew converted to Christianity, Börne revealed:
…yes,
because I was born a bondsman, I therefore love liberty more than you. Yes, because I have known
slavery, I understand freedom more than
you. Yes, because I was born without a fatherland my desire for a fatherland is more passionate than yours,
and because my birthplace was
not bigger than the Judengasse and everything behind the locked gates was a foreign country to me,
therefore for me now the fatherland is
more than the city, more than a territory, more than a province. For me only
the very great fatherland, as far as its language extends, is enough.[1196]
Under the sovereignty of the prince bishop Karl von Dalberg, an Illuminati member with connections to the Rothschilds, Börne was appointed of police actuary in the city of Frankfurt.[1197] Nevertheless, Börne commented:
A wealthy Jew kisses his hand, while a poor Christian kisses the Pope's feet. The Rothschilds are assuredly nobler than their ancestor Judas Iscariot. He sold Christ for 30 small pieces of silver: the Rothschilds would buy Him, if He were for sale.[1198]
Heine’s chief patron and benefactor was his uncle, the wealthy banker Salomon Heine (1767 – 1844), called “Rothschild of Hamburg,” who was among the first members of the Hamburg Temple. Heine recounted that he had been intended by his mother for a career in banking, but that he had an encounter in 1827, he met with Nathan Rothschild, “a fat Jew in Lombard Street, St. Swithin’s Lane,” with whom he wished to be an “apprentice millionaire,” but Rothschild told him he “had no talent for business.”[1199] By 1834, however, Heine had struck up a very close relationship with Nathan’s brother Baron James Rothschilds, the head of the French branch of the family. In 1843, when his publisher Julius Campe sent him the manuscript of a highly critical history of the Rothschilds, the radical republican Friedrich Steinmann’s The House of Rothschild: Its History and Transactions, Heine wrote that if the manuscript were to be suppressed it would repay the service “which Rothschild has shown me for the past 12 years, as much as this can honestly be done.”[1200]
Karl and Jenny Marx were married in 1843, after which they moved to Paris and befriended his distant relative, Heinrich Heine, who was a member of Young Germany. As Jewish historian Paul Johnson pointed out in his History of the Jews, Marx’s theory of history resembles the Kabbalistic theories of the Messianic Age of Shabbetai Zevi’s mentor, Nathan of Gaza.[1201] One of Marx’s grandparents was Nanette Salomon Barent-Cohen, whose cousin had married Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the head of the French branch of the family. From 1850, Marx’s private secretary was Wilhelm Pieper (1826 – 1898), who from 1852-56 as a teacher for Baron Lionel Nathan Rothschild, for his second son Alfred Rothschild (1842 – 1918).[1202] At the age of 21, Alfred would take up employment at the NM Rothschild Bank, and in 1868, he became a director of the Bank of England, a post he held for 20 years, until 1889.
Hess, an influential proponent of socialism, collaborated with a number of radical philosophers associated with Marx and Engels, including P.J. Proudhon, Bruno Bauer, Etienne Cabet, Max Stiner, Ferdinand Lassalle and the Luciferian and anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.[1203] Hess also befriended the “ingenious, prophetic Heine,” as he called him in his unpublished diary of 1836.[1204] Hess was an enthusiastic supporter of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865) the first political philosopher to call himself an anarchist, marking the formal birth of anarchism in the mid-nineteenth century.[1205] As Jeffrey Burton Russel explains, Satan was a political symbol for the anarchists, and as an example, quotes Proudhon saying, “Come, Satan, you who have been defamed by priests and kings, that I may kiss you and hold you against my breast.”[1206] Proudhon himself claimed to have been initiated in 1847 into the Masonic lodge in Besançon, Sincérité, Parfaite Union et Constante Amitié. [1207] Proudhon’s best-known assertion is that “property is theft!,” contained in his first major work, What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (1840). The book attracted the attention of Karl Marx, who started a correspondence with Proudhon. Ferdinand Lassalle (1825 – 1864), whose father was Heyman Lassal was a Jewish silk merchant, was a Prussian-German socialist and highly active in the Revolutions of 1848, during which he befriended Marx. Heine wrote of Lassalle in 1846: “I have found in no one so much passion and clearness of intellect united in action. You have good right to be audacious – we others only usurp this divine right, this heavenly privilege.”[1208]
Buonarroti and Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805 – 1881), also a member of the Carbonari, influenced the early French labor and socialist movements.[1209] In May 1839, a Blanquist-inspired uprising took place in Paris, in which participated the League of the Just, forerunners of Karl Marx’s Communist League. In 1847, Blanqui founded the Democratic Association for the Unification of All Countries (DAUAC) as a propaganda organization. Historians describe the DAUAC as a “masonic-carbonari association.”[1210] It was co-founded by the Carbonari and the German League of the Outlaws, which in turn became the League of the Just and then the Communist League of Marx and Engels. Marx was its vice-president.[1211]
A founding member of the League was Jenny Marx’s brother, Edgar von Westphalen (1819 – 1890), was an early member of the Communist Correspondence Committee’s Brussels’ circle. Marx’s wife was Jenny von Westphalen, whose brother, Ferdinand von Westphalen (1799 – 1876), was the head of the Prussian secret police. Jenny was born into a family from Northern Germany that had been elevated into the petty nobility. Her paternal grandfather, Philipp Westphalen, had been ennobled in 1764 as Edler von Westphalen by Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick—Grand Master of the Strict Observance and member of the Illuminati and the Asiatic Brethren—for his military services, and had served as his de facto “chief of staff” during the Seven Years’ War.[1212] Philipp’s wife Jane Wishart of Pittarrow was the descendant of many Scottish and European noble families. Jenny’s father was Philipp’s son, Ludwig von Westphalen (1770 – 1842), who befriended Marx’s father Heinrich. Ludwig became a mentor to the young Karl, introducing him to Homer, Shakespeare—who remained his favorite authors all his life—Voltaire and Racine. It was also Ludwig who first introduced Marx to the teachings of the socialist theorist Saint-Simon (1760 – 1825).[1213]
In 1847, the Communist League asked Marx to write The Communist Manifesto, written jointly with Engels, which was first published on February 21, 1848. In France, as the government of the National Constituent Assembly continued to resist them, the radicals began to protest against it. On May 15, 1848, Parisian workers invaded the Assembly and proclaimed a new Provisional Government. This attempted revolution was quickly suppressed by the National Guard. The leaders of this revolt, including Louis Auguste Blanqui, Armand Barbès, François Vincent Raspail and others, were arrested. In France in 1848, King Louis Philippe, the son of Philippe “Égalité,” was overthrown and the revolution of Louis Blanc (1811 – 1882) established the French Second Republic, headed by Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808 – 1873). Blanc, one of the leading representatives of the Order of Memphis, was one of the organizers of its Supreme Council in London, where he was able to direct its policy and to influence the policy of the Lodge of the Philadelphians without officially becoming a member.[1214] Two Jews were active in the French provisional government, Adolphe Crémieux and Michel Goudchaux (1797 – 1862), who was twice Minister of Finance. However, Crémieux, who held the important post of Minister of Justice, soon resigned to act as counsel for Louis Blanc, in his defense against the government.[1215]
According to his friend Alexander Herzen (1812 – 1870), the “father of Russian Socialism,” Mazzini was the “shining star” of the Revolutions of 1848, when Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions and often violent upheavals, in the Netherlands, Italy, the Austrian Empire, and the states of the German Confederation. The revolutions were inspired by ideals of “democracy,” referring to the replacement an electorate of property-owners with universal male suffrage, and “liberalism,” calling for the consent of the governed, separation of church and state, republican government, freedom of the press and the individual.
The 1840s, these ideals had been popularized by radical liberal publications such as Rheinische Zeitung (1842); Le National and La Réforme (1843) in France; Ignaz Kuranda’s Grenzboten (1841) in Austria; Lajos Kossuth’s Pesti Hírlap (1841) in Hungary, as well as the increased popularity of the older Morgenbladet in Norway and the Aftonbladet in Sweden. La Réforme was founded in 1843 by Alexandre Ledru-Rollin (1807 – 1874), a member of Carbonari. Its regular contributors included the radicals Louis Blanc, and Proudhon, Marx, and Mikhail Bakunin (1814 – 1876) also published articles. The editor was Ferdinand Flocon (1800 – 1866), also with the Carbonari, who was one of the founding members of the Provisional Government at the start of the French Second Republic. It was the speeches of Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc at working-men’s banquets in Lille, Dijon and Chalons that heralded the revolution of 1848.
The Rheinische Zeitung was launched in 1842, with Moses Hess serving as an editor, with Heinrich Heine as Paris correspondent, and with contributions from Karl Marx.[1216] When it was evident that the newspaper was becoming bankrupt soon, George Jung (1814 – 1886) and Hess convinced some leading rich liberals of the Rhineland to establish a company to buy out the newspaper, including Gottfried Ludolf Camphausen (1803 – 1890), the Prime Minister of Prussia, Gustav von Mevissen (1815 – 1899), a leading representative of Rhineland liberalism, and Dagobert Oppenheim (1809 – 1889), the son of Salomon Oppenheim, Jr. (1772 – 1828), the scion of an illustrious family of “Court Jews” who had served as advisers and moneylenders to the Prince-Archbishops of Cologne in the Rhineland area for several generations.[1217] Engels, later affirmed that it was Marx’s journalism at the Rheinische Zeitung which led him “from pure politics to economic relationships and so to socialism.”[1218] After the suppression of the paper by Prussian state censorship in March 1843, Marx had left Germany, landing in Paris, and would spend the next five years in France, Belgium, and England. Marx would return to Germany in early 1848, and immediately began to make preparations to establish a new and more radical newspaper, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, one of the most important dailies of the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany.
In 1849, Hungarian Mason Lajos Kossuth (1802 – 1894) issued the celebrated Hungarian Declaration of Independence from the Habsburg Monarchy during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and he was appointed regent-president. However, in response to the intervention of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, who was an opponent of revolution, and the failure of appeals to the western powers, Kossuth abdicated. Kossuth then first fled to the Ottoman Empire and finally arrived in England in 1851. After his arrival, the press characterized the atmosphere of the streets of London as this: “It had seemed like a coronation day of Kings.”[1219] Many leading British politicians tried without success to suppress the so-called “Kossuth mania.” Palmerston intended to receive Kossuth, but it was prevented by a vote in Cabinet. Instead, Palmerston received a delegation of Trade Unionists from Islington and Finsbury and listened sympathetically as they read an address that praised Kossuth and declared the Emperors of Austria and Russia “despots, tyrants and odious assassins.”[1220] That, together with Palmerston’s support of Louis Napoleon, caused the fall of the government of Lord John Russell (1792 – 1878).[1221]
According to Kossuth, “The genus of Rothschilds has done more for the spread of socialism than its most passionate sectarians.”[1222] In a speech he delivered in the Citizens’ Banquet in Philadelphia, December 26, 1951, he asserted.
I am no Socialist, no Communist; and if I
get the means to act efficiently, I shall so act that the inevitable revolution
may not subvert the rights of property: but so much I confidently declare—that
to the spreading of Communist doctrines in certain quarters of Europe nobody
has so much contributed as those European capitalists, who by incessantly
aiding the despots with their money have inspired many of the oppressed with
the belief that financial wealth is dangerous to the freedom of the world. Rothschild
is the most efficient apostle of Communism.[1223]
As a period of harsh reaction followed the widespread Revolutions of 1848, the next major phase of revolutionary activity began almost twenty years later with the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), often called the First International, in 1864. As demonstrated by Boris I. Nicolaevsky, the creation of the First International was the result of the efforts of the Philadelphes of the Rite of Memphis, who had become supporters of Mazzini and Garibaldi.[1224] The Grand Lodge of the Philadelphians, brought together primarily, but not exclusively, by French émigrés in England, was formally part of an association that, at the beginning of the 1850’s, was known as the radical and revolutionary Order of Memphis, with members such as Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Louis Blanc. They instituted a Grand Lodge des Philadelphes, which linked up with the Carbonari, Buonarroti’s Carbonari, Mazzini’s Young Europe and were active in the founding of the Commune Révolutionnaire and the First International.[1225]
In 1864, Marx obtained control of the two-year-old First International, by which a number of secret societies were absorbed.[1226] The First International eventually split between two main tendencies: the state socialist wing represented by Marx and the anarchist wing represented by Mikhail Bakunin, a Grand Orient Freemason, and an avowed Satanist.[1227] Bakunin, explained Boris I. Nicolaevsky, was connected to the Philadelphes.[1228] Although 33º Mason of the Scottish Rite, Bakunin wrote to Herzen that he did not take Freemasonry seriously, other than it “can be useful as a mask or as a passport.”[1229] Sociologist Marcel Stoetzler argued that the antisemitic trope of Jewish world domination was at the center of Bakunin’s political thought.[1230] In 1869, Bakunin wrote his Polémique contre les Juifs (“Polemic Against the Jews”) mainly directed against the Jews of the International. Bakunin described as “the most formidable sect” in Europe, and asserted that a leak of information had taken place in the secret societies, and that it was the reason for the breakup of his own secret society.[1231]
The claim of a leak of secrets was
also reported by Gougenot Des Mousseaux, who, also in 1969, published Le
Juif, le Judaïsme et la Judaïsation des Peuples Chrétiens (“The Jews, Judaism, and the Judaification of
Christian People”), with particular emphasis on the Alliance Israëlite Universelle and “universal” Freemasonry,
“sharing a single life, and animated by the same soul.” According to Des
Mousseaux, “It is important enough to repeat,” he wrote, “that the elite of the
[Masonic] Order, the real leaders who are only known by a few initiates, and
then only under assumed names, work in a profitable and secret dependence on
Israelite kabbalists.” Due to the “mysterious constitution” of Freemasonry, its
“sovereign counsel” consists of “a majority of Jewish members.” Adolphe Crémieux,
the founder and leader of the Alliance, was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of
France and of the Rite of Misraïm. Maurice Joly, a member of Crémieux’s Misraïm
lodge, was the author of Dialogues aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, an attack on the despotism of Napoleon III
published in 1864, which is widely accepted as having been the source plagiarized
to produce the Protocols of Zion.[1232]
Joly’s
work also supposedly as inspiration for Hermann Goedsche (1815 – 1878) to write
his novel Biarritz, published in 1668, which is
also believed to be a source for The Protocols.[1233]
In 1848, Goedsche worked for the Kreuzzeitung, a conservative newspaper whose founders included Otto von Bismarck
and Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802 – 1861), a German-Jewish constitutional lawyer
and philosopher associated with Schelling. The chapter “At the Jewish Cemetery
in Prague” described a secret rabbinical cabal, Council of Representatives of
The Twelve Tribes of Israel, which meets in the cemetery of Prague at midnight
for one of their centennial meetings, to plot world domination. The chapter
closely resembles a scene in Alexandre Dumas’ The Queen’s Necklace, published in 1848, where Cagliostro, chief
of the Unknown Superiors, among whom are Swedenborg, arranges the Affair of the
Diamond Necklace, a scandal involving Queen Marie Antoinette, which contributed
to the French Revolution of 1789.[1234] Goedsche appears as a
character The
Prague Cemetery
by Umberto Eco, whose protagonist is named Simone Simonini.
At the
meeting, described by Goedsche as the Fifth Sanhedrin, what is known as “The
Rabbi’s Speech” is delivered, next to the tomb of the Great Master of Kabbalah,
Simeon ben Yehuda, where their true god, the Golden Calf of Genesis, appears to
them amidst a blue flame. He announces to those assembled that, “The day when
we shall have made ourselves the sole possessors of all the gold in the world,
the real power will be in our hands, and then the promises which were made to
Abraham will be fulfilled.” Celebrating the power of these Jewish conspirators,
he adds:
Thus, in Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Rome, Naples, etc., and in all the Rothschild branches everywhere the Jews are the financial masters, simply by possessing so many milliards;… Today all reigning emperors, kings, and princes are burdened with debts contracted in keeping up large standing armies to support their toppling thrones. The stock exchange assesses and regulates those debts, and to a great extent we are masters of the stock exchange everywhere.[1235]
Among the methods to achieve their goal are the acquisition of landed property, infiltration into the fields of philosophy, medicine, law, economy and high public offices, including the Church, as well as branches of science, of art, of literature. Jews are to be encouraged to take Christian wives and mistresses. Most important is control of the second power after gold: the press, to define public morality and undermine Christianity by “using the allurements of the passions as our weapon, we shall declare open war on everything that people respect and venerate.” According to the Rabbi, alluding to the Communist movement:
It is in our interest that we should at least make a show of zeal for the social questions of the moment, especially for improving the lot of the workers, but in reality our efforts must be geared to getting control of this movement of public opinion and directing it.[1236]
A year
after Joly’s work was published, Des Mousseaux related in Le Juif, that he had received
a letter from a German statesman stating:
Since the revolutionary recrudescence of 1848, I have had relations with a Jew who, from vanity, betrayed the secret of the secret societies with which he had been associated, and who warned me eight or ten days beforehand of all the revolutions which were about to break out at any point of Europe. I owe to him the unshakeable conviction that all these movements of “oppressed peoples,” etc., etc., are devised by half a dozen individuals, who give their orders to the secret societies of all Europe. The ground is absolutely mined beneath our feet, and the Jews provide a large contingent of these miners…[1237]
Bakunin’s
anti-Semitism was expressed in his “To the Companions of the Federation of
International Sections of Jura.” The Jura Federation
represented the anarchist, Bakuninist faction formed during infighting in the First
International between Bakunin and Marx’s factions. According to Bakunin:
At bottom the Jews of every country are really friends only with the Jews of all countries, regardless of all the differences which may exist between their social positions, their degrees of education, their political opinions and their religious cults. It is no longer the superstitious worship of Jehovah that constitutes the Jew today; a baptized Jew is no less a Jew. There are Catholic, Protestant, pantheistic and atheistic Jews, reactionary, liberal, even democrats and socialists. Above all they are Jews, and this establishes between all the individuals of this singular race, across all the religious, political and social oppositions, an indissoluble mutual union and solidarity—It is a powerful chain, at once broadly cosmopolitan and narrowly national, in the sense of race, which links the kings of the Bank, the Rothschilds, or the most scientifically elevated intelligences, with the ignorant and superstitious Jews of Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, Africa and Asia. I do not think there is a Jew in the world today who does not flinch with hope and pride when he hears the sacred name of the Rothschilds.[1238]
Nevertheless, Bakunin notes that the Jews are “one of the most intelligent races on earth,” and cites as examples: Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, his son Felix and his friend Meyerbeer, Heine, Börne and even Karl Marx. However, according to Bakunin, “But, beside these great minds, there is the small fry: an innumerable crowd of little Jews, bankers, usurers, industrialists, merchants, literati, journalists, politicians, socialists and speculators always.”[1239] Among them Bakunin was referring to Moses Hess and his circle inside the First International, who had suspected him of being a Russian spy. In 1871, Moses Hess was a member of the First International in the camp of Marx’s supporters. Bakunin attacked Hess as a member of Marx’s camp, which he branded a “synagogue.” Bakunin called Hess “a Jewish pygmy in Marx’s entourage” and claimed that “All the Jewish world, which is one gang of exploiters, a people of leeches, a glued-on parasite that does nothing but guzzle, transcending not only political borders but all differences of political opinion—this Jewish world stands today on one side at the orders of Marx and on the other side of the orders of Rothschild.”[1240]
Another work that appeared claiming to expose a Jewish conspiracy, was The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita. The document, which was supposedly originally produced by the Italian Carbonari, was written by Piccolo Tigre (“Little Tiger”), and first published by Jacques Crétineau-Joly, in his book L’Église romaine en face de la Révolution in 1859. In 1846, Crétineau-Joly had met personally with Pope Pius IX who gave him a number of documents on the Alta Vendita, the highest lodge of the Carbonari, including seized correspondence, and asked him to write a history of secret societies.[1241] Monsignor George F. Dillon, in his 1885 book the War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization, claimed that the author “Piccolo Tigre” was supposedly the pseudonym of a Jewish Freemason. According to the Permanent Instructions of the Alta Vendita:
Ever since we have established ourselves as a body of action, and that order has commenced to reign in the bosom of the most distant lodge, as in that one nearest the centre of action, there is one thought which has profoundly occupied the men who aspire to universal regeneration. That is the thought of the enfranchisement of Italy, from which must one day come the enfranchisement of the entire world, the fraternal republic, and the harmony of humanity.[1242]
Dillon reported that, as communicated by Major-General Burnaby MP to the Jesuit Reverend Sir Christopher Bellew, when Cavour and Palmerston determined the moment opportune, they unleashed the Italian Revolution in conjunction with the Masonic lodges. With Italy then a hodge-podge of states, Mazzini led a revolt in 1848 against the “despotic” and “theocratic” regime of the Pope in central Italy. In March 1849, a constituent assembly abolished the temporal authority of the papacy and proclaimed the Roman Republic. However, France, under the leadership of Louis-Napoleon, quickly organized a military intervention, crushing Mazzini’s political experiment in Rome and reinstated the pope. After the failure of the Mazzini’s 1848 revolution, Garibaldi took the leadership of the Italian nationalists who began to look to the Kingdom of Sardinia as the leaders of the unification movement. After a short and disastrous renewal of the war with Austria in 1849, Charles Albert abdicated in 1849 in favor of his son Victor Emmanuel II. In 1852, a liberal ministry under Count of Cavour, was installed and the Kingdom of Sardinia became the key source of support driving Italian unification. A constitution had been conceded to the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1848, which finally became the Kingdom of a united Italy in 1861, after much of the Papal State’ territory was conquered, with Victor Emmanuel II as king.
However, following the unification of most of Italy, tensions between the monarchists and republicans erupted. Garibaldi was finally arrested for challenging Cavour’s leadership, setting off worldwide controversy. In 1866, Otto von Bismarck and Victor Emmanuel II formed an alliance with the Kingdom of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War. In exchange, Prussia would allow Italy to annex Austrian-controlled Venice. When King Emmanuel agreed, the Third Italian War of Independence broke out. Though Italy fared poorly in the war against Austria, Prussia’s victory allowed Italy to annex Venice.
Between 1864 and 1870, Prussia, led by Otto von Bismarck, a purported leader of the Palladian Rite, fought three campaigns, including the Second Schleswig, the Austro-Prussian and the Franco-Prussian war, at the end of which it was able to consolidate the different parts of Germany under the Prussian crown. The Franco-Prussian War, which had begun in 1870, between the Second French Empire of Napoleon III and the German states of the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia, under Otto von Bismarck. To keep the large Prussian Army at bay, France abandoned its positions in Rome, which protected the remnants of the Papal States and Pius IX, in order to fight the Prussians. Italy benefited from Prussia’s victory against France by being able to take over the Papal States from French authority. Rome was captured by the kingdom of Italy after several battles against official troops of the papacy. Italian unification was completed, and shortly afterward Italy’s capital was moved to Rome.
Between 1790 and 1850, the city of Jena was a focal point of the German Romanticism and the German Vormärz (“pre-March”)—the period in the history of Germany in the lead-up to the 1848 March Revolution—as well as of the student liberal and unification movement. Many of the leaders of the Revolutions of 1848 were influenced by Father Jahn (1778 – 1852), who laid the foundations for the German nationalism that involved into Nazism, through his membership in the Burschenschaft fraternity system in Jena and the Tugendbund (“League of Virtue”), that emerged following the humiliating Prussian defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt in 1806. As reveled by René le Forestier, in his classic, Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande (“The Illuminati of Bavaria and German Freemasonry”), the French imperial police became concerned at the rise of a number of patriotic societies, like the Tugendbund, which they believed were the result of the on-going conspiratorial workings of the Illuminati. Vincent Lombard de Langres (1765 – 1830), in an anonymous work published in 1819, titled Des Societés Secrètes en Allemagne et dans d’autres contrées, de la Secte des Illuminés, du Tribunal Secret, de l’assassinat de Kotzebue (“Secret Societies in Germany and elsewhere, of the Illuminati Sect, the Secret Tribunal, the Kotzebue assassination”) denounced the Burschenschaft fraternity movement, which grew out of the Tugendbund, as an arm of the Illuminati conspiracy.[1243] In fact, the Burschenschaft movement had its base of operations at the University of Jena, where Bode had been attempting to revive the Illuminati, and to which belonged the key figures of involved in Weimar Classicism, centered around Moses Mendelssohn.[1244]
It was recognized, however, that the Illuminati had gone from being the orchestrators of the French Revolution, to now becoming opponents to the government it produced. The change was explained by the anonymous author of a Mémoire sur les Illuminés et l’Allemagne (“Memoirs about the Illuminati and Germany”), written around 1810, which clarified that, since Napoleon changed the foundations of the social order and, through his influence on Germany, granted the German princes a guarantee of protection against them, the Illuminati had turned all their efforts against the French system. To make Germany independent from France was now their sole aim, and the means to achieve it was to mobilize public opinion against Napoleon by arousing political and religious fanaticism.[1245] The Illuminati, reported to the Mémoire, adjusted their appeals according to the interests of the various classes of the order:
To the nobility, they promised the
restoration of ancient feudal forms; to the patricians of the former Free
Imperial Cities, the return of the old Germanic independence with republican
forms; to merchants and manufacturers, the re-establishment of trade relations
with England; to those who cultivate the arts and sciences, a development of
civilization that will lead to the establishment of an aristocracy of men of
letters, etc. etc. etc.[1246]
As noted by Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew, the word Tugend (“virtue”), a prominent a value of the Enlightenment, became the core of Moses Mendelssohn’s religious philosophy, believing it could help counter the negative stereotypes of the Jews.[1247] An earlier society, also named Tugendbund, had been founded in 1786, by Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter Dorothea Schlegel, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and Henriette Herz best known for the salonnières she started with a group of emancipated Jews in Prussia.[1248] Also attending Henrietta’s salons was Friedrich von Gentz (1764 – 1832), an Austrian diplomat and a writer, who with Prince Metternich was one of the main forces behind the organization, management and protocol of the Congress of Vienna. Gentz also worked closely with the Rothschilds.[1249] Also close to the Rothschilds was Heinrich Heine, whose friend, Ludwig Börne, a member the Masonic Judenloge,[1250] was also a close friend of Henrietta’s husband, Mark Herz, who was close to Moses Mendelssohn and David Friedländer.[1251] The confused interpretation that would result from an attempt to combine Jewish identity and German nationalism was explained by Friedländer:
I am a Prussian citizen. I have sworn solemnly to promote and support my Fatherland. Both duty and gratitude demand that I achieve this with all my might. First of all, I must endeavor to join with my fellow citizens, to approach them in custom and habit, to enter with them into social and personal connections; for the bonds of sociability and love bind more closely and strongly than the law itself. And only through these bonds can I achieve the aim of living with my fellow citizens in harmony, peace, and friendship.[1252]
Assimilated Jews were often involved in supporting the competing, but sometimes overlapping causes of liberalism and nationalism. The European idea of nationalism is founded on the notion of a single national identity, based on a combination of shared culture, ethnicity, geography, language, politics, religion, traditions and history.[1253] Although the Rosicrucian movement purportedly ended in disaster when their appointment of Frederick V of the Palatinate precipitated the Thirty Years War in in 1618, it was the Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, which ended it and the Eighty Years War, which laid the foundations for the creation of a New World Order, as a global federation of nation-states.
In the past, the world was divided into Empires that adhered to a particular shared ideology, many of them multi-ethnic. The novel European idea of nationalism is founded on the notion of a single national identity, based on a combination of shared culture, ethnicity, geography, language, politics, religion, traditions and history.[1254] Scholars frequently place the beginning of nationalism with the American Declaration of Independence or with the French Revolution, for their impact on European intellectuals.[1255] The notion of nationalism, as a method for mobilizing public opinion around a new state based on popular sovereignty, went back to such philosophers such as Rousseau and Voltaire, whose ideas influenced the French Revolution.[1256] Much of the nineteenth-century European nationalism arose with Napoleon’s rise to power, when he took advantage of his invasion of much of Europe to spread revolutionary ideas.[1257]
Scholars frequently place the beginning of nationalism with the American Declaration of Independence or with the French Revolution, for their impact on European intellectuals.[1258] The notion of nationalism, as a method for mobilizing public opinion around a new state based on popular sovereignty, went back to such philosophers such as Rousseau and Voltaire, whose ideas influenced the French Revolution.[1259] Much of the nineteenth-century European nationalism arose with Napoleon’s rise to power, when he took advantage of his invasion of much of Europe to spread revolutionary ideas.[1260]
Under the First French Empire (1804–1814), German nationalism had begun to emerge in the reorganized German states. Due in part to the shared experience, albeit under French dominance, various justifications emerged to the concept of a unified Germany. As Fichte proclaimed in his “Address to the German Nation”:
The first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.[1261]
The invasion of the Holy Roman Empire by Napoleon’s French Empire and its subsequent dissolution brought about a German liberal nationalism, which advocated the creation of a modern German nation-state based upon liberal democracy, constitutionalism, representation, and popular sovereignty while opposing absolutism.[1262] Germans, for the most part, had been a loose and disunited people since the Reformation, when the Holy Roman Empire was shattered into a patchwork of over 300 states following the end of the Thirty Years’ War with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Since the start of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the German lands had been divided between Catholics and Protestants and linguistic diversity was large as well. Napoleon consolidated the majority of the German-speaking states into 16 larger client states following the Empire’s demise in 1806, forming a loose military alliance known as the Confederation of the Rhine, which grew to include 36 states. After the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars at the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815, German nationalists tried but failed to establish Germany as a nation-state, instead the German Confederation was created that was a loose collection of independent German states that lacked strong federal institutions.
As explained by Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, “We see the old German nationalism after its grand flaming up in the Wars of Liberation (1813), after its deepest foundation by Fichte, after its explosive rise through Stein and Arndt… the unqualified greatness of those men who in 1813 again led Germany from the abyss to the heights.”[1263] The origins of Pan-Germanism began with the birth of Romantic nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars, whose early proponents were two members of the Tugendbund, Father Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt, who was influenced by Fichte and who was a close friend of the Jewish salonnière Henriette Herz, whose friends and acquaintances were Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Mirabeau, Fanny von Arnstein, and Madame de Genlis [1264] The Tugendbund (“League of Virtue”) was a society formed in the spring of 1808, by a number of Freemasons, as a response of Prussia’s devastating defeat in the war with France and the oppressive Peace of Tilsit, and which became the germ of the Prussian reforms, which paved the way for the unification of Germany.
The Tugendbund was headed by Baron vom Stein (1757 – 1831), a Prussian statesman who introduced the Prussian reforms, which paved the way for the unification of Germany, and who according to the French imperial police, was a member of the Illuminati.[1265] According to Thomas Frost, in The Secret Societies of the European Revolution (1876), Stein “conceived the idea of spreading over Germany a network of secret societies, by the agency of which the people should be prepared for a struggle, when the time should seem opportune, for the liberation of the Fatherland.”[1266] The Tugendbund soon numbered in its ranks most of the Councillors of State, many officers of the army, and a considerable number of the professors of literature and science. William I, Elector of Hesse, brother of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel, was a member. “My desire for the aggrandizement of Prussia,” Stein wrote to Hans Christoph Ernst von Gagern (1766 – 1852), whom he had appointed to the administrative council for the reconquered Prussian lands in western Germany:
…proceeded not from a blind partiality to that State, but from the conviction that Germany is weakened by a system of partition ruinous alike to her national learning and national feelings… It is not for Prussia, but for Germany, that I desire a closer, a firmer internal combination—a wish that will accompany me to the grave. The division of our national strength may be gratifying to some; it can never be so to me.[1267]
Baron vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg were together responsible for a series of Liberal reforms in Prussia. In 1778, Hardenberg was raised to the rank of Privy Councillor and entered the service of the Duke of Brunswick in 1782. He was initiated into Strict Observance Freemasonry in 1778, and into Illuminati in August 1782, attaining Illuminatus Major in December of that year.[1268] Hardenberg, who attended the salons of Fanny and Caecilie Itzig, was a founding member of Masonic lodge Zur Wahrheit und Freundschaft (“Truth and Friendship”), with a patent from the Prussian Grand lodge in Berlin, the Royal York of Friendship.[1269] Around 1787, E.T.A. Hoffmann became friends with Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel the Younger (1775 – 1843), the son of a pastor, and nephew of Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel the Elder, the well-known writer friend of Immanuel Kant. In 1810, Hippel the Younger became an employee of Hardenberg, and the next year joined the State Council. Hippel joined Freemasonry in 1797 and was one of the founders in 1803 of the lodge Zur goldenen Harfe (“To the Golden Harp”), under the jurisdiction of The Three Globes in Berlin, and was elected its Grand Master in 1815.[1270]
During the negotiations at Tilsit, Napoleon refused to act upon Hardenberg’s recommendations after which Hardenberg retired. Napoleon suggested Stein as a possible successor. On October 8, 1807, Frederick William III of Prussia, utterly depressed by the terrible terms of the Treaty of Tilsit, called Stein to office and entrusted him with extensive powers.[1271] Stein was now for a time virtually dictator of the reduced and nearly-bankrupt Prussian state, during which he instituted a number of drastic reforms. First came the October Edict, issued in 1807, which abolished the institution of serfdom throughout Prussia, and abrogated all class distinctions with regard to occupations and callings of any kind. After it became known that he had written a letter in which he criticized Napoleon, Stein was obliged to resign, which he did in 1808 and retired to the Austrian Empire, from which he was summoned to the Russian Empire by Tsar Alexander I in 1812.
Arndt, along with Achim von Arnim, his brother-in-law Clemens Brentano, and other members of Madame de Staël’s Coppet Group, including the Schlegel brothers, was identified by the French imperial police as a member of the Illuminati.[1272] Arndt was married to Anna Maria Louise Schleiermacher, the sister of Herz and Schlegel’s friend Friedrich Schleiermacher, who had been educated among the Moravian Church of Count Zinzendorf.[1273] It was Schleiermacher’s student, Julius Schubring, who wrote the libretto to Felix Mendelssohn’s St. Paul. Like Fichte and Jahn, Arndt began to envision the German nation as a society of ethnic homogeneity, drawing on the history of the German people, especially in the Middle Ages. Arndt also warned of too close contact with Judaism, claiming that the “thousands [of Jews] which by the Russian tyranny will now come upon us even more abounding from Poland,” being from “the impure flood from the East.” Additionally, he warned of a Jewish intellectual conspiracy, claiming that Jews had “usurped” half of literature.[1274] Arndt played an important role for the early national and liberal Burschenschaft movement and for the unification movement, and his song Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland? (“What is the German Fatherland”) served as an unofficial German national anthem.
During Napoleon’s rule over Germany, Arnim and Brentano had published the most famous German folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boys Magic Horn”). Baron vom Stein commended the book for its important role in arousing Volk patriotism to overthrow the French.[1275] Father Jahn, who in his day was considered a liberal revolutionary, lent support to Stein’s reforms. Baron vom Stein, who aimed at transforming and modernizing Prussia, approached poets, writers and scholars to recruit them to support the reform movement by means of public propaganda.[1276] Participating in this endeavor to create a “national myth” were, among others, Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Father Jahn and the well-known Berlin publisher Heinrich von Kleist (1777 – 1811), whose patriotic stage dramas, along with Fichte’s 1808 “Addresses to the German Nation,” and Arndt’s war poetry, were all instrumental in shaping German nationalism.[1277] In 1801, Kleist visited Paris, then settled in Switzerland, where he befriended Ludwig Wieland (1777 – 1819), son of Illuminatus Christoph Martin Wieland. In 1802, Kleist returned to Germany, where he visited Goethe, Schiller and Wieland in Weimar. Kleist gathered around him a number of Prussian intellectuals who called themselves the Kleist Circle, and included Fichte and the Grimm brother’s professor, Karl von Savigny.[1278] Julius Eduard Hitzig had been the publisher of the Berliner Abendblätter, a popular newspaper edited by von Arnim and Kleist.[1279]
When the forces of Frederick William III of Prussia were defeated by Napoleon at the twin battles Jena and Auerstedt, fought on October 14, 1806, subjugating the Kingdom of Prussia to the French Empire, Jahn said the horror turned his beard grey.[1280] Since 1806, writers and intellectuals such as Johann Philipp Palm, Fichte, Ernst Moritz Arndt, Father Jahn, and Theodor Körner had been criticizing the French occupation of much of Germany, and advocated a joint effort by all Germans, including Prussians and Austrians, to expel the French. From 1810, Arndt and Jahn repeatedly appealed to high-ranking figures in Prussian society to prepare such an uprising. In early 1813, Jahn took an active part in the formation of the famous Lützowsches Freikorps (“Lützow Free Corps”), a volunteer force of the Prussian army during the Napoleonic Wars, who used the black-red-gold color scheme that would eventually be adopted as the flag of Germany.
After he met Arndt in 1800, which nationalistic sentiments shifted to the volk. Jahn was an admirer of what he believed were the virtues of the Prussians. Jahn pleaded for the creation of a greater Germany including Switzerland, the Low Countries, Denmark, Prussia and Austria, with a new capital to be called Teutonia.[1281] To find unity, as Jahn believed, the Germans would need to identify some bond more “essential” than the state. The discovery that that reality was the mystical force of Volkstum (“folklore”) led Jahn to the conclusion that scholarship must develop the study of Volk, for which he founded his Deutsches Volkstum, which appeared in 1810. For that purpose, it was necessary for peoples to maintain the purity of their race. Rome had fallen for that reason. “The purer a people, the better. The day universal monarchy will be founded will be the last day of mankind.” According to Jahn:
The holy office of the people which has to
make the world happy, is difficult to learn, and even more difficult to
fulfill, but it is a lust of virtue, a human divinity, to bless the earth as
its saviour and to implant in the peoples the seeds of true humanity… There is
still space and material for greatness on this earth. There are still holy wars
of mankind to fight, the whole earth is a promised land, still unconquered by right, happiness and virtue.[1282]
As Jahn admitted, “Germany’s unity was the dream of my waking life, was the dawn of my youth, the sunshine of manhood and is now the evening star that guides me to eternal rest…”[1283] Jahn is known in Germany as the Turnvater (“father of gymnastics”). By connecting Fichte’s linguistic philosophy with his own military ambitions, Jahn emphasized a national necessity on the idea of Turnen (“gymnastics”).[1284] Jahn’s writing is credited with the founding of the German gymnastics movement as well as influencing the German Campaign of 1813, during which a coalition of German states effectively ended the occupation by Napoleon’s First French Empire. In response to what he considered as the humiliation of his native land by Napoleon, Jahn conceived the idea of restoring the spirits of his countrymen by the development of their physical and moral powers through the practice of gymnastics. These athletics clubs called for “glory, freedom, and the mother country” and, instead of the Prussian black and white, adopted the symbolic colors of the black, the red, and the golden-yellow, which according to Jahn, symbolized the path from the black night of slavery through bloody struggle towards the golden dawn of freedom.[1285]
Also joining Jahn in the Lützow Free Corps
was Theodor Körner, a
friend of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schlegel. Theodor’s mother was a
friend of Jewish salonnière Henriette Herz, and his father Gottfried Körner was a friend of Schiller.[1286] Körner became a
national hero in Germany after he inspired his comrades by patriotic songs like
Schwertlied (“Sword Song”), composed only a few hours before his death, and
Lützow’s wilde Jagd (“Lützow’s Wild Hunt). Körner wrote a letter to Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein, the daughter of
Daniel Itzig’s daughter Fanny von Arnstein, after he had
been severely wounded in the head by a saber, signed Ihr verwundeter Sänger
(“Your wounded singer”).[1287]
“Germany is up!” Körner
wrote to his father on the March 10, 1813, before joining the Lützow Free Corps:
The Prussian eagle awakens in all hearts the great hope of Germany—at least Northern Germany—freedom. My muse sighs for her Fatherland; let me be her worthy disciple. Yes, dearest father, I have made up my mind to be a soldier! I am ready to cast away the gifts that Fortune has showered upon me here to win myself a Fatherland, were it with my blood.[1288]
One theory posits that the term Freikorps was the source of Der Freischütz, the story about a hunter making a pact with the devil.[1289] The Freischütz tale became widely circulated in 1810 when Johann August Apel included it as the first tale in the first volume of the Gespensterbuch, and is included in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil's Elixirs.[1290] Apel’s friends included Fouqué and Carl Borromäus von Miltitz (1781 – 1845), who held a literary circle, known as the Scharfenberger Circle, at his ancestral castle Schloss Scharfenberg for about six years from 1811, including Novalis, Fouqué, Apel, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, who established the principles of musical romanticism, and Christian Gottfried Körner, a friend of Schiller, who edited the works of his deceased son Theodor Körner.[1291]
With Achim von
Arnim, Arndt was active in a club called the Gesetzlose Gesellschaft (“Lawless
society”), many of whose members later joined the Deutsche Tischgesellschaft
(“German Table Society”), an exclusive luncheon club founded in 1811 in Berlin,
by Arnim and Clemens Brentano. The Tischgesellschaft was an
invitation-only club for men, whose explicit guidelines, which excluded not
only Jews, but even Jewish converts, caused a scandal in the Berlin of 1811. Founders
of the club also served as faculty members at the new University of Berlin, established
the previous year. The list of prominent professors who were invited to join included
legal historian Fichte, Savigny and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Though the Tischgesellschaft was a pointed
attack on the Jewish salons, many of the members had been and even continued to
be guests at Jewish homes. Schleiermacher was a member
from the beginning and remained Henriette’s close friend. And for years after
1811, Henriette’s friend and fellow salonnière Rahel Varnhagen maintained
her stormy friendship with Brentano.[1292]
Arndt invited Herz to his home in 1819, a few months after the hepp hepp riots which had
erupted in at least thirty German towns, opposition to
local emancipation efforts. At the time, Arndt’s writings were blamed as an
impetus for the riots. In fact, Rahel Varnhagen, in a famous letter to her brother
Ludwig Robert (1778 – 1832), actually named Arndt as one of the causes of the
pogrom.[1293]
According to Kohn, Jahn’s influence was exercised in three movements which have remained characteristic of German nationalism: military free-corps of patriotic volunteers, gymnastic associations for the training of patriotic fighters; and patriotic student fraternities.[1294] Father Jahn’s gymnastic associations exposed middle class German youth to nationalist and democratic ideals, which took the form of the nationalistic and liberal democratic college fraternities known as the Burschenschaften. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, Germany consisted of a loose confederation. After the German “Wars of Liberation” against Napoleon and the French occupation, many people were bitter about dreams of German national unity shattered after the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Democratic reforms were stalled, and governments had cracked down on press freedom and rights of association. The Frankfurt National Assembly, a meeting of the representatives of the 39 states, established in Frankfurt am Main in 1816, had little influence.
A year earlier, the first gymnastic societies (Burschenschaften) were founded, mainly on the initiative of Father Jahn. Jahn and his friend Friedrich Friesen (1784 – 1814 were the link between the Lützow Free Corps and the gymnastic organization they had founded in 1810 in Berlin. Friesen had studied at the Academy of Architecture, Berlin, and collaborated on the great atlas of Mexico edited by Alexander von Humboldt, whose friends and benefactors included Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph and David Friedländer.[1295] In 1812, Jahn and Friesen drafted a project for the reorganization of student life at the universities and submitted it to Fichte, then the rector of the University of Berlin, who rejected it as “un-German.”[1296] Jahn then turned to the University of Jena, where in 1815 a number of students, many of whom participated in the Lützow Free Corps, founded the Urburschenschaft organization in order to encourage German unity at the university. The German students demonstrated for a national state and a liberal constitution condemning the “reactionary” forces in the newly recreated states of the German Confederation. At least, a constitution for the German state of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach including articles on freedom of speech, press and assembly was amended by Grand Duke Karl August in 1816.
On October 18, 1817, about 500 students, members of the newly founded Burschenschaften student fraternities from the Jena and Halle universities came together for a “national festival” at the Wartburg castle to condemn conservatism and call for German unity under the motto “Honour – Freedom – Fatherland.” The date was chosen to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the bloody Battle of Nations at Leipzig, and the three-hundredth anniversary of the nailing of the ninety-five theses by Martin Luther, who had used the castle as a refuge. At the meeting in the Wartburg knights’ hall, speeches were held about celebrated Luther as a proto-German nationalist, linking Lutheranism to German nationalism, and helping arouse religious sentiments for the cause of German nationhood. This was followed by the Christian hymn Now Thank We All Our God as sung by the victorious Prussian troops after the 1757 Battle of Leuthen and a final blessing, the convention resembled a Protestant church service.
Hundreds of students from Berlin, Breslau, Erlangen, Gießen, Göttingen, Greifswald, Heidelberg, Kiel, Königsberg, Leipzig, Marburg, Rostock und Tübingen joined the festivities. Jena professors were also among the participants. Speakers at the event included Jahn’s friend and pupil, a member of the Jena Burschenschaft, Hans Ferdinand Massmann (1797 – 1874), a German philologist, known for his studies in Old German language and literature. The culmination of the festival, with Jahn as “the guiding spirit,” was a book burning of several books and other items that symbolized reactionary attitudes, including the Code Napoléon and August von Kotzebue’s History of the German Empires. Among the participants was Karl Ludwig Sand (1795 – 1820), from the Burschenschaft in Jena, who would assassinate Kotzebue two years later. Sand’s murder of Kotzebue gave Prince Metternich the pretext to issue the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which outlawed the Burschenschaften and put limits on freedom of the press and the rights of members of such organizations, banning them from public office, teaching or studying at universities in the states of the German Confederation.
Julius Eduard Hitzig’s friend, E.T.A. Hoffmann, had become friends with Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel the Younger, who in 1811 became an employee of Illuminatus, the State Chancellor Karl August von Hardenberg, and the next year joined the State Council, where he wrote the famous proclamation An Mein Volk (“To My People”), by Frederick William III of Prussia in 1813. The proclamation, addressed to his subjects, the Preußen und Deutsche (“Prussians and Germans”), called for their support in the fight against Napoleon, and led to the massive expansion of the Prussian Army, and to the creation of militias, such as the Jäger volunteers and Lützow Free Corps. During the Meister Floh affair, Hippel used his influence to defend Hoffmann, and was a frequent visitor during his final illness.
Hoffmann had been appointed in 1819 as a member of Immediate Commission for the investigation of political dissidence, established by Frederick William III of Prussia in the wake of the Carlsbad Decrees, and released Father Jahn, claiming he had been imprisoned on insufficient grounds. This brought him into conflict with Commissioner Karl Albert von Kamptz. When Hoffmann caricatured Kamptz in a story Meister Floh, (“The Master Flea”) is a humorous fairytale fantasy novel first published in 1822, Kamptz began legal proceedings. Those ended when Hoffmann’s case of syphilis was found to be life-threatening. Frederick William III asked for a reprimand only, but no action was ever taken. Eventually Meister Floh was published with the offending passages removed.[1297]
Nevertheless, throughout the nineteenth century, the Lützow Free Corps were greatly praised and glorified by German nationalists, and a cult of heroism built up around them. The black-red-gold color scheme formed by the combination of black cloth, red trim, and brass buttons on their uniforms would later become associated with republican and Pan-German ideals. During the Hambacher Fest of 1832 and Revolutions of 1848 in the German states, flags with these colors were used, if even often displayed in reverse order compared to modern day’s flag of Germany. This combination, reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—whose heraldic coat-of-arms depicted a black eagle on a shield of gold, often in later times with red beak and legs—was selected as the official national colors of the German flag in 1919, and again in 1949.
As a reaction to the March Revolution of 1848, the Bundestag repealed the Carlsbad Decrees on April 2, 1848. Many Burschenschafter took part in the Hambacher Fest in 1832 and the Revolution in 1848/49. The revolutions of 1848 spread from France across Europe, and erupted soon after in Austria and Germany. This resulted in the resignation of Prince von Metternich as chief minister to Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria, and his going into exile in Britain. Fearing the fate of Louis Philippe I (1773 – 1850)—the son of Illuminatus Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, Philippe Égalité—who was forced to abdicate after the outbreak of the Revolutions of 1848, some monarchs in Germany at least temporarily accepted some of the demands of the revolutionaries. The revolutions, which stressed pan-Germanism, demonstrated popular discontent with the traditional, largely autocratic political structure of the thirty-nine independent states of the Confederation that inherited the German territory of the former Holy Roman Empire after its dismantlement as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. In March 1848, crowds of people gathered in Berlin to present their demands in an “address to the king.” Frederick William IV, taken by surprise, yielded to all the demonstrators’ demands, including parliamentary elections, a constitution, and freedom of the press. He promised that “Prussia was to be merged forthwith into Germany.” A Constituent National Assembly was elected on May 1, becoming the first freely elected parliament for all German states, including the German-populated areas of the Austrian Empire.
Among the primary causes of the revolutions
were calls for liberation and for elections of assemblies to write
constitutions and guarantee basic rights universally to all citizens, and the
emancipation of Jews.[1298]
“Part of the reason that Jewish emancipation became a major issue in many of
the deliberations,” explained Glenn R. Sharfman, “was that Jews themselves
participated in the overthrowing of the monarchies as well as the writing of
the new constitutions.”[1299]
Paragraph 13 of the Basic Rights of the Frankfurt Parliament stated that civil
rights were not to be conditional on belonging to a particular religious faith.
For the Jews, this was a great improvement over the Act of 1815 which allowed
special legislation dealing with Jews. In “Who’s
Afraid of Jewish Universalism,” Carsten Wilke observed, “For German Jews,
loyalty to universal values offered a defense strategy against the threatening
accusation of communal separatism.”[1300]
Taking the lead from Paris, Heine and Börne became the leading champions of freedom in Germany. Moses Hess, Johann Jacoby and Gabriel Riesser—chairman of the Hamburg Temple, and member of the Frankfurt Judenloge—also played leading roles in the revolution of 1848-49.[1301] Two of the five victims in Vienna in 1848 were Jews, while at least ten Jews died in the fighting in Berlin. Riesser was not the only Jew fighting for German unification, five others joined him at the Vorparlament (“preparliament”), and seven Jews were elected to the German national assembly. In 1848, Riesser was chosen Vice-President of the National Assembly in Frankfurt, and also a member of the delegation sent to Berlin, to offer William IV of Prussia the crown of Germany. Riesser and countered demands that Jews be placed under separate legislation because they were not Germans by declaring that: “under just laws, Jews would be the most ardent patriots of Germany; they will become Germans along with, as well as among, Germans. Do not presume that discriminatory laws can be tolerated without dealing a disastrous blow to the entire system of freedom, and without introducing demoralization into it!”[1302]
However, on December 2, 1851, Louis-Napoleon staged a coup that marked the end of the Second Republic and the beginning of the Second Empire, became the Emperor of the French, as Napoleon III. Mazzini regarded Napoleon III not only as a traitor and the most dangerous opponent of his goal of Italian unification. Consequently, Mazzini sent a group of terrorists to France to assassinate him. As most of the terrorists came from English territory, with the assistance of Englishmen, the French press accused the English government of supporting them.[1303] The most famous attempt on Napoleon III’s life was carried out by Felice Orsini (1819 – 1858), with a grenade on January 14, 1858. Although the explosion missed its target, 156 people, including innocent bystanders, were killed.
Disappointed at the failure of the revolutions of 1848, many of its participants, known as “Forty-Eighters,” went into exile, emigrating to Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Leading “Forty-Eighters” included Gottfried Kinkel (1815 – 1882) and Johannes Ronge (1813 – 1887). In London, Kinkel had been involved with the Communist League but later joined the anti-Marx split led August Willich (1810 – 1878) and Karl Schapper (1812 – 1870.[1304] In 1949, Willich, a former Prussian military officer, and a member of the Communist League, formed the Willich Corps, which combined with other revolutionary groups to form an army of about 30,000 strong, which was joined by Engels. As a member of Young Germany, Schapper participated in Mazzini’s attempt at an armed invasion of Savoy from Switzerland and took an active part in the Revolutions of 1848–1849. However, both Schapper and Willich later emigrated to the United States and become involved in the American Civil War, serving in the Union Army. After reconciling with Marx Schapper was involved in founding the First International in London in 1864.
Kinkel developed a friendship with one of his students, Carl Christian Schurz (1829 – 1906), who fought for democratic reforms in the German revolutions of 1848–1849. Schurz, who was born in the Kingdom of Prussia, fought for democratic reforms in the German revolutions of 1848–1849 as a member of the academic fraternity association Deutsche Burschenschaft. After the revolution was suppressed, many of leading Burschenschafter, such as Schurz, went abroad. Schurz first fled to France, then went to London. In the first volume of his Reminiscences, Schurz gives a biographical sketch of Mazzini and recalls two meetings he had with him when they were both in London in 1851.[1305] Schurz gained fame in revolutionary circles when he rescued his Kinkel from a Prussian prison in Spandau, and led him into exile into London by 1851. There he met with all the other revolutionaries, including Mazzini, and even led a German delegation welcoming Kossuth into his British exile. Along with Ledru-Rollin, Kinkel was a member of the International Republican Committee, founded by Mazzini.[1306]
Although he wasn’t himself Jewish, Schurz married a Jewish wife, Margarethe Meyer-Schurz (1833 – 1876). Margarethe Meyer’s sister, Bertha Traun, married Johannes Ronge, the principal founder of the German Catholics, dissidents from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1852, Marx and Engels wrote Heroes of the Exile, in which they satirized Forty-Eighters like Ronge, as well as others like, Kinkel, Schurz and Arnold Ruge (1802 – 1880), a friend of Ledru-Rollin. In Paris, Ruge briefly co-edited the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher with Marx. Ronge was obliged to flee to London, where he signed in 1851, with Ruge, Kinkel, Gustav Struve, and others, a democratic manifesto to the German people, and where, with Robert Blum (1807 – 1848), a German Jew who supported the German Catholics, he became the leader of the Freireligiöse, the forerunners of the American Freethinkers.[1307] In London, in company with Mazzini and other radical politicians, Ruge formed a European Democratic Committee.
In 1859, the Ronges moved to Manchester where they opened a kindergarten at which they were joined by Maria Kraus Boelte, a pioneer of the methods of Friedrich Fröbel (1782 – 1852)—a disciple of Father Jahn, a member of the Illuminati front the Tugendbund[1308]—who laid the foundation for modern education and created the concept of the kindergarten.[1309] Fröbel’s nephew and star student was Julius Fröbel (1805 – 1893), who was a friend of Alexander von Humboldt, of Weimar Classicism—whose friend and benefactor was Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph—called his uncle’s school, “a breeding ground of the contemporary revolutionary spirit.”[1310] In 1840, Julius established in Zurich, in connection with Arnold Ruge, and others, a Literary Bureau, which published radical work like David Strauss’ Life of Jesus, Bruno Bauer’s Christianity Rediscovered, Louis Blanc’s History of Ten Years. Having become the chief center of agitation in Europe, the Bureau was censored by the Swiss authorities. In 1843, Fröbel went to Paris, where he met Louis Blanc and Flocon, the editor of La Réforme. Following the Revolution of 1848, Fröbel was elected a member of the Frankfurt Parliament, along with his mentor Father Jahn. Afterward, he accompanied Robert Blum to Vienna, where both joined the bloody October Uprising, out of sympathy for the Hungarian cause led by Kossuth. Fröbel was arrested and later pardoned, but Blum convicted and shot, along with the other leaders of the resistance.[1311]
As noted by Gordon R. Mork, most politically active Jews supported Otto von Bismarck’s nationalist policies.[1312] At the end of the 1850s, explains Ulrike Kirchberger, there was a national revival in Germany.[1313] Germans, for the most part, had been a loose and disunited people since the Reformation, when the Holy Roman Empire was shattered into a patchwork of states following the end of the Thirty Years’ War with the Peace of Westphalia. In Prussia, the king’s brother Wilhelm I (1797 – 1888) succeeded Frederick William IV to the throne, and a new, liberal era was expected, and the crisis in Italy helped to bring the national question back to the public agenda. An economic depression at the end of the 1850s also contributed a passionate nationalism which seized the population in Germany. The Deutsche Nationalverein (“German National Association”), a powerful organization with up to 25,000 members, founded in Frankfurt am Main in 1859, formed the core of the German national movement during the early 1860s. Their central aim was the national unification under Prussian leadership of Kleindeutschland, or Lesser Germany, which excluded Austria. Branches of the National League were also founded in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford and other British cities. The National League in Britain was composed of “Forty-eighters,” like Johannes Ronge and Gottfried Kinkel.
As explained by Glenn R. Sharfman, “Part of the enthusiasm that Jews exhibited for a united Germany stemmed from the belief that one uniform law would be more beneficial than thirty-nine separate ones.”[1314] Reflecting upon the First Schleswig War in 1848, Marx noted in 1853 that “by quarrelling amongst themselves, instead of confederating, Germans and Scandinavians, both of them belonging to the same great race, only prepare the way for their hereditary enemy, the Slav.”[1315] Gabriel Riesser, the most prominent Jewish spokesman for emancipation in the German states, asserted, “If you will grant emancipation with one hand, and with the other the realization of the beautiful dream about the political unification of Germany, I would take the second hand unhesitatingly, because I am convinced that a unified Germany will also include emancipation.”[1316] Julius Rodenberg (1831 – 1914), one of the best-known Jewish journalists of the time, and a contributor to the conservative Kreuzzeitung, visited London several times where he was in touch with leaders of the German National League, and remarked:
These Germans are the real wanderers among the peoples of the earth—the messengers and apostles of world culture—and if you went to the farthest reaches of Thule, I believe you would still find German compatriots there too!… are there any Germans in Germany? In Germany you have Prussians, or Saxons, or Hanoverians and Bückebergers… if you want Germans, go to London, to Quebec, to Buenos Aires… There are only Germans outside Germany.[1317]
Contributors to the Kreuzzeitung included Berthold Auerbach (1812 – 1882), of the Committee for Jewish Affairs in Berlin and a member of the Frankfurt Judenloge.[1318] Auerbach was a lifelong friend of Abraham Geiger of the Hamburg Temple, whose work in the nineteenth century he placed in the same category with Moses Mendelssohn’s in the eighteenth.[1319] Auerbach claimed that his highest goal was “to fuse Mosaism and Hegelian philosophy.”[1320] Auerbach was intended for the ministry, but was estranged from Jewish orthodoxy by the study of Spinoza. Applying Young Hegelian reasoning, Auerbach tried to prove the enduring validity of Judaism by showing that it could still contribute to the “true and universal messianic reign of rational religion.” He also interpreted the idea of Volhtumlichkeit (“German national character”) so as to harmonize both the Jewish and German elements in his own character as well the rest of German society. In his novel Poet and Merchant (1840), Auerbach insisted that its hero remain both a Jew and a German, for to do otherwise “would tear out his life roots”:
Our source is Jewishness… But source water can feed only a poor stream. To become rivers, we must take up from right and left the brooks issuing from that German nationality [Volkstum] amidst which we live.[1321]
In correspondence that was not made public until 1927, it was revealed that Bismarck met several times with Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863. Lassalle considered Fichte as “one of the mightiest thinkers of all peoples and ages,” praising his Addresses to the German Nation in a May 1862 speech as “one of the mightiest monuments of fame which our people possesses, and which, in depth and power, far surpass everything of this sort which has been handed down to us from the literature of all time and peoples.”[1322] Following his conviction for his involvement in the Revolutions of 1848, Lassalle was banned from residing in Berlin. After Lassalle appealed to his friend Alexander von Humboldt to intercede on his behalf before Kaiser Wilhelm I, the ban was rescinded and Lassalle was again officially allowed to live in the Prussian capital.[1323]
In 1863, Lassalle founded the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV) in Leipzig, the first organized mass working-class party in European history. Marx and his associates were disappointed that the ADAV did not choose to join the First International. The socialists grew concerned over the ADAV’s militancy in support of German nationalism and closeness to the militaristic Kingdom of Prussia and the question of Greater Germany.[1324] As the ADAV tried to cooperate with Otto von Bismarck’s government, Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826 – 1900) became disillusioned with the association, and on August 7–9, 1869, with August Bebel (1840 – 1913), founded the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) in Eisenach. Engels and Marx, being a friend and mentor to both Bebel and Liebknecht, welcomed the SDAP into the First International.
When Bismarck was pressed in the Reichstag by Bebel to provide details about his past relationship with Lassalle, he answered:
He was very much a nationalist and a monarchist. His ideal was the German Empire, and here was our point of contact. As I have said he was ambitious, on a large scale, and there is perhaps room for doubt as to whether, in his eyes, the German Empire ultimately entailed the Hohenzollern or the Lassalle dynasty. […] Our talks lasted for hours and I was always sorry when they came to an end.[1325]
According to Margiotta, Rothschild agent Gerson von Bleichröder—a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, founded by leading members of the Haskalah in the circle of Moses Mendelssohn and the Hamburg Temple—also financed Otto von Bismarck’s plans for the unification of Germany.[1326] As noted by Gordon R. Mork, most politically active Jews supported Bismarck’s nationalist policies.[1327] Bismarck drew his leading support from the National Liberal Party, founded by members of the German National Association, and where a number of Jews were prominent. The German National Association dissolved in 1867 after Prussia had attained supremacy in Germany with its victory over rivaling Austria and pushed ahead to unify Germany under Bismarck. Despite his known anti-Semitism, Bismarck’s mother, Luise Wilhelmine Mencken, had often been said to be Jewish.[1328] Bismarck’s eldest son Herbert (1849 – 1904) married Countess Marguerite, who was the daughter of Georg Anton, Count of Hoyos and Alice Whitehead. Alice was a granddaughter of Sir James Whitehead, at one time the leader of the London Jewish community.[1329] Bismarck consulted with Baron Mayer Carl von Rothschild (1820 – 1886), the grandson of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who recommended to him Gerson Bleichröder, who took over Bismarck’s control of the Prussian state and the German Empire. The German-American historian Fritz Stern, author of Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire, has shown that von Bismarck’s successes were heavily attributable to the financial Bleichröder’ support.[1330]
In 1871, when Frederick William IV’s brother, Wilhelm I of Prussia, was proclaimed German Kaiser, and the Second German Reich to succeed the First Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, was born and Bismarck became the first Chancellor of the unified German Empire. In 1840, shortly before his father’s death, Wilhelm I was initiated in a special lodge in Berlin, headed by the Grand Masters of the three Berlin Grand Lodges. His induction into the order was in compliance with his father’s wishes that he not join any one particular lodge or system, but that he belong to every lodge in the kingdom and assume the protectorate of all of them.[1331]
During the Prussian-led unification of Germany, the National Liberals became the dominant party in the Reichstag. Jews won full civil emancipation in North Germany with the Reich law of 1869, which was extended to Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria with the Imperial constitution of 1871. With the economic crash of 1873, criticism grew against Bismarck’s association with well-known Jews such as Bleichröder, Ludwig Bamberger (1823 – 1899) and Eduard Lasker (1829 – 1884). Bamberger took part in the Revolutions of 1848, as well as the republican uprising in the Palatinate and Baden in 1849, after which he was condemned to death but escaped to Switzerland.[1332] Bamberger married Anna Belmont, a relative of the famous banker and Rothschild agent August Belmont, who had emigrated to the United States. He was elected a member of the Reichstag, where he joined the National Liberal Party. In 1852, he went to Paris, where, by means of private connections to the German-Belgian Jewish Bischoffsheim family closely associated with the Goldschmidts, and became managing director of the bank of Bischoffsheim, Goldschmidt & Cie. Lasker at first compromised with Bismarck, who later strenuously opposed Lasker regarding freedom of the press. In 1881, Lasker left the National Liberal Party and helped form the new German Free Thought Party.
When Lasker died in New York in 1884, the Congress of the United States passed a resolution of condolence which read: “That his loss is not alone to be mourned by the people of his native land, where his firm and constant exposition of, and devotion to, free and liberal ideas have materially advanced the social, political and economic conditions of these people, but by the lovers of liberty throughout the world.” Although Bismarck received from the American Minister in Berlin, he declined it, citing that it represented an interference in the political affairs of Germany.[1333] Carl Schurz spoke at Lasker’s funeral in New York.
Historian William E. Weeks has noted three key themes that lent support to the notion of Manifest Destiny: the virtue of the American people, their mission to spread their institutions and the destiny under God to remake the world in the image of the United States.[1334] The origin of the first theme, later known as American exceptionalism, was often traced to America’s Puritan heritage, particularly the Rosicrucian John Winthrop’s famous “City upon a Hill” sermon of 1630, in which he called for the establishment of a virtuous community that would be a shining example to the Old World.[1335] Illuminatus Thomas Paine, in his influential 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, echoed the notion, arguing that the American Revolution provided an opportunity to create a new, better society. John O’Sullivan (1813 – 1895), editor of the Democratic Review, is generally credited with coining the term Manifest Destiny in 1845. The Democratic Review in New York City was the center of the Young America Movement, which was inspired by European reform movements such as the Young Hegelians, Young Germany and Mazzini’s Young Italy, who in league with the B’nai B’rith, the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the Golden Circle, and with backing from the European Rothschilds, played a formative role in the American Civil War.
The revolutions of 1848 drove so many Jewish refugees to the United States that several organizations were formed to aid them, including the Free Sons of Israel, founded in New York City in 1849, and affiliated with the B’nai B’rith, the oldest national Jewish fraternal order still in existence.[1336] Though the term “Forty-Niners” refers to the wave of settlers who move to California in search of gold in 1849, the failed Revolutions of 1848 spurred the significant immigration of “Forty-Eighters,” including many Jews, to America. As Jews came to be viewed as the hidden hand behind the upheavals, large-scale anti-Jewish riots and pogroms broke out all over Europe, continuing after the revolutions were suppressed in 1849. With various governments that had regained their power now executing revolutionaries, the only option for many of them was to flee. Between 1840 and 1850, the number of Jews residing in the United States climbed from 15,000 to 50,000. The Free Sons of Israel were founded by nine Jewish men who, like the B’nai B’rith, were Freemasons and Odd Fellows. It still uses regalia, passwords, ritual and is organized in lodges governed by a Grand Lodge.[1337] Hirsch Heineman, a founder of the B’nai B’rith, served as the first Grand Master.[1338]
In 1852, Mazzini sent the most
famous of all the 1848 European revolutionaries, Lajos Kossuth, and his right-hand man Adriano Lemmi
(1822 – 1896)—Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy and a purported
successor as head of the Palladian Rite—to the United States to organize Young
America lodges in revolutionary strategy.[1339] In the United States, according to Nicholas Hagger, in The Secret Founding of America, Mazzini spearheaded a plan in league with
the Rothschilds, to foment the Civil War, along the divide of the volatile
issue of race.[1340] The
Mazzini-Rothschild conspiracy devolved from Southern Jewish community networked
with secret societies of the Skull and Bones, the Knights of the Golden Circle,
and the KKK who advanced that cause of slave-ownership against the
abolitionists of the North. Civile War general Albert Pike, Grand Master of the
Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite in Charleston, was the “chief judicial officer of
the Klan.”[1341] The Rothschilds, explained Hagger, wanted to start a central bank
in America, as the second Bank of America, created by James Madison in 1816,
had collapsed in 1836. James
Mayer de Rothschild and his brother Nathan’s son, Lionel de
Rothschild, a friend of Benjamin Disraeli, were behind the funding of both
North and South in the planned division.
The Rothschilds’ funding of the North was conducted through August Belmont (1813 – 1890). Belmont, whose real name was August Schoenberg, was a German-born Jew who would become party chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 1860s, and the founder of the Belmont Stakes, third leg of the Triple Crown series of American horse racing. Belmont began his first job as an apprentice to the Rothschild banking firm in Frankfurt. In 1837, he set sail for Havana where he was charged with the Rothschilds’ interests in the Spanish colony of Cuba. In the financial recession and Panic of 1837, like hundreds of American businesses, the Rothschilds’ American agent in New York City collapsed. As a result, Belmont stayed in New York and began a new firm, August Belmont & Company, and restored the Rothschilds’ wealth.[1342]
James Rothschild controlled the South through the Rothschild agent Judah P. Benjamin (1811 – 1884), a Southern lawyer and politician who came to be known as “the Jewish Confederate.”[1343] Both Sephardi Jews from London, Benjamin’s parents, Philip Benjamin (1780 – 1853) and his wife Rebecca de Mendes (d. 1847) moved from London and eventually to Charleston around 1821, with their daughter and son Judah, who had been born in St. Croix. Philip Benjamin was a member of the Reformed Society of Israelites, which broke away from the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim. Benjamin was often called the “brain of the Confederacy,” and was featured on the Confederate two-dollar bill.[1344]
Benjamin’s political success was due to his
advocacy of states’ rights and slavery alongside his promotion of commercial
development.[1345] “In
antebellum America,”
according to David Goldenberg, the Curse of Ham “was
the single greatest justification for maintaining black slavery, and for
keeping that social order in place for centuries.”[1346]
The Curse of Ham also
received the support of Freemasonry where it served to justify the exclusion of
blacks. The first justification was articulated in Anderson’s Constitutions
of 1923, where he outlined the legends of Freemasonry
as well as its regulations or charges, including the “ancient landmarks.” As
noted by Michael
W. Homer, Lawrence Dermott—the first Grand Secretary of the rival Grand Lodge of Antients, organized in London in 1751, and who took a design by Rabbi Leon Templo as the
basis for its coat of arms—published Ahiman Rezo,
a history which provided one of the foundations upon which some American Masons
could rationalize that Ham’s descendants, who they believed were black, were
ineligible to join their lodges.[1347]
As revealed in the Financial Times, Nathan Mayer Rothschild and James William Freshfield, founder of Freshfields, benefited financially from slavery, as records from the National Archives show, even though both have often been portrayed as opponents of slavery. On August 3, 1835, in the City of London, two years after the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act, Nathan Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore came to an agreement with the chancellor of the exchequer to issue one of the largest loans in history, to finance the slave compensation package required by the 1833 act. The two bankers agreed to loan the British government £15m, with the government adding an additional £5m later, totaling 40% of the government’s yearly income, equivalent to £300bn today. It was the biggest bail-out of an industry as a percentage of annual government expenditure, dwarfing the rescue of the banking sector in 2008.[1348] The money was not paid back by the British taxpayers until 2015.[1349] Sadly, the funds were not intended to include reparations to the freed slaves or to redress the injustices they suffered. Instead, the money went exclusively to the owners of slaves, who were being compensated for the loss of their “property.”[1350] According to the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership at the University College London, Rothschild himself was a successful claimant under the scheme, as part of “Antigua 390 (Mathews or Constitution Hill),” where he was a beneficiary as mortgage holder to a plantation in Antigua which had 158 slaves in his ownership, he received a £2,571 payment at the time (worth £246 thousand in 2020.[1351]
Year of Revolutions of 1848 were celebrated by Americans with frequent parades and proclamations, and foreign revolutionaries like Louis Kossuth emerged as national celebrities. At the highest levels of government, the United States offered diplomatic support.[1352] After 1848, a faction of Democrats, concerned about the nation’s failure to support “democratic” revolutions abroad, formed a group identified as Young America.[1353] They intended to contrast themselves from the caution of their party’s so-called Old Fogies. Young America argued that the nation could only secure its ideals through more forceful “expansion and progress.” Stephen A. Douglas (1813 – 1861), the U.S. senator from Illinois who would run against Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election, became the leading political figure for citizens who wished to make America a more effective beacon of revolution overseas. Douglas, however, failed to win the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency in 1852.
Young America was founded in 1845 by Edwin De Leone (1818 – 1891), who was born in Columbia, South Carolina of Sephardic Jewish parents, and later became a confidant of Jefferson Davis (1808 – 1889), a Freemason and the first and only President of the Confederacy. In their heyday in the 1840s and 1850s, argues Yonatan Eyal, Young America were led by Stephen Douglas, August Belmont, James Knox Polk (1795 – 1849), and Franklin Pierce (1804 – 1869).[1354] The Young America movement also inspired writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Hawthorne wrote the glowing biography The Life of Franklin Pierce in support of Pierce’s 1852 presidential campaign, which was positively reviewed in the Democratic Review.
Pierce was elected to the White House in 1853 after making numerous appeals to Young America sentiment. From Britain Kossuth went to the United States of America. Kossuth completed a tour of several Masonic lodges to educate the Masonic hierarchy on how to recruit, organize, and train the youth in revolutionary strategy.[1355] In the same year, Kossuth made contact with Franklin Pierce, offering him the propaganda services of Young America to promote his bid for the presidency in return for appoint particular individuals to important posts. Earlier in the year, the New York Herald reported that Pierce was a “discreet representative of Young America.”[1356] Mazzini confirmed in his diary that Pierce was willing to accept help from Kossuth and his network of Masonic operatives: “Kossuth and I are working with the very numerous Germanic element [Young America] in the United States for his [Pierce’s] election, and under certain conditions which he has accepted.”[1357] Pierce appointed several Young Americans to the foreign service: George N. Sanders (1812 – 1873) as Consul to London; Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864) as Consul to Liverpool; James Buchanan (1791 – 1868) as Minister to the Court of St. James, Great Britain; Pierre Soulé (1801 – 1870) as Minister to Spain; John L. Sullivan as Minister to Portugal; and Edwin De Leone (1818 – 1891) as Consul to Egypt. Mazzini wrote, almost all of Pierce’s nominations “are such as we desired.”[1358]
Belmont, a lifelong member of the Democratic Party, had been taken under the wing of his wife’s uncle, John Slidell (1793 – 1871), a staunch defender of slavery as a Representative and Senator, who made Belmont his protégé and encouraged Belmont to enter politics.[1359] Belmont lent financial and political support to Pierce’s campaign, resulting in sustained attack from the city’s Whig newspapers, which accused him of using “Jew gold” from abroad to buy votes and maintaining “dual allegiance” to the Habsburg and Rothschild families. In a journalistic war of words that became known in New York City as the “Belmont affair,” Belmont demanded a retraction of a Tribune story, but after he was rebuffed by Horace Greeley, he enlisted the Democratic Herald and Evening Post in his defense.[1360] Pierce won the 1852 election easily and appointed Buchanan and Belmont to diplomatic posts in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, respectively. In 1853, Pierce appointed Belmont Chargé d’affaires to The Hague.
Pierce’s first appointment was Freemason Caleb Cushing (1800 – 1879), who as US attorney general became the master-architect of the Civil War. Cushing’s first Masonic assignment was to transfer money from British Masonic banker George Peabody to the Young America abolitionists, who after the elections were calling for the dissolution of the Union.[1361] Peabody, who owned a giant banking firm in England, hired the services of J.P. Morgan, Sr. (1837-1913) to handle the funds as they arrived in the United States. Upon Peabody’s death, Morgan took over the firm and later moved it from England to the United States, renaming it Northern Securities. In 1869, Morgan went to London and reached an agreement to act as an agent for the N.M. Rothschild Company in the United States.
The handler of the Peabody funds in London was George N. Sanders, a founder of Young America and a close friend of Mazzini. At his home in London on February 21, 1854, Saunders hosted a dinner party with guests of honor being Mazzini, Blanqui, Kossuth and Carbonari member Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, and founder of La Réforme. Sanders admitted in conversation that he was a friend of Blanqui, who had worked with Buonarroti, and a member of society at Paris called the “Club Blanqui.”[1362] Also in attendance were General Giuseppe Garibaldi; Felice Orsini, one of Mazzini’s henchmen who would attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858; and Alexander Herzen, the “father of Russian Socialism,” who initiated Freemason Mikhail Bakunin into Mazzini’s Young Russia; and Arnold Ruge, who with Karl Marx was the editor of a revolutionary magazine for Young Germany.[1363] George Sanders gave the toast: “To do away with the Crowned Heads of Europe.”[1364]
Also present at Sanders’ meeting in London in 1954 was President Pierce’s US Ambassador to England, Freemason James Buchanan, who would soon become the next president of the United States. With the support of Sanders, Buchanan was nominated in 1856 as president for the Democratic Party. Buchanan, who strongly favored the maintenance of slavery, is consistently ranked by historians as one of the least effective presidents in history, for his failure to mitigate the national disunity that led to the American Civil War. In his famous “House Divided” speech of June 1858, Abraham Lincoln charged that Douglas, Buchanan, his predecessor Pierce, and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney were all part of a plot to nationalize slavery, as allegedly proven by the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, a landmark decision in which the Supreme Court held that the US Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for black people, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, and so the rights and privileges of the Constitution could not apply to them[1365]
Standing out among the leaders of the Forty-Eighters was Civil War General Carl Schurz, who has been described by some historians as the most influential U.S. citizen of German birth.[1366] It was also in London that Schurz met his Jewish wife, Margarethe Meyer-Schurz, who then moved together to the United States, where she used the training she gained in Germany under Friedrich Fröbel to create the first kindergarten in the United States. After briefly serving as ambassador to Spain, Schurz became a general in the American Civil War, fighting at Gettysburg and other major battles. He was instrumental in helping Abraham Lincoln gain the presidency and also in helping abolish slavery. In the Illinois campaign of 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, he took part as a speaker on behalf of Lincoln—mostly in German—which raised Lincoln’s popularity among German-American voters.
Douglas’ 1860 presidential campaign was supported by his friend Benjamin Franklin Peixotto (1834 – 1890), who was the American head of the B’nai B’rith and an ally of the Alliance Israëlite Universelle.[1367] As a delegate to the pivotal 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, Belmont supported Douglas, who had triumphed in the famous 1858 Lincoln-Douglas Debates over his long-time political rival, the newly recruited Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, in their battle for Douglas’ Senate seat. Douglas subsequently nominated Belmont as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Belmont also used his influence with European business and political leaders to support the Union cause in the Civil War, trying to dissuade the Rothschilds and other French bankers from lending funds or credit for military purchases to the Confederacy and meeting personally in London with the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, and members of Emperor Napoleon III’s French Imperial Government in Paris.[1368]
The Democratic Review also
published some of the early work of Walt Whitman, James Russell Lowell, and Transcendentalist
Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862). American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne
married John O’Sullivan’s goddaughter, Sophia Amelia Peabody. Hawthorne was
born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, where his ancestors included John
Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented
of his actions. Much of Hawthorne’s fiction, such as The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Salem. In 1851, Hawthorne
published The House of the Seven Gables,
a Gothic novel whose setting was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a
gabled house in Salem, belonging to Hawthorne’s cousin Susanna Ingersoll, and
by his ancestors who had played a part in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. In Young Goodman Brown, the main character
is led through a forest at night by the Devil, appearing as man who carries a
black serpent-shaped staff. Goodman is led to a coven where the townspeople of
Salem are assembled, including those who had a reputation for Christian piety,
in-mixed with criminals and others of lesser reputations, as well as Indian
priests. Herman Melville said the novel was “as deep as Dante” and Henry James
called it a “magnificent little romance.”[1369]
Edgar Allan Poe, a fellow contributor to the Democratic Review, referred to Hawthorne’s short stories as “the products of a truly imaginative intellect.”[1370] Poe’s gothic works are replete with occult symbolism. Poe’s Cask of Amontillado enacts a Masonic ritual in a way that would be evident only to Masons. The story is set in an unnamed Italian city, told from the perspective of a man named Montresor plots to murder his friend Fortunato during Carnevale (Mardi Gras), while the man is drunk and wearing a jester’s motley. who, he believes, has insulted him. According to Robert Con Davis-Undiano, “the plot of story, from Montresor’s initial meeting with Fortunato during Italian Carnevale, through Fortunato’s final entombment, itself enacts an initiation rite for Freemasonry.”[1371]
Hawthorne and Sophia were close friends of a fellow-contributor to the Democratic Review, Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810 – 1850) an American journalist and women’s rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. Fuller was also influenced by the work of Swedenborg.[1372] Margaret Fuller actually fought in the Italian revolution alongside her lover, Giovanni Ossoli, who was a friend of Mazzini.[1373] Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane, had introduced her to Mazzini.[1374] Fuller had met Mazzini in London where she began a friendship and correspondence with him, regarding him as “not only one of the heroic, the courageous, and the faithful,” she wrote, “but also one of the wise.”[1375] In 1847, Fuller befriended crypto-Frankist Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz.[1376] Fuller’s brother, Arthur Buckminster Fuller (1822 – 1862), was the grandfather of American architect Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983).
Fuller consciously adopted Madame Germaine de Staël as her role model.[1377] Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick and a contributor to the Democratic Review, considered de Staël among the greatest women of the century.[1378] Madame de Staël was frequently quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), and she is credited with introducing him to recent German thought.[1379] Influenced by Swedenborg, Blake and the Vedanta, Emerson was the father of American Transcendentalism.[1380] Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862). In addition to Emerson, Fuller was also an inspiration to Whitman, considered one of America’s most influential poets. Whitman’s work was very controversial even in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. Oscar Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882 and wrote that there was “no doubt” about Whitman’s sexual orientation: “I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,” he boasted.[1381]
The Transcendental Club also included Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804 –1894), the sister of Hawthorne’s wife Sophia, a member of one of the upper-class families known as the Boston Brahmins. Elizabeth opened Elizabeth Palmer Peabodys West Street Bookstore, at her home in Boston, where Fuller would hold her “conversations,” and published books from Nathaniel Hawthorne and others in addition to the periodicals The Dial and Æsthetic Papers. Emerson was so impressed with Fuller that he invited her to join the Transcendental Club and to edit its literary review, The Dial. Elizabeth had a particular interest in the educational methods of Friedrich Fröbel, particularly after meeting one of his students, Carl Schurz’s Jewish wife Margarethe, in 1859.[1382] She visited Germany in 1867 to study Fröbel’s teachings more closely. In 1868, Elizabeth invited Maria Kraus Boelte (1836 – 1918) to come to Boston, but she refused. She later founded with her husband the New York Seminary for Kindergartners.[1383]
Elizabeth was also the first known translator into English of the Buddhist scripture the Lotus Sutra, translating a chapter from its French translation in 1844. She also became a writer and a prominent figure in the Transcendental movement. Elizabeth and Sophia’s sister Mary Tyler was the wife of Horace Mann (1796 – 1859), who served as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Mann was elected to the United States House of Representatives. Elizabeth Peabody and Carl Schurz were buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York, the burial ground of numerous famous figures, including Washington Irving, whose 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is set in the adjacent burying ground at the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow.
Mimi L. Eustis published a website in 2005, titled Mardi Gras Secrets, to share the deathbed confessions of her father Samuel Todd Churchill, a high-level member of the Mystick Krewe of Comus, a secret society founded in 1856 by Judah P. Benjamin—whose mentor was Slidell—and Albert Pike in order to meet and communicate the plans of the Rothschilds. The Mystick Krewe of Comus, which is named after John Milton’s Lord of Misrule in his masque Comus, is oldest continuous organization of New Orleans Mardi Gras, a modern adaptation of the Feast of Fools festival. Prior to the advent of Comus, Carnival celebrations in New Orleans were mostly confined to the Roman Catholic Creole community, and parades were irregular and often very informally organized. The inspiration for the Krewe of Comus came from Rosicrucian author John Milton’s Lord of Misrule in his masque Comus. The rebellious Thomas Morton (c. 1579 – 1647), who had maintained contacts with the School of Night, declared himself “Lord of Misrule” during the pagan revelry in Merrymount in 1627, and his fellow celebrants were described Nathaniel Hawthorne in The May-Pole of Merry Mount (1837) as a “crew of Comus.”
Cushing, recounted Eustis, dispatched Pike to Arkansas and Louisiana. Pike’s mission was to further the cause of slavery and to foment an America civil war, and to establish a line of communication with other fellow Illuminati. Pike was chosen by Cushing to head an Illuminati branch in New Orleans and to establish a New World order. Pike moved his law office to New Orleans in 1853 and was made Masonic Special Deputy of the Supreme Council of Louisiana on April 25, 1857. Eustis further asserts, Pike and Judah P. Benjamin needed a secret society in order to foster a civil war in the United States and to establish the House of Rothschild, for which purpose they founded the Mystick Krewe of Comus.
According to Eustis, both Pike and Benjamin were secret Kings of the Mystic Krewe of Comus, and participated directly in the killing of President Abraham Lincoln. Although officially, the Krewe of Comus claims to descend from the Cowbellion de Rakin Society of Mobile, Alabama, Eustis’ father claimed the society was founded by Yankee bankers from New England, who used the society as a front for the House of Rothschild, as well as for Skull and Bones, which was a branch of the Bavarian Illuminati. Passage into the secret of the code number 33, the highest stages of membership within the Skull and Bones society, required participation in the ritual “Killing of the King.” Eustis says her father emphasized that most Masons below the 3º remained in ignorance, while those to who rose past the 33º did so by participating in the “Killing of the King” ritual.
Pike
headed the Southern
Jurisdiction, while Cushing
was connected to the Northern Jurisdiction of Freemasonry. The Northern Jurisdiction was still under the British spy and
33rd-degree Freemason John J.J. Gourgas (1777 – 1865), who helped found the Knights
of the Golden Circle (KGC).[1384]
The English Masons sent Gourgas to New York to organize clandestine Scottish
Rite lodges that would appear to be pro-French but would in fact were
pro-English to help Britain in the War of 1812. In the summer of 1813, Emanual
de la Motta, one of the founders of the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in Charleston, and a
congregant of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, reached a territorial agreement with
Gourgas whereby the northern area was under the English Northern Jurisdiction
of Scottish Rite Freemasonry and based in Boston, while Charleston became the
base for the French Southern Jurisdiction of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.[1385]
In 1854, Gourgas is said to have helped
found a secret society known as the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC), from which emerged the Ku Klux Klan.[1386]
The KGC, which included
Albert Pike, Jefferson Davis and John Wilkes Booth (1838
– 1865) became the
first and most powerful ally of the newly-created Confederate States of America,
commonly referred to as the Confederacy and the South.[1387] A
testament to the power of the KGC and their conflict with Lincoln was revealed
during the Civil War in The Private
Journal and Diary of John H. Surratt, The Conspirator, written in 1866. In
this journal, Surratt details how he was inducted to the KGC in 1860 by fellow
Knight, John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and
outspoken Confederate sympathizer, at a “castle” in Baltimore, Maryland. Surratt describes the
elaborate rituals of the ceremony and of cabinet members, congressmen, judges,
actors, and other politicians who were in attendance. Surratt details Booth meeting in Montreal where he agreed to kill Lincoln.
Booth apparently received approval for the plot from Benjamin, through the KGC.[1388]
The KGC and their
conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln formed part of the plot of a 2007 film, National
Treasure: Book of Secrets, starring Nicolas Cage.
In Lincoln and the Jews, historians Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell explore the possibility that Booth belonged to a family of Spanish Jewish ancestry. Booth’s sister, Asia Booth Clarke, stated in her 1882 memoir that their father, Junius Brutus Booth, attended synagogues along with other houses of worship: “In the synagogue, he was known as a Jew, because he conversed with rabbis and learned doctors, and joined their worship in the Hebraic tongue. He read the Talmud, also, and strictly adhered to many of its laws.”[1389]
In 1864, an editorial for the Chicago Tribune spoke of the Rothschilds, their “Jewish” agent August Belmont, “and the whole tribe of Jews,” who reportedly sympathized with the South.[1390] The New York Times noted that “the great Democratic Party has fallen so low that it has to seek leaders in the agent of foreign Jew bankers.”[1391] The Rothschilds asked the American consul in Frankfurt to inform the State Department that neither Baron Rothschild nor members of his family were supporting the Confederacy. The most publicized anti-Semitic incident occurred after General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11 that expelled all Jews from his military district in western Tennessee on December 17, 1862. The fact remains, however, that many Jews during the period sympathized with the South and found employment as blockade runners and black-market profiteers. Isaac Leseer (1806 – 1868), the leader of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, commented in the Occident that, “It has been the fashion to call all who were engaged in smuggling or blockade running, as it was termed, Jews.”[1392]
Most often serving as their attorney was another Forty-Eighter, Peixotto’s friend and collaborator, Simon Wolf (1836 – 1923), the head of the B’nai B’rith for Washington DC, and also a friend of John Wilkes Booth.[1393] Originally from Bavaria, Wolf emigrated to Ohio with his grandparents when he was twelve years old amidst the upheaval of the failed Revolutions of 1848. He would eventually make friends with presidents Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson. Among his friends was also Edwin McMasters Stanton (1814 – 1869) was an American lawyer and politician who served as U.S. Secretary of War under the Lincoln Administration during most of the American Civil War, who would later organize the manhunt for Booth. Prior to that, Lafayette C. Baker (1826 – 1868), the chief of the War Department’s Detective Bureau, arrested Wolf because he suspected him of working as an enemy agent and because of his leadership in B’nai B’rith, which Baker considered, “a disloyal organization which has its ramifications in the South, and… helping traitors.”[1394] However, Stanton lashed out at Baker. Baker owed his appointment largely to Stanton, but suspected the secretary of corruption and was eventually demoted for tapping his telegraph lines and transferred out to New York.
Wolf was meant to be at Ford’s Theatre on the night of Lincoln’s assassination, but was not able to attend, due to an illness in the family. Back when Wolf lived in Cleveland, was a stronghold for the Knights of the Golden Circle, he’d been involved in theatrical productions with both Peixotto and Booth.[1395] More remarkably, Wolf spent that afternoon Booth. According to Wolf, Booth invited him for drinks at the Metropolitan Hotel in Washington. He had just been rejected by a senator’s daughter for the third time and needed to be consoled. “I knew Booth well,” writes Wolf. “We had played on the amateur stage together in Cleveland, Ohio, and I had met him that very morning in front of the Metropolitan Hotel. He asked me to take a drink. He seemed very excited, and rather than decline and incur his enmity I went with him. It was the last time I ever saw Booth.”[1396]
Working in Montreal for the operation to assassinate Lincoln was Sanders. Jefferson Davis had named Sanders as his Representative as an ex-officio member of the Confederate Micheners in Canada late in the Civil War.[1397] In 1864, a stranger who appeared to be a well-dressed Italian spoke with a Mr. Boteler, a member of Congress from Virginia, who claimed to have been sent on a mission to Richmond. He admitted:
I belong to the society of the Carbonari! It sympathizes with the Southern Confederacy; and it is the only power in Europe that can compel its recognition, for Napoleon III is secretly a member of the society, and dares not disobey its mandates. More than this, I hold in may hand the life of Abraham Lincoln; the victim who the Carbonari designate cannot elude them.[1398]
Finally, on May 2, 1865, President Johnson issued a $25,000 reward for Sanders’ arrest in connection with Lincoln’s assassination. The charges were ultimately dropped, but Sanders had probably encouraged John Wilkes Booth, although he was ultimately able to absolve the Confederacy of any blame in the plot.[1399] He had also made several trips to Europe to further the cause of the Southern States. Sanders fled to Canada and Europe. He later returned to the United States soon before he died in 1873 in New York. In Murdering Mr. Lincoln, Charles Higham asserts that Sanders was the driving force behind the assassination. Higham alleges that in June 1864, Sanders plotting against Lincoln with the Confederate Secret Service in Montreal. Higham asserts that when Booth arrived in Montreal in October of that year, he fell under the influence of Sanders and arranged Lincoln’s assassination there.
Lafayette C. Baker was recalled to Washington after the assassination. Within days, Booth was arrested and along with David Herold was eventually shot and killed. The following year, Baker was fired when President Johnson accused him of spying on him, a charge Baker later admitted in his book which he published in response. He also announced that he had had Booth’s diary in his possession which was being suppressed by Stanton. When the diary was eventually produced, Baker claimed that eighteen essential pages were missing. It was suggested by Otto Eisenschiml in his book, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, that these would implicate Stanton in the assassination.[1400]
During the Civil War, Judah P. Benjamin served as Secretary of War under Jefferson Davis, until the fall of the Confederacy on May 26, 1865. To evade certain imprisonment and possible execution, Benjamin escaped from the fallen Confederate capital at Richmond. Benjamin’s goal was to go as far away from the United States as he could—if need be, to “the middle of China,” he told friends. After his escape to England, he became an English barrister.[1401] In 1872, he attained the rank of Queen’s Counsel, and came to be recognized as the unquestioned leader of the British bar. A farewell dinner was given in Benjamin’s honor by the bench and bar of England in the hall of the Inner Temple, London, in 1883, under the presidency of the attorney-general, Sir Henry James.[1402]
When he received a visit in London in 1867 from
Bishop Richard Hooker Wilmer (1816 – 1900), who told him of the power the Ku
Klux Klan—which had
been founded on December 24, 1865—was exerting in the
United States, and for the need to control the negroes, Benjamin was moved to provide
funding for its activities.[1403]
According Susan L.
Davis in Authentic History of the Ku Klux
Klan, 1865-1877, Albert Pike was the “chief judicial officer” of the Klan.[1404]
According to As reported by Davis, Pike organized
the Klan in Arkansas after Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821 – 1877), a CSA general
in the Civil War, a Freemason and the first Grand Wizard of the Klan, appointed
him Grand Dragon of that Realm.[1405] Prior to
assembling the first convention of the KKK in 1867, as the organization was
growing, it was decided that General Robert E. Lee should serve as their
national leader. Six men were chosen to present Lee the offer, including Wilmer
as well as Major Felix G. Buchanan, of Lincoln County; Captain John B. Kennedy
of the Pulaski Ku Klux Klan, Captain William Richardson of the Athens KKK, and
Captain John B. Floyd, of the Alabama KKK.[1406]
Wilmer was a close friend of General John Tyler Morgan (1824 – 1907), the Second Dragon of the Realm of Alabama.[1407] Morgan was a general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, a six-term U.S. senator from the state of Alabama after the war. An ardent racist and ex-slave holder, he was a proponent of Jim Crow laws, states rights and racial segregation through the Reconstruction era. He “introduced and championed several bills to legalize the practice of racist vigilante murder [lynching] as a means of preserving white power in the Deep South.”[1408] Morgan was an important ally of General Henry Shelton Sanford (1823 – 1891), a wealthy American businessman and aristocrat from Connecticut who served as United States Minister to Belgium from 1861 to 1869. Sanford coordinated northern secret service operations during the Civil War, arranged for the purchase of war materials for the Union, and delivered a message from Secretary of State William H. Steward to Giuseppe Garibaldi, offering him a Union command.
In 1876, Sanford was named acting Delegate of the American Geographical Society to a conference called by King Leopold II of Belgium (1835 – 1909) to organize the International African Association (IAA) with the purpose of opening up equatorial Africa to “civilizing” influences. Leopold was the second child of the reigning Belgian monarch, Leopold I of Belgium (1790 – 1865), and of his second wife, Louise, the daughter of King Louis Philippe of France (1773 – 1850), the son of Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (Philippe Égalité). Leopold I was the youngest son of Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (1750 – 1806), of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family who gained prominence in the nineteenth century through financial links with the Rothschilds.[1409] Leopold I’s grandfather was Ernst II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, who granted refuge to his friend the fugitive Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt.[1410] It was Leopold I who promoted the marriage of Ernst II’s grandson Prince Albert to his niece, Queen Victoria.
The IAA was supported by the Rothschilds and Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal.[1411] The Association was used by King Leopold ostensibly to further his altruistic and humanitarian projects in the area of Central Africa, the area that was to become Leopold’s privately controlled Congo Free State. Sanford was a longtime supporter of the Republican Party to which President Chester A. Arthur (1829 – 1886) belonged, and Leopold believed that he could use Sanford to convince Arthur to formally recognize his claims to Congolese land. Sanford convinced Morgan that, by recognizing the existence of Leopold II’s Congo landholdings, the U.S. would have a way to establish economic connections between itself and Africa, perhaps opening up a new market for Alabama’s cotton surplus. Morgan introduced a Senate resolution recognizing Leopold’s Congo claims, and in April 1884, the U.S. became the first country to officially recognize King Leopold II’s claim to the Congo. U.S. recognition of the Congo immediately strengthened Leopold’s position in Africa.
Viscount de Lesseps declared Leopold’s plans “the greatest humanitarian work of this time.”[1412] However, Adam Hochschild’s best-seller King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, detailed the atrocities that took place in Leopold’s pillage of the Congo. At first, ivory was exported, but when the global demand for rubber exploded, attention shifted to the labor-intensive collection of sap from rubber plants. Leopold used slave-labor—coerced through torture, imprisonment, maiming and terror—to strip the county of vast amounts of wealth, largely in the form of ivory and rubber. Murder was common, and rape and sexual exploitation were rampant. Modern estimates range from one million to fifteen million Congolese people died under his regime, with a consensus growing around ten million.[1413] Leopold’s Congo inspired Joseph Conrad when he wrote Heart of Darkness (1899), which was also later the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now.
John Wilkes Booth’s brother, Edwin Booth, also an actor, reportedly told Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819 – 1900), a member of the B’nai B’rith and the “Moses of America” as some called him, that his father was Jewish.[1414] Fellow B’nai B’rith member Benjamin F. Peixotto also contributed to the establishment of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), which was founded by Wise which has since been renamed Union for Reform Judaism.[1415] Wise was born in Bohemia, left when teachings came under suspicion by the Austrian authorities, and settled in the United States were his teachings followed no less controversy. Betraying a decidedly Sabbatean orientation, he said: “Religion is intended to make man happy, good, just, active, charitable, and intelligent. Whatever tends to this end must be retained or introduced. Whatever opposes it must be abolished.”[1416] A Scottish Rite Freemason, Wise declared, “Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from the beginning to the end.”[1417] Before settling in Cincinnati, a stronghold of some 30,000 Germany Forty-Eighters, Wise made an attempt to lead Beth Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, the same synagogue that produced many of the founding members of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.
In 1824, the Reformed Society of the Israelites was founded in Charleston by Portuguese Jews, led by Isaac Harby, who dissented from Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue. Harby and his fellow reformers thought that services at Beth Elohim had to become more like those services in surrounding Protestant churches. In response, the reformers created an independent society, which met in Seyle’s Hall, a facility also rented by the Grand Lodge, Ancient Free Masons of South Carolina.[1418] Harby left Charleston for New York in 1827 Most members rejoined Beth Elohim. However, the spirit of reform in Charleston did not die with Harby. Gustavus Poznanski (1804 – 1879), who spent time in Hamburg and knew the rite of the Hamburg Temple and migrated to the United States in 1831, and was appointed was appointed minister in 1836.[1419] Poznanski’s break with the orthodox tradition opened the way for other changes in the ritual, many of which had been requested a decade earlier by the Reformed Society. Beth Elohim thereafter evolved at the forefront of reform Judaism in America.[1420] After retirement, Poznanski divided his time between Charleston and New York, where he was a member of Shearith Israel.
In 1850, when it came time to choose a successor to Poznanski at Beth Elohim, Wise applied for the position, but when he was asked by the congregants whether he believed in the coming of a Messiah and the resurrection of the body, Wise unhesitatingly answered, “No, the Talmud is no authority for me in the matter of doctrine.”[1421] Wise returned to Albany, but he was again challenged for his views. His followers seceded from the synagogue and founded a Reform congregation called Anshe Emeth. Following a storm of controversy, Wise accepted a post at the Bene Yeshurun Congregation in Cincinnati.
In August 1855, Wise published a response in The Israelite to a letter which had been published in The Boston Morning Times from an anonymous Mason from Massachusetts, in which he had claimed: “… here in Massachusetts Masonry is a Christian, or rather Protestant institution; Christian, as it merely TOLERATES Jews; Protestant, as it abhors Catholics.” Wise countered:
We characterize the above principles as
anti Masonic, because we know that not only Catholics but Israelites in this
country and in Europe are prominent and bright Masons. We know still more, viz.
that Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords
and explanations (sic) are Jewish from the beginning to the end, with the
exception of one by-degree and a few words in the obligation, which true to
their origin in the middle ages, are Roman Catholic. (…) it is impossible to be
well posted in Masonry without having a Jewish teacher.[1422]
Two weeks later, Wise published a response from “A Young Mason” from Boston, Massachusetts, who asserted that Rev. Brother Randall insisted that Masonry “was once mainly Jewish but now it is mainly Christian.” Wise’s sarcastic response was:
It is a great favour, the Rev. R. believes
that the Jews are admitted in the lodges etc. of which they must be sensible
and grateful. Why does he not consider it a favor, that we have the privilege
of living in our houses. Masonry was founded by Jews as a cosmopolitical
institution, hence it is a favor for the Jew to be admitted in the lodges, viz.
in our own house. How sapient!
We Jews have given birth to the masonic fraternity as a cosmopolitical institution; but we consider it no favor to admit you in the lodge, provided, however, you leave your sectarianism outside of the consecrated walls. We have given you Christianity to convert the heathens gradually to the pure deism and ethics of Moses and the Prophets; still, we consider it no special favor bestowed on you from our side, that you have the privilege of being a preacher in one of the churches.[1423]
As early as 1848, Wise issued a call to the “ministers and other Israelites"” of the United States, urging them to form a union which might put an end to the Jewish anarchy in the United States. His call appeared in The Occident, whose editor was Isaac Leeser (1806 – 1868), a forerunner by both Modern Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism. At a meeting held in the spring of 1847, Wise submitted to the bet din, the rabbinical court, the manuscript of a prayer-book, to be titled the Minhag America, which was intended to address conflict between sides supporting and opposing traditionalism in early Reform Judaism in the United States. Wise’s use of the title Minhag America was deliberately intended to show that his prayer book was superseding the “Minhag Ashkenaz,” “Minhag Sefard” and “Minhag Polen” that immigrants to the United States arrived with. At the Cleveland Conference of 1855, a committee consisting of Wise and other Reform rabbis was appointed to edit such a prayer-book. The result was a book under the title Minhag America, which was practically Wise’s work, and was adopted by most of the congregations of the Western and Southern states.
Wise’s efforts were challenged by the radical Reform rabbi Dr. David Einhorn (1809 – 1879) of Adath Yeshurun, who was a supporter of the principles of Abraham Geiger while he still in Germany. In 1851, before he moved to the United States, Einhorn was called to Pest, Hungary, where his views met with such opposition that the Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria (1830 – 1916) ordered his temple closed only two months after his arrival, as he suspected a connection between the Jewish reform movement and the Revolutions of 1848.[1424] Although Einhorn gradually gained the upper hand, their conflict would lay the foundation of American Reform. The Philadelphia Conference of November 3–6, 1869, saw victory the radicals, and the adoption of a platform which summarized the theory developed in Germany. Priestly privileges were abolished, as the rebuilding of the Temple was no longer anticipated; belief in the Messiah and Resurrection was denied. Wise regarded the document as the denominational “declaration of independence.”
Wise was a member of the Free Religious Association (FRA), which connected many reform rabbis to the Transcendentalist of the Democratic Review. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first person to join the association the FRA, which was formed in 1867 in part by American minister and Transcendentalist author David Atwood Wasson, with Lucretia Mott, and Reverend William J. Potter, to be, in Potter’s words, a “spiritual anti-slavery society” to “emancipate religion from the dogmatic traditions it had been previously bound to.”[1425] The FRA was opposed not only to organized religion, but also to any supernaturalism in an attempt to affirm the supremacy of individual conscience and individual reason. The FRA carried a Masonic message of the perfectibility of humanity, democratic faith in the worth of each individual, the importance of natural rights and the affirmation of the efficacy of reason. The first public assembly was held in 1867 with an audience ranging from Progressive Quakers, liberal Jews, radical Unitarians, Universalists, agnostics, Spiritualists, and scientific theists.
Also a member of the FRA was Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882). The proponents of Reform Judaism had consistently claimed since the early nineteenth-century to aim to reconcile Jewish religion with advancements scientific thought, and the science of evolution was of particular interest. In a series of twelve sermons published as The Cosmic God (1876), Rabbi Wise offered an alternative theistic account of Darwinism. Other Reform rabbis who were more sympathetic to Darwinian included Kaufmann Kohler, Emil G. Hirsch, and Joseph Krauskopf. Hirsch, for example, wrote:
In notes clearer than ever were entoned by human tongue does the philosophy of evolution confirm essential verity of Judaism’s insistent protest and proclamation that God is one. This theory reads unity in all that is and has been. Stars and stones, planets and pebbles, sun and sod, rock and river, leaf and lichen are spun of the same thread. Thus the universe is one soul, One spelled large. If throughout all visible form one energy is manifest and in all material shape one substance is apparent, the conclusion is all the better assured which holds this essentially one world of life to be the thought of one all embracing and all underlying creative directive mind... I, for my part, believe to be justified in my assurance that Judaism rightly apprehended posits God not, as often it is said to do, as an absolutely transcendental One. Our God is the soul of the Universe… Spinozism and Judaism are by no means at opposite poles.[1426]
The FRA included numerous American Jewish Reform rabbis, including Isaac Meyer Wise, Max Lilienthal the editor of The Israelite, Moritz Ellinger, Aaron Guinzburg, Raphael Lasker, S. H. Sonneschein, I. S. Nathans, Henry Gersoni, Judah Wechsler, Felix Adler, Bernhard Felsenthal, Edward Lauterbach, Solomon Schindler, Emil G. Hirsch and eventually the Sabbatean Stephen Wise, founder of the of the national Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), forerunner of the Zionist Organization of America.[1427]
Of 200 synagogues in the United States in 1860, only a handful of Reform, but twenty years later, almost all of the existing 275 were part of the movement. Wise made Cincinnati the center of his Reform movement for the continent, visiting all the chief cities in the country, from New York to San Francisco, to propagate his ideas for reform. In 1873, delegates of many reform congregations met in there and organized the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Hebrew Union College, which Wise founded in 1875.
On July 8, 1873, representatives from 34 congregations met in Melodeon Hall, Cincinnati, Ohio, and formed the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) under Wise’s auspices. A few American traditionalists, like Sabato Morais (1823 – 1897), a champion of American Reform who had succeeded Isaac Leeser as leader of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, remained outside the UAHC. In 1885, Rabbi Alexander Kohut (1842 – 1894)—a follower of Zecharias Frankel, founder of Conservative Judaism—attacked the UAHC for abandoning “traditional” Judaism. Following a series of heated exchanges between him and Reform’s chief ideologue, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler (1843 – 1926), Kohler was encouraged to convene an assembly which accepted the Pittsburgh Platform. Considered a pivotal document in the history of the American Reform Movement, the Pittsburgh Platform called for Jews to adopt a modern approach to the practice of their faith.
A small group of conservatives withdrew from the UAHC in protest, joining Kohut, Morais, and Henry Pereira Mendes (1852 – 1937) of Shearith Israel, in founding the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). At first unifying almost all non-Reform currents, it developed into the center of Conservative Judaism. The first graduate to be ordained, in 1894, was Joseph Hertz (1872 – 1946), who would go on to become the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. Many graduates of the JTS joined the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), founded by Wise in 1889, in fulfilment of his dream of uniting the American congregations, and which succeeded in publishing a uniform prayer book in use in most of the reform congregations. The CCAR is largest and oldest rabbinical organization in the world. CCAR became the principal organization of Reform rabbis in the United States and Canada. The CCAR primarily consists of rabbis also educated at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, New York City, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem. While Pittsburgh Platform was never formally adopted by the UAHC or the CCAR, the platform exerted great influence over the movement in the next fifty years, and still influences some Reform Jews who hold classicist views to this day.[1428]
In 1848, Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) adapted the tale into his popular opera Lohengrin—based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century Grail epic Parzifal—which probably the work through which the story of the Knight of the Swan is best known today.[1429] Wagner could claim descent from the Swan Knight himself, as, according to Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston-Stewart Chamberlain (1855 – 1927), Wagner’s mother, Johanna Rosine, was a former mistress of Prince Frederick Ferdinand Constantin of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, as has often been reported, but his illegitimate daughter.[1430] Prince Frederick was the brother of Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, sponsor of Weimar Classicism, and like his brother, a member of the Illuminati.[1431] Wagner’s closest friends were associated with the Asiatic Brethren, the Frankfurt Judenloge, and the Hamburg Temple, from the network that surrounded Moses Mendelssohn. Nevertheless, while Mendelssohn worked towards the emancipation of the Jews, he was also highly admired by the central figures of German Romantic movement tied with Weimar Classicism, from which Pan-German nationalism was born, and of which Wagner was one of the most important exponents.
Charles
William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, the brother of Karl August’s mother,
Duchess Anna Amalia, was a friend of Israel Jacobson, the founder of the
Hamburg Temple.[1432] Michael Bernays
(1834 – 1897), the son of Isaac Bernays, the Hakham of the Hamburg
Temple, was baptized and achieved the position of Professor of German at the
University of Munich and Lehr-Konsul to King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845
– 1886), a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, who built the famous
castle of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, inspired by Wagner’s operas Tannhäuser
and Lohengrin, about the tale of the Knight of the Swan and the
Sängerkrieg that took place at Wartburg Castle in Eisenach. Michael’s
conversion, as noted David Bakan, was typical of a pattern associated with
Sabbateanism.[1433]
The Castle of Neuschwanstein is located in the Swabia region of Bavaria, in the municipality of Schwangau—literally translated the Swan District—above the village of Hohenschwangau, which is also the location of Hohenschwangau Castle. A fortress Schwangau was first mentioned in historical records dating from the twelfth century. The von Schwangau family was a family of ministerials in the Welfs and had their seat on the site of today’s Neuschwanstein Castle. Margareta von Schwangau was the wife of minnesinger Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376 or 1377 – 1445), who was inducted as a high-ranking member of the Order of the Dragon by Emperor Sigismund in 1431.[1434] The coat of arms of the municipality is based on the one shown in the Codex Manesse as that of the minnesinger Hiltbolt von Schwangau (before 1221– c. 1254).
The castle was purchased in Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria (1573 – 1651), the son of William V, Duke of Bavaria (1548 – 1626) and Renata of Lorraine, the daughter of Francis I, Duke of Lorraine (1517 – 1545), grandson of Rene II of Lorraine, Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, himself the grandson of René of Anjou, founder of the order and Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Maximilian I’s first cousin was Christina of Lorraine, a patron of Galileo, and the wife of Cardinal Ferdinando I de Medici, a sponsor of Caravaggio. Maximilian I’s portrait was painted by Hans von Aachen (1552 – 1615), wearing the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece and gesturing the secret hand-sign of the Marranos.[1435] Aachen’s eroticized pagan scenes were particularly enjoyed by his principal patron, Emperor Rudolf II, who maintained an occult oriented-court that attracted John Dee.[1436] Maximilian I’s sister, Maria Anna of Bavaria, was the wife of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Maximilian I’s married her daughter, and his niece, Archduchess Maria Anna of Austria. In the Thirty Years’ War, Maximilian I was able to conquer the Upper Palatinate region, as well as the Electoral Palatinate affiliated with the electoral privilege of his cousin, Frederick V of the Alchemical Wedding.
Ludwig II was descended from Maximilian I’s sister, Magdalene of Bavaria, who married Wolfgang Wilhelm, Count Palatine of Neuburg (1578 – 1653), a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Wolfgang was the son of Anna of Cleves, from a family who claimed descent from the Knight Swan, and Philipp Ludwig, Count Palatine of Neuburg (1547 – 1614), the grandson of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse and Christine of Saxony. Christine was the daughter of George, Duke of Saxony, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and Barbara Jagiellon, who was named after her great-grandmother, Barbara of Cilli, who co-founded the Order of the Dragon with her husband Emperor Sigismund. Barbara was the Sister of Sigismund I the Old, who created the Duchy of Prussia in a deal brokered by Martin Luther. Sigismund I’s daughter Anna Jagiellon married Stephen Bathory, sponsor of John Dee and uncle of Elizabeth Báthory, the “Blood Countess.” The court of Wolfgang’s nephew, Christian Augustus, Count Palatine of Sulzbach, included the Kabbalists Knorr von Rosenroth and Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont.[1437] Christian August’s grandson, Count Palatine Joseph Charles of Sulzbach (1694 – 1729), married Wolfgang’s great-granddaughter, Countess Palatine Elisabeth Auguste Sofie of Neuburg.
Their grandson, and Ludwig II’s great-grandfather, was Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria (1756 – 1825), prince-elector of Bavaria from 1799 to 1806, then King of Bavaria from 1806 to 1825. Maximilian I’s private secretary was Maximilian von Montgelas, who came into conflict with Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, after he was exposed as a member of the Illuminati. Charles Theodore, who had issued a ban against the order in 1784, was married to Maximilian I Joseph’s aunt, Countess Palatine Elisabeth Auguste of Sulzbach. Maximilian I Joseph continued the relationship with Montgelas and appointed him to the government council in 1795, Privy Council in 1796, and Prime Minister of Bavaria in 1799. Montgelas was also appointed Foreign Secretary, a Minister of the Interior and a Minister of Finance. Between 1799 and 1817, Montgelas achieved almost absolute political power. During this time, “all the monasteries were secularised, the monastic orders were eliminated and a secular educational system with comprehensive attendance requirements for the whole population was established.”[1438] Historians have labeled him the “creator of modern Bavaria.”[1439] Until 1813, Maximilian I Joseph was the most faithful of Napoleon’s German allies, and cemented the relationship by the marriage of his eldest daughter to his stepson with Josephine, Eugène de Beauharnais (1781 – 1824), the military commander who served during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars.
King Ludwig II of Bavaria was probably the savior of the career of Wagner, who had a notorious reputation as a philanderer, and was constantly on the run from creditors. Like his father, Maximilian II (1811 – 1864), and his grandfather, Ludwig I (1786 – 1868), the son of Maximilian I Joseph, Ludwig II was also a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. An admirer of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance, Ludwig I patronized the arts and commissioned several neoclassical buildings, especially in Munich. Ludwig I was King of Bavaria from 1825 until the Revolutions of 1848, after which he abdicated in favor of his eldest son, Maximilian II. As crown prince, in the castle of Hohenschwangau near Füssen, which he had rebuilt, he gathered around him a circle of artists and intellectuals, and devoted his time to scientific and historical studies.[1440] Maximilian II’s Personal Private Secretary was Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810 – 1886), whose work collecting the folklore and traditions of the people of the Upper Palatinate won him the admiration of the Brothers Grimm and made him a model for other collectors of folklore.[1441] By his wife, Maria of Prussia, daughter of Prince William of Prussia, a younger brother of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, Maximilian II had two sons, Ludgwig II and Otto, King of Bavaria (1848 – 1916), who were both judge to suffer from mental illness.
Wagner was born in 1813 in Leipzig’s Jewish quarter, as the ninth child of Freemason Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner and his wife Johanna.[1442] He was baptized at St. Thomas Church. Richard was influence by his uncle, Ludwig Wagner, who studied with Fichte and Schelling, but his philosophical outlook was mostly shaped by Hegel.[1443] Wagner’s father died just six months later. After the death of his father, Wagner’s brother Julius was temporarily placed in a Dresden Masonic educational institute. Five months later, his mother married the Jewish actor, singer, poet and painter Ludwig Geyer (1779 – 1821), a member of the Masonic lodge Ferdinand zur Glückseligkeit in Magdeburg. In 1938 Henri Malherbe’s authoritative French study proved beyond doubt that Geyer was Wagner’s real father.[1444] Wagner later described his stepfather as his real spiritual father. But he too died in 1821, leaving Wagner fatherless again at the age of eight. He and his mother lived in the immediate vicinity of the Old Theater, which brought the young Wagner into contact with the theater and theater people at an early age.
Three of Wagner’s older sisters, who would later support their younger brother financially for a time, embarked on stage careers as actresses and singers. His sister Rosalie’s husband, Prof. Oswald Marbach (1810 – 1890), became a Freemason in 1844 and was Grand Master of the lodge Balduin zur Linde in Leipzig for thirty years.[1445] In 1836, Wagner married the actress Minna Planer. After living in Königsberg and Riga, the couple fled from creditors in an adventurous on a sailing ship via London to Paris. In Paris, Wagner continued work on his third opera Rienzi. In Paris, Wagner also made the acquaintance of Heinrich Heine, from whom he took material for the Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser. He also met Franz Liszt, who was accepted into the Frankfurt Masonic lodge Zur Einigkeit in 1841 and promoted and elevated in the Berlin Illuminati lodge, Zur Eintracht.[1446]
Geyer sometimes performed under the direction of Carl Maria von Weber (1786 – 1826).[1447] Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, as a tutor for her son Grand Duke Karl August, hired Illuminatus Christoph Martin Wieland, who is best-remembered for having written the Geschichte des Agathon, first Bildungsroman, as well as the epic Oberon, which formed the basis for the opera of the same name by Weber. Weber’s operas had a major impact on subsequent German composers including, Wagner and his friend, Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791 – 1864), and his compositions for piano influenced Felix Mendelssohn, Liszt and the Frankist Chopin.[1448] Meyerbeer, who with Felix was a student of Goethe’s friend, Karl Friedrich Zelter, was described as “the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century, linking Mozart and Wagner.”[1449]
Meyerbeer’ father was the wealthy financier Judah Herz Beer, a leader of the Berlin Jewish community, and a supporter of Samuel Jacobson, founder of the Hamburg Temple.[1450] Meyerbeer’s mother, Amalie Beer, achieved fame with her literary salon at Tiergartenstraße, which was occasionally honored by the presence of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia (1783 – 1851), the son of Golden and Rosy Cross member Frederick William II.[1451] Jacobson and Beer would often invite well-known Christian composers to write music for their services such as Zelter and Meyerbeer’s teacher Weber. Like Jacobson and his father, Giacomo was also member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde. Meyerbeer’s 1815 Hallelujah Cantatine was written expressly for Jacobson’s New Reform Temple in Berlin.[1452]
Meyerbeer was also in close contact with Beethoven as he played timpani at the premiere of his Seventh Symphony in December 1813. Earlier that year, Meyerbeer was appointed Court Composer by Karl August’s brother-in-law, Louis I, Grand Duke of Hesse (1753 – 1830). The Grand Duke Ludwig was also in correspondence with the Weimar court, and with Goethe and Schiller. Grand Duke Louis I’s sister, Frederica Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, was married to Frederick William II of Prussia, a member of the Golden and Rosy Cross. His other sister Natalia Alexeievna, married Paul I of Russia. Their daughter, Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach married Grand Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. Their son, Charles Alexander, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1818 – 1901), retained the tradition of Weimar’s classical period, and became a protector of Wagner and Liszt. At the Grand Duke’s palace Liszt established an artistic center that was truly international.[1453]
Maria Pavlovna was sister the of Tsar Alexander I, who came under influence of the famous psychic Madame von Krüderer, a friend of Madame de Staël. Maria maintained a lifelong correspondence with Vasily Zhukovsky (1787 – 1852), a Freemason who is credited with introducing the Romantic Movement into Russia. Schiller dedicated one of his last poems to Maria, and Goethe hailed her as one of the worthiest women of his time. As tutor for her young son, she engaged Swiss scholar Frédéric Soret (1795 – 1865) who became a close acquaintance to Goethe. Drawing on a suggestion by Goethe that the Wartburg would serve well as a museum, Maria and her son also founded the art collection (Kunstkammer) that became the nucleus of today’s museum. Charles Alexander ordered the reconstruction of Wartburg in 1838 and erected the Herder monument and the double monument for Goethe and Schiller in Eisenach. In her later years, Maria invited Liszt to her court and appointed him “Kapellmeister extraordinaire.”
Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein, the granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, hosted important artists such as Liszt, Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn, Grillparzer, Stifter, Brentano and Theodor Körner, a friend of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schlegel.[1454] Liszt had an affair with Bettina von Arnim, who numbered among her closest friends Goethe, Beethoven, Schleiermacher, with whom she attended Sara Itzig Levy’s salons, as well as Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, and Johanna Kinkel, the wife of Gottfried Kinkel.[1455] Bettina was the sister of Clemens Brentano, who married Achim von Arnim, who belonged to the Gesetzlose Gesellschaft (“Lawless society”) with Tugendbund member, Ernst Moritz Arndt, a friend of salonnière Henriette Herz, whose husband was a close friend of Moses Mendelssohn and David Friedländer.[1456] Selected poems from Arnim and Brentano’s famous Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boys Magic Horn”), which Illuminatus Baron vom Stein commended for its important role in arousing Volk patriotism to overthrow the French, have been set to music (Lieder) by a number of composers, including Weber, Mahler, Schubert, Loewe, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Zeisl and Webern.[1457]
Körner wrote a letter to Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein, after he had been severely wounded in the head by a saber, signed Ihr verwundeter Sänger (“Your wounded singer”).[1458] Körner became a national hero in Germany after he inspired his comrades by patriotic lyrics like Schwertlied (“Sword Song”), composed only a few hours before his death, and Lützow’s wilde Jagd (“Lützow’s Wild Hunt), each set to music by both Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Schubert. Wagner was also a close friend of Wendelin Weißheimer (1838 – 1910), who had studied with Liszt and was in close contact with Hans von Bülow, Ferdinand Lassalle and August Bebel. Weißheimer became music director in Augsburg. After scoring songs and ballads of the German Minnesang, as well as from Goethe and other poets, he dealt with his first opera Theodor Körner.
Another founding member of the Judenloge was Justus Hiller, who participated in Napoleon’s Sanhedrin, and whose son was Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885), a successful composer who converted to Christianity and became friends with Wagner, as well as composer Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856).[1459] Through a recommendation from Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778 – 1837)—a member of the Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen Masonic lodge[1460] and a close friend of Beethoven—Hiller gained access to the salons of leading musicians and poets, where he met, among others, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Berlioz and Franz Liszt as well as Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo.[1461]
Another friend of Wagner was the Austrian painter Ludwig Passini (1832 – 1903), who married Anna Warschauer, the daughter of Robert and Mary Warschauer, the great-granddaughter of Joseph Mendelssohn and the great-great-granddaughter of Moses Mendelssohn. When Wagner died at Vendramin Calergi in 1883, Passini, along with fellow painter Wolkoff, suggested a death mask for Wagner. The idea was at first rejected by Wagner’s wife Cosima, but was carried out by Passini and the sculptor Augusto Benvenuti under the agreement of Cosima’s daughter, Daniela.[1462]
At the age of nine, Wagner was much impressed by the Gothic elements of Weber’s opera Der Freischütz (“The Marksman” or “The Freeshooter”), which he saw Weber conduct.[1463] It premiered on June 18, 1821, at the Schauspielhaus in Berlin, and is considered the first German Romantic opera.[1464] One theory posits that the term Freikorps for the Lützow Free Corps was the source of Der Freischütz.[1465] The Freischütz tale became widely circulated in 1810 when Johann August Apel included it as the first tale in the first volume of the Gespensterbuch, and is included in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs.[1466] Apel’s friends included Fouqué and Carl Borromäus von Miltitz, who held a literary circle, known as the Scharfenberger Circle, at his ancestral castle Schloss Scharfenberg for about six years from 1811, including Novalis, Fouqué, Apel, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, who established the principles of musical romanticism, and Christian Gottfried Körner, a friend of Schiller who edited the works of his deceased son Theodor Körner.[1467]
Hoffman’s circle of Die Serapionsbrüder included Julius Eduard Hitzig, the grandson of Daniel Hitzig, member of the Asiatic Brethren and founder of the Frankfurt Judenloge, and also Motte Fouqué, who also participated in the salons of Rahel Varnhagen, friend of Henriette Herz.[1468] Rahel’s home became the meeting place for artists, poets and intellectuals such as Schlegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ludwig Tieck, Jean Paul, and Friedrich Gentz. Fouqué’s circle of friends also included E.T.A. Hoffmann, August von Kotzebue—who was murdered by the militant member of the Burschenschaften Karl Ludwig Sand—and Julius Eduard Hitzig. Kotzebue was a major inspiration on Wagner’s step-father Geyer.[1469] Wagner on the other hand, hailed Sand as a German hero for having killed the “buffoon.”[1470]
Linda Siegel has shown that Wagner drew extensively from Julius Eduard Hitzig’s friend E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose gothic tales he was introduced to his uncle, Adolph, who knew Hoffmann quite intimately.[1471] As a youth Wagner frequently attended the performances of his sisters in the stage adaptations of Hoffmann’s tales. Wagner admitted that his opera Die Hochzeit (“The Wedding,” 1832) was prompted by his fascination with Hoffmann’s treatment of the occult. Magic also plays a part in Die Feen (“The Fairies,” 1833), based on a dramatic fairy tale by Carlo Gozzi, a writer whom Hoffmann brought to the attention of the public in Der Dichter und der Komponist (“The Poet and the Composer”). The terrifying world of dreams is the core element in the plot of Wagner’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun (“The Mines of Falun,” 1842), based on Hoffmann’s story of the same name, which also stimulated Wagner’s interest in the occult. Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen (“Master Martin the Cooper and his Apprentices”), provided Wagner with the essential details of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (“The Master-Singers of Nuremberg”).[1472]
It was Julius Edward’s sister, Sara Itzig Levy, who recommended to her niece, Leah Mendelssohn, that Goethe’s friend Karl Friedrich Zelter become her son Felix’s music teacher. In 1839, Wagner met Giacomo Meyerbeer, who with Weber was a fellow student of Zelter. Meyerbeer’s 1831 opera Robert le diable (“Robert the Devil”), is regarded as one of the first grand operas at the Paris Opéra, building on the success established by the genre popularized by Weber’s Der Freischütz, performed in France as Robin des bois (Robin Hood).[1473] The opera was immediately successful from its first night on November 21, 1831, at the Opéra. Chopin, who was in the audience, said, “If ever magnificence was seen in the theatre, I doubt that it reached the level of splendour shown in Robert… It is a masterpiece… Meyerbeer has made himself immortal.”[1474]
Having returned to Leipzig in 1834, Wagner held a brief appointment as musical director at the opera house in Magdeburg. Wagner fell in love with one of the leading ladies there, the actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer, and followed her to Königsberg, where she helped him to get an engagement at the theatre. They married in 1836. In 1837, Wagner moved to Riga, but in 1839 the couple fled from their creditors to London on a stormy sea passage, from which Wagner drew the inspiration for his opera Der fliegende Holländer (“The Flying Dutchman”), with a plot based on a sketch by Heinrich Heine.[1475] The Wagners settled in Paris in September 1839, staying there until 1842. Wagner had completed Rienzi in 1840. Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years, eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor.
Wagner’s middle stage output began with Der fliegende Holländer (“The Flying Dutchman,” 1843), followed by Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850). Wagner’s Lohengrin was based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s story of the Knight Swan in Parzival, which was composed at Wartburg Castle, site of the Miracle of the Roses of Elizabeth of Hungary, and where Martin Luther translated the New Testament of the Bible into German. Tannhäuser was based on two German legends: Tannhäuser, the mythologized medieval German Minnesänger and poet, and on the Wartburgkrieg, when Wolfram produced Parzival as part of a minstrel contest against Heinrich von Ofterdingen and magician Klingsor of Hungary, who foretold the birth of Elizabeth of Hungary. For the plot of Tannhäuser as well, Wagner turned to the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Tannhäuser is based on the Minnesinger Heinrich von Ofterdingen, revived by Novalis in his eponymous fragmentary novel written in 1800, and by Hoffmann in his 1818 novella Der Kampf der Sänger. The legend is told in Hoffmann’s Die Serapionsbrüder, which were well known to Wagner. Despite Wagner’s use of the Tannhäuser story, it was Hoffmann’s Der Kampf der Sänger that supplied the bulk of the opera’s characters, including Wolfram von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide, Biterolf, and their patron, Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia.[1476]
Wagner wove a variety of sources into the narrative of the opera Tannhäuser. According to his autobiography, he was inspired by finding the story in “a Volksbuch (popular book) about the Venusberg,” which he said “fell into his hands,” although he admits knowing of the story from Hoffmann’s story, Der Kampf der Sänger and Tieck’s Phantasus, a number of his earlier stories and dramas collected in three volumes from 1812 to 1817. Tieck’s tale, which names the hero Tannenhäuser, tells of the minnesinger-knight’s amorous adventures in the Venusberg, his travels to Rome as a Pilgrim, and his repudiation by the Pope.
In the early twentieth century, nationalistic German writers portrayed Heinrich as a defender of veritable German poetry and even as author of the Nibelungenlied poem. Sigurd der Schlangentödter, ein Heldenspiel in sechs Abentheuren (“Sigurd the Snake-killer, a heroic play in six episodes,” 1808), by Motte Fouqué, was the first modern German dramatization of the Nibelung. In 1828, Fouqué, a member of Hoffman’s Die Serapionsbrüder, published his play, Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg (“The Song Contest on the Wartburg”). Carl Borromäus von Miltitz, who was part of the literary circle that included including Novalis, Körner, Fouqué, Apel and E.T.A. Hoffmann, wrote Die zwölf Nächte (“The Twelve Nights”), a story set at a castle near the Venusberg, which the hero and Venus return to haunt once a year. An account of the Wartburgkrieg was also found in the Grimm Brothers’ Deutsche Sagen. In Heinrich Heine’s essay Elementargeister (“Elemental spirits”), there appears a poem about Tannhäuser and the lure of the grotto of Venus, published in 1837 in the third volume of Der Salon.
According to Tim Ashley, “…it was in Tannhäuser, more than any of Wagner's other operas, that many in the late 19th century found a reflection of their moral and sexual concerns.”[1477] Speaking of Oscar Wilde’s interest in Wagner, Nicolai Endres asks, “Why did Wagner make such a splash?” and answers, “Homoeroticism, for one.”[1478] As Endres notes, two of Wagner’s most famous disciples, Ludwig II of Bavaria and Nietzsche, were homosexuals. There was the painter Ernst Benedikt Kietz, whom Wagner considered adopting as his son and advised: “God be with you. Don’t do too much pederasty!” Wagner dined almost every night when staying in London in 1855 with the gay couple Prosper Sainton and Carl Lüders, who lived “as man and wife.” There was the Russian painter Paul von Joukowsky, a close friend, maybe lover, of psychologist Henry James. Wagner famously ordered a pink dressing-gown and other fineries from his tailor Bertha Goldwag.[1479]
A Dr. Theodor Puschmann, in Richard Wagner: Eine psychiatrische Studie (1873), diagnoses Wagner as “psychisch nicht mehr normal” (“psychologically no longer normal”), because of, among other reasons, his interest in Männerliebe (“love of men”). Hanns Fuchs’ Richard Wagner und die Homosexualität (“Richard Wagner and Homosexuality,” 1903) and Wilhelm Stekel’s Nietzsche und Wagner: Eine sexualpsychologische Studie zur Psychogenese des Freundschaftsgefühles und des Freundschaftsverrates (“Psychogenesis of the feeling of friendship and betrayal of friendship,” 1917) assume sexual attraction between Wagner and King Ludwig, and Wagner and Nietzsche. Oskar Panizza’s Bayreuth und Homosexualität (“Bayreuth and Homosexuality,” 1895) refers to Parsifal’s “spiritual sustenance for paederasts.” Wagner’s son Siegfried was a known homosexual, enjoying all-male gatherings where he and his friends would quote Plato’s Symposium in Greek and assembling around himself in Bayreuth a gay cult following.[1480]
Wagner’s
fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II succeeded to the
throne of Bavaria, when he exerted all his influence over the fragile king to conspire
with Otto von Bismarck to realize his dreams of a new
Reich. The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the
process of creating a unified German nation state begun by Otto von Bismarck, a
member of the super-rite of Freemasonry founded by Albert Pike and Giuseppe
Mazzini, known as the Palladian Rite. The Third Reich, meaning Third Empire,
alluded to the Nazis’ perception that Nazi Germany was the successor of the
earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806), beginning with the crowning of
Charlemagne in 800 and which was dissolved during the Napoleonic Wars in 1806,
and the German Empire (1871–1918), which lasted from the unification of Germany
in 1871 by Otto von Bismarck under Kaiser Wilhelm I until the abdication of his
grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 at the end of World War II. Although
Bismarck had excluded Austria and the German Austrians from his creation of the
Kleindeutschland state in 1871, integrating the German Austrians
nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of both Austria and
Germany behind the Pan-German movement which influenced the racist fascism of
Nazis.
Advocates of the Großdeutschland (“Greater Germany”) solution sought to unite all the German-speaking people in Europe, under the leadership of the German Austrians from the Austrian Empire. Pan-Germanism had been widespread among the revolutionaries of 1848, notably among Richard Wagner and the Brothers Grimm.[1481] Writers such as Friedrich List (1789 – 1846) and Paul Anton Lagarde (1827 – 1891) argued for German hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe, with the Ostsiedlung, Germanic expansion into Slavic and Baltic lands. argued for the Zollverein, a pan-German customs union, from a nationalist standpoint. The anti-Semitism, opposition to Christianity, Social Darwinism of de Lagarde are said to epitomize the “Germanic ideology” that led to Nazism.[1482] For the Pan-Germanists, these ambitions included a Drang nach Osten (“push eastward”), in which Germans would be eventually inclined to seek Lebensraum (“living space”) is concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, which would become common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s.
As explained by Frank Turner, Wagner
“realised that he could use his ideas and his capacity for self-advertisement
to benefit from the unification of Germany then being carried out by the wars
and diplomacy of Bismarck.”[1483]
Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of
works in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner is considered to have
revolutionized opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“Total-Art-Work”),
by which he sought to synthesize the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts,
with music subsidiary to drama. Wagner
proclaimed in Art and Revolution, “When Art erst held her peace,
State−wisdom and Philosophy began: when now both
Statesman and Philosopher have breathed their last, let the Artist’s voice
again be heard.” Wagner felt that the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus had been the
finest (though still flawed) examples so far of total artistic synthesis, but
that this synthesis had subsequently been corrupted by Euripides. As Turner
explained:
Wagner’s own answer to the decadence of mid-century philistine art was a return to the Greeks and to a form of art that he thought would resemble that of Greek tragedy. Again he was anything but original, for such views had informed German literature from the time of Winckelmann and Goethe.[1484]
To repair the rift and to replace the “Grand Opera,” Wagner called the Gesamtkunstwerk that would combine all of the arts. For Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk that would replace opera was what he called “Music Drama.” Part of the genius of Greek art, and especially drama, had been its appeal to myths. Myth for Wagner and many of his contemporaries held a very special power:
The incomparable thing about the mythos is that it is true for all time, and its content, how close soever its compression, is inexhaustible throughout the ages.[1485]
Referring to Wagner’s nationalistic ambitions, “It is important to note in passing that in none of these ideas was Wagner original,” added Frank Turner. “What would give his ideas so much influence was both his artistic and his cultural-political victories from the mid-1860s onwards. These ideas would ride the crest of the nationalistic success of German unification after 1870 and the desire on the part of many educated Germans to create what they regarded as a distinctive German culture.”[1486] According to Ernest Newman, Wagner’s ideas were nothing new, but originated with the Father Jahn.[1487] On May 1, 1848, Father Jahn, a mentor to Friedrich Fröbel and many other “Forty-Eighter,” was elected by the district of Naumburg to the German National Assembly, which included many of this disciples. Jahn is believed to have coined the term Volksthum (“Folkdom”), with his books Deutsches Volksthum (1810) and Merke zum deutschen Volksthum (1833). As Ernest Newman explains:
Jahn was
an anti-Semite, he approved of the public burning of books not sufficiently
“German” in tone. He yearned prophetically for a Führer who should heal Germany
by “iron and fire,” a man whom the Folk
would honour as a saviour, forgiving him all his sins. Germany was first of all
to achieve internal unity, then take in the Danes, the Netherlanders and the
Swiss; on the other side of Europe it had a “mission” to subdue and
Christianise the Balts and Slavs, for the Germans shared with the ancient
Greeks the distinction of being “humanity’s holy people”. Individual ideas and
individual rights were all to be subject to the will of the State as the
expression of “aggressive nationalism”: there was to be “One God, One
Fatherland, One House, One Love.” No German should marry an unnaturalised
alien.[1488]
Jahn hoped
from Prussia for “a revival, in due season, of the ancient German Reich,” with
a Grossvolk who would accomplish a “New Order.” “Germany,” he continued:
if it is one with itself, if it develops, as a German commonwealth, its prodigious and as yet unexplored forces, can some day be the establisher of eternal peace in Europe, the guardian angel of humanity.[1489]
In his Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik (“German Art and German Policy”), which appeared in 1868, Wagner wrote “‘German,’ ‘German,’ the bell tolls loudly over the cosmopolitan synagogue of the ‘present day’.”[1490] In the 1860s, Wagner openly proclaimed that he was der huldvolle Genius (“the benevolent genius”) whose task was to serve his people. That is, the only German artist who had grasped what it was to be truly German.[1491] This is clearly revealed in a passage included in his diary called The Brown Book and which was inspired after seeing a picture of Parson Riemann, a leading nationalistic figure in the Burschenschaft movement:
Then came the Burschenschaft. That’s when the Tugendbund was founded. All so fantastic that no human being could grasp it. But I have grasped it. Now it is me whom no one grasps. I am the most German being. I am the German spirit. Question the incomparable magic of my works—compare them with the rest and you can for the time being say no differently than that—it is German! But what is this German? It must be something wonderful, mustn’t it, for it is humanly finer than all else?—Oh heavens! It should have a soil, this German! I should be able to find my people! What a glorious people it ought to become. But to this people only could I belong.[1492]
According to Hannu Salmi, in Imagined Germany: Richard Wagner’s National Utopia, Wagner saw the role of art in serving to bring about Weltrevolution (“World Revolution’), a concept already introduced by to the German-speaking world, by Heinrich Heine and Moses Hess, from whom it was adopted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.[1493] In German Art and German Policy, Wagner stated: “Universal as the mission of the German Folk is seen to have been, since its entrance into history, equally universal are the German spirit’s aptitudes for Art.”[1494] The idea of the universality of German culture which, as pointed out by Aira Kemiläinen, appears in the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Adam Müller, and Ernst Moritz Arndt. Wagner, however, claimed that Schopenhauer was the first thinker to understand the true import of this point.[1495] Schopenhauer concluded that all art was related to the Wille (“will”), but that it was only music that tap into the world’s essence, namely, blind, impulsive will.[1496]
Wagner had been a participant in the
revolutions of 1848 and in the Dresden Revolution of 1849, as a consequence of
which he was forced to live for many years in exile from Germany. During the two years after the failure of the
Dresden Revolution, Wagner published four major theoretical statements of his conception
of the role of art to advance his political programme: Art and Revolution (1849),
The Art-Work of the Future (1849), Jewry in
Music (1850), and Opera and Drama (1851). They involved a
condemnation of contemporary art as decadent and bourgeois, blamed that
decadence on the influence of Jews, which needed to be overcome by a new kind
of art. Jewry in Music was an attack on Jewish composers, particularly
Wagner’s contemporaries, and rivals, Felix Mendelssohn and his former friend Giacomo
Meyerbeer, but expanded to accuse Jews of being a harmful and alien element in
German culture, who corrupted morals and were, in fact, parasites incapable of
creating truly “German” art. The root cause was the manipulation and control by
the Jews of the money economy, particularly the Rothschilds. Wagner especially
denounced the “monstrosities” as “Grand Opera,”
which was infected with the influence of commercialism, Judaism, and French
decadence, and of which Giacomo Meyerbeer was the most famous example.
Wagner lived in exile in Zurich, on the run after his role in the 1849 revolution in Dresden. Wagner had been active among socialist German nationalists in Dresden, regularly receiving such guests as August Röckel and Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin had also played a leading role in the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849, helping to organize the defense of the barricades against Prussian troops with Wagner. Wagner was also influenced by the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Ludwig Feuerbach.[1497] Wagner would spend the next twelve years in exile from Germany. Having had completed Lohengrin before the Dresden uprising, he now wrote desperately to his friend Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence. Liszt conducted the premiere in Weimar in August 1850.
Liszt had been married to Countess Marie d’Agoult (1805 – 1876), a friend of Mazzini, who had left her husband for Liszt. Marie d’Agoult half-sister, Auguste Bussmann, was the second wife of Clemens Brentano, a close friend of Achim von Arnim, whose wife Bettina had an affair with Franz Liszt.[1498] Marie was the daughter of Alexandre Victor François de Flavigny (1770 – 1819), French nobleman, and Maria Elisabeth Bethmann, from an old family of German Jewish bankers converted to the Protestant Christianity. Bethmann Bank, founded by Marie’s grandfather Johann Philipp Bethmann (1715 – 1793) and his brother Simon Moritz Bethmann (1721 – 1782), developed into one of Frankfurt’s leading Christian-owned banks, on a scale comparable only to its younger rival, the House of Rothschild.[1499] Marie’s grandmother, Katharina Margarete Schaaf (1741 – 1822) was on familiar terms with the mother of Goethe and, even after she was widowed, maintained a respected salon where she received Madame de Staël in 1808.[1500] Marie recalled in her memoirs, writing under the pseudonym Daniel Stern, about having met the German poet Goethe, and that when he caressed her hair that she felt blessed by his “magnetic hand.”[1501]
From 1835 to 1839, Marie lived with Liszt, and became close to Liszt’s circle of friends, including Frédéric Chopin, who dedicated his 12 Études, Op. 25 to her. In 1841, Liszt was admitted to the Masonic lodge Zur Einigkeit, in Frankfurt am Main and Zur Eintracht in Berlin in 1842.[1502] Liszt’s “Die Lorelei,” one of his very first pieces, based on text by Heinrich Heine, was also dedicated to her. Marie was close friends with Chopin’s lover, Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil (1805 – 1876), who, writing under the pen name of George Sand, was one of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime. Marie became the leader of her own salon, where the ideas that culminated in the Revolution of 1848 were discussed by the outstanding writers, thinkers, and musicians of the day. She maintained a correspondence with Louis Blanc, Lajos Kossuth and Mazzini, whose letters were sometimes read aloud in her salon.[1503] In 1850, under the name Daniel Stern, she published The History of the Revolution of 1848.
Adam Mickiewicz, the famous Polish poet and Frankist, lavished praise on d’Agoult’s Essai sur la liberté (1847). In her articles, d’Agoult described Germany as a “crucible,” which was “embarking upon a new course,” she wrote in an essay on Heine and Freiligrath, “and this country which seems to us so calm on the surface is beset by a strange spirit of unrest.” Her apartment became a meeting place for German émigrés fleeing from repression the followed the Revolutions of 1848. These included the writer Karl Gutzkow, the founder of Young Germany, and Karl Marx.[1504] Bakunin was an occasional visitor, as was Alexander Herzen. Herzen held close ties with the various émigré communities in Paris, and his first foray into the world of Parisian journalism was with La Tribune des peoples, whose director was Adam Mickiewicz.[1505]
During the Second Empire, meeting at Marie’s salon were Émile Ollivier, Jules Grévy, Carnot, Émile Littré and the economist Dupont-White met.[1506] Ollivier (1825 – 1913) married Marie’s daughter Blandine Rachel. Ollivier was the son of Démosthène Ollivier, Republican deputy for Bouches-du-Rhône, who hosted Mazzini, then his son, during his childhood.[1507] With the establishment of the Second Republic, the Minister of the Interior, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, member of the Carbonari and friend of his father, appointed him 1848 commissioner of the provisional government in the departments of Bouches-du-Rhône and Var, when he was only twenty-two years of age. He was transferred to Haute-Marne under Eugène Cavaignac (1802 – 1857), then dismissed in 1849 after the victory of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in the presidential elections, before seizing power as Napoleon III in 1852.[1508]
Probably it was Marie Kalergis (1822 – 1874) a noblewoman and salonnière who brought Liszt into close contact with Napoleon III, as she was good friends with General Cavaignac. She studied music with Chopin, who praised her musical abilities. From 1847 she lived in Paris, where guests at her salons included Liszt and Wagner, who addressed his “Jewishness in Music” to her, despite the fact that her paternal grandmother was Jewish. Also attending were Heinrich Heine who dedicated his poem “The White Elephant” to her and Chopin.[1509]
Wagner was also associated with revolutionary circles through his friendship with Malwida von Meysenbug (1816 – 1903) and Hans von Bülow (1830 – 1894). Bülow, who was perhaps the most prominent of Liszt’s early students, fell in love with and eventually married Liszt’s and Marie’s daughter Cosima, who later left him for Wagner. Von Meysenbug was born at Kassel, Hesse. Her father Carl Rivalier descended from a family of French Huguenots, and received the title of Baron of Meysenbug from William I of Hesse-Kassel (1787 – 1867), the nephew of Prince Charles. Because of her support for the Revolutions of 1848, Malwida grew estranged from her family who supported the royal family.
In 1850, Malwida moved to Hamburg and enrolled in the Hamburger Hoschule für das weibliche Geschlecht (“Hamburg University for the Female Gender”) founded by Johannes Ronge and Johanna and Karl Fröbel, the nephew of Friedrich Fröbel. Teachers included the Freireligiöse preacher Georg Weigelt and Anton Rée (1815 – 1891), the director of the Israelite Free School, founded in 1815 with funding Baruch Abraham Goldschmidt and led for a time by Eduard Kley of the Hamburg Temple. Until 1840, Kley shared the priesthood with Gotthold Salomon (1784 – 1862), who took part in the Hamburg Temple Disputes. Salomon was also a member of the Frankfurt Judenloge and the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Following on the work of Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon was the first Jew to translate the complete Old Testament into High German in 1837, under the title Deutsche Volks- und Schulbibel für Israeliten (“German People’s and School Bible for Israelites”). In 1844, Salomon opened the New Hamburg Temple with Gabriel Riesser. Rée was elected to the Hamburg Constituent Assembly in 1848, alongside Riesser, with whom he worked closely, and was one of the most important advocates of Jewish emancipation.
When the school was forced to close in 1852, Malwida fled to England where she met Carbonari like Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Lajos Kossuth and other Forty-Eighters. The young Carl Schurz—who would go on to become a general in the American Civil War and associated with Lincoln assassination conspirator Simon Wolf—and his friend Gottfried Kinkel, an associate of Ledru-Rollin and Mazzini, also became acquainted with her there. She also met and maintained contact with Thomas Carlyle. In 1862, Malwida went to Italy with Olga Herzen, the daughter of Mazzini’s friend, the “father of Russian socialism,” Alexander Herzen. After she moved to Paris in 1860, she met Wagner for the first time and also corresponded with Arthur Schopenhauer.[1510]
Malwida was also present at the disastrous performance of Tannhäuser in Paris, first performed on March 13, 1861 at the Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opéra. What is now known as the “Paris version” of the opera was requested by Emperor Napoleon III at the suggestion of Princess Pauline von Metternich, wife of the Austrian ambassador to France, Richard von Metternich (1829 – 1895), the eldest surviving son of Illuminatus Prince Metternich. The conform with the traditions of the house, Wagner added a ballet, but in the form of a bacchanale, to conform with the sensual world of Venus’ realm. Performances erupted in whistling and catcalls, until on the third performance on March 24, the uproar caused several interruptions. As a consequence, Wagner withdrew the opera, marking the end to his hopes of establishing himself in Paris.[1511]
Wagner’s appointment to Munich in 1864 had opened up to him for the first time the real possibility of realizing his ideas of the “artwork of the future.” In his first official administrative function, Franz Seraph von Pfistermeister (1820 – 1912), the court secretary and State Council of the Kingdom of Bavaria, was ordered by Ludwig II to find Wagner and bring him to Munich.[1512] Ludwig II settled his considerable debts, and proposed to stage Tristan, Die Meistersinger, the Ring, and the other operas Wagner planned. While composing the opera Siegfried, the third part of the Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner interrupted work on it and between 1857 and 1864 wrote Tristan und Isolde and his only mature comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (“The Mastersingers of Nuremberg”). At the king’s request, Wagner also began to dictate his autobiography, Mein Leben. The premiere of Tristan und Isolde at the National Theatre Munich in 1865, the first Wagner opera premiere in almost fifteen years, was conducted by Hans von Bülow, whose wife, Cosima, had given birth that year to Wagner’s child, a daughter named Isolde. Cosima was 24 years younger than Wagner, and the illegitimate daughter of Liszt and Marie d’Agoult.
In 1865, however, as the assets of the Bavarian State Treasury were almost exhausted through Ludwig’s extravagant support of Wagner, he gained the enmity of number of politicians, including Pfistermeister and Prime Minister, Baron Karl Ludwig von der Pfordten (1811 – 1880), pressured the king of break off his friendship with Wagner. On 5th February the King refused to receive him. Wagner was banished from immediate contact with Ludwig II at the end of the year. However, the conflict between Wagner and the king did not last long.[1513]
In February 1865, Wagner was drawn into a plot conceived by Maximilian Karl, 6th Prince of Thurn and Taxis (1802 – 1871), Head of the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis and head of the Thurn-und-Taxis-Post, who led the Black Brunswickers against French domination in Germany. Maximilian Karl was the fourth child of Karl Alexander, 5th Prince of Thurn and Taxis and his wife Duchess Therese of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, sister of Queen Louise of Prussia, the wife of the wife of King Frederick William III. Maximilian Karl wanted to found a puppet kingdom for his eldest son Maximilian Anton, Hereditary Prince of Thurn and Taxis (1831 – 1867), consisting of Rhineland-Westphalia and approximately half of Belgium.[1514] Maximilian Anton was married to Duchess Helene in Bavaria, a granddaughter of Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria. Duchess Helene’s father, Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria, was introduced to Wagner through his cousin of Ludwig II and became his patron.[1515] Duchess Helene’s sister, Duchess Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria, had been for a time engaged to Ludwig II. Maximilian Anton’s brother was Prince Paul of Thurn and Taxis (1843 – 1879), Ludwig II’s homosexual lover.[1516]
Maximilian Karl had already contacted the government in Berlin to ensure Prussia’s non-intervention, and now sought a similar guarantee from Bavaria. Councillor of State Georg Klindworth (1798 – 1882) from Brussels and Baron Franz Josef von Gruben (1829 – 1888) from Augsburg, on behalf of the Maximilian Karl, presented Wagner with the offer of almost unlimited bank credit, on condition that he lend his assistance to the dismissal of Pfistermeister.[1517] Klindworth’s illegitimate daughter Agnes Street-Klindworth was a lover of Franz Liszt. In 1827, Klindworth went to Brunswick, where he entered the service of Duke Charles II of Brunswick (1804 – 1873), the son of Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1771 – 1815), the “Black Duke,” and Princess Augusta of Great Britain, a granddaughter of George II of England and a first cousin of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel. Frederick William’s father was Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, a favorite nephew of Frederick the Great and nephew of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick. Charles William Ferdinand was also brother of Duchess Anna Amalia, the mother of Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and a friend of Israel Jacobson, founder of the Hamburg Temple, and who met with Moses Mendelssohn.[1518]
In September 1830, Charles II of Brunswick was overthrown and fled to England. Klindworth then went to Paris and joined in 1832 for several years the service of King Louis Philippe I—the son of Illuminatus Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, Philippe Égalité—in whose secret cabinet, he played a leading role. In the 1840s, Klindworth served as an agent to Illuminatus Prince Metternich and Lord Palmerston, and other European princes and politicians. At time he was also a double agent for several clients.[1519] Klindworth’s illegitimate daughter Agnes Street-Klindworth was another lover of Franz Liszt.[1520]
Wagner’s
Report to His Majesty King Ludwig II of Bavaria upon a German School to be
founded in Munich (1865), outlines the plan for a
fundamentally new education for singers and musicians. Wagner’s suggestions
were subsequently implemented to a large extent. The former Royal Conservatory
was closed and reopened in 1867 under the direction of Hans von Bülow as the Münchner
Atelier für Musik (“Munich Studio for Music”). Until 1874, the school was
financed by private funds from King Ludwig II. In the same memorandum, Wagner had also
proposed the creation of a weekly journal to be devoted to furthering the
ultimate aim of the school: the redemption of “German”
culture through Wagnerian music drama. But the music journal had been only a part of
the larger scheme Wagner outlined in 1865. As he wrote to Lorenz von Düfflipp
(1886 – 1886), Ludwig II’s Cabinet Secretary, “there was to have been
established a great political paper which our aims in connection with the
founding of a genuinely German musical and dramatic style were to be set forth
and treated as intimately bound up with the higher interests of the nation.”[1521]
The program met with the approval of the Ludwig II, his Ministers, Wagner and
Cosima, and it was decided to replace the Government paper, the Bayerische
Zeitung, by a new journal with the title of the Süddeutsche Presse.
As editor, Wagner appointed his friend, Julius Fröbel, the son of Friedrich Fröbel.[1522] Julius was also a friend of Alexander von Humboldt, whose friend and benefactor was Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph. Wagner’s German Art and German Policy was immediately published in the Süddeutsche Presse on Fröbel’s appointment as editor in 1868.[1523]
Cosima assured Ludwig II that the program had “made a great sensation. I believe that in the foundation of this paper resides the possibility of a renaissance of the German spirit, and so I hail it with sincerely uplifted joy.” “You know, my valued friend”, Wagner himself wrote to Fröbel, “Our chief task must be to rescue this so vigorous and capable Folk from the neglected condition into which education by priests and bureaucrats has brought it.”[1524] Wagner quoted Konstantin Frantz (1817 – 1891), his latest mentor and one of the precursors of European federalism, that the French influence the wholly “materialistic” culture must be destroyed in order to save civilization, “and this precisely is the mission of Germany, because of all Continental countries Germany alone possesses the needful capacity and strength to bring about a nobler culture against which French civilisation will no longer have any power.”[1525] To Wagner, the re-birth of the “German spirit” will not only “ennoble the public spiritual life of the German Folk” but “found a new and truly German civilization, extending its benefits even beyond our own frontiers.” That, he believed, has been “the universal mission of the German Folk since its entry into history.”[1526]
Writing about Wagner’s dream before World War I, Houston Stewart Chamberlain claimed that what Wagner wanted most of all, and “to which he devoted his life, was single, strong Germany, in contradistinction to the impotent confederation’ of little states and squabbling peoples. In this dream the glory of Wagner’s united “German fatherland was, not that it should rule the world, but that it should ennoble and redeem the world.” through the superiority of German art.[1527] According to David Ian Hall, “Wagner was an undisputed national and international celebrity, and a symbol of Otto von Bismarck’s triumphant new Germany.”[1528] For Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, explains Hall, “Wagner was an exemplar of Germanness, and his works were testaments of German cultural superiority, which fed their fanatical ideas on Aryan concepts of race, a return to hereditary soil, and an aggressive German imperialism.”[1529]
To lend support of Bismarck’s dream of German unification, Wagner put at his disposal his unique relationship with Ludwig II. According to Berita Paillard’s and Emile Haraszti, referring the some six hundred letters kept in the Bavarian National Archives:
These pages prove still more conclusively, if there was any need of doing so, the cynical selfishness of Wagner: to get what he wanted, he did not hesitate before any obstacle. They unmask the true face of the politician, sharp and artful, pulling the strings behind the scenes; they show his great influence in the administration of Bavarian affairs; and they give us a clear picture of that wreck of a young king, hypnotized and finally betrayed by his evil genius… All this is hidden behind honeyed gratitude, drenched in unparalleled servility. In these letters we find the solution of many of the problems that have remained largely enigmatic up to the present. Above all, they reveal the mysteries of the crucible of German unity.[1530]
Historians have tended to ignore the fact that Bismarck secretly contacted Wagner in June 1866, attempting to recruit his support in persuading Bavaria to side with Prussia in the impending war. Wagner remained silent about the event, not mentioning it in his correspondence with Ludwig II, or his closest friends. Wagner’s old friend François Wille (1811 – 1896) who knew Bismarck personally, acted as mediator. At Bismarck’s request, Wille asked Wagner to intercede with Ludwig II and ask him to adopt a positive in favor of Prussian policy, and mediate between Austria and Prussia. Wagner at first declined, but changed his mind following the outcome of the Austro-Prussian War, fought in 1866 between the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, and which resulted in the abolition of the German Confederation and its partial replacement by the unification of all of the northern German states in the North German Confederation that excluded Austria and the other southern German states, a Kleindeutsches Reich.
The decision that caused Wagner’s reversal was when, on June 23, 1866, prior to the end of the war, the Landtag expressed support for his former rival, the pro-Austrian Prime Minister, Baron Pfordten, which he saw as a vote against the Ludwig II and the German Confederation. Wagner therefore appealed to Ludwig II to side with Prussia against Austria:
Germany is something. She is powerful;
Germany feels the life force within her. What is
German and what is the German spirit—that is what we wish to show to the world, and
we wish to fill, the dessicated arteries of the
poor, unbelieving Teutonic world with new life.
Let then, from Munich, the flags of the noble Germanic genius fly over Germany, all united as I envisioned it-flags that my glorious Siegfried will wave and flaunt throughout the country! The acts of French insolence and menace touch the honor of Germany; the entire people desire a reply. We stand before a highly popular war… Now or never… The greatest armed force… Forward, forward!... The Bavarian and the Prussian scales must now be hooked together in the balance. You will thus become the Führer of South Germany and of Austria. You ought to do it; it must be. And at once! This is my testament.[1531]
Helping Wagner to intercede with the Ludwig II was his homosexual lover, Prince Paul of Thurn and Taxis. Wagner succeeded in finally convincing Ludwig II to support Bismarck’s trustee in Bavaria, Chlodwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (1819 – 1901). Chlodwig’s brother, Prinz Konstantin zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (1828 – 1896), was married to Marie zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst. Marie zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst’s childhood was shaped by her parents falling out and her mother’s flight to Germany to join her lover Franz Liszt in 1848. Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz, among others, frequented the Altenburg in Weimar, where her mother had taken up residence. Marie had a special friendship with the German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel (1813 – 1863), whose circle of friends included Amalie Schoppe, Fanny Tarnow, Adelbert von Chamisso and Rosa Maria Assing, whose brother was Karl August Varnhagen, husband of the salonnière Rahel Varnhagen.
The significance of Wagner’s role in these events has been assessed in Berita Paillard’s and Emile Haraszti’s article “Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner in the Franco-German War of 1870” as being of major significance.[1532] The authors’ primary source was a report published by Cornelien Abrányi, a student of Chopin, Friedrich Wilhelm Kalkbrenner, and Fromental Halévy, and also a close friend of Franz Liszt. According to Abrányi, Liszt had been acting as an international agent, conveying information from Germany to France, as his son-in-law, Emile Ollivier, was then Minister of Justice in the Second Empire and was also from 1870 Prime Minister of France. Listzt’s contact Napoleon III and Cavaignac, Marie Kalergis, regarded not only the French emperor, but also Bismarck was a genius.[1533] Although Kalergis at first served as liaison agent between Liszt and the Emperor, later information passed through diplomatic channels, at times the French Legation at Weimar, at other times the Austrian Embassy, thanks to the invitations of Princess Pauline von Metternich, wife of the ambassador, Richard von Metternich.
The French naively expected Austria-Hungary to remain neutral and for anti-Prussian sentiments in Southern Germany, led by Bavaria, even though Liszt had warned them of Wagner’s influence over Ludwig II. According to Abrányi, Liszt related to him:
The Prussian diplomats were quite well aware of the enormous influence of Richard Wagner on the young and unstable king, who idolized him: they knew how to use him to attain their ends. There was no need to exert much pressure on Wagner to get him to accomplish the task that the Prussians expected of him.[1534]
Taking place from July 19, 1870, to January 28, 1871, the Franco-German War was caused primarily by France’s aim of reasserting its dominant position in continental Europe, following the decisive Prussian victory over Austria in Austro-Prussian War of 1866. According to a number of historians, Bismarck deliberately provoked the French into declaring war on Prussia in order to induce four independent southern German states—Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt—to join the North German Confederation.[1535] As Liszt further reported, a day after Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, Ludwig II signed the Prussian alliance and the general mobilization order. These two decrees were decisive. Napoleon III’s armies could not withstand the combined German forces, and Austria-Hungary chose to withdraw into neutrality.[1536] The war incited nationalistic fervor in Germany, inspiring volunteers to join the army, including Wagner’s friend, Friedrich Nietzsche, who was soon hospitalized, after having caught dysentery and diphtheria at the front. Wagner himself considered participating, but as Salmi noted, was “content to engage in propaganda.”[1537]
Following Germany’s victory, Prussian King Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor of a unified Germany at Versailles on January 18, 1871. Wagner, was exuberant: “Wonderful progress is being made in establishing the new Reich!”[1538] Wagner decided to compose a patriotic march, the Kaisermarsch, to be performed in the presence of the Kaiser in Berlin, an idea that had originated from the Jewish publisher Max Abraham (1831 – 1900).[1539] A well-known Wagner sympathizer, Friedrich Stade (1844 – 1928), reviewed the score for the journal Musikalisches Wochenblatt, and praised the work, writing, “Whereas, in Wagner’s creations for the stage, we perceive the workings of the German spirit indirectly; in the Kaisermarsch, Wagner provides with us a vision of that German spirit, of the German character itself; a vision imbued on the one hand with strength and energy, on the other with gentleness and introspection.”[1540]
Berlin’s largest newspaper, the Norddeutsche
Allgemeine Zeitung, reported the Kaisermarsch had been anticipated
in Berlin “with excitement.”[1541]
The paper emerged from
the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, founded in 1837 and published by
Heinrich Brockhaus (1804 – 1874), whose older brother Friedrich married
Richard Wagner’s sister Luise Konstanze, while his younger brother Hermann
married another sister, Ottilie Wilhelmine Wagner. The
newspaper was at times directly financed from the Foreign Office by Reptilienfonds,
black money hidden
usually used to exert political influence or to pay bribes. The term Reptilienfonds arose as a result of the Prussian
annexations in 1866, when Bismarck used funds from the confiscated private
assets of King George V of Haover (1819 – 1878) and Frederick William, Elector
of Hesse (1802 – 1875), the last Prince-elector of Hesse-Kassel, after the war
against Austria to buy positive press. Bismarck also wanted to obtain the support
of the Ludwig II of Bavaria for the war against France and the establishment of
a German empire under Prussian control.[1542]
The Kaisermarsch was officially premiered on May 5, 1871, at the Berlin Opera House, conducted by Wagner in the presence of the Kaiser and his wife. Although Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of SPD and close associate of Marx and Engels, was member of the founding editorial board in 1861, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung became soon a conservative flagship of the German press, Bismarck’s Hauspostille.[1543] The program included parts of Lohengrin, Wotan’s farewell from The Valkyrie, Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor, and the Kaisermarsch, performed at the beginning and again as a finale, with the audience joining in. The applause, according to the paper, was “stormy.”[1544]
The work of Wagner’s friend Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) was frequently published in Pan-German newspapers. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche introduces one of his most controversial images, the “blond beast”—the Aryan race—which he compares to a “beast of prey,” impelled by a “good,” which is an irresistible instinct for mastery over others. It was through his formulation of an idea related to the blond beast, the Übermensch (“Superman”), that Nietzsche inspired the fascist ideal of the New Man, with an excessive emphasis on male virility. Nietzsche’s revolutionary New Man of the future, the Übermensch or “Superman,” must strip away all values of conventional weak morality, including equality, justice and humility. We must have an Umwertung aller Werte, the “revaluation of all values.” The man of the future must be a beast of prey, an “artist of violence’’ creating new myths, new states based upon the essence of human nature, which Nietzsche identifies as Wille zur Macht, the “Will to Power” being a “a will to war and domination.”
In 1870, Nietzsche hoped to appeal to the anti-Semitism of his idol, the composer Richard Wagner, and his wife Cosima, when he delivered a lecture on “Socrates and Tragedy,” in which he insisted that the “Jewish press” would have a corrupting effect on German art in the same way that the influence Socrates destroyed authentic Greek tragedy. On the contrary, the Wagners felt that Nietzsche had gone too far. While agreeing with the main point he was making, Cosima wrote to Nietzsche that his lecture was “much too new to be understood by the audience” and that it could jeopardize their entire “program.”[1545] That “program” appears to have to have been a diabolical ploy, the ultimate chutzpah, to exploit patriotic feelings and foment a German nationalism, that would result in a violent response to contribute to the expulsion of Jews from Europe, and their emigration to Palestine, in service of the Zionist plot to fulfill their interpretation of End Times prophecies of the regathering of the Jews in the Promised Land, in expectation of the return of their “messiah.”
Meyerbeer and Wagner’s relationship was to have major repercussions for the careers and reputations of both. At their first meeting, Wagner read to Meyerbeer from the libretto of Rienzi, which Meyerbeer subsequently recommended for performance at Dresden. However, Wagner turned against Meyerbeer, and his vitriolic campaign against him was to a large extent responsible for the decline of Meyerbeer’s popularity. In reaction, Wagner published Das Judenthum in der Musik (“Jewishness in Music”), published in 1869, which attacks Jews in general and the composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn in particular. Wagner, however, wrote that Heine “was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the bad conscience of our modern civilization.” About Börne, in typical Frankist fashion, Wagner explained:
But Börne also teaches how this redemption cannot be achieved in comfort and with indifferent, cold complacence. Rather it teaches us that, as it does for us, it costs sweat, anguish, fears and an abundance of suffering and pain. If you take part ruthlessly in this work of redemption, which regenerates through self-annihilation, we will be united and undifferentiated! But remember that only one thing can be your redemption from the curse that weighs on you: the redemption of the Wandering Jew—downfall! [or “destruction!”][1546]
Malwida von Meysenbug—who maintained a network of friends in London belonging to the Carbonari and the Forty-Eighters, and who moved to Bayreuth in 1870 to join the Wagners—invited Nietzsche and his Jewish friend Paul Rée (1849 – 1901) to Sorrento, Italy, in the autumn of 1876. Paul was a second cousin of Anton Rée, the director of the Israelite Free School, led for a time by Eduard Kley of the Hamburg Temple. Although he exercised a formative influence on Nietzsche, Rée is primarily known through his friendship with Nietzsche, rather than as an important philosopher in his own right. According to Theodor Lessing, Rée is a tragic example of the self-hating Jew:
Rée belonged to the wondrous kind of young Jews (very common in those pre-Zionist years) completely dissociated from their rites and heritage, guarding the consciousness of their Jewish origin like a secret affliction, a mark of Cain or disfiguring birthmark. On the other hand, they were too refined to endure the taint of their birth without effects on their psyche.[1547]
In Sorrento, Rée wrote The Origins of Moral Sensations, and Nietzsche began Human, All Too Human.[1548] Rée rejected metaphysical explanations of good and evil, opting instead for a Darwinian explanation, and argued that our moral sentiments were the result of evolutionary changes that had occurred over the course of many generations. Like Lamarck, Rée argued that acquired habits could be inherited as innate characteristics by later generations. Such an acquired habit, was altruistic behavior, which was so beneficial, Rée claimed, that it came to be praised unconditionally, as something good in itself, apart from its outcomes.
By his own admission, Nietzsche’s religious thought was influenced by “Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe.”[1549] Robert C. Holub, in Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism, has highlighted Nietzsche’s problematic opinion of the Jews, despite numerous efforts to the contrary by Walter Kaufmann, Henning Ottmann, R. J. Hollingdale, Weaver Santaniello, and others. For example, Nietzsche praises the Jews in The Antichrist as “a people gifted with the very strongest vitality,” but criticizes them “evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition” only a few pages later. The basis of Nietzsche’s philosophy, as outlined in The Antichrist, is to purge the world of Christian values and return to one in which “natural.” “Christian[ity],” he writes, “is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage, of freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian[ity] is all hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general.” Christianity, though, originated in Judaism, the “soil from which it sprung.” As Benjamin Silver summarizes, “Biblical Judaism, according to Nietzsche, slowly developed ‘slavish’ values and, in so doing, eventually launched a Christian revolution. For him, Christianity is the ‘one great curse’ visited upon humanity, and it was visited upon humanity by the Jews.”[1550] Rée’s friendship with Nietzsche disintegrated in the fall of 1882 due to complications from their mutual involvement with Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Nietzsche, however, having published his
eulogistic essay “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” before the Bayreuth Festival, as
part of his Untimely Meditations, was disappointed by what he saw as
Wagner’s pandering to growing German nationalism.[1551]
Nietzsche had been a member of Wagner’s inner circle during the early 1870s,
and his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (1972), proposed
Wagner’s music as the Dionysian “rebirth” of European culture in opposition to
Apollonian rationalist “decadence.” However, Nietzsche broke with Wagner
following the first Bayreuth Festival, expressing his displeasure in “The Case
of Wagner” and “Nietzsche contra Wagner.” Nietzsche thought Wagner had become
too involved in the Völkisch movement and antisemitism. Although Wagner
expressed anti-Semitic views in Jewishness in Music, he had Jewish
friends, colleagues and supporters throughout his life. Later in life, in the course of preparing his autobiography, Mein Leben, Wagner received a cache of letters from his sister Caecilie written
by his step-father, that him to believe that Geyer was his biological father,
and possibly Jewish, a fact hinted at by Nietzsche in 1888, in the afterword to
“The Case of Wagner.”[1552]
In 1871, Wagner decided to move to
Bayreuth, which was to be the location of his new opera house. After having been
temporarily banished from immediate contact with Ludwig II at the end of 1865, Wager
switched his attention from Munich to Nuremberg, which he saw as especially
appropriate for the performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which
Hannu Salmi has described as “the most openly and clearly political of all Wagner’s
operas.”[1553]
Nuremberg, however, was abandoned when Wagner he was told by Hans Richter (1843
– 1916) that Bayreuth featured an excellent opera house. Bayreuth experienced its Golden Age
during the reign Frederick, Margrave of
Brandenburg-Bayreuth (1735 – 1763) and Margravine Wilhelmina of Bayreuth, the favourite sister of Frederick
the Great. Like her famous brother, Wilhelmina
was an enthusiastic composer, had the Margravial Opera House built in Bayreuth,
completed in 1747. Their daughter, Princess Elisabeth Friederike Sophie of
Brandenburg-Bayreuth, was described by Casanova as “the most beautiful princess
in Germany.”
In 1759,
after Wilhelmine’s death, Frederick married Princess Sophie Caroline of
Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who was a patron of a young Benjamin Constant, before
he met Madame de Stäel and was received in Weimar by her sister, Duchess Anna
Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the mother of Illuminatus Karl August of
Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.[1554] The
abdication of the last Margrave, Alexander, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach
(1736 – 1806), the Prussian Minister Hardenberg took over the administration of
the principalities of Ansbach and Bayreuth at the beginning of 1792. In 1804,
the Romantic poet Jean Paul moved from Coburg to Bayreuth, where he lived until
his death in 1825.
During the opening ceremonies of the Bayreuth Festival on August 13, 1876, Wagner was able to state Germany now had her national theatre. The Festival consisted of three operas of The Ring of the Nibelung cycle, under the direction of Hans Richter. The Bayreuth Festival was a unique cultural event in Germany, even honored by the presence of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Bismarck, however, refused to attend. All of Wagner’s most ardent supporters came to the festival, including Nietzsche, Wilhelm Tappert, Ludwig Nohl, Richard Pohl, Gottfried Semper, and Karl Klindworth, the nephew of Georg Klindworth. Professional musicians came from all over the world, the most famous of them being Edvard Grieg from Norway, who thought the work “divinely composed,” and Tchaikovsky from Russia.
A surprise guest to the Festival of 1876 was Emperor Pedro II of Brazil (1825 – 1891), a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and Knight of Malta, who was touring Europe at the time.[1555] Pedro II’s mother was Empress Dona Maria Leopoldina, the daughter of Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, the grandson of Empress Maria Theresa, who protected Jacob Frank, and the sister of Joseph II, who reported had an affair with Frank’s daughter Eve. Dona Maria Leopoldina. Maria Leopoldina’s mother, Maria Ludovika of Austria-Este, was the sister of Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, who married Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy (1802 – 1821). As a descendant of Henrietta of England, the daughter of Charles I of England, Victor Emmanuel I carried the Jacobite claim to the thrones of England and Scotland. Their sister, Archduchess Maria Leopoldine of Austria-Este, was the wife of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, who had the Illuminati lodge Charles Theodore of Good Counsel named after him.
Through his father, Pedro I of Brazil (1798 – 1834), thus a member of the Brazilian branch of the House of Braganza, established by his ancestor John IV of Portugal, the grandson of Manuel I of Portugal, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and Grand Master of the Order of Christ. Manuel I’s uncle was Afonso V of Portugal, a knight of the Order of the Garter, who employed Isaac Abarbanel as his treasurer. John IV married Luisa de Guzmán, who was from the ducal house of Medina-Sidonia of allegedly crypto-Jewish background.[1556] Their daughter Catherine of Braganza married Charles II of England, the son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici.
Pedro I’s second wife was Amélie of Leuchtenberg, the daughter
of Napoleon’s stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, and Princess Augusta of Bavaria, the
granddaughter of Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria, and the great-aunt King Ludwig
II of Bavaria. Her aunt, Princess Ludovika of Bavaria, married Duke Maximilian
Joseph in Bavaria (1808 – 1888), and was introduced to Wagner through his
cousin Ludwig II and became his patron.[1557]
Ludovika and Maximilian were the parents of the famous Empress Elisabeth of
Austria, popularly known as Sisi, the wife of Franz Joseph I of Austria. Sisi’s
sister Duchess Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria had been for
a time engaged to Ludwig II, but eventually married Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Alençon (1844 – 1910),
the grandson of Louis Philippe I, the son of
Illuminatus Louis
Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, Philippe Égalité. Prince
Ferdinand’s brother, Gaston, Count of Eu (1842 – 1922),
married Pedro II’s daughter, Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil. Isabel’s sister, Princess
Leopoldina of Brazil, married Prince Ludwig August of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1845 – 1907), a first cousin of Queen Victoria and her husband
Prince Albert.
Pedro II was a close friend of the French aristocrat Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau (1816 – 1882), as Wagner had read his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, where Gobineau expounded the theory of or Aryan master-race and that the people who had best preserved Aryan or Nordic “blood” were the Germans.[1558] Shocked by the Revolution of 1848, Gobineau first expressed his racial theories in his 1848 epic poem Manfredine, in which he revealed his fear of the aristocratic Europe being replaced by common rabble of lesser breeding. He wrote:
And the Germanic People, displaying the blond hair of their ancestors, emerged to rule in every corner of the world. Neptune and his trident serve the Anglo-Saxon, their last descendant, and the peopled deserts of young America know the strength of this heroic people. But as to the Romans, Germans, Gauls, [...] to put it briefly, those who are not German are created to serve.[1559]
One hypothesis put forward by a German author in 1926 suggested that Gobineau was initiated into the mysteries of race by Benjamin D’Israeli during meetings they might have had in Paris.[1560] Gobineau came to believe race determined culture. His primary thesis, corresponding to the hypothesis of an ancient Indo-European culture, was that European civilization flowed from Greece to Rome, and then to Germanic and contemporary civilization.[1561] Of the three races—“black,” “white,” and “yellow”—whites, he argued, were alone capable of intelligent thought, creating beauty and were the most beautiful.[1562] “The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength” he wrote, and any positive qualities the Asians and blacks possessed was due to subsequent miscegenation.[1563]
In 1841, Gobineau scored his first major success when an article he submitted to Revue des deux Mondes (“Review of the Two Worlds”) a monthly French-language literary, cultural and current affairs magazine that has been published in Paris since 1829. At the time, the journal was one of the most prestigious journals in Paris, and also published George Sand the Symbolist Théophile Gautier, who was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde. Heinrich Heine first published an essay in three parts in 1834, De l'Allemagne depuis Luther, a history of emancipation in Germany beginning with the Reformation. Stendhal published his novella Mina de Vinghel in the magazine. George Sand also serialized her novel Mauprat in the magazine in 1837. Gobineau struck up a friendship and had voluminous correspondence with Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859), best known for his works Democracy in America. Tocqueville praised Gobineau in a letter: “You have wide knowledge, much intelligence, and the best of manners.”[1564] While serving as foreign minister during the Second Republic of France, Tocqueville later gave Gobineau an appointment in the Quai d’Orsay, the French foreign ministry.
In 1869, Gobineau was appointed the French minister to Brazil, where he befriended Emperor Pedro II. A savant in his own right, the Pedro II established a reputation as a sponsor of learning, culture, and the sciences, and won the respect and admiration of people such as Charles Darwin, Victor Hugo, and Nietzsche, and was a friend to Louis Pasteur, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others. In 1876, Pedro II accompanied Gobineau on his trip to Russia, Greece and the Ottoman Empire, who introduced him to both Tsar Alexander II and Sultan Abdul Hamid II. After leaving Pedro II in Istanbul, Gobineau traveled to Rome for a private audience with Pope Pius IX.[1565] During his visit to Rome, Gobineau met and befriended the Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima.[1566]
Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final opera. Commentators have recognized Cosima as the principal inspiration for his later works, particularly Parsifal. It has been suggested that Wagner’s Parsifal was written in support of the racist ideas of Gobineau.[1567] Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final opera. Wagner’s Jewish friend Hermann Levi conducted the first performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882, even though Wagner initially objected to this and was quoted as saying that Levi should be baptized before conducting it.[1568] Levi regarded Wagner “the best and noblest of men.”[1569] Nevertheless, Parsifal is proposed as the “pure-blooded” (i.e. Aryan) hero who overcomes Klingsor, who is perceived as a Jewish stereotype, particularly since he opposes the purportedly Christian Knights of the Grail.[1570]
In view of
the Masonic aspects of his Parsifal,
it is speculated that Wagner learned much of Masonic ritual and ideas from his
father-in-law Oswarld Marbach.[1571]
Similarities between Parzifal and
Mozart’s Masonic opera The Magic Flute
have also been noted.[1572]
Another great Mason friend of Wagner was the banker, Friedrich Feustel (1824 –
1891), who from 1863-69 was master of the lodge Zur Sonne in Bayreuth. In 1847, Feustel proposed that the lodge
abolish the restrictions on non-Christians becoming members.[1573]
Feustel would become a member of the Reichstag as a candidate for the National
Liberal Party from 1877 until his death.[1574] When
Wagner and Cosima founded the Bayreuth Festival in 1877, it was supported both
financially and socially by Feustel. His son-in-law Adolf von Gross became the
festival’s financial manager for years.[1575]
After the death of Ludwig II in 1886, Gross traveled to Munich to retrieve the
funds for the festival that the king had promised.[1576]
The philosophy of Gobineau, has been described as “undoubtedly the most influential academic racist of the nineteenth century,”[1577] becoming “cult-like”[1578] among “racial aristocracy,” and strongly influential with Wagner, Nietzsche and with the proponents of the pan-German movement.[1579] Largely ignored when the Essay was published in France, it was in Germany that Gobineau’s theories aroused the most interest, introduced by Wagner in his review Bayreuther Blätter. In 1878, Wagner founded the Bayreuther Blätter (“Bayreuth pages”), a monthly journal primarily for visitors to the Bayreuth Festival. The journal was edited by Hans von Wolzogen (1848 – 1938) whose mother was a daughter of the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781 – 1841). Schinkel collaborated in architectural projects with Jewish Prussian architect Salomo Sachs (1772 – 1855), who was a neighbor of Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who married Lea Salomon, a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig.[1580] Their son was Felix Mendelssohn. Wagner published “Religion and Art” (1880) and “Heroism and Christianity” (1881) in the journal. Wagner’s sudden interest in Christianity, which infused Parsifal, was in line with his increasing alignment with German nationalism, and required on his part, and the part of his associates, “the rewriting of some recent Wagnerian history,” so as to represent, for example, The Ring of the Nibelung as a work reflecting Christian ideals.[1581] Many of these later articles, including “What is German?” (1878), repeated Wagner’s antisemitic sentiments. And yet, from 1880 to 1896 the journal carried extracts from the detailed recollections of Wagner’s rehearsal and staging techniques by Heinrich Porges (1837 – 1900) a Czech-Austrian choirmaster, music critic and writer of Jewish descent.[1582]
Gobineau in turn became a member of the Bayreuther Kreis (“Bayreuth Circle”), which included Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was particularly influenced by the racial theories of Gobineau. Chamberlain was born in Hampshire, England, and emigrated to Dresden in adulthood out of a veneration for Wagner, and was later naturalized as a German citizen. He married Wagner’s daughter Eva von Bülow. Although he never met Wagner, it was at the age of twenty three in 1878, that Chamberlain first heard his music, which struck him with all the force of a religious revelation, after which he also became an ardently pro-German and anti-French. Chamberlain founded the first Wagner society in Paris and often contributed articles to the Revue wagnérienne, the first journal in France devoted to Wagner studies. He immersed himself in philosophical writings, and became a Völkisch author, as evidenced by his huge treatise on Kant, and in which is demonstrated his and knowledge of Nietzsche. In 1888, Chamberlain wrote to his family proclaiming his joy at the death of the Friedrich III, a strong opponent of anti-Semitism, whom he called a “Jewish liberal,” and rejoicing at the accession of his anti-Semitic son Wilhelm II.[1583] Chamberlain best-known book, the two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (“The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century”), published 1899, became highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements. In fact, Chamberlain has been referred to as “Hitler’s John the Baptist.”[1584]
In the spirit of the “denial of the will to live,” a concept championed by Schopenhauer, völkisch theorists such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain sought German religious redemption.[1585] In his work Richard Wagner, Chamberlain summarized many of his father-in-law’s views and asserted that Wagner had traced the fundamental causes of human decadence to the “deterioration of the blood” and to the “demoralizing influence of the Jews.” He summed up Wagner’s doctrine of regeneration as the belief, “Out of the inner negation of the world the affirmation of redemption will be born.”[1586] Schopenhauer also maintained a marked metaphysical and political anti-Judaism, considering that Christianity constituted a revolt against what he styled the materialistic basis of Judaism, which is, he wrote, “the crudest and poorest of all religions and consists merely in an absurd and revolting theism.”[1587] Wagner’s turn to Christianity was influenced by his reading of Schopenhauer, from whom he adopted, according to David Ian Hall, “the argument that art, and specifically music, was a refuge from the world and a source of redemption and rebirth.”[1588] As noted by Frank Turner, although Schopenhauer was a contemporary of Hegel, and had published his most important work The World as Will and Idea in 1818, “during the 1850s there took place a Schopenhauer revival in Europe and his philosophy enjoyed a very considerable vogue that lasted until at least the 1920s.”[1589]
In the third edition of The World as Will and Representation (1859), Schopenhauer added an untitled appendix to the second volume, “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love,” where he remarks that pederasty is a “misguided instinct.” However, he notes that this tendency appears in either adolescents or old men, who are either too young or too old to reproduce. Therefore, by directing sexual impulse away from procreation, the “unnatural” natural tendency helps preserve the human species, by preventing the creation of weak, deformed, and short-lived offspring.[1590] Schopenhauer noted that “the vice we are considering appears to work directly against the aims and ends of nature, and that in a matter that is all important and of the greatest concern to her it must in fact serve these very aims, although only indirectly, as a means for preventing greater evils.”[1591] Schopenhauer ends the appendix by stating that “by expounding these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of philosophy a small favour. I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty.”[1592]
In the Bayreuther Blätter, writers also expressed support for Otto von Bismarck and the German Empire. Although Otto von Bismarck had excluded Austria and the German Austrians from his creation of the Kleindeutschland state in 1871, integrating the German Austrians nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of both Austria and Germany behind the Pan-German movement. Although Bismarck had excluded Austria and the German Austrians from his creation of the Kleindeutschland state in 1871, integrating the German Austrians nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of both Austria and Germany behind the Pan-German movement. Pan-Germanists originally sought to unify the Germans of the Second Reich with the other Germanic-speaking peoples into a single nation-state known as Großdeutschland, under the leadership of the German Austrians from the Austrian Empire.
As explained by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the pan-German movement originated among the fraternities of Vienna, Graz, and Prague during the 1860s. Initially formed in the 1840s, these Austrian fraternities were modelled on the German Burschenschaften, drawing inspiration from the teachings of Father Jahn.[1593] During the Wars of Liberation, Father Jahn had called for the creation of a greater Germany including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Prussia and Austria.[1594] Agitated by the problem of German nationality in the Austrian state after 1866, certain fraternities began advocating for a Kleindeutschland, that is, incorporation of German-Austria into the German Reich. They glorified Bismarck, praised the Prussian army and Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Bismarck’s ideology of Blut und Eisen (“Blood and Iron”).[1595] The phrase was derived from a patriotic poem written during the Napoleonic Wars by Max von Schenkendorf (1783 – 1817), a volunteer in the 1813 War of Liberation who was commissioned to compose patriotic songs together with Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner.[1596] In his poem “The Iron Cross,” Schenkendorf wrote that “only iron can save us, only blood can redeem us from the sins of heavy chains, from the pride of evil doers.” The phrase became symbolic of Bismarckian Machtpolitik (“Power politics”) after his famous speech of September 20, 1862, after he became Minister President:
The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power […] Prussia must concentrate its strength and hold it for the favourable moment, which has already come and gone several times. Since the treaties of Vienna, our frontiers have been ill-designed for a healthy body politic. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood (Eisen und Blut).[1597]
Völkisch Pan-Germanism began as the ideology of the small minority of Germans in Austria who refused to accept their permanent separation from the rest of Germany after 1866, which they determined to repair through the Anschluss of what they called German-Austria. Vienna, capital of the multinational Hapsburg Empire, rivaled Paris as Europe’s cultural center. Less than half of Vienna’s two million residents were Austrian, while about a quarter came from Bohemia and Moravia—the strongholds of the Sabbateans sect—so that Czech was often spoken alongside German.[1598] However, although an extensive religious literature was still in the possession of Frankists in Moravia and Bohemia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, their descendants tried to obliterate any shred of evidence of their ancestors’ beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, most of the families once associated with the Sabbateanism in Western and Central Europe continued to remain afterward within the fold of Judaism, and many of their descendants, particularly in Austria, rose to positions of importance during the nineteenth century as prominent intellectuals, great financiers, and men of high political connections.[1599] It was reported in the 1840s that Jews professing Christianity were found filling the offices of the ministry, and that Frankists had been discovered and probably existed among the Catholic and Protestant church dignitaries of Russia, Austria and Poland.[1600]
Wagner inspired Georg von Schönerer (1842 – 1921), a member of the Viennese Burschenschaft and the most influential pan-German in Austria, who exerted a significant influence on young Hitler.[1601] Schönerer’s father, Mathias, a railroad contractor in the employ of the Rothschilds, left him a large fortune. His wife was a great-granddaughter of Rabbi Samuel Löb Kohen, who died at Pohrlitz, South Moravia, in 1832.[1602] Like many other Austrian pan-Germans, Schönerer hoped for the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and an Anschluss with Germany. Schönerer’s movement only allowed its members to be Germans and none of the members could have relatives or friends that were Jews or Slavs, and before any member could get married they had to prove “Aryan” descent and have their health checked for any potential defects.[1603] Schönerer, who had adopted the swastika as a völkisch symbol, would go on to exercise a great influence on Hitler and the Nazi Party as a whole. Schönerer’s efforts were also reflected in the founding of the Neuen Richard-Wagner-Vereins (“New Richard Wagner Association”) to “free German art from adulteration and Judaization.”[1604]
In his memoirs, Arthur Schnitzler (1862 – 1931)—a friend of both Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl—recalled a popular saying in those days, that: “Anti-Semitism did not succeed until the Jews began to sponsor it.”[1605] Schnitzler’s works were also often controversial for their strong stand against anti-Semitism, as represented by works such as his play Professor Bernhardi and his novel Der Weg ins Freie, in which he dealt extensively with the Jewish Question, and depicted a variety of Jewish types. These included a pro-Zionist named Salomon Ehrenberg, who warns a young female socialist activist, Therese Golowski, that her struggle for social justice will be futile: “Exactly the same thing would happen to you Jewish Social Democrats as happened to the Jewish Liberals and German Nationalists.” Jews, he reminded her, had created Liberalism and pan-Germanism in Austria, “only to be betrayed, deserted, and spat on like dogs.”[1606]
Despite their open anti-Semitism, the Pan-German and Völkisch movements, which began to flourish mainly in Vienna, in the late nineteenth century, were closely associated with Jews who sought to resolve the age-old “Jewish Question” through full assimilation into German nationality, a tendency that initially inspired the Zionism of Herzl. Among German nationalists and Zionists, as Francis Nicosia explained in The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, “there was a common acceptance of the völkisch inviolability and separateness of the peoples of the world and the necessity of a völkisch basis for the state.”[1607] As Nicosia further outlines:
While Herder’s dictum led Zionists and some German nationalists to favor separate but not necessarily unequal national entities, each with its own state preserving its own separate völkisch character, the anti-Semites made qualitative distinctions between the racial or national groups of the world, specifically, between Germans and Jews. Their relationship was soon defined as one of hostility and struggle between the superior and the inferior, between good and evil. For all of them, however, the liberal concept of a pluralistic society, supported by the overwhelming majority of Jews in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, was unacceptable.[1608]
The term “anti-Semitism” is itself
problematic and ultimately manipulative. There are two types of anti-Semitism.
One involves negative opinions of Jews as followers of the religion of Judaism.
The other, usually referred to as “racial antisemitism,” involves hostility to
Jews driven by the belief that they constitute a distinct race, with inherent
negative traits that are in-born.[1609]
The term “antisemitic” was first employed in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish
scholar Moritz Steinschneider (1816 – 1907) to criticize the false ideas of the
French philosopher Ernest Renan (1823 – 1892) about how “Semitic races” were
inferior to “Aryan races.”[1610]
Steinschneider was born in the town of Prossnitz, Moravia, to a Sabbatian
family, and was acquainted with Leopold Zunz and Abraham Geiger of the Hamburg
Temple.[1611]
The Zionist rejection of the liberal and assimilationist orientation of the majority of central and west European Jews was firmly rooted in the conviction that the Jews constituted a separate race.[1612] The Zionists drew on the same well-spring of racist ideas as the pan-German and völkisch movements. Even the ideas of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau were enthusiastically received by a few German Zionists before World War I. In 1902, the Zionist newspaper Die Welt, founded by Herzl in 1897, accepted Gobineau’s theories on racial degeneration and the desirability of maintaining racial purity, noting that Gobineau had shared his admiration for the Jews as a strong people who believed in the necessity of maintaining its own racial purity. Elias Auerbach (1882 – 1971) and Ignaz Zollschan (1877 – 1948), central European Zionists during the years before World War I, went so far as to praise much of the racial philosophy of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law, who would become highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements of the early twentieth century.[1613]
In his diaries, Herzl refers to Plato, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling. Herzl, who was described by his cousin as having “absorbed [Nietzsche’s] style,” got ahold of every Nietzsche volume available.[1614] Herzl’s idea of the “new Jew” was profoundly similar to that of Nietzsche’s “new European man” or Übermensch.[1615] Nietzsche’s influence on Zionism expressed itself in a desire to move away from the rabbinical past into an empowering future for the Hebraic New Man.[1616] Chaim Weizmann was a great admirer of Nietzsche, and sent Nietzsche’s books to his wife, adding a comment in a letter that “This was the best and finest thing I can send to you.”[1617] By World War I, was referred to as “Nietzsche in Action,” or the “Euro-Nietzschean (or Anglo-Nietzschean) War,”[1618] Nietzsche had acquired a reputation as an inspiration for both right-wing German militarism and leftist politics.[1619] During the Dreyfus affair the French antisemitic Right also labelled the Jewish and leftist intellectuals who defended Dreyfus as “Nietzscheans.”[1620] Nietzsche had a distinct appeal for many Zionist thinkers around the start of the twentieth century, most notable being Ahad Ha’am, Hillel Zeitlin, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, A.D. Gordon and Martin Buber, who went so far as to extoll Nietzsche as a “creator” and “emissary of life.”[1621] Berdyczewski made a pilgrimage in 1898 to the fledgling Nietzsche-Archiv in Weimar, where Nietzsche, who was by then already insane, was living under the care of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.[1622]
A new element in Pan-Germanism was introduced in 1879 with the use of the neologism “anti-Semitism,” marking a break from “anti-Judaism,” favoring a racial and scientific notion of Jews as a nationality instead of a religion.[1623] Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth was married to Bernhard Förster (1843 – 1889), who became a leading figure in the anti-Semitic faction on the far right of German politics and wrote on the Jewish question, characterizing Jews as constituting a “parasite on the German body.”[1624] Anti-Semitic sentiments came to the fore in 1880 when Förster, joining with Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848 – 1911), a German officer who became noted as an anti-Semitic politician and publisher, drew up the Antisemitenpetition, a petition titled “The Emancipation of the German People from the Yoke of Jewish Rule,” that was submitted to Bismarck.
The petition was inspired by the best-selling pamphlet Der Sieg des Judentums über was Germanenthum von night confessionellen Standpunk (“The Victory of Judaism over Germandom”) by Wilhelm Marr (1819 – 1904) and by individuals who during the revolutions of 1848 announced that the time had come to “emancipate [Germany] from the Jews.”[1625] Marr was a friend of Wagner’s collaborator on the Süddeutsche Press, “Forty-Eighter” Julius Fröbel. Marr was a Lutheran, though it has been sometimes claimed that he was a Jew.[1626] Nevertheless, Marr’s second wife Helene Sophia Emma Maria Behrend, was Jewish, while his third wife, Jenny Therese Kornick, had mixed Christian-Jewish parents. This is despite the fact that Marr eventually became the head of the Léman-Bund, a secret society which belonged to Young Germany. In 1845, he was expelled from Lausanne, and went to Hamburg, where published the satirical magazine Mephistopheles.
Marr was a delegate to the National Assembly in Frankfurt after the March-Revolution of 1848. Marr joined the revolution of 1848 in Hamburg, but became disillusioned by the failure of the revolution to democratize Germany, and like many other “Forty-Eighters,” went to live in North and Central America. After the failure of the revolution he became, like so many other former revolutionaries, a proponent of the idea of German unification under Prussian leadership.[1627] Marr was influenced by the Burschenschaft, student associations which were significantly involved in the March Revolution and the unification of Germany, and included Mazzini’s friend Carl Schurz, whose Jewish wife Margarethe was a student of Julius Fröbel. The Burschenschaft rejected the participation of Jewish and other non-German minorities as members, “unless they prove that they are anxious to develop within themselves a Christian-German spirit.”[1628]
When he returned to Hamburg, Marr’s views had radically changed and he now focused his criticism on the Jews, writing his essay “Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums uber das Judenthum. (“The Way to Victory of Germandom over Judaism”), which was published in 1862. His organization, the League of Antisemites, established the first popular political anti-Jewish movement and introduced the word “anti-Semite” into the political discourse. In 1879, the often-reprinted “The Victory of Judaism over Germandom,” was a best-seller. In it, he warned that, “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” He called for resistance against “this foreign power” which was engaged in an 1,800-year global conspiracy against non-Jews.
In his pamphlet, Marr rejected the notion of assimilation as a means for Jews to become Germans. He argued that Jewish emancipation, resulting from German liberalism, had allowed the Jews to gain control of German finance and industry. According to him, the struggle between Jews and Germans would only be resolved by the victory of one and the ultimate annihilation of the other. A Jewish victory, he concluded, would result in finis Germaniae (“the end of the German people”). To prevent this from happening, in 1879, Marr founded the Antisemiten-Liga (“League of Antisemites”), the first German organization committed specifically to combating the alleged threat to Germany posed by the Jews and advocating their forced removal from the country.
Among the with 225,000 signatories the petition were Wagner’s friend Hans von Bülow, and Nietzsche’s former publisher Ernst Schmeitzner (1851 – 1895). Also involved in the petition were Adolf Stoecker (1835 – 1909), a German court chaplain to Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Heinrich von Treistschke (1834 – 1896), a member of the National Liberal Party. Stoecker was impressed with Martin Luther’s 1543 book On the Jews and their Lies, and held that to be a good Christian meant hating the Jews.[1629] The foundation of the Christian Social Party by Stoecker in 1878, helped to galvanize anti-Semitic activity in Germany and brought Sonnenberg into politics. The key demands of the petition were:
1. Restriction of immigration of Eastern
Jews from Austria-Hungary and Russia.
2. Exclusion of Jews from all positions of authority, especially from
judgeship.
3. Ban on the employment of Jewish teachers at elementary schools and strict
limits on their employment at all other schools.
4. Resumption of official statistics on the Jewish population.
Bernhard Förster planned to create a “pure Aryan settlement” in the New World, and had found a site in Paraguay which he thought would be suitable. The couple persuaded fourteen German families to join them in the colony, to be called Nueva Germania, and the group left Germany for South America in 1887. The colony failed miserably. Faced with mounting debts, Förster committed suicide by poisoning himself in 1889. Four years later, Elisabeth left the colony and returned to Germany. Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental collapse occurred by that time, and upon Elisabeth’s return in 1893 she found him an invalid whose published writings were beginning to be read and discussed throughout Europe. Elisabeth took a leading role in promoting her brother, especially through the publication of a collection of his fragments under the name of The Will to Power. She reworked his unpublished writings to fit her own ideology, often in ways purportedly contrary to her brother’s stated opinions. Through Elisabeth’s editions, Nietzsche’s name became associated with German militarism and National Socialism, while later twentieth-century scholars have strongly disputed this conception of his ideas.
Georg von Schönerer, who was elected Deputy to Parliament, attracted his major following among the farmers and the Burschenschaften at the University of Vienna. To enhance the appeal of his program, he praised the Bismarck as the real leader of the movement, even though Bismarck hadn’t encouraged annexationist goals of Schönerer and his followers. Nevertheless, explains Kurt Tweraser, Schönerer became powerful political force until 1888.[1630] According to Whiteside, “the combination of the students and Schönerer was the most important single factor in the creation of the Austrian pan-German movement.”[1631]
In the fall of 1880, Albia had became affiliated with the Akademische Lesehalle, where Schönerer delivered a speech that was enthusiastically received.[1632] William McGrath has identified a long list of Jewish students in the 1870s and early 1880s associated with radical nationalist student societies. As members of the circle of Engelbert Pernerstorfer (1850 – 1918), they were among the charter members of the Leserverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, which was committed to a combination of socialism and extreme German nationalism, stimulated by Bismarck’s creation of a united German empire, and influenced by the ideas of Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. According to Pernerstorfer:
Socialism will be the first to create a condition consciously, in which no one will be prevented by restrictive social forms from becoming a whole man… Only then will Richard Wagner’s dream and the majesty of the work of art become true.[1633]
By the early 1880s, Jews made up one-third of all students at the University of Vienna.[1634] William McGrath has identified a long list of them in the 1870s and early 1880s associated with radical nationalist student societies. As members of the circle of Engelbert Pernerstorfer, they were among the charter members of the Leserverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, which was focused almost exclusively on extreme German nationalism, and influenced by the idea of Shopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. The Pernerstorfer Circle consisted mainly of assimilated Jews who, disappointed by the bourgeois liberalism of their previous generation, were seeking alternatives. As summarized by Jacques Le Rider:
These young men were dissatisfied with the liberal ideology, which they thought too individualistic, too indifferent to social problems, too cosmopolitan and too flatly rationalistic. They sympathized with the socialist movement, stood with German nationalism against Habsburg politics, and defended “new values”: nature, country, art, the new mythology and the Volk were the guiding notions of their movement, which declared for Nietzsche and Wagner.[1635]
The list of Pernerstorfer’s Jewish supporters included Victor Adler (1852 – 1918), a founding figure of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria; Heinrich Friedjung (1851 – 1920), who became Austria’s foremost German nationalist historian; the Jewish composer Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911), a follower of Schönerer influenced by Wagner; Sigmund Freud; Freud’s friends Arthur Schnitzler and Heinrich Braun (1854 – 1927), later a prominent Social-Democrat in Germany. Adler married Braun’s wife Emma, and their son was Friedrich became a close friend of Albert Einstein.[1636] One Austrian historian recalled a student meeting where Adler and Friedjung joined others in singing “Deutschland über alles,” while Mahler accompanied them on the piano with “O du Deutschland, ich muss marchieren” (“O you Germany, I must march”).[1637]
By 1878, the Leseverein was dissolved as a danger to the state, but by 1881 its leadership managed to completely takeover the Akademische Lesehalle.[1638] Members of the Pernerstorfer circle, especially Adler, Pernerstorfer and Friedjung, were the moving spirits, together with von Schönerer, in founding the Deutsche Klub, the political organization formed to carry on the work of the Leseverein after its dissolution, and were the major contributors to the charter of the deutschnational movement. “The charter, which influenced all the mass political movements of modern Austria, centered on demands for radical social and political reform as well as for the satisfaction of extreme German nationalist ambitions.”[1639]
It was at this time that Herzl joined the Leseverein. Leon Kellner, a Viennese contemporary and author of an early biography, reported that in December 1880, Herzl was chairman of the Akademische Lesehalle’s social club, which organized beer-drinking evenings featuring German nationalist songs. According to Kellner, “At that time the waves of the German nationalist movement were rising high in this student association; Herzl was one of its most enthusiastic champions.”[1640] Schnitzler, a fellow student and friend of Herzl during his university years, described him as a “German-national student and spokesman in the Akademische Lesehalle.”[1641] In the fall of 1880, Albia became affiliated with the Lesehalle. During the 1880-1881 semester when Herzl joined Albia, von Schönerer delivered a speech that was enthusiastically received.[1642]
McGrath also established that Herzl’s close friend Oswald Boxer was a member in 1880-1881 of the Deutscher Klub, the parent organization of the deutschnational movement. Schönerer, along with Adler, Friedjung and Pernerstorfer were supporters of the Linz Program of 1882, the charter of the deutschnational movement, that called for the complete Germanization of the Austrian state. “This charter,” explains MacGrath, “which influenced all the mass political movements of modem Austria, centered on demands for radical social and political reform as well as for the satisfaction of extreme German nationalist ambitions.”[1643] Despite his close friendship with Jews, Pernersdorfer wrote in 1882 that, “the Jews with their ancient, dominating racial characteristics still confront the Indo-Germanic peoples… as alien and unchanging.”[1644]
Despite Wagner’s known writings against Jews, Herzl was an avid admirer of Wagner’s music. Hermann Bahr (1863 – 1934), Herzl’s fraternity brother in Albia, asserted, “Every young person was a Wagnerian then. He was one before he had ever heard a single bar of his music.” Herzl revealed the inspirational role that the music of Wagner—despite his known anti-Semitism—played in the writing of Der Judenstaat:
Heine tells us that he heard the flapping of an eagle’s wings above his head when he wrote certain verses. I, too, believe that I heard such a fluttering of wings while I wrote that book. I worked on it every day to the point of utter exhaustion. My only recreation was listening to Wagner’s music in the evening, particularly to “Tannhäuser,” an opera which I attended as often as it was produced. Only on the evenings when there was no opera did I have any doubts as to the truth of my ideas.[1645]
However, when Albia held a memorial ceremony for Wagner in March 1883, at which fiercely anti-Semitic speeches were made, Herzl asked to be discharged from the association on honorable terms. At the onset of the ceremonies, the orchestra played Wagner’s music and the audience sang “Deutschland über alles.” A speaker extolled German nationalism and the Reich, and another declared “there can be only one German Reich.”[1646] When the police stepped forward to prevent any further treasonous utterances, Schönerer rushed to the platform and proclaimed, “Long Live Our Bismarck!”[1647] Although, according to Kornberg, “Herzl was not protesting against anti-Jewishness, which was compatible with full assimilation, but against racial antisemitism, which sought to drive Jews back into the ghetto.”[1648]
However, Schönerer’s increasingly antisemitic policies culminated in the amendment of an “Aryan paragraph” in the Linz Program in 1885, a clause that reserved membership solely for members of the “Aryan race” and excluded from such rights any non-Aryans, particularly those of Jewish and Slavic descent. Being one of the first documented examples of such a paragraph, countless German national sports-clubs, song societies, school clubs, harvest circles and fraternities followed suit to also include Aryan paragraphs in their statutes. The rise of ant-Semitism drove away Adler and Pernerstorfer, who became leaders of the Socialist party, while Friedjung returned to the liberal fold. Nevertheless, their experiences in the deutschnational continued to influence their outlooks.[1649]
Nevertheless, as McGrath pointed out, “The probability that Herzl’s mature work was significantly influenced by his association with the German nationalist student movement is great indeed.”[1650] Providing a clue to his veneration of German nationalism, Herzl wrote, “Do you know how the German empire was made? Out of dreams, songs, fantasies, and black-red-gold ribbons—and in a short time. Bismarck only shook down the fruit of the tree which the masters of fantasy had planted.”[1651] Likewise, Friedjung advised, “If it is now the highest duty of the political writer to work on that obscure first principle of all national history, on the national character… then we must introduce into public life a powerful new force: national feeling.” It was the power of art which was to make this possible. Inspired by Wagner, Friedjung had noted, “Orpheus dared to walk with his lyre among the powers of the underworld only because he knew there lives in the obscure masses a feeling, a dark presentiment that will be awakened to thundering emotion by a full tone.”[1652] Thus, concludes McGrath, “The ideal of aesthetic, symbolic politics appealing both to the head and heart, the ideal which the members of the Pernerstorfer circle had propagated, was realized even more fully in Herzl’s Zionism than in the anti-semitic deutschnational movement of Georg von Schönerer, the Austrian politician who so favourably impressed the young Adolf Hitler.”[1653]
Paradoxically, the doctrines of the Nazis were derived ultimately from the Kabbalah, by merging the ideas of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and the theory of the Atlantean origins of the Aryans developed by Blavatsky. Like René Guénon and Julius Evola, Blavatsky believed in the polar origins of mankind in a proto-Aryan civilization called Hyperborea, a legendary country supposedly in the far North polar regions. Following Blavatsky, the Anthroposophists and Ariosophists viewed Atlantis as Thule. This mythology became the basis for the founding of the Thule Society, who adopted the swastika, which had a long history in Ariosophic circles, including Guido von List Society’s Armanen and Lanz von Liebenfels’ Order of the New Templars (ONT), an offshoot of the OTO. The Thule Society was responsible for development of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, or DAP), founded in January 1919, which was joined by Adolf Hitler, and which was eventually renamed as the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), known as Nazi party.
Wagner’s opera Rienzi was based on one of novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 – 1873), the pre-eminent personality of the era, a member of the L’Aurore Naissante (“Loge zur aufgehenden Morgenrothe”), or “the Nascent Dawn,” known as the Frankfurt Judenloge, through whom the Asiatic Brethren would also become the prime influence behind the Occult Revival of nineteenth-century England.[1654] Like Victor Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton was closely acquainted with the famous occultist Éliphas Lévi (1810 – 1875), whose real name was Alphonse Louis Constant, whom he purportedly initiated into the tradition of the Judenloge.[1655] He left the Grand Orient de France in the belief that the original meanings of its symbols and rituals had been lost. In 1855, under his civil name of Constant, Lévi published a series of articles in the Revue entitled “The Kabbalistic Origins of Christianity” and the Kabbalah as the “Source of all Dogmas,” which was the first time that he expounded his “Kabbalistic” theories to a wider socialist readership.
After Constant had adopted his occult name
of Éliphas Lévi, he would become one of the most important esoteric writers of
all time, largely through the influence of his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute
Magie. Lévi was initiated into the occult by Jozef Maria Hoene-Wronski (1776 – 1853), a
Polish philosopher and crackpot scientist. According to crypto-Frankist Adam
Mickiewicz, Hoene-Wronski
inspired in France at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, “a numerous Israelite sect, half
Christian, half Jewish, which also looked forward to Messianism and saw in
Napoleon the Messiah, at least his predecessor.”[1656] Over a
dozen years earlier, Mickiewicz’s Chopin had set two of his poems to music. Mickiewicz was also a friend of Margaret
Fuller, who collaborated with Mazzini.[1657] Certain characters in the novels of
Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850), a friend of Giacomo
Meyerbeer, were
inspired by Wronski. Ewelina Hańska, Balzac’s
famous patron and wife, was one of the adepts of Lévi.[1658]
Like Heinrich Heine, Balzac’s patron was James Mayer de Rothschild. Balzac was interested in Swedenborg,
whom he refers to throughout Séraphita, a novel dealing
with the themes of androgyny first published in the Revue de Paris in
1834.
Lévi collaborated closely with Charles Nodier (1780 – 1844) was an influential French author and librarian who introduced a younger generation of Romanticists to the conte fantastique, gothic literature, and vampire tales. As early as 1790, at the age of ten, Nodier was involved in the secret society of the Philadelphes.[1659] In 1815, he published anonymously one of his most influential works, the History of Secret Societies in the Army. Nodier successfully adapted John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” for the stage in 1820. “The Vampyre” was taken from the story Lord Byron told as part of a contest among Polidori, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, which also produced the novel Frankenstein.
In 1824, Nodier was appointed librarian of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, a position that he kept for the rest of his life. The Bibliothèque was originally founded by Francis I of France, a patron of the alchemist Guillaume Postel. Nodier and his associates methodically explored the library, which included an exhaustive collection of works on magic, Kabbalah and Hermetic thought, including the original manuscripts of The Book of Abramelin, Book of the Penitence of Adam and the Grimoire of Armadel. Nodier became a source of influence for artists and intellectuals such as Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Dumas, Delacroix, Gérard de Nerval. Dumas incorporated his recollections of Nodier into his novelette La Dame au Collier de Velours. Hugo, who was friends with Berlioz and Liszt, particularly enjoyed the music of Mozart, Weber and Meyerbeer. According to Nodier:
…that marvellous Germany, the last country of poesy and belief in the West, the future cradle of a strong society to come-if there is any society left to be created in Europe.[1660]
Around
Hugo, a “cénacle” was formed, so called in part because of the success of the
work of de Balzac who staged in his cycle of the Comédie humaine, the
Cénacle (1819). Hugo’s Cénacle attracted, among others, de Nerval, Pétrus
Borel and Théophile Gautier. Towards the end of 1830,
Gautier began to frequent meetings of Le Petit Cénacle (“The Little
Upper Room”), a group of artists who met in the studio of Jehan Du Seigneur.
Among its members were the artists Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, père,
Alphonse Brot, and Philothée O’Neddy.[1661]
Along with
the poets Lamartine, Ballanche, Sainte-Beuve and Lamennais, and the Romantic
historians, Augustin Thierry, Henri Martin and Jules Michelet, Hugo was a
member of the circle of Ferdinand Eckstein (1790 – 1861),
or Baron d’Eckstein, who under the influence of Friedrich Schlegel, converted to Lutheran
Protestantism and settled in France, after Napoleon’s defeat. In 1824,
Eckstein, known as the Sanskrit Baron, or the the “Baron Buddha” as Heine dubbed him, founded a paper, Le Catholique, in which he argued that a
“natural revelation” had been made to the Indians, and that Europe owed the
best of its blood, culture and institutions to the Germans. Also included in his circle was
Frederic Ozanam (1813 – 1853), founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de
Paul, a movement “for the restoration of Christianity by Science,” which tended
to attribute the revelation of Moses from the universal revelation of India.
According to Hegel, Eckstein was the dispenser of funds for
governmental neo-Catholic propaganda.[1662]
Nodier was also a purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Successive Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion after Ludovico Gonzaga were associated with Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, like Robert Fludd, Johann Valentin Andreae, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and the Jacobite Charles Radclyffe, also a Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, who founded the Grand Lodge of Paris. As a grandson of Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza, Radclyffe was a cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Cardinal York. Radclyffe was succeeded by Charles de Lorraine (1712 – 1780, who in turn was succeeded by his nephew, Maximilian de Lorraine (1756 – 1801). Maximilian was the brother Joseph II reportedly had an affair with Frank’s daughter Eva. Both Charles and Maximilian were also Grand Masters of the Teutonics Knights. Most importantly, Maximilian would become Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys.[1663] The remaining four Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion, before Plantard himself, included Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau.
Novak reported that, after Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel’s death in 1836, the Asiatic Brethren moved to Denmark, where they were comprised largely of members of the Baltic aristocracy, adopting the swastika as a symbol for recognizing each other and taking on distinctly Germanic and anti-Semitic tendencies.[1664] According to Godwin, the Occult Revival begins with the formation of a very small group within the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), who were recognizable by their use of the swastika, which they identified with the red cross of the Rosicrucians. Bulwer-Lytton was the “Great Patron” of SRIA, which was restricted to high-ranking Freemasons. The Asiatic Brethren, or Fratres Lucis, were derived from the German Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross (Gold- und Rosenkreuz), from which much of the hierarchical structure was used in the SRIA.[1665]
In the 1880s, the Theosophical Society, founded by H.P. Blavatsky, adopted a swastika as part of its seal, along with an Om, a hexagram or star of David, an Ankh and an Ouroboros. After she published Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky was conferred a Masonic initiation in 1878 by John Yarker (1833 – 1913), another founding member of the SRIA, who was friends with both Blavatsky and General Giuseppe Garibaldi. In 1881, Garibaldi prepared to fuse the Rites of Misraïm and of Memphis, which succeeded the Illuminati front of the Philadelphes, and which came to be known as the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm.[1666] Yarker seems to have had a hand in the founding of the Theosophical Society, whose leading members were also members of Memphis-Misraïm, headed by Garibaldi.
The Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) was founded in Germany or Austria between 1895 and 1906, by Karl Kellner (1784 – 1855) and Theodor Reuss (1855 – 1923), who would succeed Yarker as Grand Master Garibaldi’s of Memphis-Misraïm. Reuss was a professional singer in his youth and took part in the first performance of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882.[1667] Reuss first met Wagner in 1873, along with Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig I of Bavaria, Ludwig II’s grandfather, had an affair with Lady Jane Digby, a friend and traveling companion of H.P. Blavatsky.[1668]
In the early 1870s, Blavatsky went to Cairo, where she associated with a group she would later call the Brotherhood of Luxor. Theosophical historian David Board argues from various allusions to Blavatsky’s and Mackenzie’s works that the Brotherhood of Luxor was inspired by the Fratres Lucis. The Brotherhood of Luxor’s relation, if any, with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (HBoL) is not clear.[1669] The HBofL, that was later reborn as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, drew on the teachings of Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Brotherhood of Eulis.[1670] The HBofL became the key organization behind the rise of the Occult Revival, and which, as occult historian Allen Greenfield has demonstrated in The Roots of Modern Magick, was chiefly responsible for the transmission of Frankist sex magic to its leading organizations and exponents.[1671] Blavatsky was also instructed in occultism by Max Theon (1848 – 1927), the supposed leader of the HBofL. Theon gathered a number of students, including Charles Barlet (1838 –1921) and a Zionist and Kabbalist named Louis Themanlys, and they established the “Cosmic Movement,” based on material channeled by Theon’s wife, which includes an account of creation that incorporates elements of Lurianic Kabbalah.[1672]
Barlet was influenced by Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842 – 1909), the founder of Synarchism. In 1877, in England, Saint-Yves married Marie de Riznitch, Comtesse de Keller (1827 – 1895), a Polish noble woman with mediumistic abilities from Odessa. Marie was a relative of Ewelina Hańska, the wife of Honoré de Balzac, and one of the adepts of Éliphas Lévi.[1673] Marie was also a good friend of the Danish Queen Louise of Hesse-Kassel. Queen Louise married her double second cousin, Christian IX, King of Denmark (1818 – 1906), the grandson of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel, Illuminatus and Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren. Christian IX and Louise’s six children married into other royal families across Europe—including the children of Queen Victoria and the Romanovs of Russia—earning him the sobriquet “the father-in-law of Europe.”[1674] Their descendants include Prince Philip and his wife Queen Elizabeth II, and their son King Charles III, as well as Juan Carlos of Spain.
A shared source for the occult teachings of Blavatsky and Saint-Yves was a purported leader of an order named the Brotherhood of Luxor, who would have been Jamal ud Din al Afghani (1838/1839 – 1897), British spy, Sufi mystic, Islamic reformer, notorious intriguer and British agent.[1675] Despite the appellation “Afghani,” to claim Afghan nationality, scholars generally believe that he was instead an Iranian Shia. There are some reports that he was a Jew.[1676] While also acting as Grand Master of the Freemasons of Egypt, Afghani was simultaneously the founder of the fanatical “Salafi” fundamentalist tradition of Islam, which has contributed to the majority of twentieth-century Islamic terrorism, primarily through the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot. In Afghani’s own words, as cited in Elie Kedourie’s Afghani and Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam: “We do not cut off the head of religion except with the sword of religion. Therefore, if you were to see us now, you would see ascetics and worshipers, kneeling and genuflecting, never disobeying God’s commands and doing all that they are ordered to do.”[1677]
Lady Jane Digby was close friends with Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840 – 1922), who was Jamal ud Din al Afghani’s British handler along with Edward G. Browne (1862 – 1926).[1678] Blunt married Lady Anne, who was the grand-daughter of Lord Byron, a member of the Carbonari. Blunt and Lady Anne were also friends with Jane Digby and Sir Richard Burton, a member of the so-called Orphic Brotherhood led by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.[1679] Like Burton, Digby was also acquainted with Blavatsky, as well as with Lydia Pashkov, who along with her partner James Sanua, was friends with Jamal Afghani.[1680] Jane Digby died in Damascus, Syria as the wife of Arab Sheikh Medjuel al Mezrab.
From his studies with Afghani, going by the name of Haji Sharif, Saint-Yves supposedly mastered the art of astral travel, by which he claims to have travelled to Agartha himself in a state of “waking dream,” details of which he reported in Mission de l’Inde. Edward Bulwer-Lytton penned the Rosicrucian and Martinist-themed novels named Zanoni and The Coming Race or Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871), which featured a superhuman civilization living in a hollow earth, and influenced the legend of Agartha. Agartha was first referred to by Ernest Renan in the 1870s. Inspired by Nordic mythology, Renan placed Asgard of the Viking sagas in Central Asia. The myth of Agartha was further developed by another French writer, Louis Jacolliot (1837 – 1890), who was quoted by Blavatsky. The legend of Agartha was linked to the myth Shambhala. Blavatsky mentioned the mythical lost city of Shambhala in her main work, The Secret Doctrine, the teachings for which she said she received telepathically from her teachers in Tibet.
Saint-Yves’s ideas were adapted by Gérard
Encausse (1865 – 1916), more popularly known by his alias Papus, who founded
the Martinist Order based on synarchist ideas. A close friend and colleague of
Max Theon’s disciple Peter Davidson, Papus joined the Hermetic Brotherhood of
Luxor (HBofL) and the Golden Dawn. [1681] In
1888, Papus and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, along with celebrated occultists
Stanislas de Guaita and Joséphin Péladan, had founded the Rosicrucian
Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix (OKR+C), which came to be regarded as the “inner
circle” of the Martinist Order. [1682]
Apparently, Éliphas
Lévi, who would have been initiated in the tradition of the L’Aurore
Naissante, or Frankfurt Judenloge, by Bulwer-Lytton, handed it over to Abbé
Lacuria, author of Harmonies of Being, after he returned to France, who would
have then passed it to Adrian Péladan, who transmitted it to his brother Joséphin
and to Guaita.[1683]
In England in 1885, Reuss became friends with William Wynn Westcott, the Supreme Magus of the SRIA, under whose authority Reuss founded irregular Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges in Germany.[1684] Westcott was one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, named after the L’Aurore Naissante (“Loge zur aufgehenden Morgenrothe”), or “the Nascent Dawn,” the full name of the Frankfurt Judenloge. Just before his death, towards the end of 1887, Arthur Edward Waite (1857 – 1942), a member of the SRIA, passed on the so-called “cipher manuscripts” which resulted in the establishment of the Golden Dawn. By some accounts, Bulwer-Lytton received a copy of the manuscripts from the Judenloge, which was acquired by his friend Frederick Hockley, a founding member of the SRIA.[1685] The manuscript contained an address by certain Anna Sprengel, countess of Landsfeldt, the supposed love-child of Ludwig I of Bavaria and the actress Lola Montez, who was the member of the “Goldene Morgenrothe,” referring to the Judenloge.[1686] Sprengel is supposed to have given Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854 – 1918) a charter authorising him to found lodges of the Golden Dawn in Britain. Named in reference to the Golden and Rosy Cross and the Nascent Dawn, the order, known simply as the Golden Dawn claimed to be a continuation of the Kabbalistic school of Rabbi Samuel Falk.[1687] Reading the first folio page of the cipher manuscripts one finds the words Chevrah Zerach Aur Bequr, which relates to the Hebrew name of the Judgenlodge, Chevrah Zerach Bequr Aur, which translate to “The Society of the Rising Light of Dawn.”[1688]
Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947), godfather of twentieth-century Satanism, studied magic with the Golden Dawn, then went on to construct his own occult system using an amalgamation of the ritual working of Abramelin the Mage, the Goetia, and the Tantric sexual techniques of the OTO, among other sources. Crowley was convinced that he was the reincarnation of Éliphas Lévi, who died the year Crowley was born. It was Lévi who created the popular depiction of the “Baphomet”, the idol worshipped by the Templars. He described it as “The Sabbatic Goat,” inherited from the versions of the devil said to have been worshipped by medieval witches. He depicted the idol as a winged androgynous figure with parts of a male and female, but with the head of a goat, and a torch on its head between its horns. As Levi confessed: “…let us say boldly and loudly, that all the initiates of the occult sciences… have adored, do and will always adore that which is signified by this frightful symbol. Yes, in our profound conviction, the Grand Masters of the Order of the Templars adored Baphomet and caused him to be adored by their initiates.[1689]
Together, they contributed the core ideas in the development of the occult doctrines of the Nazis. As noted by Goodrick-Clarke, Theosophy “enjoyed a considerable vogue in Germany and Austria.”[1690] Its advent was tied to a wider neo-romantic protest movement in Germany known as Lebensreform (“life reform”), a type of proto-hippie movement that explored alternative life-styles, including herbal and natural medicine, vegetarianism, nudism and living in communes.[1691] In July 1884, the first German Theosophical Society (GTS) was established under the presidency of Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden (1846 – 1916), whose periodical The Sphinx was a powerful influence in the German occult revival until 1895. Following a request from Blavatsky’s successor, Annie Besant (1847 –1933), Hübbe-Schleiden had introduced the Order of the Star of the East in Germany, which proclaimed the Hindu boy Jiddu Krishnamurti world teacher.
Among Hübbe-Schleiden’s circle at this time were Franz Hartmann (1838 – 1912), one of the founding members of the OTO, and the young Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925), founder of the Waldorf schools, who were both members of the GTS. Hartmann went to visit Blavatsky at Adyar, India, travelling by way of California, Japan and South-East Asia in late 1883. A German Theosophical Society, as a branch of the International Theosophical Brotherhood, had been established in 1896, with Hartmann as its president.
Steiner, who in 1895 had written one of the first books praising Nietzsche, visited him when he was in the care of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who assumed the roles of curator and editor of her brother’s works. Nietzsche finally suffered total mental collapse in 1889. Within a week, Nietzsche’s family brought him back to Basel, where he was hospitalized and diagnosed with the syphilis. The Nietzsche scholar Joachim Köhler has attempted to explain Nietzsche’s life history and philosophy by claiming that Nietzsche was a homosexual, and he argues that his affliction with syphilis, which is “usually considered to be the product of his encounter with a prostitute in a brothel in Cologne or Leipzig, is equally likely, it is now held, to have been contracted in a male brothel in Genoa.”[1692]
While his critics argued that Nietzsche’s disturbed ideas were a reflection of his mental illness, as explains Steven E. Aschheim in The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990, the pro-Nietzscheans, “sought instead to endow Nietzsche’s madness with a positively spiritual quality. The prophet had been driven crazy by the clarity of his vision and the incomprehension of a society not yet able to understand it...”[1693] Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth even employed Steiner as a tutor to help her to understand her brother’s philosophy.[1694] Referring to Nietzsche’s mental illness, Steiner said, “In inner perception I saw Nietzsche’s soul as if hovering over his head, infinitely beautiful in its spirit-light, surrendered to the spiritual worlds it had longed for so much.”[1695]
After parting with the Theosophical Society, Steiner founded a spiritual movement, called anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. Steiner was a member of the völkisch Wagner club, and anthroposophical authors endorsed Wagner’s views on race.[1696] Steiner had been made general secretary of the German Theosophical Society in 1902. Steiner published a periodical Luzifer in Berlin from 1903 to 1908. By 1904, Steiner he was appointed by Annie Besant to be leader of the Theosophical Esoteric Society for Germany and Austria. In 1906, Theodor Reuss issued a warrant to Steiner, making him Deputy Grand Master of a subordinate O.T.O./Memphis/Misraïm Chapter and Grand Council called “Mystica Aeterna” in Berlin. Steiner finally broke away to found his own Anthroposophical Society in 1912.
Franz Hartmann is the one person who ties the Theosophical Society and the OTO to the occult movement known as Ariosophy, which inspired the bizarre racial theories of the Nazis. The ideology regarding the Aryan race, runic symbols, Nordic paganism and the swastika are important elements of Ariosophy, related to the occult systems developed by Guido von List (1848 – 1919) and his friend and pupil Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874 – 1954), as part the Völkisch movement. Liebenfels was the founder of the Order of New Templars (Ordo Novi Templi, or ONT) an offshoot of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), which included Aleister Crowley and practiced tantric sex rituals.[1697] In the 1890s, Liebenfels was involved with a Viennese literary society, which included List, founder of the List Society, which adopted the Golden Dawn system of initiatory degrees.[1698]
The membership of the List Society “implies that List’s ideas were acceptable to many intelligent persons drawn from the upper and middle classes of Austria and Germany.”[1699] The success of List’s 1888 novel Carnuntum caught the attention of Pan-German publishers Georg von Schönerer and Karl Wolf, who commissioned similar works.[1700] List was also supported by Karl Lueger (1844 –1910), the mayor of Vienna, who was also a supporter of von Schönerer and the German National Party. Lueger was known for his antisemitic rhetoric and referred to himself as an admirer of Edouard Drumont, who founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889. Asked to explain the fact that many of his friends were Jews, Lueger famously replied, “I decide who is a Jew.”[1701]
The German
theosophists, explains Goodrick-Clarke, “acknowledged List’s nationalist
popularization of their doctrines.”[1702] Franz
Hartmann became one of the leading followers of List, through his attraction of
the parallels between his ideas and those of Blavatsky. List believed that the
lost language of the ancient Germans could be found in the mystic writings of
the Kabbalah, mistakenly believed to be Jewish, but in reality a compilation of
ancient German wisdom which had survived the suppressions of the Christianity. Similarly,
Blavatsky rejected the Jewish origins of the Kabbalah, considering it a
survival of true and secret wisdom.[1703]
The principal financial contributor to Guido von List’s society was the an
Austrian/German industrialist Friedrich Wannieck (1838 –1919), a firm believer
in the Theosophical “Ascended Masters,” Morya and Koot Hoomi.[1704]
Prana, a German monthly for applied spiritualism which was published by
the Theosophical publishing house at Leipzig, was edited by Johannes Balzli,
the secretary of the Guido von List society, and secretary of the Leipzig
Theosophical Society. Hartmann, Steiner, Liebenfels and Guido von List himself
were contributors, as was C. W. Leadbetter, a close associate of an associate
of Annie Besant.[1705]
From 1908 to 1912, the völkisch List Society began to attract distinctive members,
including the complete membership of the Vienna Theosophical Society, whose
president was Franz Hartmann.[1706]
Vienna Theosophical Society was founded by Hartmann’s friend, Frederick
Eckstein (1861 – 1939), an Austrian polymath, Theosophist born into an
upper-class Jewish family.[1707]
In 1887, Eckstein
visited Blavatsky for several days in Ostende. She presented him with a charter
for the establishment of a Theosophical lodge in Vienna and a golden rose
cross. In the same year, the first official theosophical lodge in Austria was
created, with Eckstein as president.[1708]
Eckstein’s circle also included Rudolf Steiner. Eckstein’s
wife was Bertha Diener, who like her husband, was a member of the Vienna Lodge
of the Theosophical Society Adyar. Her book Mothers and Amazons (1930),
is regarded as a classic study of matriarchy. Eckstein’s own esoteric interests
included German and Spanish mysticism, the legends surrounding the Templars and
the Freemasons, Wagnerian mythology and oriental religions. After meeting with Blavatsky in
1886, Eckstein gathered a group of theosophists in Vienna.[1709]
In his book, Hammer of the Gods,
David Luhrssen lists Mahler as a member of Vienna’s Theosophical Society. Mahler
first came into contact with the Pernerstorfer circle in 1880 through the Polish Jewish poet Siegfried
Lipiner (1856 – 1911). Lipiner wrote the epic Der entfesselte Prometheus (“Prometheus
Unleashed”) in 1876, which caused quite a sensation and was appreciated by
Nietzsche and Wagner. Lipiner is remembered today in
German-speaking literary circles mainly for his translations of the Frankist
and poet Adam Mickiewicz. Mahler developed his interest in mystical religion
and Germanic myth by forming the Saga Society with Lipiner and a fellow
university student, the writer Richard von Kralik (1852 – 1934) in 1881. Their
meetings included listening to works by Wagner, reciting epic works such as the
Edda and Nibelungenlied, and sharing each other’s original
compositions, including Lipiner’s opera libretto for Jewish composer Karl
Goldmark, Merlin (1880), which premiered at the Vienna Opera in 1886.[1710]
Eckstein and Oskar Simony were also associated with the Austrian psychical researcher, Lazar von Hellenbach (1827 – 1887), who headed a spiritualist circle called the “Hellenbach lodge” or “Aurora” in Vienna and contributed to Die sphinx.[1711] In 1883, Hellenbach published a response to Eugen Dühring’s work The Jewish Question. Hellenbach criticized anti-Semitism by explaining alleged Jewish characteristics through the circumstances under which Jews had to live. At the same time, as Ulrich E. Bach points out, he accepted anti-Semitic stereotypes as facts and, for example, characterized Jews as nomadic outsiders.[1712] Based on Malthusian and Social Darwinist considerations, Hellenbach also advocated euthanasia under certain circumstances to prevent overpopulation.[1713]
Eckstein
corresponded with Golden Dawn member Gustav Meyrink (1868 – 1932),
founder of the Blue Star theosophical lodge at Prague in 1891, who later
achieved renown as an occult novelist. From 1907 to
1914, following E.T.A Hoffmann and Achim von Arnim, Meyrink wrote The Golem,
about the Prague legends of Rabbi Loew, and which contains references to
Kabbalah, Theosophy, Tarot and alchemy. The story’s descriptions of the Jews of
the ghetto of Prague are in conformity with the usual anti-Semitic stereotypes,
featuring Aaron Wassertrum, a millionaire junk dealer, blackmailer, and
criminal. There are also two saintly Jews, Kabbalist Hillel and his daughter
Miriam. The story also features the Kabbalist Hillel and his daughter Miriam,
and follows Athanasius Pernath who encounters the Golem. Pernath learns that a
man called Zottman, called the Freemason, was murdered at the same time when
Pernath felt Golem’s presence. Pernath ends up in “Goldmakers Alley,” the
Street of the Alchemists, where he learns of the legend of a house where there
is a rock beneath which there is a huge treasure buried by the “Order of
Asiatic Brethren.”
Eckstein became a life-long friend of Sigmund Freud, who shared with him membership in the Pernerstorfer Circle. Freud’s family came from Moravia, a stronghold of the Sabbatean movement, in the 1860s. Freud’s wife Martha was the niece of Michael Bernays. Freud’s nephew was Edward Bernays (1891 − 1995), one of the founders of the modern field of “public relations,” was Isaac’s grandson. Freud also read Nietzsche as a student and analogies between their work were pointed out almost as soon as he developed a following. In Sigmund Freud and The Jewish Mystical Tradition, Bakan has shown that Freud too was a “crypto-Sabbatean,” which would explain his extensive interest in the occult and the Kabbalah. The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots, by Joseph H. Berke, explores Freud and his Jewish roots and demonstrates the input of the Jewish mystical tradition into Western culture through psychoanalysis.
Freud, Nietzsche and this Jewish friend Paul Rée had a common acquaintance in Lou Andreas-Salomé. Rée met Salomé in Rome in 1882 at the literary salon of Forty-Eighter Malwida von Meysenbug. Rée proposed to her, but she instead suggested that they live and study together as “brother and sister” along with another man for company, and thereby establish an academic commune. Rée accepted the idea, and suggested that they be joined by his friend Nietzsche. After discovering the situation, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth became determined to get Nietzsche out of the hands of what she described as the “immoral woman.”[1714] Salomé claimed that Nietzsche was desperately in love with her and that she refused his proposal of marriage to her.
Salomé was a pupil of Freud and became his associate in the creation of psychoanalysis. She developed Freud’s ideas from his 1914 essay On Narcissism, and argued that love and sex are a reunion of the self with its lost half. Freud considered Salomé’s article on anal eroticism from 1916 one of the best things she wrote. This led him to his own theories about anal retentiveness, where prohibition against pleasure from anal activity “and its products,” is the first occasion during which a child experiences hostility to his supposedly instinctual impulses.[1715] It was also rumored that Salomé later had a romantic relationship with Freud.[1716]
Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862 – 1929), an associate of Sigmund Freud and an important influence on him, was a German medical doctor and a pioneer of psychotherapy and parapsychology, who had participated in Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement.[1717] Schrenck-Notzing was also the founder of the Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung (“Society for Psychological Research”) with Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden and Max Dessoir (1867 – 1947).[1718] Schrenck-Notzing devoted his time to the study of paranormal events connected with mediumship, hypnotism and telepathy. British Society for Psychical Research (SPR), invited Schrenck-Notzing to attend sittings with the notorious Italian medium Eusapia Paladino, who converted previous sceptics, such as Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Morselli and Pierre Curie to a belief in paranormal phenomena.[1719] Founded in 1882, the SPR included Fabian Society member Bertrand Russell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Round Tabler Lord Balfour, John Dewey and John Ruskin.
Both Dessoir and Schrenck-Notzing were regular contributors Hübbe-Schleiden’s periodical The Sphinx. Dessoir, who was born in Berlin into a German Jewish family, was an associate of Pierre Janet and Freud. Dessoir was an amateur magician who had used the pseudonym “Edmund W. Rells,” and was interested in the history and psychology of magic. Dessoir is also known for his coinage of the term “Parapsychologie” in an attempt to delineate the scientific study of a certain class of “abnormal,” though not necessarily pathological mental phenomena.[1720] Dessoir skipped his first semester at university to pursue “theosophical studies,” he met several time with Annie Besant, “whose enthusiasm… could attract and win over even a stubborn doubter,” and he had met Blavatsky, “together with the squire Henry Steel Olcott, who faithfully shielded her.”[1721]
According to Dr. Sanford Drob, the Chabad psychology is, “an important precursor of Freud’s famous description of psychoanalytic cure.”[1722] Maya Balakirsky Katz revealed that in consultation with Freud, the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel (1868 – 1940) treated the sixth Chabad rebbe, Sholom DovBer Schneerson (1860 – 1920), commonly referred to as the Rashab. The Rashab confessed that a “man-servant,” whose tasks included watching over him as a child, sexually molested him from the time he was “five or six” until his marriage. The Rashab’s brother habitually took the rabbi into his wife’s bedroom, “where he displayed her in scant attire, with the idea of arousing him, and to hold his wife’s beauty before his eyes.” In his brother’s absence, the Rashab remained with his sister-in-law, playing with her and “having fun.” The Rashab occasionally wrestled with a friend in his wife’s presence, and, after successfully pinning his friend on the floor, the rabbi triumphantly took his wife to bed.[1723]
In a letter to Arthur Schnitzler—another member of the Pernerstorfer Circle and a close friend of Theodor Herzl—Freud confessed “I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition—although actually as a result of sensitive introspection—everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons.”[1724] Schnitzler’s works were also often controversial for their open description of sexuality. Schnitzler was branded as a pornographer after the release of his play Reigen, in which ten pairs of characters are shown before and after the sexual act, leading and ending with a prostitute. A diary which Schnitzler kept from the age of 17 until two days before his death, and which runs to almost 8,000 pages, recorded his sexual conquests. He was often in relationships with several women at once and for a period of some years recorded every orgasm. In response to an interviewer who asked him what he thought about the criticism that his works all seemed to be devoted to the same subjects, he replied “I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?”[1725]
Frederick Eckstein’s sister Emma Eckstein (1865 – 1924) was one of Freud’s “most important patients and, for a short period of time around 1897, became a psychoanalyst herself.”[1726] When she was 27, Freud diagnosed Eckstein as suffering from hysteria and believed that she masturbated to excess.[1727] Max Schur (1897 – 1969), Freud’s friend and physician, argued that Freud’s dream known as “Irma’s injection” was heavily influenced by an incident involving Emma, where Freud had referred her to Wilhelm Fliess (1858 – 1928) for nasal surgery, the consequences of which were almost fatal for Eckstein and left her permanently disfigured.[1728] Freud ultimately defended Fliess’ competence, blaming Emma, claiming instead that her post-operative haemorrhages were “wish-bleedings,” caused by her hysterical longing for the affection of others.[1729]
Hitler stated in Mein Kampf
that he first became an anti-Semite in Vienna. According to Goodrick-Clarke, “If the German occult subculture was well
developed before the First World War, Vienna could also look back on a ripe
tradition of occult interest.”[1730] The cultural
eclecticism of the city of Vienna created a unique cultural phenomenon, the
Viennese coffee-house, a legacy of the Ottoman army following the failed siege
of 1683. The coffee-houses provided an important source of activity for the
city’s Jewish intelligentsia, and new industrialist class, made possible
following their being granted full citizenship rights by Franz Joseph I in
1867, and full access to schools and universities. [1731] Figures such as writer Stefan Zweig (1881
– 1942), psychologist Alfred Adler and the young journalist and playwright
Theodor Herzl were among those who joined the coffeehouses in Vienna. Zweig
once described the scene as “a sort of democratic club, open to everyone for
the price of a cheap cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours with
this little offering, to talk, to write, play cards, receive post, and above
all consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.”[1732]
According to Goodrick-Clarke, Frederick Eckstein, founder of the Theosophical Society of Vienna, and a member with Freud of the Pernerstorfer Circle, “cultivated a wide circle of acquaintance amongst the leading thinkers, writers and musicians of Vienna.”[1733] Eckstein was among a circle of many artists, musicians, and writers known as Jung Wien (“Young Vienna”), who met in Café Griensteidl and other nearby coffeehouses early twentieth century, along with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky, Hermann Bahr, Rudolf Steiner, Hugo Wolf, and Stefan Zweig. Many of these personalities formed part of what was called belonged to the homoerotic cult known as the George-Kreis (“George-Circle”), founded by Stefan George (1868 – 1933), that included many Jewish artists and intellectuals and associated with Jung Wien, and went on to fundamentally influence the Nazi movement.
Young Vienna turned away from the prevailing Naturalism of the time and experimented with various facets of Modernism, including Symbolism and Impressionism. George’s poetry is representative of the artistic tradition of Symbolism a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. George, like the Symbolists, was inspired by the pursuit of l’art pour l’art (“art for art's sake”), which implied that “true” art is utterly independent of any and all social values and utilitarian function. The phrase appeared in appeared in the lectures and writings of Victor Cousin, Benjamin Constant, and Edgar Allan Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle” (1850). But, although the phrase had been circulating among the Parisian intellectual circles since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was Théophile Gautier (1811 – 1872), who first fully articulated its metaphysical meaning in the prefaces of his 1832 poetry volume Albertus, and 1835 novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin.[1734] Gautier was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde.
In literature, Symbolism had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil,” 1857) by Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867), which signaled the birth of modernism in literature.[1735] Jean Moréas (1856 – 1910), partly to redeem the reputation of the new generation of young writers from the charge of “decadence” that the press had implied, published the Symbolist Manifesto (“Le Symbolisme”) in Le Figaro on September 18, 1886, which names Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1898), and Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896) as the three leading poets of the movement. Mallarmé was famed for his salons, at his house on the rue de Rome. The group became known as les Mardistes, because they met on Tuesdays (in French, mardi). For many years, those sessions, where Mallarmé held court as judge, jester, and king, were considered the heart of Paris intellectual life. Regular visitors included W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Paul Verlaine, and many others.
The Symbolist authors were often regarded as poète maudit (“damned poets), whose lives were marked by drug abuse, alcohol, criminality, violence, and depravity. Baudelaire’s Les litanies de Satan (“Litanies to Satan”) have often been emblematic as a sign of his Satanism.[1736] The work that is considered Baudelaire’s masterpiece was his collection Les Fleurs du Mal (“The Flowers of Evil”), which begins with a famous address “To the Reader”:
Stupidity, error, sin and stinginess
Garrison our minds and enslave our bodies.
On evil’s pillow, Hermes Trismegistus
Slowly rocks our enthralled minds,
And the rich metal of our wills
Is vaporized by this learned alchemist…
It is the Devil who pulls the strings that move us: We find charm in the most disgusting things; Each day we take another step down into hell, Deadened to horror, through stinking shadows… Reader, you recognize this delicate monster, Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother![1737]
À rebours (“In Reverse”) published in 1884 by J.K. Huysmans, a friend of Verlaine, contained many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. The novel, in which very little happens, catalogues the psychology of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive antihero. Des Esseintes is not impressed by the classic French authors like Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, preferring the works of Bourdaloue, Bossuet, Nicole, and Pascal. Schopenhauer, he exclaims, “alone was in the right.” Golden Dawn member Oscar Wilde was influenced by the novel as he wrote Salome, and Huysman’s book appears in The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose titular character becomes corrupted after reading the book. In Wilde’s novel, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that his picture, rather than he, will age and fade. As sin and transgression begin to alter the famous portrait, Dorian becomes obsessively drawn is Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Wilde describes the “rapt pleasure” Dorian takes in “seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.” In the late 1880s, Wilde met Clement Harris, who played Wagner on the piano to Wilde and later introduced him to his lover, Wagner’s son Siegfried.[1738]
Without exception, the French Symbolists were Wagner enthusiasts. Their progenitor Baudelaire was Wagner’s main mediator in France.[1739] Having attended performances of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Der fliegende Holländer at the Paris Opera, Baudelaire admired Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he adapted to his own Symbolist program.[1740] Mallarmé was intensively involved with Wagner, as were the poets of the same era whom George met in Paris. The Paris premiere Wagner’s Tannhäuser, in March 1861, was a debacle, with demonstrations breaking out. Appalled by the response, Baudelaire wrote the epoch-making essay “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris.” It was likely through Baudelaire that Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838 – 1889) was introduced to Wagner, whose enthusiasm for occult literature was only surpassed by his Wagner mania.[1741] In 1860, Villiers met his idol Baudelaire, who encouraged him to read the works of Edgar Allan Poe. An important event in Villiers’ life was his meeting with Wagner in 1869. Villiers read from the manuscript of his play La Révolte after which Wagner declared that the Villiers was a “true poet.”[1742] In 1890, Villiers published Axël, a Rosicrucian drama heavily influenced by Victor Hugo, Goethe’s Faust and Wagner. Axël, Villiers’ testamentary work, is “the bible of Symbolist theater.”[1743]
One of Symbolism’s most colorful promoters
in Paris was art and literary critic Joséphin Péladan, who founded the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross
(OKR+C) with Papus, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and Stanislas
de Guaita.[1744]
The “regency” of Fabré-Palaprat’s Order of the Temple, which was based on the
spurious Larmenius Charter, was given by some surviving members to Péladan.[1745] However, a schism resulted in the OKR+C due to Péladan’s eccentric
behavior, having issued a public condemnation against a female member of the
Rothschild banking dynasty.[1746]
In 1890–1891, Péladan abandoned
the OKR+C, and established his own Ordre de
la Rose-Croix catholique du Temple et du Graal (“Kabbalistic Catholic
Rose-Croix Order of the Temple and the Grail”) which included many of the
prominent Symbolist artists of the period. The reason for the split was that
Péladan “refused to associate himself with spiritism, Freemasonry or Buddhism.”[1747]
Stanislas de Guaita, on the other hand, said that Péladan didn’t want to turn
the order into a salon for artists.[1748]
According to Péladan himself, he became aware of his vocation as founder of the order in 1888, during a performance of Parsifal in Bayreuth, from which he derived its Templar and Grail references. Péladan’s conceived of the Templars and Grail Knights as the guardians of a divine secret knowledge that was passed on by the Rosicrucians.[1749] Péladan, explains Jan Stottmeister, transferred the occult theme complex to art: art itself was to be the Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the artist was to see himself as a new Templar or Rosicrucian who served the Art Dieu, the “God of Art,” among fellow brothers and masters of the order.[1750]
Péladan’s Salon de la Rose + Croix, which grew out the OKR+C, was a series of six avant-garde art, writing salons which he hosted in 1890s Paris.[1751] Péladan wanted the Salon to create a forum for artists who rejected the officially approved academic art being exhibited by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and the influential Impressionists. Central to Péladan’s doctrine was the promotion of the arts “especially of an esoteric flavour,” hoping to “overcome European materialism.”[1752] Writers as diverse as Paul Valéry, André Gide, André Breton, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline read Péladan with interest, as did Le Corbusier.[1753] Also attending the Salon was Mallarmé. Péladan opened the Salon, which was also attended by Mallarmé, proclaiming:
Artist, you are a priest: art is the great mystery, and when your efforts succeed in creating a masterpiece, a ray of the divine descends on it as on an altar… Artist, you are king: art is the true kingdom… Artist, you are a magician: art is the great miracle and proves our immortality.[1754]
In “The Occult Roots of Modernism,” Alex Ross noted, referring to the above proclamation, “What Péladan took from Wagner, above all, was the idea that art could assume the functions of religion.”[1755] When Péladan discovered Wagner, he went to Bayreuth wearing a white coat, a sky-blue tunic, a lace jabot and suede boots, with an umbrella held by a shoulder belt. Although Wagner’s widow Cosima refused to receive him, this did not prevent him from publishing the complete operas of Wagner in French with his annotations “as therapeutics to detoxify France from its materialism.”[1756] According to “Gods have no homeland on earth, and Wagner is a god. To the rhythm of the Valkyries, we'd be even better at killing the Krauts.”[1757]
Péladan singled out for praise Félicien Rops (1833 – 23 August 1898), whose “Les Sataniques,” is a series of etchings depicting satanic demons raping and killing women. Rops provided frontispieces for a series of enormously successful novels known collectively as La Décadence Latine (“Latin Decadence”), by Péladan, which began appearing in 1884. In “The Victory of the Husband,” from 1889, Izel and Adar, who are married, and honeymoon at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, cannot restrain themselves and begin making love. In “The Androgyne” from 1891, male classmates vie a feminine boy who escapes by engaging in of mutual exhibitionism with a mannish maiden. From the same year, “The Gynander,” Péladan’s preferred term for lesbians, another androgyne named Tammuz converts dozens of “gynanders” to heterosexuality after he magically generates replicas of himself. As an orchestra performs Wagner, the women fall to worshipping a giant phallus.[1758]
At the end of 1878, the government dissolved the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens (“Reading Club of the German Students of Vienna”), the official organization of the pan-German Pernerstorfer circle, and this led to the members meeting regularly at the Ramharter, Vienna’s first vegetarian restaurant, which opened in 1879, in Vienna’s city center.[1759] Many visitors of the Ramharter belonged to the pan-German Pernerstorfer circle.[1760] Eckstein, who was also affiliated with the Pernerstorfer circle, grouped his fellow vegetarians into two camps: the “Socialists” and the “Pythagoreans.” In one of his major writings, Religion und Kunst (“Religion and Art”), published in 1880, Wagner had praised Pythagoras as a teacher of the meatless diet and thus ignited interest in vegetarianism among musicians and among his fans. For the premiere of the opera Parsifal in 1882, many members in this group travelled to Bayreuth. Eckstein, apparently, did so on foot.[1761]
Among the “Pythagoreans” was the young Hermann Bahr (1863 – 1934), Herzl’s fraternity brother in Burschenschaft Albia, who then had socialist and pan-German leanings and later distinguished himself as the leading theoretician of the artistic avant-garde of fin de siècle Vienna. The composer Hugo Wolf (1860 – 1903), who later shared a flat with Eckstein would take part in the “summer colonies” (Sommerkolonien) of the Theosophically-oriented circle around Marie Lang (1858 – 1934), a women’s rights activist and social reformer, and her husband Edmund, who hosted an influential salon in Vienna.[1762] They also summered with a colony of friends in Grinzing at the Schloss Belle Vue, known as the place where Freud experienced his dream, Irma’s injection, that he subsequently analyzed to arrive at his theory that dreams are wish fulfillments.[1763] The Langs also created a Theosophical study group with Eckstein and Franz Hartmann. In 1888, they met Steiner and introduced him to Theosophical literature, as well as to Lang’s friend and ally, the painter and writer Rosa Mayreder (1858 – 1938).[1764] The two women would both become influential in Steiner’s development and he and Mayreder would continue a correspondence for many years.[1765] Steiner commented that Lang was the soul of the circle, and that it was her personality and interest in Theosophy that encouraged the participation of the rest of the group.[1766]
The “socialist” wing of the vegetarians, with Pernerstorfer’s friend Victor Adler. Adler was hosting meetings at his home at the time that Mahler first entered the Circle.[1767] However, George von Schönerer’s increasingly anti-Semitic policies, culminating in the amendment of an Aryan paragraph, led to an estrangement with Adler from the Pernerstorfer Circle. Victor’s wife Emma was the sister of Heinrich Braun (1854 – 1927), childhood classmate of Freud’s during their high school years, influencing the young Freud for a time to contemplate a career in politics or law.[1768]
Emma was a socialist who, with other Jewish writers of the time, such as Hedwig Dohm, Bertha Pappenheim, and Hedwig Lachmann, “combined political activity with artistic creativity.”[1769] Hedwig’s husband was Ernst Dohm (1819 – 1883, an actor and Jewish and a convert to Christianity, who was coeditor with Julius Rodenberg of the Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft from 1867 to 1874. From 1886, Adler published the Marxist journal Gleichheit (“Equality”), and travelled to Germany and Switzerland, where he met with Friedrich Engels, August Bebel and Karl Liebknecht. He was charged several times for his activities and spent nine months in prison. From 1882 to 1889, Adler resided at an address that later became famous as the Freud’s office, the present-day Sigmund Freud Museum. In 1889, Adler founded the Social Democratic Party of Austria. His son, Friedrich Adler (1879 – 1960) , a Social Democratic politician, perhaps best known for his assassination of Minister-President Karl von Stürgkh (1859 – 1916) in 1916. Friedrich had studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the ETH Zurich, where he became a close friend of Albert Einstein.[1770]
A well-known story is that when Victor Adler objected to Count Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, that war would provoke revolution in Russia, he replied: “And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein [Leon Trotsky] sitting over there at the Cafe Central?”[1771] At literary get-togethers in the Café Imperial, Eckstein met Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Felix Salten, Hugo Wolf, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Werfel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Adolf Loos, Leon Trotsky and especially Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896), whose student and later patron and private secretary he was. Bruckner, who was strongly influenced by Wagner, and a friend of Gustav Mahler, was a member of Vienna’s Theosophical Society.[1772] In his book The World of Yesterday, Zweig eulogized Vienna’s fin de siècle coffeehouse culture, where for “the small price of a cup of coffee,” a youth who aspired to intellectuality could “sit for hours on end, discuss, write, play cards, receive his mail, and, above all, [could] go through an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines.”[1773] Zweig had a warm relationship with Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, whom he met when Herzl was still literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, then Vienna’s main newspaper. Herzl accepted for publication some of Zweig’s early essays.[1774]
In Oedipus and the Sphinx (1905),
the cycle of Greek tragedies adapted by the symbolist dramatist and playwright
and member of the George-Kreis, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874 – 1929),
very closely follows a “Wagnerian tragedy” by Péladan.[1775]
Hugo’s great-grandfather was Austrian silk merchant Isaak Löw Hofmann (1759 – 1849),
from whom his family inherited the noble title “Edler von Hofmannsthal,” was a
Jewish tobacco farmer ennobled by Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria. Hofmann
took great interest in the Jewish community of Vienna, being president in 1806
and representative in 1812, which latter office he held until his death. His
son, and Hugo’s grandfather, was Augustin Emil Hofmann von Hofmannsthal (1815 –
1881), head of his father’s subsidiary business-house in Milan. Hugo’s sister, Elise
von Hofmannsthal, married Solly Herz, brother to Adelheid Herz, who married
Carl Mayer von Rothschild, son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and founder of the
Neapolitan branch of dynasty. Among Carl Mayer’s children were Charlotte who married Baron Lionel
de Rothschild, a friend of Benjamin Disraeli, and Mayer
Carl von Rothschild who recommended Gerson Bleichröder to Otto von Bismarck as
a banker.[1776]
Peter Altenberg (1859 – 1919), one of the main proponents of Viennese Impressionism, was a contemporary of Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, Schnitzler, the symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, and Adolf Loos, with whom he had a very close relationship. Altenberg’s favorite coffeehouse was the Café Central, to which he even had his mail delivered. Some of the poetry Altenberg wrote on the backs of postcards and scraps of paper were set to music by composer Alban Berg, who studied with Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951), the founder of modern atonal music. In 1901, Schoenberg married Mathilde Zemlinsky, the sister of the conductor and composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871 – 1942), with whom Schoenberg had been studying since about 1894.
John R. Covach
proposed that, “an understanding of both Emanuel Swedenborg’s ideas, as they
are represented in “philosophical” novels by Honoré de Balzac, and Rudolf
Steiner’s interpretation of Goethe’s scientific writing leads to a fuller
recovery Schoenberg’s meaning.”[1777]
According to literary critic Anna Balakian, Swedenborg’s doctrine of
correspondences was picked up and transformed by Symbolists, beginning with
Baudelaire. Schoenberg considered adapting chapter of Séraphita,
which refers to Swedenborg, in the early stages of Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s
Ladder”), and combining it with the story of “Jacob Wrestling” from Legends
by August Strindberg (1849 – 1912), who
was heavily influenced by Swedenborg’s philosophy.[1778] Schoenberg
acknowledged the influence of Swedenborg and Balzac in the famous “Composition
with Twelve Tones” essay. Additionally, Karl Wörner has suggested that
Schoenberg’s Die Jakobsleiter resembles Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery
Dramas, which were performed in Vienna in the years before World War I.[1779] However, it is certainly possible that
Schoenberg derived the essence of Steiner’s ideas from his life-long friend
Oskar Adler (1875 – 1955), who was very familiar with occult doctrines.[1780]
In 1897, Jewish anti-Semite Karl Kraus (1874 – 1936) broke from Young Vienna with a scathing satire, Die demolierte Literatur (“Demolished Literature”), and was named Vienna correspondent for the newspaper Breslauer Zeitung. One year later, as an uncompromising advocate of Jewish assimilation, he attacked Herzl with his polemic Eine Krone für Zion (“A Crown for Zion”). The title is a play on words, as Krone means both “crown” and the currency of Austria-Hungary from 1892 to 1918. One Krone was the minimum donation required to participate in the Zionist Congress in Basel, and Herzl was often mocked as the König von Zion (“King of Zion”) by Viennese anti-Zionists.
In 1899, Kraus renounced Judaism, and in the same year he founded his own magazine, Die Fackel (“The Torch”). In its first decade, contributors included such well-known writers and artists as Peter Altenberg, Richard Dehmel, Egon Friedell, Oskar Kokoschka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, August Strindberg, Georg Trakl, Frank Wedekind, Franz Werfel, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Golden Dawn member Oscar Wilde. Else Lasker-Schüler (1869 – 1945) was a German-Jewish poet and playwright famous for her bohemian lifestyle in Berlin and her poetry. She was in a romantic relationship with Gottfried Benn (1886 – 1956) was a German poet, essayist, and physician, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Frank Wedekind (1864 – 1918) belonged to the Wedekind family from Horst, which included suspected Illuminatus Georg Christian Gottlieb Wedekind.[1781] Wedekind was best known for the “Lulu” cycle, a two-play series, including Erdgeist (“Earth Spirit,” 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (“Pandora’s Box,” 1904). Wedekind’s first major play, Frühlings Erwachen (“Spring Awakening,” 1891), caused a scandal because it contained scenes of homoeroticism, implied group male masturbation, actual male masturbation, sado-masochism between a teenage boy and girl, rape and suicide, as well as references to abortion.
In 1900, Hofmannsthal met the composer Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949), for whom he later wrote libretti for several of his operas. Strauss has been described as a successor of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.[1782] In 1889, Strauss left his post with the Bavarian State Opera after being appointed Kapellmeister to Wagner’s patron, Charles Alexander, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, in Weimar. He served as the assistant conductor of the Bayreuth Festival during which time he befriended Cosima Wagner who became a close friend. Strauss’ first opera to achieve international fame was Salome, which featured an erotic “Dance of the Seven Veils,” shocked opera audiences from its first appearance. Gustav Mahler could not gain the consent of the Vienna censor to have it performed; therefore it was not given at the Vienna State Opera until 1918. The Austrian premiere was given at the Graz Opera in 1906, with Arnold Schoenberg, Giacomo Puccini, Alban Berg, and Gustav Mahler in the audience.
Salome used a libretto by Hedwig Lachmann that was a German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. Hedwig was Jewish and the daughter of a cantor, Isaak Lachmann. Hedwig married Gustav Landauer (1870 – 1919), one of the leading theorists on anarchism in Germany.[1783] Landauer’s closest friends included Martin Buber, Margarete Sussman, Fritz Mauthner and Auguste Hauschner.[1784] Hauschner married painter and manufacturer Benno Hauschner, and they held a salon in their apartment in the Tiergarten district of Berlin that attracted her cousin Fritz Mauthner, Gustav Landauer, Max Liebermann, Max Brod and Maximilian Harden, the journalist who exposed the homosexual conduct between the Kaiser’s close friend Philipp, the homosexual friend of Herzl, Prince of Eulenburg, and General Kuno, Graf von Moltke.
As Fritz Mauthner (1849 – 1923) related in his memoirs, his maternal grandfather was a military officer in the sect of Jacob Frank.[1785] Mauthner was enthusiastic about Bismarck, and moved to Berlin, where worked as a journalist and wrote literary and theatre criticism for the Berliner Tageblatt. During World War I, he wrote inflammatory and nationalistic newspaper articles, placing the importance of Germany’s military success above any philosophy.[1786] In 1906, he published a book on Spinoza. Mauthner, whose work is concerned with the philosophy of language and atheism, is remembered mainly for his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (“Contributions to a Critique of Language”), published in three parts in 1901 and 1902. Though mainly forgotten, Mauthner’s influence can be found in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.[1787] The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who took several of his ideas from Mauthner, acknowledges him in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).
Hedwig’s first love was Richard Dehmel (1863 – 1920), who suggested they live in a “threesome” with his wife Paula Oppenheimer, sister of the Zionist Franz Oppenheimer. Franz and Paula’s father, Dr. Julius Oppenheimer (1827 – 1909), served for many years as a preacher and teacher at the Jewish Reform temple of the Berlin.[1788] Dehmel did later live in such a threesome with Paula and Ida Auerbach, who had formerly been engaged to his rival Stefan George, founder of the George-Kreis, before divorcing Paula and marrying Ida in 1899.
In 1894, Dehmel had co-founded Pan magazine, dedicated to Gesamtkunstwerk and providing support to young artists. Pan was published from 1895 to 1900 in Berlin by Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865 – 1910) and Julius Meier-Graefe (1867 – 1935), a German art critic and novelist. As Meier-Graefe wrote, “Among us Germans, art was not a class distinction, an enervating form of dilettantism, or a luxury, but the one and only reality, the ultimate altar, the final bond holding humanity together… heroism.”[1789] Following Dehmel’s example, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876 – 1925), who wrote a book about Dehmel published in 1900, affirmed his belief in the mission of art. “We have art,” wrote Moeller, “an art that has made religion superfluous and given the citizens of the modern world an assurance that only belief in God could otherwise confer.”[1790]
Dehmel frequented the café Das schwarze Ferkel, as did Franz Evers (1871 – 1947), and pianist and composer Conrad Ansorge, August Strindberg and Moeller van den Bruck.[1791] Evers was a member of Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden’s German Theosophical Society and afterwards worked as an editor of The Sphinx.[1792] Evers shared a studio with another theosophist, the artist Fidus (1868 – 1948), who illustrated his Hohe Lieder and Prana of the Guido von List Society.[1793] Fidus also contributed to the early homosexual magazine Der Eigene (“The Unique”), published by Adolf Brand (1874 – 1945), a campaigner for the acceptance of male bisexuality and homosexuality. Brand had joined the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded in Berlin in 1897 by Magnus Hirschfeld (1868 – 1935), and six other gentlemen, to campaign against the legal persecution homosexuality. A prominent Jewish sexologist and homosexual, Hirschfeld coined the term “transvestite.” Contributors to Der Eigene included Evers, Theodor Lessing (1872 – 1933) and Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955). Katharina “Katia” Pringsheim, Mann’s wife, was the granddaughter of Hedwig and Ernst Dohm. By 1900, Fidus was one of the best known painters in Germany, and had come under the influence of writers such as van den Bruck, and the Wandervogel movements. In 1908, Fidus joined the Germanic Faith Community, a religious group led by the painter Ludwig Fahrenkrog (1867 – 1952), which adopted Germanic neopaganism.[1794]
Dehmel is considered one of the foremost
German poets of the pre-World War I era. In 1896, he published the poem “Venus
Consolatrix” in the volume of poems Weib
und Welt (“Woman and World”), in which he described a mystical
sex act with a female figure in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, Venus and Mary
Magdalene are merged. As a result, he was tried for
obscenity and blasphemy Weib und Welt was ordered to be burned. His poem
Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”) was set to music by Arnold Schoenberg,
who was influenced by Wagner.[1795]
Dehmel was a contributor to Kraus’s Die Fackel. In 1904, Kraus supported
Frank Wedekind to make possible the staging in Vienna of his controversial play
Pandora’s Box. The open depiction of sexuality and violence in these
plays, including lesbianism and an encounter with Jack the Ripper—a role that
Wedekind played in the original production—pushed the boundaries of what was
considered acceptable on the stage at the time. In Franziska (1910), the
title character, a young girl, initiates a Faustian pact with the Devil,
selling her soul for the knowledge of what it is like to live life as a man. A performance of Wedekind’s Spring’s
Awakening was attended by Hitler and his friend Kubizek in Vienna.[1796]
In 1910, Dehmel’s Pan magazine was revived by Berlin gallery owner and art dealer Paul Cassirer (1871 – 1926), who had worked for the weekly magazine Simplicissimus in Munich, which published the work of writers such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. Contributors included Hermann Hesse, Gustav Meyrink, Fanny zu Reventlow, Jakob Wassermann, Frank Wedekind, Heinrich Kley, Alfred Kubin, Otto Nückel, Robert Walser, Heinrich Zille, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Heinrich Mann, Lessie Sachs, and Erich Kästner. Under Cassirer’s leadership, Pan printed stories and poems, in the emerging Symbolist and Naturalist movements, and also played an important role in the development of German Art Nouveau. Pan went on to publish contributors like Wedekind, Georg Heym, Ernst Barlach and Franz Marc. Cassirer was the first to exhibit Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin in Germany, and he championed the work of the Impressionists’ German counterparts, like painter Max Liebermann. The group, along with Barlach, Kandinsky, and Max Beckmann eventually made up the core of the avant-garde formation, the Berlin Secession, an art movement established in 1898, who rejected traditional art styles then advanced by both academia and officials, and created the foundation of Modernism.[1797]
Despite his record of fighting conservatives, Dehmel was one of the signatories of An die Kulturwelt! (“To the Cultural World!”), a manifesto published in October 1914, signed by 93 scientists, artists and writers. The manifesto was written by was the playwright Ludwig Fulda (1862 – 1939), the son of the merchant Carl Hermann Fulda (1836 – 1917) and his wife Clementine, née Oppenheimer, daughter of the merchant and first Jewish city councilor of the Frankfurt magistrate, Julius Philipp Oppenheimer (1812 – 1869). The manifesto called on the masses to support the German Empire after the outbreak of the World War I and denied the Allies’ accusations of German miliary excesses in in neutral Belgium as self-defence.[1798] Dehmel proclaimed in 1914: “We Germans are more humane than the other nations; we do have better blood and breeding, more soul, more heart, and more imagination.”[1799]
Dehmel did eventually live a threesome with Paula and Ida Auerbach, who had formerly been engaged to his rival Stefan George, before divorcing Paula and marrying Ida in 1899. Stefan George is also known for his role as leader of the highly influential literary group of mostly homosexual—and often Jewish—intellectuals called the George-Kreis (“George Circle”), who had called for a spiritual aristocracy, what he called a “Secret Germany,” to rebuild the nation. George was very close to Ida Auerbach, who was born in Bingen into a prosperous well established Jewish family. After they met in 1892, George came close to dedicating a cycle of poems to her. When Ida married, however, in 1895, it was to Leopold Auerbach, a Jewish businessman and philanthropist from Berlin. The Auerbachs’ home became a focus for the Friedrichshagen Poets’ Circle.
George had attended every Wagner performance at the court theater during his time at grammar school in Darmstadt. In a letter to his mentor, the French poet Albert Saint-Paul, in 1891, George wrote of the “Grand Master Wagner.”[1800] In 1892, in the second issue of Blätter, George’s childhood friend Carl August Klein named Wagner first among the German cultural heroes, ahead of Nietzsche and the Symbolist artists Arnold Böcklin (1827 – 1901) and Max Klinger (1857 – 1920), who were “joined by a poet,” meaning Stefan George.[1801] From Büchern der Hirten- und Preisgedichte (“Books of the Pastoral and Praise Poems”), from 1894, to the Neuen Reich (“New Reich”) in 1928, George’s lyric poetry contains inspiration and in some cases literal borrowings from the libretti of Parsifal and Twilight of the Gods, the last in Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung.[1802]
George found his youthful penchant for Wagner confirmed and enhanced through his participation in the world of the Parisian symbolists. After George travelled to Paris in 1889, Saint-Paul also persuaded Stéphane Mallarmé to invite George to attend the Tuesday Symbolist soirées. When they met, Mallarmé received George warmly, particularly when the latter revealed that he had recently begun translating Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal into German.[1803] Mallarmé, whose circle of disciples called him Le Maître (“The Master”), was to be a lifelong model for George’s art, philosophy, and way of life.[1804] According to Ernst Morwitz (1887 – 1971), a Jewish member of the George-Kreis, who passed on a personal communication, George attended a lecture by Péladan in Brussels at the beginning of the 1890s and also met Verlaine during this event.[1805] Allusions to Templars and Rosicrucians can be found many times in George’s poetry, earliest in the poem Irrende Schar, which evokes the Grail Castle, and most explicitly in the poem Templer (“Templars”), which begins with “We Rose… We Cross.”[1806]
Hofmannsthal, whose work was influenced by Péladan, met George in 1891 at the age of seventeen and had several poems published in the Blätter für die Kunst. Robert Boehringer, head of the Boehringer Ingelheim pharmaceutical giant, joined the circle in 1905. Jewish professor Friedrich Gundolf (1880 – 1931) had been a member of the George-Kreis since 1899, having introduced himself there through Shakespeare’s sonnets translated into German. Gundolf subsequently became George’s closest friend and lover.[1807] Gundolf published first poems in George’s periodical, the Blätter für die Kunst. During 1910 and 1911, he edited the Jahrbuch für die geistige Bewegung (“Yearbook for the Spiritual Movement”), which preached the cultural political opinions of the George-Kreis. Gundolf also had several relationships with women, which George only tolerated as long as he did not plan to marry. Therefore, their break occurred when in the early 1920s when Gundolf decided to marry Elisabeth (“Elli”) Salomon, a political economy student.[1808]
George was also associated with Max Dessoir,
who founded the Society for Psychological Research with Schrenck-Notzing and Hübbe-Schleiden,
the president of the German Theosophical Society and who was also contributor
to The Sphinx. In
March 1895, Dessoir, then a professor at the Friedrich
Wilhelm University of Berlin,
wrote to Klein to ask if back issues of the Blätter were available. Dessoir
was preparing his lectures on the history of aesthetics and the theory of art,
and he wanted to address the most recent pertinent developments. Klein wrote
back:
Since just at this moment an artistic and aristocratic drive is asserting itself against the naturalistic and plebeian one and is beginning to imitate the works of our collaborators, we would find ourselves much obliged to you if you wished to say a few conscientious honest words about our movement.[1809]
George’s interest in occult literature is further corroborated by the fact that his library contained a copy of the Sphinx from 1893, which contains two translations of Verlaine poems from his poetic rival and intimate enemy Richard Dehmel.[1810] Dessoir finally made George’s poetry known for the first time in academic circles and the general public in a lecture in November 1895. The honor in a temporarily close relationship between George and Dessoir, even leading to plans for a joint journal in 1896. Hofmannsthal was intended as co-editor of the journal, but no publisher could be found for it. During that time, Dessoir introduced the unknown poet in one of the largest family magazines in the German Empire. In Westermann’s Illustrierte Monatshefte, Dessoir published an essay titled Über das Kunstgefühl der Gegenwart (“On the Artistic Feeling of the Present”). According to Dessoir in 1896, the materialism of the recent generation no longer applied to the current one: “In the midst of restless progress… we yearn for the Sabbath silence of the heart. From time to time we cherish deep, self-indulgent sadness. Then we feel God… Buddhism, Theosophy and Catholicism give us the longed-for impulse.” These impulses, explained Dessoir, were met by a new artistic feeling expressed most clearly in the Blätter für die Kunst and the “Head of the Guild: Stefan George.” The significance, according to Dessoir, is that “white magic of art creates a community of the rarest kind.”[1811]
In the years 1909 and 1910, explains Stottmeister, George will literally play the role of a master of the order.[1812] George’s “evident homosexuality” is represented by works such as Algabal and the love poetry he devoted to a gifted adolescent whom he met in 1902 named Maximilian Kronberger, whom he called “Maximin.”[1813] When Maximin died of meningitis two years later, he was “idealized [by George] to the point of proclaiming him a god, following his death… the cult of ‘Maximin’ became an integral part of the George circle’s practice…”[1814] The Maximin-Erlebnis (“Maximin Experience”) is seen as George’s ultimate attempt to establish his authority as master, prophet and reformer.[1815] Algabal, which is one of George’s best remembered collections of poetry, is a reference to the effeminate Roman emperor Elagabalus (c. 204 – 222). Elagabalus’ family held hereditary rights to the priesthood of the sun god Elagabal (Baal), of whom Elagabalus was the high priest at Emesa in Syria. The priest-kings of Emesa were closely lined with the history of Neoplatonism. Through intermarriage with the Julia-Claudio dynasty, the House of Herod and the House of Commagene, they were behind the formation of the Mysteries of Mithras. The god was later imported to Rome and assimilated with the sun god known Sol Invictus, which was closely related to the Mysteries of Mithras, and strongly influenced the development of the rites of Catholic Christianity.
Members of the George-Kreis also belonged to the Cosmic Circle, a group of writers and intellectuals in the famous bohemian Schwabing district of Munich, at the turn of the twentieth century, founded by occultist Alfred Schuler (1865 – 1923), philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872 – 1956), and German-Jewish poet Karl Wolfskehl (1869 – 1948). Wolfskehl’s friends and associates included Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber.[1816] In 1905, Mann married Katia Pringsheim, who came from a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family. Along with Theodor Herzl, Wolfskehl had established a local chapter of the Zionist movement in Munich in 1897.[1817] Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926), considered one of the most significant poets in the German language, had had a long-term affair with Lou Andreas-Salomé, Paul Rée’s and Nietzsche’s temptress, and Freud’s pupil.
In 1894, Schuler met Ludwig Derleth (1870 – 1948), who associated with Papus and Péladan, and the very prolific writer Paul Sédir (1871 – 1926), and who became Superior Inconnu Initiateur and a member of the Supreme Council of the Martinist Order.[1818] From about the turn of the century, Schuler, a disciple of Guido von List, kept in touch with occultists such as Papus, and later took part in spiritualist séances directed by Schrenck-Notzing.[1819] Theodor Lessing, before he wrote his classic on Jewish self-hatred, published by the Zionist Jüdische Verlag, became friendly with Klages, but the friendship came to an end in 1899. In 1902, Schuler was one of the founding members of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Munich, alongside with Magnus Hirschfeld.[1820]
In 1899, Schuler sent a reverential letter to Papus, the temporary Parisian “Delegate of Adyar” and founder of the Ordre Martiniste. His request for a personal audience was turned down by an intermediary named Sero, but an exchange of letters continued until 1905. At the same time, Schuler received occult study documents from Papus, which he regarded as “secret writings.”[1821] The contents of the study documents, the so-called Grüne Hefte (“Green Notebooks”), in Schuler’s possession were a hodgepodge of occultism with a strong theosophical bent. They included excerpts from The Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky, an astrological table, letters on Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, a spell probably written by Schuler, a Gnostic treatise, an Old Norse runic song, and excerpts from Papus’ Traité élementaire sur la Magie pratique (“Elementary treatise on practical magic”). Éliphas Levi, Franz Hartmann, and the occult historian Carl Kiesewetter (1854 – 1895), who was interested in Theosophy and alchemy, are mentioned by name.[1822] The latter two belonged to the founding members of the German Theosophical Society and to the circle of authors of The Sphinx.[1823]
Despite his anti-Semitism, Klages accused Schuler
of “Jewish blood” during a brief lovers’ quarrel.[1824] Nevertheless,
Derleth, Wolfskehl, Schuler and Klages developed the mysterious doctrine of “blood”
and “light,” the Blutleuchte (“Blood Lamp”), that viewed a return to
pagan origins as the only way to reverse the decay and decline of the West
caused by Christianity. After the steady decline of the blood, understood as a
sacred elixir of life, it had to be brought back to its former purity of pagan
times. They counted themselves among the few among whom the pure blood was
still effective, and who could bring about desired transformation. Schuler was
interested in ancient cult practices such as “blood brotherhood, blood
vengeance, atonement through blood, and the use of blood in healing and
protective magic.” Schuler and Klages contemplated literally “forging the
desired connection with the past through a magical blood sacrifice.”[1825]
Salvation through the Blutleuchte was to be regained under the sign of the Blutleuchte and the swastika that symbolized it.[1826] Schuler proclaimed around 1900, that the world must “choose” between the “Aryan swastika” and that “castration symbol,” the “Jewish-Christian cross.” Wolfskehl as well had the swastika symbol on his teacups.[1827] Before it became fully established as Schuler’s anti-Semitic symbol, the German-Jewish publisher Georg Bondi (1865 – 1935), George’s devoted friend and publicizer, sometimes printed the swastika on his books. Bondi was married to Eva Dohm, the daughter of Hedwig Dohm, and a friend of Martha Fontane (1860 – 1917), the daughter of Theodor Fontane (1819 – 1898), who was educated in Leipzig, where he became acquainted with the progressives of the Vormärz. Hedwig Dohm was the grandmother of Katia Mann, Thomas Mann’s wife.
The Swastika also appears prominently on designs of books from the George-Kreis designed by George’s collaborator, the Theosophist Melchior Lechter (1865 – 1937). In April 1903, a greeting card was sent to Lechter from Munich, signed by “Stefan,” Gundolf, Mr. and Mrs. Wolfskehl, Klages and Schuler, signed with the symbol of a swastika. The card referred to the “Devachanic Plane,” which according to Theosophical teachings is a plane of being above the “physical” and “astral” planes. The card stated:
DIE MUENCHENER ROSENKREUZER/SENDEN DEM BRUDER AUF DER DEVACHAN/EBENE IHRE GRÜSSE (“THE MUNICH ROSICRUCIANS/SEND THEIR GREETINGS TO THE BROTHER ON THE DEVACHAN/GREETINGS”).[1828]
Problematic for Klages, however, was that Wolfskehl claimed to have discovered a Jewish Blutleuchte (“blood lamp”). Roderich Huch (1880 – 1944) describes this problem, which would contribute to their separation:
The cosmicists Schuler and Klages could do both, because they were not looking for the race, but the soul, i.e. the luminous soul substance, as they saw it alive in Wolfskehl and others in the early days, even though they were pure-bred Jews, and only condemned Wolfskehl when he thought he had discovered a Zionist Blutleuchte and thus, in their view, betrayed the cosmic soul.[1829]
Klages
insisted George exclude Wolfskehl from the George-Kreis, on the grounds that
Wolfskehl was Jewish. Klages was in part upset about Wolfskehl’s relationship
with Klages’ former lover, Fanny zu Reventlow. Whom he described as a “pagan
saint.”[1830]
Reventlow proclaimed a doctrine of free love and matriarchy, having borne a
child out of wedlock without disclosing the father’s identity on the principle
that only the mother should have all rights in her children. Reventlow had
relationships with Rilke, Edgar Jaffe, and Adam Hetschel, who regarded
Reventlow as the most significant woman of the century and Klages as the most
significant man. Hetschel even predicted that if Reventlow and Klages joined
together, “the world of paganism would celebrate a revolutionary awakening,”
and “there would be a renewal of paganism on the whole planet.”[1831]
In 1904, Klages and Schuler broke with Wolfskehl and George, though Schuler still visited Wolfskehl later on and Wolfskehl’s admiration for Schuler did not diminish in the following years. Schuler felt surrounded by a Jewish conspiracy:
Ambiguous-unambiguous figures crossed the stage: a sinister rabbi—a gruesome Galician Jewess—a Jewish “mystic,” apparently a representative of a secret order. The dependence of the Blätter on a Jewish center became a certainty… Secret leadership became apparent, and the leader’s name was Wolfskehl.[1832]
Similarly, Klages also resented George’s relationships with various young men, stating:
…his pedagogical Eros was particularly directed towards Jewish youths… and it hardly requires greater acumen to demonstrate that the God in whom he believed and whom he saw embodied in a fifteen-year-old named Kronfeld [Maximin] was none other than—Yahweh![1833]
George’s Rosicrucian poem Templer appears in a volume of poetry titled Der Siebenten Ring (“The Seventh Ring”), which Lechter illustrated with the Ouroboros symbol of Gnosticism, of a snake biting its own tail, also employed in Blavatsky’s seal. Jan Stottmeister, the friendship developed between the Theosophist Lechter and George has no other example in George’s biography in terms of its warmth and mutual “master” veneration.[1834] Lechter read Nietzsche became an enthusiastic follower of Wagner, and his early drawings were inspired by Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger and by French symbolists. In the years before 1900, George and Lechter often visited his musician friend Richard Wintzer (1866 – 1952), who played “especially Wagner and Beethoven” for them.[1835] Lechter’s admiration of Wagner was intertwined with an equally deep admiration of Joséphin Péladan.[1836] In December 1901, Lechter had acquired the two volumes of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, which had only just been translated into German.
Stottmeister has shown that, although George ridiculed Blavatsky as die dicke Madame (“the fat madam”), it was not because of his rejection of Theosophy, but of his claim of ultimate and undisputable authority, and his concern that his pupils might show allegiance to any other “Masters” (such as the Theosophical Mahatmas), or to any other child-idol such as Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian boy elected by the Theosophists as their future World Teacher. As shown by Stottmeister, the central figure in George’s rivalry with Theosophy was artist Melchior Lechter. After Lechter met George, he would create numerous designs for his publisher, Georg Bondi Verlag, which became known to a wider circle of readers through the publication of George’s Blättern für die Kunst from 1898 and the publication of George’s books illustrated by Lechter. Lechter was part of an atelier community that included Hans Evers, Moeller van den Bruck and Fidus.[1837]
In October 1910, Melchior Lechter made a trip to India, together with Wolfskehl. Both had already become members of the Theosophical Society. They paid no less than five visits to Adyar, had a private meeting with Annie Besant, accompanied her and her followers on walks, listened to lectures, and met the young Krishnamurti. Back home, Lechter published an account of his trip to India as Tagebuch der indischen Reise (“Diary of the Indian Journey”) in 1912, and sent a copy to George as a Christmas gift. The gift was not well received, and George refused to answer and cut all ties of friendship with Lechter.
Urged on by Klages, Schuler gave three lectures in 1915 on Über die biologische Voraussetzungen des Imperium Romanum (“The Biological Preconditions of the Imperium Romanum”). Among the audience was Rilke who was deeply impressed by the hitherto unknown Schuler. This led to a personal contact between Schuler and Rilke. Rilke’s wife, the sculptor Clara Rilke, sculpted a bust of Schuler. To Princess Maria von Thum und Taxis he wrote that he had spent several hours with Schuler by whom he was marvelously stimulated (“wunderlich erregt”).[1838]
Between 1911 and 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino, near Trieste, home of Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis, who was married to Prince Alexander von Thurn and Taxis (1851 – 1939), from the Bohemian line of the House of Thurn and Taxis. She was one of five children of Egon Karl Franz zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst (1819 – 1865), a Knight of Malta and the brother of Chlodwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who had been appointed Prime Minister of Bavaria through Richard Wagner’s intercession at the secret request of Otto von Bismarck.[1839] Also visiting the Castle Duino were the Counts of Chambord, Empress Sisi and Emperor Franz Josef I, Archduke Maximilian with Charlotte, Eleonora Duse, Johann Strauss, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Paul Valéry, Mark Twain, Franz Liszt, Victor Hugo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Archduchess Maria Josefa often stayed in the castle.
George’s followers, explained Peter Viereck, were confident that the poem “Templer” written by George “would regenerate Germany and save European culture.”[1840] Viereck cites Claude David’s French biography of Stefan George as observing:
The poem summons forth a sort of Free
Masonry… living separate from the world,
misunderstood, stoned… “Only
he who always fought her”
[the earth], can force her to endure human rule. The Templars are the seed of a
new order...a spiritual elite, always recruited from the best...true to an
inner law.... They combine action with meditation: while preserving spiritual
values, they threaten the throne of the unworthy. The humanism here presented”
[as opposed to the antirational obscurantism of Klages and Schuler] “restores
the possibility of life and wisdom,… the
self confidence of humanity.”[1841]
Many of Stefan George’s Jüngeren (“Younger Ones”), who referred to him as “the Master,” revered him as the hidden spiritual leader and “emperor” of Geheimes Deutschland (“Secret Germany”). As mentioned by Lawrence A. Tritle, “There can be little doubt of the preoccupation with or idealization of Great Men among members of the Georgekreis.”[1842] George was also greatly influenced by the work of the Roman historian Plutarch, especially the Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans. The notion literary-intellectual elite originates not only with Nietzsche, but appears as well with Mallarmé and Golden Dawn member W.B. Yeats. The concepts set forth by Nietzsche, of elite groups, the Superman, the Underman, figure prominently in the works of George and his circle. George dedicated a poem to Nietzsche in Der siebente Ring. Fritz Koegel and Kurt Breysig, both member of the George-Kreis, had been friends of Nietzsche. These influences appear in three important biographies of Great Men by members of the George-Kreis: Gundolf’s Caesar, Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (“Emperor Frederick II”), and Vallentin’s Napoleon. At the conclusion of the biography of Caesar, Gundolf criticizes historians of the nineteenth century for their inability to adequately grasp the “spirit of genius” of both Caesar and Napoleon.[1843]
In 1919, George befriended the Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (1895 – 1963), a German-Jewish historian, and guided him to write his biography of Emperor Frederick II. According to Kantorowicz, George adopted the conspiratorial idea of Secret Germany from Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn (1851 – 1907), also an anti-Semite and an early figure in the Völkisch movement.[1844] Lagarde was conversant with Adolf Stoecker, who was also involved in the Antisemitenpetition. Lagarde also showed interest in völkisch societies such as the Deutscher Volksverein of Bernhard Förster and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, as well as the Deutschsoziale Partei of Theodor Fritsch. For Lagarde, Jews and liberals were allies, which the true German nationalist had to oppose. All that was needed, as he wrote in 1878, was a Führer to lead them:
Only the… strong will of a single Man can help us...not parliament nor statutes nor the ambition of powerless individuals… a Führer who would so completely represent the people that in him they would be united and his command would be their will… a new Barbarossa, a great one… a leader of genius with artistic temperament… a Caesar-Artist… whose fire of spirit and strength of arm will fulfill our ancient victorious longings.[1845]
From November 1889 to February 1890, when Nietzsche was being treated in a psychiatric clinic in Basel, Langbehn attempted to cure him, claiming that the methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition.[1846] In the following year, Langbehn anonymously published his highly successful Rembrandt als Erzieher (“Rembrandt as Educator”), a title in deliberate reference to Nietzsche’s work on Schopenhauer. To Langbehn—ignoring the artist’s friendship with Menasseh ben Israel—Rembrandt represented the epitome of German culture, which was menaced by “Americanism.” Germany’s true religion, according to Langbehn, was not Christianity but Aryanism. He described the German Nordic as “the Aryan par excellence,” and lauded Germany’s monarchy, which he believed to be enthroned by the grace of God. The Greater Germany of the future, he said, would govern Europe and achieve universal domination. In 1891, he published 40 Lieder (“40 Poems”), again anonymously, which were explicitly erotic, prompting the state prosecutor of Schleswig-Holstein to threaten to press charges, and causing Langbehn to withdraw the book.
The notion of a “secret emperor” of the Germans was found in Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher. The connection between the secret and the national was referred to in 1875 in Largade’s Schrift Über die gegenwärtige Lage des Deutschen Reichs (“On the current situation of the German Empire”): “If at least there were conspirators among us, a secretly open alliance that sank and created for the great tomorrow, and to which, even if the crowd would not understand it in these reversed days of Pentecost, all could join whose unspoken longing it offered the word.”[1847] George later commented at a reading of Lagarde: “Now there are conspirators. And the best conspiracy is at the very beginning.”[1848] The ideas of George and Kantorowicz were reflected in Lagarde who wrote:
The Germany we love and desire to see has
never existed, and perhaps never will. The ideal is something that is and is
not at the same time… People thrive only on the mysterious warmth of a
never-seen star… Germany would be founded if we took a negative stance against
the current vices of an obviously un-German-influenced time, if we formed an
open alliance to defend against and combat these vices, which should be as
little without outward signs and symbols as without the strictest discipline…[1849]
The term Geheimes Deutschland was used for the first time in 1910 by Wolfskehl in an article for the first Jahrbuch für die geistige Bewegung, a magazine published between 1910 and 1912 by Friedrich Wolters and Friedrich Gundolf, both members of the George-Kreis. As with Neuen Reiches (“New Reich”), another central concept of the George-Kreis that he coined, Wolfskehl saw Secret Germany as both an aspiration and a reality. Wolfskehl, in an essay written in 1910 and representing Stefan George’s views, first used the expression Secret Germany to describe the contributors to the Blätter fur die Kunst and its “exclusive invited readership.”[1850] In 1909, together with Wolfgang Kapp’s brother-in-law, Friedrich von der Leyen (1873 – 1966), Wolfskehl also included influential medieval authors such as Wolfram von Eschenbach in the prehistory of Secret Germany.[1851] Identified with poets revered by George and his followers, for Wolfskehl the Secret Germany was both timeless and eschatological.[1852] Wolfkehl expressed both fear and hope:
…that a movement from the depths—if such a thing is still possible in Europe—could issue only from Germany, from the secret Germany, for which every one of our words is spoken, from which every one of our verses draws life and rhythm, and in whose unceasing service lies felicity, torment and the sanctification of our lives.[1853]
However,
Wolfskehl and many other members of the George-Kreis also perceived
Secret Germany within a broader European dimension. Homer, Plato, Pindar and
Alexander the Great, then selected Roman emperors, as well as medieval emperors
from the Carolingian, Ottonian and Hohenstaufen dynasties, but also Dante, for
example, were counted among its spiritual “ancestors.” By means of the Secret
Germany, Wolfskehl also spoke of the need to revive a number of old European
virtues, “discipline and virtue, the epitome of Roman virtus, Hellenic kalokagathia
and arete.”[1854]
In his poem Lebenslied. An die Deutschen (“Song
of life. To the Germans”), Wolfskehl also addressed the Jewish significance
for the development of German poetic and political culture, referring to his
own ancestry, as he was descended from Jewish Kalonymus family. One of his
ancestors, for example, the knight Rav Kalonymus, had given his own horse to
the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II at the Battle of Stilo in 982 AD, after the
emperor had lost his own, thus saving the emperor’s life and the succession of
imperial rule and the empire.[1855] The term Secret Germany was subsequently used
many times in George-Kreis, who were convinced
that the Secret Germany had been awakened by the Master’s new poetry. George himself adopted it in the
1920s as shown in the title for one of his poems, published in 1928 in his last
volume of poetry, Das neue Reich.
The 1868 United States presidential election was the first of the Reconstruction Era, after Andrew Johnson had succeeded to the presidency in 1865 following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. After the Civil War, General Order No. 11 became a challenge in Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign as the Republican candidate. The Democrats raised the order as an issue, with the prominent Democrat and rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise urging fellow Jews to vote against Grant because of his alleged anti-Semitism. Grant sought to distance himself from the order, asserting it had been drafted by a subordinate. And, in a response to B’nai B’rith leader Adolph Moses (1840 – 1902), Grant wrote, “I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit.”[1856] Moses had taken part in the Italy’s struggle for independence as a member of Garibaldi’s army, and then studied with Abraham Geiger before emigrating to the United States, where he served as rabbi in Mobile, Alabama and Louisville, Kentucky. Moses was also a member of the Free Sons of Israel, a fraternal organization that was established in 1849 to aid Jewish “Forty-Eighters.”[1857]
The General Order did not cause much long-term damage to Grant’s relationship with the American Jewish community, and he won the election, taking the majority of the Jewish vote. In 1869, after reports surfaced that Tsar Alexander II penalized 2,000 Jewish families for smuggling by expelling them to the interior of the country, Grant publicly supported the B’nai B’rith petition against him. Grant appointed more than fifty Jew to federal office, including consuls, district attorneys, and deputy postmasters, making up the most Jews appointed to public office and higher posts than any other president before him.[1858] Grant appointed Rabbi Wise’s fellow B’nai B’rith member, and Lincoln assassination conspirator, Simon Wolf, whose efforts during the 1868 campaign helped Grant win the Jewish vote, to be Washington DC’s recorder of deeds. Wolf also served as Grant’s main advisor on Jewish affairs, making him the most important Jewish presidential adviser in American history. Wolf also often intervened with Grant on behalf of Jews seeking positions in his administration. Among Grant’s appointees was Wolf’s friend Edward S. Salomon (1836 – 1913), a German Jew who immigrated to the United States and served as a lieutenant colonel in Union in the American Civil War, and who was appointed governor of the Washington territory in 1870, becoming the first professing Jew to serve as governor of a US state or territory.
Between the
end of the Civil War and the turn of the nineteenth century, almost all Jews
who received presidential appointments were nominated for diplomatic posts.[1859] When his friend Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, who was the American head of the B’nai
B’rith and an ally of the Alliance
Israëlite Universelle, was
appointed United States Consul at Bucharest in 1870, Wolf, along with
the “robber baron” Seligmans was among the leading advocates for the
appointment, with the aim of devising plans to improve the condition of the
Jews of Romania.[1860]
The Seligman brothers were all born in Bavaria, moved to San Francisco in 1851.
After eight years, Jesse and William returned to New York and opened a store which
received government contracts to supply soldier’s uniforms for the Union Army
in the Civil War. In 1964, Joseph Seligman (1819 – 1880), and his brother James
founded J. & W. Seligman & Co., a prominent U.S. investment bank. Grant
also offered the treasury secretary position to Joseph Seligman, where he would
have become the first Jewish cabinet member, but he declined, under pressure
from his brothers who wanted him to focus on the banking business.[1861]
In 1870, Joseph Seligman founded the Continental Bank of New York with Jacob Schiff (1847 – 1920). German-born Schiff belonged to a Frankist family. Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz’s mother was also a member of the Schiff family. His most famous ancestors included the eighteenth-century dayyan David Tevele Schiff (d. 1791), who became rabbi of the Great Synagogue in London.[1862] David was a close friend of the crypto-Sabbatean Rabbi Samuel Falk, revered as the “Unknown Superior” of Freemasonry.[1863] For many years, the early Schiffs shared ownership of a two-family house with the Rothschilds. In 1877, President Rutherford Hayes asked Seligman, August Belmont, and a number of other New York bankers to come to Washington, D.C., to plan a refinancing of the war debt.
The key influence in Peixotto’s appointment as consul in Romania was Chaim Tzvi Schneerson (1834 – 1882), the great-grandson of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidism, who had been accused of being a Sabbatean.[1864] In 1840, Schneerson immigrated with his parents and his brothers to Palestine and settled in Hebron, which was the center of Chabad Hasidism in Israel at the time.[1865] As the age of eighteen, he began going on missions as a doctor to Jewish communities such as Syria, Egypt, Iran, Romania, England, and France. On behalf of the Hebron and Jerusalem communities, he also went to Persia, India, China and Australia. In India, he mainly visited Mumbai and Calcutta. Schneerson also saw his trips as opportunities to spread ideas of Zionism to the isolated Jewish communities.
Schneerson’s international talks gained prominent coverage in Jewish newspapers around the world, including Jewish newspapers Hamagid, the Jewish Chronicle, and as in Der Israelit. With the establishment of the Der Israelit, Meir Lehmann (1831 – 1890), a leading German Orthodox rabbi, attained a high position as one of the leaders of the movement for the maintenance of Orthodox Judaism in Germany. From the 1860s, Hamagid, based in East Prussia, “fervently” supported resettlement of the Land of Israel making the paper an early nucleus of the Zionist movement.[1866] The London-based Jewish Chronicle came under the leadership of Sir Francis Goldsmid (1808 – 1878), of the wealthy banking family.[1867] A century earlier, members of the Goldsmid family were Masons who funded the career of Rabbi Falk.[1868] Schneerson published articles in Hebrew presses in Israel and abroad, one of was quoted in Moshe Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem. In most of his talks, Schneerson stressed the idea that the Jews would soon be given control of Eretz Israel, proposed plans for the return of the Jews in large numbers and for the building of viable Jewish agricultural communities there.
Schneerson departed to return to Israel in 1863, and learned of Derisht Zion, a book by Forty-Eighter Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795 – 1874), in which he found ideas similar to his own. In 1848, Kalischer, who was born in Poland and educated in Berlin, Breslau and Prague, went to London, and the United States in 1849. In 1850, he was called to the Tifereth Israel congregation in Cleveland, Ohio, where he advanced the interest of Reform Judaism. Owing to Kalischer’s activism, the Alliance Israélite Universelle founded the Mikveh Israel agricultural school in Palestine in 1870. Through having exerted a strong influence on such prominent men as Heinrich Grätz and Moses Hess, he is considered to have been one of the most important of those who prepared the way for the foundation of modern Zionism.
According to Kalischer, the time was ripe for the carrying the Zionist ideals, as the sympathy of men like Crémieux, Montefiore, Edmond James de Rothschild (1845 – 1934), and Albert Cohn (1814 – 1877)—a French philanthropist with a lifelong connection with the Rothschild family—rendered the Jews politically influential. Cohn was a member of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, and did much to further its progress. Working with Moses Montefiore, Sir Anthony de Rothschild, Dr. Ludwig Philippson and others, Cohn obtained a recognition of the rights of Jews in Turkey. Cohn visited Palestine several times, and with the financial assistance of the Rothschilds, established a hospital erected, and schools.[1869]
Albert Cohn had been introduced to Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774 – 1856), considered one of the most accomplished orientalists of his time, who employed him as one of his secretaries. According to Hammer-Purgstall, in his “Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum” in volume 6 of Fundgruben des Orients, there was found among the antiquities of the Imperial Museum of Vienna some idols named Heads of Baphomet, which the Templars were said to have venerated. It had been seized during a Templar retreat, at a time when they were pursued by the law. The term “Baphomet,” the idol of the Templars, according to his interpretation, signifies the baptism of Metis, or of fire, and is, therefore, connected with the impurities of the Gnostic Ophites.
In 1869, Schneerson travelled to the United States to raise funds and publicize his views on the coming of the messiah.[1870] Upon his arrival, an invitation was sent to him by the following Rabbis which resulted in a lecture at the New-York Historical Society on February 17, 1869.[1871] Among those who signed the invitation were Samuel Adler (1809 – 1891) of Temple Emanu-El, Rabbi Dr. David Einhorn of Adath Yeshurun, and Rabbi Yehuda Lyons (1814 – 1877) of Shearith Israel, co-founder of Mount Sinai Hospital. During the American Civil War, Joseph Seligman was president of Temple Emanu-El in New York City, a flagship congregation in the Reform branch of Judaism in the United States. In 1857, after the death of Founding Rabbi Merzbacher, another German Jew, Samuel Adler, became his successor. Adler was succeeded in 1873 by a Prussian-born American rabbi Gustav Gottheil (1827 – 1903), the father of “reluctant father of American Zionism,” Columbia professor Richard Gottheil (1862 – 1936).
The list
included Rabbi Samuel Myer Isaacs (1804 – 1878), who was editor of The
Jewish Messenger and a founder of the Board of Delegates of American
Israelites, whose president was Moses Montefiore. Isaacs’s sons were lawyer and
judge Myer S. Isaacs (1841 – 1904), who was also a
member of the Central Committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and Rabbi Abram S. Isaacs (1851 – 1920),
who also became editor The Jewish Messenger. The
president of the board was Isaac’s friend Adolph L. Sanger (1842 – 1894), a
leader of the B’nai B’rith, and superintendent of the Temple Emanu-El religious
school. Also included
were Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887) was an American Congregationalist
clergyman, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, and brother of
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 – 1896), best known for her novel Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (1852). The novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African
Americans and slavery in the U.S., such that, when Lincoln met with Stowe, he
was supposed to have said to her, “So this is the little lady who started this
great war.”[1872]
Schneerson then travelled to Washington where he lectured
twice in the presence of large audiences that included the Ottoman ambassador, members
of the President’s family, and several of the Ministry and of Congress. He then
managed to obtain an interview with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish (1808 – 1893),
and finally President Ulysses S. Grant. The New York Times described,
how, dressed in “Oriental costume,” consisting of a “rich robe of silk, a white
damask surplice, a fez, and a splendid Persian shawl fastened about his waist,”
he walked toward the president who rose courteously to greet him.[1873]
The purpose of the exchange was to recommend to President Grant that he replace
the then consul in Jerusalem, as the community is best served by having Jews
serve the role of ambassadors around the world. As reported in The National
Intelligencer, Schneerson explained to Grant that,
given the oppression that Jews suffered in the Holy Land:
The only shelter the Israelites occasionally find is in the courts of the different European consulates, where one of their coreligionists is employed either as interpreter or deputy consul, who convey their grievances to the proper channel. This free Republic alone, whose banner covers the oppressed, whose foundation is based on equality, toleration, and liberty of conscience, has no Israelites employed near the consul at Jerusalem. I do pray, therefore, your Excellency, to turn your attention to the deplorable condition of my brethren in the Orient, that the principles of this Government may be truly embodied in its representatives abroad.[1874]
After
meeting with President Grant, Schneerson embarked upon a tour across America to
California. In Cincinnati, he told audiences that he felt he could discern the
finger of God pointing to a day “not far distant, he hoped, when the great
deliverance would take place and the land [of Israel] be restored to the Jewish
people.”[1875] He
also received an invitation from Brigham Young, leader of the Mormon movement,
signed “In the cause of Israel,” to speak to the “Tabernacle on subjects of
such deep and abiding interest to us all as the past history and present condition
of God’s covenant people Israel.”[1876]
Schneersohn eventually returned to Jerusalem, but not before obtaining American
citizenship before his departure from the United States.[1877]
In light of
his success in having the American consul in Jerusalem replaced, on January 19,
1870, Schneerson wrote a long letter to Grant, thanking him again for the
favor, but this time to ask him that a Jew be also appointed consul in Romania.
As noted by Lloyd P. Gartner,
writing in the American Jewish Historical Review:
Why Grant and Fish willingly met the oddly clad foreigner is unclear, even though the global responsibilities of American Presidents were not very taxing. Curiosity or cordiality aside, the new President, only three months in office, desired to please Jewish opinion which had shown during the Presidential campaign of 1868 that it remembered his anti-Jewish General Order No. 11 of Civil War days.[1878]
As Peixotto’ position was unpaid, his financial needs were covered by a group of wealthy American Jews, along with the B’nai B’rith, the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, and prominent French and English Jews led by Sir Francis Goldsmid. Representatives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Anglo-Jewish Association, Israelitische Allianz demanded that the Romanian government cease the persecution and grant emancipation to “the Romanian Israelites.”[1879] Peixotto’s reports to the United States resulted in the American government sending letters to its ministers at the various European courts inviting cooperation in ending Jewish persecution in Romania. Peixotto’s reports also inspired an important meeting at the Mansion House in London which produced a message of sympathy for the Jewish cause delivered by Lord Shaftesbury.
An article in the New York Times in 1877 reported that a dispatch sent by the Department of State from the United States Minister to Turkey, providing details concerning the condition of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, noted that of the total of 500,000, 250,000 lived in Romania, 80,000 in Asiatic Turkey, 75,000 in European Turkey, and another 2,000 or so in the Balkans. The minister however noted that norms of Ottoman justice provided better treatment for the Jews than in many parts of Europe, as they were recognized as an independent community, with the privileges of their own religious rule. The article notes that the only instance of mistreatment was perpetrated against Schneersohn by his own Jewish community. The article reports that “On Nov. 28, 1874, the Rabbi was set upon by his co-religionists, certain Jews at Tiberias, robbed of a considerable amount, and most shamefully maltreated by being imprisoned, stoned, stripped naked and ridden in that condition through the streets of Tiberias, barely escaping with his life.” The United States Consul in Beirut went to Tiberias to have the perpetrators arrested, but some claimed British protection and escaped, while friends of the others overpowered the authorities and rescued them. The affair ended with the United States Minister in Constantinople requesting American consular officers throughout the Empire to monitor the conditions of Jews and to report any instances of persecution of Jews to the legation in Constantinople.[1880]
In the 1860s and 1870s, the citizenship of Jews in Romania had become a European diplomatic concern, and part of the larger question concerning the status of religious groups in the new Balkan states emerging from the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The cause of the Romanian Jews was at the forefront of the Alliance’s efforts, becoming a test case for the larger issue of the emancipation of Eastern European Jews in general. To this end, influential Jewish organizations in Europe, led by the Alliance, established an informal network to generate international sympathy for the cause of Romania’s Jews. It included Crémieux and Armand Lévy (1827 – 1891) another prominent leaders of the Alliance. Born in a Roman Catholic family, but with a Jewish grand-father, Lévy was passionate about the Jewish cause. He was also an anti-clericalist Freemason and supported the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune. He fought alongside friends, such the crypto-Fankist Adam Mickiewicz, Mazzini’s collaborator Count Cavour, and Ion Brătianu (1864 – 1927), for the independence of Poland and Romania, and for the unification of Italy.[1881] In Germany were Rothschild agent Baron Gerson von Bleichröder, and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In Great Britain, Moses Montefiore, President of the Board of Deputies of the British Jews. And, in Vienna, Moritz von Goldschmidt (1803 – 1888), Prussian consul and authorized representative of the Rothschild banking house.
This influential coalition also extended to Peixotto in Bucharest. [1882] In Romania, Peixotto developed a friendship with between Carol I of Romania (1839 – 1914), and Peixotto initiated a conference of world Jewish organizations that convened in Brussels in 1872. Under the influence of Romanian maskilim, emigration was considered to be unpatriotic was rejected in favor of pressuring the Romanian government grant emancipation to all Jews. The conditions of the Jews in Romania were discussed at the international conferences in Brussels in 1872, in Paris in 1876 and at the Congress of Berlin, in 1878, when the Jewish question finally became a real “European question.”[1883]
Congress of Berlin in 1878, a diplomatic conference to reorganize the states in the Balkan Peninsula after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, which had been won by Russia against the Ottoman Empire. Among Peixotto’s agents who played an influential role at the Congress was Adolphe Stern (1848 – 1931), who was Peixotto’s secretary. Stern published translations of nineteenth-century Romanian writers, and his work in translations of Schiller, Goethe, Heine, D’Annunzio, and Shakespeare into Romanian played a key role in solidifying his reputation and winning him Romanian citizenship in 1880. He also founded the Society of Zion with Peixotto, which became a Romanian arm of the B’nai B’rith. Another was Joseph B. Brociner (1846 – 1918), who was as President of the Union of Hebrew Congregations of Romania. He joined the Galați Lodge of the Grand Orient of France in 1868, and attained the thirty-third degree. In 1873, Brociner was chosen president of the local committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. In 1884, Brociner would become vice-president of the Galati committee for establishing Jewish settlements in Palestine, which were afterward taken under the protection of Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris.
The Jewish community of Berlin petitioned the chairman of the congress and head of the German delegation, Otto von Bismarck, to raise the question of equal rights for Romanian Jews. As a result, the German representatives were instructed to place conditions in the peace treaty demanding equal civil rights for the members of all religions in the Balkan countries.[1884] To deal with the Jewish questions, a special council was established in Berlin consisting of Stern and Brociner, as well as the representatives of the Committee for Jewish Affairs in Berlin, which included Bleichröder, Jacob Bernays (1792 – 1849), the son of Isaac Bernays of the “neo-Orthodox” Hakham of Hamburg, Berthold Auerbach of the Frankfurt Judenloge, and Moritz Lazarus (1824 – 1903), the president of the Berlin branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Other representatives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle also included Emanuel Veneziani (1825 – 1889), a director of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, and Charles Netter (1826 – 1882), who was among the founders of the first Masonic lodge in Jerusalem in 1873.[1885]
Adolphe Crémieux and Baron de Hirsch contributed funds in support of the establishment by the Alliance Israélite Universelle of a free school by Netter in Jerusalem in 1868, followed by Mikveh Israel near Jaffa in 1870, after he was granted a tract of land from the Ottoman Emperor.[1886] Netter, the first headmaster, introduced new methods of agricultural training, with Baron Edmond James de Rothschild contributing to the upkeep of the school. Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer was offered the rabbinate, but he was too old to accept it.
In order to submit the requests of the Jews to the representatives of the different governments, Baron Maurice de Hirsch and Moses Montefiore began negotiations with the representatives of England and France, and Bleichröder attended to Bismarck and the Russian representative, Count Shuvalov (1827 – 1889). Romania acquired the status of a sovereign kingdom only upon the express condition that the civil and political rights of the Jews should be recognized.[1887] As Lord Salisbury (1830 – 1903), who was then serving as Foreign Secretary, remarked on July 24, 1879, that the powers in Berlin “adopted somewhat unusual, if not unprecedented course of making their recognition of a great political change dependent upon certain modifications of the internal laws of the country”[1888]
A
memorandum in the protocol of documents submitted to the congress on the question
of a future of Jewish homeland in Palestine but was not discussed on the floor.
In June 1878, a group of Jewish leaders submitted a memorandum to the congress,
addressed to Bismarck and Disraeli, requesting that the Jews in Palestine
should be granted their independence, just as that of the people in Balkan had
been, and permitted to establish a constitutional Jewish monarchy. Before the
congress assembled, there were discussions in the British press about a
political resurgence of the Jews in Palestine. After the congress was
concluded, Serbia and Bulgaria complied with the clauses of the peace treaty
obliging them to grant equal rights to their minorities, and even incorporated
these clauses in their constitutions. Romania refused to meet her obligation,
and the struggle to implement paragraph 44 of the peace treaty extended over many
years.[1889]
Upon his return to the United States in 1876, Peixotto was received with honor and invited to deliver many addresses in various parts of the country. He aided in forming the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), founded in 1873 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, and which has since been renamed Union for Reform Judaism, and which merged with the Board of Delegates of American Israelites in 1878, at the urging of Simon Wolf.[1890] Peixotto used his influence to help President Hayes win the election in 1876, and was appointed United States consul at Lyons, France. In 1885, he returned to the United States and returned the practice of law in New York city. The following year, he founded The Menorah, the monthly journal of the B’nai B’rith. He served as one of the trustees of the Hebrew Technical Institute, and of Temple Israel, a Reform congregation in Manhattan in New York, and was one of the founders of the Ohio Society.[1891]
The Ohio Society of New York was founded by Civil War General Thomas Ewing Jr. (1829 – 1896). Though a staunch friend and ally of Abraham Lincoln, when Edwin Stanton engaged in a post-assassination flap with Ewing’s brother-in-law William T. Sherman (1820 – 1891) over final surrender terms to the Southern armies, Ewing agreed to represent two employees of the Ford Theatre where Lincoln was assassinated, in the Lincoln conspiracy trials.
When Peixotto died in 1890, at the funeral, which the New York Times at the time described as “impressive services,” the leading lights of the B’nai B’rith and the Reform movement in the United States were in attendance, many of whom would go on to lead the Zionist movement.[1892] A large number of associations were represented, including the Hebrew Technical Institute, the Harlem Republican Club, Menorah Publishing, the Hebrew Free School, the Independent Order of the Sons of Benjamin, the Lawyer’s Club, the Downtown Business Men’s Republican Club, the Harlem Club, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.
The funeral took place in Temple Israel of Harlem, a Reform congregation in Manhattan. Henry Pereira Mendes of Shearith Israel, founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), conducted the service. Tribute was paid to him by Adolph L. Sanger and Maurice H. Harris (1859 – 1930), of Temple Israel of Harlem, who had been ordained a rabbi by Gustav Gottheil in 1884. In addition to Sanger and Myer S. Isaacs, the pallbearers included Julius Bien (1826 – 1909), president of B’nai B’rith. In Frankfurt, Bien had been a student of Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800 – 1882), a member of the Judenloge, known for his portraits of famous Jewish personalities like the Mendelssohns and the Rothschilds.[1893] He fought in the 1848 Revolution, before fleeing to New York. He produced a lithographed edition of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America. The funeral was attended by Philip Cowen (1853 – 1943), founder of the American Hebrew who was involved in B’nai B’rith. Another was Adolphus Simeon Solomons (1826 – 1910), was also an honorary trustee and general agent of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, central committee member and American treasurer of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, acting president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Multiple relatives attended including Cyrus Leopold Sulzberger (1858 – 1932), who was married to Peixotto’s niece, Rachel Peixotto Hays, and was an early trustee of Temple Israel. Cyrus’s great-grandfather, Benjamin Seixas, brother of the famous rabbi and American Revolutionary Gershom Mendes Seixas of Congregation Shearith Israel, was one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. Cyrus’ brother Solomon E. Sulzberger (1840 – 1917) was president of the B’nai B’rith and president of Temple Israel. Cyrus would later attend the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. Cyrus’s son was New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1891 – 1968).
Sulzberger’s wife, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, was the daughter of Adolph Simon Ochs (1858 – 1935) and Effie Wise, the daughter of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. Adolph’s parents were Julius Ochs and Bertha Levy, who Rabbi Bertram W. Korn in Eventful Years and Experiences, has identified among the forty Jewish political refugees of the Revolutions of 1848.[1894] In 1855, Bertha married a fellow German Jewish immigrant, Julius Ochs. During the Civil War, Julius was an officer in the Union Army stationed in Cincinnati, engaged primarily in guarding the Ohio River. Bertha, however, was sympathetic to the Confederacy. In The Trust, a 1999 authorized biography of the Ochs-Sulzberger families, authors Susan Tifft and Alex Jones write that Bertha “embraced a contemptuous antebellum view of blacks, and for the rest of her life was dogmatically conservative, even reactionary.”[1895] Shortly after purchasing The New York Times newspaper in 1896, Ochs coined the paper’s slogan, “All The News That’s Fit To Print.” But when Ochs came to New York, he brought his Southern sympathies with him, and ten years after he took over the newspaper, it ran a celebratory profile of Jefferson Davis. Under Ochs’ guidance, aided by Carr Van Anda (1864 – 1945), The New York Times achieved international scope, circulation, and reputation. Through Iphigene and her husband Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who became publisher after Adolph died, Ochs’ descendants continue to publish The New York Times through the present day.
Salo Wittmayer Baron, considered the “the greatest Jewish historian of the twentieth century,” criticized the tendency of the Jewish community to view their history through the lens of persecution, suffering, and anti-Semitism, what he referred to as “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” Baron repeatedly urged his readers and students to focus instead on the achievements of Jewish society and culture. Baron conceded that, “modern anti-Semitic movements” employed “racial anti-Semitism” to validate “the permanence and immutability of the Jewish group by virtue of blood and descent regardless of individual religious beliefs and observances.” At the same time however, Baron expressed concern about those Jewish groups, including representatives of both Reform Judaism and Zionism, who embraced an “exaggerated historical picture” characterized by “extreme wretchedness.” With regards to Zionism in particular, these efforts were part of larger scheme, “to reject the Diaspora in toto, on the grounds that a ‘normal life’ could not be led by Jewry elsewhere than on its own soil.”[1896]
An important impetus to the Zionist movement was the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. It was a notorious anti-Semitic incident in France in which Alfred Dreyfus (1859 – 1935), a Jewish French army captain, was falsely convicted in 1894 of spying for Germany. Known as the Dreyfus affair, it became one of the most controversial and polarizing political dramas in modern French history and throughout Europe. It ultimately ended with Dreyfus’ complete exoneration. Herzl claimed that the Dreyfus case turned him into a Zionist and that he was particularly affected by chants from the crowds of “Death to the Jews!”
As the Paris correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, Herzl followed the Dreyfus affair. However, some modern historians now consider that, due to few mentions of the Dreyfus affair in Herzl’s earlier accounts, and an apparently contrary reference he made in them to shouts of “Death to the traitor!” that he may have exaggerated its influence on him in order to create further support for his cause.[1897] Kornberg claims that the influence Dreyfus was a myth that Herzl did not feel it necessary to refute and that he also believed that Dreyfus was guilty.[1898]
In light of the pogroms in Russia and the Dreyfus Affair in France, Herzl, a thoroughly assimilated, German nationalist Jew, with almost no knowledge of Hebrew, or the Jewish religion, argued that assimilation had failed, and his answer to the Jewish Question was that the best way to avoid anti-Semitism in Europe was to create an independent Jewish state. Beginning in late 1895, Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (“The State of the Jews”), published 1896 to immediate acclaim and controversy, which argued that the Jewish people should leave Europe for Palestine, as their only opportunity to avoid anti-Semitism, express their culture freely and practice their religion without hindrance.
Herzl’s ambitions were reflected in a similar conclusion drawn by Moses Hess, who had taught communism to Karl Marx, and who is considered one of the first important leaders of the Zionist cause, in Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism (1862), which called for the establishment of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine. Hess asserted that for Jews, as well as non-Jews, race and racial segregation should be fundamental in all political considerations, and on this basis called for a separate national home for the Jewish people in Palestine:
The present international situation should encourage the immediate founding of Jewish colonies on the Suez Canal and on the banks of the Jordan. Stress will be laid on the heretofore neglected proposition that behind the problem of nationalism and freedom, there remains the profound question of race. This question, which is as old as history, must first be solved before a definite solution to the political and social problems can be worked out. Social institutions, like spiritual outlooks, are racial creations. All past history was concerned with the struggle of races and classes. Race struggle is primary; class struggle is secondary. When racial antagonism ceases, class struggle also ceases. Equality of all social classes follows on the heels of equality of all races and finally remains merely a question of sociology.[1899]
It was in 1882, the second year of the Russian pogroms, that Herzl was inspired to see settlement of Palestine as the only durable answer to the Jewish Question, from his reading of the book by the same name, by Eugen Dühring (1833 – 1921), published the previous year. In 1878, Dühring, attacked “the Jew Marx,” over his “racial conflict in the International,” which he attributed to “Bakunin’s revulsion against the Jewish blood of Marx.” Marx, who was then busy writing Das Kapital, left it to Engels to write Anti-Dühring. In 1879, Dühring was given a leadership role in the publication of Wagner’s Bayreuther Blätter.[1900] The Bayreuther Blätter edited by Hans von Wolzogen until his death in 1938. Wolzogen’s mother was a daughter of the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who collaborated in architectural projects with Jewish Prussian architect Salomo Sachs, who was a neighbor of Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who married Lea Salomon, a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[1901]
A professor of philosophy and economics at the Berlin University, Dühring was dismissed from his post due to his aggressive character, and blamed the Jews for the outcome. By way of revenge, he wrote The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral, and Cultural Question (1881), which claimed that it was a mistake to dismiss the errors of the Jews to their religion, and that the problems of the Jews were race-based.[1902] Blaming the deviousness of assimilated Zionists, or those who are willing to don the guise of another religion to advance their objectives, as a fault to be found among all Jews, Dühring concludes:
A Jewish question will exist even if all
Jews turn their back on their religion and were converted to one of the ruling
churches among us, or if all religion were already destroyed… It has always been precisely the baptized Jews who
have penetrated without hindrance most widely into all the channels of society
and of the life of the
community. They have, as it were, provided themselves with a passport and
pushed their tribe forward to where the religious Jews could not follow them.[1903]
Dühring, who was “deeply” inspired by Schopenhauer, influenced later anti-Semites and such as Theodor Fritsch, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Georg von Schönerer.[1904] Dühring described the “Jewish question” similarly to Wilhelm Marr, as an expression of an inevitable racial antagonism, and he believed that only “terror and brute force” were adequate means to deal with these “foreign parasites,” and ultimately, that “the murder of races” was “the higher law of history.”[1905] In the chapter entitled “Toward a solution,” three times Dühring used the term Judenstaat (“Jewish State”), defining it as “a Palestine newly populated with Jews,” though he rejected the idea as preposterous.[1906]
Herzl, explained Jacques Kornberg, knowingly entered the Burschenschaft Albia with the intent of shedding his Jewishness and embracing German nationality.[1907] Many of Albia’s members looked forward to the full assimilation of Jews into the German nation. Both Karl Becke and Dietrick Herzog spoke positively about the Jewish brethren who “felt German” and were genuinely devoted to Albia.[1908] At the time, Herzl believed that Jews were plagued by vices and corruption and that Judaism was backwards, the result of centuries of persecution and forced isolation in Christian lands. The solution was the full assimilation of the Jews into European societies. Much of what he wrote in his reviews of anti-Semitic authors like Dühring’s The Jewish Question and Wilhelm Jensen’s The Jews of Cologne, reflected ideas that would have been prevalent in Albia, that Jewish morality was corrupted by commercial greed, that the Jews were an oriental people alien to Europe, that Judaism was narrow-minded and superstitious and that Jewish physical features were deformed. According to Kornberg, “Equally, his solution was the disappearance of Jewry, or in his formula, cross-breeding on the basis of a common state-religion.”[1909]
In 1881–1882, a year after the Antisemitenpetition began to be circulated across Germany, anti-Semitic pogroms broke out in the Pale Settlement of Russia, which were pointed to by the Zionists as yet another example of the persecution that was a persistent aspect of the Jews’ long and painful history, and which could only be resolved through the creation of their own state in the Promised Land. Pogroms were carried out in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881 and 1905. Many Odessan Jews fled abroad after 1882, particularly to the Ottoman region that became Palestine, and the city became an important base of support for Zionism.
Odessa, in what is now Ukraine, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea, for a time was the third largest Jewish city in the world. Odessa became home to an extremely diverse population of Albanians, Armenians, Azeris, Bulgarians, Crimean Tatars, Frenchmen, Germans (including Mennonites), Greeks, Italians, Jews, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Turks, Ukrainians. Its cosmopolitan nature was documented by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who lived in internal exile in Odessa between 1823 and 1824. H.P. Blavatsky also spent many years of her childhood in Odessa, where her maternal grandfather Andrei Fadeyev, a civil administrator for the imperial authorities, had been posted. In 1905, Odessa was the site of a workers uprising supported by the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin and the Menshevik’s Iskra, portrayed in Sergei Eisenstein’s famous movie The Battleship Potemkin.
Odessa traditionally had an ancient culture of banditry, dating back to its large and impoverished Jewish population. The Jewish community of Odessa was made up of Jews from all over Russia and also from other countries. Forbidden to reside in Saint Petersburg, Moscow or Kiev, Jews poured into the southern Russian cities of Odessa, eventually constituting a third of their population before the Second World War.[1910] Old Odessa, explains Jarrod Tanny in City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the myth of old Odessa, was also a “Judeo-kleptocracy,” a city overrun and governed by Jewish gangsters, smugglers, thieves, pimps and swindlers. According to Tanny, “Old Odessa is Russia’s Great Southern Babylon, and successive generations of mythmakers have commemorated it in literature, film, humor, and song.”[1911] Isaac Babel wrote Odessa Tales (1931), featuring tales of the Jewish gangsters of Odessa, for which he has been hailed as the greatest Russian Jewish writer that ever lived. Their legendary exploits created the myth of the Jewish gangster of Odessa, in stark contrast to the stereotype dominant elsewhere of the meek scholarly ghetto Jew, constantly the victim of pogroms.[1912]
As one historian put it, “the Jewish community of Odessa continued to stand in the vanguard of nearly every modernist Jewish movement developed in the Russian empire.”[1913] The influence in Odessa of the Maskilim, exponents of the Haskalah, was considerable and also reached other parts of Russia. While the Haskalah achieved successes in Germany and Austria, the movement was largely rejected inside Russia, where members were often ostracized and persecuted.[1914] Nevertheless, their numbers increased, and soon there were attempts to found schools to offer secular education to Jewish children. Hirsch (Hyman) Baer Hurwitz opened such a school in Uman in the Ukraine, in 1822, “after the system of Mendelssohn.”[1915] Similar schools were established in Odessa and Kishinef, and later in Riga and Wilna. The Haskalah in Odessa began with a group of settlers who migrated to the city from Brody, a town in Austrian-controlled Galicia, who started arriving in the 1820s. In 1840 they opened up the Brodskii Synagogue, the first “modern” synagogue in Russia whose service was patterned on the reforms then taking place in Germany.[1916] The Friends of Enlightenment was founded in 1879 by Rabbi Abraham Danon from Edirne, who later became director of the seminary founded by the Alliance Israélite Universelle at Constantinople.[1917] The Rothschild family archives show that during the 1870s the family contributed nearly 500,000 francs per year on behalf of Eastern Jewry to the Alliance Israélite Universelle.[1918]
Pogroms began to occur after Imperial Russia acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire from 1772 to 1815, which were named “the Pale of Settlement.” Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of European Russia, including Finland, unless they converted from Judaism or obtained a university diploma or first guild merchant status. Migration was not restricted to the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East or Central Asia. The “Pale of Settlement,” a name that first arose under Nicholas I, came into being under the rule of Catherine the Great in 1791, initially as a measure to speed colonization of territory on the Black Sea recently acquired from the Ottoman Empire.
The event which triggered the pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 13, 1881, for which some blamed “agents of foreign influence,” implying that Jews committed it.[1919] One of the conspirators, Hesya Mirovna (1855 – 1882), was Jewish, and a member of a Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a revolutionary socialist political organization inspired by the “Propaganda of the Deed” articulated by Bakunin. In “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis” (1870), Bakunin stated that “we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.”[1920] Narodnaya Volya emerged in 1879 from the split of an earlier revolutionary organization called Zemlya i Volya (“Land and Liberty”), associated in particular with the names of M.A. Natanson (1850 – 1919), a Lithuanian Jew, who also was one of the founders of the Circle of Tchaikovsky, and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
Russian officials, such as P.A. Cherevin—the commander of the Imperial Guard, a trusted friend of Tsar Alexander III (1845 – 1894)—and Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev urged governors-general of provinces to seek out the supposed kahal, the semi-autonomous Jewish government. Jacob Brafman, a Russian Jew from Minsk, had a falling out with agents of the local Kahal, and consequently turned against Judaism. He converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and authored polemics against the Talmud and the Kahal. Brafman claimed in his books The Local and Universal Jewish Brotherhoods (1868) and The Book of the Kahal (1869), that the Kahal continued to exist in secret and that it was an international conspiratorial network, under the central control of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, then under the leadership of Adolphe Crémieux in Paris.[1921]
Although an 1821 attack occured in Odessa, most historians cite 1881 incidents beginning in Elizavetgrad, in present-day Ukraine, as the beginning of the Russian pogroms. The Elizavetgrad violence spread rapidly throughout seven provinces in southern Russia and Ukraine, where peasant attacked and looted Jewish stores and homes, destroyed property. Pogroms also occurred in Kiev and Odessa among a hundred other locations. The first Jewish self-defense organizations, initiated by students at Novorossiysk University in Odessa, began to form at this time. At least 40 Jews were killed during pogroms between April and December 1881.[1922]
The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.[1923] The Times in London was an early sponsor of the theory that as early as 1881 the Russian government knowingly used the Jews as a scape-goat for the expanding the revolutionary movement.[1924] The Times editor was Thomas Chenery (1826 – 1884), a Hebrew scholar and Orientalist. Chenery had succeeded John Thadeus Delane (1817 – 1879), who was an admirer of Lord Palmerston.[1925] Delane was an intimate friend of the family of Sir Anthony de Rothschild, 1st Baronet (1810 – 1876), the son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild and brother of Lionel de Rothschild.[1926] Anthony’s wife was Louise Montefiore. Their daughter, Constance married Cyril Flower, 1st Baron Battersea (1843 – 1907), who later became was involved in a homosexual scandal, but was granted immunity from prosecution by the Government of Arthur Balfour.[1927] From 1850 to 1854, Jewish journalist Samuel Phillips (1814 – 1854), who was Chief Literary Editor, under Delane, had been helped by Moses Montefiore and the Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, and became baptized in order to be able to enter Sidney Sussex College.[1928] The Duke of Sussex was the sixth son and ninth child of King George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Among his godparents were Illuminati members Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and Prince Charles of Hess-Kassel.[1929] In 1817, the Duke of Sussex sent a letter to Carl Leopold Goldschmidt authorization the Frankfurt Judenloge to operate as a Masonic lodge.[1930]
In 1880, The Times took a response to criticism of the Jews by the Russian paper, Novoe vremia, which argued that the Jews were over-represented in the revolutionary movement, which it attributed to some innate characteristic of Judaism itself. The Times responded to the charge in four separate editorials, denying that Jews were in any way particularly inclined to revolutionary ideas, but rather that the phenomenon was a result of the limited rights afforded to them by the state. The Times apologized that the source of the oft-repeated Russian complaints about “Jewish exploitation,” are the result of their prevention from assimilation:
…It must be acknowledged that in Slavonic countries the Jew does not exhibit the characteristics of his race in an admirable form. He obtrudes his nationality as Jewish rather than Russian in dress and manners. He uses his larger acquaintance with human propensities and infirmities to impose a heavy pecuniary yoke upon his neighbors. Every one would rejoice could Jewish energies in Eastern Europe be diverted from the channel of money-lending to other vocations less provocative of dislike.[1931]
The Times presented a lengthy, two-issue description of the pogroms, “compiled from the best available sources of information,” which in reality, though unnamed, included the Jewish World, a pro-Zionist publication founded in London in 1873. The articles spared no exaggeration in an attempt to horrify their audience:
“During the past eight months, a tract of country, equal in area to the
British Isles and France combined, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
has been the scene of horrors that have hitherto only been perpetrated in
medieval days during times of war. Men ruthlessly murdered, tender infants dashed to death,
or roasted alive in their own homes, married women the
prey of a brutal lust that has often caused their death; and young girls
violated in the sight of the relatives by
soldiers who should have been the guardians of their honour—these have been the deeds with which the
population of Southern Russia has been
stained since last April.”[1932]
On May 24, 1881, a delegation from the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Jewish Board of Deputies met with the Foreign Secretary of Gladstone’s cabinet, Lord Granville. Public outrage culminated in a meeting at Manor House on February 1, 1882. Numerous letters were printed on the subject, including one from the Earl of Shaftesbury. The Times reported that the Jews of England had presented a memorandum calling for the abolition of restrictive laws for Russian Jews to the Russian ambassador, who refused to transmit it to his government.
The Times was forced to backdown from its more far-fetched claims, with the publication of a Parliamentary Paper, “Russia, No. 1, 1882,” containing correspondence which the Foreign Office had received from the British embassies in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Taganrog, and Mykolaiv, which that The Times’s claims were often grossly exaggerated or outright fabrications.[1933] According to Vice-Consul Wagstaff as Mykolaiv, “… this description is so incorrect and exaggerated, and the descriptions of what took place at some other of the places mentioned so far exceed in horrors the descriptions given to me by eye-witnesses at these places, that I think very little faith can be given to any part of it, more especially to these accounts of the violations of women.” Wagstaff then emphasizes: “I have taken pains to question Jews of all classes, and none know of such a case.”[1934]
Wagstaff insists that the motivations were largely directed at the exploitive economic practices of Russian Jews. He points out that, whereas Jews in Western Europe or America are fully assimilated, they live quite apart in Russia. Those occupations constantly denounced by the public, include being dealers in spirits, keepers of “vodka” (drinking) shops and brothels, traders of stolen goods, illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. They have also succeeded in servicing the government as contractors, using their commercial skills to collude with corrupt officials in defrauding the State of vast sums of money. Wagstaff also notes that there are many well-educated, highly-respectable, and honorable Jews living in Russia, but that they are a minority, though they condemn the occupations of the lower-class Jews, and acknowledge their abuses and work to remedy the situation.[1935]
Wagstaff dismisses claims that the outbreaks were organized and directed by the members of the Executive Committee of the Revolutionarily party, but he concedes that the Nihilists—meaning terrorists inspired by Bakunin and Alexander Herzen—incited the people to violence, as confirmed by depositions of some of the peasants which noted, “that they were ordered to plunder the Jews.”[1936] According to Consul-General Stanley at Odessa:
Not a person I have spoken to but things that the recent outbreaks against the Jews throughout South Russia were fomented by these who used the Jews as a pretext, and who wished to cause general disturbance and disaffection, in the same manner as they previously fomented incendiarism, and, as there is reason to fear, will do so again. Among other results hoped for by them was the hostility which would be aroused against the Government by the quantity of innocent people who would certainly be arrested, as is always the case on any disturbance occurring in Russia.[1937]
However, a lengthy report of the Russo-Jewish Committee, was submitted by Sir Nathaniel de Rothschild (1812 – 1870), another son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, which gathered numerous testimonies from Russian Jews to not only to confirm the truth of The Times’s reports, but to show that they had been incomplete. The Russian government, however, replied, largely through the official Journal de St. Petersburg, which was reproduced in The Times:
The English journals, with The Times at their head, have published alleged details of the Russian “atrocities” in which the greatest fantasy and plainest malevolence are strikingly apparent. It is easy enough to pile up figures and statistics of people killed and goods lost, and say, “Refute that if you can.”[1938]
Novoevremia, a Russian publication, perceived the Manor House meeting as part of an on-going campaign engineered by Jews, whose first tactic had been a demand for equal rights. When the Russian government was not compliant, it claimed, foreign Jews attacked Russian credit on the international stock exchange, a plot which nevertheless failed because Russia was not in need of a foreign loan. Rus, another Russian publication, from Ivan Aksakov (1823 – 1886), noted the role played in anti-Russian agitation by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and recommended that the Russian government block its further interference in Russian internal affairs. Aksakov was one of the founders at Moscow of a circle of Slavophiles, who, aiming to restore Russia to the position independence from West European civilization it had held in the days before Peter the Great, opposed to all the foreign elements of Russia-Germans, Poles, and, above all, Jews. Aksakov’s concern with the Alliance would reach its peak in 1883 when Rus reprinted from the French newspaper L’Antisemitique a purported “manifesto” of Adolphe Crémieux, detailing the Alliance as a secret organization of the whole Jewish world to obtain control of all governments.[1939]
At the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, Herzl offered his warm support for the creation of Jüdische Verlag, an important Zionist publisher in Berlin and Cologne, with a group that included Martin Buber, Chaim Weizmann, and others. The aim of the publishing house was to publish the spiritual, cultural, literary, and artistic heritage of the Jewish people throughout history as a basis for the spiritual-cultural renaissance of the Jewish people. The idea had received Herzl’s warm support at the Fifth Zionist Congress (1901). That same year, Leo Winz (1876 – 1952) amd Davis Trietsch (1870 – 1935), a founder of the Verlag, founded Ost und West (“East and West”), the first German-language cultural magazine dedicated only to Jewish topics. Between 1907 and 1914, some pages of the magazine were used by the Alliance Israélite Universelle to publish their communications. One of the main concerns was to introduce the culture of the new Eastern European Jewish immigrants, known as Ostjuden, to the assimilated German Jews, who perceived negatively, in conformity with the usual anti-Semitic stereotypes.
In his seminal 1896 book The Jewish State, Herzl criticized opponents of his plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine, as a solution to the “Jewish Question,” calling them “disguised anti-Semites of Jewish origin.” For those who retain the pseudo-scientific perception of Jews as a “race,” rather than a religious grouping, criticism of the actions, culture or behavior by some Jews has been characterized as “anti-Semitism.” Similarly, criticism by some Jews of other Jews—and more importantly, in some cases, criticism of Zionism by anti-Zionists—is characterized as “self-hatred.” The origins of terms such as “Jewish self-hatred” lie in the mid-nineteenth-century feuds between German Orthodox Jews of the Breslau seminary and Reform Jews. Both accused the other of betraying Jewish identity, the Orthodox Jews accused the Reform Jews of identifying more closely with German Protestantism and German nationalism than with Judaism.[1940]
Jewish elites in the West, who had assimilated the secular principles of the Enlightenment, following from the influence of the Haskalah, were committed to their nations, and concerned with displays of Jewishness and Jewish nationalism, and were prone to echo mainstream stereotypes about the poverty, filthiness and superstitiousness of the Ostjuden, or Eastern Jews.[1941] The large-scale pogroms swept through Russia from 1881 to 1884 coincided with burgeoning influx of the displaced rural poor into cities. The waves of immigration stirred xenophobic reactions in countries to the west, and they were looked down upon by the assimilated the Jewish middle-class for their backwardness.[1942] The Ostjuden were described by Joseph Roth, in The Wandering Jews (1926–27), about the plight of the Jews refugees who fled to the West from Lithuania, Poland and Russia in the mid-1920s, wrote, “They sought shelter in cities and towns where most of them had never been and, unfortunately, where they were made despicably unwelcome.”[1943]
Eastern Jews, who represented 75% of the Jewish population at that time, figure frequently described in early Zionist texts as an impoverished population that was both physically and morally “degenerate.”[1944] The Ostjuden, explains Steven E. Aschheim, were “portrayed as immoral, culturally backward creatures of the ugly, anachronistic ghetto.”[1945] As to why German Jews rejected their Ostjuden brethren, he adds:
Eastern ghettos became a symbolic construct by which emergent Jewry could distinguish itself from their less fortunate, unenlightened, and unemancipated East European brothers. Such an attitude was encouraged by the implicit dictates of assimilation. Integration was not merely the attempt to blend into new cultural and social surroundings. It was also a purposeful, even programmatic dissociation from traditional Jewish national and cultural moorings. In their eagerness to prove their worthiness for equal rights, it was first necessary for West European Jews to demonstrate “self-regeneration” and to establish the difference between themselves and the traditional Jews of the ghetto. The emergent stereotype of the “Ostjude” was therefore as much the dialectical product of Enlightenment thinking as the self-image of modern German Jew.[1946]
According to Aschleim, throughout the nineteenth century, it was quite common to find surprisingly negative portrayals of “Polish” Jews by German Jews and non-Jews from. Typical were depictions of Galician Jewry by the newspaper Der Israelit as having fallen to the lowest cultural depths, living in horrible filth and poverty, and dominated by ignorance and superstition. Heinrich Graetz, although a proto-nationalist and committed Jew, chastised the Eastern Jews’ “Talmudic spirit,” and their love of “twisting, distorting, ingenious quibbling and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie within their field of vision.”[1947] The novelist Jakob Wassermann (1873 – 1934) proposed an ontological distinction between a “Jewish” Jew and a German Jew: “Are those not two distinct species, almost two distinct races, or at least two distinct modes of life and thought?”[1948]
The specific term “self-hating Jew” came into use developing from Herzl’s polemical use of the term “anti-Semite of Jewish origin,” in the context of his rejection of his project of political Zionism.[1949] Herzl published an article entitled Mauschel (“Kike/Sheeny/Yid/Ikey”), in 1897, not long after the conclusion of the First Zionist Congress. It is often considered to be emblematic of an antisemitic strain of thinking within Zionism, and as a virulently anti-Semitic diatribe or screed.[1950] Herzl believed that there were two types of Jews: Jiden (“Yids”) and Juden (“Jews”), and employed the term Mauschel as a label for any Jew who opposed his Zionist solution to the Jewish Question. According to Herzl, “no true Jew can be an anti-Zionist; only Mauschel is one.”[1951] A Mauschel, Herzl explained, “is a distortion (Verzerrung) of human character, something unspeakably low and repugnant.”[1952] The pulpits of synagogues, he claimed, should be cleared of rabbis who are critical of Zionism. The opponents of Zionism should be treated as the enemies they are, the “motley crew” of profit-seekers, Jewish financiers, with skeletons in their closets, blackmailing Jewish journalists who accept bribes to coverup wrongdoings, Jewish lawyers who serve a shady clientele, along with corrupt politicians and businessmen.[1953] Elsewhere in his writings, Herzl described opponents of the Zionism he was proposing as Schädlinge (“Jewish vermin”).
According to Annie Levin, “The writings of Herzl and his colleague, Max Nordau, are littered with descriptions of European Jews as parasites, social diseases, germs, aliens. They were frustrated and bewildered that most Jews wanted to assimilate and live in their countries of birth.”[1954] As Levin explains, “Zionists accepted the 19th century view that anti-Semitism—in fact all racial difference—was a permanent feature of human nature. For this reason it was pointless to struggle against it. The solution for Jews was to form a state and convince the European world that Jews belonged to the class of the ‘superior’ colonizers, not to that of the colonized.”[1955]
Herzl himself imagined the Promised Land as a place where stereotypical Jews with their hooked noses, red hair and bow-legs could live free from being despised.[1956] In The State of the Jews, Herzl wrote:
The unthinking might, for example, imagine that this exodus would have to take its way from civilization into the desert. That is not so! It will be carried out entirely in the framework of civilization. We shall not revert to a lower stage, we shall rise to a higher one. We shall not dwell in mud huts; we shall build new, and more beautiful, more modern houses, and possess them in safety… We should there form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism… [Europe] would have to guarantee our existence.[1957]
In his 1908 novel Der Weg ins Freie (“The Road into the Open”), Arthur Schnitzler has one character say: “I myself have only succeeded up to the present in making the acquaintance of one genuine anti-Semite. I’m afraid I’m bound to admit,… that it was a well-known Zionist leader.” In 1894, Herzl wrote to Schnitzler about his play Das neue Ghetto (“The New Ghetto”) which he hoped to have performed. However, Schnitzler disagreed with the stereotypes that Herzl portrayed, writing: “It’s not true that, in the ghetto you are referring to, all Jews inwardly repressed or go about shabbily. There are others—and it is precisely these who are most hated by the anti-Semites.”[1958]
Israeli historian Anita Shapira remarked, “Anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes did nourish, to some degree, the thought of Zionist public opinion makers.”[1959] Karl Kraus, the Jewish anti-Zionist writer who broke from the Young Vienna circle around Theosophist Frederick Eckstein, regarded antisemitism as the “essence” of the Zionist movement and characterized Jewish supporters as “Jewish antisemites.”[1960] In 1915, Pinhas Felix Rosen (1887 – 1978), who rose to be Israel’s first Justice Minister, wrote in a field report on Ostjuden published in Der Jüdische Student that the great lesson for young Jewish Zionists fighting on the eastern front, on experiencing disillusionment at what they observe of Jewish life there, was that Palestine was one large “institute for the fumigation of (all) Jewish vermin.”[1961] Always active in Zionist circles, working as chief of staff to Chaim Weizmann, Rosen was Chairman of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD) from 1920 to 1923, and eventually migrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1926 where he practiced as a lawyer and helped create the Central European Immigrants Association.
In 1898, Herzl began a series of diplomatic initiatives to build support for a Jewish country. He was received by Kaiser Wilhelm II on several occasions, one of them in Jerusalem, and attended the Hague Peace Conference, enjoying a warm reception from many statesmen. Herzl appealed to the Rothschilds, Sir Samuel Montagu, later cabinet minister, and to the Chief Rabbis of France and Vienna. In preparatory notes for his appeal to Baron Maurice de Hirsch to underwrite the Jewish State, Herzl concluded his request with the words “Honor, Freedom, Fatherland,” the old motto he recalled from his days in the Burschenschaft (fraternity) Albia, which was associated with Georg von Schönerer.[1962]
Historian Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson argued that the secular Zionism of Theodor Herzl cannot be understood without reference to the Sabbatean movement.[1963] In the nineteenth century, the newly emancipated Jews sought a unique symbol to identify themselves and chose the Star of David for its lack of specifically religious connotations, when the symbol finally became widely adopted. The six-pointed Star of David became representative of the worldwide Zionist community after it was chosen as the central symbol on a flag at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. In the same year, at considerable personal expense, Herzl founded the Zionist newspaper Die Welt in Vienna, and planned the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. He was elected president of the Congress, a position he held until his death in 1904.
The Sabbatean influences on the Zionist movement are demonstrated by its rejection of Jewish law, while also adhering to the expectations of the Messiah, and the return of all Jews dispersed in the Diaspora to the Promised Land. In “Herzl’s Image and the Messianic Idea,” Arthur Kamczycki explained that, “From the very beginning Zionism opposed the conservative rabbinate and the religious Jewry in general.”[1964] According to orthodox interpretation, the restoration of Zion by the Messiah could not be brought about through a human whose actions would be subject to God’s will.[1965] Additionally, attempts at estimating the time of the Messiah’s arrival were seen as blasphemy. Herzl, who was aware of this discrepancy, stated that “the orthodoxy should understand that there is no contradiction between God’s will and the Zionist attempt of grabbing the destiny with one’s own hands.”[1966]
During a two-week trip to Italy in 1904, Herzl met with Pope Pius X in an effort to gain his support for the cause of Zionism. The meeting occurred two days after Herzl had met with Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (1869 – 1947). In addition to showing an interest in the Zionist movement, Victor Emmanuel III revealed that one of his ancestors had been a co-conspirator of Shabbetai Zevi. When the king asked Herzl if there were still Jews who expected the Messiah, Herzl assured him: “Naturally, Your Majesty, among religious circles. In our own, the university-trained and enlightened classes, no such thought exists […] our movement has a purely national character.”[1967] Herzl mentioned to the king that while visiting Jerusalem, he did not want to use a white horse, mule or donkey in order to avoid evoking the iconographic tradition of the Messiah who is often portrayed as a man on a white horse, mule or donkey, usually entering the city. Nevertheless, in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem are two photographs showing Herzl riding on the back of a white donkey.[1968]
A few months before meeting Victor Emmanuel III, Herzl was warned by Dr. Joseph Samuel Bloch, editor of the Österreichische Wochenschrift, that if he were to present himself as the Messiah, that all Jews would reject him. Instead, he told Herzl, “The Messiah must remain a veiled, hidden figure.”[1969] Nevertheless, in “Theodor Herzl: Between Myth and Messianism,” Robert S. Wistrichin pointed out, “Yet his diaries testify that from June 1895 (when his Zionist conversion is usually dated) his curiosity and even sense of affinity with Shabbetai Zevi was growing.”[1970] Herzl wrote in a diary entry from March 1896: “the difference between myself and Shabbetai Zevi, or the way I perceive him… is that Zevi became so great that he equaled the greats of this world, whereas I belong to the little ones of this world.”[1971] In Herzl’s utopian novel Old-New Land (1902), the protagonists are presented with the choice of spending an evening at a theatrical performance, a drama about Moses, or an opera about Zevi, they choose the opera. The novel’s protagonist David Littwak, while watching the opera, explains the success of false leaders:
It was not that the people believed what these charlatans told them, but the other way round—they told them what they wanted to believe. They satisfied a deep longing. That is it. The longing brings forth the Messiah. You must remember what miserable dark ages they were, the times of Sabbatai and his like. Our people were not yet able to gauge their own strength, so they were fascinated by the spell these men cast over them. Only later, at the end of the nineteenth century when all the other civilized nations had already gained their national pride and acted accordingly—only then did our people, the pariah among the nations, realize that they could expect nothing from fantastic miracle-workers, but everything from their own strength.[1972]
Herzl’s appeals fared best with Israel Zangwill (1864 – 1926), and Max Nordau (1849 – 1923), co-founder of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) together with Herzl at the First Zionist Congress in Basel. Zangwill, who earned the nickname “the Dickens of the Ghetto,” wrote an internationally successful novel Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892). Zangwill’s Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898) consists of a series of sketches based on the lives of historical figures, including Benjamin Disraeli, Heinrich Heine, Ferdinand Lassalle, Spinoza, and a glowing account of the mission of Shabbetai Zevi.
Joseph Brociner, who become one of the leaders of the Hovevei Zion movement in Romania, which preceded the Zionist Organization founded at the First Zionist Congress, proposed to Herzl to found a Zionist association in the country.[1973] It was another leader of the Romanian Hovevei Zion, Moses Gaster, and later Hakham, or Chief Rabbi, of the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, and founder of the British Zionist Federation, who were to be the recipients of the Balfour Declaration, who introduced Henry Pereira Mendes to Herzl. Herzl then asked Mendes to spread the Zionist cause in America and became one of the founders of the Federation of American Zionists, serving as its president.[1974]
In 1891, Baron Maurice de Hirsch established the Baron de Hirsch Fund in New York City to help Russian Jews immigrate to the USA. Myer S. Isaacs, who was also a member of the Central Committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, was the fund’s President and Jacob Schiff was the Vice President. In cooperation with the Baron de Hirsch Fund, B’nai B’rith also sought to promote the establishment of Jewish agricultural colonies.[1975] Through a special office in Washington, maintained until its national headquarters were also moved to that city, B’nai B’rith rendered legal aid to thousands of Jewish immigrants through the services their national spokesman, Lincoln-assassination conspirator Simon Wolf.[1976]
In 1891, Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA or ICA) to help Jews from Russia and Romania to settle in Argentina. Baron de Hirsch died in 1896 and thereafter the JCA began to also assist the Jewish settlement in Palestine. At the end of 1899, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild (1845 – 1934), youngest child of James Mayer de Rothschild, transferred title to his colonies in Palestine plus fifteen million francs to the JCA. Through his daughter-in-law, Dorothy de Rothschild, a close friend of Chaim Weizmann, Edmond would be introduced to the English branch of the Rothschild family, in particular, to Lionel Walter Rothschild, the son of Baron Nathan Rothschild, who would become the official recipient of the Balfour Declaration. Edmond also provided funding for the establishment of Petah Tikva, a city in the Central District of Israel, as a permanent settlement in 1883. Overall, he bought from Ottoman landlords 2–3% of the land which now makes up present-day Israel.[1977]
Edmond James de Rothschild was also a supporter of Hovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”), a variety of organizations founded in Odessa in 1881, in response to the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, and now considered the foundation-builders of modern Zionism. From the inception of the Hibbat Zion movement—also known as Hovevei Zion—Odessa served as its chief center. Hibbat Zion were officially constituted as a group at a conference led in 1884 by Leon Pinsker (1821 – 1891), who gained the backing of Baron Edmond James de Rothschild. Pinsker, who had been influenced by the Haskalah, no longer believed that mere humanism and Enlightenment would defeat anti-Semitism. Many of the first groups were established in Eastern European countries in the early 1880s with the aim to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine, and advance Jewish settlement there. The Benei Moshe Society founded by Achad Ha-Am in 1889, which attempted to organize the intellectuals and activists of the movement, was established in Odessa.
In 1897, when the First Zionist Congress established the World Zionist Organization (WZO), at the initiative of Theodor Herzl, most of the Hovevei Zion societies joined it, and it also adopted the Hatikvah, the anthem of Hovevei Zion, which later became the national anthem of the State of Israel. The beliefs of the majority of members of the as the WZO were initially referred to as General Zionism, which supported the leadership of Chaim Weizmann. A variety of types of Zionism emerged, including political Zionism, liberal Zionism, labor Zionism, revisionist Zionism, cultural Zionism, and religious Zionism. The term General Zionism was first used at the Eighth Zionist Congress of 1907 to distinguish the delegates who were neither affiliated with Labor Zionism nor religious Zionism. David Ben-Gurion is considered one of the major theoreticians of the Labor Zionist movement. The Labor Zionists, maintains Zeev Sternhell, in The Founding Myths of Israel, maintained that the movement’s synthesis of socialism and nationalism was its main historical achievement and its claim to uniqueness among labor movements.”[1978] Continuing from the work of Moses Hess, Ber Borochov (1881 – 1917), helped form the Poale Zion party, a movement of Marxist–Zionist Jewish workers founded in various cities of Poland, Europe and the Russian Empire in 1901.
The
General Zionists began to lean towards Labor or Revisionist Zionism. Revisionist
Zionism, founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880 – 1940), was the chief ideological
competitor to the dominant socialist Labor Zionism. Jabotinsky, who was born in
Odessa, acquired a job as a correspondent for a local Odessan newspaper, the Odesskiy
Listok, and was sent to Bern and Rome as a correspondent. In his autobiography, Jabotinsky confessed that “my entire outlook on issues concerning nation, state and
society took shape during those years under Italian influence,” and pointed directly to “the myth of Garibaldi, the works of Mazzini,
the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi and Giuseppe Giusti, [which] added depth to my
shallow Zionism, transforming it from an instinctive sentiment into a concept.”[1979] In 1903, Jabotinsky was
elected as a Russian delegate to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel,
Switzerland. After Theodor Herzl’s death in 1904, he became the leader of the
right-wing Zionists.
Jabotinsky advocated a “revision” of the “practical Zionism” of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann which was focused on individuals settling Palestine. Jabotinsky’s main demand was the creation of Greater Israel. Jabotinsky also held views that were often typical of Zionist anti-Semitism. Early Zionists contrasted their ideal of the “new Jew” or “Hebrew,” against the Yid, the negative caricature of European Jewry, employing language similar to that of anti-Semites. Jabotinsky wrote, for example:
Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite… because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. The Yid is despised by all and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to charm all. The Yid has accepted submission and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to learn how to command. The Yid wants to conceal his identity from strangers and, therefore, the Hebrew should look the world straight in the eye and declare: “I am a Hebrew!”[1980]
During the 17th Zionist Congress in 1931, a vote would take place on whether or not the Congress would pursue the “ultimate objective” platform of the Revisionist Zionists. A message was sent from Palestine relayed the of fear of an Arab pogrom if the “all or nothing stance” of the Revisionist Party were adopted, resulting in the rejection of the proposal. After two years of campaigning, the Labor Zionist party won the election to have leadership of the Zionist Congress at the 18th Congress in 1933.[1981] In 1935, after the Zionist Executive rejected his political program, Jabotinsky resigned from the WZO, and founded the New Zionist Organization (NZO), known in Hebrew as Tzakh.
The “reluctant father of American Zionism” was Columbia professor Richard Gottheil (1862 – 1936). Gottheil’s father, Gustav Gottheil, eventually became the chief Rabbi and one of the most influential, well-known and controversial leaders of Reform Judaism in America. Gustav succeeded Samuel Adler as rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, a flagship congregation in the Reform branch of Judaism in the United States. Unlike most Reform Jews of the time, Rabbi Gottheil was a supporter of Zionism and attended the First Zionist Congress of 1897 in Basel. In the same year, his son Richard Gottheil founded the Federation of American Zionist Societies of New York (FAZ), an amalgam of Jewish societies that all endorsed the Basel program of the First Zionist Congress. FAZ established The Maccabean, the first English language Zionist magazine, edited by Louis Lipsky, who would later become the voice for the later Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the first official Zionist organization in the United States.[1982]
From 1898 to 1904, Gottheil was president of the American Federation of Zionists, and worked
with both Stephen S. Wise (1874 – 1949), who became FAZ’s secretary. Helen Rawlinson in
her book Stranger At The Party, recounts a sexual encounter where she
describes how Wise had sex with her in his office on his conference table, and
quoted the verse from Psalms which
Sabbateans did when engaged in sexual intercourse.[1983] When Gottheil attended the second Zionist
Congress in Basel of 1898, establishing relationships with Theodor Herzl and Max
Nordau, Rabbi Wise attended as the American correspondent for William Randolph
Hearst’s New York Journal.[1984]
Herzl recommended to Gottheil that he hire Jacob de Haas (1872 – 1937), the secretary of the First Zionist Congress, who became the new secretary of FAZ. De Haas befriended later U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856 – 1941), whom he introduced to the ideas of Herzl and ideals of Zionism, and who would later assist Chaim Weizmann in formulating the Balfour Declaration. Brandeis belonged to a Frankist family, being descended from Esther Frankel, an aunt of Rabbi Zecharias Frankel, a Sabbatean and intellectual progenitor of Conservative Judaism.[1985] Louis’ great-grandfather Aron Beer Wehle (1750 – 1825) and his brother Jonas Beer Wehle (1752 – 1823) were considered spiritual leaders of the Frankist movement in Prague. In 1832, the son of Jonas Wehle was among the founders of the first Reform Congregation in Prague which invited Leopold Zunz as preacher.[1986] Brandeis, would head the FAZ and the American Zionist movement by 1912. Brandeis was head of world Zionism when the war forced the movement to relocate its headquarters to New York from Berlin. Under Brandeis’ leadership, the American Zionist movement grew from 10,000 members to over 200,000 members by 1920.
Brandeis encouraged Felix Frankfurter (1882 – 1965) to become more involved in Zionism.[1987] Frankfurter received a portrait of Jacob Frank’s daughter Eva from his mother, a tradition among Sabbateans.[1988] During World War I, Frankfurter served as Judge Advocate General. After the war, he helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and returned to his position as professor at Harvard Law School. He became a friend and adviser of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him to the Supreme Court, where he served from 1939 to 1962. Frankfurter famously said, “The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise their power from behind the scenes.”[1989] Brandeis, Frankfurter, Wise and others laid the groundwork for a democratically elected nationwide organization of “ardently Zionist” Jews, “to represent Jews as a group and not as individuals.”[1990] In 1918, following national elections, this Jewish community convened the first American Jewish Congress (AJC). Rabbi Wise remained the President and chief spokesperson of the AJC until his death in 1949.
Important in exploiting Britain for its ambitions, Zionism made use of Sabbatean millenarianism, as expressed in an interpretation of the End Times known as Dispensationalism, which developed from Evangelical Christianity and contributed to the emergence of Christian Zionism. John Nelson Darby (1800 – 1882), one of the influential figures of the Plymouth Brethren—a sect that derived from the Moravian Church, that Aleister Crowley was raised in[1991]—devised the system of dispensationalism that was incorporated in the development of modern Evangelicalism, and which reflected the millenarian aspirations of Sabbateanism. As a hint of their probable crypto-Judaism, Christian dispensationalists sometimes embrace what some critics have pejoratively called “Judeophilia,” which includes support of the state of Israel, observing traditional Jewish holidays and practicing traditionally Jewish religious rituals.[1992] Dispensationalist beliefs are at the forefront of Christian Zionism, which shares the exact same ambitions of the Zionists, but instead when God has fulfilled his promises to the nation of Israel, the future world to come will result in a millennial kingdom and Third Temple where Christ, upon his return, will rule the world from Jerusalem for a thousand years.
The foundations of Christian Zionism were laid when Darby visited the United States and catalyzed a new movement. This was expressed at the Niagara Bible Conference in 1878, which issued a 14-point proclamation, including the following text:
that the Lord Jesus will come in person to introduce the millennial age, when Israel shall be restored to their own land, and the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord; and that this personal and premillennial advent is the blessed hope set before us in the Gospel for which we should be constantly looking. (Luke 12:35–40; 17:26–30; 18:8 Acts 15:14–17; 2 Thess. 2:3–8; 2 Tim. 3:1–5; Titus 1:11–15)
In 1891, the tycoon William Eugene Blackstone (1841 – 1935), who was inspired by the Niagara Bible Conference to publish the book Jesus is Coming, had lobbied President Benjamin Harrison for the restoration of the Jews, in a petition signed by 413 prominent Americans, that became known as the Blackstone Memorial. The names included the US Chief Justice, Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, and several other congressmen, future President William McKinley, and Chief Justice Melville Fuller, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan Sr. and other famous industrialists. It read, in part: “Why shall not the powers which under the treaty of Berlin, in 1878, gave Bulgaria to the Bulgarians and Servia [Serbia]to the Servians [Serbians] now give Palestine back to the Jews?… These provinces, as well as Romania, Montenegro, and Greece, were wrested from the Turks and given to their natural owners. Does not Palestine as rightfully belong to the Jews?”[1993]
Dispensationalist beliefs were popularized in the United States by the evangelical Cyrus Scofield (1843 – 1921), who had a history of fraud.[1994] Two years after Scofield’s reported conversion to Christianity in 1879, the Atchison Patriot described Scofield as “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally,” and went on to recount a few of Scofield’s “many malicious acts.” Scofield was heavily influenced by Darby, as evidenced in the explanatory notes to his Scofield Reference Bible, which became the most influential statement of dispensationalism. A core doctrine is the expectation of the Second Coming and the establishment of a Kingdom of God on Earth. Scofield further predicted that Islamic holy places would be destroyed and the Temple in Jerusalem would be rebuilt, signaling the end of the Church Age when all who seek to keep the covenant with God will acknowledge Jesus as their Messiah in defiance of the Antichrist.
On May 16, 1916, at the behest of Louis Brandeis, Nathan Straus (1848 – 1931)—who co-owned two of New York City’s biggest department stores, R.H. Macy & Company and Abraham & Straus—wrote Rev. Blackstone:
Mr. Brandeis is perfectly infatuated with the work that you have done along the lines of Zionism. It would have done your heart good to have heard him assert what a valuable contribution to the cause your document is. In fact he agrees with me that you are the Father of Zionism, as your work antedates Herzl.[1995]
Brandeis recruited Scofield after he joined the prestigious Lotos Club in New York. Founded primarily by a young group of writers and critics, the club was composed of journalists, artists, musicians, actors and amateurs of literature, science and fine arts. Mark Twain, an early member, called it the “Ace of Clubs.” The Club took its name from “The Lotos-Eaters,” a poem by Tennyson. Alluding to the use of opium, the poem describes a group of mariners who, upon eating the lotos, are put into an altered state and isolated from the outside world.
Eerily, Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, almost exactly nine months after the gruesome murders of by Jack the Ripper, which involved a network connected to the Golden Dawn and the founders of the Round Table, an organization that would be central in helping to bring about the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Jack the Ripper murders served as inspiration to the novel Dracula, by Golden Dawn member Bram Stoker, whose consultant on Transylvanian culture was a close friend of Theodor Herzl, Hungarian Zionist named Arminius Vambery (1832 – 1913), an agent of Lord Palmerston. Dracula was inspired by the vampire novel Carmilla by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814 – 1873), an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels inspired by Swedenborg. According to one occult historian, the model for le Fanu’s Carmilla was Barbara of Cilli, who assisted her husband Emperor Sigismund in founding the Order of the Dragon in 1408, was a vampire who was taught by Abraham of Worms, student of Abramelin the Mage.[1996] The Book of Abramelin had regained popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to the efforts of Golden Dawn founder MacGregor Mathers’ translation, and later within the mystical system of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema.
When Herzl wanted to make contact with British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes (1853 – 1902), founder of the Round Table, through one of its founding members, William T. Stead (1849 – 1912)—the famous British journalist and friend of Annie Besant and H.P. Blavatsky—he contacted Joseph Cowen (1868 – 1932), a founder and leader of the English Zionist Federation, which would later be the recipient of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, granting the land of Palestine to Jewish settlement, addressed to Walter Rothschild, the son of Baron Nathan Rothschild (1840 – 1915), the head of the London branch of the family bank, N.M. Rothschild & Sons, also a founding member of the Round Table.[1997] Nathan, whose father was Baron Lionel de Rothschild, a friend of Benjamin Disraeli, married Emma Louise von Rothschild, the daughter of Mayer Carl von Rothschild who recommended Gerson Bleichröder to Otto von Bismarck as a banker.[1998] Nathan’s brother Alfred Rothschild was tutored by Wilhelm Pieper, Karl Marx’s private secretary.[1999] Cowen numbered among his friends the entire circle of Carbonari: Mazzini, Garibaldi, Louis Blanc, Bakunin, Ledru-Rollin, Herzen, Orsini, and Kossuth, who met in London at the dinner party of Lincoln-assassination conspirator George N. Sanders in 1854.[2000] With Karl Marx, this was largely the same circle of 1848 revolutionaries or Forty-Eighters who participated in the salons of Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, the mother of Richard Wagner’s wife Cosima, who were supporters of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Stead was a British newspaper editor, regarded as a pioneer of investigative journalism. However, Stead was also a central figure in a strange confluence that connected the Jack the Ripper murders with the Golden Dawn and the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF)—who had sponsored the first Masonic lodge in Palestine—as well as H.P. Blavatsky and Papus, the leading disciple of the synarchism of Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, who were associated with the Protocols of Zion. More importantly, Stead, with Rhodes and Baron Nathan Rothschild, was also an original founding member of the Round Table, whose plotting for global domination the Protocols purportedly referred to, and yet also was the organization behind the settlement of Jews in Israel.
Early British political support for an increased Jewish presence in the region of Palestine, based upon geopolitical considerations, began in the early 1840s and was led by Lord Palmerston, following the occupation of Syria and Palestine by separatist Ottoman governor Muhammad Ali of Egypt.[2001] While the French exercised an influence in the region as protector of the Catholic communities, Russians of the Eastern Orthodox, Britain without a sphere of influence. These political aspirations were supported by evangelical Christian sympathy for the “restoration of the Jews” to Palestine among elements of the mid-nineteenth-century British political elite, most notably Lord Shaftesbury (1801 – 1885), who married Lady Emily Caroline Catherine Frances Cowper, who was likely to have been the natural daughter of Lord Palmerston.
Shaftesbury was the grandson of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671 – 1713), was highly esteemed by Moses Mendelssohn,[2002] and Yirmiyahu Yovel, author of The Other Within: The Marranos, listed him as an example of “marranesque” philosophy, along with Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume Diderot, Mandeville, Locke, Montaigne, Boyle, Kant and Descartes. Not only Leibniz, Voltaire and Diderot, but Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Gottfried von Herder, all drew from his philosophy.[2003] Shaftesbury, was one of the first leading Christian Zionists, and an early proponent of the Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land, providing the first proposal by a major politician to resettle Jews in Palestine. Lord Shaftesbury sought to turn his vision of a restored and converted Israel, including Jewish resettlement in Palestine and the creation of an Anglican church on Mt. Zion, into official government policy. Shaftesbury became president of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, founded in 1809 by leading evangelical Anglicans such as Simeon and William Wilberforce, a leader of the Clapham sect, and Charles Simeon (1759 – 1836), who desired to promote Christianity among the Jews. Most early nineteenth-century British Restorationists, like Simeon, were Postmillennial in eschatology, an interpretation of chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation which sees Christ’s second coming as occurring after the Millennium.[2004]
The society’s work began among the poor Jewish immigrants in the East End of London and soon spread to Europe, South America, Africa and Palestine.[2005] It supported the creation of the post of Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem in 1841, and the first incumbent was one of its workers, Michael Solomon Alexander (1799 – 1845), a former rabbi who converted to Christianity from Judaism.[2006] It was Shaftesbury who persuaded Palmerston to appoint James Finn (1806 – 1872), a member of the society, as British consul to Jerusalem in 1838, “to afford protection of the Jews generally” in Palestine.[2007]
One
of the goals of the London Society was the establishment of an Anglican
bishopric in Jerusalem, which was formed when the British and Prussian
Governments as well as the Church of England and the Evangelical Church in
Prussia entered into a unique agreement. Prussian Union of Churches became the largest
independent religious organization in the German Empire and later Weimar
Germany. Karl Marx’s father, Heinrich Marx, known as a child as Herschel,
converted from Judaism to join the state Evangelical Church of Prussia, taking
on the German forename Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.[2008] In 1816, at the age of
seven years, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, was
baptized with his brother and sisters in a home ceremony by Johann Jakob
Stegemann, minister of the Evangelical congregation of Berlin’s Jerusalem
Church and New Church.[2009] Although Mendelssohn was a
conforming Christian as a member of the Reformed Church, he was both conscious
and proud of his Jewish ancestry and notably of his connection with his
grandfather Moses.[2010] In 1843, Mendelssohn accepted a leadership position as Generalmusikdirektor
at the Belin Cathedral, a central institution of the Prussian Union Church, and
he composed numerous pieces of music for use in the service.[2011]
The Damascus Incident of 1840 provided a motive for more concrete British intervention on behalf of the Jews in Turkey. Under the influence of Shaftesbury, Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, called on the Ottoman Empire to facilitate the settlement of Jews from all Europe and Africa in Palestine in addition to allowing Jews living in the Turkish empire “to transmit to the Porte, through British authorities, any complaints which they might have to prefer against the Turkish authorities.” The Sultan made the grant in February 1841, and equality of treatment to Jewish subjects was guaranteed in April. The British government wanted to prop up the ailing Ottomans, and admitting Jews to Palestine with “the wealth they would bring with them would increase the resources of the Sultan’s dominions.”[2012]
The bishopric had the support of the Protestant king Frederick William of Prussia: his envoy appointed to England, specifically to aid Shaftesbury y in the project. In 1840, Alexander McCaul (1799 – 1863) was appointed principal of the Hebrew college founded by the London Society. McCaul was for some time tutor to the Earl of Rosse (1800 – 1867), who became president of the Royal Society. McCaul studied Hebrew and German at Warsaw, and at the end of 1822 went to St. Petersburg, where he was received by Alexander I of Russia. Moving to Berlin, he was befriended by George Henry Rose, the English ambassador, and by the Frederick William IV of Prussia, who had known him at Warsaw. In the summer of 1841, through Frederick William IV, he was offered the Protestant Bishopric in Jerusalem, but declined it because he thought it would be better held by one who had been a Jew.[2013] Instead, his friend Michael Solomon Alexander was appointed (1799 – 1845), a converted Jew and professor of Hebrew and Arabic at King’s College, was chosen by Palmerston, on the advice of Shaftesbury.
Finn married McCaul’s daughter, Elizabeth Anne Finn (1825 – 1921). In 1849, Elizabeth helped to establish the Jerusalem Literary Society, which attracted the notice of Prince Albert (1819 – 1861), the husband of Queen Victoria, as well as George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen (1784 – 1860) and the Archbishop of Canterbury. She raised funds to purchase a farm outside Jerusalem, which became known as Kerem Avraham, founded in 1855, where the Finns established The Industrial Plantation for Employment of Jews in Jerusalem, to allow the local Jewish population could become self-sufficient. In 1882, Elizabeth launched the Society for Relief of Distressed Jews to provide support for Russian Jews suffering persecution during pogroms. Sir John Simon (1818 – 1897), a leading member of England’s Jewish community was moved to testify to “Mrs Finn’s extraordinary knowledge of his people and astonishment that a Christian should take such an interest in his afflicted people.”[2014]
Finn continued to lecture on Biblical subjects in the Assyrian Room of the British Museum and retold her experiences in Jerusalem in support for the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) at fundraising meetings to build on the legacy of the Jerusalem Literary Society. In 1875, Shaftesbury told the Annual General Meeting of the PEF, that “We have there a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant—a country without a people, and look! scattered over the world, a people without a country,” being one of the earliest usages by a prominent politician of the phrase “A land without a people for a people without a land,” which was to become widely used by Zionists as justification for the conquest of Palestine.[2015] Along with individuals, a number of institutional members supported the PEF, including the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society of Antiquaries, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the Grand Lodge of Freemasons.[2016]
An important member of the PEF was Field Marshal Lord Kitchener (1850 – 1916), who Lanz von Liebenfels claimed was a member of his Order of New Templars (ONT) and a reader of his anti-Semitic magazine Ostara.[2017] Nevertheless, Kitchener was also a close friend of Nathan’s brother Rothschild.[2018] Kitchener was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1871, and in 1874 he was assigned by the PEF to a mapping-survey of the Holy Land. As Chief of Staff in the Second Boer War, Kitchener won notoriety for his imperial campaigns, and later played a central role in the early part of World War I.
Another important member of the PEF was Baron Lionel de Rothschild. Prime Minister Gladstone proposed to Queen Victoria that Lionel be made a British peer. She declined, asserting that titling a Jew would raise antagonism and that it would be unseemly to reward a man whose wealth was based on what she called “a species of gambling” rather than legitimate trade.[2019] Lionel shared a friendship with Benjamin Disraeli and Prime Minister Gladstone with Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814 – 1906), the granddaughter of Henry Poole’s banker Thomas Coutts. In 1837, Angela inherited Thomas’ fortune and became the wealthiest woman in England after Queen Victoria. 1839, Angela offered herself in marriage to the much older the Duke of Wellington, who also had a close friendship with Madame de Staël.[2020] She befriended Charles Dickens who dedicated Martin Chuzzlewit to her and she was said to be the inspiration for Agnes Wickford in David Copperfield. Together with Dickens she founded a home for “fallen” women known as Urania Cottage, recalling the name later adopted by the Isis-Urania Temple of Golden Dawn.[2021] Angela was a friend of Robert Walter Carden, whose son, Alexander James Carden, was initiated into the Isis-Urania temple in London, in March 1891.[2022] Together with Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James and Bram Stoker, she was a member of the Ghost Club, a paranormal investigation and research organization, founded in London in 1862, whose membership overlapped with that of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in 1882, and which included Lord Balfour. Burdett-Coutts is hinted at in Stoker’s Dracula.[2023] Bram’s older brother Thornley, who read on commented on drafts of Dracula, visited Naples to meet with Burdett-Coutt’s private physician, and accompanied her on at least one cruise on the Mediterranean.[2024]
The PEF was linked to Quatuor Coronati (QC) Lodge, a Masonic Lodge in London dedicated to Masonic research, to the Golden Dawn and the murders of Jack the Ripper. The PEF was founded in 1865, shortly after the completion of the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, and is the oldest known organization in the world created specifically for the study of the region of Ottoman Palestine, producing the PEF Survey of Palestine between 1872 and 1877. An ulterior motive of the PEF was intelligence gathering.[2025] According to Nur Masalha the popularity of the Survey led to a growth in Zionism amongst Jews.[2026]
Annie Besant’s brother-in-law, Sir Walter Besant (1836 – 1901), was an enthusiastic Freemason, becoming the third District Grand Master of the Eastern Archipelago in Singapore, one of the founding members of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge and was acting secretary of the PEF, between 1868 and 1887. Walter Besant’s main novels included All in a Garden Fair, which Rudyard Kipling credited in Something of Myself with inspiring him to leave India and make a career as a writer.[2027] In 1883, he was also made a Knight of Justice of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and in 1884 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Walter Besant also co-authored the novel The Monks of Thelema (1878) with James Rice. François Rabelais wrote of the Abbey of Thélème, built by the giant Gargantua, where the only rule is fay çe que vouldras (“Fais ce que tu veux,” or “Do what thou wilt”). Sir Francis Dashwood also employed Rabelais’s “Do what thou wilt” as the motto his Hellfire Club, as did Aleister Crowley, in his philosophy of Thelema, as set forth in his Book of the Law.
In 1867, PEF’s biggest expedition was headed by General Sir Charles Warren (1840 – 1927)—the founding Master of the Quatuor Coronati—along with Captain Charles Wilson and a team of Royal Engineers, who discovered Templar tunnels beneath the ancient Temple of Jerusalem in 1867.[2028] Warren named his find the “Masonic Hall.”[2029] Warren was also supportive of bringing Freemasonry to the Holy Land and PEF members were involved in the first Masonic ceremony in Palestine was held on May 7, 1873, within the cave known as Solomon’s Quarries.[2030] The event was organized by Robert Morris, an American Mason, Past Grand Master of Kentucky, along with a few Masons then living in Jaffa and Jerusalem, reinforced with the presence of some visiting British naval officers with Masonic credentials. The list of those taking part included Americans, Britons, the Prussian consul, and the Ottoman Governor of Jaffa. Morris called the group the “Reclamation Lodge of Jerusalem.” Referring to the Templars, Morris. Noted that the ceremony was being held in Jerusalem for the first time “since the departure of the Crusading hosts more than seven hundred years ago.”[2031]
Morris was also involved in the establishment of the first real Masonic lodge in the Holy Land, after he convinced his friend William Mercer, the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Canada in the Province of Ontario, to grant a charter. The charter was issued on February 17, 1873 and Royal Solomon Mother Lodge N° 293 was formally consecrated on May 7. Signers of the petition included Charles Netter, a founding member of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, who played an instrumental role at the Congress of Berlin, and founder of Mikveh Israel. A letter to Netter from Chaim Tzvi Schneerson’s younger brother Pinchas Eliyahu, is located in the Mikveh Israel archive.[2032] The first candidate to petition the lodge was Moses Hornstein, a Jew from Odessa, who had close business links with the Thomas Cook and Son travel company provided him a close a connection with the British Consulate.[2033] Hornstein converted to Christianity through American missionary James Turner Barclay (1807 – 1874), known as an explorer of the Barclay Gate, an ancient gateway to the Jerusalem Temple which was sealed-off in his day, and which has since been named after him.[2034] A complete description of Barclay’s Gate is found in Charles Warren’s and Claude R. Conder’s book Jerusalem, published by the PEF. Conder carried out survey work for the PEF with his old schoolmate of Lord Kitchener.[2035]
Another member of the lodge was William Habib Hayat, son of the British Consul in Jaffa, Jacob Assad Hayat, who would become Master of the Jerusalem lodge in 1889. Also a member of the lodge was Christian Arab of Lebanese origin, Alexander Howard, whose real name was Iskander Awad, was also an agent for Thomas Cook. Howard’s home in Jaffa served as a Masonic Temple, where the motto in Hebrew, Shalom Al Israel is engraved over the ornate marble entrance. The legend is derived from the 18º of the Scottish Rite, Chevalier Rose-Croix. In fact, Howard called himself Le Chevalier Howard.[2036]
Around 1890, his home became the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Hovevei Zion. Howard took as his assistant another founder of the lodge, Rolla Floyd, a Mormon, who succeeded him as the local agent for Thomas Cook.[2037] Two further Jewish brothers of the lodge were Jacob Litwinsky and Joseph Amzalak, reportedly the wealthiest Jew in Jerusalem. Amzalak, based in Gibraltar, traded slaves to the Caribbean, but ceased this business when asked by a rabbi in Malta. Amzalak then went to live in the Holy Land, where Moses, his wealthy brother from Portugal, joined him around 1841. Haim Nissim Amzalak, Joseph’s son, acted as honorary Portuguese consul in Jerusalem from 1871, and then in Jaffa from 1886 to 1892.[2038]
During the 1860’s, Hornstein rented out the upper floors of the Amzalak family home in Jerusalem to establish the Mediterranean Hotel. This was the hotel where Robert Morris organized the meetings to prepare the ceremony in King Solomon’s Quarries.[2039] The hotel was of particular importance to the PEF because several of its explorers stayed there on various occasions, including Warren Conder, as well as Charles Frederick Tyrwhitt-Drake (1846 – 1874).[2040] Sir Richard Burton wrote after his death that he “was my inseparable companion during the rest of our stay in Palestine, and never did I travel with any man whose disposition was so well adapted to make a first-rate explorer.”[2041] The hotel was also the lodging of Mark Twain and his group when they visited Jerusalem in 1867.[2042] The chronicle of Twain’s travels, which he published as The Innocents Abroad (1869), became one of the best-selling travel books of all time.
Haim Amzalak was one of the financial backers and promoters of the next Masonic lodge to be formed in Israel, the Royal Solomon Mother Lodge, officially established in Jaffa. Around 1890, a group of Arab and Jewish Masons petitioned the Misraïm Rite, based in Paris, and founded the Lodge Le Port du Temple de Salomon (“The Port of Solomon’s Temple”). The Lodge received a large number of affiliate members, French engineers who came to build the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, the first in Palestine. In 1906, realizing that the Misraïm Rite was irregular and unrecognized by most Grand Lodges of the world, the Masons the Jaffa Lodge decided to change their affiliation to the Grand Orient of France. They adopted a new name, Barkai (“Dawn”), and eventually became integrated into the Grand Lodge of the State of Israel, and is the oldest Masonic lodge in the country still in existence.[2043]
From 1886 to 1888, Warren became the chief of the London Metropolitan Police during the Jack the Ripper murders. In a preface to Dracula, Stoker confessed that, “The strange and eerie tragedy which is portrayed here is completely true, as far as all external circumstances are concerned…”[2044] The Jack the Ripper murders implicated the famous actor Henry Irving, who served as Stoker’s inspiration for the character Count Dracula.[2045] Irving, the first actor to be knighted, ran the Lyceum Theatre where Stoker served as his business manager from 1878 to 1898. Irving had also been initiated into the Jerusalem Lodge of Freemasonry, which included the Prince of Wales (1841 – 1910), the son of Queen Victoria, later Edward VII King of England, and a close friend of Baron Nathan Rothschild, who had been installed as Most Worshipful Grand Master of the Masonic Order in England in 1875.[2046] Edward’s finances had been ably managed by Sir Dighton Probyn (1833 – 1924), Comptroller of the Household, and had benefited from advice from Edward’s financier friends, some of whom were Jewish, including Ernest Cassel (1852 – 1921), Maurice de Hirsch and the Rothschild family.[2047]
In Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, Stephen Knight proposed that the murders were part of a Masonic coverup. When it was discovered that the Prince of Wales’ son, Prince Albert Victor (1864 – 1892), had an illegitimate child with Mary Jean Kelly, whose friends numbered among Jack the Ripper’s victims, they attempted to blackmail the government. Sir William Gull, Physicians-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria and a Freemason, was called in to rectify the potential scandal. Their executions were carried out in what appeared to be ritual Masonic fashion by a group drawn from Irving’s Masonic network, Lord Salisbury who was Prime Minister at the time of the murders, and included Sir William Gull, and Lord Randolph Churchill (1849 –1895), father of future Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill.[2048]
Randolph Churchill was a close friend of fellow Mason, Baron Nathan Rothschild. Churchill was a descendant of the first famous member of the Churchill family, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Churchill’s legal surname was Spencer-Churchill, as he was related to the Spencer family, though, starting with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, his branch of the family used the name Churchill in his public life. Winston Churchill’s mother was Jennie Jerome, daughter of American Jewish millionaire Leonard Jerome.[2049] Known as the “King of Wall Street,” Jerome controlled the New York Times and had an interest in a number of railway companies and was a friend of William K. Vanderbilt.[2050] Through his mother’s family, several of Churchill’s ancestors had fought in the American Revolution on behalf of the American cause. As a result, in 1947, Churchill’s was admitted as a member of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Connecticut. Churchill, a Scottish Rite Freemason, was eventually invested as Knight of the Order of the Garter. He was also a member of the Ancient Order of Druids, created by Wentworth Little, founder of the SRIA.[2051]
According to author Stephen Senise, in Jewbaiter Jack The Ripper: New Evidence & Theory, it is not a coincidence that Britain’s most infamous unsolved crime is alleged to have been committed by a Jew, but were designed to tap that most ancient of anti-Semitic slanders, the “blood libel.” The murders took place in Whitechapel, a poverty-stricken slum in London’s East End and its surrounding neighborhoods almost exclusively Jewish, famously portrayed in Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto. In Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the den operated by Fagin, “the Jew” and ringleader of the boy thieves, was located in Whitechapel. Whitechapel was at the center of the huge late nineteenth century influx of Jewish immigration into Britain. In many parts of the East End, Jews constituted a majority of the local population. Sunday Magazine labeled the area “the Jewish colony in London.”[2052]
Baron Nathan Rothschild remarked, “…We have now a new Poland on our hands in East London. Our first business is to humanise our Jewish immigrants and then to Anglicise them”[2053] In 1885, Nathan Rothschild founded the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company, with of other prominent, Jewish philanthropists including Frederick Mocatta and Samuel Montagu, the MP of Whitechapel, to provide “the industrial classes with commodious and healthy Dwellings at a minimum rent.”[2054] The company set out to replace the lodging houses of Whitechapel with tenements, known as “Rothschild Buildings,” designed to house mostly Jewish tenants on Thrawl Street, Flower and Dean Street, and George Street in Spitalfields, just outside the City of London.[2055] Flower and Dean Street was one of the most notorious slums of the Victorian era, being described in 1883 as “perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis.”[2056]
Five victims—Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—whose murders took place between August 31 and November 9, 1888, are known as the “canonical five.” Since the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, rumors had been circulating that the killings were the work of a Jew dubbed “Leather Apron,” which had resulted in antisemitic demonstrations. In both the criminal case files and contemporary journalistic accounts, the killer was called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron. The name may be an allusion to the ceremonial aprons of Freemasonry, which were originally made of leather.[2057] One Jew, John Pizer, who had a reputation for violence against prostitutes and was nicknamed “Leather Apron” from his trade as a bootmaker, was arrested but released after his alibis for the murders were corroborated.[2058] Pizer had a prior conviction for a stabbing offence, and Police Sergeant William Thicke apparently believed that he had committed a string of minor assaults on prostitutes.[2059]
The murder scenes were all in close proximity to Jewish establishments. Buck’s Row was opposite Brady Street Ashkenazi Cemetery; on Hanbury Street was Glory of Israel and Sons of Klatsk Synagogue; on Berner Street was St. George’s Settlement Synagogue; and Mitre Square, where Catherine Eddowes was murdered, was beside the Great Synagogue; and Miller’s Court was beside Spitalfields Great Synagogue.[2060] After the murders of Stride and Eddowes in the early morning hours of September 30, Constable Alfred Long of the Metropolitan Police Force discovered a dirty, bloodstained piece of an apron in the stairwell of a tenement on Goulston Street in Whitechapel, most of whose residents were Jews.[2061] Goulston Street was within a quarter of an hour’s walk from Mitre Square, on a direct route to Flower and Dean Street where Eddowes lived. The cloth was later confirmed as being a part of the apron worn by Eddowes. Above it, there was writing in white chalk on either the wall or the black brick jamb of the entranceway, with the words, “the Juwes are the men that Will not be Blamed for nothing.” This graffito became known as the Goulston Street graffito.
In their book The Ripper File, Elyn Jones and John Lloyd noted that the word “Juwes” was actually a Masonic reference. In the ritual of Master Mason, Hiram Abif was slain by three ruffians collectively termed The Juwes. The three “Juwes” are named as Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum and obviously have a common root in Jubel. The ordeals attributed to the three ruffians mirror the mutilations of the victims. The throats of all the Ripper victims were cut. Chapman and Eddowes had their intestines thrown over their shoulders. In testimony, when Dr. Brown, the City Police surgeon was asked to comment on his statement that the intestines were “placed,” the coroner asked, “do you mean put there by design,” Brown answered in the affirmative.[2062] Likewise, as Jones and Lloyd shown, the crimes are similar to the account of the three “Juwes” who lamented their fate:
Jubela: that my throat had been cut across, my tongue torn out…
Jubelo: that my left breast had been torn open and my heart and vitals taken from thence and thrown over the left shoulder….
Jubelum that my body had been severed in two in the midst, and divided to the north and south…[2063]
However, acting as Police Commissioner, Warren feared that the Goulston Street graffito might spark anti-Semitic riots and ordered the writing washed away before dawn.[2064] While most historians put the police’s failure to catch the Ripper down to incompetence, as recently as 2015, a book about the case by Bruce Robinson, titled They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, criticized Warren as a “lousy cop” and suggested that a “huge establishment cover-up” and a Masonic conspiracy had been involved.
On October 17, after noticing that Warren had been claiming that “no language or dialogue is known in which the word Jews is spelled JUWES,” Robert Donston Stephenson (1841 – 1916), a journalist and military surgeon obsessed with the occult, wrote a letter to the City Police, claiming that a similar word did indeed exist.[2065] Stephenson, however, seemed to be toying with the police as he suggested the word was a misspelling of the French Juives, for “Jews.” Stephenson, who lived near the site of the murders at the time they were committed, wrote articles claiming to know the true identity of Jack the Ripper, and that the murderer would have to be a practician of “black magic,”, derived from Éliphas Lévi’s work Le Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie.[2066] Stephenson himself came under suspicion by the police and was arrested twice for the crimes but was released each time.
Stephenson also later fell under the suspicion of W.T. Stead. In a foreword to an article written by Stephenson in the April 1896 issue of Stead’s spiritualist journal Borderland, Stead writes that the author “prefers to be known by his Hermetic name of Tautriadelta,” and that he believed him to be Jack the Ripper. In the article itself, Tautriadelta claims to have been a student occultism under Edward Bulwer-Lytton.[2067] Stephenson lived in Whitechapel, in the same lodging house where Theosophist Mabel Collins and her occultist friend Vittoria Cremers lived. After having read the book Light on the Path by Collins, Cremers felt inspired to immediately join the Theosophical Society. In 1888, she travelled to Britain to meet Blavatsky, who asked her to take over the management of the Theosophical journal Lucifer. Cremers was soon introduced to the bisexual Mabel Collins, with whom she competed for attention with Stephenson. Cremers was also a disciple of Aleister Crowley and came to believe that Stephenson was Jack the Ripper, and that in a trunk under his bed she had found five blood-soaked ties, which had supposedly become stained as a result of his cannibalism. Accepting the story as true, Crowley came to regard Stephenson as a talented black magician, and later claimed to a member of the press that he met Stephenson who had given him the five ties.[2068]
Crowley reports that during his trip to America he met a man named Henry Hall who had interviewed Stead and confirmed his own diagnosis of him: “In walking down the street, Stead broke off every minute or two to indulge in a lustful description of some passing flapper and slobber how he would like to flagellate her.”[2069] Stead is mentioned in an unpublished article by Crowley, titled “Jack the Ripper,” where he recounts the story between Collins, Cremers and Stephenson. However, in his characteristically enigmatic style, Crowley began the article by stating that, “It is hardly one’s first, or even one's hundredth guess, that the Victorian worthy in the case of Jack the Ripper was no less a person than Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.” Then, he notes that “persons sufficiently eminent” in matters of occult knowledge possess an “overflowing measure the sense of irony and bitter humour” and “exercise it is notably by writing with their tongues in their cheeks or making fools of their followers.” Crowley goes on to explain that reports of fraud attached to Blavatsky only served to get rid of doubters among her followers that she had no need of. Crowley then goes on to recount a story that Cremers turned Collins against Stephenson, which is why the searched through his things.
Crowley also mentions an article that appeared in Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette by Tau Tria Delta, which proposed that the murders followed prescriptions found in the grimoires of the Middle Ages, whereby a sorcerer could attain “the supreme black magical power,” including the power of invisibility. Additionally, the location of each murder formed the shape of an upside-down pentagram pointing South. Finally, after a discussion with a crime expert of the Empire News, Crowley decided to explore the possible astrological significance of the murders, and wrote he discovered that, in every case, either Saturn or Mercury were precisely on the Eastern horizon. As Crowley explained, “Mercury is, of course, the God of Magic, and his averse distorted image the Ape of Thoth, responsible for such evil trickery as is the heart of black magic, while Saturn is not only the cold heartlessness of age, but the magical equivalent of Saturn. He is the old god who was worshiped in the Witches’ Sabbath.”[2070]
In 1901, on instructions from Herzl, Joseph Cowen asked William T. Stead to arrange a meeting with Cecil Rhodes, highlighting his excellent relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm II.[2071] The leaders of Zionism realized the pragmatism of securing the support of one of the European Great Powers for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Throughout the nineteenth century, not only had Germany had served as a haven, but also as a cultural and spiritual beacon for persecuted Jews from the ghettos of eastern Europe. And while largely east European in origin, the Zionist leadership was almost entirely German or German-educated Jews from eastern Europe, despite the overwhelmingly liberal, assimilationist, and anti-Zionist inclinations of German Jews. Berlin, in effect, emerged as an important center of the fledgling international Zionist movement. As explained by Francis R. Nicosia, in The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, it was in recognition of Germany’s growing political and economic ties to the Ottoman Empire and its strategic aims in the Middle East that “the Zionist movement sought to become a willing instrument in the formulation and pursuit of German foreign policy.”[2072]
Herzl’s friend Arminius Vambery was a strong supporter of British expansionism and also served as foreign consultant to Abdul Hamid II. In that position, he introduced Herzl to the Sultan in 1901. In his diaries, Herzl devotes many pages to describing his encounters with Vambery and repeatedly acknowledges his contributions to the Zionist cause. While Max Nordau claims that it was he who first introduced Herzl to Vambery in 1898, Herzl identified William Hechler (1845 – 1931), an English clergyman of German descent who became a close friend of Herzl, as the one who introduced him to Vambery in 1900 in his efforts to meet with the Sultan.[2073] It was also Hechler who assisted Herzl in his attempts to recruit Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Zionist cause. Hechler’s interest in Jewish studies and Palestine evolved under the influence of Restorationism, a term that was eventually replaced by Christian Zionism. He began developing his own eschatological theories and timelines for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. In 1854, Hechler returned to London and took a position with the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews.
By 1873, Hechler became the household tutor to the children of Frederick I, Grand Duke of Baden (1826 – 1907). Through Frederick’s son Ludwig, Hechler developed a relationship with the young Kaiser Wilhelm II. Hechler’s wife had been a student of one of the Kaiser’s closest friends and suspected homosexual lover Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg (1847 – 1921). Philipp was a diplomat and composer of Imperial Germany who achieved considerable influence through his friendship with the Kaiser, who shared his interest in the occult.[2074] Eulenburg became very close to the French diplomat, writer and racist Count Arthur de Gobineau, whom Eulenburg was later to call his “unforgettable friend.”[2075] Eulenburg was deeply impressed by Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.[2076] Gobineau would later to write that only two people in the world who properly understood his racist philosophy were Richard Wagner and Eulenburg.[2077]
In 1876, Gobineau accompanied his close friend Pedro II on his trip to Russia, Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Gobineau introduced him to both Emperor Alexander II of Russia and Sultan Abdul Hamid II. After leaving Pedro II in Constantinople, Gobineau traveled to Rome, Italy, for a private audience with Pope Pius IX.[2078] During his visit to Rome, Gobineau met and befriended the Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima.[2079] Wagner helped popularize Gobineau’s racial theories his newspaper Bayreuther Blätter. Gobineau in turn became a member of the Bayreuther Kreis (“Bayreuth Circle”), which included Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who became a close friend of Eulenburg, who shared Chamberlain’s love of Wagner’s music. Besides being a passionate Wagnerite, Eulenburg also found much to admire in Chamberlain’s anti-Semitic, anti-British and anti-democratic writings.[2080]
Eulenburg played an important role in the rise of Bernhard von Bülow (1849 – 1929), a German statesman who fell from power in 1907 due to the Harden–Eulenburg affair when he was accused of homosexuality. The Harden–Eulenburg affair was a scandal involving accusations of homosexual conduct among prominent members of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s cabinet and entourage during 1907–1909. The affair centered on journalist Maximilian Harden’s accusations of homosexual conduct between the Eulenburg and General Kuno, Graf von Moltke.[2081] Moltke was forced to leave the military service. Despite his anti-Semitism, during his time as Ambassador to Austria, Eulenburg engaged in a homosexual relationship with the Austrian Jewish banker Nathaniel Meyer von Rothschild (1836 – 1905), grandson of Salomon Mayer von Rothschild, founder of the Austrian branch of the family.[2082] Salomon retained ties with Prince Metternich. Salomon was also a member of the Frankfurt Judenloge.[2083]
Kaiser Wilhelm II as well was a known anti-Semite. Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II’s biographer noted that in 1888 a friend of his “declared that the young Kaiser’s dislike of his Hebrew subjects, one rooted in a perception that they possessed an overweening influence in Germany, was so strong that it could not be overcome.” Cecil concludes:
Wilhelm never changed, and throughout his life he believed that Jews were perversely responsible, largely through their prominence in the Berlin press and in leftist political movements, for encouraging opposition to his rule. For individual Jews, ranging from rich businessmen and major art collectors to purveyors of elegant goods in Berlin stores, he had considerable esteem, but he prevented Jewish citizens from having careers in the army and the diplomatic corps and frequently used abusive language against them.[2084]
Hechler’s Restorationist theology resonated with the Grand Duke of Baden, who would play a pivotal role in the history of the Zionist movement.[2085] While serving as Chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna, Hechler, who had read Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, visited Herzl in 1896. Hechler arranged an extended audience with the Grand Duke in 1896. The Grand Duke in turn spoke with Kaiser Wilhelm II in October 1898 about the Zionists’ ideas. Hechler arranged an introduction for Herzl to Eulenburg. On October 7, 1898, Eulenburg summoned Herzl to Liebenberg to announce that Wilhelm II wanted to see a Jewish state established in Palestine (which would be a German protectorate) in order to “drain” the Jews away from Europe, and thus “purify the German race.”[2086] In Berlin, Herzl had already negotiated with the German Chancellor Prince Hohenlohe, and with Eulenburg’s friend Bernard von Billow, the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, and he believed that a Jewish state in Palestine was close at hand. Through the efforts of Hechler and the Grand Duke, Herzl publicly met Wilhelm II in 1898. The Kaiser assured Herzl of his support for the Jewish protectorate under Germany. They decided that Herzl, and his associate Max Bodenheimer (1865 – 1940, the first president of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD) and one of the founders of the Jewish National Fund, and David Wolffsohn (1855 – 1914), the Cologne banker who was later elected to succeed Herzl as head of the WZO after his death in 1904, should head for the Near East.[2087] A week later, Herzl and the Kaiser met again in Jerusalem, at the village of Mikveh Israel, founded in 1870 by Charles Netter. The meeting significantly advanced Herzl’s and Zionism’s legitimacy in Jewish and world opinion. [2088]
Robert Cecil (1864 – 1958)—the cousin of Lord Arthur Balfour (1848 –1930), a member of the Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table and the author of the Balfour Declaration—who became Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, wrote to his colleagues: “I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews.”[2089] Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1863 – 1945), however, though a Christian Zionist, once described his colleague Herbert Samuel (1870 – 1963), a British Cabinet member and a secular Zionist as “a greedy, ambitious and grasping Jew with all the worst characteristics of his race.”[2090] Chaim Weizmann was aware of the full extent of Lord Balfour’s anti-Semitism, as Weizmann wrote of Balfour that, “He told me how he had once had a long talk with Cosima Wagner [wife of Richard Wagner] at Bayreuth and that he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.”[2091] “Many [gentiles] have a residual belief in the power and the unity of Jewry,” one of Weizmann’s followers observed many years later. “We suffer for it, but it is not wholly without its compensations.… To exploit it delicately and deftly belongs to the art of the Jewish diplomat.”[2092]
The Protocols of Zion emerged at a time of a flurry of anti-Masonic activity, as represented
by Là-bas (1891) by Joris-Karl Huysmann and Lucifer Unmasked (1895),
a collaborative work by the notorious Leo Taxil and Jules Doinel (1842 – 1902), who was initiated Master Mason in 1885 with “congratulations and
encouragement” from Albert Pike.[2093] In 1890, Doinel founded l'Église Catholique Gnostique, the official church
of the Martinist Order. Doinel had for some years frequented occult circles,
where he encountered the teachings of the Johannite Church of Fabré-Palaprat
and Eugène Vintras (1807 – 1875), who claimed to be the reincarnation of the
prophet Elijah and founded the Church of Carmel. Vintras was alleged to have incorporated
forms of sex magic in his rituals, which included naked celebrations of the
Mass, homosexuality, and magical prayers accompanied by masturbation.[2094] In 1888, the “Eon Jesus”
appeared to him in a vision and charged him with the work of establishing a new
church, spiritually consecrating him as “Bishop of Montségur and Primate of the
Albigenses.” After his vision, Doinel began attempting to contact Cathar and
Gnostic spirits during seances in the salon of Lady Caithness, Duchesse de
Medina Pomar. Lady Caithness was approached around 1882 by Blavatsky, Colonel
Olcott, and Annie Besant, to establish the French branch of the Theosophic
Society. She married, as his second wife, James Sinclair, 14th Earl of
Caithness (1821 – 1881), a respected scientist and inventor and was a Fellow of
the Royal Society.
Lady Caithness’ Theosophical Society of the East and West included the widowed Comtesse de Mnizech, Balzac’s stepdaughter, whose husband had been Éliphas Lévi’s heir. Her salons attracted Papus, Stanislas de Guaita and Oswald Wirth (1860 – 1943), another founding member of the OKR+C. Also belonging to the secret group were Edouard Schuré—a close friend of Richard Wagner, soon to be famous for his Les Grands Inities (1888)—and the Christian socialist Albert Jounet, a friend of the journalist Jules Bois (1868 – 1943), a notorious Satanist. Bois published a series of exposes on satanism, including Les petites religions de Paris (“The Small Religions of Paris”) and Le Satanisme et la magie (“Satanism and Magic”). It was likely at Lady Caithness’ salon that Bois met the famous actress and singer Emma Calvé (1858 – 1942), who would eventually become his lover.[2095] At the end of 1890, Doinel joined the Martinist Order and also became a member of its Supreme Council. Doinel started to consecrate a number of Bishops and Sophias, among the first who was Papus, as Tau Vincent, Bishop of Toulouse, in 1892, along with other leaders from the Martinist Order, OKR+C and the HBofL[2096]
After Oswald Wirth conveyed to Guaita some papers of Vintras’ successor Abbé Boullan (1824 – 1893), a friend of Bois, Guaita embarked on a “magical war,” known as the Boullan Affair. Boullan, an ordained priest with a doctorate from Rome, became the lover of a nun, Adèle Chevalier, who together traveled about dispensing cures compounded of feces and consecrated hosts. When Adèle gave birth to their bastard child, they sacrificed it as a mass on December 8, 1860. Although the murder remained undiscovered until much later, from 1861 to 1864 Boullan was sent to prison for selling fake medicines. In 1869, he was imprisoned again by the Holy Office in Rome, and composed his journal, the Cabier rose, which confirmed all the rumors about his Satanic crimes. Enough of the truth was revealed that he was finally defrocked by the archbishop of Paris in 1875.[2097]
Bois’ friend, J.K. Huysmans, who was associated
with the Symbolists, began an affair with Berthe Courtière, a friend of
Boullan. Courtière put him in touch with Boullan, sent Huysmans extensive materials on magic, incubi, and the black
mass, which he attributed to Stanislas de Guaita and the OKR+C. Guaita and other
occultists tried in vain to convince Huysmans that Bollan was lying. Boullan
inspired the character of Dr. Johannès in Huysmans’s Là-bas. The plot of Là
Bas concerns the novelist Durtal, who seeks relief from the banality of the
modern world and studies the life of Gilles de Rais, the notorious fifteenth-century
satanist. Through his contacts in Paris, notably Dr. Johannès, Durtal finds out that Satanism is also
alive in turn of the nineteenth-century France. The novel ends with what would
become the standard literary depiction of a Black Mass, based on combined
material Huysmans had received from Courrière, Bois, and Boullan. Huysmans and
Bois both went public with their accusations of satanism in 1893 following the
mysterious death of Boullan, whom Huysmans and Bois both accused Guaita of
murdering through the use of black magic, after which Guaita
summoned him to a gun duel. Both come out unscathed.
Là
Bas would also be used by the notorious Léo Taxil,
who denounced Albert Pike as the head of a Luciferian body over Freemasonry
called the Palladium Rite. Taxil, if he was in fact Dr. Bataille, the author of
Le Diable au XIXe siècle (“The Devil in the Nineteenth Century”), also
devoted a considerable part of the book to denouncing the satanism of Papus, Guaita and the Gnostic Church. Doinel was also a
member of a small occult circle, L’Institut d’études Cabalistiques
(“Institute for Kabbalistic Studies”), which included Taxil. In 1895, Doinel
suddenly converted to Roman Catholicism, abdicated as Patriarch of the Gnostic
Church, resigned from his Masonic Lodge, and the pseudonym “Jean Kostka,”
Doinel collaborated with Taxil a book called Lucifer Unmasked, denouncing
the organizations he had formerly been a part of. Doinel describes satanic rituals
at the private chapel of a “Madame X,” who was thought to be the Lady
Caithness.[2098] However, in 1900, three
years after Taxil confessed to his hoax, Doinel recanted and requested his
readmission as a Bishop in the Gnostic Church.[2099]
The influential Russian mystic, H.P. Blavatsky, who would inspire the Aryan fantasies of the Nazis, was a first cousin of Count Sergei Witte (1849 – 1915), a Russian statesman who served as the first prime minister of the Russian Empire, replacing the tsar as head of the government. Witte recalled in his memoirs conversations he had in Paris in 1903 with Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, who observed: “great events, especially of an internal nature, were everywhere preceded by the prevalence of a bizarre mysticism at the court of the ruler.”[2100] What the Baron Rothschild was referring to was a hub of activity in St. Petersburg, consisting of theosophists and synarchists headed by Papus, and including Witte, a patron of the theosophist Esper Ukhtomsky (1861 – 1921), who envisioned Nicholas II was the “White Tsar of Shambhala.”[2101] Nicholas II would become the last of the Romanov Tsars, when he was overthrown in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and he and the entire royal family, including his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children, were executed the following year.
To Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, the rapprochement between the Russia and England was a precondition for the synarchic union of the European rulers with the “university temple of Agarttha.”[2102] Saint-Yves was able to promote the idea of synarchism thanks to his excellent social connections among the ruling dynasties of Western Europe, Scandinavia and Russia through Nicholas II’s father, Tsar Alexander III.[2103] It was from these same circles—intersecting with the Theosophical Society, and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s main disciple, Papus—from which emerged the first example of the notorious The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purporting to detail a Jewish and Masonic plot for global domination. The Protocols were first published in Russian, in 1905, by Sergei Nilus, a pious extremist of the Russian Orthodox Church, and were reportedly the product of a secret meeting of leaders at the First Zionist Congress, the inaugural congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), held in Basel on August 29–31, 1897, and convened by Theodor Herzl.
According to his biographer Peter Grose, Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, who was in Constantinople at the time, discovered “the source” of the forgery which he then provided to The Times.[2104] In the first article of Peter Graves’ series, titled “A Literary Forgery,” the editors of The Times claimed to have proven that the Protocols were plagiarized from the work of Maurice Joly, The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Joly, however, has been reported to having been a Jew and a protégé of Adolphe Crémieux, founder of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and Grand Master of the Masonic Rite of Misraïm and Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of France, responsible for managing the high degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite within the Grand Orient of France.[2105] According to Norman Cohn’s analysis of the text, in Warrant for Genocide:
In all, over 160 passages in the Protocols, totaling two fifths of the entire text, are clearly based on passages in Joly; in nine of the chapters the borrowings amount to more than half of the text, in some they amount to three quarters, in one (Protocol VII) to almost the entire text. Moreover with less than a dozen exceptions the order of the borrowed passages remains the same as it was in Joly, as though the adaptor had worked through the Dialogue mechanically, page by page copying straight into his ‘protocols’ as he proceeded. Even the arrangement in chapters is much the same - the twenty-four chapters of the Protocols corresponding roughly with the twenty-five of the Dialogue. Only towards the end, where the prophecy of the Messianic Age predominates, does the adaptor allow himself any real independence of his model. It is in fact as clear a case of plagiarism - and of faking - as one could well desire.[2106]
In 1884, according to Victor Marsden, who produced the first English translation, a woman named Yuliana Glinka, a disciple of H.P. Blavatsky, hired Joseph Schorst-Shapiro, a member of Joly’s Misraïm Lodge, to obtain sensitive information, and purchased from him a copy of the Protocols, and subsequently gave them to a friend who passed them on to Sergei Nilus.[2107] The Protocols were first mentioned in the Russian press in April 1902 by the Saint Petersburg newspaper Novoye Vremya, written by a famous conservative publicist Mikhail Menshikov, who reported “how the lady of fashion [Glinka] had invited him to her house to see the document of vast importance. Seated in an elegant apartment and speaking perfect French, the lady informed him that she was in direct contact with the world beyond the grave and proceeded to induct him into the mysteries of Theosophy… Finally, she initiated him into the mysteries of the Protocols.”[2108]
W.T. Stead was connected to the Protocols through his friendship with the journalist and writer Juliette Adam another associate of Blavatsky and very close friend of Glinka. Adam joined the lodge La Clémente Amitié, at that time the most important lodge of the Grand Orient de France. In 1877, the lodge had about 250 members, including Gambetta and Maurice Joly, author of the Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a satire in protest against the regime of Napoleon III, enemy of the Carbonari. Juliette’s salon in Paris, where Gambetta played a leading role, was an active center of opposition to Napoleon III and became one of the most prominent republican circles. There, met Wagner’s mother-in-law Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, Louis Blanc, Georges Clemenceau, Gustave Flaubert, and Victor Hugo, which overlapped with the network around Joseph Cowen. She also encouraged the literary beginnings of Alexandre Dumas fils. Papus mentioned Adam as early as 1891/92 as a member of his Groupe Independant d’Études Ésoteriques, which he founded after leaving Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, and always spoke full of praise for her work.[2109]
Glinka was also an agent of Piotr Rachkovsky (1853 – 1910), Paris head of the Okhrana, the Russian secret service.[2110] Glinka was the granddaughter of a colonel whose Masonic affiliations had led to his arrest for involvement in the Carbonari-inspired Decembrists’ plot of 1825 against Tsar Nicholas I.[2111] In Paris, Glinka involved herself in the circles around Papus, became a close friend of Blavatsky and belonged to the Paris branch of her society, the Theosophical Society of East and West, headed by Lady Caithness.[2112]
According to Webb, in The Occult Establishment, Vsevolod Solovyov (1849 – 1903), who was also part of Adam’s circle, probably met Saint-Yves d’Alveydre personally in the year that he published The Mission of the Jews (1884).[2113] Vsevolod visited Paris in 1884 where he met Blavatsky, and came into contact with Master Morya, and collaborated with Blavatsky’s sister Vera Jelikovsky and her two daughters. By 1886, however, he became disillusioned and abandoned his plans to promote theosophy in Russia and denounced Blavatsky as a spy of the Okhrana. Of his later novels, the best known are The Magi (1889) and The Great Rosicrucian (1890), dealing with occultists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
It is generally believed that Vsevolod’s brother, Vladimir Solovyov (1853 – 1900), who was influenced by the Russian Rosicrucian tradition, was the first Russian philosopher to show a serious interest in Jewish Kabbalah.[2114] Paradoxically, Solovyov and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881) had inspired far-rightists of Imperial Russia to propagate the notion of Orthodox Christian superiority and warn of an impending apocalyptic battle between Russia at the head of all Slavs and conspiratorial international Jewry, where Russians would assume the role of Christ, and Jews would take the part of the Antichrist. Dostoevsky warned: “Their kingdom is approaching, their entire kingdom! The triumph of ideas is coming before which feelings of philanthropy, thirst for the truth, Christian feelings, national and even folk pride of the European peoples will flag” in the face of “materialism, the blind, lustful craving for personal material security.” Dostoevsky claimed that this collapse stood “‘near, in the doorway,’” in reference to Revelation 3:20, which foretells the destruction of the sinful world in great upheaval and chaos, after which the Kingdom of God will appear on earth.[2115]
The theme mentioned in Solovyov’s 1900 “A Short Tale of the Anti-Christ” was part of his Three Conversations. Solovyov discussed the “man of the future,” the Anti-Christ, in order “to reveal in advance the deceptive mask behind which the abyss of evil is hiding.” According to Solovyov, the Anti-Christ gains power with the help of Freemasons and the Comite permanent universel (Standing Universal Committee), referring to the Alliance israelite universelle.[2116] Solovyov’s interpretation of the Anti-Christ story deeply impressed Russian mystic Sergei Nilus, who became famous for disseminating the Protocols, which he received from Glinka, who was an agent of Piotr Rachkovsky.[2117]
It was purported forgers in Rachkovsky’s circle who were said to have made use of an earlier version of the Protocols discovered by Papus.[2118] As noted by James Webb, “All authorities on the Protocols have united in the opinion that the forgery emanated from the circle of Juliette Adam and the Nouvelle Revue,” which was ardently opposed to Count Sergei Witte and his policies.[2119] Adam was accused by the anti-Masons of also entertaining Fabre des Essarts, who succeeded Jules Doinel as head of the Église Catholique Gnostique. Doinel was also a disciple of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, from whom the author of The Secret of the Jews drew a considerable amount of material. Webb speculated that the author of The Secret of the Jews was Glinka, who may have turned against Saint-Yves and Papus, or left the Theosophical Society because it was anti-Christian.
The book’s premise follows the beliefs of Egyptian Rite Freemasonry, where Moses adapted the teachings of the Emerald Table of Hermes, which were inherited by the Essenes. The secret Jewish plot to undermine Christianity began during the First Crusade and the founding of the Templars, for the mystic mission of rebuilding the Temple of Solomon. Since that time, the Jewish secret cabal has been operating, under various names, including Gnostics, Illuminati, Rosicrucians, Martinist, and so on. The conspiracy was responsible for Humanism, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, the unification of Italy, and the 1848 International. According to the book, by 1895 the conspiracy was focused on encouraging liberalism, secularism, capitalism and the destruction of the aristocracy, and it called for the publication of a summary to expose the Jewish plot against the whole Christian world and against Russia in particular. Glinka handed the book to General Orzheyevsky, who was to pass it on to General Cherevin.
Two other women belonged to the occult community of Juliette Adam and Papus. The first was the Russian journalist and propagandist agent of Blavatsky’s publisher Mikhail Katkov, Olga Alekseevna Novikova (c. 1842 – 1925), a friend of William T. Stead. Stead dedicated an extensive biographical portrait to Novikova, highlighting her contributions to the realization of the British-Russian rapprochement.[2120] Novikova was one of the friends of Russian to provide a critique of the exaggerated claims published in The Times about the Russian pogroms of 1881–1882. The hatred of the “Talmudic Jew,” she proposed, arose not from religious bigotry, but as a response to the Jews’ insatiable greed, and their economic role as middlemen. Their behavior could be contrasted with that of the small Jewish Karaite sect, which, though Jewish, did not display these negative characteristics and were thus left untouched by the raging mobs. In effect, she summarized, “the Karaites are Russian citizens of the Hebrew faith. The Talmudists are aliens settled on Russian soil.”[2121]
Through Novikova, Stead also developed a friendship with Blavatsky in 1888, and claimed responsibility for having introduced her to Annie Besant, whom he referred to as “one of my most intimate friends,” leading to her conversion to Theosophy and eventual leadership of the movement.[2122] In the 1890s, Stead became increasingly interested in spiritualism. In 1893, Stead published the quarterly Borderland, whose focus was on spiritualism and psychical research, and which was regularly announced and specially reviewed in Papus’ Le Voile d’Isis. For his part, Papus compiled an address list of the circles established by Borderland and their members, which he grouped according to their occult abilities such as “clairvoyance, telepathy, occultism, automatic writing, etc.”[2123] In 1909, Stead invited Papus to consult a spirit in London.[2124]
The other person in this web was Princess Catherine Radziwill, born Catherine Rzewuska, niece of Ewelina Hańska, the famous wife of Honoré de Balzac and a disciple of Éliphas Lévi and a relative of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s wife, the Comtesse de Keller. In 1873, Catherine married the Polish-Lithuanian Prince Wilhelm Radziwill, whose great-great-grandfather was Marcin Mikolaj Radziwill (1705 – 81), who during his incarceration in Sluck, reportedly observed the Jewish dietary laws of kashrut, and even spent one night with Jacob Frank.[2125] Wilhelm was the grandson of Antoni Radziwill (1775 – 1833) and Princess Louise of Prussia, niece of Frederick II the Great. Ewelina was the sister of the writer Henryk Rzewuski and Russian spy Karolina Rzewuska, who was a friend of Alexander Pushkin and mistress of the Frankist poet Adam Mickiewicz.[2126]
At
the age of nine, Catherine was
sent by her father Adam Rzewuski to Paris to live with his sisters Ewelina and
Carolina Lacroix. When she was working as a prostitute at the age of sixteen, Delacroix
met Leopold II of Belgium, then aged 65, and embarked on a relationship that
was to last until his death in 1909. Through Ewelina and Carolina, Catherine
gained access to the Paris salons, where she met the cultural and literary
celebrities of the day, including Juliette Adam, with whom Catherine had worked
since 1882, when she returned to Paris from St. Petersburg. It was in the
circle around Adam in Paris, that Catherine also met her great cousin Comtesse
de Keller.[2127] In 1888, Catherine moved to St. Petersburg where she held a prominent
position at the Russian court and began an affair with Cherevin.[2128]
Anna de Wolska, a militant feminist of Polish descent and Papus’ lover since 1888, had succeeded in convincing Adam in the early 1890s to attend séances and to contribute to the journal L’Initiation.[2129] Anna was the daughter of Polish author, Kalikst Wolski (1816 – 1885). After his death, Kalikst name was usurped by the Okhrana, in order to publish anti-Semitic publications under his name. Rachkovsky had his name changed to “Kalixt de Wolski,” and made him the author of an anti-Jewish pamphlet, La Russie Juive (“Jewish Russia”), published in 1887 by the publisher Albert Savine, who had just published La France juive (“Jewish France”) by Édouard Drumont. La Russie juive was written during the pogroms of the 1880s, in which Kalikst accused the Jews of ultimately bringing the persecutions upon themselves. Referring to the writings Kniga kagala. Materialy dlja izučenija evreiskogo byta (“The Book of the Kahal. Materials for the Study of Jewish Life,” 1869) and Kniga kagala. Vsemirnyj evreiskij vopros (“The Book of the Kahal. The Global Jewish Question,” 1879) by Jacob Brafman, Wolski referred to the administrative establishment of the Kahal which he claimed revealed the conspiratorial aims of the Jews. As an example, using Goedsche’s chapter The Jewish Cemetery in Prague from Biarritz, he employed the fictitious speech delivered: “When we have become the sole owners of all the gold of the earth, the true power will pass into our hands, and then the promises made to Abraham will be fulfilled.”
In 1896, Stead arranged for Catherine Radziwill to meet with Cecil Rhodes. The Round Table was founded by Rhodes, an ardent believer in British imperialism, with Stead and Alfred Milner. Nathan Rothschild also funded Cecil Rhodes in the development of the British South Africa Company, and the De Beers diamond conglomerate. Rothschild administered Rhodes’ estate after his death in 1902, and helped to set up the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. While studying at Oxford, Rhodes became a member of the regular Apollo Lodge No. 357, Orient of Oxford, where he was elevated to Master Mason in 1877, at the age of 24. In that same year, Rhodes wrote down in a “Confession of Faith”:
I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. [...] the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars. [...] I look into history and read the story of the Jesuits. I see what they were able to do in a bad cause and I might say under bad leaders. In the present day I become the member of a Masonic Order. I see the wealth and power they possess, the influence they hold [...]. Why should we not form a secret society with but one object—the furtherance of the British Empire, for the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire. [...] To forward such a scheme, what a splendid help a secret society would be, a society not openly acknowledged, but who [sic!] would work in secret for such an object. [...] Let us form the same kind of society which should have its members in every part of the British Empire working with one object, and one idea, who should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands. [...] The Society should inspire and even own portions of the press, for the press rules the mind of other people.[2130]
To that end, in 1891, Rhodes met with three other men to discuss his plans for the creation of a secret society to advance his goals. One was Reginald Baliol Brett, later known as Lord Esher, friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and who would become the most influential adviser of kings Edward VII and George V. The other was William T. Stead. As Stead had explained to his wife in 1889:
Mr. Rhodes is my man! I have just had three hours talk with him. He is full of a far more gorgeous idea in connection with the paper than even I have had. I cannot tell you his scheme because it is too secret… His ideas are federation, expansion, and consolidation of the Empire... He took to me. Told me some things he has told no other man —save Lord Rothschild…[2131]
Shortly
after the meeting, Stead added Alfred Milner to the society. An ardent
imperialist, Milner in 1897 became high commissioner in South Africa and
governor of the Cape Colony and helped to bring about the South African War
(1899–1902). When Britain annexed the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in
1901 during the war, Milner left his post as governor of the Cape and took over
as administrator of those two Boer territories. Retaining the office of high
commissioner, he and the military commander, Lord Kitchener, negotiated the
Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 that ended both the war and the independence of
the two Boer republics.
Stead also held ambitions for the creation of a one-world government. Stead’s younger brother, Herbert, was a Christian mystic, who claimed to have experienced a vision of Christ. In early 1894, while praying for peace, Herbert heard what he believed was a divine voice, telling him to “Approach the Emperor of Russia: Through Him Deliverance will come.”[2132] Stead believed the voice Herbert had heard was a divine revelation and took up the cause of peace, calling in The Review of Reviews for a general European reduction of armaments and appealing for leadership to the Nicholas II, as “the peace-keeper of Europe.” On 24 August 1898, Nicholas II issued a rescript, calling for an international conference to for that very purpose. A month later, Stead left London to embark on a “Pilgrimage of Peace’ across Europe, and met a number of political leaders, among the Nicholas II. Stead’s pilgrimage included a visit to Rome, where he hoped to convince the Pope Leo XIII to join with the Tsar in helping lead his Peace Crusade, but he was not granted an interview.
Returning to London in November, Stead spearheaded a campaign to mobilize British public opinion in support of the Nicholas II’s rescript, though some denounced his scheme overly idealistic or as serving the interests of the Tsar. Nevertheless, in response to the Tsar’s rescript, representatives from twenty-six states, including the United Kingdom, accepted the invitation of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands to meet as an international conference in her capital, The Hague, to discuss peace, arbitration, the limitation of armaments, and the laws that should govern warfare. Along with the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions were among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the body of secular international law.
As explained by Stewart J. Brown, “Stead believed that he had been God’s principal agent in bringing about the conference.”[2133] Though the Conference did not achieve all he had hoped for, Stead hailed the convention as “the meeting of a Parliament of Man laying the foundations of the federation of the world.”[2134] “The work of the Twentieth Century,” he proclaimed, would be “the destruction of Nationalism Militant, the death-knell of which was sounded at the Conference of the Hague” and the spread of internationalism. As his brother Herbert described, Stead’s “culminating life-work was for ‘the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’.” After the Hague Conference, Herbert suggested to his brother a new motto for The Review of Reviews: “One World, One People, One Destiny.”[2135]
Radziwill left her husband in 1899 for an adventurous life which led her successively to England, then to South Africa, where she asked Rhodes to marry her. They initially became friends, but Rhodes, who some historians have suggested was homosexual, turned her down.[2136] Nevertheless, Rhodes paid her debts and sent her back to London. She took advantage of her trip to forge her signature on checks for 600,000 francs which she managed to cash.[2137] Prosecuted for forgery, she was sentenced to two years in prison in Cape Town in 1902, but was released after sixteen months, before returning to London in August 1903.[2138] But in Milner’s eyes, Catherine was “the most repulsive animal imaginable” and warned in capital letters, “She is Dangerous!” On another occasion, he remarked: “Strange how sex enters into these great matters of State. It always has. It always will. It is never recorded, therefore history will never be intelligible...” Milner also accused Radziwill of sowing discord between him and Rhodes, “by telling either party lies as to what the other had said about him.” She was a schemer in the service of hostile powers. As Markus Osterrieder remarked:
Whether Catherine Radziwill, who eventually stole confidential papers and forged Rhodes’s signature on checks and bills of exchange in Cape Town, really passed on information to Paris before her imprisonment in November, which was then incorporated into Papus’ “Niet” pamphlet, or whether Papus had learned details of Rhodes’ far-flung plans through Stead, remains unclear.[2139]
In
October 1901, Papus collaborated with an
anti-Semitic journalist Jean Carrère in producing a series of articles
in the Echo de Paris under the
pseudonym Niet (“no” in Russian). They described a “hidden conspiracy”
which had been responsible for the French Revolution and again the Unification
of Italy, concluding that, “Now, today, supremacy is ensured by the possession
of gold. It is the financial syndicates who hold at this moment the secret
threads of European politics.”[2140] Papus’ articles insinuated
that behind the cabal there was a secret Anglo-German, but by reference to the
House of Rothschild implicitly primarily “Jewish” conspiracy in Russia, in the
form of an all-powerful financial cartel: “A few years ago, therefore, a
financial syndicate was founded in Europe, which is now all-powerful, whose
supreme aim is to monopolize all the markets of the world, and which, in order
to facilitate its means of action, must fatally conquer political influence.
[...] the center is in London, and ... the most important branches are in
Vienna and Germany.” The most recent act of this cartel, he said, was the
monopolization of gold mines with the help of the war in Transvaal. As noted by
Markus Osterrieder, the naming of the Transvaal, annexed by the British Empire
at the end of the Second Boer War, makes it clear whom Papus had in mind as
organizers of the “cartel” in addition to Blavatsky’s cousin, Sergei Witte: the
prime minister of the Cape Colony, Cecil Rhodes, his friend, the governor of
the Cape Colony, Alfred Milner, and the banking complex of the Jewish
Rothschild family associated with them, and their co-conspirator Count Sergei
Witte, who was sponsored by Rachkovsky.[2141]
In August 1903, Vyacheslav Plehve (1846 – 1904), Minister of the Interior, passed on documents to Tsar Nicholas II that suggested Witte was part of a Jewish conspiracy. In that same month, Herzl visited St. Petersburg and was received by Witte and Plehve, to discuss a proposition that the Russian government request from the Turks a charter for Jewish colonization of Palestine. Witte assured Herzl that he was “a friend of the Jews.”[2142] As a result, Witte was removed as Minister of Finance.[2143] Plehve had organized the Kishinev pogroms of April of the same year, which focused worldwide condemnation of the persecution of Jews in Russia. The Kishinev pogrom led Herzl to advance a scheme proposed by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for a Jewish Colony in what is now Kenya, which became known as the “Uganda Project.” The plan was endorsed by the majority at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in August, 1903, but faced strong opposition from the Russian delegation particularly, who stormed out of the meeting. In 1905, the Seventh Zionist Congress declined the offer and committed itself to a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
A
story printed in 1920, in the “Organ of
the Democratic Idea,” asserted that Papus compiled a report for the Russian
Tzar—part of which included the Protocols
of the sittings of the secret Masonic Lodges—which detailed a conspiracy
against the Tsar on the part of Maître Philippe. This story goes on to say that Rachkovsky “spiced up this
sensational report so as to guarantee the desired effect.” Papus and Rachkovsky
were also apparently assisted in this endeavor by Adjutant General P.P. Gesse,
and the Dowager Empress, Marija Federovna, as spouse of Emperor Alexander III.[2144] Many authors maintain that it was Matvei Golovinski, the agent of Rachkovsky,
who in Paris in the early 1900s authored the first edition of the Protocols.[2145] Matvei’s father, Vasili Golovinski was a friend of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. According
to Radziwill, the original forgery was part of an endeavor to convince Tsar
Alexander III that the assassination of his father was part of a Jewish
conspiracy. The first draft was produced in 1884, under the inspiration of
General Orgewski, then head of the Third Section of Police. The draft was then
enlarged by Rachkovsky, Manasewitch-Maniuloff and Golovinski, who brought it to
Princess Radziwill and her friends, including Henrietta Hurlburt, an
anti-Semite who corroborated Radziwill’s story in an interview for The
American Hebrew, published by Philip Cowen, who was
involved in B’nai B’rith.
During a lecture she delivered in
1921 at Hotel Astor in New York, when members in the audience were offended
when the authenticity of her claimed pedigree was questioned by an unnamed
interrogator, Radziwill responded by saying: “I expect this attack. I expected
someone would say that the Jews had bought me for doing what I believe to be my
duty in making known the origin of these protocols.”[2146] Hotel Astor was a hotel on Times Square in Midtown Manhattan owned by William
Waldorf Astor (1848 – 1919), of the famous Astor family, descended from
German-born American businessman, John Jacob Astor (1763 – 1848), one of the
wealthiest people in history. Astor made his fortune mainly in a fur trade
monopoly, by smuggling opium into China, and by investing in real estate in or
around New York City. Washington Irving’s Astoria (1836), describes an
expedition sponsored by Astor to the mouth of the Columbia River and the
ultimate failure of attempts to establish a trading post for his Pacific Fur
Company at Fort Astoria. Times Square became one of the prized possessions of
John Jacob Astor, who made a second fortune in real estate as the city rapidly
spread uptown.[2147] Formerly known as Longacre Square, Times Square was renamed in 1904 after The
New York Times moved its headquarters to the then newly-erected Times
Building, now One Times Square. John Jacob’s son, William Backhouse Astor Sr.
(1792 – 1875), William Waldorf Astor’s grandfather, was a friend of the
philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.[2148] William Waldorf Astor made several business acquisitions while he lived in
London. In 1892, he purchased the Pall Mall Gazette, and in 1893
established the Pall Mall Magazine. In 1911, he acquired The Observer.
In 1912, he sold the Magazine, and in 1914 gifted the Gazette and
The Observer to his son Waldorf Astor (1879 – 1952), a member of the
Round Table.[2149]
Prior to the incident, Radziwill had already written a book about Rhodes, Cecil Rhodes, man and empire-maker (1918), defending his beliefs and policies. Stead was invited to speak at a Peace Congress at Carnegie Hall in 1912, having reputedly been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize that year, but he died with the sinking of the Titanic. He was last spotted alongside American tycoon John Jacob Astor IV (1864 – 1912), a cousin of William Waldorf Astor, clinging to a raft and his body was never recovered. Even After his death, through the medium Mrs. Foster Turner, Stead purportedly predicted the horrors of World War I, six months before its outbreak. Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes murder mysteries, also heard from Stead, who told Doyle that he and Cecil Rhodes had looked into Christ’s eyes and that Christ had told Stead to tell Arthur his work was holy, and that Doyle’s message was His.[2150]
In 1923, Wickham Steed (1871 – 1956) became editor of Stead’s Review of Reviews. From 1919 to 1922, Steed had been editor of The Times. In 1920, Steed had endorsed The Protocols as genuine, writing in an editorial in which he blamed the Jews for World War I and the Bolshevik regime and called them the greatest threat to the British Empire. However, he retracted his view on The Protocols in 1921, when Philip Graves, the Istanbul correspondent of The Times, based on a clue provided to him by Allen Dulles, future head of the CIA, exposed The Protocols as a forgery, largely plagiarized from Maurice Joly’s The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The Times were owned by Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (1865 – 1922), an admirer of Cecil Rhodes, who in 1911 had met Geoffrey Dawson (1874 – 1944), who had worked very closely with Alfred Milner in establishing the Round Table, who became editor the newspaper from 1912 to 1919.
Dawson was editor of The Times again after it was purchased by John Jacob Astor (1912 – 2001), brother of William Waldorf Astor, in 1922, following the death of its owner, Alfred Harmsworth. Waldorf Astor, who with his wife Nancy was a member of the Round Table, held regular weekend parties at their home Cliveden, a large estate in Buckinghamshire on the River Thames, whose members were known as the Cliveden Set. Guests of the Astors at Cliveden included Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Joseph Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw, von Ribbentrop, Mahatma Gandhi, Amy Johnson, F.D. Roosevelt, H.H. Asquith, T.E. Lawrence, Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, Henry Ford, the Duke of Windsor and the writers Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Edith Wharton.[2151] Those specifically associated with the Cliveden Set were mostly members of the Round Table, and included Lothian, Lord Halifax, Geoffrey Dawson, Samuel Hoare, Lionel Curtis, Nevile Henderson, Robert Brand and Edward Algernon Fitzroy, who was Speaker of the Commons. Nancy Astor and Philip Graves shared a friendship in T.E. Lawrence of Arabia.
Poale Zion was active in Britain during the war, and influential on the drafting by Sidney Webb and Arthur Henderson of the Labour Party’s War Aims Memorandum, recognizing the “right of return” of Jews to Palestine, a document which preceded the Balfour Declaration by three months.[2152] Sidney Webb (1859 – 1947), a co-founder of the London School of Economics, was an early member of the Fabian Society, the British socialist organization founded in 1884, along with his wife Beatrice, H.P. Blavatsky’s successor Annie Besant, and George Bernard Shaw. The Fabian Society was as a splinter group of the Fellowship of the New Life, composed of artists and intellectuals, which included Annie Besant and also members of the Society for Psychical Research. Fellowship members included Shaw, Besant, Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, Walt Whitman’s homosexual lover Edward Carpenter, and Havelock Ellis. Leading Fabians included Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells and Aldous’ brother Julian Huxley. Sidney and Beatrice Webb set up the Coefficients, a society which included Leo Amery and Alfred Milner, two core members of the Round Table, who would play a formative role in authoring the Balfour Declaration.[2153]
The Zionists were willing to not only tolerate anti-Semitic attitudes, but even exploited them to advance their goals. In particular, they were disposed to encouraging the perception that, in return for support for the Zionist colonization of the Holy Land, that they could be expected to exercise their enormous behind-the-scenes political influence—the kind of insidious power outlined in the Protocols of Zion—to induce the United States to enter the war, and the Russians to drop out of it. As historian Jonathan Schneer explained, “Zionists did not take this argument seriously. However, they encouraged the British governing elite in its belief that Jewish influence was a global force.”[2154] Therefore, the Balfour Declaration, issued by the British Government on November 2, 1917, and promising the land of Palestine to the Zionists, was, effectively, according to Schneer, in “How Anti-Semitism Helped Create Israel,” a bribe.[2155]
In July 1914, war broke out in Europe between the Triple Entente (Britain, France, and the Russian Empire) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and, later that year, the Ottoman Empire). With the British offensive from Egypt under General Allenby had moved into Palestine, and the German-Ottoman position in the Middle East was on the verge of collapse by the summer of 1917, many Zionists began looking to Great Britain for the fulfillment of their hopes. The German Zionist Richard Lichtheim (1885 – 1963) observed:
We owed Germany very much, but the course
of events in the war compelled Zionism to seek a connection with and help from
the Anglo-Saxon Powers… In
1917 the center of gravity of Zionist policy was moving more and more toward
London and Washington. This was the necessary result of military and political
developments, as well as the evident readiness of the British and American
governments to support Zionist wishes.[2156]
On October 4, 1917, United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour spoke to the War Cabinet in London, arguing that Germany was seeking to enlist the support of the Zionist movement, and proposed urgent the need to prepare an official British declaration of support for the Zionist cause. Much of Palestine had already been overrun by General Allenby’s army and his Arab allies, and Jerusalem was to fall in a month. On December 9, Balfour wrote the declaration, addressed to a close friend to Weizmann, Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, and the son of Baron Nathan Rothschild, who supported the Round Table, founded by Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner, W.T. Stead. The declaration, which was intended for transmission to the British Zionist Federation, stated:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Britain, in fact, had realized what might be gained by a declaration of support for Zionist cause in Palestine.[2157] All earlier Zionist efforts had limited success, as only 24,000 Jews were living in Palestine just prior to the emergence of Zionism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.[2158] As explained by Nahum Sokolow (1859 – 1936), an associate of Weizmann and a journalist and executive of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), in his History of Zionism: 1600–1918 (1919), “Many of the most important Jewish scholars arriving in England, and becoming in course of time the pride of English Jewry, were much attracted by the idea that England was the classical soil for a fruitful work in Palestine.”[2159] Among them was Moses Gaster, who had been a central figure of Hovevei Zion in Romania before he moved to England where he became chief Rabbi of the Bevis Marks Synagogue and helped establish the British Zionist Federation in 1899. Rising in worldwide Jewish affairs, he became vice-president of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, in 1897, and was a prominent figure in each succeeding congress. Visitors to Gaster’s home in London included Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud and his friend Vladimir Lenin.
When Herzl’s attempts to gain the support for a German protectorate in Palestine from the Kaiser Wilhelm II had failed, he turned to Great Britain in the same year, thereby creating the pro-British faction that was soon to be led by Chaim Weizmann, and result of the Balfour Declaration. In 1900, Herzl declared at the Fourth Zionist Congress, held in London, “England the mighty, England the free, will understand us and understand our aspirations. With England as starting point we could be certain that the Zionist idea will grow mightier and rise higher than ever before.”[2160] In 1901, on instructions from Herzl, Joseph Cowen, a founder and leader of the Zionist movement in Great Britain, asked Stead to intercede with Cecil Rhodes for a meeting, highlighting his excellent relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm II. When Kaiser Wilhelm II asked Theodor Herzl what he wished him to ask of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Herzl answered “A Chartered Company–under German protection,” to be modelled on the African country of Rhodesia, established by his idol Cecil Rhodes.[2161]
Herzl believed that Rhodes could secure the funds necessary for his attempt to offer Sultan Abdul Hamid II to pay off the debt of the Ottoman Empire in return for surrendering Palestine.[2162] In 1901, Herzl met again with the Abdul Hamid II, who turned down his offer to consolidate the Ottoman debt in exchange for a charter allowing the Zionists access to Palestine.[2163] The Sultan said:
Please advise Dr. Herzl not to make any serious move in this matter. I cannot give up even one small patch of land in Palestine. It is not something that I own as a part of my personal estate. Palestine in fact belongs to the Muslim Nation as a whole. My people have fought with their blood and sweat to protect this land. Let the Jews keep their millions and once the Caliphate is torn apart one day, then they can take Palestine without a price. To have the scalpel cut my body is less painful than to witness Palestine being detached from the Caliphate state and this is not going to happen…
During his
talks with the sultan, Kaiser Wilhelm II spoke favorably of Zionism, its efforts
to secure a homeland for the Jews in Palestine and the potential economic
benefits that Jewish settlement of Palestine could produce for the Ottoman
Empire. And, after the Sultan rejected Herzl’s offer, the Kaiser immediately lost
his initial enthusiasm for Zionist cause, and the German Foreign Office
concluded that the matter should be officially dropped so as not to alienate
the Ottoman government. The Germans were not convinced
by the Zionist argument that Germany’s strategic interests in the Middle East
were best served by the realization of Zionist aims in Palestine. As early as
December, 1898, Herzl had indicated in a letter to his friend the Grand Duke of
Baden that the Zionist movement might seek the support and protection of Great
Britain.[2164]
When Herzl’s initial attempts frustrated, the Round Table embarked on a plan to use British imperialisms during War World I to appropriate the Holy Land for Zionist settlement. Immediately following their declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, the British War Cabinet began to consider the future of Palestine. Baron Edmond James de Rothschild’s son, James de Rothschild (1878 – 1957), requested a meeting with Weizmann on November 25, 1914, to enlist him in gaining influence over those within the British government who might be receptive to their Zionist agenda.[2165] Through James’ wife Dorothy, Weizmann was to meet Rózsika Rothschild, who introduced him to the English branch of the family, in particular her husband Nathaniel Charles (1877 – 1923) and his older brother Walter, a former Member of Parliament. Zionism was first discussed at the British Cabinet level on November 9, 1914, four days after Britain’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire. David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, “referred to the ultimate destiny of Palestine.” A decade before, Lloyd George’s law firm Lloyd George, Roberts and Co had been engaged by the British Zionist Federation to work on the Uganda Scheme.
In a discussion after the meeting with Herbert
Samuel, Lloyd George assured him that “he was very keen to see a Jewish state
established in Palestine.”[2166]
On December 10, 1914, Weizmann met with Samuel, who believed Weizmann’s demands
were too modest, and “that perhaps the Temple may be rebuilt, as a symbol of
Jewish unity, of course, in a modernized form.”[2167] Two
days later, Weizmann met Balfour again, for the first time since their initial
meeting in 1905. A month later, Samuel circulated a memorandum entitled The
Future of Palestine to his Cabinet colleagues, in which he declared that that
incorporation into the British Empire would be the solution “which would be
much the most welcome to the leaders and supporters of the Zionist movement
throughout the world.”[2168]
In a discussion after the meeting, Lloyd George assured Samuel that “he was
very keen to see a Jewish state established in Palestine.”[2169]
It was the first time in an official record that enlisting the support of Jews
as a war measure was proposed.[2170]
Samuel discussed a copy of his memorandum with Nathan Rothschild in February
1915, a month before the latter’s death.[2171]
Many further discussions followed, including the initial meetings in 1915–16
between Lloyd George and Weizmann, which Lloyd George later recalled being “fount
and origin” of the declaration.[2172]
In terms of British politics, the Balfour Declaration resulted from the coming into power of Lloyd George and his Cabinet, which had replaced the H.H. Asquith led-Cabinet in December 1916. Lloyd George and Balfour, who was appointed as his Foreign Secretary, favored a post-war partition of the Ottoman Empire as a major British war aim.[2173] Lloyd George’s War Cabinet included only four other members: Andrew Bonar Law and Arthur Henderson, and Garter knights George Curzon and Alfred Milner. The British military was represented by Leo Amery (1873 – 1955), an original member of the Round Table, who as a parliamentary under-secretary in Lloyd George’s national government. Amery, who was of Hungarian Jewish descent, was also an active Freemason.[2174] Amery and Milner had been a member of the Coefficients, set up in 1902 by the Fabian Society founders Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Members included Halford Mackinder, Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells. It was Amery, acting on behalf of Milner, who recruited Mackinder (1861 – 1947), the father of geopolitics, to conduct research into imperial matters.[2175] Amery was also a member of the “X Committee,” a secret organization set up to keep Milner as the de facto member of the inner-circle of decision-makers, when he became Secretary of War during World War II. The committee, who met regularly to decide war policy, maintained contact with the British War Cabinet and included Lloyd George, Henry Wilson and Amery as secretary.[2176]
Following the change in government, Mark Sykes (1879 – 1919) was promoted into the War Cabinet Secretariat with responsibility for Middle Eastern affairs. By the end of the month, he had been introduced to Weizmann and Sokolow. The first negotiations between the British and the Zionists took place at a conference on February 7, 1917, at Moses Gaster’s home in London and included Sykes, Weizmann, Nahum Sokolow, Baron Walter Rothschild, Herbert Samuel. It was Sykes’ idea that the Zionists draft a declaration that would be sent to Lord Rothschild, who would then recommend it Balfour, who in turn would reply to Rothschild on behalf of the British Government.[2177] Sykes concluded, “With ‘Great Jewry’ against us,” he warned, there would be no possibility of victory, as the power of the Zionists was “atmospheric, international, cosmopolitan, subconscious and unwritten, nay often unspoken.”[2178]
Balfour met Weizmann at the Foreign Office on 22 March 1917. Weizmann explained at the meeting that the Zionists had a preference for a British protectorate over Palestine, as opposed to an American, French or international arrangement; Balfour agreed, but warned that “there may be difficulties with France and Italy.”[2179] Following the United States’ entry into the war on April 6, 1917, the Balfour led a mission to Washington, DC and New York, where he discussed Zionism with President Wilson’s ally, Louis Brandeis, who had been appointed as a Supreme Court Justice a year previously.[2180] By June 13, 1917, it was acknowledged by Ronald Graham, head of the Foreign Office’s Middle Eastern affairs department, that the three most relevant politicians Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Robert Cecil, were all in favor of Britain supporting the Zionist movement. On the same day, Weizmann had written to Graham to advocate for a public declaration.[2181] Six days later, at a meeting on June 19, Balfour asked Lord Rothschild and Weizmann to submit a formula for a declaration. The decision to release the declaration was taken by the British War Cabinet on October 31, 1917. Also consulted was President Woodrow Wilson. Amery and Milner were among the authors of the Balfour Declaration. Amery helped draft the Balfour Declaration, an idea proposed by Milner. Weizmann helped to draft the declaration, along with the assistance of Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and Rabbi Stephen Wise, all leading Zionists and known Sabbateans.[2182]
According to Gerald Henry Fitzmaurice (1865 – 1939), who was appointed British consul to Constantinople and served as a British dragoman before the war, the Dönmeh Jews—descendants of the followers of Shabbetai Zevi who feigned conversion to Islam—now controlled the Ottoman government, and their goal was to hand Palestine over to the Zionists. Fitzmaurice therefore proposed that, Britain should promise Palestine to the Jews immediately, in return for the Dönmeh withdrawing their support from the Ottoman government, which would then inevitably collapse. Fitzmaurice, then attached to the intelligence division at the British Admiralty, lobbied Hugh James O’Bierne, an experienced and well-respected British diplomat, who responded positively. On February 28, 1916, O’Bierne composed the first Foreign Office memo linking the fate of Palestine with both Zionist interests and British chances of victory in World War I.[2183]
From the middle of the nineteenth century, the British had worked to develop an alliance between several leading Sufi orders in Turkey, such as the Bektashi who had strong associations with the Dönmeh, as well as the Naqshbandi, and the Scottish Rite Freemasons of Afghani and his followers.[2184]Afghani also had been part of the creation of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)—a Masonic political party, also known as the Young Turks—who carried out a military coup against the crumbling regime of Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman Sultan, who was overthrown, and the Young Turks ultimately seized power over the Ottoman Empire in 1908. The failure of the Young Ottoman policies in reversing the decline of the Ottoman Empire led groups of intellectuals to search for other means. One of these groups was the Young Turks The Young Turks regarded themselves the heirs of the secret organization known as the Young Ottomans, formed in 1865, which drew its inspiration from the Carbonari societies founded by Mazzini, like Young Europe, Italy, Spain and Poland. The Young Turks regarded themselves the heirs of the secret organization known as the Young Ottomans, formed in 1865, which drew their inspiration from the Carbonari societies founded by Mazzini, like Young Europe, Italy, Spain and Poland.
The Young Turks were created in the 1890s by a prominent Sephardic Jewish family in Ottoman Salonika (modern Thessaloniki, Greece) and an official of the Italian B’nai B’rith, named Emmanuel Carasso. Carasso was also the grand master of an Italian masonic lodge there called “Macedonia Resurrected.” The lodge was the headquarters of the Young Turks, and all the top Young Turk leadership were members. The Italian masonic lodges in the Ottoman Empire had been set up by a follower of Mazzini named Emmanuel Veneziano, who was also a leader of the European affiliate of the B’nai B’rith, as well as the Alliance Israëlite Universelle.[2185] The Zionist leadership also hoped that the influence of the Young Turks within the Ottoman government would demonstrate greater sympathy for Zionist aspirations in Palestine.[2186] In 1908, the Berlin Executive office of the WZO, sent Jabotinsky to the Ottoman capital Constantinople where he became editor-in-chief of a new pro-Young-Turkish daily newspaper Le Jeune Turc (“Young Turk”) which was founded and financed by Zionist officials like WZO president David Wolffsohn and his representative in Constantinople Victor Jacobson.[2187]
The Young Turks were largely comprised of the Dönmeh—the crypto-Sabbateans of the community of secret Jews descended from the followers of Shabbetai Zevi who converted to Islam. In The Dönmeh: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries and Secular Turks, Professor Marc David Baer wrote that many Dönmeh advanced to exalted positions in the Bektashi and Mevlevi Sufi orders.[2188] Writing in 1906, H.N. Brailsford said of the Bektashi, “their place in Islam is perhaps most nearly analogous to that of Freemasonry in Christianity and noted that “Bektashis themselves like to imagine that the Freemasons are kindred spirits.”[2189] Richard Davey, author of The Sultan and His Subject, published in 1897, wrote “[The Bektashi] are even said to be affiliated to some of the French Masonic Lodges. One thing is certain; the order now consists almost exclusively of gentlemen of education, belonging to the Liberal, or Young Turk party.”[2190] According to historian Marc David Baer, the Young Turks “wholeheartedly embraced theories of race, although they rearranged the hierarchies to place Turks on top. By 1906, Turkish nationalism based on the pseudoscientific race theories of Europe had become the guiding ideology of the CUP.”[2191]
Through the influence of the Bektashi Sufis, the Young Turks adopted an ideology of Pan-Turkism, which aspired towards reviving shamanism as the true religion of the Turkish heritage. Pan-Turkism was developed by Arminius Vambery, a friend of Theodor Herzl and a source for Golden Dawn member Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vambery was inspired by Alexander Csoma de Körös (1784/8 – 1842), who was an important source for Blavatsky, and the first in the West to mention Shambhala, which he regarded as the source of the Turkish people, and which he situated in the Altai Mountains and Xinjiang. In Turkish nationalist mythology, Ergenekon, which is related to the synarchist myth of Agartha, is the name of an inaccessible valley in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, where the remnants of a number of Turkic-speaking tribes regrouped following a series of military defeats at the hands of the Chinese and other non-Turkic peoples, where they were trapped for four centuries. Under the leadership of Bumin Khan (died c. 552), they expanded and founded what has come to be known as the Göktürk Empire. According to legend, they were able to leave Ergenekon when a blacksmith created a passage by melting rock, allowing the grey wolf named Asena to lead them out.[2192]
Among the favorite European authors of the Pan-Turkists were Nietzsche and Gobineau.[2193] According to historian Marc David Baer, the Young Turks “wholeheartedly embraced theories of race, although they rearranged the hierarchies to place Turks on top. By 1906, Turkish nationalism based on the pseudoscientific race theories of Europe had become the guiding ideology of the CUP."[2194] Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks expanded on the ambitions of Pan-Turkism and tried to replace the lost legacy with a new Turkish commonwealth. The legend of Agartha was therefore promulgated by Kemal Ataturk (c. 1881 – 1938), the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, who sought to create a sense of nationalism to replace the religion of Islam as the primary identity of the new Turkish secular regime.[2195] In Salonika, Greece, the heartland of the Dönmeh community, Turkish Freemasonry and the Young Turks, many Jews claimed that Ataturk was a Dönmeh.[2196]
From without, the final dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate was accomplished by exploiting the treachery of the Arab Muslims of the Hijaz, who rose up in a large-scale insurrection, known as the Arab Revolt. Based on the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, exchanged between Henry McMahon of the United Kingdom and Hussein bin Ali of the Kingdom of Hejaz, the rebellion against the Ottoman Empire was officially initiated at Mecca on June 10, 1916. The British government had promised to recognize an independent and unified Arab state stretching from Aleppo to Aden. Led by Hussein and the Hashemites with backing from the British, the Arabs successfully fought and expelled the Ottoman military presence from much of the Hejaz and Transjordan. By 1918, the rebels had captured Damascus and proclaimed the Arab Kingdom of Syria, a short-lived monarchy that was led by Hussein’s son Faisal I. However, the British betrayed their Arab allies, having secretly signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement with France. Instead, the Arab-majority Ottoman territories of the Middle East were broken up into a number of League of Nations mandates, jointly controlled by the British and the French. The agreement allocated to the UK control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, and an additional small area that included the ports of Haifa and Acre to allow access to the Mediterranean. France was to control southeastern Turkey, the Kurdistan Region, Syria and Lebanon.
The British Foreign Office had set up a special branch for Jewish propaganda within the Department of Information, under the direction of an active Zionist, Albert Montefiore Hyamson (1875 – 1954). In April 1917, Hyamson was made the editor of The Zionist Review, the newspaper published by the British Zionist Federation. In October of that year, Jabotinsky proposed a Jewish Bureau for the UK government’s Department of Information, however as Jabotinsky was occupied with organizing the Jewish Legion, the role fell to Hyamson. His work at the Bureau involved distributing propaganda materials to Jewish communities around the world through local Zionist organizations and other intermediaries, while leaflets containing the text of the Balfour Declaration were dropped over German and Austrian territory. After the capture of Jerusalem in December, 1917, pamphlets were circulated among Jewish troops in the German and Austrian armies, which read:
Jerusalem has fallen! The hour of Jewish
redemption has arrived…
Palestine must be the national home of the Jewish people once more… The Allies are giving the land of Israel
to the people of Israel. Every loyal Jewish heart is now filled with joy for
this great victory. Will you join them and help to build a Jewish homeland in
Palestine?... Stop fighting the Allies, who are
fighting for you, for all Jews, for the freedom of all small nations. Remember!
An Allied victory means the Jewish people’s
return to Zion.[2197]
Jabotinsky’s main demand was the creation of Greater Israel, which the Revisionists equated to the whole territory covered by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, including Transjordan. In its early years, under Jabotinsky’s leadership, Revisionist Zionism was focused on gaining support from Britain for settlement. Jabotinsky expressed this ideology as “every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arab and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state.”[2198] Jabotinsky openly acknowledge his Zionist agenda as a colonial one:
[It is the] iron law of every colonizing movement, a law which knows of no exceptions, a law which existed in all times and under all circumstances. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else–or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempts to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not “difficult,” not “dangerous” but impossible!... Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot—or else I am through with playing at colonization.[2199]
Leo Amery encouraged Jabotinsky in the formation of the Jewish Legion for the British Army, a group primarily of Zionist volunteers, assisted in the British conquest of Palestine. In November 1914, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi proposed to the Ottoman commander in Jerusalem that a Jewish Legion could be raised to fight with the Ottoman Army. The proposal was approved and training began but was soon cancelled by Djemal Pasha, who became known for persecuting Zionists. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi were among thousands of Jews deported. In February 1915, a small committee in Alexandria approved a plan of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor (1880 – 1920) to form a military unit from Russian Jewish émigrés from Palestine that would participate in the British effort to seize Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. The British commander General Maxwell said he was unable, under the Army Act, to enlist foreign nationals as fighting troops, but that he could form them into a volunteer transport Mule Corps. Jabotinsky rejected the idea and left for Europe to seek other support for a Jewish unit, but Trumpeldor accepted it and began recruiting 650 volunteers from among the local Jews in Egypt and those who had been deported there by the Ottomans in the previous year, which the British Army formed of them into the Zion Mule Corps. 562 served in the Gallipoli Campaign. Almost all the members of the Jewish regiments were discharged immediately after the end of the First World War in November 1918. Some of them returned to their respective countries, others settled in Palestine to realize their Zionist aspirations, among them the future first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.
On 25 April 1920, the Principal Allied Powers agreed at the San Remo conference to allocate the Ottoman territories to the victorious powers and assigned Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq as Mandates to Britain, with the Balfour Declaration being incorporated into the Palestine Mandate. The leaders of the Zionist Commission, founded in 1918 and headed by Weizmann, had contributed to the drafting of the Mandate.[2200]Arab opposition to British rule and Jewish immigration led to the 1920 Palestine riots and the formation of a Jewish militia known as the Haganah (“The Defense”), from which the Irgun and Lehi paramilitaries would later split off. In 1922, the League of Nations granted Britain the Mandate for Palestine under terms which included the Balfour Declaration with its promise to the Jews, and with similar provisions regarding the Arab Palestinians.
The Haganah came under the control of the Jewish Agency for Israel, formerly known as the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the largest Jewish non-profit organization in the world. It was established in 1929 as the operative branch of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Chaim Weizmann was the leader of both the WZO and the Palestine Zionist Executive until 1929. The Palestine Zionist Executive was charged with facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine, land purchase, and planning the general policies of the Zionist leadership. It ran schools and hospitals, and formed the Haganah. In 1921, Jabotinsky was elected to the executive of the agency, but he resigned in 1923, accusing Weizmann of not being vigorous enough with the Mandatory Government.[2201]
After his split with Weizmann, Jabotinsky established a new revisionist party called Alliance of Revisionists-Zionists and its Zionist youth paramilitary organization Betar. From 1923, Jabotinsky was editor of the revived Jewish weekly Rassvet (“Dawn”), published first in Berlin, then in Paris, where he served as a column writer at the Posaldina Novosti, the most popular Russian exile newspaper in Paris, where he worked closely with some of the members of the Northern Star Masonic lodge. Following the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, all the Masonic lodges in Russia were closed and their members were exiled or fled from Russia. Members of Northern Star lodge met again in Paris and were part of the Russian exile community in Paris. Jabotinsky was asked to join and he agreed.[2202]
The Jewish National Council (JNC), also known as the Jewish People’s Council, was the main national executive organ of the Assembly of Representatives of the Jewish community (Yishuv) within Mandatory Palestine. The Assembly of Representatives was the elected parliamentary assembly of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, established on April 19, 1920. The Assembly met once a year to elect the executive body, the Jewish National Council, which was responsible for education, local government, welfare, security and defense. Since 1928, the JNC was also the official representative of the Yishuv to the British Mandate government. It operated until 1948, when its functions were passed to the newly-established state of Israel.
The first chairman of the Jewish National Council (JNC) was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865 – 1935), the spiritual father of Religious Zionism, and the first Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine. Kook’s maternal grandfather was a follower of the Kapust branch of the Hasidic movement, founded by the son of the third rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (1789 – 1866), also known as the Tzemach Tzedek, and the third rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement. The ideas of Rabbi Luria, explain Shahak and Mezvinsky, also greatly influenced Rabbi Kook and his son Zwi Yehuda Kook (1891 – 1982), who also became a prominent ultranationalist Orthodox rabbi. Kook was a mystical thinker who drew heavily on Kabbalistic notions through his own poetic terminology. His writings are concerned with fusing the false divisions between sacred and secular, rational and mystical, legal and imaginative. Kook drew heavily on Kabbalistic notions through his own poetic terminology. His writings are concerned with fusing the false divisions between sacred and secular, rational and mystical, legal and imaginative.
Rabbi Kook, who is considered one of the first exponents of Religious Zionism, justified Zionism according to Jewish law, and urged young religious Jews to support efforts to settle the land, and the secular Labour Zionists to give more consideration to the religion of Judaism. Religious Jews tended to disapprove of the Zionists because many of them were secular Jews or atheists, taking their cue from Marxism. Religious Zionists believe that the real justification for the colonization of Land of Israel is God’s promise to the ancient Israelites. The ideology of the Rabbi Kook and his son Yehuda, which is both eschatological and messianic, resembling similar expectations among Christians and Muslims, assumes the imminent coming of the Messiah and asserts that the Jews, aided by God, will thereafter triumph over the non-Jews and rule over them forever. All current political developments will either accelerate his arrival or postpone it. The sins of the Jews, particularly a lack of faith, could postpone the advent of the Messiah. That delay, however, will be brief in duration, because even the worst sins of the Jews will not deter the course of Redemption. The two world wars, the Holocaust and other calamities that have recently afflicted the Jews are examples of punishment. The elder Rabbi Kook did not withhold his approval over the loss of lives in World War I, explained that the death toll was necessary “in order to begin to break Satan’s Power.”[2203]
In an additional act of treachery, the British also intended to remove Sharif Hussein and have the Hijaz ruled instead by their long-standing Wahhabi ally Ibn Saud, who had no interest in the Caliphate. While the Hashemites, Hussein, Faisal and Abdullah, were backed by the Arab Bureau, their enemy Ibn Saud was also receiving British backing. The first formal treaty between Ibn Saud and the British had been signed in 1915. Although the Saudis present themselves to the world as Sunnis and defenders of the Islamic faith, they are in fac followers of a deviant set known as Wahhabism, founded in the eighteenth century by a British agent name Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab (c. 1703 – 1792), who colluded with Ibn Saud’s ancestor, also known as Ibn (1687 – 1765), to create the First Saudi State, which was defeated by the forces of the Ottoman Empire in 1818.
The US Department of Defense released a translation of an Iraqi intelligence document in September 2002, titled “The Emergence of Wahhabism and its Historical Roots,” which indicates that Abdul Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, and his sponsor ibn Saud, who created the Saudi dynasty that now rules Saudi Arabia, were reported by several sources as being secretly of Jewish origin.[2204] The Iraqi intelligence documents also resort to the Hempher Memoirs, and, citing numerous Arabic sources, connect Wahhab and Ibn Saud with the Dönmeh of Turkey. Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, wrote Dr. Mustafa Turan in The Dönmeh Jews, was a descendant of a family of Dönmeh.[2205] Turan maintains that Abdul Wahhab’s grandfather, Sulayman was actually Shulman, having belonged to the Jewish community of Bursa in Turkey. From there he settled in Damascus where he feigned Islam but was apparently expelled for practicing sorcery. He then fled to Egypt, where he again faced condemnation and so made his way to the Hijaz, in the western portion of the Arabian Peninsula, where he got married and fathered Abdul Wahhab’s father. The same is claimed in The Dönmeh Jews and the Origin of the Saudi Wahabis, by Rifat Salim Kabar.[2206]
The Aniza tribe—to which the Saudis as well as the ruling Sabah family of Kuwait belong—originally issued from Khaybar in Arabia, which was initially inhabited by Jews before Islam. A report of the Saudi family also being of Jewish ancestry was published by Mohammad Sakher, who, it is claimed, was ordered killed by the Saudi regime for his revelations. The Wahabi Movement/The Truth and Roots, by Abdul Wahhab Ibrahim al-Shammari, relates a similar account to Sakher’s according to which Ibn Saud is apparently descended from Mordechai bin Ibrahim bin Mushi, a Jewish merchant from Basra. Apparently, when this Mordechai was approached by members from the Arabian tribe of Aniza, he then claimed to be one of them and traveled with them to Najd where his name became Markhan bin Ibrahim bin Musa.[2207]
British collusion in Wahhab’s mission is detailed in a work that appeared in the 1970s entitled Memoirs of Mr. Hempher. The work has been dismissed by critics as a hoax, but already in 1888, Ayyub Sabri Pasha, a well-known Ottoman writer and Turkish naval admiral who served the Ottoman army in the Arabian Peninsula, recounted Abdul Wahhab’s association and plotting with a British spy named Hempher, who “inspired in him the tricks and lies that he had learned from the British Ministry of the Commonwealth.”[2208] Whatever the case may be, the absurdity of Abdul Wahhab’s claims and the direction and ramifications of his pronouncements point to the fact that he was, in one way or another, in the service of British colonialism. Most importantly, despite their fervent disavowals, the mission of the Wahhabis only managed to survive against adversity from other Muslims through British support.
Assigned to assist him was Harry St. John “Jack” Philby, a protégé of E.G. Browne. Philby, who made a feigned conversion to Islam, taking on the name “Abdullah,” was responsible for conveying to Ibn Saud his monthly retainer of £5,000. Philby also escorted Ibn Saud’s teenage son, the future King Faisal, on a tour of London, including a visit to E.G. Bowne and Scawen Blunt, who worked closely with Jamal ud Din al Afghani.[2209] Then, assisted with British support, Ibn Saud defeated Hussein in 1924. The conquest of Arabia by the Wahhabis, however, came at the cost of 400,000 killed and wounded. Cities such as Taif, Burayda, and al Hufa suffered all-out massacres carried out by the Ikhwan, Ibn Saud’s notorious Wahhabi henchmen. The governors of the various provinces appointed by Ibn Saud are said to have carried out 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations. Ibn Saud’s cousin, Abdullah ibn Musallim ibn Jilawi, the most brutal among the family, set about subjugating the Shia population, by executing thousands.
Afghani and his disciple Mohammed Abduh had long supported the plan of the British to create an Arab Caliphate to replace the Ottoman one. Rashid Rida, another Freemason who after the death of Afghani in 1897, and Abduh in 1905, assumed the leadership of the Salafi movement, had also supported the plot. Therefore, after a visit to the newly conquered Arabian Peninsula, Rida did his part to legitimize Ibn Saud’s criminal usurpation of power in the eyes of the world’s Muslims, by publishing a work praising Ibn Saud as the “savior” of the Holy sites, a practitioner of “authentic” Islamic rule and two years later produced an anthology of Wahhabi treatises.
The organization primarily responsible for the perpetration of most acts of terrorism in the name of Islam in the twentieth century, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan al Muslimeen, was created in 1928 by Hassan al Banna (1906 – 1949), a student of Abduh’s pupil, Rashid Rida, in reaction to the 1924 abolition of the caliphate. As discovered by John Loftus, former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer, when he was allowed to peruse CIA archives, al Banna had been recruited in the 1930s by Hitler to establish an arm of German intelligence in Egypt.[2210] Banna’s Brotherhood was also established with a grant from England’s Suez Canal Company in 1928, and over the following quarter century would be at the disposal of British diplomats and MI6 as a tool of British policy.[2211] To get the Brotherhood started, the Suez Canal Company helped Banna build a mosque in Ismaillia, that would serve as its headquarters and base of operations, according to Richard Mitchell’s The Society of the Muslim Brothers. The Suez Canal was pivotal to the British as the route to its prized colony, India, and in 1928 Ismailia also housed not only the company’s offices but a major British military base built during WWI.
In 1933, Ibn Saud negotiated a sixty-year contract that allowed California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), an affiliate of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of California (SOCAL), to have exclusive rights to explore and extract oil.[2212] The deal was negotiated with the assistance of the future head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, while at Sullivan & Cromwell, and Jack Philby.[2213] According to John Loftus and Mark Aarons, Dulles and Philby, together with Ibn Saud, “were the secret source of oil, wealth, and international influence that worked behind the scenes to put Hitler onto the world stage.”[2214] In 1924, Dulles had spelled out in an official State Department communication his interest in making use of oil exploration as a cover for intelligence gathering. In 1936, Socal and Texaco created a partnership which would later be named the Arabian-American Oil Company, or Aramco. To Socal and Texaco were later added Exxon and Mobil. Together, with the remaining partners of the Seven Sisters, this cartel controlled the price of oil, along with the Saudi royal family, who managed the world’s largest source of petroleum. Being a country that is said to “belong” to the royal family and is named for them, the lines between state assets and the personal wealth of senior princes are often blurred.
It was Jewish banker Paul Warburg (1868 – 1932) who said, confirming the fears of a New World Order Jewish conspiracy put forward in the Protocols of Zion, “We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent.”[2215] As Markus Osterrieder revealed, through the involvement of its founder W.T. Stead, and his collaboration in the occult network around Blavatsky and Papus responsible for the forgery of the Protocols, the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy they claimed to expose might have actually been a reference to the plotting of the Round Table.[2216] Were the Protocols a hoax, or could it be as Henry Ford believed, as he was quoted in the New York World on February 1921, as stating: “The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on.” However, Ford’s collaborator was Boris Brasol, suspected of being a Jew himself, and working closely with the agents of Sir William Wiseman, head of British Intelligence, who was linked to the Zionists at Kuhn Loeb. Could there be a still more dastardly purpose behind the dissemination of the Protocols—a kind of Chutzpah to create an exaggerated impression of Jewish influence? Their close collaboration with the Rothschilds would have evidently placed substantial financial resource and crucial political influence at their disposal.
Perhaps the answer to understand the source and purpose of the Protocols of Zion is provided in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, a pupil of Aldous Huxley and a friend of David Astor, the brother of John Jacob Astor, who in 1923 purchased The Times, which had endorsed The Protocols as genuine in 1919, but retracted the following year, when Philip Graves, their Istanbul correspondent, based on a clue provided to him by Allen Dulles, future head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), exposed The Protocols as a forgery. David’s mother Nancy, who shared a mutual friend in T.E. Lawrence of Arabia with Graves, was the wife of Waldorf Astor, were both members of the Round Table, also known as the Cliveden Set. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949 by Secker & Warburg, which served as a front for the Information Research Department (IRD), a department of the British Foreign Office, which was overseen by MI6.[2217] Secker & Warburg was also involved in the sale of the movie rights to Animal Farm to the CIA.[2218]
The protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four is Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party, who works at the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites historical records by revising past editions of The Times, and sending the original documents for incineration down “memory holes.” Winston suspects that his superior O’Brien, an Inner Party official, is part of an underground terrorist movement known as the Brotherhood, formed Emmanuel Goldstein to overthrow Oceana’s dictator, Big Brother. O’Brien introduces himself to Winston as a member of the Brotherhood and sends Winston a copy of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Goldstein, which purportedly revealed the conspiracy by which the state managed political illusions to maintain power. However, O’Brien finally reveals himself to be a member of the Thought Police, and after being tortured to reeducate him, tells Winston that he will never know whether the Brotherhood actually exists and that Goldstein’s book was written collaboratively by him and other Party members. Winston had recalled that:
There were… whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author, and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as The Book.
Otto Warburg (1859 – 1938), a cousin of the German-based Warburgs, was elected head of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) in 1911. As one of the most prominent bankers of his time, Paul’s brother Max Warburg (1867 – 1946) attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 at Versailles, held at the conclusion of World War I, as part of the German delegation. Drawing inspiration from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Congress of Vienna of 1825, the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 and 1907, and the wartime collaboration between the Allies, the Paris Peace Conference established the League of Nations, a first step towards World Government.[2219] Simultaneously, the Warburgs’ behind-the-scenes efforts were in collaboration with a network working for British intelligence, linked with Kuhn Loeb bank, and occultist Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn, who were responsible for rise of anti-Semitism through the dissemination of the Protocols of Zion.
The Warburgs, a Sabbatean family, had reached their financial influence during the years of the nineteenth century, with the growth of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, with whom they stood in close personal union and family relationship.[2220] Abraham Kuhn (1819 – 1892) migrated to New York about 1840, with his brothers Solomon and Max. In 1849, he married Regina Loeb, a sister of his future partner, Solomon Loeb (1828 – 1903), a Forty-Eighter, who immigrated from Germany to the United States in that same year, and settled in Cincinnati. Loeb moved to New York City in 1865 and with Kuhn, started the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Co, founded in 1867. In Frankfurt, Kuhn met Jacob Schiff, and sent him to work for Kuhn, Loeb in New York. Shortly after he became a partner, Schiff married Loeb’s daughter Teresa.
A practitioner of Reform Judaism, Schiff supported the cause of Zionism, despite not agreeing fully with the ideas of Theodor Herzl. Schiff grew to be one of America’s top Jewish philanthropists and leaders, donating to nearly every major Jewish cause, including the Sabbatean-influenced Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA), which was headed by Solomon Schechter, a Frankist and founder of the American Conservative Movement. Schiff also supported relief efforts for the victims of pogroms in Russia, and helped establish and develop Hebrew Union College, the Jewish Division in the New York Public Library, and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which was founded in 1906.[2221] The AJC is one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations and, according to The New York Times, is “widely regarded as the dean of American Jewish organizations.”[2222] In 1914, when Professor Emeritus Joel Spingarn of Columbia University became chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he recruited for its board such Sabbatean Jewish leaders as Jacob Schiff, and Rabbi Stephen Wise.[2223]
Paul Warburg, the inspiration behind “Daddy Warbucks” in the Annie cartoons, married Solomon Loeb’s daughter Nina and became a partner in Kuhn Loeb in 1902. Paul’s brother Felix Warburg (1871 – 1937), a partner in Kuhn Loeb, married Schiff’s daughter Frieda, the of Jacob. Intermarriage among the German-Jewish elite was common. Consequently, the partners of Kuhn, Loeb were closely related by blood and marriage to the partners of J&W Seligman, Speyer & Co., Goldman, Sachs & Co., Lehman Brothers and other prominent German-Jewish firms. Schiff eventually became the leader of Kuhn Loeb and grew the firm into the second most prestigious investment bank in the United States behind J.P. Morgan & Co.
Kuhn Loeb came to be led by Felix and the German-born American banker Otto Kahn (1867 – 1934), who became a leader of Kuhn Loeb, was a close friend of Aleister Crowley.[2224] Although Crowley was associated with German occult fascism, he and his associates nevertheless held close personal ties with the activities of the leading promoters of Zionism. These included Wall Street banker and Lotos Club member Samuel Untermyer (1858 – 1940), who was also reportedly a member of the Golden Dawn of New York, and a British newspaper called him a “satanist.”[2225] Untermeyer also identified as a Zionist and served as president of the Keren Hayesod, the agency whose early leaders included Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and through which the movement was then and still is conducted in America.[2226]
The activities of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, Crowley’s network of occultist spies, and the Round Table, centered around advancing the cause of Zionism, while also simultaneously pursuing the conflicting objectives of fomenting the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and promoting the cause of global capitalism. The further purpose of World War I was to create the preconditions for the Russian revolution of 1918, which, according to State Department Decimal File (861.00/5339), in a document entitled Bolshevism and Judaism, dated November 13, 1918, was financed and orchestrated by Jacob Schiff through Kuhn, Loeb. & Co. With the creation of the Soviet Union, they purported to implement a form of communism as outlined by Karl Marx, eventually elevated as a threat to the Western powers.
According
to State Department Decimal File (861.00/5339), in a document entitled Bolshevism
and Judaism, dated November 13, 1918, the Russian Revolution was financed
and orchestrated by Jacob Schiff through Kuhn, Loeb & Company of New York. As reported by Richard Spence in Secret
Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, soon
after the Russian Revolution, Otto Kahn’s associate, William Wiseman, 10th
Baronet (1885 – 1962),
the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6),
and future employee of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.—“decided to ‘guide the storm’ in
Russia, using money, secret propaganda and hand-picked agents.”[2227]
As found in the Sir William Wiseman
Papers, Wiseman described one part of his plan as “endeavor[ing] to do in
Russia what we have done successfully elsewhere; namely to place Germans who
are working for us among the real German agents…,” and use agents who “have
special facilities for getting into the confidence of German agents.” Among
Wiseman’s concerns were that “the Germans have managed to secure control of the
most important secret societies in Russia.” “It is necessary that this German
influence should be exposed,” he noted, “and counter-Societies organized, if
necessary.”[2228]
Working for Wiseman were “Ace of Spies” Sidney Reilly (c. 1873 – 1925), author Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) and, according to Spence, likely Aleister Crowley.[2229] Reilly hinted of his connections to international business and finance as the “Occult Octopus.”[2230] Reilly’s friend, former diplomat and journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, was a close acquaintance of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, for many years and recounted to Fleming many of Reilly's espionage exploits.[2231] In 1917, Somerset Maugham undertook a mission to Russia for Sir William Wiseman. Dispatches from Russia, including those of Maugham, described “Jewish socialists” as the main tools of German intrigue in Russia, financed by Jewish financiers such as Max Warburg.[2232]
In 1913, less than a year before World War I officially began, a British intelligence agent Casimir Pilenas had been sent to the to New York city to work under Wiseman. Pilenas, who was a spotter for Scotland Yard, was also recruited as an informant for the Russian Okhrana by Pyotr Rachkovsky.[2233] Pilenas worked closely with another Russian double-agent, Boris Brasol (1885 – 1963), a member of the Black Hundred, and founder of the Union of Czarist Army and Navy Officers, who was chiefly responsible for the dissemination of the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Despite his purported anti-Semitism, Pilenas claimed that “It has come to light that Brasol is of Hungarian Jewish descent, which fact I expect will be described fully in the press.”[2234] According to Richard Spence, “Over a span of at least four decades, Boris Brasol would work like a diligent spider weaving a far-flung web of hatemongering, intelligence peddling, and outright espionage, a kind of mirror image or, perhaps, unconscious parody of the worldwide conspiracy he claimed to combat.”[2235]
At the end of 1917, Pilenas came under the employ of the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division, as a result of a positive recommendation from Sir William Wiseman. On March 25, 1917, three days after Pilenas informed Wiseman of Trotsky’s plans, Trotsky appeared at the British Consulate—which was under Wiseman’s direct supervision—and received authorization to sail home for Russia to join the Revolution.[2236] Leon Trotsky (1879 – 1940) was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to a Ukrainian Jewish family. Trotsky, who did not receive a religious education, and probably never went to the synagogue, was partly educated in a Russian-German gymnasium in Odessa, inspired by the Haskalah.[2237] Trotsky later acknowledged the helpfulness of British officials who placed no obstacle on his travels.[2238] In that same month, Wiseman himself cabled to London that Trotsky was about to sail for Russia backed by “Jewish funds… behind which are possibly German.”[2239]
According to Yohanan
Petrovsky-Shtern in Lenin’s Jewish Question, Lenin’s great-grandfather
was also Jewish, though the truth of his ancestry was suppressed by the Soviets
until the 1980s.[2240]
The French Freemason Rozie of the Jean Georges lodge in Paris hailed his Masonic
brothers Lenin and Trotsky.[2241]
Lenin was a freemason of the 31º degree and a member of the French lodge Art et Travail.[2242]
Lenin was a member of the most notorious lodge of the Grand Orient, the Neuf
Sœurs, in 1914.[2243]
Lenin, Grigori Zinoviev, a lifelong collaborator of Trotsky (Grand Orient),
Karl Radek (Grand Orient) and Yakov Sverdlov were also members of B’nai B’rith.[2244]
Explaining the reason for his interest in Freemasonry, Trotsky wrote, “In the
eighteenth century Freemasonry became expressive of a militant policy of
enlightenment, as in the case of the Illuminati, who were the forerunners of
the revolution; on its left it culminated in the Carbonari… I discontinued my
work on freemasonry to take up the study of Marxian economics… The work on
freemasonry acted as a sort of test for these hypotheses… I think this
influenced the whole course of my intellectual development.”[2245]
Sovereign Order of St.
John of Jerusalem (SOSJ)
Brasol also worked closely with
Reilly, and both were members of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem
(SOSJ), part of the Russian Tradition of the Knights Hospitaller, which evolved
from the Knights of Malta, founded by Paul I of Russia, the son of Catherine
the Great. The
SOSJ was legitimately continued outside of Russia by Grand Duke Kirill
Vladimirovich of Russia (1876 – 1938), son of the Russian SOSJ Grand Prior, Grand
Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich of Russia (1847 – 1909), a knight of the Order of
the Golden Fleece.[2246] Grand Duke
Kirill assisted Richard
Teller Crane of Chicago with plans to organize the American White Cross in New
York City. Richard
Teller Crane I (1832 – 1912) was the founder of R.T.
Crane & Bro., a Chicago-based manufacturer, later Crane Co.. He was also a
member of the famous Jekyll Island Club (aka The Millionaires Club) on Jekyll
Island, Georgia, whose members came from many of the world’s wealthiest
families, most notably the Morgans, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts.
The most prominent families in the United
States joined the American Grand Priory of the SOSJ, which was thereby transformed
into the first American civilian foreign intelligence network. An early and prominent member of the American
White Cross was Wall Street lawyer William Nelson Cromwell (1854 – 1948). The law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, founded in 1879 by Cromwell and Algernon
Sydney, which and represented the Kuhn Loeb Company, gained renown for its business and commercial law
practices and its impact on international affairs.[2247]
The firm advised John Pierpont Morgan during the creation of Edison General
Electric (1882) and later guided key players in the formation of U.S. Steel
(1901).[2248]
Cromwell was
responsible for the success of, among many other projects, McCormick Harvester,
Carnegie’s U.S. Steel Corporation and the Panama Canal. Cromwell became Grand
Prior of the American SOSJ in 1912.
According to SOSJ’s own history, “The American Grand Priory was peopled with the scions of Wall Street and the ‘Eastern Establishment.’ These men and women, many of them active or reserve officers in the military, worked with the fledgling western military intelligence communities and made the Grand Priory the first civilian foreign intelligence organization in the United States.”[2249] As a result of the “success” of SOSJ international ventures, President Wilson and Col. House had created “The Inquiry” at the American Grand Priory headquarters on upper Broadway in New York City in 1917, which became the internationalist advisory Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1921.[2250]
President Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) had his chief advisor, Round Tabler “Colonel” Edward Mandell House (1858 – 1938), assemble “The Inquiry,” a team of academic experts including Walter Lippman (1889 – 1974), to devise efficient postwar solutions to all the world’s problems. “The Inquiry” held as Pratt House made plans for a peace settlement which eventually evolved into Wilson’s famous “fourteen points,” which he first presented to Congress in 1918. They were globalist in nature, calling for the removal of “all economic barriers” between nations, “equality of trade conditions,” and the formation of “a general association of nations.” The subsequent Paris conference, in January 1919, which culminated in the Treaty of Versailles, House’s vision was implemented as the League of Nations, and the first important step towards world government.
As revealed in Colin Simpson’s The Lusitania, since Wilson had promised to keep America out of World War I, to provide the necessary pretext to justify America’s entry into the war, he, Round Table member Col. Edward Mandel House, J.P. Morgan and Winston Churchill conspired to perpetrate a false-flag operation, whereby a passenger ship named the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat, killing 1,198 innocent people. The Germans knew the ship was also carrying munitions, and therefore regarded the sinking of the ship as a military act, but the British insisted it was merely carrying civilians and justified military retaliation. According to Spence, in Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, the sinking of the Lusitania, which provided the pretext for America’s entry into World War II, was orchestrated with Crowley’s important assistance, working with Sir William Wiseman in Washington, DC.
Wilson and House both worked closely with Sir William Wiseman. House was Wilson’s chief advisor on European politics and diplomacy during World War I and at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Rabbi Stephen Wise acted as an important intermediary to Wilson and House, when, with Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, he helped formulate the text of the Balfour Declaration.[2251] House conferred with Paul Warburg and with Samuel Untermyer.[2252] Rabbi Wise referred to House in his autobiography, Challenging Years, as “the unofficial Secretary of State.” House felt that the war was an epic battle between democracy and autocracy, and argued the United States ought to help Britain and France win a limited Allied victory. The sinking of the Lusitania finally provided the pretext.
In his Confessions, Crowley boasted of having “proved that the Lusitania was a man-of-war” in a black propaganda piece for the pro-German The Fatherland published after the sinking.[2253]Although Wiseman denied that Crowley worked for British intelligence, a US Military Intelligence report identified him as an “employee of the British Government” and showed that the Justice Department was aware of his status by 1918, through the “British Counsel [sic], New York City,” which had “full cognizance” of Crowley’s activities, and that “the British Government was fully aware of the fact that Crowley was connected with… German propaganda and had received money for writing anti-British articles.”[2254]
Under a cover of being a German propaganda agent and a supporter of Irish independence, Crowley’s mission was to gather intelligence about the German intelligence network and the Irish independent activists, and produce exaggerated propaganda aiming at compromising the German and Irish ideals. As his supposed cover, Crowley wrote for German fascist magazines The Fatherland and The International. Crowley, whose black propaganda, produced under the authority Admiral Hall, chief of British Naval Intelligence, had actively encouraged German aggressiveness. In a written defense of his actions, published in 1929, Crowley insisted that as soon as America entered the war in 1917, the U.S. Department of Justice had hired him as an agent-in-place at his Fatherland and International editorial offices.[2255]
The
International and The Fatherland were founded by George Sylvester Viereck (1884 – 1962).
Viereck was born in Germany in 1884, to a German father and a German-American
mother. His father Louis Viereck joined the
Socialist Workers’ Party. Both Marx and Engels claimed that Louis was an
illegitimate child of Kaiser Wilhelm I and German actress Edwina Viereck, making George a cousin of
Kaiser Wilhelm II.[2256]
Wilhelm I was the son of Frederick
William III, and grandson of Frederick William II, who was a member of the
Golden and Rosy Cross. Another relative of the
Hohenzollern family assumed legal paternity of the young Louis. In 1896, Louis
Viereck emigrated to the United States, and his U.S.-born wife Laura and their
twelve-year-old son George followed in 1897.
In 1914, Viereck asked Samuel Untermyer to finance The Fatherland. Untermyer, who identified himself as a German-American, represented a number of German-American brewing companies.[2257] Viereck also corresponded with Felix Warburg. Before 1917, Felix also established himself within the German-American community. He became a member of the Chamber of German-American Commerce, the German Society of New York, and the Germanistic Society. Following American entry into the war in April 1917, Felix and Paul Warburg joined many other German-Americans in fully supporting the U.S. war effort. As a member of the Federal Reserve Board, Paul actively promoted Liberty Bonds. In 1918, however, both his opponents in Congress and populist newspapers tried to block his re-nomination by playing up his German ethnicity. When Paul reluctantly resigned from the Federal Reserve Board, Viereck publicized the case as the latest example of anti-German hysteria.[2258]
Within a weeks of the war being declared between England and Germany, armed with Kaiser Wilhelm II’s blessing, Paul’s brother Max Warburg, head of the MM Warburg Bank of Hamburg, and Bernhard Dernburg (1865 – 1937), a prominent German banker, brought $175 million in treasury certificates to the US market. Jacob Schiff was open to assist but realized adequate funds required the cooperation from J.P. Morgan & Co.. However, pro-Allied Morgan declined. Disappointed with their banking mission, Max returned to Germany, but Dernburg remained in New York to supervise the German Information Bureau on Broadway and to front the Germans’ secretive “Propaganda Kabinett.”[2259]
As recounted by Jacob Schiff’s biographer, Naomi W. Cohen, Viereck, the highly-respected German-Jewish-American academic, Harvard Professor Hugo Münsterberg (1863 – 1916), and Semitics scholar Morris Jastrow (1861 – 1921), turned to Schiff with ideas on how to arouse American sympathy. Münsterberg had been a student of William James joined the Theosophical Society and was a keen student of Helena P. Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence, from which he quoted repeatedly in his Gifford Lectures. James served as President of the American Society of Psychical Research (ASPR), the American Association of Psychologists and the American Philosophical Association.[2260]
Dernburg, who in close cooperation with Berlin’s Ambassador Count Johann von Bernstorff, along with Dr. Isaac Straus, were in close contact with Schiff even while they were engaged in open propaganda efforts. Straus worked on the anti-Russian Jewish immigrant masses through a new periodical, the American Jewish Chronicle. Schiff secretly guarded these activities even from his friends. He was well aware of the purpose of the German mission in America, but he claimed, with respect to Straus, that he broke off connections when he learned that he was a German secret agent out to propagandize among the Jews. Overall, Schiff’s correspondence shows him to have been sympathetic toward to their efforts. In 1914, Schiff wrote a friend in Munich that American public opinion “is not as much in favor of Germany as we all would wish, but with a group of friends we are doing our best to spread the truth.”[2261]
Dernburg, in close cooperation with von Bernstorff, assumed control of the German Information Bureau on Broadway. The Bureau fronted for a secretive Propaganda Kabinett that counted Viereck, Hugo Münsterberg, as well as horror fiction writer and dedicated student of Nietzsche, Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871 – 1943), among its members and resources, who were all intimately acquainted with Crowley.[2262] Correspondence between Ewers and Otto Kahn showed Kahn to have been one of Ewers’ longtime backers.[2263] This was despite the fact that Ewers was also an associate of Ariosophists Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels.[2264] Students of the occult are also attracted to his works, due to his longtime friendship and correspondence with Aleister Crowley. Ewers was a dedicated student of Nietzsche and a follower of the eugenics movement.[2265]
From the 1910s and onwards, Ewers held wildly popular lectures with the title Die Religion des Satan (“The Religion of Satan”). Their content was based almost verbatim on decadent novelist Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868 – 1927)’s 1897 German book Die Synagoge des Satan (“The Synagogue of Satan”), a title taken from Revelation 2:9 and 3:9, referring to a group persecuting the church “who say they are Jews and are not.” Though born in Poland, Przybyszewski was much admired by Ukrainian Jewish circles.[2266] He left for Berlin, where he became fascinated by Nietzsche, began referring to himself as a Satanist and immersed himself into the bohemian life of the city. Przybyszewski, who was much admired by Ukrainian Jewish circles, met Marta, the daughter of a Jewish merchant, who became his mistress.[2267] He left her to marry Dagny Juel, a former model for Edvard Munch, painter of The Scream. Przybyszewski became fascinated by the philosophy of Nietzsche, and began referring to himself as a Satanist. The God of the Bible, he says, wants to oppress human beings and limit their free will. By contract, Satan embodies lawlessness, and brought forth science, philosophy and art. He proposes “proud sinning in the name of Satan-instinct, Satan-nature, Satan-curiosity, and Satan-passion.”[2268]
In 1913, Ewers wrote the screenplay for The Student of Prague, silent horror considered to be the first German art film.[2269] Being loosely based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and Faust, the film is about a man who sells his soul to the devil. Ewers is now known mainly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels about the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modelled on himself. Ewers’ first book, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, concerns Braun’s attempts to manipulate a small cult of Evangelical Christians in a small Italian mountain village for his own financial gain, and the horrific results which ensue. Braun returned in 1911 in Alraune, in which he collaborates in creating a female homunculus or android by impregnating a prostitute in a lab with the semen from an executed murderer. Ewer’s story, along with Achim von Arnim’s mandrake and golem tale Isabella of Egypt, formed the basis of the script for Alraune und der Golem (“Alraune and the Golem”), a German silent horror film drama that the Swedish director Nils Chrisander directed in 1919. The cinematographer Guido Seeber (1879 – 1940) had already been involved in the filming of Der Student von Prag (1913) about a man who sells his reflection to the satanic sorcerer Scapinelli, and Der Golem (1915), about a Jewish junk dealer who uses a magic formula from Rabbi Loew to bring to life a statue of a golem discovered by construction workers digging in Prague’s old Jewish ghetto. In the 1921 Vampyr, Braun where he is transformed into such as a blood-drinking creature.
Untermyer also met with Heinrich Albert, Privy Councilor of the German Government, who served as Handelsattaché (commercial attaché) at the German embassy at Washington DC, later in charge of administering the property of enemy aliens in Germany.[2270] Albert established himself in the New York offices of the Hamburg America Line, a transatlantic shipping enterprise based in Hamburg, Germany. Albert used the two military attachés of the German embassy in Washington, Franz von Papen (1879 – 1969), future chancellor of Germany under Hitler, and the naval attaché Karl Boy-Ed (1872 – 1930). By the beginning of World War I, Boy-Ed and von Papen had built up a secret service espionage and sabotage network, operating in the US, Canada and Mexico, under cover of their diplomatic positions. Their network also included the former German diplomat and general representative of the Hamburg-America Line Carl Gottlieb Bünz (1843 – 1918), the consul Franz Bopp (1862 – 1929), and the employee of the German embassy Franz von Rintelen (1878 – 1949), the news officer Horst von der Goltz (b. 1884), the assistant of the military attaché Wolf Walter von Igel (1888 – 1970), the representative of the Krupp company in the US Hans Tauscher (1867 – 1941). They organized arms and material purchases through camouflaged companies and the establishment of regional news offices, collected information important to the war, committed passport and visa violations, violated US customs and foreign exchange laws with the aim of harming Britain’s German enemy.[2271]
According to Crowley’s “Affidavit” prepared specifically to explain past activities to the US Department of Justice and uninformed Allied authorities in 1917, it was Otto Kahn who personally advised him how to approach British intelligence in New York. Crowley and Kahn also continued their association after the war. In 1923, when journalist Frank Harris and Crowley attempted purchase of the Paris Telegram newspaper, “my friend Otto Kahn” was willing to advance the funds for the deal. And, when Crowley was attacked by the British tabloids, his devotee Norman Mudd wrote to Kahn in 1924 asking for written confirmation of Crowley’s defense of his activities for the Americans, Kahn complied.[2272]
Viereck was also interested in the occult, and published a vampire novel, The House of the Vampire (1907), which is one of the first psychic vampire stories where a vampire feeds off more than just blood.
Among his numerous contacts and personal acquaintances, Viereck was also a close friend of Sigmund Freud and the famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was a member of the Fabian Society. Sexologists Magnus Hirschfeld, Albert Moll and Harry Benjamin were also friends with Viereck.[2273] Viereck was particularly successful at interviews, some of which were with personal friends such as Kaiser Wilhelm II and George Bernard Shaw.[2274] During the mid-1920s, Viereck also interviewed Oswald Spengler, Benito Mussolini, Henry Ford and Albert Einstein. Viereck, who published a popular book of his own about Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1920s, became close friends with Nikola Tesla, with whom he discussed his psychological breakdown.[2275]
Still fascinated by the erotic, Viereck joined poet Paul Eldridge in a trilogy exotic fantasy novels that used the theme of The Wandering Jew. The book became a bestseller, and went on to twelve American editions and many translations. Thomas Mann thought the book was “audacious and magnificent.”[2276] The Chicago Tribune lauded it for approaching “the beauty of the Greeks.” When it was censored in Ireland, the Golden Dawn member W.B. Yeats came to Viereck’s defense. An article in The World in 1930 celebrated “The Return of George S. Viereck,” proclaiming that “its enfranchisement in aesthetic freedom, American poetry has George Sylvester Viereck to thank more than anyone else, with the possible exception of Ezra Pound.”[2277]
Aleister Crowley and fellow British agent George Sylvester Viereck shared a friendship with Kaiser Wilhelm II and his top general, Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (1865 – 1937), who was involved in the Aufbau, an organization of White Russian emigrees in Germany who would introduce the Nazis to the anti-Semitic outlook of the Protocols of Zion. Ludendorff, along with Boris Brasol and Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi’s chief ideologue, shared membership in Aufbau: Wirtschafts-politische Vereinigung für den Osten (“Reconstruction: Economic-Political Organization for the East”). As explained by Ian Kellogg in The Russian Roots of Nazism, in the period leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the far right in the German and Russian Empires had failed politically. Many of the supporters of the Romanov monarchy, known as White Russians, many of them members of Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem (SOSJ), fled and found their way to Germany. Consolidating themselves within a conspiratorial organization known as the Aufbau, in collaboration with Soviet and British double-agents associated with Round Tabler Sir William Wiseman—they teamed with the Nazis for the overthrow of the governments of Russia and Germany, deemed to be under the threat of the rise of communism, which they believed was part of a Jewish conspiracy outlined in the Protocols of Zion, and which had been responsible for the toppling of the Russian aristocracy and the rise of the Bolsheviks.
The Aufbau
drew on the apocalyptic ideas of Russian slavophile authors, like Fyodor
Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov.
Dostoevsky, explains Michael Kellogg, “crystallized
conservative revolutionary ideology in Imperial Russia much like Wagner shaped völkisch views in Germany.”[2278]
Paradoxically, it is generally believed that Solovyov, who was
influenced by the Rosicrucian tradition of Russia, was the first Russian
philosopher to show a serious interest in Jewish Kabbalah.[2279]
Building upon the
anti-Semitic ideas of Dostoevsky, the fundamental views of Aufbau maintained
that an insidious Jewish world conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews manifested
itself as the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union.[2280]
Brasol, Reilly and Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich (1866 – 1926) were connected through the so-called Anti-Bolshevik League with other rightist White Russians and their fascist supporters in a global network stretching across Europe and the Americas with branches as far away as Japan.[2281] While many of Reilly’s business and espionage associates were also Jewish, he openly denounced Jewish dominance in American banking and commerce, the pro-Bolshevik sympathies of many Jewish immigrants, and the American immigration laws that allowed entry to such people. As summarized by Richard Spence, “Jew or no Jew, the history of the SOSJ claims Reilly as another member of the order, and makes the Anti-Bolshevik League one more gambit of the order’s secretive intelligence-propaganda activities, activity that also included dissemination of the Protocols.”[2282]
In March 1918, Brasol secured employment in the New York office of the War Trade Board’s Intelligence Bureau as a “special investigator” in charge of “investigations of importance and of the most confidential nature,” that made use of his “knowledge of European political and territorial problems” and the “chaotic conditions in Siberia and Russia.”[2283] Brasol resigned from the bureau in April 1919, and immediately took up a new post with the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) as a special assistant to its chief, Gen. Marlborough Churchill a distant relative of Winston Churchill. Churchill was very concerned with the “Bolshevik Menace” and receptive of Brasol’s suggestion that a Jewish conspiracy was behind it. In December 1919, Brasol submitted a report that described an “international German Jewish gang,” allegedly working out of Stockholm, that aimed at “world socialist revolution.”[2284] It consisted of twelve leaders, a “Jewish dozen,” which included Trotsky, Jacob Schiff, and Max Warburg.[2285]
In The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Joseph M. Canfield suspects that Cyrus Scofield was associated with one of the Lotos Club’s committee members, Samuel Untermyer.[2286] According to Prof. David W. Lutz, in Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem:
Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.[2287]
Untermyer then blackmailed American President Woodrow Wilson, with the knowledge of his affair with Mary Peck, the wife of a professor colleague, in return for appointing Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court.[2288] Finally, relying on the legal opinion of Brandeis now in his new role, Wilson was able to declare war against Germany on April 7, 1917. Having succeeded in rallying the Americans into sacrificing their lives to “liberate” Europe, the war was finally brought to an end in 1918. Additional plans involved the creation of the League of Nations, a first step towards World Government, and the destabilization of Germany, cultivating the grievances that would set the stage for the rise of Hitler.
During
World War I, Viereck had been in touch with leaders on both sides of the
conflict, including Ludendorff—then Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and top
military official—while simultaneously remaining in touch with their
counterparts among the allies, like Sir William Wiseman, the head of British
Intelligence in the US, President Woodrow Wilson and his advisor “Colonel”
Edward Mandell House, as well as the rest of the “Big Four” which included
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd
George, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, who wrote the
terms of the new peace that resulted from Germany’s defeat at the end of World
War II in 1918.
Wilson’s Fourteen Points—written by “The Inquiry” assembled by Round Tabler “Colonel” Edward House, a friend of George Sylvester Viereck—were well received in the United States and Allied nations and even by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, as a landmark of enlightenment in international relations.[2289] Wilson subsequently used the Fourteen Points as the basis for the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, which ruined the German economy, leading to depression and eventually providing the Round Table the pretext to bolster the rise of their agent Hitler and the Nazis.
Ludendorff had wanted Russia badly out of the war, especially so he could move his armies to the Western front to fight the British, French, and Americans, the latter of whom, days earlier, had officially entered the conflict. And so, in 1917, Ludendorff, with the Kaiser’s financing and blessing, arranged to facilitate Lenin and his cohort’s famous return in a sealed train to St. Petersburg, to spark the Russian Revolution. The Kaiser even financed it.[2290] The people who travelled with him included Gregory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Georgi Safarov, Zinaida Lilina and Moisey Kharitonov. Ludendorff later admitted his involvement in his autobiography, My War Memories, 1914-1918 (1920), that he told senior officials: “Our government, in sending Lenin to Russia, took upon itself a tremendous responsibility. From a military point of view his journey was justified, for it was imperative that Russia should fall.”[2291]
As the war was coming to an end, the military Supreme Command (OHL), nominally headed by Paul von Hindenburg, was effectively controlled by his subordinate Erich Ludendorff, was virtual dictator of Germany for two years of the war.[2292] When it became clear that the war was lost in late summer and fall of 1918, Ludendorff recommended the acceptance of the main demand of President Wilson to democratized the Imperial Government, effecting a transfer of power to those parties that held the majority in the Reichstag, such as the SPD, Centre Party and Progress Party. This enabled him to protect the reputation of the Imperial Army and place the responsibility for the capitulation and its consequences on the democratic parties and the Reichstag. Thus, the so-called Dolchstoßlegende (“stab-in-the-back legend”) was born.
Ludendorff’s wanted to set up the republican politicians, many of whom were Socialists, to be brought into the government and become the parties to negotiate the Armistice with the Allies, normally negotiated between the military commanders, and thereby making them scapegoats to take the blame for losing the war, instead of himself and Hindenburg.[2293] The attitude of the military was “[T]he parties of the left have to take on the odium of this peace. The storm of anger will then turn against them,” after which the military could step in again to ensure that things would once again be run “in the old way.”[2294] Ludendorff said to his staff on 1 October:
I have… asked His Majesty to include in the government those circles who are largely responsible for things having developed as they have. We will now see these gentlemen move into the ministries. Let them be the ones to sign the peace treaty that must now be negotiated. Let them eat the soup that they have cooked for us![2295]
On September 29, the Supreme Army Command, at army headquarters in Spa, Belgium, informed Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Imperial Chancellor Count Georg von Hertling that the military situation was hopeless. Ludendorff said that he could not guarantee to hold the front for another twenty-four hours and demanded a request to the Entente powers for an immediate ceasefire. Hertling objected to handing over the reins to the Reichstag, thus Wilhelm II appointed Prince Maximilian of Baden (1867 – 1929) as the new Imperial Chancellor on 3 October. Prince Maximilian was the nephew of Frederick I, Grand Duke of Baden, who in 1896 had met Theodor Herzl via their mutual acquaintance William Hechler, and helped Herzl in obtaining an audience with his nephew Wilhelm II, German Emperor. On October 5, 1818, Prince Maximilian contacted Wilson, indicating that Germany was willing to accept his Fourteen Points.
Further blame was laid at the feet of the politicians, later derived as the “November Criminals,” after they signed the Treaty of Versailles at the subsequent Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which led to territorial losses and a crippling schedule of reparation payments. The conference was attended by Wilson, Colonel House, bankers Paul Warburg and Bernard Baruch, and others, House’s vision was implemented as the League of Nations in 1920, the precursor to the United Nations. Paul Warburg led the American, which included Walter Lippmann and the brothers John Foster and Allen Dulles, future head of the CIA. Paul’s brother Max, of the Warburg banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands, headed the German delegation. Judge Louis Brandeis also brought his influence to bear on the Wilson administration in the negotiations leading up to the Balfour Declaration and the Paris Peace Conference.
In his book Geneva Versus Peace (1937), the Comte de St. Aulaire, who was the French ambassador to London from 1920-24, recalled a dinner conversation with Otto Kahn who detailed the nature of the dialectical strategy to bring about the League of Nations:
…our essential dynamism makes use of the forces of destruction and forces of creation, but uses the first to nourish the second… Our organization for revolution is evidenced by destructive Bolshevism and for construction by the League of Nations which is also our work. Bolshevism is the accelerator and the League is the brake on the mechanism of which we supply both the motive force and the guiding power. What is the end? It is already determined by our mission. It is formed of elements scattered throughout the whole world, but cast in the flame of our faith in ourselves. We are a League of Nations which contains the elements of all others… Israel is the microcosm and the germ of the City of the future.[2296]
However, the US Senate ultimately rejected League of Nations. Deciding that America would not join any scheme for world government without a change in public opinion, Col. House, members of the Inquiry and the Round Table formed the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) in 1920, for the purpose of coordinating British and American efforts. They also formed an American branch, known as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded in following year by Col. House and Walter Lippmann with the financial assistance of John D. Rockefeller Jr.. The early CFR included members like J.P. Morgan, Paul Warburg and Jacob Schiff. Round Tabler Lionel Curtis became a strong supporter of international government in the form of the League of Nations and attended the Paris Peace Conference. In 1919, he was the main figure behind the establishment of RIIA in London, and he also helped the helped the formation CFR.
Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III, the
leader of the Ismaili Muslims, and descendant of the Assassins, who are
important in Masonic tradition for their relationship with the Knights Templar,
was nominated to
represent India to the League of Nations in 1932 and served as its President
from 1937–38. His sone Prince Aly Khan (1911 – 1960) was the father of Prince Karim Aga Khan, the current Aga Khan IV.
The reason Germans were so susceptible to German propaganda, explained Elmer Davis, was because “three generations of Germans have been conditioned by [Wagner’s] Ring operas to the conviction that the German Hero can never be struck down except by a stab in the back,” such as the dark Hagen inflicted on the blond Siegfried.[2297] After reading the memoirs of Aufbau member General Erich Ludendorff, Richard Wagner’s wife Cosima believed he was the man to save Germany. In September 1919, she wrote: “Ah, if only Ludendorff could be our dictator,” in a letter to Ernst II, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1863 – 1950), whose sister-in-law was the wife of Grand Duke Kirill of the SOSJ.[2298] Faced with the war effort’s collapse and a growing popular revolution, Kaiser Wilhelm II forced Ludendorff to resign. After the war, although he had been responsible for unleashing Lenin, who led the Bolsheviks to victory in Russia in 1917, and supported acceptance of Wilson’s Fourteen Points—written by the “The Inquiry” assembled by Round Tabler “Colonel” Edward House, also a friend of George Sylvester Viereck—Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader. Along with Alfred Rosenberg, a fellow member of the Aufbau, and the Thule Society, Ludendorff was a promoter of the Stab-in-the-back myth, which posited that the German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially by Marxists, Bolsheviks, Freemasons and Jews who were furthermore responsible for the disadvantageous settlement negotiated for Germany in the Treaty of Versailles.
The Stab-in-the-back myth arose out of the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic. At the end of the World War I, awareness of imminent defeat sparked a revolution in Germany, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, formal surrender to the Allies, and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic on November 9, 1918. The German Revolution of 1918–1919 was primarily a power struggle between the Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which favored a social democracy, and the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (1871 – 1919), and dissenting members of the SPD, which wanted to set up a Bolshevik as in Russia. Liebknecht was the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, who, along with August Bebel, was one of the founders and key leaders of the SPD, which had its origins in the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), founded in 1863 by Lassalle, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), founded in 1869 in Eisenach as part of the First International.
Karl Liebknecht was baptized a Lutheran in St. Thomas Church. According to the Liebknecht family tradition, their lineage was directly descended from Martin Luther.[2299] His godparents included Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.[2300] At the Friedrich Wilhelm University, now the Humboldt University of Berlin, he attended lectures by Heinrich von Treitschke, (1834 – 1896), one of the signers of the Antisemitenpetition of 1880.[2301] With his brother Theodor and the socialist and Oskar Cohn (1869 – 1934), a Zionist affiliated with Ber Borochov and the Poale Zion movement, he opened a law office in Berlin in 1899.[2302]
Born and raised in a secular Jewish family in Congress Poland, Rosa Luxemburg became a German citizen in 1897. The Luxemburg family were Polish Jews living in the Russian sector of Poland, after the country was partitioned by Prussia, Russia and Austria almost a century earlier. Rosa’s father Edward, like her grandfather Abraham, supported the Jewish Reform movement.[2303] During the November Revolution, she co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne (“The Red Flag”), the central organ of the Spartacist movement.
Right-wing groups like the Anti-Bolshevik League had been agitating against German Communists and the leaders of the Spartacus League even before the January uprising. The Anti-Bolshevik League in 1918 was founded by Eduard Stadtler (1886 – 1945) had begun advocating the creation of a “national socialist” dictatorship.[2304] The circle around Stadtler and Heinrich von Gleichen (1882 – 1959) operated a magazine called Das Gewissen (“The Conscience”), which included Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who would go on to become a major figure in the German Conservative Revolution and coin the term “Third Reich.”[2305] Heinrich von Gleichen was a cousin of Friedrich Schiller’s last great-grandson, the writer Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm, whom he provided with a life annuity until old age. Gleichen played a leading role in the Kulturbund, founded in 1915 and supported by the Reich government, which included, among others, Max Planck, Walter Rathenau and Max Liebermann of the Berlin Secession movement of artists associated with Richard Dehmel’s Pan magazine.[2306]
During World War I, Walter Rathenau (1867 – 1922), who was one of Germany’s leading industrialists in the late German Empire, played a key role in the organization of the German war economy, and would become an influential figure in the politics of the Weimar Republic. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, after 1880, the Gesellschaft der Freunde (“Society of Friends”)—founded by leading members of the Haskalah, around Moses Mendelssohn—became an organization where leading Jewish bankers, entrepreneurs, merchants, and managers met, including the Mendelssohns, Liebermanns, Ullsteins, Mosses, Rathenaus, and Bleichroeders.[2307] On January 10, 1919, around fifty leading representatives of the German industrial, commercial and banking, many of them members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, met and set up an Anti-Bolshevik Fund. Among the invited participants were industry association head Hugo Stinnes, Albert Vögler, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, Otto Henrich of Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Ernst von Borsig, Felix Deutsch from AEG, Arthur Salomonsohn from Disconto-Society.[2308] Felix Deutsch (1858 – 1928) was a German-Jewish businessman and industrial manager who is considered a co-founder of AEG, one of the world’s largest electrical companies. Arthur Salomonsohn (1859 – 1930) was a German-Jewish banker. Deutsch, Salomonsohn and von Siemens were members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde. At the beginning of the Weimar Republic, Salomonsohn supported Hugo Stinnes and Albert Vögler in their projects to reorganize and vertically concentrate German industry through the formation of interest groups.[2309]
The group, according to Stadtler, agreed to provide 500 million marks in funding to all anti-Bolshevik groups, including the Anti-Bolshevik League and the right-wing Freikorps (“(Free Corps”), who were motivated by Pan-German militarism and völkisch doctrines.[2310] Following the Armistice of 1918, and of the Bolshevik revolution, as there were many disturbances throughout Germany, World War I General Georg Ludwig Rudolf Maercker (1865 – 1924) suggested the formation of Freikorps to suppress these and a number of formations formed themselves, usually around individual army officers.[2311] Maercker paid strict attention to discipline and subordinated the Freikorps to the Reich government.
Stadtler also received funds from Friedrich Naumann (1860 – 1919), originally a follower of the conservative-clerical and antisemitic Berlin movement led by Adolf Stoecker, who was also involved in the Antisemitenpetition.[2312] Naumann, however, later distanced himself from Stoecker’s conservatism and antisemitism, and became interested in the social theories advocated by his friend Max Weber (1864 – 1920), one of the central figures in the development of sociology. Weber classified Jewish people as having been a “pariah people,” which meant that they were separated from the society that contained them.[2313]
Weber was a prominent member of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League). In 1891, Alfred Hugenberg (1865 – 1951) co-founded, along with Karl Peters (1856 – 1918), the ultra-nationalist General German League, and in 1894 its successor movement, the Pan-German League. Peters, who had acquired the majority of Germany’s colonial holdings, initiate a congress on German overseas interests, had been a student of Heinrich von Treitschke at Humboldt University of Berlin and wrote a dissertation on Schopenhauer. The League wanted to uphold German racial hygiene and were against breeding with so-called inferior races like the Jews and Slavs. At the League’s congress in 1894, Weber argued that Deutschtum (“Germanness”) was the highest form of civilization.[2314] After World War I, the League supported Ludendorff and the Stab-in-the-back myth.
The Anti-Bolshevik League printed posters and appeals to the population of Berlin offering a high reward for the Bolshevik ringleaders to be found and handed over to the military. One leaflet that circulated in large numbers proclaimed:
The Fatherland is close to ruin. Save it! It is not threatened from outside, but from within: from the Spartacus League. Strike their leaders dead! Kill Liebknecht! Then you will have peace, work and bread. – The frontline soldiers.[2315]
On November 9, 1918, in a move that was contrary to the constitution because only the Kaiser could appoint a chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, at the request Friedrich Ebert (1871 – 1925), transferred his powers as chancellor to him. On the death of Bebel in 1913, Ebert, a former student of Rosa Luxemburg, was elected leader of the SPD. On November 11, an armistice was signed at Compiègne by German representatives. On November 15, Ebert appointed Hugo Preuss (1860 – 1925), a German-Jewish, a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, and a teacher of constitutional law to the Reich Office of the Interior, after he wrote Obrigkeitstaat und Volksstaat (“Government by bureaucrats versus popular government”). Preuss developed a theory of politics that aimed to bridge the gap between revolution and constitution by institutionalizing the power of the Volk. Preuss believed that the old elites of Prussia and other states, and the parties of Reichstag, including the liberals, had failed to accept democracy. Additionally, Preuss saw in the spread of anti-Semitism and anti-socialism the successful strategy of the old elites to deflect attention from their own failures and preserve their power. During the war, Preuss transformed these criticisms into a proposal for transforming the empire into a demokratischer Volksstaat (“democratic people’s state”).[2316] Ebert charged Preuss with drafting a Reich constitution, which he based in large part on the Frankfurt Constitution of 1849 which was written after the German revolutions of 1848–1849 and intended for a unified Germany that was not realized at the time. The constitution designated the old black-red-gold tricolour flag of the Lützow Free Corps and the Burschenschaften as the national flag. In 1919, Preuss was among the founders of the social liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei (“German Democratic Party,” DDP) with Theodor Wolff and Friedrich Naumann.
Ebert allied himself with conservative and nationalistic political forces, in particular the Freikorps, with whose help his government crushed Spartacist uprising of January 5–12, 1919. Ebert ordered the rebellion quashed, and Gustav Noske (1868 – 1946), who was in charge of the Army and Navy, used both regular forces and Freikorps units to end the uprising. On January 15, 1919, members of the Freikorps led by Captain Waldemar Pabst abducted and extrajudicially murdered Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The vigilante group responsible for their murders received a high reward, which, as author Frederik Hetman suspected, came from the Anti-Bolshevik Fund.[2317] Emperor Wilhelm II fled the country and abdicated his throne, allowing elections for the National Assembly to take place on January 19. Out of the four possible locations that were considered for the assembly, including Bayreuth, Nuremberg and Jena, Weimar was chosen to symbolically connect republican Germany with the purportedly humanistic and enlightenment traditions of Weimar Classicism.[2318] As part of its duties as the interim government, it debated and reluctantly approved the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
While Naumann is not considered a forerunner of the Nazis’ antisemitism, historian Götz Aly accuses him of having “combined social, imperial, and national thought into a cohesive intellectual current that could eventually blend with the NSDAP’s mindset.”[2319] Stadtler, whose Anti-Bolshevik League was funded by Naumann, was a member of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) until 1933 when he defected to the Nazi Party weeks prior to it being dissolved.[2320] Theodor Fritsch (1852 – 1933), who would become one of the founders of the Thule Society, was a major figure of pre-war German anti-Semitism, and in the politics of Germany between 1900 and 1914. Fritsch created an early discussion forum, Antisemitische-Correspondenz (“Antisemitic Correspondence”) in 1885 for antisemites of various political persuasions. In 1887, he sent several editions to Nietzsche but was brusquely rebuffed. Nietzsche sent Fritsch a letter in which he thanked him to be permitted “to cast a glance at the muddle of principles that lie at the heart of this strange movement,” but requested not to be sent again such writings, for he was afraid that he might lose his patience.[2321] In 1894, Fritsch offered editorship to Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg—who with Nietzsche’s brother-in-law Bernhard Förster, was the author of the Antisemitenpetition—whereafter it became an organ for Sonnenberg’s Deutsch-Soziale Partei (German Social Party) under the name “German Social Articles.” In 1881, Förster and Sonnenberg set up the Deutscher Volksverein (German People’s League).
In June 1889, at Bochum, an anti-Semitic conference, attended by many representatives from France, Hungary, Germany and Austria, including Georg von Schönerer, led to the establishment of two German anti-Semitic parliamentary parties, the German Social Party (DSP) under the leadership of Sonnenberg, and the Antisemitische Volkspartei, led by Otto Böckel (1859 – 1923). Sonnenberg’s DSP became the Deutschsoziale Reformpartei (DRP) when it merged with Böckel’s Deutsche Reformpartei in 1894. For a time, the party organ was Antisemitische-Correspondenz after Sonnenberg had acquired the rights to the paper from Fritsch. The DRP, whose main basis was anti-Semitism, was active in 1898 in support of campaigns to restrict the immigration of Russian Jews into Germany and argued that such laws could form the basis of their ultimate aim of removing rights from all Jews in Germany.[2322] Wilhelm Giese emerged as a prominent member of the group and was especially noted for his criticism of Zionism, an idea that had some support among contemporary anti-Semites as a possible solution to the “Jewish problem.” In 1899, Giese ensured that the party adopted the Hamburg Resolutions explicitly rejecting removing the Jews to a new homeland and instead called for an international initiative to handle the Jews by means of complete separation and final destruction of the Jewish nation.[2323] The program helped to lay the foundations for the future Final Solution, a term it used.[2324]
The later version of the DRP was established in either 1889 or 1890 by Otto Böckel and Oswald Zimmermann (1859 – 1910), who had been involved in the original party, under the name Antisemitic People’s Party. In 1894, the DRP merged with the similarly antisemitic German Social Party (DSP) to form the German Social Reform Party (DSRP). The party split entirely in 1900 with the DSP re-established. The remnants of the group would subsequently be absorbed into the German National People’s Party (DNVP) in 1918. The DNVP was formed in December 1918 by a merger of the German Conservative Party and the Free Conservative Party of the old monarchic German Empire. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major conservative and nationalist party in Weimar Germany. Several prominent Nazis began their careers in the DNVP.
When Fritsch wanted to establish a broad and powerful anti-Semitic movement outside parliament, in January 1902, he founded the Hammer, a periodical, which was to act as a catalyst for the new movement. Among its contributors were Lanz von Liebenfels. Numbering more than three thousand persons, Hammer readers began organizing themselves into local Hammer-Gemeinden (“Hammer-Groups”). In 1904, Fritsch’s collaborator, and Bernhard Förster’s brother, Paul Förster (1844 – 1925), had published an appeal for a völkisch general staff to spearhead a nationalist-racist revival of Germany and so unite the many groups and leagues, while “cleansing” the nation of Socialists, the Jews, and any other opponents of opponents of German imperialism.[2325]
At a meeting at his Leipzig home on May 24 and 25, 1912, Fritsch and some twenty prominent Pan-Germans and anti-Semites formally founded two groups to indoctrinate German society. Karl August Hellwig, a retired colonel and a List Society member, headed the Reichshammerbund, a confederation of all existing Hammer groups. Hermann Pohl, became the chief officer of the Germanenorden (also called the Teutonic Order), founded with Philipp Stauff (1876 – 1923), who held office in the Guido von List Society and High Armanen Order.[2326] The High Armanen-Orden claimed descent from the Templars, and wished to reestablish the science of runes and the worship of Wotan (old High German for Odin, progenitor of the Scandinavians who migrated from “Asgard”) as well as an Aryan-dominated empire loosely based on the Teutonic Knights.[2327]
The notion of an anti-Semitic group organized like a secret quasi-masonic lodge, to counteract the widespread Jewish secret conspiracy, appears to have arisen amongst völkisch activists around 1910. As explained by Johannes Hering, who belonged to the local Hammer group in Munich as well as the Pan-German League, and who was friendly with both List and Liebenfels, wrote that he had been a Freemason since 1894, but that this “ancient Germanic institution” had been polluted by Jews and called for the need for an Aryan lodge.[2328]
In late 1911, Pohl announced to potential collaborators that the Hammer group in Magdeburg had already formed a lodge conforming to the appropriate racial principles and a ritual based on Germanic pagan tradition. The Wotan lodge was accordingly instituted on April 5, 1911, with Pohl elected Master, which formulated the rituals of the Grand Lodge founded on April 15, with Fritsch as Grand Master. On March 12, 1912, the organization adopted the name Germanenorden, upon the recommendation from Fritsch.[2329] The Germanenorden, whose symbol was a swastika, had a hierarchical fraternal structure based on Freemasonry, and celebrated the summer solstice, an important festivity in Völkisch circles. Members were encouraged to study the Prose Edda as well as some of the German mystics, including Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus. In addition to occult and magical philosophies, it taught to its initiates nationalist ideologies of Nordic racial superiority and anti-Semitism.
In 1916, the Germanenorden split into two parts. The schismatic offshoot: the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy Grail, was joined in the same year by Rudolf von Sebottendorf (1875 – 1945), the pseudo-aristocratic alias of German occultist Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer, a Freemason, with an interest in Sufism, Kabbalah, Theosophy and astrology, and also an admirer of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels. Sebottendorf increased the Germanenorden’s membership from about a hundred in 1917 to 1500 by the autumn of the following year.[2330] The Munich lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater when it was formally dedicated on August 18, 1918 was given the cover name, the Thule Society. Sebottendorf invited the numerous pan-German societies to join forces: Heinrich Class’ Alldeutsche Verband, Joseph Rohmeder’s Schulverein, Fritsch’s Hammerbund, Hans Dahn’s National Liberal Party, the Iron Fist, Old Reich Association and Der Stahlhelm. At the society’s founding, Sebottendorff proclaimed his commitment to fighting the Jewish conspiracy:
I intend to commit the Thule Society to his
combat, as long as I hold the Iron Hammer… I swear on this swastika, on this
sign which for us is sacred.[2331]
Sebottendorff and his lodge members founded the Thule Society to counter looming threat of a Soviet-style communist takeover of Bavaria. After the proclamation of the Free People’s State of Bavaria on November 8, 1918, by Kurt Eisner, whom the opponents of the revolution denounced as a traitor, a destroyer of Bavarian traditions and as a Jewish immigrant from Galicia, the Kampfbund (“Thule Combat League”) was established as the military arm of Thule Society. The weapons provided by Thule associate Julius Friedrich Lehmann (1864 – 1935), a leading publisher of eugenic and pan-German literature.[2332]
By August 1918, Sebottendorf accumulated
enough money from the Germanenorden
and the army to buy a small local paper from Franz Eher Verlag called the Münchener
Beobachter. Along with fellow Thule member and sportswriter Karl Harrer (1890
– 1926), Sebottendorf turned the Beobachter into an anti-Semitic tabloid
with a sports section.[2333]
On May 24, 1919 Philipp Stauff (1876 – 1923), a Berlin journalist, good friend
of Guido von List and Armanist, and who had been active in both the Reichshammerbund
and the Germanenorden, wrote an obituary to him which appeared in the
paper. Among the Beobachter’s
attacks on the left was calling Bavarian Communist leader Max Levien a
syphilitic and accusing Kurt Eisner’s widow of having an affair with Gustav
Landauer, the husband of Hedwig Lachmann, and a minister of the first Bavarian
Soviet Republic.[2334]
Eisner, the first premier of the People’s State of Bavaria, was assassinated on February 21, 1919 by Prince Arco-Valley (1897 – 1945), and seven Thule members were executed by the communists, becoming the first martyrs of the movement that would become the Nazi party.[2335] Arco-Valley’s mother, Emily Freiin von Oppenheim (1869 – 1957), was from a wealthy Jewish banking family. According to Goodrick-Clarke, Arco-Valley was resentful at his exclusion from the Thule Society and wanted to prove his patriotism.[2336] “Eisner” Valley claimed, “is a Bolshevist, a Jew; he isn’t German, he doesn’t feel German, he subverts all patriotic thoughts and feelings. He is a traitor to this land.” The killing of Eisner made von Arco-Valley a hero to the far right.
However, Arco-Valley’s action triggered
retaliation by socialists, communists and anarchists throughout Munich, during
which a number of people were killed, including another member of the Thule
Society, Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis (1888 – 30 April 1919). The dynasty
of Thurn and Taxis are one of the wealthiest families in Europe, and have long
been associated with the Rothschilds, the Illuminati and the Asiatic Brethren. Prince
Gustav’s uncle was Prince
Paul of Thurn and Taxis, King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s
homosexual lover, who helped Wagner intercede with the king on behalf of Bismarck
to have the pro-Prussian Chlodwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst
appointed Minister President of Bavaria.[2337]
Paul’s brother, Maximilian
Anton, Hereditary Prince of Thurn and Taxis (1831 – 1867), was married to Duchess Helene in
Bavaria, a granddaughter of Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria. Duchess Helene’s
father, Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria, was introduced to Wagner through his
cousin of Ludwig II and became his patron.[2338]
Duchess Helene was also a cousin of Pedro I of Brazil, the father of Pedro II
of Brazil, and the friend of Wagner and Arthur de Gobineau.
Johannes Hoffmann (1867 – 1930) succeeded Eisner as minister-president of the People’s State of Bavaria on March 17, 1919 as the first freely elected Bavarian Minister President. After the assassination of Eisner, opposing factions of the far left competed for control of Munich, and turned on those they thought were traitors. Some of the “reds” had seized several leading members of Thule society, and on April 30 they made the fatal mistake of executing them. As the news spread, volunteers calling themselves the Volkswehr (“the people’s defense”) organized themselves within the city to retaliate, and crushed the red revolution on May 2. At Hoffman’s commission, Sebottendorff, who joined the Volkswehr, founded a second paramilitary group, the Freikorps Oberland, a force that later would put down workers’ insurrections.[2339]
On March 6, 1919, the Weimar Assembly authorized the Reich President to dissolve the existing army and to form a provisional Reichswehr (“Reich Defence”), which became the official name of the German armed forces during the Weimar Republic and the first years of the Third Reich. The first Reichswehr Minister was Gustav Noske. The revolution effectively ended on August 11, 1919, when the Weimar Constitution was adopted, and Ebert became the first president of Germany. On January 20, 1920, the Treaty of Versailles came into force, restricting the German army to 100,000 men or less. On February 28, 1920, Noske, following orders of the Interalliierte Militärkontrollkommission, which oversaw Germany’s compliance with the Treaty, dissolved the branches of the Freikorps. The highest ranking general of the Reichswehr, Walther von Lüttwitz (1859 – 1942), who had directed the suppression of the Spartacist Uprising by the Freikorps refused to comply, resulting in what became known as the Kapp Putsch.[2340]
“Fritsch and Pohl,” explained Eric Kurlander, managed to build a remarkably broad coalition of like-minded politicians and intellectuals,” to which could be added Ludendorff, who was also among the leaders of the Kapp Putsch[2341] According to Michael Kellogg, Ludendorff and Wolfgang Kapp (1858 – 1922) used demobilized Germans and White émigrés to undermine the Weimar Republic. Kapp was born in New York City where his father, Forty-Eighter Friedrich Kapp, a Reichstag delegate for the National Liberal Party, had settled after the failed European revolutions of 1848. In New York, Friedrich founded Zitz, Kapp & Fröbel, with Julius Fröbel and another Forty-Eighter, Franz Dr. Franz Heinrich Zitz (1803 – 1877), who married Kathinka Zitz-Halein, called “the poet laureate of the German Revolution.” Fröbel’s father Friedrich was a disciple of Father Jahn and edited Wagner’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. Julius was also a friend of Alexander von Humboldt, of Weimar Classicism, whose friend and benefactor was Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph. Julius was also a teacher of Carl Schurz’s Jewish wife Margarethe, as well as a friend of Wilhelm Marr.
Friedrich Kapp was close friends with the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872), whose criticism of religion strongly influenced Karl Marx. Feuerbach was the brother of mathematician Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach (1800 – 1834) and uncle of painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829 – 1880). Their father, the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, was identified by the French imperial police as a member of the Illuminati.[2342] In 1801, Feuerbach was professor at the University of Jena, and in the following year accepted a chair at Kiel, where attended the lectures of fellow Illuminati members Karl Leonhard Reinhold, son-in-law of Christoph Martin Wieland, and Gottlieb Hufeland.
Kapp was also acquainted with Ludwig Bamberger, who was among the Jewish bankers, along with Rothschild agent Gerson von Bleichröder, and Eduard Lasker, who backed Bismarck’s plan for German unification.[2343] Other acquaintances of Friedrich from his time as a student included Berthold Auerbach—of the Committee for Jewish Affairs in Berlin and member of the Judenloge—and Bettina von Arnim. Bettina was the sister of Clemens Brentano, who married Achim von Arnim, who belonged to the Gesetzlose Gesellschaft (“Lawless society”) with Tugendbund member, Ernst Moritz Arndt, a friend of Henriette Herz, whose husband was a close friend of Moses Mendelssohn and David Friedländer.[2344] Bettina numbered among her closest friends Goethe, Beethoven, Schleiermacher, with whom she attended Sara Itzig Levy’s salons, as well as Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Johanna Kinkel, the wife of Gottfried Kinkel, and Franz Liszt, with whom she had an affair with.[2345] Auerbach was intended for the ministry, but was estranged from Jewish orthodoxy by the study of Spinoza. The uprisings of March 1848 in Germany prompted Kapp to go to Frankfurt to work as a journalist. Due to his involvement in the September Rebellion he had to flee to Brussels. There he worked as a private teacher for the son of Alexander Herzen.
In 1870, the Kapp family returned to Germany. In 1907, Wolfgang Kapp took over the position of director of the East Prussian Agricultural Credit Institute. In 1912, he was elected to the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank. Kapp became a proponent of the stab-in-the-back myth. He joined the German National People’s Party (DNVP) in 1919 and participated in the anti-republican Nationale Vereinigung (“National Union”). In reaction to the Reichstag Peace Resolution of 1917, Kapp, with Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (1849 – 1930), who had been Secretary of State of the German Imperial Naval Office, and Heinrich Class (1868 – 1953), founded the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (“German Fatherland Party,” DVLP), which all the members of the Wagner family joined, and of which Kapp was briefly the chairman.[2346] The DVLP also included members of the Anti-Bolshevik Fund, like Ernst Borsig, Hugo Stinnes, and the Jewish banker Arthur Salomonsohn, who was also a member the Gesellschaft der Freunde.[2347]
German Fatherland Party included Thule members Julius Friedrich Lehmann and Anton Drexler. Lehmann and fellow Thule Society member Theodor Fritsch were on the advisory board of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (“German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation”), founded in 1919, the largest and the most active antisemitic federation in Germany after World War I, and an organization that formed a significant part of the völkisch movement during the Weimar Republic. The director of Trutzbund was Alfred Roth (1879 – 1948), sometimes known by his pseudonym Otto Arnim. Roth met Georg von Schönerer in 1904 and became an enthusiastic supporter of his pan-German ideas. He was an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate for Sonnenberg’s Deutsch-Soziale Partei (German Social Party) in 1907, and was also a member of the Pan-German League. As leader of the Trutzbund he was credited with attracting some 200,000 members to the group.[2348] Roth was active in Fritsch’s Reichshammerbund before serving as an officer in World War I.[2349]
The Trutzbund’s manifesto was Wenn ich der Kaiser wär (“If I Were the Kaiser”), which was written by Heinrich Class, President of the Pan-German League, whose slogan was “Germany for the Germans.” Class had been a student of Heinrich von Treitschke, one of the signers of the Antisemitenpetition. Other students of Treitschke included Karl Liebknecht and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963), a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose board included Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise.[2350] Working as a lawyer, Class defended Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was also heavily influenced by Treitschke.[2351]
On March 13, 1920, Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz led the so-called Kapp Putsch, an attempted coup against the German national government in Berlin, to undo the German Revolution of 1918–1919, overthrow the Weimar Republic, and establish an autocratic government in its place. Kapp’s press chief at the time was Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln (1879 – 1943), a lager-than-life character, a Jewish adventurer of Hungarian origin, who spent parts of his life as a Protestant missionary, Anglican priest, British Member of Parliament for Darlington, German right-wing politician and spy, Nazi collaborator and Buddhist abbot in China. Trebitsch-Lincoln was initiated to the occult by Harold Beckett, an ex-Indian Army officer who allegedly had ties with Maître Philippe and Papus, after which Trebitsch-Lincoln went on to join numerous secret societies including the Freemasons, the OTO and Chinese triads.[2352] René Guénon had described Trebitsch-Lincoln as a representative of dark occult influences with a close connection to Crowley. Another French writer, Pierre Mariel, also insists that Trebitsch-Lincoln was a member of the OTO.[2353] In 1915, Trebitsch-Lincoln visited the offices of Crowley and Viereck’s The Fatherland’s, after which he was arrested by the Americans upon pressure from the British government.
American intelligence regarded Trebitsch-Lincoln as the organizer of the Kapp Putsch.[2354] Guido Preparata, author of Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, believes that the British used Trebitsch-Lincoln as “an agent steeped in counter-insurgency tactics and disinformation to thwart, expose and burn all the monarchist conspiracies against the Weimar Republic.”[2355] Preparata refers to a British report which suggests that Trebitsch-Lincoln was sent to Germany by then Secretary for War Winston Churchill. The same report claims that when the right-wing Kapp plot began to fail, Trebitsch-Lincoln switched to “working to bring about Bolshevism in Germany.” Although US military intelligence reports declared that Trebitsch-Lincoln “was and still is an English agent,” he was also reported to be “actively engaged in the ‘Red Movement’” and “working in the interest of the Soviet Government in Austria and Hungary.”[2356] In 1920, following the putsch, Trebitsch-Lincoln was appointed press censor to the new government. In this capacity he met Hitler, who flew in from Munich the day before the putsch collapsed.
After the failed Kapp Putsch of 1920, the organization gained further support from dissolved Freikorps units. In 1923, the former DNVP politician Theodor Duesterberg (1875 – 1950) joined Der Stahlhelm (The Steel Helmet”) and quickly rose to deputy of Franz Seldte (1882 – 1947). As a reaction to the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Seldte founded Der Stahlhelm in 1918, agitating against the Treaty of Versailles and German war reparations, and promoting the Stab-in-the-back legend and the “November Criminals” bias against the Weimar Coalition government. Financing was provided by the Herrenklub. In March 1924, Duesterberg and General Maercker, the founder of the Freikorps, and forced Seldte to adopt the “Aryan clause” and expel all Jews from Der Stahlhelm. The “Aryan clause” of 1924 was later to serve as the inspiration for similar “Aryan clauses” under the Third Reich, and in particular influenced the War Minister, General Werner von Blomberg (1878 – 1946) in his attempts to keep the Wehrmacht “racially clean.”[2357] In 1932, Duesterberg was nominated by Der Stahlhelm and DNVP to run for President of Germany, but the Nazis ultimately destroyed any his chances when they revealed he had Jewish ancestry. Duesterberg learned for the first time that his grandfather was a Prussian Jewish doctor who converted to Lutheranism in 1818, a revelation that caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown and to submit his resignation in shame from Der Stahlhelm.[2358]
Members of the ultra-nationalist Organisation Consul (OC), composed of former Kapp Putsch conspirators, were involved in the assassination of Walter Rathenau in 1922. The OC grew out of the ranks of Marine Brigade Ehrhardt, a Freikorps unit formed by Hermann Ehrhardt, after the failure of the Kapp Putsch. The OC played a significant role in the formation of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1921. His assassins explicitly cited Rathenau’s membership in the “three hundred Elders of Zion” as justification for the killing.[2359] Rathenau had famously said in a 1909 in Neue Freie Presse: “Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, guide the economic destinies of the Continent and seek their successors from their own milieu.” By 1912, Theodor Fritsch considered Rathenau’s comment as an “open confession of indubitable Jewish hegemony” and as proof that Rathenau was the “secret Kaiser of Germany.”[2360]
Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, almost exactly nine months after the gruesome murders of by Jack the Ripper began, as if the killings were part of some dark ritual performed by the Golden Dawn to bring about the birth of some sort of “mind-controlled” messiah of chaos, and Aleister Crowley must have been his handler. Edward Bulwer-Lytton was the “Grand Patron” of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), whose Supreme Magus, William Wynn Westcott, one of the three founders of the Golden Dawn. Westcott became an important member of Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, later also Master of the Masonic research lodge Quatuor Coronati, and under his authority Theodor Reuss founded irregular masonic and Rosicrucian lodges in Germany in 1902. Crowley joined Reuss’s Ordo OTO in 1912. Eerily, in the Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky described the ominous portent of the so-called Vril force of the coming race mentioned by Bulwer-Lytton:
It is this Satanic Force that our generations were to be allowed to add to their stock of Anarchist's baby-toys.... It is this destructive agency, which, once in the hands of some modern Attila, a bloodthirsty antichrist, for instance, would in a few days reduce Europe to its primitive chaotic state, with no man left alive to tell the tale.[2361]
According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Thule Society founder Rudolf von Sebottendorf was initiated by the Termudi family of Jewish Freemasons in Salonika (Thessaloniki), the heartland of the Dönmeh sect, into a lodge believed to have been affiliated to the French Rite of Memphis.[2362] The lodge he had been admitted to by the Termudi was, before the Young Turks seized power, the secret Bursa base of the CUP.[2363] He eventually inherited their library of texts on alchemy, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Sufism. He was initially interested in Theosophy and Freemasonry, through which he was introduced to the Bektashi Sufis, whose belief in their origins in Ergenekon corresponded with the legend of Agartha and Shambhala. [2364] In later years, Sebottendorff would explain that the magical practices of “Oriental freemasonry” preserved the secrets of the Rosicrucians and the alchemists, that modern Freemasonry had forgotten.[2365]
Sebottendorf derived his racist ideas from the Pan-Turkism of the Dönmeh of Turkey, who venerated an ancient homeland called Ergenekon, which corresponded to the legend of Agartha, also venerated by the Thules. The Thule Society identified the Germanic people as the Aryan race, the descendants from Thule, and sought its transformation into a super-race by harnessing the power of Vril, mentioned in Bulwer-Lytton’s Coming Race. Inspired by Greco-Roman geographers who located the mythical land of “Ultima Thule” in the furthest north, Nazi mystics identified it as the capital of ancient Hyperborea, a lost ancient landmass supposedly near Greenland or Iceland, and the land of the super-race who inhabited the Hollow Earth. The Ancient Greeks wrote not only of the sunken island of Atlantis, but also of Hyperborea, a northern land whose people migrated south before it was destroyed by ice.
Like Guido von List, the father of Ariosophy, Sebottendorf believed that blonde, blue-eyed giants with supernatural abilities lived in far north long ago. Through miscegenation with inferior races, they lost their “third eye,” which allowed them to communicate with the “etheric continuum.”[2366] After the destruction of Ultima Thule, its refugees withdrew to Asgard, the home of the gods in Norse mythology, corresponding with Agartha. These Hyperborean Masters communicated telepathically with Ariosophic prophets such as Guido von List to help them prepare for “The Coming Great One,” a warrior-priest who would lead the Aryans to victory.[2367] Judging by the enthusiasm with which the members of the Thule Society received Hitler and were impressed by his manic rhetorical abilities, they must have perceived him not only to be the embodiment of this prophesied Aryan savior, but to be possessed, or in direct telepathic contact, or “channeling,” these Hyperborean gods or deceptive entities.
According to Greg Hallett, author of Hitler Was a British Agent, Hitler was in England in 1912-1913, a fact supported by his sister-in-law’s book, The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler, and he proposes that Hitler spent February to November 1912 undergoing mind-control training at the British Military Psych-Ops War School at Tavistock in Devon and in Ireland. Hitler’s sister-in-law describes him as completely wasted upon his arrival at her Liverpool home luggage-less. “I had an idea he was ill, his color was so bad and his eyes looked so peculiar,” she wrote. “He was always reading, not books, little pamphlets printed in German. I don’t know what was in them nor exactly where they came from.”[2368] Hallett proposed that this reading material was manuals from Tavistock.
What gave rise to the Tavistock program was
the British Army Psychological Warfare Bureau’s use of propaganda during World
War I, which was intended to convince the British that war was necessary and
that Germany was an enemy to be detested. A key element in that plan was the
provocation of Germany’s sinking of the Lusitania. Profiting from this
experience, the British Army Bureau of Psychological Warfare set up the
Tavistock Institute for Human Relations on the orders of the British monarchy
and placed British newspaper magnate, Alfred Harmsworth (1865 – 1922), Viscount
Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and The
Times, and an admirer of Cecil Rhodes, who was appointed director for
propaganda under David Lloyd George.[2369] It was
under Harmsworth’s
ownership that The Times first published The
Protocols as genuine in 1920, before publishing a retraction
in 1921, when Philip Graves, the Istanbul correspondent of The Times, based on
a clue provided to him by Allen Dulles, future head of the CIA, exposed The
Protocols as a forgery, largely plagiarized from Maurice Joly The
Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.
The
activities of the Round Table leading up to and during World War I, were
propagandized by Harmsworth his newspapers. By 1914, Harmsworth controlled 40
per cent of the morning newspaper circulation in Britain, 45 per cent of the
evening and 15 per cent of the Sunday circulation.[2370]
According to Harry J. Greenwall, the author of Northcliffe:
Napoleon of Fleet Street (1957), Harmsworth “with the Daily Mail
unleashed a tremendous force of potential mass thought-control” as it became
the “trumpet… of British Imperialism.”[2371] Harmsworth’s
editorship of the Daily Mail in the years just preceding the World War
I, when the newspaper displayed “a virulent anti-German sentiment,” caused The
Star to declare, “Next to the Kaiser, Lord Northcliffe has done more than
any living man to bring about the war.”[2372] Arthur
Balfour, the leader of the party in the House of Commons, sent a private letter
to Harmsworth. “Though it is impossible for me, for obvious reasons, to appear
among the list of those who publish congratulatory comments in the columns of
the Daily Mail perhaps you will allow me privately to express my
appreciation of your new undertaking.”[2373]
The Tavistock Clinic, later renamed the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, a British not-for-profit organization formed at Oxford University in 1920 by Dr. Hugh Crichton-Miller, a psychiatrist who developed psychological treatments for shell-shocked soldiers. Tavistock was reportedly formed on the orders Round Table’s Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), and relies on grants from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, the British Home Office and other anonymous supporters.[2374] Its members referred to themselves as an “invisible college,” in reference to the in reference to the seventeenth-century precursor to the Royal Society.[2375] The staff at Tavistock consisted of Arnold Toynbee, a future director of studies at the RIIA, Round Tabler Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays.[2376]
Tavistock was concerned with the psychology of group behavior and organizational behavior, based on the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud.[2377] As shown in “The Consolation of Theosophy II,” an article by Frederick C. Crews for The New York Review of Books, several scholars have established that Freud was among the key figures who developed therapy through the retrieval of forgotten trauma, through a debt to Mesmer.[2378] People have been employing hypnotic-type states for thousands of years, and in many cultures and religions. Hypnosis is what has been referred to in the past as casting a spell, or the trance or altered states of consciousness of mystics, mediums and shamans. Research psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey in The Mind Game aligns hypnotic techniques with witchcraft.”[2379]
According to William Kroger and William Fezler in Hypnosis and Behavior Modification, “For centuries, Zen, Buddhist, Tibetan, and Yogic methods have used a system of meditation and an altered state of consciousness similar to hypnosis.”[2380] When Ernest Hilgard, an American psychologist and professor at Stanford University—who became famous in the 1950s for his research on hypnosis—was asked what was the difference between hypnosis as used by a trained practitioner and that used by shamans or witch doctors, he responded, “Trained practitioners know a great deal about contemporary psychotherapy and hypnosis is merely adjuvant. In this they differ from those whose practices are essentially magical.”[2381]
Western scientists first became involved in hypnosis around 1770, through the influence of occultist Franz Anton Mesmer. The theories and practices of mesmerism greatly influenced the up-and-coming field of psychiatry with such early practitioners as Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet and Freud. Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing traces Mesmer’s use of hypnotism to uncover the influence of unconscious mental activity as the source of repressed thoughts or impulses in the theories of Freud. Jonathan Miller traced the steps by which psychologists gradually stripped Mesmerism of its occult associations, reducing it to mere hypnosis and thus paving the way for recognition of non-conscious mental functioning.[2382]
Adolf Hitler, an inhabitant of Vienna
from 1907 to 1913, saw Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, who was also a
supporter of von Schönerer and the German National Party, as an inspiration for
his own views on Jews. Liebenfels claimed that Hitler had visited him at the
office his Ostara journal in Rodaun on the outskirts of Vienna during
1909.[2383]
Hitler was in Vienna in 1913, where in the same year there also lived Leon
Trotsky, Yugoslavia’s eventual leader Marshal Tito, Freud and Joseph Stalin. Freud
frequented the Cafe Landtmann, while Trotsky and Hitler often visited Cafe
Central. Hitler read newspapers and pamphlets that published the thoughts of
philosophers and theoreticians such as Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Gustave Le Bon and Arthur Schopenhauer.[2384] Hitler was also influenced by Eugen
Karl Dühring, Paul Anton de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Adolf Stoecker, Arthur Comte de
Gobineau, and Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.[2385]
Nevertheless, as is popularly known, there had been widespread rumors that Hitler was himself Jewish. Such a claim was put forward by a prominent New York City attorney named Jerrold Morgulas, in The Torquemada Principal, while still other theories suggested Hitler was the illegitimate grandchild of a Rothschild. In fact, Hitler’s Jewish and African ancestry has been confirmed through recent genetic studies.[2386] Like Napoleon, Hitler belonged to the Y-DNA haplogroup E1b1b, which is rare in Germany and even Western Europe. According to Ronny Decorte, genetics expert at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven who sampled Hitler’s current living relatives, “the results of this study are surprising” and “Hitler would not have been happy.”[2387] E1b1b is presently found in various forms in the Horn of Africa, North Africa, parts of Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa, West Asia, and Europe, especially the Mediterranean Spain and the Balkans. E1b1b is quite common amongst populations with an Afro-Asiatic speaking history, where a significant proportion of Jewish male lineages are E1b1b1, including that of Albert Einstein. E1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18% to 20% of Ashkenazi and up to 30% of Sephardi Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population.[2388]
In The Jew of Linz, Kimberley Cornish alleges that the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had a profound effect on Hitler when they were both pupils in the early 1900s at the Realschule in Linz, Austria, a state school of about 300 students.[2389] While Hitler was just six days older than Wittgenstein, they were two grades apart at the school, as Hitler was required to repeat a year while Wittgenstein had been advanced one. Cornish’s theory that Hitler knew the young Wittgenstein, and learned to hate him, and that Wittgenstein was the one Jewish boy from his school days at the Realschule referred to in Mein Kampf:
Likewise at school I found no occasion which could have led me to change this inherited picture. At the Realschule, to be sure, I did meet one Jewish boy who was treated by all of us with caution, but only because various experiences had led us to doubt his discretion and we did not particularly trust him; but neither I nor the others had any thoughts on the matter.[2390]
Hitler had left his hometown of Linz in Austria in 1907, to live and study fine art in Vienna, financed by orphan’s benefits and support from his mother. He applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna but was rejected twice, since he had not completed secondary school.[2391] In 1909, Hitler ran out of money and was forced to live a bohemian lifestyle in homeless shelters and a men’s dormitory. According to Samuel Igra, author of Germany’s National Vice, an affidavit in the possession of the diplomatic representatives of several governments in Vienna “declared that Hitler had been a male prostitute in Vienna… from 1907 to 1912, and that he practiced the same calling in Munich from 1912 to 1914.”[2392]
Also in Mein Kampf, Hitler described how, in his youth, he wanted to become a professional artist, but his dreams were crushed because he failed the entrance exam of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In 1909, Hitler ran out of money and was forced to live a bohemian life in homeless shelters and a men’s dormitory. He earned money as a casual laborer and by painting and selling his paintings of Vienna’s sights. Samuel Morgenstern (1875 – 1943), a Jewish businessman who sold picture frames, sold many of Hitler’s paintings. Hitler maintained a friendly relationship with Morgenstern and his wife, at one point visiting the two once a week as a guest in their home. The majority of the buyers were Jewish from Morgenstern’s regular clientele from around his workshop on Liechtensteinstrasse near downtown Vienna, quite close to Freud’s practice. One of Morgenstern's main customers was the lawyer Dr. Josef Feingold.[2393] In a statement made in the 1930s, Hitler said that Morgenstern had been his “savior” during the Vienna period.[2394] Reinhold Hanisch (1884 – 1937), a petty criminal and sometime business partner of the young Hitler, stressed that Hitler associated almost exclusively with Jews, and his best friend in the men’s dormitory was the Jewish copper cleaner Josef Neumann. Another Jewish friend was a one-eyed locksmith’s assistant, Simon Robinsohn.[2395] From 1909 to 1913, Hitler supplied his paintings on a regular basis Jakob Altenberg (1875 – 1944), another Jewish businessman. Although Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf to have discovered his hatred of the Jews during his time in Vienna, Altenberg is reported to have said that he never heard Hitler utter an anti-Semitic remark.[2396]
During his time in Vienna, Hitler pursued a growing passion for architecture and music, attending ten performances of Lohengrin, his favorite Wagner opera, when he was only twelve.[2397] “I was captivated at once,” Hitler wrote in the opening pages of Mein Kampf. “My youthful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds.”[2398] According to August Kubizek, a childhood friend, Hitler was so influenced by seeing Wagner’s Rienzi in 1906, based on a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton of the same name, that it triggered his political career. The hero is a man of the people, a visionary who sings: “and if you choose me as your protector of the people’s rights, look at your ancestors and call me your Volk tribune!” The masses shout back, “Rienzi, Heil! Heil, Volk tribune!”[2399] Kubizek, describes the effect that Wagner’s music had on Hitler, as a young man:
Never before and never again have I heard
Hitler speak as he did in that hour....It was as if another being spoke out of
his body, and moved him as much as it did me. It wasn’t at all the case of a
speaker being carried away by his own words. On the contrary;
I rather felt as though he himself listened with astonishment and emotion to
what burst forth from him with elementary force… It was a state of complete
ecstasy and rapture… He was talking of a mandate which, one day, he would
receive from the people, to lead them out of servitude to the heights of
freedom… It was a state of complete ecstasy and rapture, in which he
transferred the character of Rienzi, without even mentioning him as a model or
example, with visionary power to the plane of his own ambitions...a special
mission which one day would be entrusted to him.[2400]
When Kubizek reminded Hitler, in 1939 at Bayreuth, of his enthusiastic response to the opera, Hitler replied, “At that hour it all began!”[2401] A fellow solider during World War I later reported that Hitler “said that we would hear much about him. We should just wait until his time has arrived.”[2402] In August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Hitler was living in Munich and voluntarily enlisted in the Bavarian Army, despite the fact that he was as an Austrian citizen and should have been returned to Austria.[2403] It was on October 15, 1918, when he was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack and was hospitalized in Pasewalk, when Hitler again had an important experience with the “Voice.”[2404] Hitler reported hearing “the Voice” when he narrowly escaped death from a French artillery shell on November 15, 1914:
I was eating my dinner in a trench with several comrades. Suddenly, a voice seemed to be saying to me: “get up and go over there.” It was so clear and insistent that I obeyed automatically as if it has been a military order. I rose at once to my feet and walked twenty meters along the trench carrying my dinner can with me. Then I sat down to go on eating, my mind once more at rest. Hardly had I done so when a flash and defining report came from the part of the trench I had just left. A stray shell had burst over the group in which I had been sitting, and every member of it was killed.[2405]
Hitler also admitted that he experienced a “vision” and heard a voice from “another world,” during which he was told that he would need to restore his sight so that he could lead Germany back to glory.[2406] The “Voice” insisted that Hitler had been chosen by Providence and had been given a Divine mission. Hitler was destined to establish a new social order, a new Reich which would be established under his leadership. In a footnote of his biography of Hitler, John Toland purported that Hitler may have been hypnotized.[2407] According to historian Dr. Thomas Weber of the University of Aberdeen, who has explored the significance of Hitler’s time in Pasewalk, “Hitler left the First World War an awkward loner who had never commanded a single other soldier, but very quickly became a charismatic leader who took over his country.”[2408]
According to a US Navy Intelligence report
which was declassified in 1973, and written by Austrian nerve specialist Karl
Kroner, who was working when Hitler was treated in Pasewalk, the consulting
psychiatrist Edmund Forster concluded that Hitler’s condition was hysterical
blindness.[2409]
Whatever treatment Hitler received under Forster’s care will never be known due
to the fact that in 1933 the Gestapo seized all psychiatric records related to
his treatment and destroyed them. Forster also committed suicide in the same
year. According to historian
Dr. Thomas Weber of the University of Aberdeen, who has explored the
significance of Hitler’s time in Pasewalk, “Hitler left the First World War an
awkward loner who had never commanded a single other soldier, but very quickly
became a charismatic leader who took over his country.”[2410]
Hitler in Pasewalk by Bernhard Horstmann and David Lewis’ The Man who Invented Hitler both explain the metamorphosis in terms of the hypnosis. Toland refers to a curious parallel of Hitler’s experience, found in a book completed in 1939 titled The Eyewitness, written by a Jewish doctor Ernst Weiss, who was acquainted with Forster. Weiss fled Germany in 1933 and committed suicide in Paris when the Nazis arrived. The Eyewitness tells of a German corporal named “A.H.” blinded during a mustard gas attack and treated by a psychiatrist at Pasewalk. The Corporal is described as a patient with an Austrian accent, who has received the Iron Cross, and who loves the music of Wagner but hates Jews. The psychiatrist hypnotizes A.H. and suggests that he must recover his sight in order to lead the German people. “Perhaps you yourself have the rare power, which occurs only occasionally in a thousand years, to work a miracle,” the doctor tells A.H. “Jesus did it. Mohammed. The saints? You are young; it would be too bad for you to stay blind. You know that Germany needs people who have energy and blind self-confidence.”[2411]
The man
who supposedly “discovered” Hitler and advanced
his career in Germany, was Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887 – 1975), a German
businessman with key links to the Round Table conspirators and the highest
echelons of power in the US, right up to the office of the American president
at the time.[2412] Hanfstaengl,
nicknamed “Putzi,” was born in Munich, the son of a German art publisher and an
American mother. Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1818 – 1893), the
older brother of Queen Victoria’s husband Albert, was Hanfstaengl’s godfather. Ernst’s father, Edgar Hanfstaengl (1842 – 1910), had a love-affair with Duchess
Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria, the favorite sister of Empress Sisi of Austria,
and a fiancée of Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Hanfstaengl’s
mother was Katharine Wilhelmina Heine, daughter of Forty-Eighter
William Heine (1827 – 1885), a German-American artist, world traveler and
writer as well as an officer during the American Civil War. Heine was born in
Dresden, where his family connections included Wagner, whose father had been a
family friend.[2413]
Heine studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden and in the studio of
Julius Hübner, who painted a portrait of
Berthold Auerbach, a member of the Frankfurt Judenloge and of the Committee for
Jewish Affairs in Berlin, and a contributor to the Kreuzzeitung. He fled
to New York in 1849, following the suppression of the May Uprising in Dresden,
aided by Alexander von Humboldt, whose friends and benefactors included Moses
Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph and David Friedländer. Heine received an
invitation to join the The Eulenburg expedition, conducted in 1859–1862, by
Friedrich Albrecht zu Eulenburg—grandfather of Herzl’s friend Philipp, Prince
of Eulenburg—to establish diplomatic and commercial relations with China, Japan
and Siam. During the trip he met up with Mikhail Bakunin in Yokohama, who was
in the process of returning to Europe, following his escape from Siberia.[2414]
Learning of the outbreak of the American Civil War; the Forty-Eighter returned
and volunteered for the Union Army. Heine was nephew-in-law of American Civil
War Union Army general John Sedgwick (1813 – 1864).
Hanfstaengl spent most of his early years
in Germany but later moved to the United States and attended Harvard University
and through his membership in the Harvard Club he counted among his friends
Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Delano Roosevelt, then Senator of New York, T.S. Eliot,
John Reed and Walter Lippmann, who was also associated with the Tavistock
Institute, where he had been appointed to handle the manipulation of American
public opinion in preparation for the entry of the United States into World War
I.[2415]
It was also at Harvard that Hanfstaengl made friends with Roosevelt. A private message was sent from Roosevelt to Hanfstaengl in Berlin, to the effect that Roosevelt hoped that Hanfstaengl would do his best to prevent any rashness and hot-headedness on the part of Hitler and that, “If things start getting awkward please get in touch with our ambassador at once.”[2416] As recounted by Andrew Nagorski in Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, after his return to Germany in 1922, Warren Robbins, a Harvard classmate serving at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, called Hanfstaengl in Munich to ask him to assist Truman Smith, a young military attaché working for American ambassador Alanson B. Houghton. Smith was sent to Munich to “try to make personal contact with Hitler himself and form an estimate of his character, personality, abilities, and weaknesses.” In his report filed to Washington, Smith characterized Hitler as a “a marvelous demagogue… I have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man.”[2417] When they finally met, Smith gave Hanfstaengl his press pass to a Nazi rally that evening. Hanfstaengl’s first impression of Hitler was underwhelming, but once Hitler took the podium, the atmosphere became “electric.”[2418]
Interviewed by the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS) during World War II, Ernst Hanfstaengl recounted that Hitler had made
it known privately that at Pasewalk he had had a “supernatural vision which
commanded him to save his unhappy country. After giving his first speech at the
Hofbräukeller for the DAP on October 16, 1919—a year after first having heard
the “Voice,” at Pasewalk—the members the Thule Society were so impressed by the
oratorical skills of Hitler—a former male prostitute, and failed artist with
barely a secondary-school education—that he was received by them as the
“messiah” they had been awaiting. Thule founder Dietrich Eckart (1868 – 1923) had
expressed his anticipation of List’s prophecy of a “German Messiah” who would
save Germany after World War I in a poem he published in 1919, months before he
met Hitler for the first time. When he met Hitler, Eckart was convinced that he had encountered the
prophesied redeemer. Eckart refers to Hitler as “the Great One,” “the Nameless
One,” “Whom all can sense but no one saw.”[2419]
Ludendorff “trembled with emotion” when he first heard Hitler.[2420]
Several months after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Sebottendorf published a book titled Bevor Hitler kam: Urkundliches aus der Friihzeit der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung (“Before Hitler Came: The early years of the Nazi movement,”), where he detailed how the Thule Society was the organ of the Nazi Party:
Thule members were the people to whom Hitler first turned, and who first allied themselves with Hitler. The armament of the coming Führer consisted—besides the Thule Society itself—of the Deutscher Arbeiterverein, founded in the Thule by Brother Karl Harrer at Munich, and the Deutsch-Sozialistische Partei, headed there by Hans Georg Grassinger, whose organ was the Münchener Beobachter, later the Völkischer Beobachter. From these three sources Hitler created the Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei.
According to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, the Thule’s “membership list… reads like a Who’s Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich.”[2421] In a book also titled Bevor Hitler Kam (“Before Hitler Came”), Dietrich Bronder alleged that members of the Thule Society included Dietrich Eckart, Gottfried Feder, Hans Frank, Hermann Göring, Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, and Alfred Rosenberg. Bronder also noted that among the anti-Semites there were quite a few of Jewish origin, and concluded, from his own research, that among 4000 men of the Nazi leadership there were 120 foreigners by birth, many with one or two parents of foreign origin and one percent even of Jewish descent. Of Jewish descent or related to Jewish families he listed Thule member Rudolf Hess, Gregor Strasser, Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Franz Hanfstaengl, and Aufbau and Thule members Alfred Rosenberg and Karl Haushofer. According to Bronder, Ribbentrop—a protégé of Hanfstaengl—also maintained a close friendship with Chaim Weizmann.[2422]
Hanfstaengl was intimately associated with Otto Khan and Aleister Crowley’s friend and co-conspirator, Hanns Ewers, who worked the secretive Propaganda Kabinett of Max Warburg’s associate Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, with George Sylvester Viereck and Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg.[2423] Ewers was also an associate of Guido von List Lanz von Liebenfels.[2424] Ewers wrote a screenplay about the Nazi martyr Horst Wessel that was produced by Hanfstaengl.
In 1932, Goebbels pamphlet published to refute certain allegations that his grandmother was Jewish.[2425] Gregor Strasser, for many years second only to Hitler in the Nazi Party, had asserted that Goebbels was of Jewish ancestry, citing the club foot as proof.[2426] After attending the lectures at University of Heidelberg on the German Romantics from his Jewish professor Friedrich Gundolf, a member of the George-Kreis, Goebbels became completely captivated by the works of the Schlegel brothers, of Tieck, Novalis and Schelling.[2427] Goebbels sent a letter to Professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg (1858 – 1938), with whom he graduated, reiterating how much he owed to Gundolf.[2428] Goebbels’s first love, Anka Helhom, often showed her friends a book with his personal inscription on it, the Buch der Lieder, by Heinrich Heine. In the summer of 1922, he began a love affair with Else Janke, a schoolteacher. After she revealed to him that she was half-Jewish, according to Goebbels the “enchantment [was] ruined.”[2429] Nevertheless, he continued to see her on and off until 1927.[2430]
A prominent member of the Nazi Party, Goebbels’s wife Magda was a close ally, companion and political supporter of Adolf Hitler. When she was eight-years-old, Magda’s mother married Jewish businessman and leather-goods magnate Richard Friedländer and moved with him to Brussels in 1908. Friedländer’s residency card, found in Berlin archives, stated that Magda was his biological daughter.[2431] Friedländer was later killed in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Ludendorff was also friendly with Karl Haushofer (1869 – 1946).[2432] Under the Nuremberg Laws, Haushofer’s wife and children were categorized as Mischlinge, the German legal term used in Nazi Germany to denote persons deemed to have both “Aryan” and Jewish ancestry. His son, Albrecht, was issued a German Blood Certificate through his protégé Rudolf Hess’ help. Albrecht had studied alongside Hess at Munich University. Hess and Albrecht shared an interest in astrology, and Hess also was keen on clairvoyance and the occult.[2433]
In March 1920, at the behest of Captain
Karl Mayr (1883 – 1945), head of the Army Intelligence Division in the Reichswehr,
Hitler and Eckart flew to Berlin to meet Kapp and take part in the Kapp Putsch
of March 1920, along with Ludendorff, and Aufbau members Scheubner-Richter,
Biskupsky, Vinberg, Shabelsky-Bork.[2434]
Mayr was personally ordered by Ludendorff to have Hitler join the Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei (DAP), founded by members of the Thule Society, and which
would become the Nazi Party, and build it up.[2435] Mayr recruited Hitler with the task of gathering
intelligence on political movements potentially hostile to the Bavarian
authorities, and attending to the “political education” of the troops to
counter alleged Bolshevik influences. As noted by Richard Landes, in Heaven on
Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, although Hitler asserted in Mein Kampf that he
had already adopted a hatred of Jews in Vienna, most of the reliable evidence
suggests that it occurred quite late in his Munich career, that is, in 1919,
coinciding with his first exposure to the fully articulated racist
millennialism of Ariosophy and the Thule Society and to the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion.[2436]
In June 1919, Mayr sent Hitler—who had not
graduated from high school—to courses at Munich University with Gottfried Feder
(1883 – 1941) and Graf von Bothmer (1852 – 1937), both of whom wrote for
Dietrich Eckart’s Auf Gut Deutsch, as well as the historian Karl
Alexander von Müller (1882 – 1964). Feder, together with fellow Thule Society
members Eckart, Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer, had founded the DAP in January
of that year. During one course, Müller identified Hitler’s “rhetorical talent.”
Müller would be chosen by the Nazi Party in 1935 as the official head of the Institut
zum Studium der Judenfrage (“Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question”). Mayer’s assignment
for Hitler’s was to learn from these men to then teach his fellow soldiers.
Also impressed with his skills as a communicator, Mayr then entrusted Hitler with
responding to a request for elaboration on the so-called Jewish question by
Adolf Gemlich, a German Army soldier. In the letter to Gemlich, dated September
16, 1919, Hitler stressed the need for a “rational” and “scientific”
anti-Semitism, that Jews were not a
religious group, but a race “through thousands of years of the closest kind of
inbreeding,” and that the aim for the government “must be the total removal of
all Jews from our midst.” For these ends, concluded Hitler, “a government of
national strength, not of national weakness, is necessary.”[2437]
Hitler then adds:
The Republic in Germany owes its birth not to the uniform national will of our people but the sly exploitation of a series of circumstances which found general expression in a deep, universal dissatisfaction. These circumstances however were independent of the form of the state and are still operative today. Indeed, more so now than before. Thus, a great portion of our people recognizes that a changed stateform cannot in itself change our situation. For that it will take a rebirth of the moral and spiritual powers of the nation.
And this rebirth cannot be initiated by a state leadership of irresponsible majorities, influenced by certain party dogmas, an irresponsible press, or internationalist phrases and slogans. [It requires] instead the ruthless installation of nationally minded leadership personalities with an inner sense of responsibility.[2438]
Sebottendorf instructed Karl Harrer to set up a political group aimed at ordinary workers, which became the short-lived DAP, formed by Anton Drexler, Hermann Esser, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, and which was the precursor of the Nazi Party, which was officially known as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (“National Socialist German Workers’ Party” or NSDAP.[2439] Hitler’s journey towards becoming their Führer began formally on September 12, 1919, at the Sterneckerbräu on the Tal in central Munich, when he attended a meeting of the DAP. The popular account is that Hitler was initially indifferent. However, after his explosive reaction to Professor Baumann, who advocated Bavarian separatism, Drexler’s allegedly remarked: Mensch, der hat a Gosch’n, den kunnt ma braucha (“Goodness, he’s got a gob. We could use him”).[2440]
Hitler met Heinrich Class in 1918, and Class provided Hitler with support for the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which Lehmann and Ludendorff were also a part. Aufbau leader Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (1884 – 1923), a Baltic German from the Russian Empire, had introduced Hitler to Ludendorff. An early member of the Nazi Party, Scheubner-Richter served as Hitler’s chief advisor on foreign policy matters and as one of his closest counselors. Along with Alfred Rosenberg, Scheubner-Richter devised the plan to drive the German government to revolution through the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup attempt by Hitler—along with Ludendorff and other Kampfbund leaders—to seize power in Munich, on November 8–9, 1923. About two thousand Nazis, led by Hitler, Ludendorff, Göring, and other Nazi leaders, marched to the center of the city, where they confronted the police, resulting in the death of sixteen Nazis and four police officers. Scheubner-Richter was shot in the lungs and died instantly, at the same time dislocating Hitler’s right shoulder. Hitler escaped immediate arrest and was spirited off to safety in the countryside. When the Beer Hall Putsch failed, Hanfstaengl fled to Austria, but when Hitler’s car broke down he decided to seek refuge with Hanfstaengl’s wife Helen, who reportedly prevented him from committing suicide. After two days, he was arrested and charged with treason.
Hanfstaengl introduced himself to Hitler after the speech and began a close friendship and political association that would last through the 1920s and early 1930s. For much of the 1920s, Hanfstaengl introduced Hitler to Munich high-society and helped polish his image. Hitler was the godfather of Hanfstaengl’s son Egon. Hanfstaengl composed both Brownshirt and Hitler Youth marches patterned after his Harvard football songs and, he later claimed, devised the salute “Sieg Heil.”[2441] By December 1920, when Alfred Rosenberg’s Völkisch Observer was heavily in debt, Dietrich Eckart initiated its purchase by the Nazi Party, and funds for a printing press were provided by Hanfstaengl.[2442] When Hanfstaengl returned to Munich in July 1921, the economic and political turmoil that he saw left him “looking back to the happier days of Ludwig II and Richard Wagner.”[2443]
The Freikorps Oberland, founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorf and the Thule Society in 1919, played a part in the Beer Hall Putsch. Captain Ernst Röhm (1887 – 1934), who belonged to the Freikorps under General Franz Ritter von Epp, was an original member of the German Workers Party (DAP)and a known homosexual, who became a close associate of Hitler and the founder of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing. Although he was of mixed Jewish and ethnic German ancestry, Emil Maurice (1897 – 1972), Hitler’s personal chauffer, was an early member of the Nazi Party and a member of Freikorps Oberland. Hitler’s personal friendship with Maurice dated back to 1919 when they were both members of the DAP. Maurice led the SA stormtroopers in fights that were known to break out with other groups during those early days.[2444] In 1923, Maurice also became a member of the Stoßtrupp (“Shock Troop”), a small separate bodyguard dedicated to Hitler’s service, who along with the SA and several other paramilitary units, took part in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch.
Hitler’s arrest was followed by a 24-day trial, which was widely publicized and gave him a platform to promote his nationalist sentiments to Germany and the world. Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison. To make way for his stay in in cell 70, another inmate was moved, the Jewish anti-Semite, assassin of Kurt Eisner and rejected Thule Society member Anton Arco-Valley. Hitler, and his fellow prisoner Rudolf Hess, was visited in prison by Eckart and Karl Haushofer. Around the same time, Haushofer forged a friendship with the young Rudolf Hess, who would become his scientific assistant and later the deputy leader of the Nazi Party. In Landsberg Prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, dictated to Hess, and in which he combined the theories of Hess’ mentor Karl Haushofer and those of Alfred Rosenberg. Help in editing the work was also provided by Hanfstaengl.[2445]
As explained by Michael Kellogg, “The Protocols’ warnings of an insidious Jewish plot to achieve world domination greatly affected völkisch Germans and White émigrés, including Hitler’s mentors Eckart and Aufbau member Alfred Rosenberg.”[2446] Rosenberg, who was also a Baltic German, led the Nazi Party during Hitler’s imprisonment following the Aufbau-backed Beer Hall Putsch. Aufbau member Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork (1893 – 1952) had arrived in Berlin in early 1919 with a copy of the Protocols, which he gave for translation and publication in German to the völkisch publicist Ludwig Müller von Hausen, a member of Fritsch’s Germanenorden. Hausen sent The Protocols to the Völkisch Beobachter, who ran a large front-page article, “The Secrets of the Wise Men of Zion,” in April 1920.[2447] The “fighting paper of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany,” as it called itself, the Völkisch Beobachter, which was owned by von Sebottendorf, had its origin as the Munich Observer of the Thule Society.
Like the Völkisch Observer, Mein Kampf was published by Franz Eher Nachfolger, the central publishing house of the Nazi Party. The publishing house was registered by Franz Xaver Josef Eher (1851 – 1918) in 1901. However, the firm was actually founded with the name Münchener Beobachter in 1887. After Eher’s death, Rudolf von Sebottendorf took over the firm in 1918. By December 1920, the Völkisch Observer was heavily in debt, and the Thule Society were open to an offer to sell the paper to the Nazis. Röhm and Eckart persuaded Röhm’s commanding Freikorps Oberland officer, Major von Epp, to purchase the paper for the Nazi Party. In 1921, Hitler, who had taken full control of the NSDAP earlier that year, acquired all shares in the company, making him the sole owner of the publication.[2448] Alfred Rosenberg became the editor in 1923. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:
…[The Protocols] are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans [ ] every week… [which is] the best proof that they are authentic… the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.[2449]
Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to Maurice
along with Rudolf Hess.
In the aftermath of the putsch, Hitler, Hess, Maurice
and other Nazi leaders were incarcerated together at Landsberg Prison. Maurice
became Hitler’s permanent chauffeur in 1925, and when he informed Hitler that
he was having a relationship with Hitler’s half-niece Geli Raubal, Hitler
forced an end to the affair. Although Himmler considered Maurice to be a
serious security risk, given his “Jewish ancestry,” in a secret letter written in
1935, Maurice and his brothers were informally declared “Honorary Aryans” and
allowed to stay in the SS.[2450]
In 1926, Ludendorff married his second wife Mathilde von Kemnitz, who was interested in Ariosophy and the occult. In Insanity Induced Through Occult Teachings (1933), she attacked Schrenck-Notzing’s work and argued that occult practices had been responsible for the development of mental illness in a number of her patients.[2451] In the Fraud of Astrology, she was critical of astrology, arguing that it had always been a Jewish perversion of astronomy and that it was being used to enslave the Germans and dull their reasoning. In spite of her personal opposition to occultism, Mathilde was a member of the Edda Society of Rudolf John Gorsleben, whose other members included Friedrich Schaefer, a follower of Karl Maria Wiligut, and Otto Sigfried Reuter, a strong believer in astrology.[2452] In 1925, Ludendorff and Mathilde founded the Tannenbergbund (“Tannenberg Union”), taking its name from the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg, one of Ludendorff’s greatest military triumphs. As its central ideas were inspired by the Thule Society, the Bund saw history as a struggle between the Nordic hero and the three-way alliance of Jews, Catholics and Freemason.[2453]
In Mein Kampf, Hitler recalled his “vision” in Pasewalk, saying of his period of blindness, “in the days that followed, my own fate became known to me.” A Frankfurter Zeitung editorial of January 1923 reported that, while blinded, Hitler was “delivered by an inner rapture that set him the task of becoming his people’s deliverer.”[2454] Ludwell Denny, writing for The Nation, in 1923, reported about Hitler that, “during the war he was wounded, or through fright or shock became blind. In the hospital he was subject to ecstatic visions of Victorious Germany, and in one of these seizures his eyesight was restored.”[2455] During the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler gave an impassioned speech, referring to the Pasewalk episode:
I am going to fulfill the vow I made to myself five years ago when I was a blind cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals had been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.[2456]
One of
Hitler’s professors at Munich University, Karl Alexander von Müller—whose
immediate disciples included Baldur von Schirach,
Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, Walter Frank, and Ernst Hanfstaengl—heard his first speeches on January
27, 1923, and referred to the charged atmosphere as “mass hypnotism.”[2457]
As demonstrated by David Redles, in Hitler’s
Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation, the
success of the Nazi movement was rooted in millennialist fervor inspired by an
“apocalypse complex.” However,
as Richard Landes indicated, in Heaven on Earth: The
Varieties of the Millennial Experience “Hitler’s religiosity continues to constitute a major problem for
historians. Most tend to view Hitler though a secular prism.”[2458]
Modern historians, effectively, fail to recognize that the reason that Hitler’s
apostolicism is stripped of its usual religious themes is because it is rooted
in the Gnostic theology of the Thule Society.
Hitler shared his vision of a community of nations with Otto Wagener (1888 – 1971), a German major general who joined the SA and became Hitler’s economic advisor and confidant, that would be “the final goal of human politics on this earth.” He explained:
The peace on earth Christ wanted to bring
is the very socialism of nations! It is the new great religion, and it will
come because it is divine! It awaits the Messiah!
But I am not the Messiah. He will come
after me. I only have the will to create for the German Volk the foundations of
a true Volk community. And that is a political mission, though it encompasses
the ideological as well as the economic.
It cannot be otherwise, and everything in me points to the conviction that the German Volk has a divine mission. How many great prophets have foretold this![2459]
Paul Gierasch, writing for The Current History Magazine of the New York Times in 1923, perceptively observed:
Their leader, Hitler, had worked up these
emotions by using the reactions to economic and spiritual distress that pervade
the psychology of the German people today. Radical antipathies and religious
motives are fused with dreams of a better day to come. Hitler asks that the
German nation be cleansed of all non-Aryan elements and that it find renewal in a church of the people in which the belief
in the nordic Wotan shall be merged with that in Christ. To the purified nation
shall at the appointed time come forth a new German emperor-king who, as the
national messiah, shall free German from the bondage of her foreign taskmaster.[2460]
Hitler’s
“Christian” mission was one that combined Nietzsche’s predatorial “blond
beast,” with Wagner’s mythical heroes, Siegfried and Rienzi, mobilized for the
preservation of an idealized German Volk.[2461]
Thus, the Christian ideal that Hitler reinterpreted was
not the sense of unity of being bound together for the advancement of universal
principles—particularly of charity and compassion. Rather, Hitler transposed
religious significance and belonging to a community, the Volk, unified
in collective purpose: self-preservation. Hitler cultivated fanatical
patriotism by misappropriating the noblest deed, martyrdom, counterfeited as
“masculine” virtues of fascism, self-discipline and self-sacrifice.
As the
young Rudolf Hess wrote in 1921, “common interest goes before self-interest;
first the nation, then the personal ego… this union of the national with the
social is the fulcrum of our time.”[2462]
Hermann Rauschning, a one-time Nazi supporter, recalled Hitler’s saying,
The day of individual happiness has passed. Instead, we shall feel a collective happiness. Can there be any greater happiness than a National Socialist meeting in which speakers and audience feel as one? It is the happiness of sharing. Only the early Christian communities could have felt it with equal intensity. They, too, sacrificed their personal lives for the higher happiness of the community.[2463]
To
inculcate the messianic aura around Hitler, the Nazis employed the
mass-hypnotic qualities of psychodrama of occult ritual on a large scale. As
explained by Peter Viereck:
The techniques of showmanship in Wagner’s
opera settings are also imitated effectively by Hitler. These techniques, whose
aim is to flabbergast the audience with awe, are the model for Hitler’s
stage-managing of the Nazi party congresses. The torchlight parades, the mob
choruses, the grand gestures of the nordic heroes, the reiteration of
leitmotivs and ever rising climaxes—all these have been reproduced from
Bayreuth in Nuremberg.[2464]
The Nuremberg rallies, which first took
place in 1923, became a national event once Hitler rose to power in 1933, and became
annual occurrences. The first grand-scale rally occurred in 1929 and featured
most of the elements that distinguished all future rallies: Wagnerian
overtures, martial songs, banners, goose-step marches, human swastika
formations, torchlight processions, bonfires, and fireworks. Hitler and other
Nazi leaders delivered lengthy speeches. Buildings were decorated with enormous
flags and Nazi symbols. The climax of the rallies was the solemn consecration
of the colors, in which new flags were touched to the Blutfahne (“Blood
Banner”), a tattered standard said to have been soaked in the blood of those
killed in Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch.[2465]
From 1933, the size and scale of the rallies increased dramatically. The 6th
Party Congress held in Nuremberg, September 5–10, 1934, was attended by about
700,000 Nazi Party supporters. Leni Riefenstahl film Triumph des Willens
was made at this rally. The rally was notable due to Albert Speer’s Cathedral
of light, where a 152 searchlights cast vertical beams into the sky around the
Zeppelin Field.
As
explained by Redles, “The religious rites and ceremonies of the
Nazis, complete with chants, flags, banners, music, and torchlit processions,
undoubtedly had a powerful psychological effect, as well, inducing nondirected
thinking in large numbers of individuals.”[2466]
Klaus Vondung explained that the Nazis deliberately
used ritualized settings for speeches, party rallies, and other public
performances, so that “social reality” could be manipulated through what he
termed “magical consciousness.”[2467] As a
contemporary writer, Hanns Johst, explained, the party rallies enabled the
individual to experience, “in the community of equally minded, equally feeling,
equally believing people the dream of salvation as displayed and envisioned
truth.”[2468]
Alfons Heck, who experienced the mass rallies as a young boy, was impressed by
the “pomp and mysticism,” which had an effect “very close in feeling to
religious rituals,” a “gigantic revival meeting but without the repentance of
one’s sins… it was a jubilant Teutonic renaissance.” He added that “no one who ever attended a
Nuremberg Reichsparteitag can forget the similarity to religious mass fervor it
exuded. Its intensity frightened neutral observers but it inflamed the
believers.”[2469] The
sociologist Jean-Pierre Sironneau described that at the rallies “a genuine
sacred drama was preformed there, which only the resurgence in the twentieth
century of religious drives that were supposed to have disappeared can
explain.”[2470]
This drama, Sironneau added, involved the communion of leader and led, what he
termed a “dialectic of possession,” for “the crowd leader, possessed by they
who surround him, possesses them in his turn; because the crowds recognize
themselves in him and somehow create him, he subjugates them.”[2471]
As explained by Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, “We see the old German nationalism after its grand flaming up in the Wars of Liberation (1813), after its deepest foundation by Fichte, after its explosive rise through Stein and Arndt… the unqualified greatness of those men who in 1813 again led Germany from the abyss to the heights.”[2472] In 1814, Jahn called for a “unity-creator.” He wanted a Führer to apply Hippocrates’ cure for cancer: “What medicine does not heal, steel heals, what steel does not heal, fire does.” The idea of “iron and blood” was repeated in “The Iron Cross,” by Max von Schenkendorf, who had been commissioned to compose patriotic songs together with Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner, and later famously adopted by Bismarck. Of his “iron and fire” Führer Jahn stated: “The Volk will honour him as saviour and forgive him all his sins.”[2473]
The first example of the political use of Führer was with Georg von Schönerer, the leading exponent of pan-Germanism who was associated with the Albia fraternity that included Theodor Herzl. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, “[von Schönerer’s] ideas, his temperament, and his talent as an agitator, shaped the character and destiny of Austrian Pan-Germanism, thereby creating a revolutionary movement that embraced populist anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, anti-Semitism and prussophile German nationalism.”[2474] Schönerer’s views and philosophy would go on to exercise a great influence on Hitler and the Nazi Party as a whole. Hannah Arendt called von Schönerer the “spiritual father” of Hitler.[2475] Schönerer, who had adopted the swastika as a völkisch symbol,[2476] was addressed by his supporters as the Führer and himself and his followers also used the “Heil” greeting, two things Hitler and the Nazis later adopted.[2477]
Sebottendorf advanced the “Führerprinzip” and commanded that the Aryan believers greet each other with the straight-armed salute with the words “Sieg Heil!”[2478] In the December 1922, the Völkischer Beobachter proclaimed Hitler a “special Führer” for the first time.[2479] It was noted that “ever since Dietrich von [sic] Eckart discovered him in Munich, Adolf has never lacked people who encouraged his belief in his mission.”[2480] Baldur von Schirach (1907 – 1974), leader of the Hitler Youth movement, later lamented, “this unlimited, almost religious veneration, to which I contributed, as did Goebbels, Göring, Hess, Ley and countless others, strengthened in Hitler the belief that he was in league with Providence.”[2481] Goebbels, who had been searching for his personal savior for some time, wrote to Hitler in prison, stating, “What you said there is the catechism of a new political creed coming to birth in the midst of a collapsing, secularized world… To you a god has given the tongue with which to express our sufferings. You formulated our agony in words that promise salvation.”[2482]
As stated in the Organization Book of the Nazi Party, “The will of the Führer is the Party’s law.” The first commandment for the Party members declares: “The Führer is always right.”[2483] As explained by Rosenberg:
The Führer unites in himself all the sovereign authority of the Reich; all public authority in the state as well as in the movement is derived from the authority of the Führer. We must speak not of the state’s authority but of the Führer’s authority if we wish to designate the character of the political authority within the Reich correctly. The state does not hold political authority as an impersonal unit but receives it from the Führer as the executor of the national will. The authority of the Führer is complete and all embracing; it unites in itself all the means of political direction; it extends into all fields of national life; it embraces the entire people, which is bound to the Führer in loyalty and obedience. The authority of the Führer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited.[2484]
However, as David Redles noted, perhaps the most significant individual who helped bring Hitler’s messianism to the forefront was Rudolf Hess, who came to see in Hitler the ‘coming man’ he longed for, the man who would save him and Germany from misery.”[2485] Hess even produced Hitler’s astrological chart to prove it.[2486] According to Hess, “He himself has nothing in common with the masses, his entire personality is ever greater. This power of his personality radiates from a certain something that brings acquaintances under his spell and cultivates ever wider circles.”[2487] Hess proposed that what Germany needed was a “savior from the chaos,” a “Napoleon as dictator,” a Caesar, or a Mussolini. As “chaos… calls forth a dictator,” thus “it will likewise come in Germany.” Thus, Hess concluded, “the Volk longs for a genuine Führer free from all party haggles, for a pure Führer with inner veracity.”[2488]
Through the Nazis’ complete control of the press, they were able to advance the Thule Society’s veneration of Hitler as a messiah figure as the Führerprinzip (“leader principle”) at all levels of German society. The key figure leading the Franz Eher Nachfolger publishing house’s expansion was Max Amann (1891 – 1957), the first business manager of the Nazi Party. Amann’s most notable contribution was persuading Hitler to retitle his first book from Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit, (“Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice”) to Mein Kampf, which he also published. Eher Verlag published, among other imprints, the anti-Semitic satirical magazine Die Brennessel and the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps (“The Black Corps”). Amann joined the SS in 1932 with the rank of SS-Gruppenführer, was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer in 1936 and was assigned to the staff of the Reichsführer-SS, the highest rank of the SS. In his official role as Reich Press Leader and president of the Reich Press Chamber, Amann had the power to seize or close down any newspapers that either ran counter to the Nazis’ wishes or did not fully support the Nazi regime. By 1942, Amann controlled 80% of all German newspapers through his publishing empire.[2489] Combined with the proceeds from Mein Kampf, this made the Eher-Verlag the largest newspaper and publishing company in Germany, and one of the largest in the world.[2490]
From June 1933, Carl Schmitt (1888 – 1985), known as the “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich,” was drawn to the Nazi party by his admiration for a decisive leader, praised him in his pamphlet State, Volk and Movement, because only the ruthless will of such a leader could save Germany and its people.[2491] Schmitt in the leadership council of Academy for German Law, founded on the initiative of Hans Frank, a former member of the Thule Society, and the head of the Reich Legal Department (Reichsrechtabteilung) in the Nazi Party’s national leadership (Reichsleitung) and, at the time, also the Bavarian Minister of Justice. Other former members of the Thule Society involved in the academy included Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg.[2492] Schmitt developed the doctrine of a “necessary enemy,” by defining that the sphere of the “political” is based on the distinction between “friend” and “enemy.” A population can be unified and mobilized through the political act, in which an enemy is identified and confronted.[2493]
Schmitt developed a geopolitical interpretation of history ultimately based on a land and sea dichotomy of the Medieval Kabbalah and its discussions of an apocalyptic war between Leviathan and Behemoth—beasts described in the Book of Job. The historian Eugene Sheppard has argued that Schmitt was inspired by Johannes Buxtorf (1564 – 1629), who had in 1603 written the book De Synagoga Judaica, which included the Kabbalistic belief in the war of Gog and Magog, which, according to Buxtorf, originated with Isaac Abarbanel as a conflict between a “Leviathan” and “Behemoth,” between a sea monster and a land monster. Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, almost certainly had access to the writings of Abarbanel, mainly through the writings of the Buxtorf family.[2494]
As Schmitt explained in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938), in the course of the Middle Ages two major categories of interpretations of the symbolism of the Biblical creature emerged: the one Christian and the other Kabbalistic. Schmitt also mentions Isaac La Peyrère, Menasseh ben Israel’s co-conspirator, in his “for many reasons, important” book, about a reference to the “pre-Adamites” in the Book of Job, which deals with the Chaldean magicians who cite the Leviathan qui Daemon est (“who is the devil”), and that he adds that it has been affirmed that there exists a land and a sea leviathan or, in other words, a land and a sea demon.[2495] In Land and Sea, Schmitt cites a prophecy by Roman poet Seneca, in his tragedy Medea, and makes reference to mythical land of Thule, and which he believed foreshadowed the current geopolitical conflicts:
The Indian drinks of the icy Araxes.
The Persians quaff the Elbe and the Rhine.
An age will come in the far-off centuries,
When Ocean will loosen the bonds of things,
And the whole broad Earth will be revealed,
When Thetis will disclose new worlds.
And Thule will no longer be the bound. [2496]
In Land and Sea, Schmitt elaborated an occult-inspired interpretation of the geopolitical theories of Alfred T. Mahan and Halford Mackinder (1861 – 1947), which pitted sea power against land power. World history, therefore, according to Schmitt, “is the history of the wars waged by maritime powers against land or continental powers and by land powers against sea or maritime powers.”[2497] Everywhere we look in history we see this struggle between Land and Sea. Land and Sea, he explains, become “two distinct worlds, and two antithetical, juridical convictions.”[2498] For instance, Persia against Greece, Sparta against Athens, and Rome against Carthage. In the nineteenth century, the great example of the struggle between Land and Sea Powers was England and Russia. Key to the opposition to Britain as a sea power was the consolidation of German power under a single dictatorial leader.
In 1933, Schmitt was appointed State Councilor by Göring, Hitler’s Reichsmarschall, and became the president of the Union of National-Socialist Jurists. As professor at the University of Berlin, he presented his theories as an ideological foundation of the Nazi dictatorship, and a justification of the “Führer” state with regard to legal philosophy. After the Nazis, under Göring’s sponsorship, staged the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, blaming the Communists, and on February 28, when Hitler suspended basic constitutional rights, Schmitt provided the legal basis for Hitler’s assumption of power, and authored the necessary article justifying the enabling laws of March 24, 1933.
The Gleichschaltung (“Coordination”) was the process of Nazification by which Hitler and the Nazi Party which successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education.”[2499] Hitler promptly used these powers to thwart constitutional governance and suspend civil liberties, which brought about the swift collapse of democracy at the federal and state level, and the creation of a one-party dictatorship under his leadership. When Hitler finally came to absolute power, after being appointed Chancellor and assuming the powers of the President when Paul von Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, he changed his title to Führer und Reichskanzler (“Führer and Reich Chancellor”), at which time the Führerprinzip became an integral part of German society.
After the massacre known as Night of the Long Knives, which took place between June 30 and July 2, 1934, Hitler declared: “in this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and was therefore the supreme judge of the German people!”[2500] On June 30, 1934, Hitler had Röhm arrested and shot on suspicions of disloyalty, being the most high-profile execution of the massacre known as the Night of the Long Knives. Röhm’s execution was also the beginning of a massive crackdown on homosexuals. According to German historian Lothar Machtan, however, Röhm and the large number of homosexual figures within the SA were killed by Hitler to silence speculation about his own homosexuality.[2501] The officer corps of the SA became the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), organized by Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command.
In 1939, Hitler looked back on the performance of Rienzi in Vienna as decisive: “in that hour it began,” he confided in the presence of both Kubizek and Winifred Wagner.[2502] Hitler was fond of saying, “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.”[2503] To some Germans, the idea of a Dolchstoßlegende (“stab-in-the-back legend”) was evoked from Wagner’s 1876 opera Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”), in which Hagen murders the hero of the story, his enemy Siegfried, with a spear in his back.[2504] To Hitler, David Ian Hall explained, in “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany’s Rebirth after the First War,” Germany’s defeat in World War I and the unacceptable terms of peace at the Treaty of Versailles, agreed to by Friedrich Ebert and the SDP, known as the November Criminals, were symptoms of a cultural decline that needed to be reversed if Germany was to recover its former greatness. To “master this disease,” Hitler believed, Bolshevism in all its forms had to be resisted and destroyed. Only a true Volksgemeinschaft (“national community”), based on racial purity and inspired with an authentic German culture, led by a heroic leader, combination of Siegfried and Parsifal, could see Germany successfully through this historic struggle.[2505] Of the first meeting of the Nazi party, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “Out of its flames was bound to come the sword which was to regain the freedom of the German Siegfried.”[2506]
Members of the Thule Society maintained very close ties with the Bayreuther Kreis (“Bayreuth circle”), an active and influential group of pan-German intellectuals, editors, and writers who promoted Wagner’s ideas and work. Thule leader Dietrich Eckart introduced Hitler to Thule Society members, including Dr. Gottfried Grandel, nationalist publisher Julius Lehmann, General Erich Ludendorff, as well as piano company executive Edwin Bechstein and his wife Helena, society matron Elsa Bruckmann, Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried and his English-born wife Winifred Wagner, who saw Hitler as “destined to be the savior of Germany.”[2507] The Bayreuther Blätter, founded in by Wagner in 1878, and written primarily for visitors to the Bayreuth Festival, increasingly “nazified” Wagner, linking his work with the ideology of National Socialism.
Winifred Wagner and the leaders of the Bayreuther Kreis—including Eva Chamberlain, the widow of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Hans von Wolzogen, editor of Bayreuther Blätter—were involved in the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (“Militant League for German Culture,” KfdK), a nationalistic anti-Semitic political society founded in 1928 as the Nationalsozialistische Gesellschaft für deutsche Kultur (“National Socialist Society for German Culture,” NGDK) by Thule and Aufbau member Alfred Rosenberg. Ludwig Schemann (1852 – 1938), a member of both the KfdK and the Bayreuther Kreis, together with Adolf Bartels, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Henry Thode and Hermann Hendrich, Schemann was one of the founders of the völkisch Werdandi-Bundes. Schemann was involved with other race ideologists such as the anthropologist Otto Ammon and the writer Thule Society founder Theodor Fritsch in the Pan-German League.[2508] Schemann, who was close to Cosima Wagner and was inspired by her to found the Gobineau Vereinigung (“Gobineau Society”), translated Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races into German between 1893 and 1902, and “did a great deal to bring Gobineau’s term ‘Aryan’ into vogue amongst German racists.”[2509]
The Bayreuther Blätter edited by Hans von Wolzogen until his death in 1938. Wolzogen’s mother was a daughter of the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who collaborated in architectural projects with Jewish Prussian architect Salomo Sachs, who was a neighbor of Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who married Lea Salomon, a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[2510] In its pages, writers had expressed support for Otto von Bismarck and the German Empire. After Germany’s defeat in World War I, it showed opposition to the Weimar Republic, eventually supporting Hitler and Nazi Germany. From 1887, each issue began with an epigraph from Great men of German cultural history. The majority were taken from Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Franz Liszt, Thomas Carlyle, and Martin Luther. Others, like Carl von Clausewitz, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Paul von Hindenburg, Paul de Lagarde and Hitler.
In a letter to her friend Helena Boy, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred (1897 – 1980), the English-born wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried Wagner (1869 – 1930), wrote, “My God, who would have thought that such a turn of events was possible! How proud we were of our German Fatherland, and how ashamed we are that a worm at the core could produce such degradation.” The “‘worm” was Ebert and the SDP.[2511] In March 1936, following the successful German reoccupation of the Rhineland, while listening to a recording of the prelude to Parsifal on his special train, Hitler reaffirmed the vow he had made at Wahnfried—the name given by Richard Wagner to his villa in Bayreuth: “I have built up my religion out of Parsifal.”[2512]
According to Hall, “Hitler’s Wagner was an ever-present metaphysical voice aestheticizing political life in National Socialist Germany – first to regenerate and afterwards to sustain public support for the Kampf (struggle) that lay ahead.”[2513] Hitler believed Germany would be great again once it became a truly united, which was attainable only through a revered and widely shared German culture, beginning with core German artistic values, as portrayed in the great music dramas of Richard Wagner. As both believed that Germany’s rebirth depended on cultural regeneration, Hitler’s dream of creating a Kulturstaat (“culture state”) as the first step in restoring Germany’s greatness, was endorsed and legitimized by Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, both the guardians of Wagner’s life work.[2514]
In 1921, at her Berchtesgaden Villa, Eckart introduced Hitler to Helena Bechstein, the wife of Edwin Bechstein (1859 – 1934), who was the guardian of Winifred, and responsible for her education. Bechstein was the owner of the C. Bechstein piano company established in 1853 by Edwin’s father Carl Bechstein (1826 –1900). By 1870, with endorsements from Franz Liszt and Hans von Bülow, Bechstein pianos had become a staple in many concert halls and private mansions. Bechstein was the official piano maker for the Tsars of Russia, the royal families of Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Austria and Denmark, and other royalty and aristocracy. Helena took a liking to Hitler and when he was imprisoned after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, she visited him regularly in prison and once claimed to the prison that he was her adopted son. Upon Hitler’s release, Helena introduced him to German high society in Berlin, with whom she shared her belief that at last “Germany’s young Messiah” had been found.[2515] Both Helena and Hitler grew close to each other, with Bechstein calling him Wölfchen (“little wolf”), stating she would have liked to have had him as a son. Hitler reciprocated by allegedly giving her an original manuscript of Mein Kampf. The Bechsteins both publicly funded Hitler, giving him the funds to continue publishing Völkischer Beobachter.[2516]
As a child, Winifred was orphaned and adopted by Karl Klindworth (1830 – 1916), the paternal nephew of Georg Klindworth, and Franz Liszt’s pupil and a friend of Richard Wagner. It was arranged that Winifred, aged eighteen, would marry Siegfried, aged 45, in the hope to end Siegfried’s homosexual encounters. After Siegfried’s death in 1930, Winifred took over the Bayreuth Festival. Like Hitler, Winifred believed profoundly in the cult of German nationalism, Nordic self-realization, and völkisch aspiration. When Hitler was jailed for his part in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Winifred sent him food parcels and stationery on which Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf may have been written. In the late 1930s, she served as Hitler’s personal translator during treaty negotiations with Britain. Her relationship with Hitler grew so close that by 1933 there were rumors of impending marriage. Haus Wahnfried, the Wagner villa in Bayreuth, became Hitler’s favorite retreat. The name Wahnfried is a German compound of Wahn (delusion, madness) and Fried(e) (peace, freedom). Hitler gave the Bayreuth Festival government assistance and tax-exempt status, and treated Winifred’s children affectionately.[2517]
In 1923, Edwin, Helene and Eckart took Hitler to visit Siegfried Wagner and introduced them. Winifred, along with Helena and Elsa Bruckmann (1865 – 1946), the wife of Thule Society member Hugo Bruckmann (1863 – 1941), helped to teach Hitler table manners and helped reform his public image.[2518] Elsa Bruckmann, born Princess Cantacuzène of Romania was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Munich publisher. She held the “Salon Bruckmann” and made it her mission to introduce Hitler to leading industrialists. In 1899, Chamberlain read at Elsa Bruckmann’s first salon in January 1899. Attendees at their salon included Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Wölfflin, Rudolf Kassner, Hermann Keyserling, Karl Wolfskehl, Harry Graf Kessler, Georg Simmel, Hjalmar Schacht and her nephew Norbert von Hellingrath.[2519] Schuler and Klages, founders of the Cosmic Circle, attended the salon.[2520] Hitler was known to have attended some of Schuler’s lectures there in 1922 and 1923.[2521]
Helena Bechstein also introduced Hitler to Wahnfried, Wagner’s family home and the spiritual headquarters of the Bayreuther Kreis. The intellectual leader of Wahnfried was Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was already famous for his Die Grundlagen desneunzehnten Jahrhunderts (“The foundations of the nineteenth century,” 1899), an important text for the pan-German movement and völkisch anti-Semitism. In 1917, Chamberlain along with Heinrich Class and Georg von Below started a new journal, Deutschlands Erneuerung (“Germany’s renewal”), to provide a forum for German nationalists and anti-Semitic writers.[2522] Hitler visited Wahnfried at the end of September 1923, and was the principal speaker at the German Day in Bayreuth, organized by nationalists and right-wing paramilitary groups to protest against the French occupation of the Ruhr and the “shameful Treaty of Versailles.”[2523] After the speech, Hitler went to the Wagners at Wahnfried. There he visited Wagner’s tomb alone, spending a considerable time in contemplation at Wagner’s grave before he returned to the house. Winifred recalled that he came back in a state of great emotion, saying, “Out of Parsifal I will make a religion.”[2524] Hitler read and absorbed Chamberlain’s writings and could quote both Wagner, and his biographer with ease.[2525] By the end of October 1923, Hitler obtained Chamberlain’s blessing and the full support of Wahnfried and the Bayreuth Circle. A week after they met, Chamberlain wrote a letter to Hitler, telling him that he had expected to meet a fanatic but instead he had found a savior, the key figure of the German counter-revolution.[2526]
Their meeting in Bayreuth was memorialized by the Nazis. As Hall explained, “Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain clasped hands. The great thinker, whose writings went with the Führer on his journey and laid the intellectual foundations of the Nordic German world view, the genius, seer, and herald of the Third Reich, felt that through this simple man of the people Germany’s destiny would achieve a glad fulfilment.”[2527] The Nazi journal Völkischer Beobachter dedicated five columns to praising him on his seventieth birthday, describing Chamberlain’s Foundations as the “gospel of the Nazi movement.”[2528]
In 1883, Bernhard Förster, the husband of Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, published an anti-Semitic pamphlet in Wagner’s Bayreuther Blätter in which he depicted the Jews as parasites that threatened the health of the German body.[2529] Elisabeth herself would enthusiastically dub Hitler the “superman” her brother had predicted.[2530] In 1932, she received a bouquet of roses from Hitler during a German premier of Benito Mussolini's 100 Days, and in 1934 Hitler personally presented her with a wreath for Nietzsche’s grave carrying the words “To A Great Fighter.” Also in 1934, Elisabeth gave to Hitler Nietzsche’s favorite walking stick, and Hitler was photographed gazing into the eyes of a white marble bust of Nietzsche. Heinrich Hoffmann’s popular biography, Hitler as Nobody Knows Him, featured the photo with the caption: “The Führer before the bust of the German philosopher whose ideas have fertilized two great popular movements: the National Socialist of Germany and the Fascist of Italy.”[2531]
Eckart was also familiar with Jewish self-haters Otto Weininger and Arthur Trebitsch (1880 – 1927). Amos Elon attributes Jewish ant-Semitism as a cause in the overall growth of anti-Semitism when he says of the book by Otto Weininger (1880 – 1903), that it “inspired the typical Viennese adage that anti-Semitism did not really get serious until it was taken up by Jews.”[2532] Although born Jewish, Weininger was deeply convinced by German völkisch ideology, venerated Wagner, and despised his own race. In 1901, Weininger tried to find a publisher for his work Eros and the Psyche: A biological-psychological study, which he submitted as his thesis in 1902. He met Freud, who did not, however, recommend the text to a publisher. His professors accepted the thesis and Weininger received his Ph.D. degree in July 1902. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity. “The Jews would have to overcome Judaism before they could be ripe for Zionism,” Weininger explained. However, Weininger argues: “Every single Jew must seek to answer it for his own person.” He added, “Christ was the greatest human being because he overcame the greatest adversity,” as “the only Jew who has ever succeeded in defeating Judaism.” In Sex and Character, which he wrote in 1903 shortly before committing suicide, Weininger wrote:
The faults of the Jewish
race have often been attributed to the repression of that race by Aryans, and
many Christians are still disposed to blame themselves in this respect. But the
self-reproach is not justified. Outward circumstances do not mould a race in
one direction, unless there is in the race the innate tendency to respond to
the moulding forces; the total result comes at least as much from a natural
disposition as from the modifying circumstances.[2533]
James Webb, in The Occult Establishment, suggests that Weininger must have been acquainted with occult and Theosophical groups.[2534] His book Sex and Character combined anti-Semitism and a distaste for women with a prophecy in this “Jewish century” of a great founder of a new religion. Weininger went on to elaborate a symbolic theory of the universe, which borrowed from Plato, incorporated the analogy of microcosm and macrocosm, and declared that character could be discovered from astrology. There are even indications, explained Webb, that he saw himself as the great prophet he had predicted.[2535]
Trebitsch was an Austrian writer and racial theorist, and fellow student of Weininger, also known for being an antisemite of Jewish origin. As a young man he came under the influence of Weininger and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose Viennese circles he frequented. Trebitsch established a vanity press which he named Antaios Verlag, after the mythological giant Antaeus in reference to a passage in Wagner’s 1850 essay The Art Work of the Future. Trebitsch became convinced of an international “Jewish world conspiracy against the German people,” which was behind the outbreak of World War I. He apparently came to believe that Providence had set him the task of becoming the savior of the Nordic race. According to Trebitsch, whose theories were first articulated in his 1919 book Geist und Judentum, the Jews were an Ungeist that was fundamentally destructive to the geist (“spirit”) of the Aryan peoples. However, he believed as an antitoxin works best when it is derived from the toxin itself, people of Jewish ancestry who reject Judaism, such as himself, will be the spiritual force to destroy the corrupting influence of the Jewish presence in Europe.[2536] Jesus Christ was the archetype of a Judaised Aryan who had overcome and rejected the Jewishness within himself. As detailed in his 1923 book Die Geschichte meines “Verfolgungswahns” (“The Story of my ‘Paranoia’”), he believed Jews were trying to kill him with “poisoned electric rays.”
In his private conversations, Hitler recalled a remark his mentor
Dietrich Eckart made about Otto Weininger: “I only knew one decent Jew and he
committed suicide on the day when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay
of peoples…”[2537] In the early 1920s, Trebitsch
helped to set up and fund the Austrian branch of the Nazi party, allegedly
being considered its leader for a brief period.[2538] Trebitsch knew both Hitler and
Eckart personally. Eckart refers to Trebitsch in his book Der Bolschewismus
von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Hitler und mir (“Bolshevism from
Moses to Lenin: Dialogues Between Hitler and Me”), which records a conversation
he is supposed to have had about Trebitsch, in which he refers to him as “a
Jewish writer against Jews—at least he thinks he does. His every other word is
‘We Aryans’”.[2539] Hitler would later recommend an
acquaintance, “Read every sentence he has written. He has unmasked the Jews as
no one else did.”[2540] Hitler apparently considered
giving Trebitsch Alfred Rosenberg’s role as head of ideological education,
given that Rosenberg was one of the “smart-alecky Zionist snakes” that Trebitsch
had warned him against in the party who would undermine it from within.[2541]
According to Bronder, Eckart coached Hitler on his public speaking skills, along with Erik Jan Hanussen (1889 – 1933). Mel Gordon in Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant discusses the career of Hanussen as an occult figure in late Weimar Berlin, in the service of the Nazis. Hanussen became famous for giving performances of his psychic abilities at La Scala in Berlin, attracting the attention of people from Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann to Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre. At the Zionist congress in Basel, Hanussen declared his descent in direct line from Judah Leib of Prossnitz, one of the successors of Shabbetai Zevi, according to a list of ordination in the Schiff Collection.[2542] According to Dr. Walter C. Langer’s World War II report for the OSS: “…during the early 1920’s Hitler took regular lessons in speaking and in mass psychology from a man named Hanussen who was also a practicing astrologer and fortune-teller. He was an extremely clever individual who taught Hitler a great deal concerning the importance of staging meetings to obtain the greatest dramatic effect.”[2543]
As pointed out by Richard B. Spence, one of Hanussen’s closest collaborators was Dr. Leopold Thoma, a psychoanalyst, paranormal researcher, and chief of the Psychologische Abteilung (“Psychology Department”) of the Viennese police. In 1921 he formed his own Institut fur Kriminal Telepatische Forschung (“Criminal Telepathic Research”). Thoma was well-acquainted with fellow Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler—a first cousin of Victor Adler of the Pernerstorfer Circle. Aleister Crowley claimed to “know [Adler] personally” and to have “handled” some of the Adler’s Berlin patients and to have “put a lot of my own theory and practice into it.”[2544] As well, Thoma was friends with Dr. Alexander Cannon, another psychiatrist, paranormal researcher and friend of Aleister Crowley who crossed paths with Hanussen.[2545] Cannon, who was sometimes referred to as the “Yorkshire Yogi” or the “leader of black magic in England,” would later face accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser and German spy.[2546] Cannon was renowned for prescribing exotic remedies for stress, alcoholism, sex and self-esteem problems, with treatments including electrotherapies and Tibetan hypnosis, learned while he was a prison doctor in China. John Gastor, a socialite of the day, said the King Edward VIII had been “entrapped and ensnared” by Cannon. Cannon was the subject of an MI5 investigation and then an establishment cover-up before settling in virtual exile in the Isle of Man, where he put on magic shows and psychic performances.[2547]
Hanussen was also a
confidant of horror fiction writer Hanns Heinz Ewers, who was a friend of
Hanfstaengl, and also connected with
Crowley and Viereck in the Propaganda
Kabinett.[2548] During the last years of the Weimar Republic, Ewers became involved
with the Nazi Party, attracted by its nationalism, its Nietzschean moral
philosophy, and its cult of Teutonic culture, and joined the NSDAP in 1931. Despite
his involvement with the Nazi, Ewers’ main character in his horror novels, Frank
Braun, is depicted as having a Jewish mistress, Lotte Levi, who is also a
patriotic German. This was one of the factors which ended Ewers’ popularity
with the Nazi leadership. With the addition to his homosexual tendencies, he
soon lost favor with party leaders. In 1934, most of his works were banned in
Germany, and his assets and were property seized. Alfred Rosenberg was his main
adversary in the party, but after submitting many petitions, Ewers eventually
secured the rescission of the ban.
Like Ewers’s Alraune,
Hanussen was also associated with the magical mandrake root. In 1932, Hitler’s
mistress Eva Braun attempted suicide. Additionally, Hitler's own political
prospects were fading, and became suicidal himself. But his old friend Hanussen
produced for him an astrological chart, which predicted that an auspicious
future lay ahead, but that Hitler was impeded by a hex. In order to rid himself
of the spell, explained Hanussen, Hitler would have to return to his hometown,
on a full moon at midnight in a butcher’s backyard and remove from the earth a
mandrake, a man-shaped root known in European folklore for its magical and
medicinal properties. Hanussen performed a ritual, and set off to collect the
mandrake himself, returning on New Year's Day 1933 with the root and a
prediction: that Hitler's return to power would take place on January 30, a
date approximately equivalent to the pagan Sabbath of Oimelc, one of the four “cross-quarter”
days of the witches’ calendar. As unlikely as it seemed at the time, Hitler was
Chancellor of Germany on precisely the date Hanussen had predicted.[2549] Hanussen also made a further
prediction, during a séance held at his “Palace of Occultism” in Berlin, that
the communists in Germany would attempt a revolution, marked by the destruction
(by fire) of an important government building. That was the day before the
infamous Reichstag fire, which is widely considered to have been a false-flag
operation that provided Hitler the opportunity to seize power and declare
himself “Führer.” But Hanussen was eventually killed six weeks later in the
purge of the Night of Long Knives, as some claim, because he “knew too much.”[2550]
In 1931, just before Hitler’s rise to power, Crowley played chess with Ernst Schertel, German author, probably best known for his Magic: History, Theory and Practice (1923), of which he sent a dedicated copy to Hitler, who read the book and marked several passages, including, “He who does not have the demonic seed within himself will never give birth to a magical world,” and “Satan is the beginning…”[2551] Around 1925, Crowley and Ludendorff met and they discussed “Nordic Theology,” including the occult significance of the swastika.[2552] According to Crowley’s notes, Ludendorff “almost certainly got the [Swastika] from us. I personally had suggested it to Ludendorff in ‘25 or ‘26.”[2553] Crowley also famously wrote in a 1933 article for the Sunday Dispatch, “before Hitler was, I am.” Crowley also believed Hitler’s Mein Kampf was inspired by his own The Book of the Law. Crowley marked the pages of his copy Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks—available at the Warburg Institute—which showed that he believed that Hitler’s “table talk” was Thelemically-inspired.[2554] One member of Hitler’s inner circle claimed that several meetings took place between Crowley and Hitler, a claim repeated by Réne Guénon in a letter to Julius Evola in 1949.[2555] Crowley regarded himself the “proper man” that Hitler envisioned, as he wrote to Viereck in 1936: “Hitler himself says emphatically in Mein Kampf that the world needs a new religion, that he himself is not a religious teacher, but that when the proper man appears he will be welcome.”[2556]
Hanfstaengl was a friend of Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford (1914 – 1948), who was one of the six infamous Mitford sisters, who achieved contemporary notoriety for their controversial and stylish lifestyles and politics. They were caricatured by The Times journalist Ben Macintyre as “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur.”[2557] Jessica renounced her privileged background at an early age and became an adherent of communism. Jessica became a well-known writer, the author of The American Way of Death in 1963. She later married Robert Treuhaft, a Jewish-American civil rights lawyer, and became a friend and mentor to J.K. Rowling, author of the blockbuster Harry Potter series.
While Jessica turned to the left, Unity and her sister Diana turned to fascism. The Churchill’s eldest daughter Diana was a flower girl at Diana Mitford’s wedding to Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and she was often invited for extended visits or parties at Clementine and Winston Churchill’s country house. Diana however divorced Guinness for Sir Oswald Mosley (1896 –1980), with whom she was having an affair. Mosley, was a devotee of Aleister Crowley and the founder of the British Union of Fascists.[2558] Mosley’s closest ally was a disciple of Crowley, Major-General J.F.C Fuller (1878 –1966). While serving in the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry, Fuller had entered and won a contest to write the best review of Crowley’s poetic works, after which it turned out that he was the only entrant. This essay was later published in book form in 1907 as The Star in the West. After this he became an enthusiastic supporter of Crowley, joining his magical order, the A∴A∴., within which he became a leading member, editing order documents and its journal, The Equinox.
In 1920, Mosley married Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of Round Tabler, Lord Curzon. When Cynthia died in 1933, Oswald married his mistress Diana Mitford in secret in Germany in 1936, in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, where Hitler was one of the guests. Mosley spent large amounts of his private fortune on the British Union of Fascists, negotiating with Hitler, through Diana, for permission to broadcast commercial radio to Britain from Germany.
Diana became well acquainted with Winifred (1897 – 1980), the English-born wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried Wagner (1869 – 1930), and with Goebbels’ wife Magda. Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston Churchill, relentlessly criticized his cousin Unity Mitford for her crush on Hitler. Unity, who was conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, Canada, where her family owned gold mines, was famous for her adulation of and friendship with Hitler. Her middle name was Valkyrie, after the war maidens in the opera of Wagner, and a friend Unity’s grandfather, Algernon Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale (1837 – 1916). Redesdale had also translated books by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. After meeting Unity and Diana, Hitler described them as the perfect examples of Aryan women.[2559] Pryce Jones reports that “She [Mitford] saw him, it seemed, more than a hundred times, no other English person could have anything like that access to Hitler.”[2560] Hitler’s inner circle, however, suspected she was a British spy. Nevertheless, when Hitler announced the Anschluss in 1938, Unity appeared with him on the balcony in Vienna.
When she lived in Munich before the war, Unity had befriended Ernst Hanfstaengl and lived in his sister Erna’s house. Some authorities suggest that Hitler was romantically involved with Erna, or had romantic affections for her.[2561] Some authorities suggest that Hitler was romantically involved with Erna, or had romantic affections for her.[2562] Unity shot herself in the head days after Britain declared war on Germany, but failed to kill herself and eventually died of pneumococcal meningitis at West Highland Cottage Hospital, Oban. However, investigative journalist Martin Bright, as revealed in an article in The New Statesman, has discovered evidence suggesting that Unity may have faked her injuries to hide the fact that she was carrying Hitler’s child.[2563]
“Although their targets did not entirely overlap,” explains Eli Valley, “Hitler directly drew from portions of Nordau’s work in Mein Kampf, while eliding the source.”[2564] The main work that gave rise to theories of decadence was the work Degeneration (1892) by Max Nordau—a co-founder of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) together with Herzl, and president or vice president of several Zionist congresses—and which was adopted by nationalists who presented their brand of nationalism as a cure.[2565] Roger Griffin, the noted scholar of fascism, describes the ideology as having three core components: “(i) the rebirth myth, (ii) populist ultra-nationalism, and (iii) the myth of decadence.”[2566] Although considered to have first emerged in France in the 1880s, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Hegel have also been considered as influential in the development of fascism. The ideological roots of fascism have also been traced to Social Darwinism, Wagnerian aesthetics, Arthur de Gobineau’s racialist anthropology, Oswald Spengler and his The Decline of Western Civilization.
The main work that gave rise to decadence theories was Nordau’s Degeneration.[2567] The book deals with numerous case studies of various artists, writers and thinkers, including Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, but its basic premise remains that society and human beings themselves are degenerating, and this degeneration is both reflected in and influenced by art. In the in the opening pages, Nordau establishes the cultural phenomenon of fin de siècle, but he then develops the viewpoint of a physician and identifies what he sees as an illness in the entire artistic and literary avant-garde, “contempt for the traditional views of custom and morality.” Nordau compared the modern artist to a criminal:
It never occurs to
us to permit the criminal by organic disposition to “expand” his individuality
in crime, a as little can it be expected of us to permit the degenerate artist
to expand his individuality in immoral works of art. The artist who
complacently represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of
it, perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the
criminal who actually commits it.[2568]
As indicated by Griffin, while fascism has tended to be seen incorrectly as opposed to modernism, there was a significant interplay between the two. Many of the intellectual sources of modernism, Griffin points out, are not normally associated with the movement. The Futurists, Expressionists, Dadaists, Sorelians, and radical aesthetes from Van Gogh, Rilke, Stravinsky, D’Annunzio to Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Wyndham Lewis, and Ernst Jünger, all shared with fascism a pessimism about the state of the modern world.[2569] Instead, Griffin suggests that modernism must be expanded to embrace not just experimentalism in literature, art, and architecture, but to radical or revolutionary politics. The common denominator, Griffin explains, is:
…that in different ways the projects and movements in question aimed to put to an end to what Spengler portrayed as ‘the decline of the West,’ reverse what Max Weber called the ‘disenchantment’ of modern society, resolve what Sigmund Freud described as ‘the discontents’ of civilization, satisfy modern man’s (and woman’s) search for a ‘soul’ explored by Carl Jung, and remedy what Heidegger interpreted as a loss of ‘being at home in the world”.[2570]
Mark Antliff, in Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939, investigated the central role that theories of the visual arts and creativity played in the development of fascism in France, and its formative influence on the history of avant-garde art. Included in this trend were the European Symbolists, a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. One of Symbolism’s most colorful promoters in Paris was art and literary critic Joséphin Péladan, who founded the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (OKR+C) with Papus, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and Stanislas de Guaita.[2571] “I believe in the Ideal, in Tradition, in Hierarchy,” Péladan declared, reflecting the ideals of fascism. Max Nordau, in his book, Degeneration, shows a soft spot for Péladan, declaring that “the conscious factor in him knows that [mysticism] is all nonsense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the unconscious life to do as it pleases.”[2572]
The idea of
supra-rational knowledge, omnipresent in the work of Papus’
leading pupil, Réne Guénon (1886 – 1951), inspired avant-garde artistic circles who
sought to go beyond rational thought, in particular the surrealist movement.[2573]
Guénon took on an “anti-Masonic” stance because he was opposed to the
rationalist orientation of the fraternity, which became a constant feature of
his career and strategy, which Marie-France James, one
of the best Catholic critics of Guénon, described as a “clearly Gnostic-Masonic
objective, with all the with all the hallmarks of a rehabilitation and
propaganda operation.”[2574]
Guénon met Papus and was
initiated into the Martinist Order in 1907, becoming “Superior
Unknown.” He contributed to the occultist magazine Le Voile d’Isis
founded by Papus in 1890. He was also initiated into the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm in 1907, and was
raised to the third degree of Master Mason of Freemasonry. Guénon was also a close friend of Charles Barlet
(a.k.a. Albert Faucheux), a member of the Max
Theon’s Cosmic Movement, from
whom he received numerous documents from his master, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, and
from the H.B.of L, for which he was the representative for France.[2575]
In 1908, Guénon was
secretary at the International Masonic Congress held in Paris organized by
Papus, where he met Léonce Fabre des Essarts who, under the pseudonym of
Synésius, succeeded Jules Doinel as leader of the Gnostic Church, and which
became the official church of the Martinist Order, as l'Église Gnostique Universelle (“Universal
Gnostic Church”). Guénon joined the church, became a Gnostic
bishop, and wrote many
articles under the pseudonym Palingenius between 1909 and 1912 in the magazine La
Gnose. With Victor Blanchard, a member of Papus’ Supreme Council, he also
founded a short-lived Order of the Temple, which would later drive a wedge
between him and Papus.[2576]
Guénon was received in 1912 into the Thébah
(“arch” in Hebrew) Masonic lodge, that was created in 1901 by Symbolists for the purpose
of spiritual research, esotericism or the Kabbalah. Thébah belonged to the
Grande Loge de France, which in 1894 became independent of the Supreme
Council of France, once governed by Adolphe Crémieux, head of the Alliance Israelite Universelle and also
Grand Master of the Rite of Misraïm. Its first Venerable Master was Pierre Deulin (1973 – 1912),
the brother-in-law of Papus. Deulin was also secretary of the Revue
cosmique, organ of the Cosmic Movement created by Max Théon. The secretary
of the OKR+C, Oswald Wirth, contributed to the rewriting of several high grades
of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite with Albert Lantoine, at the request
of the Grand Commander of the Supreme Council René Raymond, himself the founder
of Thébah and a member of the Cosmic Movement.[2577]
Guénon, who would become an important
intellectual inspiration to much of the political right, had been involved with
Action Française and its founder Charles Maurras (1868 – 1952).[2578] The movement Action Française
and the journal were founded as a nationalist reaction against the intervention
of left-wing intellectuals on the Dreyfus Affair. Henri Vaugeois (1864 – 1916)
and Maurice Pujo (1872 – 1955), the original founding members of Action Française, had belonged to l’Union pour l’Action Morale (“Union
for Moral Action”), founded in 1893 by Paul Desjardins (1859 – 1940), a French professor, journalist and
Synarchist.[2579]
The Union split during the Dreyfus affair, giving rise to L’Union pour la
Vérité (“Union for Truth”), led by Paul Desjardins, a supporter of Dreyfus,
and the Action Française being established by Vaugeois and Pujo in 1889.[2580]
Under Maurras Action française became a political movement that was monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary and anti-Semitic. Also associated with Maurras and his Action Française was French revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847 – 1922), one of the key activists who greatly influenced fascism. Action Française also attracted figures like Maurice Barrès (1862 – 1923), a staunch Wagernite and one of the founding members of revived Martinist Order along with Papus. Barrès was also a friend of Stanislas de Guaita and Claude Debussy, one of the founding members of revived Martinist Order along with Papus. Barrès was the first to coin the term “national socialism” in 1898, an idea which then quickly spread throughout Europe.
French composer Claude Debussy (1862 –1918), who was greatly influenced by the Symbolist poetic movement, was a member of the OKR+C and one of the founding members of revived Martinist Order along with Papus, and a purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Debussy made Victor Hugo’s acquaintance and subsequently he set a number of Hugo’s works to music. Debussy associated with the symbolist playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Pelleas et Melisande, he turned into a world-famous opera. In his early twenties, Jean Cocteau became associated with Proust, Gide and Maurice Barrès as well. He was also a close friend of Victor Hugo’s great-grandson, Jean, with whom he participated in explorations of spiritualism and the occult. In 1926, Cocteau designed the set for a production of the opera Pelleas et Melisande because, according to one commentator, he was “unable to resist linking his name for all time to that of Claude Debussy.”[2581]
Barrès was a close associate of Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863 – 1938), who was a friend of Stefan George and Grand Master of the Scottish Rite Great Lodge of Italy, which in 1908 had separated from the Grand Orient of Italy.[2582] Like Barrès, d’Annunzio was also a great admirer of Wagner. When Wagner died, in Venice in 1883, d’Annunzio was among the pallbearers. Il fuoco (“The Flame”), d’Annunzio’s 1900 novel, which tells a story inspired by his relationship with the actress Eleonora Duse, novel contains expositions of many of his theories about drama, largely inspired by Nietzsche and Wagner. After World War I, d’Annunzio settled permanently in Wagner’s former villa on Lake Garda, given to him by Wagner’s family. D’Annunzio swore to die heroically like “his beloved Siegfried.” Mussolini also greatly admired Wagner, though he considered him quite un-German.[2583]
Angered by the proposed handing over of the city of Fiume, whose population was mostly Italian, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, d’Annunzio led the seizure of the city and then declared Fiume an independent state, the Italian Regency of Carnaro. As the de facto dictator of Fiume, d’Annunzio maintained control over what has been described as a “new and dangerously potent politics of spectacle,” which was imitated by Mussolini.[2584] D’Annunzio has been described as the John the Baptist of Italian fascism, as virtually the entire ritual of fascism was invented by him during his occupation of Fiume. The flag of the Regence of Carnaro, also known as the Endeavor of Fiume, featured the Ouroboros, the Gnostic symbol of a snake biting its own tail, and the seven stars of the Ursa Major.
D’Annunzio occupied a prominent place in Italian literature and later political life, often referred to under the epithets Il Vate (“the Poet”) or Il Profeta (“the Prophet”). One of D’Annunzio’s most important novels, scandalous in its day, is Il fuoco (“The Flame of Life”) of 1900, in which he portrays himself as the Nietzschean Superman Stelio Effrena, in a fictionalized version of his love affair with Eleonora Duse. He collaborated with Debussy on a musical play Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (“The Martyrdom of St Sebastian”), from 1911, written for the Russian-Jewish dancer and actress Ida Rubinstein. The Vatican reacted by placing all of his works in the Index of Forbidden Books. Rubinstein made her debut in 1908 in a single private performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, in which she stripped nude for the Dance of the Seven Veils.
Mussolini’s concept of the New Man was inspired by Futurism, founded by Filippo Marinetti (1876 – 1944), who in 1916, linked with D’Annunzio, and together they had helped push Italy into war with the central powers. As well as Sorel, with whom Marinetti would remain in close contact, Futurism was also influenced by Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès.[2585] One of the central features of the Futurist movement was the glorification of modernity, which he called “modernolatry,” based on the belief that technology had fundamentally improved the capacity of human beings. Futurism aimed to accomplish a comprehensive “revolution,” not only in different forms of art, such as literature, theatre and music, but also in politics, fashion, cuisine, mathematics, and in every possible aspect of life.[2586] On February 20, 1909, across the front page of the French right-wing magazine Le Figaro, a publication which had been subsidized by Pyotr Rachkovsky, the head of the Okhrana in Paris,[2587] Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto, which proclaimed that that “Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.” For Marinetti, the war was “the most beautiful futurist poem that has seen the light of day.”[2588]
Through the association Marinetti with the Symbolists, Futurism prepared the ground for the modernist revolution of the early twentieth century. The Cubism of Picasso and Braque, along with the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky, German Expressionism and the Futurist movement of Marinetti, are considered to be a hallmark of modernism. More than any other person, it was Gertrude Stein, who coordinated the avant-garde art movement. Stein began to accept and define her pseudo-masculinity through the ideas of “Jewish self-hater” Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1906).[2589] Weininger considered Jewish men effeminate and women as incapable of selfhood and genius, except for lesbians who may approximate masculinity. A close friend of Bertrand Russell, Stein started her career under the tutelage of William James at Harvard University.[2590] In her Paris salon, Stein entertained nightly a circle frequented by the painters Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, Diego Rivera, the American writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the composers Maurice Ravel, Stravinsky, Erik Satie and many, many others. Their private collection, assembled from 1904 to 1913, soon had a worldwide reputation. Their acquisitions included works by Gauguin, Cézanne, Delacroix, Matisse, Picasso, Paul Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.
The pagan-themed ballet Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, a close friend to Aldous Huxley and W.H. Auden, has been heralded as the birth of modernism.[2591] As suggested by its subtitle “Pictures of Pagan Russia,” the theme for Stravinsky’s opera is the pagan worship of the dying-god, whose resurrection was traditionally celebrated on Easter. In the opera, Stravinsky dared to associate the rite with human sacrifice. When the ballet was first performed at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in 1913, the controversial nature of the music and choreography caused a riot in the audience. The concept for the controversial ballet the Rite of Spring was developed by his friend Nicholas Roerich, another important member of the Theosophical Society and also a friend of H. G. Wells.
Many in these circles were connected with the Theosophical Society and intersected with the Golden Dawn, which included, among others, Yeats, Maude Gonne, Constance Lloyd (the wife of Oscar Wilde), Arthur Edward Waite and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Shaw’s mistress, Florence Farr, had been a member of the Golden Dawn, as well as a friend of Masonic scholar Arthur Edward Waite. These personalities were often also members of, or further intersected with, the Theosophical Society, which included D.H. Lawrence, as well as William Butler Yeats, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Dame Jane Goodall, Thomas Edison, Piet Mondrian, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Gustav Mahler. “I got everything from the ‘Secret Doctrine’ (Blavatsky),” Mondrian wrote, in 1918.[2592]
Gurdjieff also worked closely with Thomas de Hartmann (1884 – 1956), a friend of Kandinsky and Rainer Maria Rilke, who were friends of Karl Wolfskehl of the George-Kreis. Even before 1910, Kandinsky studied the Theosophical books of Blavatsky, Besant and Leadbeater, Rudolf Steiner, and Schuré, a close friend of Richard Wagner. In 1912, he wrote in his main theoretical work Über das Geistige in der Kunst (“On the Spiritual in Art” on the importance of Theosophy “for his art. In his treatise, Kandinsky stated that Blavatsky began “one of the greatest spiritual movements which unites a great number of people and which also has established a material form of this spiritual phenomenon in the Theosophical Society.”[2593] Arnold Schoenberg, a friend of Kandinsky, agreed with much of what he wrote in the book.[2594]
Martin Buber, along with Frieda and D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and Alma Mahler, the wife of composer and Theosophical Society member Gustav Mahler, were members of the sexual cult of Dr. Otto Gross, who was Freud’s as well as Jung’s student. [2595] As a bohemian drug user from youth, as well as an advocate of free love, Gross is sometimes credited as a founding father of twentieth century counterculture. While working as a ship’s doctor in 1900, he became addicted to cocaine, and remained an addict for the rest of his life. He entered a clinic for it several times but did not succeed in becoming clean. Gross was involved in a number of scandalous affairs and illegitimate children. He had an affair with Frieda Weekly, who later eloped with D.H. Lawrence, with whom she would spend the rest of her life.[2596] Years later, Jung recalled that Gross “mainly hung out with artists, writers, political dreamers, and degenerates of any description, and in the swamps of Ascona he celebrated miserable and cruel orgies.”[2597] About his relationship with Gross, Jung wrote to Freud that “I have learnt an unspeakable amount of marital wisdom, for until now I had a totally inadequate idea of my polygamous components despite all self-analysis.”[2598]
Gross was the dominant influence in the area of Ascona, Switzerland, originally a resort area for members of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy cult. In 1889, OTO founder and List Society member Franz Hartmann established, together with Alfredo Pioda and Countess Constance Wachtmeister, the close friend of Blavatsky, a theosophical monastery at Ascona. There, Hartmann published his periodical Lotusblüten (“Lotus Blossoms”), which was the first German publication to use the theosophical swastika on its cover. In 1900, Henri Oedenkoven and Ida Hofmann founded Monte Verità (The Mountain of Truth), a utopian commune near Ascona, which became a sort of early New Age haven of bohemianism and the occult, featuring experimentation in surrealism, paganism, feminism, pacifism, nudism, psychoanalysis and alternative healing.
The OTO had its only female lodge at Ascona. In 1916, Theodor Reuss moved to Basel, Switzerland where he established an “Anational Grand Lodge and Mystic Temple” of the OTO and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light at Monte Verità. In 1917, Reuss organized the Sun Festival (“Sonnenfest”), a conference there covering many themes, including societies without nationalism, women’s rights, mystic freemasonry, and dance as art, ritual and religion. Performing at the festival was Mary Wigman (1886 – 1973) was a German dancer and choreographer considered one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance.[2599] Wigman was a student of Carl Jung and OTO member Rudolf von Laban (1879 – 1958), known as the “Founding Father of the Expressionist Dance” in Germany.[2600] In 1923, one of Wigman’s students, Helene Hanke, married Hildebrand Gurlitt, the “quarter-Jew” who would come to be among the several art dealers part of the Nazi looting operation.[2601] In 1934, Laban was promoted to director of the Deutsche Tanzbühne, in Nazi Germany. He directed major festivals of dance under the funding of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry from 1934-1936. Laban wrote during this time that “we want to dedicate our means of expression and the articulation of our power to the service of the great tasks of our Volk. With unswerving clarity our Führer points the way.”[2602]
Monte
Verità was significant for the development of both the Cabaret Voltaire and the
European avant-garde and anti-art movement known as Dada.[2603]
Dada was begun by a group of artists and poets
associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Living across the street from
the Cabaret Voltaire were Lenin, Karl Radek and Gregory Zinoviev who were busy
planning the Bolshevik Revolution.[2604]
Though the cabaret was to be the birthplace of the Dada movement, it featured
artists from every sector of the avant-garde, including Marinetti, Kandinsky,
Paul Klee, and Max Ernst. On July 28, 1916, Hugo Ball read out the Dada
Manifesto, and also published a journal with the same name, which featured
work from Guillaume Apollinaire and had a cover designed by Taeuber-Arp.
Dada grew out of an already vibrant artistic tradition in Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, that was transported to Switzerland when a group of Jewish modernist artists—Tristan Tzara, Marcel and Iuliu Janco, Arthur Segal, and others—settled in Zurich. Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963), born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, was best known for being one of the founders and central figures of the movement. According to Menachem Wecker, the works of the Jewish Dadaists represented “not only the aesthetic responses of individuals opposed to the absurdity of war and fascism” but, invoking the well-worn light unto the nations theme, insists that they brought a “particularly Jewish perspective to the insistence on justice and what is now called tikkun olam.”[2605]
Norman Finkelstein links the Dada founded by Tzara to the influence of the Sabbateans’ and Frankists’ notion of “redemption through sin.”[2606] In recent years, researchers such as Tom Sandqvist, Milly Heyd, Haim Finkelstein, and Marius Hentea, have given new emphasis on the Jewishness of the Romanian contributors to Dada.[2607] In his book Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, Tom Sandqvist points out that Tzara’s Hasidic and Kabbalistic influences of his youth were evident in his art.[2608] Tzara’s hometown Moinesti is, in Andrei Codrescu’s opinion, “the center of the modern world, not only because of Tristan Tzara’s invention of Dada, but because its Jews were among the first Zionists, and Moinesti itself was the starting point of a famous exodus of its people on foot from here to the land of dreams, E’retz-Israel.”[2609]
According to the Jewish American poet Jerome Rothenberg, there are “definite historical linkages between the transgressions of messianism and the transgressions of the avant-garde.”[2610] Rothenberg refers to these heresies as “libertarian movements,” and connects them to Jewish receptivity to the forces of secularization and modernity, leading in turn to the “critical role of Jews and ex-Jews in revolutionary politics (Marx, Trotsky etc.) and avant-garde poetics (Tzara, Kafka, Stein etc.).”[2611] Milly Heyd endorses Rothenberg’s thesis, observing that “Tzara uses terminology that is part and parcel of Judaic thinking and yet subjects these very concepts to his nihilistic attack.”[2612] Tzara declared that, “Dada is using all its strength to establish the idiotic everywhere. Doing it deliberately. And is constantly tending towards idiocy itself… The new artist protests; he no longer paints (this is only a symbolic and illusory reproduction).”[2613]
As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called “Dada presidents,” who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara himself, figures ranging from Max Ernst, André Breton, Julius Evola and Igor Stravinsky.[2614] An article by Jean-Pierre Lassalle, titled “André Breton et la Franc-Maçonnerie,” revealed the existence of a core of active Freemasons from the “Guénonian” Thébah Masonic lodge who were tied to the Parisian surrealists, many of them students of the alchemist Eugène Canseliet (1899 – 1982) and associated with André Breton (1896 –1966), the leader of the Surrealist movement.[2615] Guénon’s work had an impact on many artists, in particular in the surrealist movement that developed out of the Dada activities during World War I. One example was Breton, who was interested in the works of Joseph Péladan.[2616] Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement.[2617] From the 1920s onward, the surrealist movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.
A very important exponent of the avant-garde was French surrealist artist Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963). In his early twenties, Cocteau had become associated with Action francaise and with the writers Ernst Jünger, Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. It was during his time with Action Française that Cocteau made his acquaintance of his close friend, Jacques Maritain (1882 – 1973).[2618] Jacques Maritain’s grandfather was Jules Favre, a Freemason and a friend of Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.[2619] In 1904, Maritain married Raïssa Oumançoff, a Russian Jewish émigré. They then converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1906. Maritain was a friend and supporter of René Guénon, with whom he corresponded frequently on philosophy and metaphysics.[2620] In addition to Cocteau, Maritain also counted among his friends the artist, Marc Chagall. Cocteau also met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. He wrote the libretto for Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus rex.
Cocteau became closely associated with the Dada movement. He collaborated on the Anthologie Dada and participated in a Dada matinée in 1920, along with Breton, Tzara, Francis Picabia and friend Max Jacob (1876 –1944). Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. Jacob, who was Jewish, claimed to have had a vision of Christ in 1909, and converted to Catholicism, hopeful that this conversion would alleviate his homosexual tendencies.[2621] Jacob would become close friends with Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916. Jean Hugo was the great-grandson of author Victor Hugo. Cocteau behaved like a Dada “pervert,” producing phallic images and cartoons for Picabia. Although for this reason Cocteau would become known briefly as an “anti-Tzara,” Cocteau and Tzara posed together for a photographic artwork by Man Ray in 1922.[2622]
After World War I, fascist intellectual “Baron” Julius Evola (1898 – 1974) had been attracted to the avant-garde, and briefly associated with Marinetti’s Futurist movement, and became a prominent representative of Dadaism in Italy. Evola was the most important successor to Guénon’s Traditionalism. According to one scholar, “Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century.”[2623] Evola authored books covering themes such as Hermeticism, the metaphysics of war, sex magic, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism and the Holy Grail. Evola’s influences included Plato, Jacob Boehme, Arthur de Gobineau, Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West he later translated into Italian.
Evola was introduced to Traditionalism around 1927 after he joined the Theosophical League founded by Arturo Reghini (1878 – 1946). As an Italian representative of the OTO, Reghini also had a common friend in Crowley with Evola.[2624] In the final article of Book Three of the Introduction to Magic, Evola translates several sections from Aleister Crowley’s Liber Aleph, the Book of Wisdom or Folly, where Evola claims that, “In the contemporary magical amphitheater… Crowley is a figure of the first rank.”[2625] In 1927, Reghini, Evola and other occultists, including Giovanni Colazza (1877 – 1953), a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, founded the Gruppo di Ur, which performed rituals intended to inspire Italy’s fascist regime with the spirit of imperial Rome. The Ur group also included Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986), a central figure in the history of Traditionalism.[2626] First interested in Theosophy and Martinism, Eliade became an intimate friend Evola who introduced to the work of Guénon.[2627]
Also belonging to the Ur Group was Maria Naglowska (1883 – 1936), a Russian occultist who wrote and taught sex magic and referred to herself as a “Satanic woman.”[2628] She was rumored to have been initiated by Hassidic Jews or by Rasputin, or by the Russian sect of the Khlysty to which Rasputin was rumored to belong.[2629] Naglowska married Jewish musician, Moise Hopenko, against the wishes of his family. The resulting break with Maria’s aristocratic family led the young couple to leave Russia for Berlin, Germany and then Geneva, Switzerland. However, after he met Theodor Herzl, he became a Zionist, and decided to leave them and move to Palestine around 1910, abandoning her and their children.[2630] Naglowska moved to Rome around 1920 where she became acquainted with Evola.[2631] In 1929, she moved to Paris where she conducted occult seminars on her ideas on sex magic. Attendance at these sessions included notable avant-garde writers and artists such as Evola, William Seabrook, Man Ray and André Breton. These gatherings eventually led to the establishment of the Confrerie de la Flèche d’Or (Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow).[2632] Evola, in his book Eros Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, claimed that Naglowska often wrote for shock effect, noting her “deliberate intention to scandalize the reader through unnecessarily dwelling on Satanism.”[2633] In 1931, Naglowska compiled, translated and published in French a collection of writings by Paschal Beverly Randolph, who had a profound influence on the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. Her publication of Randolph’s previously little known teachings was the source of his subsequent influence in European magic.[2634]
After the Italian surrender to the Allied forces in 1943, Evola moved to Germany where he spent the remainder of the war and also worked as a researcher on Freemasonry for the SS Ahnenerbe in Vienna. Inspired by SS member Herman Wirth, Evola reinterpreted Guénon’s perception that the origin of the “Primordial Tradition” was Hyperborean.[2635] Evola admired Himmler and regarded the SS as a model elite, of which he wrote in Vita Italiana, “We are inclined to the opinion that we can see the nucleus of an Order in the higher sense of tradition in the ‘Black Corps.’”[2636] Himmler then commissioned Wiligut to assess Evola. Apparently jealous, Wiligut concluded that “Evola works from a basic Aryan concept but is quite ignorant of prehistoric Germanic institutions and their meaning,” areas Wiligut was supposed to have excelled in, and recommended rejecting Evola’s “utopian” proposal.[2637]
“The similarities between the Jewish political messianic trend and German Nazism,” conclude Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, “are glaring.”[2638] The millenarian influences of the Sabbateans on the Nazi movement are expressed in their ambition to create a “Third Reich.” The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the process of creating a unified German nation state begun by Otto von Bismarck. The Third Reich, meaning Third Empire, alluded to the Nazis’ perception that Nazi Germany was the successor of the First Reich, the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806), with the crowning of Charlemagne in 800 and which was dissolved during the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, and Second Reich, the German Empire (1871–1918), which lasted from the unification of Germany in 1871 by Otto von Bismarck under Kaiser Wilhelm I until the abdication of his grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 at the end of World War I.
Despite their association with Marxism, there was a curious overlap between the Jewish members of the Frankfurt School, with the exponents of the German Conservative Revolution which gave rise of Nazism, along with the George-Kreis, the Munich Cosmic Circle, and the burgeoning field of History of Religions associated with the Eranos conferences. Rooted in the Counter-Enlightenment of the Romantic Era, the movement rejected liberalism and parliamentary democracy as the failed legacies of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the notion of the Volk, the movement advocated a new conservatism and nationalism that was specifically German, or Prussian in particular.[2639] Ultimately, explained Kurt Sontheimer, Conservative Revolutionary anti-democratic thought in the Weimar Republic “succeeded in alienating Germans from the democracy of the Weimar constitution and making large groups receptive to National Socialism.”[2640]
Together, they shared the influence of Sabbatean antinomianism, in a transgressive approach to art and culture, referred by Steven M. Wasserstrom to as “defeating evil from within.”[2641] The name Frankfurt School describes the works of scholarship and the intellectuals who were the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), an adjunct organization at Goethe University Frankfurt, founded in 1923, by Carl Grünberg, a Marxist professor of law at the University of Vienna. The Frankfurt School originated through the financial support of the wealthy student Felix Weil (1898 – 1975), a Jewish German-Argentine Marxist. In addition to Hegel, Marx, and Weber, Freud became one of the foundation stones on which the Frankfurt School’s interdisciplinary program for a critical theory of society was constructed.
Although conservative essayists of the Weimar Republic like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal of the George-Kreis, or Franz von Papen’s secretary, Edgar Jung (1894 – 1934), had already described their political project as a Konservative Revolution (“Conservative Revolution”), the name saw a revival after the 1949 doctoral thesis of Neue Rechte philosopher Armin Mohler (1920 – 2003) on the movement.[2642] Notions of a “thousand year Reich” and “fire of the blood” were adopted by the Nazis and incorporated into the party’s propaganda from Stefan George, founder of the George-Kreis—who was identified by Armin Mohler as an exemplar of the German Conservative Revolution.[2643]
In 1950, Mohler, who served as private secretary to Ernst Jünger (1895 – 1998), published Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932 (“The Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932”), the product of his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Karl Jaspers (1883 – 1969). However, Mohler noted that the phenomenon of the Conservative Revolution was not exclusively German, and cited as examples: Dostoyevsky in Russia, Georges Sorel and Maurice Barres in France, Julius Evola in Italy, D.H. Lawrence and G.K. Chesterton in England, Madison Grant and James Burnham, the theorist of the “managerial revolution” in the United States, and Zeev Jabotinsky for Zionism.[2644]
According to Mohler, the interrelationship between these disparate influences in the movement during the interwar period was explained in the novel The Plumed Serpent by D.H. Lawrence, first published in 1926. The novel’s plot takes place after the Mexican Revolution (1901–1920), when Don Cipriano, a Mexican general who supports a religious movement, the Men of Quetzalcoatl, founded by his friend Don Ramón Carrasco, who bring about an end to Christianity in Mexico, replacing it with pagan Quetzalcoatl worship. In the novel, Ramón explains to Cipriano that he wants to be “to be one of the Initiates of the Earth. One of the Initiators.” And, because races should neither mix nor mingle, every nation should have its own savior, and only the natural aristocrats of the world, can be international, or cosmopolitan, or cosmic, forming together a “Natural Aristocracy of the World.” Specially, Mohler then quotes Ramón explaining:
So if I want Mexicans to learn the name of Quetzalcoatl, it is because I want them to speak with the tongues of their own blood. I wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan, and the tree Igdrasil. And I wish the Druidic world would see, honestly, that in the mistletoe is their mystery, and that they themselves are the Tuatha De Danaan, alive, but submerged. And a new Hermes should come back to the Mediterranean, and a new Ashtaroth to Tunis; and Mithras again to Persia, and Brahma unbroken to India, and the oldest of dragons to China.[2645]
The
phrase “Third Reich” was originally coined by Moeller van den Bruck, who in
1923 published a book titled Das Dritte Reich. In German, as indicated by Richard Landes, in Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the
Millennial Experience, the word Reich can connote at once kingdom, realm, empire, and
also something sacred, or an “age” or “epoch.” When Engels spoke of the Reich
der Freiheit, he was referring to the realm or “age” of freedom. Reich
also has a religious meaning. When Germans pray zu uns kommed ein Reich
(“Thy kingdom come”), they are calling for the “Lord’s kingdom.”[2646] According to Moeller van den
Bruck:
It is an old and great German conception.
It arose from the collapse of our first Reich. It was fused early on with
expectations of a millennial Reich. Yet always there lived within it a
political conception which aimed to the future, not so much upon the end of
times, but upon the beginning of a German epoch in which the German Volk will
fulfill its destiny on earth.[2647]
Moeller van den Bruck’s use of the term “Third Reich” was inspired by of Joachim of Fiore—a heretical Cistercian abbot from Calabria, and a disciple of Bernard of Clairvaux, patron of the Templars—who is suspected by several historians of having been a crypto-Jew.[2648] Looking back at German history, Moeller van den Bruck distinguished two separate periods, and identified them with the ages proposed by Joachim of Fiore: the Holy Roman Empire as the Age of the Father and the German Empire, beginning with unification under Otto von Bismarck to the defeat of Germany in World War II, as the “Second Reich” or the Age of the Son. After the interval of the Weimar Republic, during which constitutionalism, parliamentarianism and even pacifism ruled, these were then to be followed by the “Third Reich” or The Age of the Holy Ghost.
The book begins with a “Prefatory Letter to Heinrich von Gleichen,” the founder of the Anti-Bolshevik League, with Eduard Stadtler. The Anti-Bolshevik League was funded by the Anti-Bolshevik Fund, composed of Jewish financiers like Arthur Salomonsohn and Felix Deutsch, both members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, founded leaders of the Haskalah around Moses Mendelssohn.[2649] Gleichen played a leading role in the Kulturbund, founded in 1915 and supported by the Reich government, which included, among others, Max Planck, and also members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, Max Liebermann and Walter Rathenau.[2650] In 1919, von Gleichen organized the Juniklub (“June Club”), a discussion group for the Jungkonservative (“Young Conservatives”), where Moeller van den Bruck played an important role as chief ideologist. When the Juniklub dissolved in 1924, von Gleichen founded the Deutsch Herrenklub (“German Men’s Club”) in 1924, an association that included important industrialists who supported the Nazi cause, like Fritz Thyssen and politicians like Hjalmar Schacht, another member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde. In 1925, he took over the editorship of the magazine Das Gewissen (“The Conscience”) from Stadtler and changed the name to Der Ring in 1928. Von Gleichen founded branches in other cities that called themselves Rings and copied the model of British gentlemen’s clubs and Masonic lodges.[2651] The Herrenklub achieve renown when its members Heinrich Brüning (1885 – 1970 became Chancellor in 1930 and Franz von Papen in 1932. Wilhelm von Gayl (1879 – 1945) became Reich Minister of the Interior in 1932. During the World War I, Gayl was an advisor General Erich Ludendorff.[2652]
Julius Evola, a close friend of Baron Von Gleichen, addressed the Herrenclub in Berlin in 1934, of which he wrote, “there I was to find my natural milieu.”[2653] Moeller van den Bruck, like Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola and Carl Schmitt, was a leading figure of the German Conservative Revolution. Otto Weininger, the “self-hating” Jew who assimilated völkisch ideas and was admired by Dietrich Eckart, also had a strong influence on Evola, Ludwig Wittgenstein, August Strindberg and, via his lesser-known work Über die letzten Dinge, on James Joyce.[2654] Evola translated Weininger’s Sex and Character into Italian, and wrote the text Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, where his views on sexuality were dealt with at length. Goodrick-Clarke noted the fundamental influence of Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character on Evola’s dualism of male-female spirituality.[2655] In Sex and Character, Weininger argues that the male aspect is active, productive, conscious and moral/logical, while the female aspect is passive, unproductive, unconscious and amoral/alogical. When applied to the Jewish race, Weininger concluded:
The true concept of the State is foreign to
the Jew, because he, like the woman, is wanting in personality; his failure to
grasp the idea of true society is due to his lack of free intelligible ego.
Like women, Jews tend to adhere together, but they do not associate as free
independent individuals mutually respecting each other’s individuality.
As there is no real dignity in women, so what is meant by the word “gentleman” does not exist amongst the Jews. The genuine Jew fails in this innate good breeding by which alone individuals honour their own individuality and respect that of others. There is no Jewish nobility, and this is the more surprising as Jewish pedigrees can be traced back for thousands of years.[2656]
Evola also shared a number of acquaintances with Schmitt, including Ernst Jünger, Armin Mohler and Prince Karl Anton von Rohan (1898 – 1975)—who worked with Baron von Gleichen’s Juniklub—who founded the Kulturbund, the Austrian counterpart of the Herrenclub. After the World War I, there appeared a large number of movements dedicated to the economic and political union of European. One example was the fascist-leaning Verband für kulturelle Zusammenarbeit founded in Vienna in 1921 which cooperated closely with its sister organization, the Fédération des Unions intellectuelles, with which it later united as the was the Association for Cultural Cooperation (“Kulturbund”).[2657]
Rohan, an active supporter of the idea of
conservative revolution, was the scion of one of the most prestigious
aristocratic families in Europe. Karl’s aunt was Berthe de Rohan (1868 – 1945),
who participated in Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement.[2658] The Kulturbund later opened individual
centers in Paris, Milan, Frankfurt and Heidelberg, and its membership reads
like a “Who’s Who” of European industry and intelligentsia.[2659]
Future Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, who had belonged to the
pro-Zionist Pro-Palästina Komitee, was among the leading members. The Kulturbund’s periodical, Europäische
Revue, which Rohan founded in 1925 and edited until 1936, was identified by
Armin Mohler as one of Germany’s leading “young conservative” publications.[2660]
After the onset of the Great
Depression, IG Farben subsidized the journal and other Kulturbund
activities. Lilly von Schnitzler, whose husband George was a director of IG
Farben, was one of the Kulturbund’s treasurers.[2661]
Lilly was in extensive correspondence with Carl Schmitt. As Paul Gottfried
observed, although the Europäische Revue
“never surpassed 2,000 paid subscribers,” nevertheless, “its list included
almost every leading political, religious, and philosophical thinker in the
1920s.”[2662] Frequent
contributors to the Europäische Revue
were George-Kreis members Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Wolfskehl and Joseph
Goebbels’ Jewish professor Friedrich Gundolf. Foreign authors featured in the Europäische Revue included Winston Churchill, Julius Evola, Aldous
Huxley, H.G. Wells, Arrigo Solmi, José Ortega y Gasset and Carl Jung.[2663]
The revue appeared from 1925, but in 1933 came under the control of the
ideology of National Socialism. The journal would
continue its publication until 1944, with the help of Goebbels.[2664]
In 1901, Hofmannsthal married Gertrud “Gerty” Schlesinger, the daughter of a Viennese Jewish banker.[2665] Their daughter, Christiane von Hofmannsthal, married the German Indologist and linguist Heinrich Zimmer (1890 – 1943). Christiane’s brother, Raimund von Hofmannsthal (1906 – 1974), married Ava Alice Muriel Astor, daughter of John Jacob Astor IV, the Robber Baron who died on the Titanic in 1912. Astor’s cousin, Waldorf Astor, was a member of the Round Table, also known as the Cliveden Set. With his wife Nancy Astor, Waldorf held regular weekend parties at their home Cliveden House, a large estate in Buckinghamshire on the River Thames. Guests of the Astors at Cliveden included Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Joseph Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw, von Ribbentrop, Mahatma Gandhi, Amy Johnson, F.D. Roosevelt, H.H. Asquith, T.E. Lawrence, Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, Henry Ford, the Duke of Windsor and the writers Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Edith Wharton.
Mohler also maintained extensive correspondence with Carl Schmitt.[2666] Mohler was also press secretary for Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), and whose urging Schmitt joined the Nazi party.[2667] Heidegger who would become one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and a major influence on the rise of Postmodernism. Heidegger’s thought was influenced by Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938), who established the school of phenomenology. According to Athol Bloomer, “Phenomenology itself has roots in the teachings of Jacob Leib Frank who wished to encourage a spirituality that looked at truth from the perspective of man and his life.”[2668] In 1923, Heidegger began an extra-marital affair with then seventeen-year-old Hannah Arendt, who was raised in a secular Jewish family and who was also close friends with Anna Mendelssohn, whose family was descended from Moses Mendelssohn.[2669] Arendt later faced criticism for this because of Heidegger’s support for the Nazis after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933.
Heidegger was a friend of the German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany. Jaspers was a close friend of the Weber family, and Max Weber also having held a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, where he had studied.[2670] Friends and students of Jaspers included the linguists Benno von Wiese and Hugo Friedrich with whom Hannah Arendt attended lectures by Friedrich Gundolf—Goebbels’ Jewish professor and a member of the George-Kreis—at Jaspers’ suggestion, and who inspired in her an interest in German Romanticism.[2671] After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Jaspers was considered to have a “Jewish taint” due to his Jewish wife, Gertrude Mayer, and was forced to retire from teaching in 1937.
Victor Farias in Heidegger and Nazism has revealed comments from Heidegger in 1933 such as, “the glory and the greatness of the Hitler revolution,” and a speech in that same year where proclaimed: “Doctrine and ‘ideas’ shall no longer govern your existence. The Führer himself, and only he, is the current and future reality of Germany, and his word is your law.”[2672] During a 1935 lecture, which was published in 1953 as part of his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger refers to the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement.[2673] Karl Löwith, a former student who met Heidegger in Rome in 1936, recalled that Heidegger wore a swastika pin to their meeting, though Heidegger knew that Löwith was Jewish. Löwith also recalled that Heidegger “left no doubt about his faith in Hitler,” and stated that his support for Nazism agreed with the essence of his philosophy.[2674]
Ernst Jünger (1895 – 1998), a close friend of Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, and a contributor to Baron von Gleichen’s Das Gewissen, was the most prominent of the German Conservative Revolutionaries and considered one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century. He was a highly-decorated German soldier in World War I, after which he became active in German politics, experimented in psychedelic drugs, and travelled the world. Jünger never joined the Nazi Party, and eventually turned against them by the late 1930s. Along with Karl Haushofer, the Strasser brothers, Niekisch and other figures of the Conservative Revolution, Jünger advocated National Bolshevism, a German-Russian revolutionary alliance which influenced the German Communists with connections to the Nazi left-wing.[2675] Jünger’s 1932 work Der Arbeiter (“The Worker”) is considered a seminal National Bolshevik text.
Freud’s former student, Carl Jung (1875 – 1961), the founder analytical psychology, published frequently in Rohan’s Europäische Revue. The uncle to Jung’s grandfather was Johann Sigmund Jung (1745 – 1824), a member of the Illuminati.[2676] In his autobiography, Jung attributes the roots of his destiny as the founder of analytical psychology to his ancestor Dr. Carl Jung of Mainz (d. 1645), whom he portrays as a follower of the Rosicrucian and alchemist Michael Maier.[2677] Jung indicated that his own grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung Sr., famous as a doctor in Basel, rector of the University and a Grand Master of Swiss Masons, and that his coat of arms included Rosicrucian and Masonic symbolism. During his student days, he entertained acquaintances with the family legend that his paternal grandfather was the illegitimate son of Goethe and his German great-grandmother, Sophie Ziegler.[2678] Jung’s mother, Emilie Preiswerk, was the youngest child of a distinguished Basel churchman and academic, Samuel Preiswerk (1799 – 1871), an antistes of the Swiss Reformed Church and a proto-Zionist, who taught Jung’s father Paul Hebrew at Basel University.[2679]
In a newspaper article entitled “The Fight against Neurosis and the Renewal of Europe,” Rohan wrote that “Jung stands among the leading avant-garde in the fight for a new Europe.”[2680] Richard Noll, in The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, has argued that the early Jung was influenced by Theosophy, sun worship and völkisch nationalism in developing the ideas on the collective unconscious and archetypes.[2681] Jung initially interpreted the Nazi Movement as a manifestation of the “Wotan” archetype that had been reactivated in Germany.[2682]
Otto Gross, who was Freud’s as well as Jung’s student, explains Richard Noll, “knew several of the members of the circle and probably developed his interest in matriarchy and Bachofen through them.”[2683] Gross was connected to the Cosmics through his relationship with Klages’ lover, Contessa Franziska “Fanny” zu Reventlow. Fanny left Munich for Monte Verità in in 1910, where she wrote her “Schwabing” novels. She also got to know Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank Wedekind, and Theodor Lessing, a friend of Klages who had studied under Edmund Husserl. Lessing was the author of Der jüdische Selbsthaß, his classic on Jewish self-hatred, published by the Jüdische Verlag. Lessing’s political ideals, as well as his Zionism made him a very controversial person during the rise of Nazi Germany. He was assassinated by Sudeten German Nazi sympathizers on August 30, 1933.
In Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reports how Jung described “Hitler as possessed by the archetype of the collective Aryan unconscious and could not help obeying the commands of an inner voice.” In a series of interviews between 1936 and 1939, Jung characterized Hitler as an archetype that often took the place of his own personality. “Hitler is a spiritual vessel, a demi-divinity; even better, a myth. Benito Mussolini is a man.”[2684] Jung, explained Goodrick-Clarke, likened Hitler to Mohammed, the messiah of Germany who teaches the virtue of the sword. “His voice is that of at least 78 million Germans. He must shout, even in private conversation… The voice he hears is that of the collective unconscious of his race.”[2685]
Munich psychotherapist Gustav Richard Heyer (1890 – 1967) of the Göring Institute, was Jung’s leading promoter in Germany. Heyer also had connections with the George-Kreis and was a devotee of the völkisch Lebensphilosophie of Klages of the Cosmic Circle.[2686] Heyer’s influence can be seen in his 1932 book The Organism of the Soul, published by Lehmanns Verlag, Germany’s leading publisher of medical books and major promoter of eugenics and other völkisch causes. The firm’s policy was a reflection of the convictions of the firm’s founder, Thule Society member Julius Lehmann. In 1940, the firm issued a fiftieth anniversary volume that recounted its history and included a bibliography of such leading eugenicists as Hans Gunther, Albert Hoche, and Ernst Rüdin.[2687] Ernst Rüdin (1874 – 1952) headed the Kraepelin Institute, named after his mentor Emil Kraepelin (1856 –1926), who is considered the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, and which came under the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm institution in Munich. Rüdin and his staff, as part of the Task Force of Heredity Experts chaired by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, drew up the Nazi sterilization law.
Heyer helped found the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1926. Jung joined the society in 1928, and became its president in 1930. However, when Hitler came to power in 1933, all German professional societies were required to become gleichgeschaltet, “conformed” to Nazi ideology. In 1934, the leadership of the German General Medical Society for Psychotherapy was taken over by Matthias Göring (1879 – 1945), whose position as leader of organized psychotherapy in Nazi Germany stemmed from the fact that he was an elder cousin of Hermann Göring. The German Institute became popularly known as the Göring Institute. Göring, who had joined the Nazi party in 1933, preached against “Jewish” psychoanalysis and enforced the exclusion of Jewish psychoanalysts, particularly those from the Freudian school of thought.[2688]
As sitters in Schrenck-Notzing psychical research seances, Jung and Eugen Bleuler (1857 – 1939), a Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist, confirmed reports of movements of objects and other phenomena previously observed with Willi Schneider’s brother Rudi and his predecessors. Records of the sittings with Rudi were compiled by Gerda Walther (1897 – 1977) after Schrenck-Notzing’s death and published, with a foreword by Bleuler, by his widow.[2689] Walther, who is considered an exponent of phenomenology, later became a student of Husserl. In her childhood, Walther came into contact with her parents’ social democratic friends, including August Bebel, Klara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Adolf Geck.
Walther became friends with Husserl’s assistant was Edith Stein (1891 – 1942), a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She was born into an observant Jewish family, but had become an atheist by her teenage years. From reading the works of the Marrano of the Carmelite Order, Teresa of Ávila, she was drawn to the Catholic faith. She was baptized on 1 January 1922 into the Catholic Church. She was eventually canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church, and she is one of six co-patron saints of Europe. She met Heidegger in 1929. She tried to bridge Husserl’s phenomenology to Thomism. She was executed at Auschwitz and eventually canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church. She was beatified in 1987 by Pope John Paul II as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
Walther was also associated with Ernst Schulte-Strathaus (1881 – 1968), Rudolf Hess’ leading occult adviser. In 1907, Schulte-Strathaus, together with Karl Wolfskehl, Carl Georg von Maassen (1880 – 1940), Hans von Weber (1872 – 1924), and Franz Blei (1871 – 1942), had founded the Gesellschaft der Münchner Bibliophilen (“Munich Society of Bibliophiles).[2690] Maassen is best known as the editor of the historical-critical edition of the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Weber was a German publisher and art patron, whose grandfather was a cousin of Theodor Körner. Blei was an Austrian writer, among whose translations are Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales and Dangerous Liaisons by Illuminatus Pierre Choderlos De Laclos.
In 1933, Schulte-Strathaus married Heilwig
Seidel, the daughter of the writer Ina Seidel (1885 – 1974), who in 1933, was among
the signers of the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft (“promise of most
loyal obedience”), a declaration by 88 German writers and poets of their
loyalty to Hitler. Ina was personally added by Hitler to the Gottbegnadeten-Liste (“God-Given
List), assembled by Goebbels in 1944, and to which
belonged the composer Richard Strauss. Schulte-Strathaus had met Hess through the
German scholar and library scientist Ilse Pröhl, who had become Hess’ wife in
1927. Schulte-Strathaus also played a role in establishing the Institute
for Research on the Jewish Question, conceived as a branch of a projected elite
university of the party under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg.[2691]
Anthony Masters, author of The Man Who Was M: The Life of Charles Henry Maxwell Knight, which claims that Hess’ trip was part of a scheme devised by British Intelligence officer Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, modelled on sorcerer John Dee, also claims that Hess selected the date of the flight after he was informed by his astrologer, Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, that there was going to be a rare alignment of six planets in the astrological sign of Taurus at the time of the full moon on May 11, 1941, exactly one day after his landing in Scotland. Hitler, who had not authorized the flight, saw it as a betrayal or the act of a mentally ill person. He ordered that all supporters should be arrested. On the morning of May 14, Schulte Strathaus was arrested and taken for questioning by the Gestapo. In the course of the investigation, parapsychologist Gerda Walther, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s assistant, was arrested and interrogated about her correspondence with Schulte Strathaus. During the interrogation, Walther explained that she had seen Schulte Strathaus as an “enthusiastic supporter of Schrenck.”[2692] Schulte Strathaus transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.[2693]
It was at the School of Wisdom that
Carl Jung met Prince Karl Anton Rohan and became active in the Kulturbund.
After his break with Freud, Jung became more active in Germany attending
conferences at the School of Wisdom founded by Count Hermann Keyserling (1880 –
1946), who was married Countess Maria Goedela Bismarck, granddaughter of Otto Bismarck.
In 1920, through a donation from Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse (1868 – 1937),
Keyserling founded his School of Wisdom in Darmstadt, Germany, in order to synthesize
the knowledge of East and West.[2694]
Ernest was the uncle of Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg,
became a student of the works of Keyserling.
Alice became interested in occultism
through her favorite book, Les Grands Initiés (“The Great Initiates”),
by Eduard Schuré, a member of Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement. A friend of Richard
Wagner and Rudolf Steiner, Schuré was listed by Lanz von Liebenfels’ among the “ario-christian”
tradition of mystics that included Éliphas Lévi, Joséphin Péladan, Papus, H.P.
Blavatsky, Franz Hartmann, Annie Besant, Charles Leadbeater. Alice became
deeply religious, converting to the Greek Orthodox Church in 1928. She believed
herself to be married to Christ, with whom she was “physically” involved, and
through whom she met spiritual leaders such as the Buddha. She believed it was
her duty to serve as the link between these various gods and the people of
earth.[2695]
Keyserling invited many of his friends to participate in this new venture, including psychologist, sinologist and translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm, theologian Paul Tillich, German novelist and Noble prize winner, Hermann Hesse and Noble prize-winning Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, who was heavily involved with members of the Theosophical Society in England and India.
At Keyserling’s School of Wisdom, Jung also met Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881 – 1962), a German Indologist and religious studies writer. As Hauer boasted, “By the way, regarding the expression ‘conservative revolutionary’, I can tell you, if that expression is now popular, I am its source.”[2696] In 1932, Hauer founded the German Faith Movement, a religious society aimed at replacing Christianity in German-speaking countries with an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic modern paganism based on German literature and Hindu scripture. Hauer had initially hoped that his cult might be adopted as the state religion of the Third Reich. Jung had met Hauer at Keyserling’s School of Wisdom in the late 1920s, where they discussed their common interest in yoga. Jung attended Hauer’s lecture on yoga at a conference of the International Society in Baden-Baden in 1930. A year later, Jung accepted Hauer’s offer to dedicate to him his book on yoga, Yoga als Heilweg.
Through her association with the School of Wisdom, Keyserling befriended Olga Froebe-Kapteyn, who in 1933 founded the Eranos Conferences, an intellectual discussion group dedicated to the study of psychology, religion, philosophy and spirituality which met annually in Ascona, near the site of Monte Verità.[2697] In the late 1920s, she was introduced to the theosophist Alice Ann Bailey (1880 – 1949). In 1920, a dispute arose over leadership of Annie Besant, whose position as president had been undermined by the fallout over the “World Teacher” Krishnamurti. Following independently channeled messages she became to receive in 1919, Bailey broke with the Theosophical Society. In 1928, following a “vision” she experienced in 1927, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn built a lecture hall near her Casa Gabriella, called, Casa Eranos. When Froebe-Kapteyn met Carl Jung at Keyserling’s School of Wisdom, he suggested the auditorium be used as a “meeting place between East and West.”[2698] It was finally Jung who induced Froebe-Kapteyn to turn away from the group surrounding Bailey. When Jung saw her “Meditation Plates,” he told her that one could see that she “was dealing with the devil.”[2699]
In her private notes on her meditation
images, she speaks of her admiration for Germany. One of these images shows a
swastika and is captioned “The Beginning of Creation.” According to Froebe-Kapteyn:
The Golden Swastika is a Sun symbol = a symbol of sun-energy and power. The black swastika or the lefthand swastika, as it is in Germany = a symbol of dark power = destruction. With both these symbols I was identified!!! Here lies the root, the deepest root of my identification with Germany!!! Both these black symbols of highest but destructive power mean possession by the Devil. Just as Germany is possessed by him, the dark aspect of the Self. Or by Kali the Destroyer.[2700]
When Froebe-Kapteyn met Carl Jung at Keyserling’s School of Wisdom, he suggested her auditorium be used as a “meeting place between East and West.”[2701] Discussions were opened by the first scholar that Froebe-Kapteyn invited, Heinrich Zimmer—brother-in-law of George-Kreis member Hugo von Hofmannsthal—with an address on “The Meaning of Indian Tantric Yoga.” Zimmer befriended Alexander von Bernus, a practicing alchemist, whose two books on the subject are still considered classics by specialists.[2702] Bernus’ entourage included Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and members of the George-Kreis. Bernus was also a close friend of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner also wrote articles for the journal Das Reich, edited by Bernus, which appeared between 1916 and 1920 and to which Emil Preetorius and Max Pulver also contributed, who would both later be speakers at Eranos.[2703] Accommodation for lecturers, was usually in the Hotel Monte Verità, which from 1923 to 1926, was operated as a hotel until it was acquired in 1926 by Zimmer’s friend, Baron Eduard von der Heydt, who showed suspicious sympathies for Nazi Germany.[2704]
By 1930, there had been ten meetings or
seminars. Lecturers included Leo Baeck, Jung, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Erwin
Rousselle who were also to reappear at Eranos. Also included were Gustav
Richard Heyer, Thomas Mann, Alfred Adler, Paul Dahlke, Leo Frobenius, Leopold
Ziegler, Max Scheler, Ernst Troeltsch, Rabindranath Tagore, and, from the
Stefan George circle, Rudolf Kassner and Oskar A.H. Schmitz. Of all her friends
and all the artists and writers with whom she interacted, the one who
influenced her most strongly was Ludwig Derleth, who while living in Munich
became part of the George-Kreis and also the Munich Cosmic Circle.[2705]
Italian professor of German literature, Furio Jesi, has claimed that Derleth
had devised pseudo-magical and anti-Semitic rites. Froebe-Kapteyn herself was
allegedly an “extremely willing disciple” in these “anti-Semitic rituals.”[2706]
Thomas Mann regarded Derleth as a precursor of National Socialism and took him
as the model for two of his fictional characters, first in The Magic
Mountain (1924) and then again as Daniel zur Höhe, both in the short story At
the Prophet’s (1904) and in Doctor Faustus (1947).[2707]
Also participating in the first conference was the theologian and scholar of religion Friedrich Heiler (1892 – 1967), with whom Froebe-Kapteyn was particularly close. Heiler was also in contact with the influential occultist Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, the founder of the Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua, belonged to the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and knew Theodor Reuss as well as Aleister Crowley and others. Heiler was also patriarch of the Gnostic Catholic Church, the ecclesiastical arm of the OTO.[2708]
Invited to speak in at the 1934 conference was Rudolf Bernoulli (1880 – 1948), who lectured on the symbolism of the Tarot. Bernoulli was well acquainted with Schrenck-Notzing. Bernoulli co-founded the Hermetische Gesellschaft (“Hermetic society”), with Fritz Allemann, who for many years was vice-president of the Swiss Banking Corporation (today UBS). It was apparently through Allemann that Jung made the acquaintance of Oskar Rudolf Schlag (1907 – 1990), who is considered and one of the most gifted mediums of the twentieth century.[2709] According to Schlag, Jung was well had been a member of the Hermetic Society, until—his expulsion was made necessary due to the rivalry between “Atma,” the guiding spirit of the Society, and “Philemon,” Jung’s spirit guide.[2710]
Allemann was also in friendly contact with the Jewish Gestapo officer and Zen master Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim (1896 – 1988), and had several meetings with the Dalai Lama.[2711] Among Dürckheim’s friends were Rainer Maria Rilke, Lasker-Schüler and Paul Klee, and Hanfstaengl’s protégé, Joachim von Ribbentrop von Ribbentrop. During the 1930s, Dürckheim had become chief assistant to Ribbentrop, Germany’s Foreign Minister. Then it was discovered that Dürckheim was of Jewish descent: his maternal great-grandmother was the daughter of the Jewish banker Salomon Oppenheim, and he was also related to Mayer Amschel Rothschild.[2712] He was therefore considered a Mischling, and had become “politically embarrassing.” Ribbentrop decided to send him to Japan, where he coordinated the dissemination of Nazi propaganda in Japan, likening German military ideals to Japanese bushido and encouraging the idea that Japan and Germany would share the world.[2713] Dürckheim was arrested by the Allies during their occupation of Japan and served more than a year in prison as a member of the Gestapo.[2714]
Also speaking at the conference in 1934 was Jung’s friend Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who a year earlier had joined both the Hitler Youth and Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (“Militant alliance for German culture,” and was subsequently inducted by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich personally into the SS and the SD.[2715] After Hauer gave a number of lectures, including one on yoga, at Jung’s Psychology Club in Zurich, Jung was so inspired that in 1932 he broke off his own seminars on the active imagination visions of Christiana Morgan—mistress to both Henry A. Murray and Chaim Weizmann—in for order Heinrich Zimmer to lecture.[2716] Jung invited Hauer and Zimmer to collaborate with him on an international journal with the publisher Daniel Brody, who later published the Eranos volumes. Keyserling also took part. Hauer also became close to Jung’s “muse” and mistress, Toni Wolff.[2717]
As noted by Justin Cartwright, “By the mid-1920s George was considered one of the most influential people in the world, cited in one international newspaper as the equal of Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson.”[2718] In his critique of George-Kreis member Gundolf’s Caesar, German historian Eckhart Kehr had noted at the time that the biography, extolling a “Great Man,” appeared in 1924, and may therefore be explained as a response to the collapse of Germany the previous year.[2719] Fellow George-Kreis member Ernst Kantorowicz, who was ousted from his professorship in 1933 by the Nazi race laws) used the swastika in 1927 on his important scholarly book about the First Reich, his biography of Frederick II. During World War II, Ludwig Klages—fellow-founder of the Cosmic Circle with Alfred Schuler and Karl Wolfskehl—repeated the slogan put forward by Schuler around 1900, that the world must “choose” between the “Aryan swastika” and that “castration symbol,” the “Jewish-Christian cross.”[2720] Despite a few scattered critical remarks, Stefan George was pleased enough with the new “national movement” to state, in March 1933, that now for the first time he was hearing his views being disseminated outside his own circle.[2721]
In February 1933, the Nazis had begun dismissing all of their political opponents as well as Jews from the Prussian Academy of the Arts, including Thomas Mann. In May, the Prussian Minister for Sciences, Arts, and Public Education, Bernhard Rust, informed George that the new government wished to appoint him to an honorary position within the Academy and to publicly describe him as the forefather of the Nazi Party’s “national revolution.” George declined both the offer, but said that he approved of its “national” orientation and did not deny his “ancestorship of the new national movement and did not preclude his intellectual cooperation.”[2722] Some within the Nazi Party, however, were enraged by George’s refusal, and suspected his sincerity and even denounced him as a Jew.[2723] It was intentional that George deliberately had his refusal delivered to Goebbels by Morwitz. Hearing that Goebbels planned a national celebration of his birthday, George left his home before then, briefly visited Berlin, where he said goodbye to his Jewish friends Ernst Morwitz and Georg Bondi, and in August left Germany for Switzerland, where he died the same year.[2724]
Nevertheless, George and his entourage’s use of the swastika in some of his publications, such as the Blätter für die Kunst (“Journal for the Arts”), was derived from the influence of the Cosmic Circle. According to Michael and Erika Metzger, “When Stefan George died in 1933, there was a grim dissonance between the eulogies from inside and outside Germany, the former claiming George as the prophet of the Third Reich, which had taken power that year, the latter often interpreting his silence as expressing his utter contempt for the new regime.”[2725] Twenty-five members of the George-Kreis, including Jewish members like Wolfskehl, attended the funeral. The laurel wreath later delivered by the German Foreign Office bore a swastika printed on a white ribbon. Some of the younger members of the George-Kreis were seen given the Nazi salute.[2726]
As a number of George-Kreis followers had initially welcomed and supported the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Among those of George’s friends who joined the Nazi Party were Ernst Bertram, Walter Elze, Kurt Hildebrandt, Ludwig Thormaehlen, Woldemar, Count Uxkiill and Albrecht von Blumenthal. Rudolf Fahrner joined the SA. Ernst Bertram (1884 – 1957), a literary historian, who was in a love triangle with his lover Ernst Glöckner and George, was a close friend of Thomas Mann.[2727] Bertram declared that the New Germany of George’s vision had been realized in 1933.[2728] Sculptor and art historian Ludwig Thormaehlen (1889 – 1956) encouraged his friends to join the Nazi Party. With the George’s permission, Thormaehlen’s protege Frank Mehnert (1909 – 1943) sculpted a bust of Hitler which was successfully marketed by the Munich art dealer Eberhard Hanfstaengl (1886 – 1973), a cousin of Ernst Hanfstaengl.[2729] Hanfstaengl became a “supporting member” of the SS as of February 1934.[2730]
But other, predominantly Jewish member of the George-Kreis, such as Wolfskehl, Edgar Salin, Kantorowicz and Ernst Morwitz were expelled from Germany, without those who had remained behind protesting publicly. Before the mid-1920, George had regarded Morwitz as his sole heir and literary executor.[2731] Wolfskehl, old, almost completely blind and impoverished, wrote some moving poems in exile in New Zealand, in which he professed to be the guardian of Secret Germany in exile. These poems include Zu Schand und Her (“To Shame and Honor”), which pays tribute to the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 as an act of liberation in the spirit of Secret Germany.[2732]
Hitler assassin and George-Kreis member Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1907 – 1944), a friend of Ernst Jünger, began to have doubts about Hitler because his belief in the ideas of his mentor Stefan George. Stauffenberg was one of the leading members of the failed plot of July 20, 1944, to assassinate Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power. Those closest to the “Master,” as Stefan George had his disciples called him, included several members of the assassination plot. George dedicated Das neue Reich (“the new Empire”) in 1928, including the Geheimes Deutschland (“secret Germany”) written in 1922, to Stauffenberg’s eldest brother, Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg planned to kill Hitler by detonating an explosive hidden in a briefcase. However, the blast only dealt Hitler minor injuries. The plotters, unaware of their failure, then attempted a coup d'état. A few hours after the blast, the conspiracy used Wehrmacht units to take control of several cities, including Berlin. This part of the coup d’état attempt is referred to by the name Operation Valkyrie, which also has become associated with the entire event. When Stauffenberg was executed, his last words were, Es lebe das heilige Deutschland! (“Long live our sacred Germany!”), or, possibly, Es lebe das geheime Deutschland! (“Long live Secret Germany!”).[2733]
Invited to speak in at the 1934 conference was Martin Buber (1878 – 1965), Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher, who despite his dedication to Zionism, was heavily influenced by the völkisch ideology. Buber was a direct descendant of the sixteenth-century rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, known as the Maharam of Padua. Karl Marx is another notable relative. In 1898, he joined the Zionist movement, and in 1902 became the editor of its central organ, the weekly Die Welt. In that year, he published his thesis, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Individuationsproblems, on Jakob Boehme and Nicholas of Cusa. Buber also wrote Tales of the Hasidim, based on the written and oral lore of the founder of Hasidism, Baal Shem Tov. Buber also wrote The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, contrasting Hasidism with biblical prophecy, Spinoza, Freud, Sankara, Meister Eckhart, Gnosticism, Christianity, Zionism, and Zen Buddhism. However, Buber broke with Judaism. He maintained close friendships to Zionists and philosophers such as Chaim Weizmann, Max Brod, Hugo Bergman, and Felix Weltsch.
As George Mosse and Paul Mendes-Flohr have argued, völkisch themes can easily be traced in Buber’s creed.[2734] Buber’s Zionism breaks with a century of Jewish-bourgeois symbiosis, “that ‘purified,’ that is, soulless, ‘Judaism’ of a ‘humanitarianism’ embellished with ‘monotheism,’” as he stated.[2735] Buber, explains Maor, “advocated a new Jewish religiosity, based on his version of Hasidism, centered around the sanctification of the worldly aspects of life.”[2736] As Zionists tended to regard increased Jewish spirituality with the degeneration resulting from exile, they aspired to revive “authentic” ancient Judaism, which was rooted in the soil and corporeality. Thus, Buber advocated that only a return to the material aspects of life could foster the “organic unity” of the people.[2737] Buber wrote, “There is nothing that is evil in itself; every passion can become a virtue… Every act is hallowed, if it is directed toward salvation.”[2738] Zionist sentiment, according to Buber, is aroused when the individual becomes conscious of “what confluence of blood has produced him, what rounds of begettings and births has called him forth.” The individual should then arrive at the conclusion that, “blood is a deep-rooted nurturing force,… that the deepest layers of our being are determined by blood,” which in turn allows him to leave his inauthentic society and look for “the deeper-reaching community of those whose substance he shares.”[2739]
Along with Frieda and D.H. Lawrence, Franz
Kafka, Alma Mahler, the wife of Gustav Mahler, Buber was a member of the sexual
cult of Dr. Otto Gross [2740]
Buber was also a friend of Karl Wolfskehl of the George-Kreis and
the Cosmic Circle.[2741]
Through Wolfskehl, Buber was introduced to Rainer Maria Rilke, who read most of
his books, beginning in 1908 with Legende des Baalshem (“Legend of the
Baal Shem”).[2742]
Along with Margarete Sussman, the Frankist Fritz Mauthner and Auguste Hauschner, Buber was closest friends
of Hedwig Lachmann’s husband, Gustav Landauer. George-Kreis member
Richard Dehmel was the first love of Lachmann, whose libretto, a German
translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde, was used Salome
by Richard Strauss, who collaborated with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a member Young
Vienna and the George-Kreis.
Buber was a friend of Eugen Diederichs (1867–1930), who was connected to Eranos, and whose publishing house, the Eugen Diederichs Verlag, was the one of the most important organs of völkisch romanticism.[2743] Diederichs founded his publishing house with the intention of dedicating himself to “modern endeavors in the field […] of Theosophy.”[2744] Diederichs was a crucial factor in the spread of theosophical and völkisch ideas, publishing the works of Paul de Lagarde, Guido von List, Julius Langbehn and Alfred Schuler of the Cosmic Circle.[2745] Diederichs, who was described as an “energetic in championing anthroposophy,” cooperated with Rudolf Steiner.[2746] Diederichs published The Thule Collection, a German translation of the Icelandic Edda and poetic writings of the Skaldik in German. At Monte Verità in Ascona, Diederichs became a close contact of OTO member Rudolf von Laban, whose works he published.[2747] Diederichs also published the leading feminists of the time, including Rosa Mayreder and Lou Andreas-Salomé. According to Marino Pullio, “Diederichs was the patron saint of those who embraced the counter-culture, the Lebensreform movement, the avant-garde and all forms of alternative ferment, ranging from the nationalist right to the non- Marxist left—all of them sharing the common denominator of a radical criticism of modernity.”[2748] From 1913 onward, Diederichs edited and published the journal Die Tat, which became an important platform for thinkers associated with the German Conservative Revolution.[2749]
In 1900, just a few months prior to Buber’s call for a “Jewish Renaissance,” Diederichs had issued a circular under the title Zu neuer Renaissance! (“ Towards a new renaissance!”), calling for a new cultural awakening. Diederichs coined the term Neuromantik (“New Romanticism) in 1905 to characterize the new German Renaissance, a reality that is best realized through mysticism and myth. He declared that “the Germans must now pass into mysticism in order again sense the world as a whole.” Similarly, Buber felt challenged by Diederichs to demonstrate the “existence of a Jewish mysticism.” As early as 1903, Buber discussed with Diederichs his plans for an anthology of mystical testimonies. Due to Diederichs initial reservations, the work was postponed until 1909, when it was published under the title Ekstatische Konfessionen (“Ecstatic Confessions”), Buber's seminal essay on mysticism, reproducing texts through the centuries from oriental, pagan, Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim sources.[2750]
Buber worked closely with Bosnian-Serb mystic Dimitrije Mitrinovic (1887 – 1953), who while at Munich University, was linked with Wassily Kandinsky. Along with Franz Marc (1880 – 1916)—a friend of Karl Wolfskehl of the Cosmic Circle and the George-Kreis—Kandinsky was a co-founder of the editorial group Der Blaue Reiter, which opened its first exhibition in Munich in 1911. As a young man Mitrinovic was active in the Young Bosnia movement, inspired by the various Young movements founded by Mazzini. The group, which opposed the Austro-Hungarian empire, sought the assistance of the Serbian government and received assistance by the Black Hand, a covert organization founded by the Serbian Army, and which had ties to Freemasonry. Ostensibly in retaliation against Austria’s 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Serbs had claimed for themselves, the Black Hand was responsible for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 which precipitated World War I.
Along with a number of prominent Fabians, Mitrinovic was a contributor to the magazine The New Age, which became one of the first places in England in which Freud’s ideas were discussed before World War I. The magazine’s editor, Alfred Richard Orage (1873 –1934), was a friend of Aleister Crowley, and also personally knew George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. In 1896, Orage married Jean Walker who was a passionate member of the Theosophical Society, and together they met Annie Besant.[2751] Orage also worked with George Gurdjieff after he had been recommended to him by Gurdjieff’s leading student, P.D. Ouspensky.[2752] Under the editorship of Orage, The New Age according to a Brown University press release, “helped to shape modernism in literature and the arts from 1907 to 1922.”[2753] The circle of The New Age contributors widely influential, and included Aleister Crowley, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Havelock Ellis, Filippo Marinetti, H.G. Wells, Florence Farr, George Bernard Shaw, Marmaduke Pikthall, C.H. Douglas, Hilaire Belloc and Ezra Pound.
Along with the German Jewish mystical thinker Erich Gutkind (1877 – 1965), the Dutch writer and psychologist Frederik van Eeden (1860 – 1932), Walter Rathenau and Gustav Landauer, Buber was a member of the Forte Kreis (“Forte Circle), whose ultimate aim, explained Marcel Poorthuis, “was to establish a new mankind, was a tributary to Nietzsche as well as to theosophy and the esoteric.”[2754] A well-known intellectual, Eeden maintained friendships with Freud and Peter Kropotkin, and corresponded with Hermann Hesse. Eeden, together with Gutkind, had written Welt-Eroberung durch Helden-Liebe (“World Conquest Through Heroic Love”), to serve as the blueprint of the commune to be founded for the “Kingly of Spirit.” The group first met in Potsdam, outside of Berlin, and came to be known as the Forte Kreis, because of a planned follow-up meeting in Capri, at the Forte dei Marmi. This Blut-Bund (“Blood Brotherhood”) included Franz Oppenheimer, Wassily Kandinsky, Upton Sinclair, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rabindranath Tagore and Poul Bjerre, who fell in love with Lou Andreas-Salomé.[2755] The program of their first meeting included discussions about the future of Europe, the role of women or the metaphysical encounter between the Germanic and Jewish races.[2756]
The group influenced Mitrinovic, who identified Gutkind among the bearers of revelations, along with Rudolf Steiner, Helena Blavatsky and Vladimir Solovyov, and promoted his work in Orage’s The New Age.[2757] Mitrinovic interpreted the concept of the Blut-Bund as an “organization for a pan-human little brotherhood of the most world-worthy bearers of present day culture,” to comprise the leadership of the future.[2758] Mitrinovic believed that only Europe and the Aryan race could “establish a functional world system in which each of the races and nations is called upon to play its natural and organic part.”[2759] Despite the anti-Semitic overtones of his theories, Mitrinovic placed particular attention on the role played by the nation of the Jews, which “was ‘chosen’ for the ‘mission’ of becoming White… in preparation for their role as the inheritors or ruling race of the kingdom of the world.”[2760] To contribute the Forte Circle, Mitrinovic maintained correspondence with Henri Bergson, H.G. Wells, Maxim Gorky, Maurice Maeterlinck, Pablo Picasso, Filippo Marinetti, Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, Knut Hamsun, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.[2761]
Mitrinovic founded the Adler’s Society (the English Branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology), with Hungarian-born Jew, Alfred Adler, who was a first cousin of Victor Adler of the Pernerstorfer Circle and who apparently worked with Aleister Crowley. Adler was also well-acquainted with Dr. Leopold Thoma, one of the closest collaborators of Erik Jan Hanussen, Hitler’s Jewish clairvoyant.[2762] Adler had also been assisted in his work with his patients by Aleister Crowley.[2763] In collaboration with Freud and a small group of Freud’s colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. To Freud, Adler was “the only personality there.”[2764] Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics, and thus to be one of the three great psychologist/philosophers of the twentieth century.
Walter Rathenau, a member of the Kulturbund, was an early proponent of the concept of the “United States of Europe.” Rathenau had become close friends with the businessman Bernhard Dernburg, who was appointed Germany’s first colonial secretary in May 1907. Dernburg, in close cooperation with Berlin’s Ambassador Count Johann, would later assume control of the German Information Bureau on Broadway, which fronted for a secretive Propaganda Kabinett that counted George Sylverster Viereck, Hugo Münsterberg, Hanns Heinz Ewers, who were all intimately acquainted with Aleister Crowley.[2765] Already before the war, Rathenau made the case for the establishment of a Central European customs union, which became a reality in 1957 as the European Economic Community. After the war, Rathenau pursued the normalization of the relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union and the allied victorious powers as well as a settlement with Soviet Russia, and insisted that Germany fulfil its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles. Perceiving his actions to be evidence of the “power of international Jewry,” Rathenau was assassinated by members of the Organisation Consul (OC), composed of former participants in the Kapp Putsch.”[2766]
Forte Kreis member Franz Oppenheimer (1864 – 1943) collaborated with Friedrich Naumann, a friend of Max Weber, and a supporter of the Anti-Bolshevik League of Eduard Stadtler.[2767] The Anti-Bolshevik League was funded by the Anti-Bolshevik Fund, composed of Jewish financiers like Arthur Salomonsohn and Felix Deutsch, both members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, originally founded by leaders of the Haskalah around Moses Mendelssohn.[2768] According to Etan Bloom, among the important non-Jewish figures in German culture who were attracted to Zionism in the first decade of the twentieth century was Naumann, whose writings appeared in Die Welt, the main publication of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (“German Zionist Organization,” ZVfD), by far the largest Zionist organization in Germany, having attracted 10,000 members by 1914.[2769] Naumann believed that the Zionists would be helpful to German colonial interests, and that decreasing Europe’s Jewish population would help resolved the Jewish Question.[2770]
Oppenheimer, the editor-in-chief of the magazine Welt am Morgen, was the brother of Paula Oppenheimer, the wife of Richard Dehmel, who had a love affair with Gustav Landauer’s wife Hedwig Lachmann. Franz and Paula’s father, Dr. Julius Oppenheimer (1827 – 1909), served for many years as a preacher and teacher at the Jewish Reform temple of the Berlin.[2771] Like many assimilated Zionists, Oppenheimer excused his German nationalism as a virtue that would serve for the elevation of the Ostjuden. In 1910, in his article Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein (“ethnic consciousness and national consciousness”), for the Oestereichische Rundschau, he wrote:
We are, collectively, [either] Germans by culture or French by culture and so on...because we have the fortune to belong to cultured communities that stand in the forefront of nations… We cannot be Jewish by culture because Jewish culture, as it has been preserved from the Middle Ages in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, stands infinitely lower than the modern culture which our [Western] nations bear. We cannot regress nor do we want to.[2772]
Max Bodenheimer, who formed the original leadership of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD) with Franz Oppenheimer, explains Jay Ticker, “was the chief advocate of the pro-German policy for the Zionist movement.”[2773] Bodenheimer had been president from its foundation in 1897 until 1910, and when the war began, he served as head of the Jewish National Fund. Bodenheimer and Oppenheimer, along with several other Zionists, travelled to the Eastern Front, where they were received by Aufbau member General Ludendorff and later also by Field-Marshal von Hindenburg. Already in the late autumn of 1914, Ludendorff, in his capacity as general Chief of Staff of the Eastern Command of the Imperial Armies, issued an appeal in the Yiddish language “to my dear Jews in Poland.”[2774] Bodenheimer wrote about the meeting that Ludendorff:
…showed lively interest in our endeavors. He welcomed our intention to inform the Jewish population of the political situation and of the prospect of an improvement in their position in the case of the axis powers achieving victory. To him we proposed sending our trustworthy men into the occupied territory so that understanding between the military and the Jews would be facilitated.[2775]
When Herzl asked him to help work on the Jewish colonization of Palestine, Oppenheimer submitted a plan to the Zionist Congress of 1903. Oppenheimer, Zelig Soskin (1872–1959) and Otto Warburg (1859 – 1938), a cousin of the German-based Warburgs, received formal permission and funding from the World Zionist Organization (WZO) to begin planning the colonization of Palestine. Soskin wrote in the proposal: “We need only refer to how the Aryan people colonize. I refer to the Germans in the African colonies, etc.”[2776] Based on that plan, Oppenheimer founded the agricultural cooperative Merhavia in 1911, south of Nazareth.[2777] In 1914, Oppenheimer was joined by Loe Motzkin (1867 – 1933) and Theodor Herzl’s associate Max Bodenheimer, to create a German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, which was supported by the German Empire.[2778] Motzkin participated in the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and became close to Herzl, who sent him on a mission to Palestine to investigate the problems of the Jewish community. Motzkin proceeded to establish a Jewish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to represent the interests of Jews across Europe. This committee became a permanent institution under the League of Nations.[2779]
In 1919, Landauer briefly served as Commissioner of Enlightenment and Public Instruction in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic during the German Revolution of 1918–1919. He was murdered by Freikorps soldiers when the republic was overthrown. Soon after his death, Landauer was almost completely forgotten by European socialists and anarchists, though his memory and heroic example enjoyed a revival in Zionist and kibbutznik circles thanks to his friend of Martin Buber.[2780] Landauer and his disciple Martin Buber, explains Nordheimer Nur, in Eros and Tragedy, influenced the leaders of Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, which laid the foundation for Israel’s kibbutz movement, and their adoption of the notions of Gemeinschaft and Bund, which they renamed in Hebrew as eda. Over the course of his intellectual development, Landauer refined his socialist thinking, moving from a focus on improving the plight of the urban proletariat to aspirations of communal agrarian communities, described in 1900 as a way for the German volk to reinvigorate itself as a nation of peasants and craftsmen. Landauer believed that each nation contributes equally to a common humanity, and that an individual who wishes to lead an authentic life must live with his own volk.[2781]
The ideas of Gustav Wyneken (1875 – 1964), one of leaders of the German youth movement, also influenced Hashomer Hatzair. The Wandervogel, with its precursor the Bündische Jugend, together are referred to as the German Youth Movement, is often regarded as a part of the Germany Conservative Revolution.[2782] Wyneken’s books were published by Eugen Diederichs, who was an avid devotee of Nietzsche, and saw the Youth Movement as producing a new culture for the Nietzschean Übermensch.[2783] In 1920, Wyneken was ousted from the Wickersdorf Free School Community which he had founded in Thuringia, after being convicted of homosexual contact with students.[2784]
Wyneken was defended by his friend Hans Blüher (1888 – 1955), listed by Armin Mohler as an early exponent of the German Conservative Revolution.[2785] As revealed by Nordheimer Nur, Hashomer Hatzair was inspired by the theories of Freud and Nietzsche, and was modeled on the concept of the Männerbund, the all-male “warrior-society” of pre-modern cultures, as defined by Blüher. Strongly influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis, Blüher wrote a highly controversial history of the German Wandervogel youth movement, Die Rolle Der Erotik in Der männlichen Gesellschaft (The Role of the Erotic in Male Society), published by Eugen Diederichs, in which he elaborated on the role of homoeroticism and the foundation of human civilization. Blüher earned fame with the publication in 1912 of a trilogy, whose third volume, titled “The Wandervogel Youth Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon,” outraged the movement leaders. In order to facilitate the acceptance of his interpretations, Blüher sought professional support: “For this purpose, I appropriately approached two particularly distinguished authorities in the field of sexual science: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the foremost expert on the subject matter, in Berlin, and Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud, the greatest sexual theorist, in Vienna.” His interpretation was “recognized and deemed good” by both of them, which Hirschfeld even agreeing to provide a foreword to third volume.[2786]
Hashomer Hatzair’s encounter with Eros, the Greek god of love and sex, began through the influence of Siegfried Bernfeld (1892 – 1953), who had studied psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna. While still a student, Bernfeld was involved in the psychoanalytical movement, and later became an important member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. During the war years and the 1920s, he had access to the most prestigious intellectual circles in Vienna, frequently visiting Freud’s home, where he participated in a study group with Anna Freud, who was reportedly in love with him.[2787] Bernfeld was active in the Psychoanalytic Society and, in the early 1920s, was Buber's secretary and assistant. Bernfeld was also active in the German movement for educational reform inspired by Wyneken, and edited and published Der Anfang. In reaction to the rise völkisch ideology emergent in some aspects of the German Youth Movement during the war, Bernfeld decided to focus his efforts on Jewish youth. Becoming a Zionist, he became involved in Jerubbaal, a journal was associated with a secret order, the Kreis Jerubbaal (“Jerubbaal Circle”) which functioned as an Order of Jewish Youth. This order, of which very little is known, included degrees, oaths, and secret signs much like the Freemasons.[2788] Several leaders of Hashomer Hatzair became contributors to the journal, which appeared only in 1918–1919. From 1922 until 1925, he practiced psychoanalysis in Vienna, and from 1925 to 1932 he worked at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.
The members of Bitania Ilit, the community founded by Hashomer Hatzair in Palestine, hung on the wall of their dining hall a reproduction of Plato’s Symposium—which featured panegyrics on Eros and the virtues of pederasty—painted by Anselm Feuerbach, the nephew of Ludwig Feuerbach.[2789] Meir Yaari (1897 – 1987), one of the early leaders of Hashomer Hatzair—who would eventually become a member of the Knesset as the founder of the Mapam political party—later recalled how he first became acquainted with Freud in one of the groups of the Jugendkulturbewegung, aussi connu sous le nom de cercle de l’Anfang autour de Bernfeld. Yaari, who was and the most influential theoreticians of the movement, envisioned the eda as a Männerbund. As Yaari described:
Our erotic attachment bursts out of our unified soul, spreading everywhere and covering all—the land, work, the landscape from which come color, symbol, and piety. It tears our souls open and fuses us with the entire cosmos.[2790]
As a result of the unconventional relations between the sexes developed in the movement, not unlike those of the Jugendkultur movement in Vienna, Hashomer Hatzair were accused by outsiders of being promiscuous societies of “free love.”[2791] Eros had not only a positive aesthetic role but a subversive one as well, understood as a means to undermine the bourgeois family by building an alternative, erotic community. When he published “The Youth Movement” in July 1922, in Hapoel Hatzair, the most popular weekly among Palestine’s workers, Hashomer Hatzair member and another Der Anfang editor, David Horowitz, presented Eros as one of the most fundamental elements in the ideal community. The essay, written as a socialist manifesto for all workers in Palestine, represented one of the first attempts ever to bring together the ideas of Marx and Freud. “Erotic life,” Horowitz explained, “created major social communities which found expression in spiritual life and in the eternal values of humanity.” As examples of these social communities Horowitz listed the Essenes, the biblical prophets, and the early Christians.[2792]
Otto Fenichel (1897 – 1946), one of
the most influential psychoanalysts in Europe in the 1920s, also supported
Hashomer Hatzair’s efforts to integrate Marxism with psychoanalysis.[2793]
Fenichel was among the
many psychoanalysts who worked at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute founded
in 1920, before later becoming the Göring Institute, who developed a
philosophical combination of Marxist dialectical materialism and Freudian
psychoanalysis. These included Wilhelm Reich (1897 –
1957), Ernst Simmel
(1882 – 1947), Franz Alexander (1891 – 1964), and Otto Fenichel (1897 – 1946),
as well as Erich Fromm (1900 –
1980), who would go on to become one of the founders of
the Frankfurt School. Simmel
diagnosed Princess Alice of Battenberg—the mother Elizabeth II’s husband Prince
Philip, and a student of Keyserling’s School of Wisdom—with schizophrenia in
1930, after she had reported communicating with Christ and Buddha.[2794]
Shmuel Golan reported to Max Eitingon (1881 – 1943) that eighty Hashomer Hatzair teachers were in the psychoanalytic training programme that he and Moshe Wulff had started.[2795] During the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, the Nazi rise to power in Germany, and the Anschluss of Austria, disciples of Freud began arriving in Palestine and laying a foundation for the psychoanalytic movement in the country. They included Dorian Feigenbaum, Montague David Eder, Max Eitingon, Moshe Wulff, Josef Friedjung, and Grete Obernik-Reiner. Eitingon, Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel ran the secret Psychoanalytic Committee until the rise of Nazism in 1933.[2796] Eitingon was invited by Freud to join the committee after he settled in Berlin after the war.[2797] Eitingon was cofounder and president from 1920 to 1933 of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. Ernst Simmel, Hanns Sachs, Franz Alexander, Sándor Radó, Karen Horney, Siegfried Bernfeld, Otto Fenichel, Theodor Reik, Wilhelm Reich and Melanie Klein were among the many psychoanalysts who worked at the institute.
Eitingon established and underwrote the first psychoanalytic outpatient clinic in Berlin, which attracted young students sponsored by Hashomer Hatzair. On Freud’s advice, compelled by the Nazi threat, Eitingon left Germany in September 1933 and emigrated to Palestine. In 1934 he founded the Palestine Psychoanalytic Association in Jerusalem. Anna Freud was extremely interested in the fate of the psychoanalytic group established by Max Eitingon in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Anna made several trips to Israel, including a trip accompanying her father in 1934, where they met with Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion.[2798]
Arnold Zweig (1887 – 1968), a friend of Freud and Martin Buber, and who lived in Haifa, met with Max Eitingon regularly.[2799] In 1933, after spending some time with Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers and Bertolt Brecht in France, he set out for Mandatory Palestine, then under British rule. In Palestine, Zweig became close to a group of German-speaking immigrants who felt distant from Zionism and viewed themselves as refugees or exiles from Europe, where they planned to return. This group included Max Brod, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and Else Lasker-Schüler, a friend of Karl Wolfskehl.[2800]
“In the latter half of the 1930’s,” wrote Stephen Schwartz, “a gang of killers appeared in Western Europe whose accumulated crimes—considering their impact on history—are probably unequaled in the annals of murder.”[2801] Schwartz was referring to a special unit that included Eitingon, who has been described by several researchers as a member of a group of Soviet agents who conducted high profile assassinations in Europe and Mexico. Although there is no direct proof of his involvement in the murders, grounds for suspicion included his financial interests in the Soviet Union and connections with all key members of team, including his brother Leonid Eitingon, who acted as an intermediary between NKVD and Gestapo in Tukhachevsky Case, a 1937 secret trial of the high command of the Red Army, a part of the Great Purge.[2802] As Robert Conquest established, to contrive evidence against the highest leaders of the Soviet Army, including the chief army commissar and eight generals, this special unit connived with Reinhard Heydrich.[2803] Max’s brother, Leonid Eitingon (1899 – 1981), was a Soviet intelligence officer, who gained prominence through his involvement in several NKVD operations, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Max Eitingon is said to have been pulled into the work of a “special unit [which] connived with Reinhard Heydrich of Hitler’s intelligence service.”[2804]
After settling in Los Angeles in 1938, Fenichel helped found the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. His training analysands included Ralph R. Greenson (1911 – 1979), Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist at the time of her death. Before Greenson, Monroe would undergo psychoanalysis regularly from 1955 until her death, with psychiatrists Margaret Hohenberg (1955–57), Anna Freud (1957), her friend Marianne Kris (1957–61), the daughter of a friend of Freud, Oscar Rie. Marilyn left her belongings to Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio, whose actress daughter, Susan, was her friend and confidante. Strasberg’s third wife, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, hosted elegant soirées in the Central Park West apartment and in the Brentwood house, joined Hedwig Lachmann and Gustav Landauer’s grandson, famous Broadway and Hollywood director Mike Nichols, as well as Carly Simon and Al Pacino.[2805]
Marcel Poorthuis, in “The Forte Kreis: an Attempt to Spiritual Leadership over Europe,” noted: “It is striking how especially the Jews in Germany were eager to demonstrate their loyalty to Germany.”[2806] Buber, initially, celebrated the advent of World War I as a “world historical mission” for Germany along with Jewish intellectuals to civilize the Near East. He now felt that the concept of volk had become a reality. “Millions have applied for voluntary service, among them Wolfskehl and Gundolph,” Buber wrote. Buber was disappointed to have failed the medical exam, but tried to contribute in other ways: “If not at the front, that still in the neighbourhood,” he wrote to his Hans Kohn (1891 – 1971).[2807] Buber’s friend, the Jewish writer Hugo Bergmann (1883 – 1975), avowed in the midst of the war, that he feels “how deep we Jews are entrenched in German culture, now that we fight for it. Our generation has only an artificial relationship towards the Bible and Hassidic Judaism, whereas our attitude to Fichte or any other European thinker who shows us the way is far more natural.”[2808]
Buber was a member of Brit Shalom (“covenant of peace”), a group of Jewish Zionist intellectuals in Mandatory Palestine, founded in 1925, and whose supporters and founders included economist and sociologist Arthur Ruppin, Hugo Bergmann, Gershom Scholem, historian Hans Kohn, Henrietta Szold, Israel Jacob Kligler. Albert Einstein also voiced support. Judah Leon Magnes, one of the authors of the program, never joined the organization. Brit Shalom sought peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews, to be achieved by renunciation of the Zionist aim of creating a Jewish state. The alternative vision of Zionism was to create a center for Jewish cultural life in Palestine, echoing the earlier ideas of Ahad Ha’am, a purported member of the Alliance Israëlite Universelle and proposed author of the Protocols of Zion.[2809] At the time, Brit Shalom supported the establishment of a bi-national state, also known as the one-state solution, as a homeland for both Jews and Palestinians.
The Merhavia co-operative was founded with the assistance of Arthur Ruppin (1876 – 1943), a friend of Chaim Weizmann, who joined the Zionist Organization (ZO, the future World Zionist Organization, WZO) in 1905. At the Zionist Congress of 1907 in Hague, Otto Warburg recommended nominating Ruppin to make a pilot study of the possibilities for colonization in Palestine. He was sent by David Wolffsohn, the President of the ZO, to study the condition of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, then under Ottoman control. After eleven weeks, Ruppin presented a concrete plan to the Restricted Executive Committee (REC), who decided to establish a Palestine Office (PO), that would function as the official representation of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Ruppin was appointed its director. Following Ruppin’s ideas, Warburg suggested the establishment of the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC), which the board of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) approved.[2810] The PLDC worked to purchasing land, to train Jews in agricultural pursuits, and to establish Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. Ruppin’s work made Practical Zionism possible and shaped the direction of the Second Aliya, the last wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine before World War I.
Ruppin’s main intellectual influences included Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Nietzsche and Gustav Wyneken.[2811] Inspired by works of anti-Semitic thinkers, including some Nazis, Ruppin believed that the realization of Zionism depended on the “racial purity” of Jews.[2812] For Ruppin, what Zionism required was to weed out inferior, “semitic” racial elements among Ostjuden, to select only those biologically adapted to life in Palestine. To that end, he drew up a hierarchy of Jewish racial types which distinguished Ashkenazi—allegedly not Semitic but Aryans descended from Hittites and Amorites—from the inferior Bedouin-related Sephardim.[2813] Ruppin drew such ideas from Heinrich Himmler’s mentor, Hans F.K. Günther (1891 – 1968), also known as Rassenpapst (“Race Pope”), who greatly influenced Nazism.[2814] Ruppin met with Günther in Jena in 1933, and recalled:
Günther was very kind, rejected the authorship for the concept of Aryans, he agreed with me that the Jews are not inferior [minderwertig], but just different [anderswertig] and that the Jewish question had to be settled in a decent fashion.[2815]
In his
autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem, Scholem, a regular participant in the Eranos conferences, reports about his involvement in
the Forte Kreis as a group he terms “anarchistic aristocrats of the spirit.”[2816] In his
youth, Scholem carried out practical exercises based on Abraham Abulafia’s
mystical techniques. In 1928, he published an essay entitled “Alchemie und
Kabbala” in the journal Alchemistische Blätter, published by Otto
Wilhelm Barth, probably the most important occult publisher and bookseller in
Germany at the time, along with the Pansophist Heinrich Tränker, with whom
Barth collaborated. As discovered by Konstantin Burmistrov, not only did
Scholem possess many classics of occultism, including the works of Éliphas
Lévi, Papus, Francis Barrett, McGregor Mathers, A.E. Waite, Israel Regardie, and
so on, but his handwritten marginal notes show that he studied these works
intensively. According to Burmistrov, the essay on “Alchemie und Kabbala”
reveals the strong influence of A.E. Waite.[2817]
Scholem was also apparently interested in chiromancy, a subject he discussed
with three women he called “witches,” all of whom were associated with Eranos:
the graphologist and student of Jung and Ludwig Klages, Anna
Teillard-Mendelsohn; Hilde Unseld, first wife of Siegfried Unseld, the influential
publisher of Suhrkamp; and Ursula von Mangold, a niece of Walther
Rathenau and later director O.W. Barth publishing house, which in 1928 had planned
the publication of a journal with the title Kabbalistische Blätter.[2818]
Scholem went to visit the occult novelist and Golden Dawn member Gustav Meyrink, and expressed a positive opinion about the parapsychological investigations of Emil Matthiesen (1875 – 1939).[2819] Of great importance for Scholem was Franz Joseph Molitor, a member of Asiatic Brethren, and according to whom the order drew on the magic of the Sabbateans, “such as Shabbetai Zevi, Falk (the Baal Shem of London), Frank, and their similar fellows.”[2820] According to Joseph Dan, holder of the Gershom Scholem Chair of Kabbalah at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Scholem was first and foremost a Jewish nationalist and not a mystic. However, there have been differing views on this point. Scholem was deliberately cryptic about his interest in the occult, feigning scientific disinterest: “I am certainly no mystic, because I believe that science demands a distanced attitude.”[2821] As explained by Joseph Weiss, one of Scholem’s closest pupils, “His esotericism is not in the nature of an absolute reticence, it is a kind of camouflage.”[2822]
Before immigrating to Palestine, Buber’s protégés, Hans Kohn, Hugo Bergmann, and Gershom Scholem shared a critical stance toward the legacy of the Enlightenment, a stance they shared with the Conservative Revolution. Scholem would become a renowned twentieth-century expert on the Kabbalah, being regarded as having founded the academic study of the subject. Scholem’s career as a researcher of mysticism originated in the mystical experiences had as a young man, and in idiosyncratic Kabbalistic interpretations. “Reason is a stupid man’s longing,” wrote Scholem.[2823] The development of mystical or psychic abilities that were discredited by the Enlightenment, such as experience, intuition, and clairvoyance, could create a new mentality that might heal the ailments of modern times.[2824]
Bergmann and Kohn were attracted to mysticism as well. Bergmann immigrated to Palestine in 1920. Together with Buber, he founded Brit Shalom in 1925. Bergmann served as the director of the Jewish National Library between 1920 and 1935. He brought Gershom Scholem from Germany to serve as the head of the Judaica Division. Bergmann was friends with Franz Kafka, who was a schoolmate of his. Bergmann translated several of Rudolf Steiner’s books about Threefold Social Order into Hebrew. Kohn would later publish a biography of Martin Buber.
According to Maor, “the influence of Buber’s ‘rightist’ völkism on young Scholem, Kohn, and Bergmann was decisive; they all adopted, for a while, some of the aggressive facets of his creed.”[2825] Their völkism, according to Maor, “was not of the moderate type; it legitimated political violence and denigrated so-called bourgeois morality.”[2826] Kohn’s long-standing attraction to bouts of violence and Nietzschean immoralism found its expression during the war in his identification with the vision of the redemptive power of violence. For Kohn, violence and power are morally condemned only when they are exercised in the service of particularist interests. When they are employed for the sake of the “absolute,” “coming in Divine grace,” on the other hand, they bring forth redemption.[2827]
Scholem saw Buber as the herald of the Messiah, and as the only Zionist thinker who truly grasped Judaism’s depth.[2828] In The Founding Myths of Israel, Ze’ev Sternhell explains that Scholem not only did not abandon Buber’s völkism, but even adopted its most hazardous aspect: its immoralism.[2829] In an unpublished draft essay, Politik des Zionismus (“Politics of Zionism”), Scholem argued: “Morality is a little nonsense [Geschwätz] (when it is rightly understood; when wrongly understood it is most essential).” As explained by Sternhell, Scholem defined politics as a realm in which actions are principally regarded as means. In effect, politics is a closed system where external considerations are irrelevant. Scholem argued, “The demand for equivalence of the political and the ethical, not to speak of the popular demand for their identification… is a conceptual confusion.”[2830] For that reason, Scholem wrote, “Sometimes I start to think that Friedrich Nietzsche is the only one in modern times who said anything substantial about ethics.”[2831]
Buber was invited to speak at Eranos in 1934, alongside Jung’s friend Jakob Wilhelm Hauer.[2832] A discussion between Buber and Hauer was recorded in the files of the SD, about a possible agreement between the Third Reich and the leaders of the Zionist movement, according to which the Jewish influence in Germany would be restricted.[2833] Years later, when he was asked for his opinion on Hauer, Buber said, “Hauer is someone who lives according to an earnest and deeply religious worldview. This has led him to a passionate longing for a renewal of the German nationhood from its essential roots.”[2834] Froebe-Kapteyn invited Hauer to come again in 1935, but he was obliged to refuse. As Froebe-Kapteyn later explained, Martin Buber’s participation in the 1934 Eranos conference led to difficulties with the German Ministry of Education, which in 1936 forbid German speakers to travel abroad. In 1935, Hauer was forced to issue a press communiqué denying his membership in the Eranos circle, and he stated that he had not been aware of any “Judaeo-Masonic machinations or occult exercises.”[2835]
Steven M. Wasserstrom explains that Scholem, a regular speaker at the Eranos conferences, was the scholar responsible for communicating the Frankist notion of “defeating evil from within” to the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School’s main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Freud, Max Weber and Georg Lukacs, focusing on the study and criticism of culture developed from the thought of Freud. The Frankfurt School’s most well-known proponents included Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer (1895 – 1973), media theorist Theodor Adorno (1903 – 1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979), Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) and Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929). When asked during an interview for German radio about the briefest possible definition of the purpose of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer, without hesitating, answered that it was a “Judaism under-cover.”[2836]
The influence of Hasidism in the Frankfurt School was also felt in the thought of Erich Fromm, who was also deeply immersed in Judaism and later indicated how he was influenced by the messianic themes in Jewish thought. Central to Fromm’s worldview was his interpretation of the Talmud and Hasidism. He began studying Talmud as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Chabad Hasid. While working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg, Fromm studied the Tanya by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad.[2837]
According to Wasserstrom, Adorno was another example of “cultural Sabbateanism,” when he stated: “Only that which inexorably denies tradition may once again retrieve it.”[2838] Martin Jay, in his history of the Frankfurt School, concedes that the Kabbalah would have had some influence as well, as noted by Habermas.[2839] Jurgen Habermas cites the example of the Minima Moralia of Adorno who, despite his apparent secularism, explains that all truth must be measured with reference to the Redemption—meaning the fulfillment of Zionist prophecy and the advent of the Messiah:
Philosophy, in the only way it is to be responsive in the face of despair, would be the attempt to treat all things as they would be displayed from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but what shines on the world from the redemption; everything else is exhausted in reconstruction and remains a piece of technique. Perspectives would have to be produced in which the world is similarly displaced, estranged, reveals its tears and blemishes the way they once lay bare as needy and distorted in the messianic light.[2840]
Scholem, by tracing the origins of Jewish mysticism from its beginnings in Merkabah Mysticism all the way forward to its final culmination in the messianic movement of Shabbetai Zevi, rehabilitated perceptions of the Kabbalah as not a negative example of irrationality or heresy but as supposedly vital to the development of Judaism as a religious and national tradition.[2841] According to Scholem’s “dialectical” theory of history, Judaism passed through three stages. The first is a primitive or “naïve” stage that lasted to the destruction of the Second Temple. The second is Talmudic, while the final is a mystical stage which recaptures the lost essence of the first naïve stage, but reinvigorated through a highly abstract and even esoteric set of categories. In order to neutralize Sabbateanism, Hasidism had emerged as a Hegelian synthesis.
As Wasserstrom noted, Scholem’s classic essay about Sabbatean antinomianism, “Redemption through Sin,” published in 1937, “remains one of the most influential essays written not only in Jewish Studies but in the history of religions more generally.”[2842] According to Scholem:
Evil must be fought with evil. We are thus gradually led to a position which as the history religion shows, occurs with a kind of tragic necessity in every great crisis of the religious mind. I am referring to the fatal yet at the same time deeply fascinating doctrine of the holiness of sin.[2843]
The appearance of the mystical messiah, explained Scholem, caused an “inner sense of freedom” which was experienced by thousands of Jews. He explains, “powerful constructive impulses… [at work] beneath the surface of lawlessness, antinomianism and catastrophic negation… Jewish historians until now have not had the inner freedom to attempt the task.”[2844] In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem speaks of the “deeply fascinating doctrine of the holiness of sin,” and in On The Kabbalah and its Symbolism he confesses that “[o]ne cannot but help be fascinated by the unbelievable freedom… from which their own world seemed to construct itself.”[2845] Scholem told his friend Walter Benjamin of his attraction to “the positive and noble force of destruction,” and declared that “destruction is a form of redemption.”[2846]
Scholem first saw Benjamin in 1913 at a meeting above the Cafe Tiergarten in Berlin, held jointly by Young Judea, the Zionist youth organization to which he belonged, and the Youth Forum, a discussion group composed of members of the Youth Movement founded by Gustav Wyneken, who also inspired by Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair.[2847] Benjamin held a leading role in the Wyneken-edited radical youth journal Der Anfang (“The Beginning”), which brought him into personal contact with intellectual figures such as Martin Buber and Ludwig Klages, founder of the Cosmic Circle. According to Benjamin, in Der Anfang he found “…an elitist, aristocratic and fiercely intellectualist wing of the German youth movement… Wyneken’s ideal (was) of an elite and highly ethical Männerbund devoted to the ideals of Kant, Hegel, Goethe and Nietzsche.”[2848]
Scholem recalled that he was introduced by Benjamin to Erich Gutkind, founder of the Forte Kreis.[2849] Gutkind had already developed a reputation in New Age circles based on the popularity of his first major work, under the pseudonym Volker, Siderische Geburt: Seraphische Wanderung vom Tode der Welt zur Taufe der Tat (“Sidereal birth: Seraphic wanderings from the death of the world to the baptism of the act,” 1910), the first in a series of attempts to reconcile communist utopia, inspired by Jakob Böhme and the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria.[2850] Although largely rejected as a philosopher in Germany, Gutkind’s book was praised by Ernst Barlach in a letter to Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.[2851]
Benjamin socialized with a group of Jewish intellectuals he referred to as the Zauberjuden (“sorcerer Jews”).[2852] The friends of the Cosmic Circle’s Karl Wolfskehl included Walter Benjamin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber.[2853] Benjamin once took a class on the Ancient Mayans from Rilke.[2854] In 1924, in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge magazine, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a member of the George-Kreis, published Benjamin’s Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (“Goethe’s Elective Affinities”), about Goethe’s third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). Benjamin later wrote of George-Kreis founder Stefan George, “It was not too much for me to wait for hours on a bench reading in the castle park in Heidelberg in expectation of the moment when he was supposed to walk by.”[2855] Benjamin eulogized the Cosmic Circle, and corresponded with Klages and employed their ideas in his celebrated Arcades Project, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the nineteenth century.[2856]
Benjamin was intent on writing even more about Klages, but Adorno and Horkheimer convinced him against it. However, in the very letter he wrote to Benjamin on December 5, 1934, Adorno admitted that Klages’ “doctrine of ‘phantoms’ in the section ‘The Actuality of Images’ from his ‘Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele’ lies closest of all, relatively speaking, to our own concerns.” Nevertheless, Adorno even tried to keep the letters Benjamin and Klages wrote to each other out of Benjamin’s collected works.[2857]
The George-Kreis’ ideas have been
identified as preparing the ground for the rise of Nazism by Marxist scholars
such as Bruno Frei or writers like Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and
Thomas Mann. However, in 1934 Adorno wrote an essay on Stefan George’s Days
and Deeds, which he attached a lot of importance to, but which has been
lost. In 1939–40, Adorno wrote a lengthy
essay on the George-Hofmannsthal correspondence. In the 1940s, Adorno followed
the example of Schönberg, Weber, and Berg and set a cycle of George poems to
music. In 1957, he would write the essay “Lyric Poetry and Society,” which concludes
with a panegyric to George; and in 1967 he wrote and delivered a radio piece called
simply “George.”[2858]
Both Adorno and
Benjamin praise George for foreseeing in his poem “Templars” a Weltnacht
(“universal night”) for “doomed” capitalism.[2859]
Scholem also befriended Jewish philosopher
Leo Strauss (1899 – 1973) and corresponded with him throughout his life.[2860]
Benjamin to became socially acquainted with Strauss, and he remained an admirer
of Strauss and his work throughout his life.[2861]
As a youth, Strauss was “converted” to political Zionism as a follower of Zeev
Jabotinsky. He was also friends with Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, who
were both strong admirers of Strauss. He would also attend courses at the
University of Freiburg taught by Martin Heidegger. Because of the Nazis’ rise
to power, he chose not to return to his native country and ended up in the
United States, where he spent most of his
career as a professor of political science at the Rockefeller-funded University of Chicago.
Despite his Nazi affiliations, Schmitt was also associated closely with well-known Jewish philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Leo Strauss.[2862] Schmitt and Benjamin were both obsessed by the “state of exception.”[2863] According to Wasserstrom, Schmitt was another example of “cultural Sabbateanism,” expressed through the “imperative to defeat evil from within.” [2864] Schmitt’s speculations strongly influenced those of Ernst Jünger, who, according to Steven M. Wasserstrom, elaborated what he calls a “cabala of enmity,” based on Kabbalistic traditions he associated with the myth of Leviathan myth, in an “anti-Jewish politico-theosophical program.” Jewish enmity, explains Wasserstrom, was as central for Jünger as it was for Schmitt. And according to Jünger, who adopted Schmitt’s concept: “The great goal of the political will is Leviathan.”[2865]
Schmitt’s highly positive reference for Leo Strauss was instrumental in winning Strauss the scholarship funding that allowed him to leave Germany, when he ended up teaching at the University of Chicago, at the invitation of its then-President, Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899 – 1973).[2866] Strauss’ critique and clarifications of The Concept of the Political (1932) led Schmitt to make significant emendations in its second edition. Writing to Schmitt during 1932, Strauss summarized Schmitt’s political theology as follows: “[B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against—against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men… the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state.”[2867]
French philosopher George Bataille (1897 – 1962)—who would exercise a formative influence on the post-modernist movement—along with Man Ray, André Breton, Jean Paulhan and several other personalities of the avant-garde, participated in the sessions of Naglowska.[2868] With his friend and collaborator Pierre Klossowski (1905 – 2001), Bataille founded the College of Sociology, a loosely-knit group of French intellectuals, named after the informal discussion series that they held in Paris between 1937 and 1939, when it was disrupted by the war. Klossowski’s mother, Elisabeth Dorothée Spiro Klossowska, who had an affair with Rainer Maria Rilke, was descended from Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to East Prussia.[2869] Pierre’s brother, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908 – 2001), known as Balthus, was a modern artist known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls. The group met for two years and lectured on many topics, including the structure of the army, the Marquis de Sade, English monarchy, literature, sexuality, Hitler, and Hegel. Participants also included Hans Mayer, Jean Paulhan, Jean Wahl, Michel Leiris, Alexandre Kojève and André Masson. The College published Klossowski’s “The Marquis de Sade and the Revolution” in 1939. In 1937, Walter Benjamin met George Bataille, who was linked through friendship with several participants of the Eranos conferences. Bataille was also affiliated with the Surrealists, and heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche and Guénon.[2870]
From 1925 to 1940, Jean Paulhan (1884 – 1968) was editor of Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), which was closely associated with the intellectual group who met at the Pontigny Abbey—one of the four daughter houses of Cîteaux Abbey, along with Morimond, La Ferté and Clairvaux—founded in 1114 by Hugh of Mâcon, who later joined his friend St. Bernard at the Council of Troyes in 1128 to officially approve and endorse the Templars on behalf of the Church. In 1909, the abbey was purchased by the philosopher Paul Desjardins, the synarchist founder of l’Union pour l’Action Morale, which split in 1889 to form the Action Française. At Pontigny, Desjardins held meetings there every year, known as Décades de Pontigny (“Decades of Pontigny”), from 1910 to 1914 and then from 1922 to the start of the World War II in 1939. The intellectual elite of Europe who participated in included Paul Valéry, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Nikolai Berdyaev, Raymond Aron, H.G. Wells, Denis de Rougemont and Martin Buber.[2871]
The NRF became the leading literary journal, occupying a unique role in French culture. The review was founded in 1909 by a group of intellectuals including André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Jean Schlumberger. In 1911, Gaston Gallimard (1881 – 1975) became editor, which led to the founding of the publishing house, Éditions Gallimard. The first published works by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 –1980), one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism, were in the pages of the NRF.
As summarized by Wasserstrom, “In short, Scholem’s antinomian necessity ‘to defeat evil from within’ enjoyed a certain elective affinity not only with the College of Sociology, Eranos, and the history of religions, but with a scattered elite of postreligious intellection.”[2872] Jeffrey Mehlman links the transgressive and antinomian elements in Bataille’s thought to Sabbateanism through Benjamin’s friendship with Scholem.[2873] Bataille’s writing has been categorized as “literature of transgression.” He was a coprophiliac, a necrophiliac and committed, by his own confession, an incestuous sexual act, in a state of “arousal to the limit,” upon his mother’s corpse after her death.[2874] Bataille wrote that human beings, as a species, should move towards “an ever more shameless awareness of the erotic bond that links them to death, to cadavers, and to horrible physical pain.”[2875]
Fascinated by human sacrifice, Bataille founded a secret society, Acéphale, the symbol of which was a headless man. According to legend, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration, though none of them would agree to be the executioner.[2876] In “The Sacred Conspiracy,” the call to arms which Bataille published in the first issue of Acéphale, he exhorted his followers “to abandon the world of the civilized and its light,” and to turn to “ecstasy” and the “dance that forces one to dance with fanaticism.”[2877]
Members of Acéphale were also invited to meditation on texts of Nietzsche, Freud and Marquis de Sade, after whom the words “sadism” and “sadist” were derived, and whose is best known for the execrable The 120 Days of Sodom. Starting in the 1930s, Klossowski, Bataille, Paulhan, French philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Blanchot celebrated the Marquis de Sade as a model of perfect freedom. According to Wasserstrom, at the same time Klossowski was extolling de Sade as a liberator contributing to the spirit that led to the French Revolution, Scholem described Jacob Frank in much the same terms in “Redemption through Sin.”[2878] Klossowski knew Walter Benjamin, who favorably reviewed his article, “Evil and the Negation of the Other in the Philosophy of D.A.F. de Sade,” in the Frankfurt School’s journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforshung. [2879]
Sartre established
a long-term romantic relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, best known as the
author of the feminist classic, The Second Sex. In 1943, she worked for
Radio Vichy, founded by pro-Nazi journalists. In that same year, Beauvoir was
suspended for life from teaching for “behavior leading to the corruption of a
minor,” when she was accused of seducing her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie
Sorokine in 1939. It is well known that she and Sartre developed a “contract,”
which they called the “trio,” in which Beauvoir would seduce her students and
then pass them on to Sartre, who enjoyed taking girls’ virginities. According
to a review of Carole Seymour-Jones’s book, Simone de Beauvoir? Meet Jean-Paul
Sartre, in The Telegraph, “de Beauvoir’s affairs with her students
were not lesbian but paedophiliac in origin: she was ‘grooming’ them for
Sartre, a form of ‘child abuse’.”[2880]
Paulhan
admired the Marquis de Sade’s work and told his lover, French author Anne
Desclos, that a woman could not write like Sade. To challenge him, Desclos
wrote for him the Story of O, under the pen name Pauline Réage. Story
of O is a tale of sado-masochism, involving a beautiful Parisian fashion
photographer named O, who is taught to be constantly available for oral,
vaginal, and anal intercourse, offering herself to any male who belongs to the
same secret society as her lover. She is regularly stripped, blindfolded,
chained, and whipped, while her anus is widened by increasingly large plugs,
and her labium is pierced and her buttocks are branded. In 1955, Story of O
won the French literature prize Prix des Deux Magots, a major French literary
prize, but the French authorities brought obscenity charges against the
publisher.
Klossowski was to enjoy a strong
relationship with the work of Henry Corbin and Mircea Eliade, key figures and
longtime associates of Scholem’s at the Eranos conferences. Despite his anti-Semitism, Gershom Scholem,
as reported by Mircea Eliade, stated that Jung’s friend Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, was
among the very few Nazis against whom he had no objection.[2881]
According to Gershom Scholem:
When we, Adolf Portmann, Erich Neumann, Henry Corbin, Ernst Benz, Mircea Eliade, Karl Kerényi and many others—scholars of religion, psychologists, philosophers, physicists and biologists—were trying to play our part in Eranos, the figure of Olga Fröbe was crucial—she whom we always referred to among ourselves as “the Great Mother.” Olga Fröbe was an unforgettable figure for anyone who came here regularly or for any length of time. I have never been a great Jungian… but I have to say that Olga Fröbe was the living image of what in Jungian psychology is called the Anima and the Animus.[2882]
Swiss writer and cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont once evoked the Eranos ideal with the slogan, “Heretics of the World Unite!”[2883] De Rougemont, who wrote the classic work Love in the Western World, was another leader of the College of Sociology. Participants over the years have included the scholar of Hinduism, Heinrich Zimmer, Karl Kerényi the scholar of Greek mythology, Mircea Eliade, Gilles Quispel the scholar of Gnosticism, Gershom Scholem, and Henry Corbin a scholar of Islamic mysticism.[2884] Over the years, interests at Eranos included, Yoga and Meditation in East and West, Ancient Sun Cults and the Symbolism of Light in the Gnosis and in Early Christianity, Man and Peace, Creation and Organization and The Truth of Dreams.
In 1938, Froebe-Kapteyn had applied for financial support to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, but was turned down. Her fortunes changed when she met Mary and Paul Mellon 1907 – February 1, 1999), of the influential Mellon family, thanks to her friendship with Jung.[2885] Paul was the son of Andrew Mellon (1855 – 1937), who through the bank established by his father, Thomas Mellon, the patriarch of the family, had developed some of the leading American industries, including Gulf Oil, Standard Steel Car Company, and the Aluminum Company of America. Prior to becoming Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, a supporter of Hitler, controlled interests such as Alcoa, and formed several cartel arrangements with I.G. Farben.[2886] At Yale, Paul was also the first man to be tapped by both Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key, but turned down Bonesmen for Keys. As the co-heir to one of America’s greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank, was one of the four richest men in the United States, the others were Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew’s brother Richard.[2887]
Paul Mellon served with the OSS in Europe during World War II, working in Berne
with Allen Dulles, who worked closely with Jung. US military intelligence
apparently found that claims of Jung’s Nazi sympathies were unsubstantiated,
and cleared him for employment in the OSS, where he was known as “Agent 488” by
Dulles. Jung had a devoted student in Mary Bancroft, who became Dulles’ mistress.
Dulles later remarked: “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof Jung
contributed to the allied cause during the war.”[2888] Nearing
the end of the war, Dulles exchanged letters with Jung on the best use of
psychological techniques for turning the German “collective mind” from Nazism
towards democracy.[2889]
Mary Mellon had begun reading Jung’s work in 1934 and she and her husband were deeply impressed on hearing Jung speak to the Analytical Psychology Club in New York in 1937. In New York, the Mellons underwent a Jungian analysis with Ann Moyer and her husband, Erlo van Waveren, the “business manager” of Alice Bailey. The Mellons travelled to Zurich in 1938, attending Jung’s later famous seminars on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra at the Psychology Club. One of the participants, the psychologist Cary Baynes, was a friend of Froebe-Kapteyn. After the seminar, Baynes and the van Waverens suggested to the Mellons that they visit to Ascona to meet Froebe-Kapteyn. Even before they left Ascona, the Mellons had committed themselves to funding the publication of the proceedings of the forthcoming conference at Eranos on the “The Great Mother.”[2890]
Froebe-Kapteyn had fallen under the suspicion of the FBI since 1941. It had also been noticed that all her travel expenses had been paid by Paul Mellon and that she had given his residence as her address during the visit. Due to outbreak of the war, and aggravated by the FBI’s suspicions about Froebe-Kapteyn, the Mellons were forced to break off all contact with everyone apart from those living in the United States or England. As a result, in the early summer of 1942, the Bollingen Foundation was completely dissolved. Despite the dissolution of the foundation, Mary Mellon did not want to give up her publishing activities. Finally, in May 1943, the Mellons set up a budget for a publishing project called the Bollingen Series.[2891] In early 1943, Froebe-Kapteyn once again came under accusations of pro-Nazism. On Jung’s advice, she turned to Dulles, who investigated the case and found no evidence, thus putting an end to the suspicions once and for all. Dulles’ mistress Mary Bancroft is also said to have spoken out in Olga’s favor.[2892]
It was also the custom that each speaker at Eranos donated the text of his lecture in exchange for lodging and hospitality, which resulted in the collection of over seven hundred articles published in over seventy Eranos Yearbooks. Parallel with the development of the conferences was the creation of an Eranos-Archiv für Symbolforschung (“Eranos Archive for Symbol Research”), to hold the numerous reproductions of images derived from Eastern and Western iconographic traditions, including alchemy, folklore, mythology, and contemporary “archetypal” representations. The Eranos Archive supported studies, such as Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (1944), Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible—The Origins and Structure of Alchemy (1956), and Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954) and The Great Mother—An Analysis of the Archetype (1955). The material is preserved at the Warburg Institute in London as the Eranos Collection of Jungian Archetypes. The Eranos Archive also represented the basis for the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) in New York.[2893]
The path of Hitler’s seizure of dictatorial powers was paved by Franz von Papen,, who on January 9, with Reich President Paul von Hindenburg agreed to form a new government that would bring in Hitler. Papen’s old friend, Joachim von Ribbentrop, a protégé of Ernst Hanfstaengl, had joined the Nazi Party in 1932, and began his political career by offering to be a secret emissary between him and Hitler. After General Kurt von Schleicher ousted Papen in December 1932, Papen and various friends of Hindenburg negotiated with Hitler to oust him. On the evening of January 22, in a meeting at Ribbontrop’s villa in Berlin, with State Secretary Otto Meissner (1880 – 1953) and Hindenburg’s son Oskar (1883 – 1960) met Hitler, Hermann Göring (1893 – 1946), and Thule Society member Wilhelm Frick (1877 – 1946), Papen made his fateful decision to concede abandoning his claim to the Chancellorship and to support Hitler.[2894]
Franz von Papen, along with to Count Johann von Bernstorff, was part of the Zionist and Round Table plotters associated with the Propaganda Kabinett, whose members included George Sylvester Viereck, who operated The Fatherland with Aleister Crowley, and whose contributors included Golden Dawn member Samuel Untermyer.[2895] In 1913, von Papen, who would become Vice Chancellor under Hitler, entered the diplomatic service as a military attaché to von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in the United States, and worked out of the New York offices of the Hamburg-America Line. Working out of the New York offices of the Hamburg-America Line, von Papen was Heinrich Albert’s chief accomplice in sabotage operations in the US, until their activities were exposed when Albert’s briefcase was stolen by an American secret service agent in 1915.[2896]
In the 1925 presidential elections, von
Papen supported Paul von Hindenburg. Between 1928 and 1930, von Papen concentrated his political activity on
various conservative organizations, such as the Herrenklub. Hindenburg chose him as Chancellor in 1932. With the formation of Papen’s presidential
cabinet in May 1932, after he had been chosen Chancellor
by von Hindenburg, the Herrenklub,
which at that time had around 5,000 members, gained considerable influence on
German politics as Papen’s “main contact point for political suggestions.”[2897]
For example, Wilhelm Freiherr von Gayl, another prominent member of the club,
was appointed to the Reich government as Minister of the Interior. After two Reichstag elections increased the Nazis’ power in the
Reichstag, von Papen was forced to resign as Chancellor. After Hitler lost a
popular election to von Hindenburg in 1932, thirty-nine business leaders,
including Alfred Krupp, Siemens, Herrenclub member Fritz Thyssen and
Robert Bosch, sent a petition to von Hindenburg urging that Hitler be appointed
Chancellor of Germany.
It wasn’t until after Hitler met in secret with von Papen on January 4, 1933, at the villa of Baron Kurt von Schroeder (1889 – 1966) in the fashionable Braunsfeld neighborhood of Cologne, that Hindenburg would relent and appoint Hitler chancellor, effectively giving birth to the Third Reich.[2898] Also attending the meeting were Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess and Hjalmar Schacht, the head of the Reichsbank. The famous meeting was also attended by Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers John Foster and his brother Allen Dulles, future head of the CIA.[2899] These men formed part of what Charles Higham, in Trading With the Enemy: The Nazi American Money Plot 1933-1949, called “the Fraternity,” which was a network of the Warburgs and the Rockefeller-controlled Standard Oil and First National City Bank, or the Chase National Bank, who financed the rise of the Third Reich.
The key actors responsible for assisting Hitler’s rise to power were connected to a network of financiers closely associated with the infamous Skull and Bones society at Yale, which was the dominant American chapter of the international Brotherhood of Death secret societies, that included Germany’s Thule Society, later the Nazis. Alexandra Robbins describes the Skull and Bones as “the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known,” and related that the society has been dominated by about two dozen of the country’s most influential families, including the Bush, Bundy, Harriman, Lord, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney families, who are encouraged to intermarry amongst themselves.[2900] Society members dominate financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Brown Brothers Harriman, where at one time more than a third of the partners were Bonesmen. As Robbins explains, “Through these companies, Skull and Bones provided financial backing to Adolf Hitler because the society then followed a Nazi—and now follows a neo-Nazi—doctrine.”[2901]
In 1919, Averell Harriman (1891 – 1986)
founded W.A. Harriman & Co with fellow Bonesman George Herbert Walker (1875
– 1953), the grandfather of George H.W. Bush, which led the way in directing
American money to German companies. In 1926, Walker made his son-in-law,
another Bonesman, Prescott Bush (1895 – 1972), vice president of W.A. Harriman.
In 1931, W.A. Harriman merged with Brown Brothers creating Brown Brothers,
Harriman & Company, where more than a third of their partners were Bonesmen.
Prescott Bush was a senior partner of Brown Brothers, Harriman & Company.
Walker was president of Union Banking Corporation (UBC), was in fact a front for numerous German nationals. In 1926, Prescott Bush was assigned to UBC, where he oversaw its German operations from 1926 until 1942. Bush looked after the American interests of Fritz Thyssen, who controlled the vast German Steel Trust. According to government and Thyssen family records, Thyssen’s contributions were a major reason Hitler succeeded in his climb to power.[2902] Under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, President Roosevelt personally approved an investigation, which concluded that UBC had been the single largest front for the Nazis operating in the United States. The Alien Property Custodian issued a Vesting Order, which detailed how UBC and other entities operated by the Bush, Walker, and Harriman families had assisted the Nazi war effort. The Alien Property Custodian also concluded that Brown Brothers had been used as a front by the Nazis and that the Germans had controlled these strategic interests since the 1920s.[2903]
Prescott Bush was selected by Max Warburg to be the American Ship & Commerce Line official representative on the board of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, a shipping line and cover for IG Farben’s Nazi espionage unit in the United States. IG Farben, which was indispensable to the German war effort, was formed when Carl Duisburg, the chairman of Bayer, argued for a merger of German manufacturers of synthetic dyes and other chemical products. Duisburg was inspired following a visit to the United States in the spring of 1903, when he visited several of the large American trusts such as Standard Oil, US Steel, International Paper and Alcoa. In the 1920s, the dye industry leaders, led by Duisberg and Carl Bosch of BASF, successfully pushed for the merger of the dye makers into a single company. In 1925, the companies merged into the Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG or IG Farben. During World War I, Duisberg had devised the slave-labor system later perfected by the company.[2904] Duisberg was also responsible for the development and implementation of “Gruenkreuz” (phosgene) and “Mustard gas,” and aggressively pushed forth their use, in deliberate contravention of The Hague Land Warfare Convention. In Leverkusen, Duisberg set up a school specifically for chemical warfare. Duisberg also provided substantial financial support to the Nazi with the agreement that the government would only buy chemical products from IG Farben.[2905]
The company had become a donor to the Nazi Party in the 1930s, and was a large government contractor after the Nazi takeover of Germany, providing significant material for the German war effort. IG Farben also ultimately produced the Zyklon B gas used in Nazi extermination camps. The huge corporation, which soon included related industries such as explosives and fibers, was the biggest enterprise in all of Europe and the fourth largest in the world, behind General Motors, United States Steel and Standard Oil of New Jersey. IG Farben and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil were effectively a single firm, having been merged in hundreds of cartel arrangements. It was led up until 1937 by Rockefeller’s partners, the Warburgs. Since 1927, Max Warburg served on the board of directors of IG Farben, while his brother Paul served on the board of directors of the company’s wholly-owned American subsidiary, which was also associated with Standard Oil.[2906]
Warburg was also a close friend with
Montagu Norman (1871 – 1950), chairman of the Bank of England, who was also a
partner in Brown Brothers, Harriman and a close friend of Prescott Bush. Norman was a close friend of Hjalmar
Schacht, who was appointed to head the Reichsbank under direct recommendation
from Adolf Hitler, and the godfather to one of Schacht’s grandchildren.[2907] Although born in
Germany, Schacht spent part of his
early upbringing in Brooklyn and maintained powerful Wall Street connections.[2908]
Schacht was also a Freemason, having joined the lodge Urania zur
Unsterblichkeit in 1908.[2909] Schacht was also
a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, founded during the Haskalah by
members of Moses Mendelssohn’s circle.
Schacht and Norman were both members of the
Bank for International Settlements (BIS), founded in 1930. According to Higham,
“sensing Adolf Hitler’s
lust for war and conquest, Schacht, even before Hitler rose to power in the
Reichstag, pushed for an institution that would retain channels of
communication and collusion between the world’s financial leaders even in the
event of an international conflict.”[2910] Though the
BIS was an instrument of the Nazis, its operations were approved by Great
Britain, and the British director Sir Otto Niemeyer, and chairman and devoted
Hitler supporter Montagu Norman, remained in office throughout the war.[2911]
Formed in 1930, the BIS was an intergovernmental organization of central banks
of six nations: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. According to the Bank’s charter,
the respective governments agreed that the BIS should be immune from seizure,
closure, or censure, whether or not its owners were at war. These owners
included the Bank of England, the Reichsbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of
France, and three private international banks from the
United States: J.P. Morgan & Company, First National Bank of Chicago and
First National City Bank of New York, which later became Chase Manhattan Bank
when it merged with the Rockefeller-dominated Chase City Bank, and eventually
Citibank. Established under the Morgan
banker Owen D. Young’s so-called Young Plan, the BIS’s ostensible purpose was
to provide the Allies with reparations to be paid by Germany for World War I.
At the time, Young concurrently served on board of trustees of the Rockefeller
Foundation, and also had been one of the representatives involved in a previous
war-reparations restructuring arrangement, the Dawes Plan of 1924.
However, noted Higham, “the Bank soon turned out to be the instrument of an opposite function. It was to be a money funnel for American and British funds to flow into Hitler’s coffers and to help Hitler build up his war machine.”[2912] By the outbreak of World War II, reports Higham, the BIS was completely under Hitler’s control. Among the directors under Thomas H. McKittrick were Hermann Schmitz, head of IG Farben, Baron Kurt von Schroder, head of the J.H. Stein Bank of Cologne and a leading officer and financier of the Gestapo; and Dr. Walther Funk of the Reichsbank and Emil Puhl, who were Hitler’s personal appointees to the board.[2913]
While in
the past Norman’s role in the transferring of Czech gold to the Nazi regime in
March 1939 was uncertain, a vault in Basel, Switzerland, holds politically
sensitive documents from World War II, which historians believe will
demonstrate that Norman “bent over backwards to help the Nazi war machine.”[2914]
On March 15, 1939, after Hitler completed his invasion of Czechoslovakia, he
found that the country’s gold reserve had already been transferred via BIS in
the Bank of England. The Germans ordered them to retrieve it. Careful
investigation by historian David Blaazer of the Bank of England’s internal
memos has established that Norman knowingly authorized the transfer of Czech
gold from Czechoslovakia’s account with the BIS to an account which
Norman knew was managed by the German Reichsbank.[2915]
Norman’s arrangement was no surprise says Scott Newton,
lecturer in modern history at Cardiff University. “Monty Norman and the leading merchant banks
in the City [of London] were up to their necks in helping to prop up the German
financial system. The Germans owed a lot of money to British banks.”[2916]
Hjalmar Schacht was a member of the Circle of Friends of the Economy, for Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft, a pro-Hitler lobbying group established by Wilhelm Keppler, in order to strengthen ties between prominent industrialists and members of Hitler’s inner circle. Keppler, who had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1927, and a friend of Heinrich Himmler, formed the Freundeskreis after Hitler’s request in 1932 for the formation of a “study group on economic questions.”[2917] The financial manager of the Freundeskreis was Baron Kurt Freiherr von Schroeder, a German nobleman, financier and SS-Brigadeführer. Dissatisfied with the instability of the Weimar Republic, Schroeder first joined the center right and pro-monarchist German People’s Party led by Gustav Stresemann. After Stresemann’s death, however, Schroeder increasingly veered towards the nascent National Socialist movement before becoming an influential fundraiser and economic advisor to the Nazi Party.
Kurt von Schroeder was the head of the international Schroder banking empire, and had extensive financial contacts in New York and London. Kurt von Schroder was a co-director of Thyssen foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush’s New York bank partner. Schroeder was also the vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. George Herbert Walker helped take over North American operations of the company. Hamburg-Amerika smuggled in German agents, and brought in money for bribing American politicians to support Hitler. A 1934 congressional investigation also showed that Hamburg-Amerika was subsidizing Nazi propaganda efforts in the United States.[2918]
After serving a stint in Constantinople,
Allen Dulles became the first new director of the Council on Foreign Relations
in 1927, and joined his brother John Foster as a lawyer in Sullivan and
Cromwell. As Dulles’ biographer Peter Grose notes, Sullivan and Cromwell,
“constituted a strategic nexus of international finance, the operating core of
a web of relationships that constituted power, carefully crafted to accrue and
endure across sovereign borders.”[2919]
As partners in the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, Allen and John Foster Dulles
also represented IG Farben.
An agreement to coordinate all trade between Germany & America was reached in Berlin after negotiations between Hjalmar Schacht and John Foster Dulles. As a result, Oliver Harriman, Averell’s cousin, formed a syndicate of 150 firms to conduct all business between Germany and the United States.[2920] Beginning in 1933, Max Warburg also served directly under Hjalmar Schacht on the board of the Reichsbank. Two executives of Standard Oil’s German subsidiary were Karl Lindemann and Emil Helfferich, prominent figures the Freundeskreis, its chief financiers and close friends and colleagues of Baron von Schroder.[2921] Prior to the war, Allen Dulles was a director of the J. Henry Schroeder bank in London.
Max Warburg was forced out of IG Farben through “Aryanization” in 1933. Jews were then expelled from the board of directors altogether in 1937, together with Otto von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the eldest child of Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy and his first wife, Else Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1845 – 1868), born Oppenheim. The parents were as direct descendants of Moses Mendelssohn in the third or fourth generation remotely related to each other. As principal shareholder of Agfa, which was founded by his father and merged with IG Farben, Otto was a member of the supervisory board of both companies. Of the 24 directors of IG Farben indicted in the so-called IG Farben Trial (1947 – 1948) before the subsequent Nuremberg Trials, 13 were sentenced to prison terms between one and eight years, but most were quickly released and several became senior industry executives in the post-war companies that split off from IG Farben and other companies.
Göring joined the Nazi Party in 1922 after hearing a speech by Hitler. He was given command of the SA as the Oberster SA-Führer in 1923. At this time, Carin—who liked Hitler—often played hostess to meetings of leading Nazis, including her husband, Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Ernst Röhm.[2922] Göring, who was with Hitler leading the march to the War Ministry, was shot in the groin. With Carin’s help, he was smuggled to Innsbruck, where he received surgery and was given morphine for the pain, developing a morphine addiction which lasted until his imprisonment at Nuremberg. Göring was certified a dangerous drug addict and was placed in Långbro asylum in 1925 where he had to be confined in a straitjacket.[2923]
Göring once reprimanded an aide for an anti-Semitic remark about one of his dinner guests and said, “I’ll decide who is and who is not a Jew.”[2924] Göring retained Milch as his Luftwaffe adjutant; shielded Ilse Ballin, a Jewish woman who treated him when he was wounded in Beer Hall Putsch; gained Vollarier (“full Aryan”) status for synthetic fat inventor Arthur Imhausen; protected art dealer Kurt Walther Bachstitz, the Jewish wife of half-Jewish sons of General Bernhard Kuhl, part-Jewish Baroness Elisabeth von Stengl, half-Jewish female test pilot Melitta Schenck von Stauffenberg, Prussian Theater director Gustav Grundgens, and several of his wife Emmy’s Jewish theatrical friends.[2925]
Göring’s mother was Franziska Tiefenbrunn, a German-Jewish Surname. Hermann’s father Heinrich Ernst Göring (1839 – 1913) married Franziska in London, where he had been sent by Bismarck to study British methods of colonial administration before being appointed colonial governor of Germany’s fledgling Protectorate of South West Africa, where he became a friend of Cecil Rhodes.[2926] In Africa, Heinrich also befriended Dr. Hermann Epenstein, a wealthy Jewish physician and businessman, who provided the Göring family, who were surviving on Heinrich’s pension, first with a family home in Berlin-Friedenau, then in a small castle called Veldenstein, near Nuremberg. Göring’s mother became Epenstein’s mistress around this time, and remained so for some fifteen years.[2927] Epenstein was at Franziska’s side when his namesake, Hermann, was born and upon the birth of her youngest child, Albert Günther, he announced that he would become the Göring children’s godfather. Epenstein acted as a surrogate father to the children as Heinrich Göring was often absent from the family home.[2928]
In 1920, while she was estranged from her first husband, Göring met his wife Carin von Kantzow at Rockelstad Castle in Sweden, while she was visiting her sister Mary, who was married to Count Eric von Rosen (1879 – 1948). Eric von Rosen’s father was Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen and his mother was Ella Carlton Moore of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a descendant of the Winthrop family of Rosicrucians.[2929] Eric von Rosen had been using a swastika as a personal owner’s mark, and used the symbol as a decorative element throughout the house. He first found swastikas on a Viking rune-stone on Gotland, where he was attending high-school. During his travels among the descendants of the Inca in Bolivia, he was surprised to find the swastika common among them, and surmised that this was a universal symbol that had been used by many cultures all over the world.[2930] Being a friend of Finland, in 1918, to signify the beginning of the Finnish Air Force, he gave the newly independent state an aircraft marked with his badge, a blue swastika on a white background. The Finnish Air Force adopted this roundel as their national insignia until sometime during World War II.[2931]
At the Nuremberg Trial, Göring testified: “I had no desire to see the Jews liquidated. I just wanted them out of Germany.”[2932] Göring spoke to his brother Albert Göring (1895 – 1966) and others of building an independent Jewish state the size of Lichtenstein near Warsaw. In contrast to his brother Hermann, Albert was opposed to Nazism and helped Jews and others who were persecuted in Nazi Germany. In 2016, Albert’s daughter told the BBC that her mother said that Albert told her that her lover, the Jewish doctor von Hermann Epenstein, who served as surrogate father to the children, was his father.[2933]
Albert regularly went to Hermann Göring’s Berlin office to seek his help on behalf of a Jewish friend or political prisoner. In 2010, Edda Göring, the daughter of Hermann, said of her uncle Albert in The Guardian, “He could certainly help people in need himself financially and with his personal influence, but, as soon as it was necessary to involve higher authority or officials, then he had to have the support of my father, which he did get.”[2934] Albert and his sister Olga pleaded for Hermann to intervene on behalf of Archduke Josef Ferdinand of Austria, the last Habsburg Prince of Tuscany, then detained at Dachau concentration camp. “Hermann was very embarrassed. But the next day the imprisoned Habsburger was free,” Albert recollected to his old friend Ernst Neubach. As Albert became ever more bold in his attempts, the Gestapo compiled a large file against him. Although four arrest warrants were issued in his name during the war, through his brother’s influence, he was never convicted. The brothers met for the last time in May 1945, in a transit jail in Augsburg. Albert spent two years in prison, unable to convince his interrogators of his innocence. One report reads: “The results of the interrogation of Albert Göring, brother of the Reichsmarschall Herman [sic], constitutes as clever a piece of rationalisation and ‘white wash’ as SAIC [Seventh Army Interrogation Center] has ever seen.”[2935]
It was in the same January 29, 1933, meeting that von Papen first learned that Hitler wanted to dissolve the Reichstag when he became Chancellor and, once the Nazis had won a majority of the seats in the ensuing elections, to activate the Enabling Act, a law that gave German Cabinet—in effect, the Chancellor—the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag, and to override fundamental aspects of the Weimar Constitution.[2936] The arson attack on the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, depicted by the Nazis as the beginning of a communist revolution, resulted in the Reichstag Fire Decree, which among other things suspended freedom of press and habeas corpus rights just five days before the election. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer wrote that at Nuremberg, General Franz Halder stated in an affidavit, that Göring boasted about setting the fire: “On the occasion of a lunch on the Führer’s birthday in 1943, the people around the Führer turned the conversation to the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears how Göring broke into the conversation and shouted: ‘The only one who really knows about the Reichstag building is I, for I set fire to it.’”[2937]
After being appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Hitler asked von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag. A general election was scheduled for March 5, 1933. A secret meeting was held between Hitler and a number of industrialists at Göring’s official residence in the Reichstag Presidential Palace, aimed at financing the election campaign of the Nazi Party. The Nazi Party wanted to achieve two-thirds majority to pass the Enabling Act and desired to raise three million Reichsmark to fund the campaign. Present at the meeting, among many others, were Hjalmar Schacht, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Fritz von Opel, board member of Adam Opel AG, and Georg von Schnitzler, board member of IG Farben. Schacht requested three million Reichsmark, which was made out to Nationale Treuhand, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht and deposited in the Bank of Delbrück Schickler & Co.[2938] A statement from the IG Farben Trial indicated a total of 2,071,000 Reichsmark had been paid. The money then went to Rudolf Hess who transferred it to Franz Eher Nachfolger, the central publishing house of the Nazi Party which had been owned by Rudolf von Sebottendorf and published Völkischer Beobachter and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Through various intimidation tactics of the SA, and with the help of their DNVP allies, the Nazis garnered enough votes to pass the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, with only the SPD in opposition. For all intents and purposes, the entire Weimar Constitution was rendered void.[2939] Enacted by the Reich government using the Enabling Act, the Provisional Law on the Coordination of the States with the Reich, passed March 31, dissolved the sitting parliaments of all German states except the recently elected Prussian parliament, which the Nazis already controlled. Through June and July, even their the DNVP, as well as the German State Party, the Bavarian People’s Party, the German People’s Party and the Centre Party, all formally disbanded. The Law Against the Formation of Parties, passed on July 14, 1933, declared the NSDAP as the country's only legal political party. The Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich, passed on August 1, 1934, combined the office of Reich President with that of Reich Chancellor under the title of Führer and Reich Chancellor.
One of Göring’s first acts as a cabinet minister was to oversee the creation of the Gestapo, which he ceded to Himmler in 1934. Göring was made a Reich Plenipotentiary, whose jurisdiction covered the responsibilities of various cabinet ministries, including those of the Minister of Economics, the Defense Minister and the Minister of Agriculture. Upon being named Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan in 1936, Göring was entrusted with the task of mobilizing all sectors of the economy for war, an assignment which brought numerous government agencies under his control and helped him become one of the wealthiest men in the country. The plan was part of the alternative governmental structure created by Hitler and the Nazi Party, which included entities such as Organisation Todt and the unification of the SS and the German police forces, including the Gestapo, under Himmler.[2940]
In his diary, Arthur Ruppin—the Zionist who founded Brit Shalom with Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem—described his impressions of one of Hitler’s first speeches after he assumed power in 1933: “Two days ago, I heard on the radio Hitler’s speech in the Reichstag. It was a much better speech than all his election speeches—full of content, interesting, fascinating.”[2941] Ruppin was referring to Hitler’s speech in the Reichstag on March 23, 1933, where he proclaimed:
Simultaneously with this political purification of our public life, the Government of the Reich will undertake a thorough moral purging of the body corporate of the nation. The entire educational system, the theatre, the cinema, literature, the press, and the wireless – all these will be used as means to this end and valued accordingly. They must all serve for the maintenance of the eternal values present in the essential character of our people. Art will always remain the expression and the reflection of the longings and the realities of an era. […] It is the task of art to be the expression of this determining spirit of the age. Blood and race will once more become the source of artistic institution.[2942]
“All great art,” Hitler proclaimed in Mein Kampf, “is national” and therefore had to be protected.[2943] Hitler’s rise to power on January 31, 1933, was quickly followed by actions intended to cleanse the culture of “degeneracy”: book burnings took place, artists and musicians were dismissed from teaching positions, and curators who had supported modern art were replaced by Party members.[2944] On April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union (DSt) organized the first book burnings. The DSt had been dominated since 1931 by the National Socialist German Students’ League, a division of the Nazi Party, founded in 1926, and dedicated to integrating university education within the framework of the Nazi worldview, in accord with the Führerprinzip, and which dressed its members in classic brown shirts and Swastika emblems. On the same day, the DSt, whose board was dominated by Burschenschafter, published the “Twelve Theses,” a title chosen to commemorate Martin Luther’s burning of a papal bull when he posted his ninety-five theses in 1520, and the book burning at the 1817 Wartburg Festival.
Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, the authors of The Pink Swastika, reveal that the first Nazi book burning took place four days after Röhm and his Storm Troopers raided Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sex Research Institute in Berlin. Hirschfeld claimed to have transcripts from two male clients who testified that they had sexual encounters with Hitler.[2945] The SA removed all volumes from the library and storing them for the later book burning event. The institute had extensive records on the sexual perversions of numerous Nazi leaders, many of whom had been under treatment there prior to the beginning of the Nazi regime, as required by the German courts for persons convicted of sex offenses. Ludwig L. Lenz, who worked at the Institute at the time of the raid but managed to escape with his life, later wrote:
Why was it then, since we were completely non-party, that our purely scientific Institute was the first victim which fell to the new regime? The answer to this is simple… We knew too much. It would be against medical principles to provide a list of the Nazi leaders and their perversions [but]… not ten percent of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal… Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material—we possessed about forty thousand confessions and biographical letters—was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.[2946]
The books targeted for burning were any deemed to degrade German purity, including books by Jewish, communist, liberal, pacifist author, or considered pornographic. A total of over 25,000 volumes were burned, including those by Marx, Heine, Einstein, H.G. Wells, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, or which advocated degenerate art like the music of Felix Mendelssohn or the Bauhaus architectural movement. In Berlin, in from of some 40,000 people, Goebbels proclaimed:
The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism
is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared
the way on the German path… The future German man will not just be a man of
books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you.
As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to
overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death - this is the task
of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit
to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic
deed - a deed which should document the following for the world to know - Here
the intellectual foundation of the November Republic is sinking to the ground,
but from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise.[2947]
During the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, Germany emerged as a leading center of the avant-garde. Films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) brought Expressionism to cinema. It was also the birthplace of Expressionism in painting and sculpture, of the atonal musical compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, and the jazz-influenced work of Kurt Weill (1900 – 1950), a Jewish composer active from the 1920s in his native Germany, and in his later years in the United States. In 1919, Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956), wrote the poetic memorial Epitaph honoring Luxemburg and Weill set it to music in The Berlin Requiem in 1928. With Brecht, Weill also developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad “Mack the Knife.”
As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. The term Entartung (“Degeneration”) had gained currency in Germany by the late nineteenth century the Zionist Max Nordau devised the theory presented in his 1892 book by that name. Nordau drew upon the writings of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835 – 1909), the self-proclaimed founder of modern scientific psychiatry, who is purported to have coined the term criminology. In The Criminal Man, published in 1876, Lombroso attempted to prove that there were “born criminals” who could be identified by their physical traits. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Count Dracula is described as having the type of physical appearance Lombroso would have described as criminal.[2948]
Lombroso published The Man of Genius in 1889, which argued that artistic genius was a form of hereditary insanity, and provided inspiration for Nordau's work, as evidenced by his dedication of Degeneration to Lombroso. Nordau developed a critique of modern art, explained as the work of those so corrupted by modern life that they have lost the self-control needed to produce coherent works. According to Nordau, the degenerate artists and writers were “mentally disturbed.” Art, he said, should be uplifting and “wholesome,” and not glorify the ugly and sick like a “lunatic.” Nordau mainly wanted to point out the “degeneration” caused by “modem mysticism,” which transgressed the values of Enlightenment, the worst examples being Wagner and Nietzsche.
“Nordau’s
book,” explained Brigitte Hamann, “made the word degenerate fashionable
but transformed its meaning in Vienna. It now was
applied to the Jews and became an anti-Semitic slogan that acquired a Darwinist
twist.”[2949]
The modernist movement in Vienna was considered to be largely
Jewish. As far back as in his essay Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (“The
Work of Art of the Future”)—which he began by stating “As Man stands to Nature,
so stands Art to Man”— Wagner referred to “Jewish modernism,” calling it “something
quite miserable and very dangerous, especially for us Germans.” In fact,
Jews did share a proportionally large part in fin-de-siecle Vienna, as
builders, patrons, buyers, and audience at performances of plays, exhibitions,
and concerts.[2950]
Around 1900, the German-national newspapers in Vienna published numerous reports of the alleged interference other ethnic groups’ against “German” culture, calling for every German to assume the responsibility of fighting for “pure German art.” In 1909, when Hitler was in Vienna, pan-German newspapers discussed a hierarchy of “racial esthetics,” assigning the modem, “degenerate” artist to the lowest level in Darwinian terms. A change, they proposed, could only occur “by way of an appropriately long-lasting inbreeding” toward improving the race, and thus art.[2951] George von Schönerer’s Unverfälschte Deutsche Worte (“Unadulterated German Words”), claimed that German culture needed to be protected from “clever seducers” through censorship.
German nationalists, as well as a growing number of middle-class Germans, feared the end of the German Reich and German art, and even the German nation itself. Combatting the Bolsheviks, and the socialists, explains David Ian Hall, in “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany’s Rebirth after the First War,” became increasingly understood to implicate fighting for the nation and its Kultur. Many Germans began to long for a return to a familiar Heimat (“Homeland”), and there was a growing sense of Germanness and the notion of a Volksgemeinschaft (“national community”).[2952] Bolshevism thus became a catch-all for left-wing politicians, pacifists, the liberal press, Jews, and anyone else who could be blamed for Germany’s defeat and post-war problems. The term was also used to stigmatize new trends in art, architecture, literature, and music. Atonal music, Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism—anything that was modern and experimental—was deemed to be an assault on traditional German life and culture.[2953]
The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur remained under Rosenberg’s leadership until it was reorganized and renamed to the Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde (“National Socialist Culture Community”) in 1934. Members included anti-Semitic literary historians Adolf Bartels, Ludwig Polland, Gustaf Kossinna, physicist and Albert Einstein-opponent Philipp Lenard, the composer Paul Graener, the philosophers Otto Friedrich Bollnow, and Eugen Herrigel, the poet and later president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer Hanns Johst, the architect Paul Schulze-Naumburg, who edited the periodical Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”), Gustav Havemann, a violinist and later leader of the Reichsmusikkammer and who founded and lead a Kampfbund orchestra, the theater director Karl von Schirach, Fritz Kloppe who led Werwolf, a paramilitary organization, and the theologian, nationalist musicologist Fritz Stein, actors Carl Auen and Aribert Mog, philosopher, sociologist and economist Othmar Spann, and Austrian political philosopher and a teacher of Friedrich Hayek.[2954]
In response to Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and of his own conflict with the Weimar “progressive” architectural scene, Paul Schulze-Naumburg (1869 – 1949) began condemning modern art and architecture in racial terms, thereby providing some of the basis for Hitler’s theories, in which classical Greece and the Middle Ages were the true sources of Aryan art.[2955] Schultze-Naumburg wrote books such as Die Kunst der Deutschen. Ihr Wesen und ihre Werke (“The Art of the Germans. Its Nature and Its Works”) and Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”), published in 1928, in which he argued that only “racially pure” artists could produce a healthy art which reflected the timeless ideals of classical beauty, while racially “mixed” modern artists betrayed their inferiority and corruption by producing distorted artwork. As evidence, he reproduced examples of modern art alongside photographs of people with deformities and diseases.
Eckart introduced Hitler to Adolf Bartels (1862 – 1945), who in 1897 wrote a history of German literature that became a pioneering work for National Socialist literary reviews. According to Bartels, even authors whose names sounded Jewish, who wrote for the “Jewish press,” or who were friendly with Jews were “contaminated with Jewishness.” The noblest task of völkisch cultural policy would therefore be a radical de-Jewing of the arts, and thus the “salvation of National Socialist Germany.” Bartels led a successful campaign to prevent the unveiling of a statue of Heinrich Heine in 1906. After World War I, to promote his ideas, Bartels’ followers formed the Bartelsbund (“Bartels Society”), which later merged with Ludendorff’s Tannenbergbund.[2956] Bartels’ work achieved “quasi-official” status in Nazi Germany, and Hitler personally awarded him the Adlerschild (“Eagle Shield of the German Reich”) medal, Nazi Germany’s highest civilian honor, in 1937.[2957] The Adlerschild was introduced during the Weimar Republic, under President Friedrich Ebert and continued under Nazi Germany.
The Kampfbund published the periodical Mitteilung des Kampfbundes für deutsche Kultur (“Proceedings of the KfdK”) from 1929 to 1931. Under the heading “Signs of the Times,” they listed their enemies: Erich Kästner, Kurt Tucholsky, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Mehring, and the Berlin Institute for Sexual Research. Later, the most frequently mentioned were Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Kurt Schwitters, the Bauhaus Movement, Emil Nolde, Karl Hofter, Max Beckmann, and Dada artist Georg Grosz. Books by Jewish authors such as Ernst Toller, Arnold Zweig, Jakob Wassermann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnolt Bronnen, Leonhard Frank, Emil Ludwig, and Alfred Neumann were dismissed as not properly German. In 1930, the society directed a campaign against Ernst Barlach and the so-called Hetzkunst (“hate art”) of Käthe Kollwitz.
Also members of the Kampfbund were publishers and Thule Society members Julius Friedrich Lehmann and Hugo Bruckmann (1863 – 1941). Hugo’s wife Elsa Bruckmann was the Munich publisher of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and who with Winifred Wagner, helped to teach Hitler table manners and helped reform his public image.[2958] Elsa held the “Salon Bruckmann” which was attended by Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages, both members of the George-Kreis. Bruckmann and her husband financially supported International Modernism in art and design. In 1899, Chamberlain read at Elsa Bruckmann’s first salon in January 1899. Attendees at their salon included Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Wölfflin, Rudolf Kassner, Hermann Keyserling, Karl Wolfskehl, Harry Graf Kessler, Georg Simmel, Hjalmar Schacht and her nephew Norbert von Hellingrath.[2959] Hitler was known to have attended some of Schuler’s lectures there in 1922 and 1923.[2960] Rilke’s lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Freud’s pupil as well as Paul Rée’s and Nietzsche’s temptress, was eventually attacked by the Nazis as a “Finnish Jewess.”[2961] A few days before her death, the Gestapo confiscated her library, because practiced “Jewish science” and had many books by Jewish authors.[2962]
Carl Jung’s friend, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who spoke at the Eranos conference in 1934, had joined both the Hitler Youth and the Kampfbund, and was subsequently inducted by Himmler and Heydrich personally into the SS and the SD.[2963] Mary Wigman and her associates decided to join the Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund (“National Socialist Teachers League”) and the Kampfbund. Letters to the branch schools pointed out that that they would need to dismiss their Jewish teachers and pupils.[2964] The Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund was founded by former schoolteacher Hans Schemm (1891 – 1935), the Gauleiter of Bayreuth. In 1919, Schemm was a member of the Freikorps Bayreuth, which took part in the suppression of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich. Schemm had joined the Nazi Party in 1922. In 1923, he first met Hitler. When the Party was banned in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch, Schemm, with Hitler’s blessing, became First Assessor in the Bayreuth Völkischer Bund in 1924 and, when it disbanded, joined the National Socialist Freedom Movement (NSFB) led by Ludendorff. When the NSFB won 32 seats in the Reichstag in the 1924 elections, Ludendorff, former SA head Ernst Röhm and also Thule Society founder Theodor Fritsch, were among the winning candidates.
When Schemm died in 1935, he was given a lavish state funeral, attended by Hitler and most Party and State dignitaries. One observer noted:
[It] was the biggest Bayreuth had ever seen and far more ostentatious than Richard Wagner's. When all the guests had taken their places, for the funeral ceremony, Hitler arrived unexpectedly, and walked silently between the ranks of the raised arms. ... Hess delivered the main funeral oration, followed by Goebbels, Frick, Frank, Rosenberg, Himmler and many others. The ceremony concluded with the funeral march from the Twilight of the Gods.[2965]
In 1930, Thule Society member Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi Interior and Cultural minister of Thuringia and KdfK regional leader, named Hans Severus Ziegler (1893 – 1978) of the Schultze-Naumburg firm as director of the Weimar Architecture Institute. Ziegler, who was in Eisenach, was the son of a banker and, through his mother, the grandson of New York publisher Gustav Schirmer, who had promised to acquire Wagner’s texts for German immigrants in the United States.[2966] Ziegler grandmother, the American-born Mary Francis Schirmer, was a close friend of Cosima Wagner, through whom Ziegler was attracted to the militant nationalism and from an early age.[2967] Frick ordered artworks by “degenerate artists” to be removed from the Schlossmuseum in Weimar. These included works by Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Barlach, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, and Emil Nolde, although the latter was himself a Nazi. Works by modernist composers Stravinsky and Hindemith were removed from state-subsidized concert programs, and books by Erich Maria Remarque, and films by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and G.W. Pabst were banned.
Ziegler was a strong critic of atonal music, dismissing it as decadent “cultural Bolshevism.”[2968] In May 1938, he curated the Entartete Musik exhibition in Düsseldorf, where Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Walter Braunfels, Karol Rathaus and Wilhelm Grosz were amongst those who received the strongest condemnation. Whilst working under Frick, in Thuringia, Ziegler had also overseen the removal of works of modern art pieces museums and public buildings, and helped to bring about a crackdown on the “glorification of Negroidism” by restricting the performance of jazz music.[2969] After the war, Ziegler was politically active in Deutsches Kulturwerk Europäischen Geistes, where he became a regular guest of Winifred Wagner, who often hosted such other far-right personalities as Adolf von Thadden, Edda Göring, and Oswald Mosley.[2970]
Lion Feuchtwanger (1884 – 1958), one of the artists denounced by the Nazis, was a German Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht. His most successful work in this genre was Jud Süß (“Jew Sweet”), written 1921–1922, published 1925, which was well received internationally. The novel is the story of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, a German Jewish banker and court Jew for Charles Alexander, Duke of Württemberg in Stuttgart. Charles Alexander’s, Charles Eugene, Duke of Württemberg, was a patron of Friedrich Schiller. Charles Eugene’s sister, Duchess Auguste, married Karl Anselm of Thurn and Taxis, Head of the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis, whose preferred banker was Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild dynasty.
Nevertheless, in 1940, Goebbels commissioned Nazi film-maker Veit Harlan (1899 – 1964) to make film-version of Jud Süß, based in part on Feuchtwanger’s novel, which is considered one of the most antisemitic films of all time.[2971] In Feuchtwanger’s novel, it is Süss Oppenheimer’s daughter who is raped and killed by the Duke of Württemberg. In Harlan’s film, it is Süss who infiltrates and corrupts the gentile community, dupes the innocent Duke, and rapes a pure Christian woman, who drowns herself in shame. To the cries of “Kill the jew!” from the gathered crowd, Süss is hanged in the climactic scene.
The film starred Werner Krauss (1884 – 1959), who dominated the German theatre and cinema of the early twentieth century. Krauss initially gained minor and secondary roles like King Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. Committed to playing sinister roles, he became a worldwide sensation for his demonic portrayal of the titular character in Robert Wiene’s film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Considered a milestone of German Expressionist cinema, the film tells the story of an insane hypnotist, played by Krauss, who uses a mind-controlled somnambulist to commit murders. The script was written by two Jewish writers, Hans Janowitz (1890 – 1954) and Carl Mayer (1894 – 1944).
Mayer worked with Béla Balázs (1884 – 1949) on the script for Das Blaue Licht (“The Blue Light”), a 1932 film version of the witch Junta directed by Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. Balázs was a moving force in the Sonntagskreis (“Sunday Circle”), the intellectual discussion group which he founded in the autumn of 1915, together with the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács (1885 – 1971), who was an important influence on the Frankfurt School. Lukács befriended Thomas Mann who later based the character of the Jewish Jesuit Naphta on Lukács in his novel The Magic Mountain. Shortly after, in 1933, Mayer moved to London to escape the Nazi regime. Riefenstahl later removed Balázs’s and Mayer’s names from the film credits because they were Jewish.
Riefenstahl heard Hitler speak at a rally in 1932 and was mesmerized by his talent as a public speaker.[2972] Hitler was immediately captivated by the work Riefenstahl, who fit his ideal of Aryan womanhood, as he had noted when he saw her starring in Das Blaue Licht.[2973] However, rumors of an affair between Riefenstahl and Hitler, as well as allegations that she was of mixed Jewish-Polish descent, were circulated in German political circles as early as 1933, and even found their way into the international press, such as the French newspaper Paris-soir in September 1934.[2974] An article that appeared in October 1934 in Hayarden, the newspaper of the Revisionist movement in Palestine, noted that after 1933, Riefenstahl was appointed head of the UFA studio, not because of her professional qualifications. In 1927, Alfred Hugenberg (1865 – 1951), a leader of the DNVP who became Minister of the Economy and Minister of Agriculture and Nutrition in Hitler’s cabinet, purchased UFA and transferred ownership to the Nazi Party in 1933. According to Hayarden, “Until the ‘national awakening,’ she committed transgressions of racial disgrace with Jewish directors… and thanks to her special talents she quickly reached an agreement with the new masters.”[2975] Riefenstahl directed the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will (1935), distributed by UFA, and Olympia (1938), both widely considered two of the most effective and technically innovative propaganda films ever made.[2976] When Paris was occupied by the Nazis in June 1940, Paris-soir was the only newspaper to have its printing press, which was new and considered the best in Europe, handed over to the Germans right away.[2977]
Winifred was also close to Magda Goebbels. On September 22, 1933, at the instigation of Goebbels, the Reichskulturkammer (“Reich Chamber of Culture”) was passed into law, as part of the Gleichschaltung. Its vice-presidents included Walther Funk of the Reichsbank; Karl Hanke (1903 – 1945), the final Reichsführer of the SS; and Werner Naumann (1909 – 1982), who was State Secretary in Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. SS officer Hans Hinkel (1901 – 1960), who editor for the Berlin edition of the Völkischer Beobachter. In 1920, Hinkel joined the Freikorps Oberland, which had been formed by Sebottendorf and the Thule Society[2978], and took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Hinkel also became the Organisationsleiter (“Organizational Leader”) of Rosenberg’s Kampfbund, and was one of the officers in charge of the chamber and Goebbels’ special commissioner for the removal of Jews from German cultural life.
As Reichstheaterkammer (“Reich Theatre Chamber”), Goebbels chose Rainer Schlösser (1899 – 1945), who was Culture-Political Editor of the Völkischer Beobachter. Rainer’s father was a professor at the University of Jena who, in 1917, became the director of the Goethe-Schiller Archives at Weimar, where Rudolf Steiner worked for a time. Schlösser was a proponent of the Thingspiele, described as “multi-disciplinary outdoor theatre.” About forty outdoor theatres, usually modelled on those of ancient Greece, were developed during the Third Reich. Schlösser described the Thingspiele in a speech in 1934, as “a longing for a drama that intensifies historical events to create a mythical, universal, unambiguous reality beyond reality.” He added that “…only someone who understands this longing will be able to create the cultic popular drama of the future.”[2979] Schlösser’s view was encapsulated in his comments about von Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz:
The cultural-political goal of the Third Reich is not to focus upon bureaucratic power, but to create fervor in the service of Holy Art. Der Freischütz is a mirror of the soul.[2980]
Carl Froelich (1875 – 1953) headed the Reichsfilmkammer (“Reich Chamber of Film”) from 1939. In 1913, Froelich made his directorial debut with the silent film Richard Wagner. In 1929, Froelich made the first German sound film, Die Nacht gehört uns (“The Night Belongs To Us”). In 1931, Froelich was advisor, to Leontine Sagan’s famous boarding-school film and later lesbian classic, Mädchen in Uniform (“Girls in Uniform”). Some of Froelich’s best-known films included Ich für dich, du für mich (“I for You, You for Me”), for the Reich Propaganda Directorate of the Nazi Party in 1934, which promoted the concepts of blood and soil. Froelich headed the Reichsfilmkammer (“Reich Chamber of Film”) from 1939.
G.W. Pabst (1885 – 1967) began his career as a film director at the behest of Froelich, who hired Pabst as an assistant director. Pabst, who was one of the most influential German-language filmmakers during the Weimar Republic, developed a talent for “discovering” actresses, including Greta Garbo, Asta Nielsen, Louise Brooks, and Leni Riefenstahl. After the coming of sound, Pabst made a trilogy of films that secured his reputation: Westfront 1918 (1930), The Threepenny Opera (1931) based on the Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill musical, and Kameradschaft (1931). Under the auspices of Goebbels, Pabst made two films in Germany during this period: The Comedians (1941) and Paracelsus (1943), starring Werner Krauss as the medieval alchemist Paracelcus.
A silent film version Frank Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box in 1929 was directed by Pabst. Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box also formed the basis for the opera Lulu by Alban Berg (1885 – 1935) in 1935. Berg studied with Schoenberg and was a part of Vienna’s cultural elite during the heady fin de siècle period, which included Kraus, Loos, the musicians Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, the painter Gustav Klimt, and the poet Peter Altenberg. Adolf Loos was a widely-known critic of the Art Nouveau movement, and a friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein. During the summer of 1908, after Mathilde left him for several months for a young Austrian painter, Richard Gerstl, Schoenberg composed Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide (“You lean against a silver-willow”), the thirteenth song in the cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Op. 15, based on the collection of the same name by the German Stefan George, founder of the George-Kreis.[2981]
Berg’s opera tells the story of a mysterious “femme fatale” known as Lulu, who follows a downward spiral from a well-kept mistress in Vienna to a street prostitute in London. In 1935, as he was financially and artistically ruined by the Reichskulturkammer, which proscribed his work as “degenerate music” under the label Kulturbolschewismus (“Cultural Bolshevism”), Berg accepted a commission from Russian-born American violinist Louis Krasner, dedicated Manon Gropius, the deceased daughter of architect Walter Gropius (1883 – 1969), founder of the Bauhaus School, and Gustav Malhler’s widow Alma.[2982] A monument in honor of the workers who were killed in the wake of the Kapp Putsch was erected in the Weimar central cemetery according to plans submitted by Gropius. In 1936, the monument was destroyed by the Nazis, who considered it an example of “degenerate art.”
To head the Reichsmusikkammer (“Reich Chamber of Music”), Goebbels appointed Richard Strauss.[2983] Along with Werner Krauss, Richard Strauss was among the signatories of the Aufruf der Kulturschaffenden (“call to the artists”), a declaration by German artists printed in the Völkischer Beobachter on August 18, 1934, showing their support for the merger of the offices of President and Chancellor in the person of Hitler. In 1933, Krauss joined the Vienna Burgtheater ensemble to perform as Napoleon in 100 Tage (“Hundred Days”), a drama written by Giovacchino Forzano with Benito Mussolini, who supposedly advised him on how to play the part. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s foreign press chief at the time, was in charge of artistic supervision.[2984] Krauss also made the acquaintance of Goebbels, who appointed Vice President of the theatre department of Reichskulturkammer, where served from 1933 to 1935.[2985]
Some works of several of the artists to sign the Aufruf, like Ernst Barlach and Emil Nolde, were later condemned as degenerate. Another signatory was Hanns Johst (1890 – 1978), who had joined Rosenberg’s Kampfbund in 1928. It was in response to Johst’s play Der Einsame (“The Lonely”), a dramatization of the life of playwright Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801 – 1836), that Bertolt Brecht wrote his first play Baal, about a wastrel youth who becomes involved in several sexual affairs and at least one murder. Heinrich Heine saw Grabbe as one of Germany’s foremost dramatists, calling him “a drunken Shakespeare” and Freud described him as “an original and rather peculiar poet.”[2986] Succeeding Hans-Friedrich Blunck in 1935, Johst became the President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (“Reich Writers Chamber”). In the same year, Martin Buber was expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer. During the war, Johst held various positions within the SS, including on the personal staff of Himmler, which Thomas Mann stated was the reason that several charges of pedophilia and abuse of children were dropped against Johst in the winter of 1944.[2987]
Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (“Reich Chamber of Fine Arts”) was headed by Eugen Hönig (1873 – 1945). Through the pages of Völkischer Beobachter, Hönig, along with other German architects such as Alexander von Senger, Konrad Nonn, German Bestelmeyer and especially Paul Schultze-Naumburg, openly attacked the modern style of architecture, calling Bauhaus “the cathedral of Marxism.” Hönig was succeeded by Adolf Ziegler (1892 – 1959), who met Hitler in 1925 and became one of his advisors in artistic matters. In 1937, Ziegler painted the Judgement of Paris, a scene typically associated with alchemical symbolism.[2988] Hitler personally acquired the painting, hanging it in his Führerbau residence at Munich. Similarly Hitler later also hung Ziegler’s The Four Elements, over his fireplace.
Nevertheless, Strauss attempted to ignore Nazi bans on performances of works by Debussy, Mahler, and Felix Mendelssohn. And due to his influence, his Jewish daughter-in-law was placed under protected house arrest during the war, but despite extensive efforts he was unable to save dozens of his in-laws from being killed in Nazi concentration camps.[2989] Strauss famously defied the Nazi regime by refusing to sanction the removal of Stefan Zweig’s name from the program for the work’s première in 1935 in Dresden.[2990]
Strauss enjoyed a close association with Zweig, who collaborated with Theodor Herzl. Zweig provided the libretto for Strauss’ Die schweigsame Frau (“The Silent Woman”). Zweig had belonged to the same Young Vienna circle that frequented Café Griensteidl, including Mahler, von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Frederick Eckstein, the founder of the Theosophical Society of Vienna, and a friend of Freud and Franz Hartmann, member of the OTO and the List Society. Zweig had been a prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s, befriending Freud and Schnitzler, a member of the of the pan-German circle of Engelbert Pernerstorfer, and fellow student and friend of Herzl.[2991] Schnitzler’s works were called “Jewish filth” by Hitler and were banned by the Nazis in Austria and Germany. In 1933, when Goebbels organized book burnings in Berlin and other cities, Schnitzler’s works were thrown into flames along with those of other Jews, including Einstein, Marx, Kafka, Freud and Zweig.[2992]
The opening to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra became one of the best-known pieces of film music when Stanley Kubrick used it in his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though he was born Jewish, Kubrick, in 1958, married Christian Harlan, the niece of Veit Harlan, director of the anti-Semitic Jud Süß. Schnitzler’s Rhapsody, also published as Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”), later adapted as the film Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick. The book deals with the thoughts and psychological transformations of Doctor Fridolin over a two-day period after his wife confesses having had sexual fantasies involving another man. In this short time, he meets many people who give clues to the world Schnitzler creates. This culminates in the masquerade ball, an event of masked individualism, sex, and danger for Doctor Fridolin, the outsider. The first book edition appeared in 1926 in S. Fischer Verlag, founded in 1881 by Jewish publisher Samuel Fischer (1859 – 1934). Famous authors include Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann, both awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
Also in 1937, Ziegler organized Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst (“The Degenerate Art exhibition”) in Munich, which presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. The systematic dispossession of Jewish people and the transfer of their homes, businesses, artworks, financial assets, musical instruments, books, and even home furnishings to the Reich was an integral component of the Holocaust.[2993] Art dealers and profiteers like Hildebrand Gurlitt, Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller, and Bernhard Boehmer set themselves up in Schloss Niederschonhausen, just outside Berlin, to sell a cache of nearly 16,000 paintings and sculptures which Hitler and Göring removed from the of German museums in 1937–1938. They were first put on display in the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 1937, with the Nazi leaders inviting public of two million visitors to mock and condemn modern art in the Degenerate Art Exhibition, organized by Adolf Ziegler. On exhibit were the works of Paul Klee, Picasso, Mondrian, Chagall and Kandinsky. Goebbels in a radio broadcast called Germany’s degenerate artists “garbage.” Hitler opened the Haus der Kunst exhibition with a speech describing German art as suffering from “a great and fatal illness.”
After 1933, Ferdinand Möller (1882 - 1956), being neither Jewish nor among those identified by the party as an opponent of the government, remained a leading figure in the German arts world and was recruited in looting “degenerate art.” Many sources assert that he found opportunities to enrich himself while undertaking this assignment for the government.[2994] The grandmother of Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895 – 1956), however, was Jewish, which would prove problematic under Nazi rule, as he was considered a “quarter-Jew” under the Nuremberg laws.[2995] In 1923, Gurlitt married ballet dancer Helene Hanke who was trained under Mary Wigman.[2996] In 1936, Gurlitt was visited in Hamburg by modernist author Samuel Beckett.[2997] Gurlitt used his “officially sanctioned” status to also further enrich his own holdings, and became very wealthy from commissions paid by Hitler’s regime for artworks. Some of the works also went to swell Göring’s personal art collection.[2998]
Karl Buchholz (1901 – 1992) dealt in art looted by the Nazis, both from museums and from Jewish collectors. Buchholz worked with German-Jewish art dealer Curt Valentin (1902 – 1954), who was given special dispensation from Hitler and Göring to sell looted art in New York to help fund Nazi war efforts.[2999] Before working for Buchholz, Valentin worked Alfred Flechtheim (1878 – 1937), whose gallery in Berlin was “Aryanized.” The Nazis seized and sold off the contents of Flechtheim’s gallery as well as his private collection.[3000] In 1939, Valentin bid for art looted by the Nazis—including paintings that had been seized from Flechtheim—that was being auctioned at the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne on behalf of Valentin’s close friend Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902 – 1981) who provided money donated to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).[3001]
After studying at Harvard, Barr was a professor of art history at Wellesley College from 1926, where he offered the first-ever undergraduate course on modern art, “Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting.” In 1929, Anson Conger Goodyear (1877 – 1964), member of the Goodyear family and one of the founding members and first president of MoMA, acting on the recommendation of Paul J. Sachs (1878 – 1965), offered Barr the directorship of the newly founded museum. Goodyear was invited by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Lillie P. Bliss to help establish MoMA in 1929. Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield (1872 – 1947) to join him as founding trustees. Crowninshield is best known for developing and editing the magazine Vanity Fair, where he attracted those who are regarded as the best writers of the era, including Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The magazine was also the first periodical in the United States to print reproductions of works by artists such as Picasso and Matisse. Paul’s father, Samuel Sachs (1851 – 1935), was a partner of the investment firm Goldman Sachs, and his mother was the daughter of the firm’s founder, Marcus Goldman (1821 – 1904). Marcus’ older son, Julius Goldman, married Sarah Adler, daughter of Samuel Adler, the head rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, the leading Reform congregation in the United States. Adler was succeeded by Gustav Gottheil, father of Richard Gottheil, the founder of American Zionism.
In June 1942, Barr, who knew all about Valentin’s relationship with Buchholz and the Nazi regime, lied when he wrote in support of Valentin’s application for U.S. citizenship: “Mr. Valentin is a refugee from the Nazis both because of Jewish extraction and because of his affiliation with free art movements banned by Hitler. He came to this country in 1937, robbed by the Nazis of virtually all possessions and funds.”[3002] Barr at MoMA and Hilla Rebay at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting—the precursor of the Guggenheim Museum—bought artwork confiscated or stolen by the Nazis from Valentin, usually at below market prices, by German artists such as George Grosz and Paul Klee, which are still in the permanent collections of both MoMA and the Guggenheim. Valentin later told the FBI, which during the war investigated him for violating the Trading with the Enemy Act and seized paintings sent to him by Buchholz, that he had started his gallery with the help of both the banker E.M. Warburg, who was on MoMA’s board, and someone from Cassel & Co., a small investment firm.[3003]
Beginning in 1937, the Nazis had seized more than 17,000 works of art from German museums. After selecting the ones Hitler preferred, the Nazis piled up most of the remainder, about 4,000 works, in front of Berlin’s central fire station and burned them, on March 20, 1939. A further 700 of these artworks were given to art dealers to sell in order to raise foreign currency. One such sale of 126 paintings and sculptures took place at the Fischer Gallery, organized by Barr and Valentin. Barr secretly enlisted Valentin as his agent in the Fischer auction, with funds supplied by his trustees. In addition to works by Braque, Chagall, Gauguin, Klee, Matisse, Modigliani, and Mondrian, there were also works by the leading German and Austrian Expressionists. The day after the auction, Barr wrote to a MoMA colleague from Paris: “I am just as glad not to have the museum’s name or my own associated with the auction… I think it very important that our releases on our own German acquisitions should state that [the works] have been purchased from the Buchholz Gallery, New York.”[3004]
Several private collectors participated in the Fischer auction of 1939, including the Saint Louis publisher Joseph Pulitzer Jr. (1913 – 1993), grandson of the famous newsman Joseph Pulitzer, and the New York banker Maurice Wertheim (1886 – 1950), who would serve as president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in 1941–1943. In its early years, the AJC was led by lawyer Louis Marshall, Jacob H. Schiff, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, scholar Cyrus Adler, and other wealthy and politically connected Jews. Wertheim was married to Alma Morgenthau, the sister of Henry Morgenthau.
In January 1940, Hitler gave Rosenberg the task of looting Jewish and Masonic cultural treasures, including synagogues, libraries, and archives in western Europe. Georg Ebert, who was a member of Rosenberg’s Office of Foreign Affairs, discovered that the Grand Orient de France in Paris had been abandoned and personally guarded the building, with its library collection, museum and archives, until he could turn it over to the army. In 1940, an organization known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (“Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce”), or ERR, was formed by Rosenberg with the chief purpose of collecting Jewish and Freemasonic books and documents, either for destruction or for removal to Germany for further “study.” Between 1940 and 1945, the ERR operated in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, and on the territory of the Soviet Union in the Reichskommissariat Ostland and Reichskommissariat Ukraine.[3005]
In France, the Nazis took 50,000 books from the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 10,000 from L’Ecole Rabbinique, one of Paris’ most significant rabbinic seminaries, and 4,000 volumes from the Federation of Jewish Societies of France. They took a total of 20,000 books from the Lipschuetz Bookstore and another 28,000 from the Rothschild family’s personal collection. The Nazis moved on to the Netherlands where they would take millions more. They raided the house of Hans Furstenberg, a wealthy Jewish banker and stole his 16,000 volume collection. In Amsterdam, they took 25,000 volumes from the Bibliotheek van het Portugeesch Israelietisch Seminarium, 4,000 from Ashkenazic Beth ha-Midrasch Ets Haim, and 100,000 from Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. In 1943, Nazis came through Italy, and took every book from Rome’s central synagogue’s two libraries, one owned by the Italian Rabbinic College and the Jewish community Library.
With France part of the German-occupied territories, the ERR and Rosenberg now fell under Hermann Göring’s authority and control. Göring and Nazi dignitaries like Foreign Affairs minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, also took advantage of German military conquests to grow their private art collections. Almost immediately, the Nazis turned their attention to the Rothschild art collections, which were the largest and most valuable Jewish-owned art collections in Austria. After the Anschluß of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, when the Rothschild family was forced to flee and went into exile in England, Adolf Eichmann moved into the vacated Palais Albert Rothschild, a palatial residence in Vienna, and set up the infamous Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, to “organize” the emigration of Jews from Austria. The Palais Albert Rothschild, was one of five Palais Rothschild in the city that were owned by members of the Rothschild banking family of Austria, a branch of the international Rothschild family. Commissioned by Baron Albert von Rothschild (1844 – 1911), it was designed and built by the French architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur between 1876 and 1884.
Albert’s brother was Nathaniel Meyer von Rothschild, who had a homosexual relationship with Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, close friend of friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Theodor Herzl. In 1898, Eulenburg had summoned Herzl to Liebenberg to announce that Wilhelm II wanted to see a Jewish state established in Palestine. From 1868 to 1875, their brother Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839 – 1898), became Treasurer of the Jewish Board of Guardians and Warden of the Central Synagogue in 1870. In 1886, over the issue of Irish Home Rule, Ferdinand joined the Liberal Unionists and hosted meetings at Waddesdon Manor—where Joseph Chamberlain, Arthur Balfour and Lord Randolph Churchill were often guests—that led to the formation of the Conservative Party. Albert was forced to sign a document giving his consent to the art collection’s confiscation, plus the appropriation of all Rothschild assets in Austria by the German government, in exchange for his brother’s release from Dachau concentration camp and safe passage for them both out of Austria.
After the Anschluß, Albert’s son Baron Louis de Rothschild (1882 – 1955) was arrested and taken into custody by the Nazis because he was a distinguished member of the Jewish oligarchy. While in prison, he was visited by Heinrich Himmler. Louis apparently impressed the SS leader, who subsequently ordered that Louis’s prison conditions be improved.[3006] Louis was released only after lengthy negotiations between the family and the Nazis and upon payment of $21,000,000, believed to have been the largest ransom payment in history for any individual.[3007] Louis also signed away his rights to Vitkovice works, the Czech iron and steel company owned jointly by the Gutmanns of Vienna and the Rothschilds of Vienna and London. Reichswerke Hermann Göring, an industrial conglomerate established in Nazi Germany in 1937, forcibly absorbed ownership of Vítkovice in June 1939.[3008] At the request of Britain’s Queen Mary, the mother of the Duke of Windsor, Göring granted safe passage to Louis, whose brother Eugène Daniel von Rothschild, with his wife Kitty, were friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.[3009]
Late in 1940, Göring, who in fact controlled the ERR, had issued an order that effectively changed its mission, mandating it to seize “Jewish” art collections and other objects. Göring also commanded that the loot would first be divided between Hitler and himself. Hitler later ordered that all confiscated works of art were to be made directly available to him. Under Rosenberg and Göring’s leadership, the ERR seized 21,903 art objects from German-occupied countries.[3010] The treasures of Baron Louis von Rothschild, composed of paintings, statues, furniture, books, armor and coins, were all seized and removed from his house at Theresianumgasse, prior to the Gestapo commandeering the building as its Vienna headquarters. All of the Rothschild possessions were plundered and subsequently “Aryanised.”[3011] The city-palace of the family was destroyed after the war. The baron never received most of his former belongings back, since most of the paintings were taken over by the Austrian state, which did not allow the paintings to leave the country. In 1998, over 200 art works were returned to the Rothschild heirs by the Austrian Government, and were placed at Christie’s in London for auction in 1999.[3012]
In 1930, Theodor Lessing—a friend of Ludwig Klages of the Cosmic Circle, and who had studied under Edmund Husserl—published Der jüdische Selbsthaß, his classic on Jewish self-hatred, published in 1930 by Jüdische Verlag, the Zionist publisher established in 1901 by a group that included Chaim Weizmann and Martin Buber, shortly before the fifth Zionist Congress. Lessing, who dedicated several writings to Nietzsche’s philosophy, tried to understand the phenomenon using the Nietzschean concepts of Verinnerlichung (“internalization”) and ressentiment, a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon, frequently resulting in some form of self-abasement.[3013] In the book, written three years before Hitler came to power, Lessing tried to explain the phenomenon of Jewish intellectuals who incited anti-Semitism against the Jewish people and who regarded Judaism as the source of evil in the world. As examples of Jewish self-haters, Lessing listed Nietzsche’s friend Paul Rée, as well as Otto Weininger and Arthur Trebitsch, who were both admired by the founders of the Thule Society, which gave rise to the Nazis.
In “German-Jewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933-1938,” Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor Jacob Boas noted, “It was a fact that in the opening years of the Hitler regime, the Nazi leaders favored Zionists over non-Zionists, and Zionists themselves proclaimed that of all Jewish groups, only they could approach the Nazis in good faith, as ‘honest partners’.”[3014] By preferring the race-minded, emigration-focused Zionists to the “assimilationists,” whom they regarded as bent on destroying National Socialism, powerful Nazis like Heydrich backed Zionist attempts to gain ascendency over the Jewish community of Germany, echoing the official SS position that the activities of Zionists should be encouraged, at the expense of the non-Zionists who were to be discouraged.[3015] According to Heydrich:
We must separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation. The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own Jewish state… our good wishes and our official goodwill go with them.[3016]
Astounding is the fact that numerous Nazis were of Jewish origin—reflecting the anti-Semitic tendencies of the Frankists—even, by some accounts, Hitler himself. Such a claim was asserted in The Torquemada Principle (1976), by Jerrold Morgulas, where Reinhard Heydrich (1904 – 1942)—a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust—comes into possession of a confidential file named “Torquemada,” which hides the secret that Hitler had Jewish ancestry. The name “Torquemada” was in reference to Thomas of Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, who despite his own Jewish heritage, was responsible for the persecution of Jews. Likewise, the psychological torment of self-hatred that would have burdened Hitler produced the insanity that resulted in so many barbarities. The novel follows the efforts of a journalist, a historian, and a CIA agent to find the file and reveal the truth, while being pursued by ruthless enemies who want to destroy it.
According to Jean Robin, there are reports
that Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the racist theories of the Nazis,
known as Ariosophy, was also a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[3017]
As detailed by French historian Charles Novak, a number of Sabbateans
descendants were found in the Nazi army, including the families of von
Oppenfield, formerly Oppenheimer. As
Abraham Duker noted, given the extent of their assimilation into Christian
societies, “It is not by accident that the Nazi encyclopedia, Sigilla Vrei,
had nothing to say about the Frankists. Evidently the Nazi genealogists
preferred to leave them alone, fearful that such revelations might embarrass
many persons of importance.”[3018]
Mark Rigg, author of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, has revealed that a surprisingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or “partial-Jews” (Mischlinge) in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Numerous “exemptions” were made in order to allow a soldier to stay in the service or to spare his family or other relatives from incarceration or extermination. Hitler’s own signature can be found on many of these “exemption” orders. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was far higher than previously suspected, being perhaps as many as 150,000 Jewish men who served in the Nazi regime, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. Rigg noted two field marshals and two full generals, eight lieutenant generals, and five major generals were Jews or of partial Jewish descent.
Other Nazis with Sabbatean ancestry included general Erich von Manstein (1887 – 1973), whose original name was Manstein von Lewinski, as well as SS war criminal Ernst Biberstein, whose real name was Szymanowski.[3019] Manstein was a German commander of the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany’s armed forces during World War II, whose strategy Hitler chose for the invasion of France of May 1940. Biberstein, who was a defendant at the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg, gave testimony and prepared a paper that, along with his later memoirs, helped cultivate the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht,” the myth that the German armed forces were not culpable for the atrocities of the Holocaust.[3020] Biberstein was charged with having executed some two to three thousand people, many of whom were stripped of valuable articles, gassed, and left in a mass grave. Captain Ulrich Gunzert, shocked to have witnessed Einsatzgruppe D massacre a group of Jewish women and children, went to Manstein to ask him to do something to stop the killings. Gunzert states that Manstein told him to forget what he had seen and to concentrate on fighting the Red Army.[3021] Manstein believed that Bolshevism and Jews were inextricably linked, that there was a global conspiracy led by the Jews, and that in order to stop the spread of communism it was necessary to remove the Jews from European society. His order reads in part:
Jewish Bolshevik system must be wiped out
once and for all and should never again be allowed to invade our European
living space… It is the same Jewish class of beings who have done so much
damage to our own Fatherland by virtue of their activities against the nation
and civilisation, and who promote anti-German tendencies throughout the world,
and who will be the harbingers of revenge. Their extermination is a dictate of
our own survival.[3022]
Erhard Milch (1892 – 1972), the son of Jewish pharmacist Anton Milch, was a German field marshal who oversaw the development of the Luftwaffe as part of the re-armament of Nazi Germany following World War I.[3023] In 1935, an investigation that followed rumors that his father was a Jew was halted by Göring, who produced an affidavit by Milch’s mother that his true father was her uncle Karl Brauer, who admitted not only to adultery but also incest. Milch was then issued with a German Blood Certificate.[3024] After the war, Milch was convicted of responsibility for slave labor and fatal medical experiments during the Milch Trial at Nuremberg in 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment. The sentence was commuted by John J. McCloy, American High Commissioner of Germany, to 15 years of imprisonment in 1951.
Theodor Fritsch, among the founders of the Thule Society, was on the advisory board of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (“German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation”), the largest and the most active antisemitic federation in Germany after World War I, and an organization that formed a significant part of the völkisch movement during the Weimar Republic. The Trutzbund merged with Fritsch’s Reichshammerbund and with the Deutschvölkischer Bund, the organization that had succeeded the Deutschvölkische Partei. The Trutzbund’s publishing arm issued books that greatly influenced the opinions of Nazi Party leaders such Himmler.[3025] After the organization folded in around 1924, many of its members eventually joined the Nazis, among whom was Reinhard Heydrich—a secret Sabbatean, and author of the Final Solution.[3026]
Heydrich was described by Swiss diplomat and historian Carl Jacob Burckhardt was a “young, evil god of death,” after meeting him, and he was sometimes called by his subordinates, “the Blond Beast.” According to Hitler’s Biographer Joachim Fest:
Heydrich was actually a deeply split personality. This menacing figure with its apparently well-knit, compact inhumanity concealed a nervously irritable individual, subject to secret anxieties and continually plagued by tension, bitterness and self-hatred. His cynicism, the sign of complex weakness and vulnerability, alone betrayed what his elastic youthfulness concealed. His hardness and imperviousness were founded less in a tendency to sadistic brutality, as is popularly believed, than in the forced absence of conscience of a man who lived under continual constraint. For Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was besmirched by an indelible stain and in a melancholy state of ‘mortal sin’; he had Jewish ancestors.[3027]
Hitler described purported Heydrich as “the man with the iron heart.”[3028] He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks carried out by SA stormtroopers against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria in November, 1938. In March 1945, Hermann Schmitz, the Chief Executive Officer of I.G. Farben, told Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, “Germany will have a poor image problem this time. Much worse than after the First World War. It can all be placed on the doorsteps of Goering, Himmler, and Heydrich. Goering and Himmler thought up the Final Solution for the Jews, and Heydrich made it a fact.”[3029]
As reported by Israeli historian Shlomo Aronson, a legend circulated in Germany that Heydrich was of Sabbatean descent from his mother’s side.[3030] Heydrich was the son of a musician, opera singer and composer named Bruno Heydrich, who was passionate about Wagner. Bruno became director of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Dresden, one of whose backers was Major Freiherr von Eberstein, also a Wagner enthusiast. Eberstein became a friend of the family and godfather to the infant Reinhard. Two of Reinhard’s forenames were musical references: “Reinhard” referred to the hero from his father’s opera Amen, and “Tristan” stems from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Heydrich’s third name, “Eugen,” was his late maternal grandfather’s forename, Eugen Krantz (1844 – 1898), who had been the director of the Dresden Royal Conservatory, one of the oldest German conservatoires, established in 1856 after Francesco Morlacchi, Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner made reference to the necessity of establishing institutional training for musicians in Dresden. Weber was invited to write music for the Hamburg Temple, which was founded with the financial support of Judah Herz Beer, the father of his friend, Giacomo Meyerbeer.[3031]
Despite his love for the anti-Semitic Wagner, Bruno’s appearance and manner, as Peter Padfield explained, was “just what many of the good citizens of Halle took to be Jewish,” and even von Eberstein’s son Karl von Eberstein (1894 – 1979) described him as looking “really Jewish.”[3032] Additionally, Bruno was fond of mimicking an “Isidor,” as Jews were known. And when it was discovered that he sent money every month to a Frau Ernestine Süss, a Jewish name, the name taken by his mother when she remarried, suspicions grew. Bruno was referred to as the “Jud Süss.” Reinhard and his brother Heinz were taunted at school with “Isi! Isi!” Then in 1916, when the two boys were attending the Realgymnasium, an encyclopedia of music appeared in which the entry for their father was written as “Bruno Heydrich (really Süss).” Although Bruno managed to have the entry removed from subsequent editions, the rumors persisted.[3033]
Karl von Eberstein told Schlomo Aronson that as a schoolboy Reinhard had been “extremely völkisch,” had joined several völkisch groups and had developed into an “absolute race fanatic.”[3034] Apparently, Heydrich later told one of his crew comrades that, because his father was called a Jew, he himself had become especially active in anti-Semitic circles and it was soon said, “The old Heydrich cannot be a Jew if his Reinhard is such a rampant anti-Semite.”[3035] Heydrich’s former fellow officer, Hubertus von Wangenheim, told a relative who was working in the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters, about the rumors that had accompanied Heydrich’s time in the navy, and mentioned that Heydrich had been teased by his fellow officer cadets as a “white Jew” and “white Moses.”[3036]
Eberstein also joined the SS and was appointed to the staff of Heinrich Himmler. And when Heydrich joined the National Socialist Party in 1931, with von Eberstein’s help, he was able to obtain a meeting with Heinrich Himmler. Himmler received Heydrich and hired him as the chief of the new SS Intelligence Service, which would later become known as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), charged with seeking out and neutralizing resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and murders. Richard Evans argues that Heydrich “became perhaps more universally and cordially feared and disliked than any other leading figure in the Nazi regime” and had the qualities that Himmler needed: “Unsentimental, cold, efficient, power-hungry and utterly convinced that the end justified the means, he soon won Himmler over to his ambitious vision of the SS and its Security Service as the core of a comprehensive new system of policing and control.[3037] In 1933, Hermann Göring established the Gestapo. The following year, he decided to form an alliance with Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, appointing Himmler Inspector of the Secret State Police and Heydrich its commander. The whole police apparatus was then firmly in control of the SS.
As early as 1932, rumors were spread by
Heydrich’s enemies of his alleged Jewish ancestry. Admiral Canaris said he had
obtained photocopies proving Heydrich’s Jewish ancestry, though these
photocopies never surfaced.[3038]
Nazi Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan claimed Heydrich was not a pure Aryan.[3039]
Gregor Strasser passed the allegations on to the Nazi Party’s expert on racial
matters, Achim Gercke, who investigated Heydrich’s genealogy. Gercke finally
insisted that the rumors were baseless and reported that according to the Ahnenliste
(“Ancestry List”) provided, Heydrich was “…of German origin and free from any
colored and Jewish blood.”[3040]
Nevertheless, Heydrich privately engaged SD member Ernst Hoffmann to further
investigate and dispel the rumors.[3041] Hoffman later recalled Heydrich’s nervousness
at each of their meetings, a nervousness which seemed “understandable but
without foundation.”[3042]
However, as pointed out in Charles Wighton’s biography, Heydrich: Hitler’s Most Evil Henchman, the Ancestry List or chart enclosed with the report completely ignores the existence of Heydrich’s maternal grandmother and her ancestors. The chart showed that Heydrich’s mother was Elisabeth Maria Anna Amalie Krantz, daughter of Eugen Krantz, but omitted to mention his wife, which must have been a deliberate omission to protect Heydrich. From a study of the top secret Ahnenliste kept by Martin Bormann, which Wighton had been permitted to inspect in the closely guarded U.S. Document Centre in West Berlin, he concluded a yet more secret set of files containing information which could not be included in the normal Party archives must have been kept in Bormann’s panzerschrank (“armoured safe”), where the surname of the mysterious grandmother was listed as Mautsch. As Wighton concluded, “There can be little doubt that Martin Bormann held secret evidence that the maternal grandmother of Reinhard Heydrich was either Jewish or had at least Jewish blood.”[3043]
According to Walter Schellenberg (1910 –
1952), Heydrich’s former subordinate, who, towards the end of the war, largely
took Heydrich’s place in the Himmler establishment, Canaris—just after
Heydrich’s assassination in 1942—assured him that he possessed proof of
Heydrich’s Jewish ancestry.[3044]
Again, in 1940, a baker from Halle, Johannes Papst, himself a member of the
Nazi Party, was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for spreading further rumors
that Heydrich was a Jew, when Heydrich won an action against him. But the case
went to appeal, when the higher court was informed that all records relating to
the period of Heydrich’s birth in 1904—both in the civil registration office
and in the church books—had disappeared.[3045] After 1945, Wilhelm Höttl, a former SS
officer, maintained in his autobiographical book The Secret Front (1950)
that Heydrich ordered his agents to remove the gravestone of his “Jewish
grandmother.”[3046] According
to Felix Kersten, Himmler’s Finnish masseur, Himmler confirmed that he had known about Heydrich’s Jewish background ever
since their time together in the Munich police in 1933. Himmler revealed to Kersten
Hitler, too, had known about Heydrich’s ancestry.[3047]
In his preface to the Kersten
memoirs, published in English in 1947, Hugh Trevor-Roper confirmed “with
all the authority that I possess” that Heydrich was a Jew, a view supported by
eminent German historians such as Karl Dietrich Bracher and the Hitler
biographer Joachim Fest.[3048]
The basic elements of what was to become the official policy of Nazi Germany toward Zionism during the 1930s, in terms of both domestic Jewish policy and the Palestine question as an issue of strategic and foreign policy, is found in the early writings of Thule member Alfred Rosenberg. The basis of Rosenberg’s conspiracy theory was the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whereby the goal of the Zionists was not only the creation of Jewish state in Palestine, but a power base of a “Jewish Vatican,” from which to carry out their plans to subvert and dominate the rest of the world. Nevertheless, in Die Spur, published in 1920, Rosenberg concluded, “Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.” Rosenberg’s identification of the Zionists as the group among Jewish organizations in Germany with potential for cooperation with a future in impeding Jewish assimilation and promoting Jewish emigration was eventually transformed into policy by the Hitler regime after 1933.[3049]
As was outlined by Nicosia, the Nazis’ support of the Zionist cause was a continuation of decades of policy on the part of the German government towards the Jewish Question. The result of the conquest of Palestine was a shift in the locus of the Zionist movement from Germany and central Europe to London and the United States. The Zionist movement had become an instrument for the promotion of British, rather German, imperial interests. The press and public opinion in Germany, both Jewish and non-Jewish, began calling for German counter-response, as the impact of the Balfour Declaration on world Jewish opinion was recognized as a victory for the British. The German Foreign Office decided to press the Ottomans to also issue a declaration in favor of Zionist aims in Palestine, which they did on December 12. A similar statement was issued by the Austro-Hungarian government on November 21, and Germany followed with its own declaration on January 5, 1918.
In early in 1918, in an attempt to reverse the trend, the German Foreign Office created a special department for Jewish affairs under the Zionist Professor Moritz Sobemheim (1872 – 1933). In May 1918, as the government also encouraged German Zionists and their supporters in their efforts to set up a German equivalent to the British Palestine Committee, the Deutsches Pro-Palästina Komitee (“German Pro-Palestine Committee”), was established in Berlin. It stressed the political, economic and cultural advantages that Germany would reap in the strategically important Middle East and the importance of strengthening Jewish sympathy for Germany around the world. With the end of World War I, Germany’s defeat, the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of British power in Palestine, the prior alliance between the German government and German Zionism came to an end. The Pro-Palästina Komitee quickly disbanded,
In September, 1920, the German Foreign Office began to consider reviving active support for the German and international Zionist movements as a means of rebuilding German influence in Palestine. The small community of Palästinadeutsche, the German citizens of Palestine, along with a growing number of central and east European Jewish immigrants, who continued to be culturally oriented towards Germany, came to be viewed as useful instrument for promoting Germany’s promotion of political, economic and cultural interests. On May 8, 1922, its first policy statement on Palestine was issued to all German diplomatic missions abroad, which highlighted the strategic value gained by Britain in Palestine and throughout the Middle East, and the sympathy of the world’s fourteen million Jews that resulted from the Balfour Declaration.
Friedrich Naumann, the pro-Zionist member
of the Weimar National Assembly, had noted that the German cultural orientation
of European Jews promised an alliance with the German Templer Society, among the Palästinadeutsche, who came expressed support for the Nazi movement.[3050]
An American-German colony was founded in 1866 by American colonists from Maine,
which included Rolla Floyd—one of the founding members of the first Masonic
lodge in Israel, linked to the Quatuor Coronati (QC) and the Palestine
Exploration Fund (PEF)—but when that failed, it was resettled and became a
German Templer colony, which in time evolved into a mixed German Protestant
colony.[3051]
The Templers were founded by Christoph Hoffmann (1815 – 1885), who was inspired
by Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687 – 1752), who had belonged to Zinzendorf’s
Moravian Church.[3052]
Hoffmann believed that humanity’s salvation lay in the gathering of God’s
people in a Christian community. He also believed that the second coming of
Christ was imminent, and that according to biblical prophecy it would take
place in Jerusalem, where God’s people were to gather as a symbol of the
rebuilding of the temple. The German branch of the PEF, the German Association
for Palestine Exploration (Deutscher Verein zur Eiforschung Palästinas),
also known as the German Palestine Association (Deutscher Palästinaverein,
DPV), developed ties with the Templers, with the aim of reinforcing the
presence of a newly united Germany in the area.[3053]
When it joined the League of Nations in 1922, Germany became bound the British Mandate over Palestine, and was treaty-bound to support the implementation of the Balfour Declaration. To that end, the German government pursued its Palestine policy through the German Zionist movement. Seeking to generate greater popular support within Germany for its endorsement of the Zionist cause and the British Mandate, the German Foreign Office participated in the reestablishment of the Pro-Palästina Komitee in December, 1926, composed of prominent Jews and gentiles. Its first chairman was Count Johann von Bernstorff (1862 – 6 October 1939), a member of every German delegation to the League of Nations. The Pro-Palästina Komitee provided assistance to the German Foreign Office in cultivating friendly relations with the World Zionist Organization (WZO), giving support to several visits to Germany by Chaim Weizmann and other leaders of the during the 1920s. Membership in the organization continued to grow and by 1932, it had secured the active participation of 217 of the most prominent German citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish, including Konrad Adenauer (1876 – 1967), then Mayor of Cologne, who would eventually become the first chancellor of post-War Germany.
Article 4 of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws granted that, while Jews were forbidden to fly the Reich or national flag, they were, on the other hand, permitted to display the “Jewish colors,” the Zionist white and blue flag marked with the Star of David, a right to be protected by the state.[3054] The struggle for leadership of the Jewish community in Germany was between two camps: advocates of assimilation to the “German-Jewish way” of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbuerger juedischen Glaubens (“Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith,” or CV), against the “racial” conception of Jewry of the Zionitsische Vereinigung für Deutschland (“Zionist Federation of Germany” or ZVfD), favored by the Nazis. As German Jews were overwhelmingly non or anti-Zionist, the ZVfD believed that Hitler’s assumption of power would encourage a flow of immigrants to Palestine. The ranks of the ZVfD grew rapidly as Germans Jews flocked to the Zionist side, and encouraged by the pro-Zionist bent of Nazi Jewish policy, the ZVfD ultimately considered itself the legitimate representative for all German Jews. The Jüdische Rundschau, the official organ of the ZVfD, wrote on June 13, 1933:
Zionism recognizes the existence of the
Jewish question and wants to
solve it in a generous and constructive manner. For this purpose, it wants to enlist the aid of all peoples;
those who are friendly to the Jews
as well as those who are hostile to them, since according to its conception,
this is not a question of sentimentality, but one dealing with a real problem
in whose solution all peoples are interested.[3055]
From gaining power in 1933, until the outbreak of war in 1939, the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany was focused on intimidation, expropriating their money and property, and encouraging them to emigrate.[3056] British historian Christopher Sykes, referring to the Hitler’s election victory in 1932, noted “that the Zionist leaders were determined at the very outset of the Nazi disaster to reap political advantage from the tragedy.”[3057] Although they represented only a small minority of German Jews, German Zionists were vocal and politically active, and challenged the prevailing assumptions about assimilation, proposing that the Jews constituted a nation. They therefore advocated for a for a new understanding of the relationship between Western and Eastern European Jews. The Zionist proposed that a national movement would transform the Ostjuden into an equal partner with his western brother. Earlier critiques of assimilation glorified the Ostjuden as a more authentic representation of Jewish identity.[3058]
Nevertheless, Zionists never overcame the fundamental biases that existed against the Ostjuden. The difference was the Zionists wanted to “cure” the “sick” Ostjuden by removing them to the Promised Land, as Herzl explained it.[3059] “From this viewpoint,” explained Aschleim, “Zionism could also be understood as a kind of safety valve for bourgeois German Jewry, a convenient mechanism for removing from German territory the ubiquitous threat of invading masses of ‘Ostjude’.”[3060] As German Zionist Adolf Friedeman admitted in the Jüdische Rundschau, the official organ of the ZVfD:
West Europeans will mainly provide the
organisers for colonisation… naturally we are not about to initiate a mass
emigration of German, French, and English Jews.[3061]
According to Boas, “much of the idiom through which Zionism expressed its main ideas bore a striking, if superficial, resemblance to the völkisch ideas of the day.”[3062] The Zionists, though, were cognizant of these troubling parallels and went to great lengths to dissociate themselves from them. And yet, as Boas explains, the Zionists were impressed by the growing power of Nazi regime, and appropriated aspects of its style, ideas and rhetoric. An example was the Juedische Volkspartei, a party organized in 1919 by Zionist-oriented Jewish groups in Germany, who did not call for a Jewish state in Palestine, but who nevertheless viewed the Jews as a Volk (“people” or “ethnic group”) and advocated that the previously religious communities should transform into Volksgemeinde (“people’s community”). As Boas summarizes, “Nevertheless, at bottom it was this elemental consonance with currently popular völkisch modes of thought, in addition to the existence of Palestine as a potential haven, which enabled Zionists to gain the upper hand in the prolonged struggle for supremacy in the Jewish community.”[3063]
On March 1, 1933, the Nazi SA Storm Troopers occupied the central office of the CV and closed it, and five days later the CV in Thuringia was banned because of “high treasonous intrigues.” At the same time, the Nazis turned against other non-Zionist Jewish organizations, including the Reich League of Jewish Veterans and the Union of National German Jews. When, during a session of the Eighteenth Zionist Congress, on August 24, 1933, the condition of German Jews was to be discussed, the Congress Presidium moved to prevent the discussion. The fascists rewarded the Zionists for their “restraint” and allowed the ZVfD to proceed with their work unhindered. The Nazi’s nevertheless turned against other non-Zionist Jewish organizations.
After 1933, the Nazis permitted the Zionists to continue with their propaganda. While the newspapers published by the Communists or the Social Democratic Party or the trade unions and other progressive organizations were banned, the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau was allowed to appear. Winfried Martini, the then correspondent in Jerusalem of the Deutsche Ailgemeime Zeitung who, according to his own testimony, had “close personal ties with Zionism,” remarked later on the “paradoxical fact” that “of all papers, it was the Jewish press that for years retained a certain degree of freedom which was completely withheld from the non-Jewish press.”[3064] He added that, in the Jüdische Rundschau views critical of the Nazis were published without reprisals. Only after 1933 was a ban on selling the paper to non-Jews imposed. The freedom of activity for the Zionists included the publishing of books. Until 1938, many publishing houses, including the Jüdische Verlag and the Schochen-Verlag in Berlin were permitted to publish Zionist literature unhindered. Thus, the works of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Arthur Ruppin of Brit Shalom were allowed to appear.[3065]
During the early period of the Nazi domination in Germany, the Zionists held a direct line to its instruments of repression like the Gestapo and the SS. Before 1933, the Zionist official, Leo Plant, already “had a connection” with the head of the Gestapo Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Hermann Göring. Plant apparently even had the secret telephone number he could call Diels anytime.[3066] As Polkehn surmises, although the details of these contacts are kept secret at the Yad-Vashem archives in Jerusalem, “it is to be supposed that it was through these contacts that a meeting was arranged between the then Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring and the leaders of German Jewish organizations.”[3067] The meeting took place on March 26, 1933, and included Kurt Blumenfeld, the secretary general of the ZVfD. Blumenfeld opposed the Anti-Nazi boycott saying “The boycott harms German Jews first and foremost. The boycott has no favorable results for us.”[3068]
Blumenfeld was also a good friend of Martin Heidegger’s Jewish girlfriend Hannah Arendt. In 1929, Arendt married the Jewish philosopher Günther Stern, a fellow student of Heidegger, but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany. The ZVfD persuaded Arendt to use her access to the Prussian State Library to obtain evidence of the extent of antisemitism, for a planned speech to the Zionist Congress in Prague. As this research was illegal at the time, Arendt and her mother were arrested by the Gestapo. They were released served eight days and fled to Paris, where Arendt befriended Stern’s cousin, Walter Benjamin and also the Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron, who was a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Leo Strauss.[3069]
SS officials were even instructed to encourage the activities of the Zionists within the Jewish community, who were to be favored over the assimilationists, said to be the real danger to National Socialism. Even the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had referenced the Zionist flag and stated that the Jews were forbidden to display the Reich and national flag or the German national colors but were permitted to display the “Jewish colors,” the current flag of the state of Israel featuring the .[3070] Ernst Herzfeld also reports that in the last months of 1936 the Gestapo acted more leniently towards Zionists than towards “assimilationists.”[3071] The Israelitisches Familienblatt of March 21, 1935, cited authoritative Nazi sources urging favoritism towards pro-emigration groups like the Zionists.[3072] At its convention held in Berlin in May 1935, the ZVfD unanimously adopted a resolution which boldly proclaimed: “The Zionist movement in Germany demands the right to influence decisively the entire Jewish life in Germany.”[3073]
The most infamous case of Zionist collaboration with fascism came in the 1930s, when Chaim Arlosoroff—the former lover of Goebbels’ wife Magda—on behalf of Ben Gurion’s Mapai, negotiated the Haavara Agreement—also known as the Transfer Agreement—with the Nazis. The property and valuables of Jews who fled Nazi Germany were confiscated by the regime. But those who emigrated to Palestine could regain some of their lost wealth in the form of Nazi goods exported to Palestine. Arlosoroff was a protégée of Arthur Ruppin, who founded the Brit Shalom movement with Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. According to Etan Bloom, in Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture, Ruppin’s “friendly” meetings with the Nazi race theorist Hans F.K. Günther in 1933, were actually the preliminary discussions for the Transfer Agreement.[3074] They arrived at the common conclusion, as Günther put it, that as the German and Jewish races had their own particular moral and cultural standards, mutual understanding between them was impossible.[3075]
In the year following the Ruppin’s meeting with Günther, in their efforts to justify the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis published a pamphlet entitled Warum Arierparagraph? Ein Beitrag zur Judenfrage (“Why the Aryan law? A Contribution to the Jewish Question”), designed for mass distribution, which argued in favor of the beneficial effects of the “Aryan Law.” Schulz and Frercks, the literary agents who wrote the pamphlet, quoted Ruppin extensively. In 1934, Ruppin wrote in Jews in the Modern World:
Such an attempt at a peaceful settlement of the problem would have been possible if [...] Jews [...] had recognized that their peculiar position among the Germans was bound to lead to conflicts which had their origin in the nature of man, and could not be removed by arguments and reason. Had both sides realized that the present position was due, not to bad will, but to circumstances which had arisen independently of the will of either side, it would have been unnecessary to attempt the solution of the Jewish problem in an orgy of unbridled hatred.[3076]
Like Ruppin, Arlosoroff was also a close friend of Chaim Weizmann. He went on to become a noted leader of Labor Zionism or socialist Zionism, the left-wing of the Zionist movement. Arlosoroff’s ideas attracted another Zionist thinker, A.D. Gordon (1856 – 1922). In The Founding Myths of Israel, Ze’ev Sternhell contends that Gordon was a proto-fascistic figure who, “in his rejection of the materialism of socialism, employed the classic terminology of romantic, völkisch nationalism.”[3077] Sternhell argues that the ideologues of Labour Zionism realized early on that the two objectives were irreconcilable, and that the pursuit of egalitarianism was really only ever a “mobilising myth,” in the sense of George Sorel, “a convenient alibi that sometimes permitted the [Zionist] movement to avoid grappling with the contradiction between socialism and nationalism.”[3078]
1930, Arlosoroff was influential in unifying the two major Zionist socialist political parties, the Poale Zion and the Hapoel Hatzair (Young Worker). The Poale Zion Party had a left wing and a right wing. In 1919, the right wing, including David Ben-Gurion, founded Ahdut HaAvoda. In 1930 Ahdut HaAvoda and Hapoel Hatzair fused into the Mapai party, which included all of mainstream Labor Zionism. Through the Mapai’s political influence, Arlosoroff received election as a member of the Zionist Executive at the 1931 Zionist Congress. By the early 1930s, David Ben-Gurion had taken over the party, and had become de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine (known as the Yishuv). It was a member of the Labour and Socialist International between 1930 and 1940.
In addition, Arlosoroff was named Political Director of the Jewish Agency for Palestine—established in 1929 as the operative branch of the World Zionist Organization (WZO)—a prominent position which he filled until his 1933 assassination, just two days after his return from negotiations in Germany. Despite intense investigation and much controversy, Arlosoroff’s murder was never solved. One theory is that it was Goebbels who had him killed. Arlosoroff had begun to view Magda as his conduit to Goebbels to secure a transfer deal, but his former relationship with Magda proved to be an embarrassment to Goebbels. Mapai was also responsible for the founding of Hashomer and Haganah, the first two armed Jewish groups which secured the people and property of the new and emerging Jewish communities.[3079]
News of the Transfer Agreement produced an uproar of criticism at the Eighteenth Zionist Congress in Prague. Samuel Untermyer hypocritically complained: “It is simply inconceivable that we should ever become parties to such an unholy compact.”[3080] However, after deliberations, the conference voted on September 3, 1933, not only to adopt the agreement, but to abandon its idea of an organized, world-wide boycott of German goods, to avoid risking devaluing the Reichsmark that would have led to a reduction of Palestine’s purchasing power.[3081] The Jewish conference in London in 1933, to weaken or defeat any boycott resolution, was torpedoed from Tel Aviv because Ruppin, in close contact with the consulate in Jerusalem, sent cables to London:
Our main function here is to prevent, from Palestine, the unification of world Jewry on a basis hostile to Germany […]. It can damage the political and economic strength of Jewry by sowing dissension in its ranks.[3082]
As explained by Etan Bloom, “The Transfer Agreement is considered as being a crucial step toward the establishment of the State of Israel and the improvement of its social structure—a fact fully recognized by the Nazis themselves.”[3083] A December 1937 internal memorandum by the German Interior Ministry reviewed the effect of the Transfer Agreement:
There is no doubt that the Transfer Agreement arrangement has contributed most significantly to the very rapid development of Palestine since 1933. The Agreement provided not only the largest source of money, but also the most intelligent group of immigrants, and finally it brought to the country the machines and industrial products essential for development.[3084]
The Zionists also rejected attempts to save the German Jews which did not have as their aim the settlement of the Jews in Palestine. When in 1933 a number of countries refused to take in Jewish refugees from Germany, the President Roosevelt called for a world conference on refugees to convene in the Swiss town of Evian, between June 6-15, 1938. The conference failed when the participants refused to take in Jewish refugees. Instead of raising objections, the Zionist leaders tabled a motion at the beginning of the conference calling for the admission of 1.2 million Jews into Palestine. They were not interested in other solutions and, as Christopher Sykes later commented: “'They looked on the whole thing with indifferent hostility from the very beginning… the truth of the matter was that what was being attempted in Evian in no way conformed with the idea of Zionism.”[3085]
In support of the emigration to Palestine for the Haavara agreement, the Zionists established their own Palestine Shipping Company, which bought the German passenger ship “Hohenstein,” formerly the former the Polynesia owned by the Hamburg-Amerika Line. The ship was renamed the “Tel Aviv” and sent to Palestine at the beginning of 1935, while flying the swastika. The captain of the ship, Leidig, was a registered member of the Nazi Party. Hitler, as is seen in a memorandum of the Political Trade Department of the Foreign Office, dated January 27, 1938, decided that the Haavara procedure should be maintained, despite the risk of losing the support of the Arabs against the British.[3086]
The absorption of the transferred Jews was handled by a special department directed by Ruppin, with special programs and a construction company that planned settlements and neighborhoods in accordance with their particular needs. Between 1933 and 1941, approximately 50,000 German Jews immigrated to Palestine as a result of the Transfer Agreement, comprising about ten percent of Germany’s 1933 Jewish population. By 1939, the German Jewish immigrants made up about 15% of Palestine’s Jewish population. Many of them transferred considerable personal wealth and were recognized by the Zionist immigration authorities as valuable Menschenmaterial (“human resources”). Approximately 60% of all capital invested in Palestine between 1933 and 1939 was channeled through the agreement.[3087] The SS also cooperated with the Haganah and secretly supplied weapons to THE Jewish settlers for use in their clashes with Palestinian Arabs.[3088]
In the spring of 1933, the ZVfD commissioned Kurt Tuchler, a member of the Juedische Volkspartei on the Berlin Executive, to appeal to Nazis sympathetic for the Jewish enterprise in Palestine. Tuchler managed to recruit SS officer Baron Leopold von Mildenstein (1902 – 1968), who worked in the headquarters of the SD, in charge of the Jewish Desk, with the title of Judenreferat (Office for Jewish Affairs), under the overall command of Heydrich.[3089] Later that spring, the two men, accompanied by their wives, embarked on a trip to Palestine. Upon his return, the Baron persuaded the editors of Goebbels’ newspaper Der Angriff to carry a story titled “A Nazi travels to Palestine,” which positively presented Zionist colonization of Palestine. To commemorate the voyage, Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side and the Zionist Star of David on the other.[3090] Mildenstein remained in Palestine for a total of six months before returning to Germany as an ardent supporter of Zionism, and even began to study Hebrew.[3091]
On his return to Berlin, Mildenstein’s suggestion that the solution to the Jewish problem lay in mass migration to Palestine was accepted by his superiors within the SS. From August 1934 to June 1936, Mildenstein worked in the headquarters of the SD, in Section II/112, in charge of the Jewish Desk, with the title of Judenreferat, under the overall command of Heydrich.[3092] The Judenreferat was in charge of Nazi policy towards the Jews until 1938, as formulated in the official organ of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps: “The time may not be far distant when Palestine once again receives the sons whom it lost a thousand years ago. Our wishes along with the good will of the state accompany them.”[3093] In the summer of 1935, Mildenstein, then holding the rank of SS-Untersturmführer, attended the 19th Congress of the Zionist Organization in Lucerne, Switzerland, as an observer attached to the German Jewish delegation.[3094]
Though the Zionist leaders who had “discreetly advised” Mildenstein during his trip to Palestine continued their contacts with the SS and SD, few details are known about these contacts, as the records are highly classified.[3095] One of the few documents available is a memorandum by Professor Franz Six, dated June 17, 1937, which bears the classification “Secret Matter for the Command,” containing information about a visit to Berlin of Feivel Polkes, a commander of the Haganah. SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert Hagen, who succeeded Mildenstein as director of the Judenreferat, claimed in his papers that Polkes held the “leadership of the whole self-defense apparatus of the Palestinian Jews.”[3096] Polkes stayed in Berlin from February 26 to March 2, 1937, holding several meetings with SD agents representing the Nazi regime, two of whom were with SS-Hauptscharfuhrcr Adolf Eichmann, who had by then taken up work at the Judenreferat.
Eichmann was sent to observe the Twentieth Zionist Congress in 1937.[3097] Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party in 1932. Eichmann was accepted into the SD in 1934 and assigned to the sub-office on Freemasons, organizing seized ritual objects for a proposed museum and creating a card index of German Freemasons and Masonic organizations. He prepared an anti-Masonic exhibition, which proved to be extremely popular. Visitors included Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Baron Leopold von Mildenstein.[3098] Mildenstein invited Eichmann to join the Judenreferat at its Berlin headquarters.[3099] Eichmann was assigned to study and prepare reports on the Zionist movement and various Jewish organizations. He even learned a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish, gaining a reputation as a specialist in Zionist and Jewish matters.[3100] Eichmann was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer (head squad leader) in 1936 and was commissioned as an SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) the following year.
According to a report discovered by the CIA, by Dr. Franz Reichert, then a representative of the German news agency in Jerusalem of the DNB, the official central press agency of the Third Reich, was one of the principal agents of Eichmann, and Polkes one of his sub-agents. Eichmann’s agents included Gentz, the DNB representative in Cairo, responsible for monitoring development of the “Jewish State”; Siegfried Levit, a Czechoslovakian Jew who worked for the Gestapo; Gustav Doerr, a Romanian who reported on “the development of the Jewish Question”; Hans D. Ziegra, president of the New York Overseas Corporation involved in financing mass emigration of Jews from Germany, and who had established contact with the he Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), an organization under Heinrich Himmler; Heinrich Schlie, who had contacts with Croatians and supported illegal emigrations of Jews; and von Bolschwing, a Nazi Party member in Berlin who reported on Jewish emigration from Germany. [3101]
Polkes offered to collaborate with the German regime telling Eichmann that he was interested above all in “accelerating Jewish immigration to Palestine, so that the Jews would attain a majority over the Arabs in his country. For this purpose, he worked together with the secret services of England and France and he also wanted to cooperate with Hitler's Germany.”[3102] The SS immediately provided Polkes with the instructions put forth by Six: “Pressure is being exerted on the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany in order to compel Jews emigrating from Germany to head only to Palestine and not to any other country.” Six added: “Such a measure lies entirely in the German interest and it is already being put into effect by the Gestapo.”[3103]
Polkes invited Eichmann to visit the Jewish colonies in Palestine. However, rather than admit that Eichmann, the notorious murderer of the Jews was at one time invited as a guest of the Haganah, Zionist writers reversed the blame and claimed that the purpose of Eichmann’s trip was to contact the Palestinian rebels, or even to conspire with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, also known as “Hitler’s Mufti.” The inventor of this myth was the well-known Zionist, Simon Wiesenthal.[3104] A travel report found in SS-chief Heinrich Himmler’s secret archives reveal that Eiehmann and Hagen left Berlin on September 26, 1937, in the guise of editors of the Berliner Tageblatt. arriving in Haifa on October 2, 1937, on the ship Romania. As the British authorities refused them entry, they went on to Egypt where they met not with Al Husseini but with Polkes. Polkes then praised the results of the anti-Semitic terror in Germany: “Nationalist Jewish circles expressed their great joy over the radical German policy towards the Jews, as this policy would increase the Jewish population in Palestine, so that one can reckon with a Jewish majority in Palestine over the Arabs in the foreseeable future.”[3105]
Following the trip of Eichmann and Hagen, the collaboration between Nazis and Zionists was cemented by the “Mossad Alivah Beth,” which had been created by the Haganah as an illegal immigration organization, after Britain had banned Jewish immigration to Palestine as a result of the Peel paper. At the end of 1937, emissaries of the Mossad, Pina Ginsburg and Moshe Auerbach, travelled to Germany with the permission of the Nazi authorities in Berlin. Ginsburg, who introduced himself to the Gestapo as emissary of the “Union of Communal Settlements,” declared that he was on a special mission to organize the emigration of German Jews to Palestine, a task that confirmed with the intentions of the Nazi government, and that only with the support of the Nazi leaders could such a project be carried out on a large scale. The Gestapo had then discussed with Ginsburg “how to promote and expand illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine against the will of the British mandate government.”[3106]
In Nazi-occupied Vienna, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established and placed under Eichmann’s charge. In the early summer of 1938, again in Vienna, Eichmann had met another emissary of the Mossad, Bar-Gilead, who requested permission to establish training camps for emigrants to prepare them for their work in Palestine. After passing on this request to the Nazi headquarters in Berlin, Eichmann granted permission and supplied all the requirements for the establishment of training camps. By the end of that year, around a thousand young Jews had been trained in these camps. Likewise, Ginsburg in Berlin was able, again with the help of the Nazi authorities, to establish similar training camps.[3107]
Ben-Gurion abhorred the Revisionist Movement’s founder and leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, calling him “Vladimir Hitler,” in a People’s Meeting in Tel Aviv.[3108] As noted by Klaus Polkehn, in “The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941,” for the Journal of Palestine Studies, while the majority group in the Zionist movement, like the Labour Zionists, carefully camouflaged their contacts with the Nazis, and spoke out publicly against them, the right wing of Zionism, the Revisionists, had openly expressed their admiration on many occasions before 1933 for people like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.[3109] In a trial held in Jerusalem in 1932 when the lawyer Cohen, a member of the Revisionist party, declared in defending the perpetrators of outrages in the university: “Yes, we entertain great respect for Hitler. Hitler has saved Germany. Without him it would have perished four years ago. And we would have gone along with Hitler if he had only given up his anti-Semitism.”[3110] For a time, Mussolini had supported the Revisionists and permitted them to establish a school for training navy soldiers in Italy. In 1932, Jabotinsky made the proposal that the mandate over Palestine should be handed to Italy because Mussolini would be more amenable to furthering the cause of the Jewish state than the British.[3111]
With World War II looming, British policies in Palestine were influenced by a desire to win Arab world support and could ill afford to engage with another Arab uprising. The MacDonald White Paper of May 1939 declared that it was “not part of [the British government’s] policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State,” sought to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine and restricted Arab land sales to Jews. However, the League of Nations commission held that the White Paper was in conflict with the terms of the Mandate as put forth in the past. The outbreak of the Second World War suspended any further deliberations. The Jewish Agency hoped to persuade the British to restore Jewish immigration rights, and cooperated with the British in the war against Fascism. Aliyah Bet was organized to help Jews escape out of Nazi controlled Europe, despite the British prohibitions. However, the White Paper also led to the formation of Lehi, a small Jewish organization which opposed the British.
Later, Revisionist groups independent of Jabotinsky’s direction conducted campaigns of Zionist political violence against the British to drive them out of Mandatory Palestine to establish a Jewish state. The Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias, remained cooperative with the British. But the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization, NMO) and Lehi, two small, dissident militias of the right-wing Revisionist movement which split from the Haganah, launched a rebellion against British rule in 1944, ending the hiatus in operations it had begun in 1940. IZL, Irgun Zva’i Leumi, is the Hebrew army, the “army of freedom and royalty,” implying that it shall be the one to establish the “Kingdom of Israel.”[3112] Lehi, often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, was founded in August 1940 by Avraham Stern, a former member of the Irgun. In a pamphlet entitled 18 Principles of Rebirth, Stern noted the need to “solve the problem” of the “alien population” and called for the “conquest” of Palestine. It also emphasized the need to gather the Jewish Diaspora into a new sovereign state, revive the Hebrew language as a spoken language, and build a Third Temple as a symbol of the “new era.”[3113] Stern’s overriding desire was to establish the Third Temple at the centre of the restored Kingdom of Israel.[3114]
The Irgun were among the
Zionist groups labelled as terrorist organizations by the British authorities, the
United Nations, and United States governments, and in media such as The New
York Times.[3115]
During the later stages of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Mandatory Palestine, the
Irgun conducted a campaign of violence against Palestinian Arab civilians
resulting in the deaths of at least 250. The group also killed a number of Jews
it deemed guilty of “treason.”[3116]
Lehi openly declared its members as “terrorists.”[3117]
An article titled “Terror” in the Lehi underground newspaper He Khazit (The Front)
argued as follows:
Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: “Ye shall blot them out to the last man.”[3118]
Some
writers have stated that Lehi’s true goals were the creation of a totalitarian
state.[3119]
“The main features of their ideology,” explains
Heller, “were historical determinism, social Darwinism, militarism, corporatism
and imperialism, xenophobia, ‘sacred egoism’, suppression of opposition,
subordination of the individual to the state, anti-liberalism, a denial of
democracy and an internally centralised regime.”[3120]
Perlinger
and Weinberg write that the organization’s ideology placed “its world view in
the quasi-fascist radical Right, which is characterized by xenophobia, a
national egotism that completely subordinates the individual to the needs of
the nation, anti-liberalism, total denial of democracy and a highly centralised
government.”[3121]
Perliger and Weinberg state that most Lehi members were admirers of the Italian
Fascist movement.[3122]
According to Kaplan and Penslar, Lehi’s ideology was a mix of fascist and
communist thought combined with racism and universalism.[3123]
In mid-1940, Stern became convinced that the Italians were interested in the
establishment of a fascist Jewish state in Palestine. He conducted
negotiations, he thought, with the Italians via an intermediary Moshe Rotstein,
and drew up a document that became known as the “Jerusalem Agreement.” In
exchange for Italy’s recognition of, and aid in obtaining, Jewish sovereignty
over Palestine, Stern promised that Zionism would come under the aegis of
Italian fascism, with Haifa as its base, and the Old City of Jerusalem under
Vatican control, except for the Jewish quarter.[3124]
Believing
that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice
attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis, proposing a Jewish state based on
“nationalist and totalitarian principles, and linked to the German Reich by an
alliance.”[3125]
Britain’s betrayal of Zionism disqualified her from
being an ally. England was the real “enemy,” Germany a mere “persecutor.”[3126]
The Irgun
and Stern Gang, later called Lehi, attacked police
and government targets but intentionally avoided
military ones, to ensure that they would not hinder the British war
effort against the Nazis. Stern defined
the British Mandate as “foreign rule” regardless of British policies and took a
radical position against such imperialism even if it were to be benevolent.[3127]
On January 11, 1941, a year and a half after the outbreak of the war, at a time when the massacre of Jews in occupied Poland had already begun, the Lehi proposed a formal military pact with the Nazi Third Reich. The offer, which is contained in a report known as the Ankara document, which is still kept in a locked archive in Britain, tells of contacts the Naval attaché at the German Embassy in Turkey had with emissaries of the Irgun. The offer states:
The indirect participation of the Israeli
freedom movement in the drawing
up of the New Order in Europe, already in its preparatory stage,
would be connected with a positively radical solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with
the above-mentioned national
aspirations of the Jewish people. This would strengthen to an uncommon degree the moral basis of the
New Order in the eyes of
the entire world.
The cooperation of the Israeli freedom movement would also be in line with one of the recent speeches of the German Reich Chancellor in which Herr Hitler stressed that any combination and any alliance would be entered into in order to isolate England and defeat it.[3128]
According to Joseph Heller, “The memorandum arising from their conversation is an entirely authentic document, on which the stamp of the ‘IZL in Israel’ is clearly embossed.”[3129] Stern offered “active participation in the war on the German side. On the condition that the aforementioned aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognised.” Within the framework of co-operation, Stern hoped he could recruit 40,000 men for the conquest of Eretz Israel. Stern emphasised that the “moral” effect of the participation of “the Jewish liberation movement in the New Order… would strengthen its moral foundations in the eyes of all humanity.”[3130]
Even as the full scale of Nazi atrocities became more evident in 1943, Lehi refused to accept Hitler as the main foe, as opposed to Britain.[3131] After Stern’s death in 1942, the new leadership of Lehi began to move towards support for Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and the ideology of National Bolshevism, which was considered an amalgam of both right and left.[3132] Regarding themselves as “revolutionary Socialists,” the new Lehi developed a highly original ideology combining an “almost mystical” belief in Greater Israel with support for the Arab liberation struggle.[3133] According to Yaacov Shavit, professor at the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University, articles in Lehi publications contained references to a Jewish “master race,” contrasting the Jews with Arabs who were seen as a “nation of slaves.”[3134] Lehi advocated mass expulsion of all Arabs from Palestine and Transjordan, or even their physical annihilation.[3135]
The lrgun began embarking on terrorist raids against British institutions in the Near East. The leader of the Irgun from 1943 to 1948 was Menachem Begin (1913 – 1992), a disciple of Jabotinsky and future Prime Minister of Israel. Irgun’s most notorious bombing of the British administrative headquarters for Palestine, which was housed in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on the July 22, 1946. Ben-Gurion had agreed that the Haganah could cooperate with Begin’s Irgun in fighting the British, who continued to restrict Jewish immigration. Ben-Gurion initially agreed to Begin’s plan to carry out the King David Hotel bombing, with the intent of embarrassing the British military stationed there rather than killing them. However, when the risks of mass killing became apparent, Ben-Gurion told Begin to call the operation off. Begin refused, and carried out the attack as planned.[3136] A total of 91 people of various nationalities were killed and 46 were injured. It was characterized as one of the “most lethal terrorist incidents of the twentieth century.”[3137] In April of 1948, Lehi and the Irgun were jointly responsible for the massacre in Deir Yassin of at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children. Lehi assassinated Lord Moyne, British Minister Resident in the Middle East, and made many other attacks on the British in Palestine.
The same suspect collaboration that took place between the leaders of the German Conservative Revolution, and the George-Kreis, the Frankfurt School, the Modernists of the Avant-Garde and the transgressors around Georges Bataille, extended to the Synarchist and pro-Nazi regime that ruled France during World War II, known as Vichy, many of whose participants would later contribute to the founding the European Union after the War. Vichy was established after the Third French Republic—the system of government adopted in France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War—declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, after the German invasion of Poland. The Germans launched their invasion of France on May 10, 1940. Within days, it became clear that French military forces were overwhelmed and that collapse was imminent. Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856 – 1951) signed the Armistice of 22 June 1940, which divided France into occupied and unoccupied zones. Northern and western France, that encompassed all English Channel and Atlantic Ocean, was occupied by Germany, and the remaining southern portion of the country came under the control of the French government with the capital at Vichy under Pétain, a General who was viewed as a national hero in France because of his outstanding military leadership in World War I. Officially independent, it adopted a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
In July, a report was submitted by Henri Chavin, at the time the Director of Sûreté nationale, to the French Minister of the Interior, which presented the synarchist conspiracy as an attempt by international capitalism to “subject the economies of different countries to a single, undemocratic control exercised by high banking groups.”[3138] According to the Chavin Report, the leadership of the Vichy regime derived secretly from the Mouvement Synarchique d’Empire (MSE), founded by Pétain’s friend Jean Coutrot (1895 – 1941), as a direct successor of Papus’ Martinist Order.[3139] According to the Chavin Report, Coutrot, an engineer educated at the École Polytechnique, who had been associated with Action française,[3140] travelled several times to England in 1938 and 1939 to meet with Aldous Huxley, who is described as “pro-national-socialist.”[3141]
The goal of the synarchists is the creation of a united Europe, as part of the fulfilment of the vision advanced by Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, a call for which appears on the first page of his first book on synarchy, Keys to the East. Coutrot’s MSE was a direct successor of Papus’ Martinist Order. Papus’ death in 1916 had resulted in a schism in the Martinist Order over its involvement in politics. After Papus’ death, Charles Détré (1855 – 1918), known simply as Téder briefly led the Martinist Order, as well as the French section of the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm and the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and from 1916 to 1918 he was the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the Swedenborgian Rite of France, which had been taken up by Papus on the fringes of his Martinist Order.[3142]
It was Téder’s friend Jean Bricaud (1881 – 1934) who succeeded him at the head of the Martinist Order, moving its headquarters from Paris to Lyon. Under Bricaud, who also became Grand Master of Memphis-Misraïm, and President of the International Occultist Society, a hybrid form of Martinism was developed, which included Martinism, Elus Cohen, the Gnostic Church, and the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry. Bricaud was also Patriarch of l'Église Gnostique Universelle (“Universal Gnostic Church”), which he founded with Papus in 1907, as a schematic branch of the Gnostic Church of Jules Doinel.[3143]
In 1908, at International Masonic and Spiritualist Conference in Paris, organized by Papus, Victor Blanchard (1873 – 1953), Téder and others, Papus was chartered by Reuss to establish a “Supreme Grand Council of the Unified Rites of Antient and Primitive Masonry for the Grand Orient of France and its Dependencies at Paris.” The constituting letters of Patent were sent to Berlin by John Yarker. Papus apparently granted Reuss episcopal and primatial authority in the Église Catholique Gnostique, which Reuss translated into German as Die Gnostische Katholische Kirche. In his publication of Crowley’s Gnostic Mass in 1917, Reuss referred to Bricaud as the Sovereign Patriarch of the EGU, and himself as Legate for Switzerland and Sovereign Patriarch and Primate of Die Gnostische Katolische Kirche (GKK), his German branch of the church. Bricaud and Reuss then revealed their idea of introducing Crowley’s Gnostic Mass as a Gnostic religion for the 18° of the Scottish Rite, at the Zurich Masonic Congress in 1920. This, however, only led to the final rupture between the OTO and Freemasonry.[3144]
In 1918, Bricaud consecrated Blanchard, had been secretary to Papus and Détré, and a member of Papus’ Supreme Council, as bishop of l'Église Gnostique Universelle, which had become the official church of the Martinist Order. Blanchard. Many Martinists left the Ordre Martiniste de Lyons, some of them joining Blanchard, who also claimed to be the legitimate successor of Papus as head of the Martinist Order, but who rejected the Masonic requirements, and in 1920 founded his own Ordre Martiniste et Synarchique (OMS). The official church of the OMS was the Église Gnostique Universelle, also known as L’Église Gnostique Apostolique (“Gnostic Apostolic Church”). The activists within the OMS established the Synarchic Central Committee in 1922, designed to pull in promising young civil servants and “younger members of great business families.”[3145]
Blanchard was the Grand Master of the Brotherhood Polaires, which included Maria Naglowska and Julius Evola. In 1929, the Brotherhood Polaires received an order from the “The Oracle of the Astral Force,” a channel to the “Rosicrucian Initiatic Centre of Mysterious Asia,” to found La Fraternite des Polaires, de Thule en Shamballah (Brotherhood Polaires, of Thule in Shambhala”). Between the two world wars, the Polaires brought together a number of French occultists, such as René Guénon, Jeanne Canudo, Jean Chaboseau, Fernand Divoire, and the alchemist Eugène Canseliet, and Paul Le Cour. Jean Chaboseau (1903 – 1978), the son and successor of Augustin Chaboseau who co-founded the Martinist Order with Papus, was the author of Tarot: Interpretive Essay Based on the Principles of Hermeticism. Fernand D’ivoire (1883 – 1940) was the author of Pourquoi je crois en l’occultisme (“Why I Believe in Occultism”) and maintained links with the Thule Society.
Le Cour (1871 – 1954) belonged to the Hiéron du Val d’Or, which believed that Christianity originated in Atlantis, and was the “universal tradition” sought by occultists. Le Cour created the organization Atlantis to continue the work of the Hiéron after the demise of the order. Also an astrologer, in 1927, Le Cour created the association and the journal Atlantis, and in 1937, he published The Age of Aquarius, which is considered to be one of the precursor texts of the “New Age” movement.[3146]
Also involved in Le Cour’s Atlantis association was alchemist Eugène Canseliet, a member of the Brotherhood Polaires. Several students of Canseliet were members of the “Guénonian” Thébah Masonic lodge and associated with André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement.[3147] According to Le Cour, Canseliet was none other than Fulcanelli, whose most well-known book is Le Mystère des Cathédrales (“The Mystery of the Cathedrals”), which aim to decipher the alchemical symbolism of several Templar constructions, such as Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, Amiens Cathedral, the Lallemant Hotel in Bourges, the Obelisk of Villeneuve-le-Comte.[3148] Fulcanelli and his group of students would become known as Les Frères d’Héliopolis (“the Brotherhood of Heliopolis”).
Péladan and Maurice Magre (1877 – 1941)—a leading member of the Polaires—were major influences on Otto Rahn (1904 – 1939), whose research would result in his best-selling book Crusade Against the Grail. Also associated with the George-Kreis, Rahn was in the employ of the Ahnenerbe, founded in 1935 by Herman Wirth and Heinrich Himmler, for the purpose of conducting research around the globe for the lost heritage of the Aryan race, including the Holy Grail, a quest made popular in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies. Rahn’s first publisher later described him as a student of and George-Kreis member and Stefan George’s lover, Goebbels’ professor, Friedrich Gundolf.[3149]
In 1937, le Cour was to be an inspiration for Pierre Plantard’s Priory of Sion hoax through his involvement in the Hiéron du Val d’Or.[3150] As a student, Plantard had been a follower of Eugene Deloncle (1890 – 1944), founder of right-wing terrorist gang the CSAR (Secret Committee for Revolutionary Action), known as the Cagoule, a breakaway group of the Action Française, created by Coutrot’s MSE.[3151] Deloncle even likened its recruiting procedures to the ‘chain method’ of the Illuminati.”[3152] The Chicago Tribune’s correspondent in Paris, William Shirer, summed up the Cagoule as “deliberately terrorist, resorting to murder and dynamiting, and its aim was to overthrow the Republic and set up an authoritarian régime on the model of the Fascist state of Mussolini.”[3153]
Plantard’s endeavors resulted in the
formation of the group Alpha Galates, a pseudo-chivalric order known to
have been in existence as early as 1934.
An important member of Alpha
Galates, George Monti was initiated into the Kabbalistic Order of the
Rose-Croix (OKR+C) by Joséphin Péladan, and then into Martinism by Papus. Monti
was also connected to Leon Daudet, son of Alphonse Daudet, who together with Charles
Maurras was the leader of Action Française.[3154]
Among the many societies Monti joined was the Holy Vehm, the German revival of
the order of the same name.[3155]
Monti was then initiated into the OTO by Aleister Crowley. The two shared
similar contacts with the superiors of several German lodges that had been
involved with bringing the Nazi regime to power. Monti worked as a spy in World
War I, then for the Nazis, British Intelligence as well as for the Second
Bureau of the French Intelligence Service.[3156]
All but two of the purported Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion are also found on lists of alleged “Imperators” and “distinguished members” of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), which shared extensive links with the synarchists and the Brotherhood Polaires.[3157] AMORC was founded in 1915 in New York by Harvey Spencer Lewis (1883 – 1939), borrowed heavily from Theosophy, the Golden Dawn and the OTO. Reuben Swinburne Clymer, who headed the rival Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, claimed Lewis was aiming to transform AMORC into a cult of black magic, under the dominion of Aleister Crowley, whom he acknowledges to be his Secret Chief, and of largely plagiarizing OTO materials.[3158] Along with Lewis, Blanchard and Émile Dantinne (1884 – 1969), a member of Joséphin Péladan’s Order of the Temple and the Grail and of the Catholic Order of the Rose-Croix, would become of the three Imperators of Universal Federation of Initiatic Orders and Societies (FUDOSI).
The Synarchic Central Committee became the Mouvement Synarchique d'Empire (MSE) in 1930, with the aim of abolishing parliamentarianism and replacing it with synarchy, and was headed by Coutrot.[3159] While the leadership of the MSE remained a secret, the names of two of the authors the Synarchist Pact were revealed: Vivien Postel du Mas and Jean Coutrot.[3160] Both du Mas and his associate Jeanne Canudo belonged to the Brotherhood of the Polaires.[3161] Postel du Mas was also a member of the French Theosophical Society, and around 1936, founded the Theosophical branch Kurukshétra based on ideas of the pro-German right.[3162] It is this branch that supposedly gave birth in 1937 to the MSE.[3163]
Postel du Mas was also involved a group called Les Veilleurs (“the Watchers”) founded by a French occultist René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz (1887 – 1961) who was also a student of Theosophy and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s synarchy.[3164] Despite being born of a Jewish mother, de Lubicz along with other members of the Theosophical Society broke away to form an occult right-wing and anti-Semitic organization, which he called Les Veilleurs, to which the young Rudolf Hess also belonged.[3165] Some have argued it was possible that Hess borrowed ideas from the Watchers which he could have introduced to the Thule Society. As Joscelyn Godwin points out, there’s even a phonetic link between “Thule” and the name of the Watchers’ inner circle, “Tala.”[3166]
French historian Annie Lacroix-Riz has identified Hypolite Worms (1889 – 1962), and Jacques Barnaud (1893 – 1962), the director of Banque Worms, and original founders of the MSE.[3167] After the Banque de France, Banque Worms was the second most powerful bank in the country. Banque Worms was founded in 1928 by Hypolite Worms as a division of Worms & Cie, which founded by his grandfather in 1910. The Worms banking dynasty were one of sixteen Jewish families that belonged to the haute bourgeoisie d’affaires, including Oppenheim and Dupont.[3168] There was also a Worms branch of the Rothschilds, after Charlotte Jeanette Rothschild, the daughter of the dynasty’s founder, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, married Benedikt Moses Worms (1801 – 1882).
The activities of the synarchists were also exposed in the French collaborationist daily L’Appel. According to L’Appel, the synarchists had connections in Britain and in the United States, especially with the American DuPont and Ford interests. Irenee du Pont (1876 – 1963), president of the DuPont company and the most imposing and powerful member of the dynasty, was an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini. Despite the fact that he had Jewish blood, he advocated a race of supermen to be achieved through eugenics policies. By 1915, Du Pont had begun to absorb General Motors. The du Pont company, and particularly GM, was a major contributor to Nazi military effort. Du Pont’s GM and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey collaborated with IG Farben, the Nazi chemical cartel, to form Ethyl GmbH.[3169]
According to the newspaper, the synarchists had access to the American embassy in Vichy, then headed by Admiral William D. Leahy, a close friend President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[3170] Banks such as Rothschild, Lazard, Banque d’Indochine or Banque Worms financed many fascinating small groups in the inter-war period.[3171] Michael Sordet, in “The Secret League of Monopoly Capitalism,” published in the scholarly Swiss review, Schweiner Annalen, describes the synarchist movement in Europe as “The representatives of international high finance,” who helped bring fascism to power in Germany and who contributed to the defeat of France and the rise of the Vichy regime of Pétain.[3172]
The MSE’s leaders were mainly executives of Banque Worms and members of Opus Dei involved in the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis. Several researchers have suggested that the Hiéron du Val d’Or was the precursor of the Opus Dei, the group made infamous by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.[3173] Among them is Jean-Pierre Bayard, a recognized scholar of Rosicrucianism, who regards Opus Dei among the organizations that “could claim to belong [to Rosicrucianism] but which however do not seem to take advantage of this.”[3174]
The Third French Republic—the
system of government adopted in France from 1870, when the Second French Empire
collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War—declared war on Germany on September
3, 1939, after the German invasion of Poland. The Germans launched their
invasion of France on May 10, 1940. Within days, it became clear that French
military forces were overwhelmed, and that collapse was imminent. Pétain signed
the Armistice of 22 June 1940, which divided France into occupied and
unoccupied zones. Northern and western France, that encompassed all English
Channel and Atlantic Ocean, was occupied by Germany, and the remaining southern
portion of the country came under the control of the French government with the
capital at Vichy under Pétain, a General who was viewed as a national hero in France because of his outstanding military
leadership in World War I. Officially independent, it adopted a
policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
According to the Chavin Report, Coutrot had founded several groups as synarchist fronts, allegedly for the purpose of recruiting members of the MSE, including the Center for the Study of Human Problems (CSHP), X-Crise, the Comité national de l’organisation française (CNOF), Centre national de l’organization scientifique du travail (COST), the Groupements non-conformistes, and the Institute for Applied Psychology. In 1936, Huxley and Coutrot had founded the CSHP, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.[3175] The CSHP met for the first time in Pontigny, where the Synarchist Paul Desjardins held his Pontigny Decades.[3176] According to the Chavin Report, the CSHP was one of several synarchist fronts, which were all set up for the purpose of recruiting members to the MSE, of which Coutrot was the leader.[3177] Also affiliated with the CSHP was Huxley’s friend and fellow Fabian, H.G. Wells, and the controversial Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955), who was a close friend of Aldous Huxley’s brother Julian. The coining of the term transhumanism is erroneously attributed to Julian Huxley, in a 1957 article. However, as pointed out by Olivier Dard and Alexandre Moatti, the first to use the term was Jean Coutrot in 1939, the during the Decades of Pontigny, which he helped organize, and based on his promotion of the fascist doctrine of the “New Man.”[3178]
A central part of the non-conformist movement, Ordre Nouveau was founded in 1933 by French-Jewish philosopher Alexandre Marc (1904 – 2000). The Ordre Nouveau journal was founded by French-Jewish historian Robert Aron (1898 – 1975), an upper-class Jewish family from eastern France, and Arnaud Dandieu (1897 – 1933). Their work together included Décadence de la Nation Française (1931), Le Cancer Américain (1931) and La Révolution Nécessaire (1933), which constituted the principal theoretical base Ordre Nouveau, which with Esprit represented one of the most original expressions of the Nonconformist Movement. Dandieu was a friend of de Rougemont and Georges Bataille, who were all colleagues at the Bibliothèque Nationale.[3179] In their infamous 1933 “Letter to Hitler,” the Ordre Nouveau welcomed the way the Nazis had overturned the liberal political order and capitalism, but denounced their idolization of the state and racism.[3180] Charles de Gaulle was also associated with Ordre Nouveau between the end of 1934 and the beginning of 1935.[3181]
Along with de Rougemont, Marc belonged to the Sohlberg Circle (Sohlbergkreis), which played an important role in building the circle of collaborators in France. Sohlberg was founded in 1931, at the Black Forest town of Sohlberg, by Otto Abetz (1903 – 1958), a member of the SS, who was in charge of the Nazi Party’s relations with French intellectual circles before becoming ambassador of the Reich.[3182] As a member of the Hitler Youth, Abetz became a close friend of Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would serve as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945.[3183] Abetz was also associated with groups such as the Black Front, a political group formed by Otto Strasser after he resigned from the Nazi Party in 1930.[3184] Abetz pledged his support for the Nazi party in 1931. In Paris, Abetz joined Masonic lodge Goethe in 1939.[3185]
Alexandre Marc, disciple of Husserl and Heidegger, was born in 1904 as Alexandr Markovitch Lipiansky in Odessa, Russian Empire, to a Jewish family, but later converted to Catholic Christianity. As shown by Martin Mauthner, author of Otto Abetz and His Paris Acolytes, many of Abetz’s chief protegees in Paris had Jewish family ties. Jules Romains (1885 – 1972), a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement, who was accommodated by the German government at the Hotel Adlon when he gave a talk in Berlin in 1934, had a Jewish wife. Fernand de Brinon (1885 –1947), the first French journalist to interview Hitler, was married to Lisette, a Jewish woman converted to Catholicism. He became friends with von Ribbentrop. Another journalist, Jean Luchaire (1901 – 1946), had an actively anti-Nazi Jewish stepmother, Antonina Vallentin, born Silberstein. The political thinker, Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903 – 1987), who wrote flattering interview with Hitler in 1936, had a Jewish mother.
That same year, de Jouvenel joined the Parti Populaire Français (PPF), generally regarded as the most collaborationist party of France.[3186] The PPF was founded by Jacques Doriot (1898 – 1945) and a number of fellow former members of the French Communist Party (PCF), who had moved towards nationalism in opposition to the Front populaire (“Popular Front”), an alliance of left-wing movements and the socialist French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) during the interwar period. The Popular Front won the 1936 elections, leading to the formation of a government headed by SFIO leader, the French Jew Leon Blum (1872 – 1950), and exclusively composed of republican and SFIO ministers. Another member of Ordre Nouveau, in addition to Coutrot and de Rougemont, was Charles Spinasse (1893 – 1979), a deputy of SFIO and a member of Coutrot’s X-Crise. Following the victory of the Popular Front in 1936, Coutrot was invited to head COST, which was created by an official decree signed by Blum and Spinasse, who became Minister of National Economy.[3187] According to the Chavin Report, Coutrot became an intimate adviser to Spinasse, and then took the opportunity to introduce the greatest number possible of members of the MSE into the government.[3188]
After the French defeat in the Battle of France in 1940, and the establishment of Pétain’s Vichy regime, the U.S. State Department placed the PPF on a list of organizations under the direct control of the Nazi regime.[3189] Doriot was part of the Légion des Volontaires Français, a French volunteer force fighting alongside the Germans on the eastern front. The LVF originated as an initiative by a coalition of far-right factions including Doriot’s PPF, the National Popular Rally (RNP) of Marcel Déat, Pierre Costantini’s French League, and Eugène Deloncle’s Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR), the successor organization of La Cagoule. The MSR supported the idea of the Nazis’ New Order in Europe in the belief that France could become a great power again alongside the Third Reich.[3190]
In 1943, Doriot met with John Amery (1912 – 1945), the son of Round Table member and among the authors of the Balfour Declaration, Leo Amery, and inspired him to create the British Free Corps (BFC) a unit of the Waffen-SS. Amery and Doriot first met in France in 1936, and travelled together to Austria, Italy, and Germany. Amery joined Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, where he worked for Franco as a liaison with French synarchist Cagoule and gun-runner.[3191] After he settled in France, Amery travelled to Berlin in 1942, and proposed to the Nazis the formation of the BFC to help fight the Bolsheviks. Hitler was impressed by Amery and allowed him to remain in Germany as a guest. Leading members of the BFC later became known among the renegades as the “Big Six.” Thomas Haller Cooper, a former member of the British Union of Fascists, was also promoted to SS-Unterscharfuhrer in 1941. It has been stated that “the circumstantial case is compelling” that Cooper was involved in the Holocaust.[3192] After being captured, New Zealand soldier Roy Courlander claimed that Hitler told BFC members that if Britain was defeated, the Duke of Windsor would replace George VI on the throne and Oswald Mosley would become the Prime Minister.[3193] Amery was charged with high treason by the British and was hanged seven months after the war ended.
During the trial of Marshall Pétain in 1945, questions were asked about his connection with the Synarchist Pact.[3194] L'Appel, which recorded the announcement of Coutrot’s mysterious death in 1941, revealed that most of the ministers and generals in the Vichy regime belonged to the MSE.[3195] Also closely associated was Admiral François Darlan (1881 – 1942), a major figure of the Vichy regime in France during World War II, who became its deputy leader for a time. Accusations arose that synarchists had engineered the military defeat of France for the profit of Banque Worms, a division of Worms & Cie.[3196] According to former OSS officer William Langer, as reported in Our Vichy Gamble:
Darlan’s henchmen were not confined to the fleet. His policy of collaboration with Germany could count on more than enough eager supporters among French industrial and banking interests—in short, among those who even before the war, had turned to Nazi Germany and had looked to Hitler as the savior of Europe from Communism… These people were as good fascists as any in Europe. Many of them had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of ‘Synarchy,’ which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists.[3197]
The Chavin Report accuses the MSE of laying the groundwork for the eventual seizure of power by the Cagoule, who by blackmail helped accelerate the military defeat of 1940 that put Petain in power. Under Petain, the MSE controlled the entire Ministry of the National Economy and Finance. The aim was to design financial agreements between the French and German people in order to unite the oil, textile, mining and other big industries, in such a way that their interests lead them to put fair pressure on their government so that the Judeo-American interests were fully protected. The command was given to seek a series of agreements with German firms like IG Farben and Dupont, to create solidarity with German industry leaders, all strongly structured and designed with the aim of joining the American groups at the end of the war. The negotiations were held in the occupied zone in Lyon and in Basel, with the leaders of IG Farben and an attaché from the American Embassy in Vichy, which at the time was headed by Admiral Leahy.[3198]
According
to Charles Higham, author of Trading with the Enemy, Banque Worms was an
important component of The Fraternity involved in financing the Nazis, through connections
that linked the Paris branch of Chase to Schröder and Standard Oil of New Jersey
in France. On May 23, 1940, two weeks after the Nazis
occupied France, as reported by Paul Manning, in his detailing of Bormann’s Aktion
Adlerflug (“Operation Eagle Flight”), all French banks were brought under
the supervision of the German banking administration. In the years prior to the
war the German industrialists and bankers had established close ties with their
counterparts in France. Following the occupation, they agreed to the
establishment of German subsidiary firms in France and permitted the
acquisition of equity stakes in French companies. In Paris the usual direct
penetration took place by shareowner control of such as the Banque de Paris
et des Pays-Bas, Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie (now
Banque Nationale de Paris), and Banque de l’Indo Chine (now Banque de
l’Indo Chine et de Suez Group), and most importantly, Worms et Cie. (now
Banque Worms Group). [3199]
Standard Oil’s
Paris representatives were directors of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas,
which had intricate connections to the Nazis and to Chase.[3200]
After the fall of Paris, Banque Worms “Aryanized”
its entire board of Jewish executives. The head of the German subsidiary of Worms et Cie was Alexander
Kreuter (1886 –1977), an influential German business lawyer and banker during the
Nazi occupation of France. Kreuter was a member of the General SS, working in the Nazi foreign
intelligence service headed by Walter Schellenberg.[3201] Kreuter was connected to Dillon, Read, the
Jewish banking firm that had helped finance Hitler until 1934 and with whom
Allen Dulles was involved. According to Charles Higham, “Kreuter’s activities
with the Americans are obscure, he belonged to a joint American-French- British
business group in Vichy and ran so close to the wind with Hitler that he was
arrested on suspicion of espionage for America, and only Schellenberg’s personal
guarantee of his bona fides secured his release.”[3202]
During his time in Vichy, Darlan brought a whole clique of Banque Worms into the government. After the outbreak of World War II, Hypolite Worms was placed in charge of the French delegation to the Franco-English Maritime Transport Executive in London. The key leaders of the MSE involved in the regime included Paul Baudoin, Jacques Gudrard, Jacques Barnaud, and Jacques Benoit-Mechin. Another MSE member included Paul Reynaud, who after the outbreak of World War II had become the penultimate Prime Minister of the Third Republic in March 1940. In the last months before France’s capitulation, Paul Baudoin, a major member of Opus Dei, a director of the Banque d’Indo-Chine and a friend of Mussolini, became right-hand adviser to Reynaud. Jacques Gudrard was a banker who held the post of Ambassador to Lisbon under the Vichy regime. An important Cagoule member was Joseph Darnand (1897 – 1945), who later founded the Service d’ordre légionnaire (SOL), the forerunner of the Milice, the Collaborationist paramilitary of the Vichy regime, who fought the French Resistance and enforced anti-Semitic policies. Darnand took an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler after accepting a Waffen SS rank.[3203] One of the three managing directors of Banque Worms, MSE member Jacques Barnaud, a favorite with Göring, was responsible for handing over to the Germans the major French chemical industries headed by the Francolor trust.[3204] William D. Leahy, the United States ambassador to France reported to his friend Franklin D. Roosevelt that French industrialist and MSE member François Lehideux was part of a group of strongly pro-Nazi figures that Pétain had surrounded himself with.[3205] Darlan also brought in Pierre Pucheu (1899 – 1944), former member of the PPF and director of several companies of the Worms, who became Secretary of State for Industrial Production and then for the Interior in Vichy.
In 1939, France expelled Abetz as a Nazi agent. However, in 1940, following the German occupation of France, Abetz was assigned by von Ribbentrop to the embassy in Paris, as the official representative of the German Government with the honorary rank of SS-Standartenführer.[3206] According to Charles Higham, author of Trading With The Enemy, Abetz and the German Embassy poured millions of francs into various French companies that were collaborating with the Nazis. On August 13, 1942, 5.5 million francs were passed through in one day to help finance the military government and the Gestapo High Command. This money helped to pay for radio propaganda and a campaign of terror against the French people, including beatings, torture, and brutal murder. Abetz paid 250,000 francs a month to fascist editors and publishers in order to run their vicious anti-Semitic newspapers. He supported Déat’s RNP and Deloncle’s MSR, which liquidated anti-Nazi cells in Paris. In addition, Abetz used embassy funds to trade in Jewish art treasures, including tapestries, paintings, and ornaments, for the benefit of Hermann Göring, who wanted to get his hands on every French artifact possible.[3207]
Despite Hitler’s hesitations and against the opposition of Himmler and Goebbels, Abetz was convinced the French could be won over to the idea of collaboration and the acceptance of their own subservience to a German world order. During several meetings with Hitler, Abetz argued that it was in the interest of Germany to implement a strategy of Divide and Rule to reduce France to the status of a “satellite state” with a “permanent weakening” of its position in Europe. Abetz claimed that “the French masses” already admired Hitler and that, with the right propaganda, it would be easy to lead them blame their misfortunes on the various scapegoats: politicians, Freemasons, Jews, the Church and others who were “responsible for the war.” The French elite and intelligentsia could be won by exposing them to German culture and especially by emphasizing “the European idea.” In Abetz’s words: “In exactly the same way as the idea of peace was usurped by National Socialist Germany and served to weaken French morale, without undermining the German fighting spirit, the European idea could be usurped by the Reich without harming the aspiration to continental primacy embedded by National Socialism in the German people.”[3208]
From his German Embassy in Paris, Abetz then maneuvered three of his French publicist friends, Jean Luchaire, Fernand de Brinon, Drieu la Rochelle (1893 – 1945), into key positions, from where they could praise Nazi achievements and denounce the Resistance.[3209] Like Alexis Carrel, other intellectuals who are often viewed as fascists, notably de Jouvenel and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, were members of the PPF at various times.[3210] Drieu, who was also married to a Jewish woman and working with Abetz, was an admirer of England and also a friend of Aldous Huxley. Drieu was editor of the collaborationist journal Nouvelle Revue Française, whose founders, including André Gide, were closely associated with the Decades of Pontigny, to which belonged Jean Coutrot’s CSHP. Drieu sat on the governing committee of the Groupe Collaboration, established in September 1940, whose headquarters were in Paris, although the Groupe was permitted to organize in both Vichy France and the occupied zone. The initiative had the support of Abetz and was at least partially supported financially by the Nazi government.[3211]
Through the ambassador to Bucharest, Paul
Morand, Benoist-Méchin met with Ernst Jünger, who was assigned to an
administrative position as intelligence officer and mail censor in Paris.[3212] Jacques Benoist-Méchin (1901 – 1983), like Pierre
Drieu la Rochelle, had been a member of Otto Abetz’s Sohlberg Circle. Benoist-Méchin,
a French journalist and historian who served as an
undersecretary in Darlan’s cabinet, was also a friend of James Joyce and
attempted to translate Ulysses. Benoist-Méchin also developed a close
friendship with Oswald Mosley who lived in France after the war.[3213]
According to Eliot Neaman, in his foreword to Jünger’s A German Officer in
Occupied Paris, as a well-known author, Jünger was welcomed in the best
salons in Paris, where he met with intellectuals and artists across the
political spectrum. A
number of conservative Parisian intellectuals greeted the Nazi occupation,
including the dramatist Sasha Guitry and the writers Robert Brasillach, Marcel
Jouhandeau, Henry de Montherlant, Paul Morand, Drieu la Rochelle, Paul
Léutaud and French surrealist artist Jean Cocteau.[3214]
Jünger frequented the Thursday salon
of Paris editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Marie-Louise Bousquet (1885 – 1975),
who was married to the playwright Jacques Bousquet. She
is credited with being one of the first to recognize the potential of Christian
Dior in 1938.[3215]
In 1918, the Bousquets launched a salon from their Paris apartment which, every
Thursday, which were frequented by Pablo Picasso and Aldous Huxley, as well as Drieu la Rochelle and Henry
de Montherlant. Another of Jünger’s key contacts in
Paris was the salon of Florence Gould, where he fraternized with Georges
Braque, Picasso, Sacha Guitry, Julien Gracq, Paul Léautaud, and Jean Paulhan,
one of the founders of the resistance newspaper Lettres Françaises, and
his friend Marcel
Jouhandeau, well-known for his anti-Semitic lampoon Le Péril Juif
(“The Jewish Peril”), published in 1938. Florence was the third wife of
Frank Jay Gould, the son of Jay Gould, one of the original Robber Barons. She entertained Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Kennedy, and many
Hollywood stars, like Charlie Chaplin, who became her lover. Florence became
embroiled in a notorious money-laundering operation for fleeing high-ranking
Nazis in France, but later managed to avoid prosecution and became a
significant contributor to the Metropolitan Museum and New York University. She
also became friends with friends like Estée Lauder.[3216]
Jünger also frequented the George V luxury hotel, where a roundtable of French
and German intellectuals gathered, including the writers Morand, Cocteau,
Montherlant, as well as the publisher Gaston Gallimard, and Carl Schmitt.[3217]
Biographer James S. Williams describes Cocteau’s politics as “naturally Right-leaning.”[3218] During the Nazi occupation of France, collaborationist and right-wing writers and critics denounced him as anti-French and a “Jewified” lover of “negroids.”[3219] Cocteau eventually sought protection from those among the occupiers whom he considered Francophile, cultured and influential. They included Otto Abetz, Lieutenant Gerhard Heller, Bernard Radermacher, the artistic and personal representative of Joseph Goebbels, and Ernst Jünger, who acknowledged Cocteau as the most important French literary figure in Germany. Jünger became close to Cocteau, although he considered him “tormented like a man residing in his own particular hell, yet comfortable.”[3220]
During the Nazi occupation, Cocteau’s friend Arno Breker (1900 – 1991)—Hitler’s favorite artist—convinced him that Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France’s best interests in mind. Writing privately in his diary, Cocteau accused France of disrespect and ingratitude towards the Führer who loved the arts and all artists. Cocteau even considered the possibility that Hitler, who was still unmarried, might be a homosexual, and might be sublimating his repressed sexuality by supporting such artists as Breker. Cocteau praised Breker’s sculptures in an article entitled “Salut à Breker” published in 1942. As a consequence of the public repercussions of what became known as “the Breker Affair,” Cocteau was branded in 1944 even by the BBC as a collaborator. Cocteau’s friend Max Jacob died from pneumonia in 1944 after a month’s internment on his way to Auschwitz at the transit camp for Jews in Drancy. Cocteau had attempted to no avail to exercise his influence Abetz by formulating a petition on Jacob’s behalf, who had contact with key Germans in the deportation process.[3221]
After the liberation of France, the principals of Worms & Cie were investigated for possible collaboration with the Germans. Hypolite Worms was arrested on September 8, 1944. He was released on January 21, 1945, and the charges dismissed on October 25, 1946. The inquiries found that Worms & Cie Banking Services had only played a small and involuntary role in financing for the Germans.[3222]
After World War II, many of the
Non-Conformists, such Robert Aron and Alexandre Marc—protégées of Otto
Abetz, SS officer and German ambassador to France around whom gathered a circle
of collaborationist intellectuals, known as the Sohlbergkreis—who
founded Ordre Nouveau with de
Rougemont, became activists of European federalist movements, participating in
the European Movement, which contributed to the fulfilment of the synarchist
dream, the creation of a European Union. Indeed, several of the same Europeans who had
helped launch the EM were also present at the creation of Bilderberg, including
that “eminence grise of Europe,” Joseph Retinger (1888 – 1960).[3223] With the support of former SS
officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Retinger originated the idea for
the founding of the infamous Bilderberg Group, who every year gather to discuss
the world’s fate, in utter secrecy. A preparatory
meeting was held on September 25, 1952, at Baron François de Nervo’s mansion in
Paris, in the presence of Retinger, Van Zeeland, Prince Bernhard, Antoine Pinay
and Guy Mollet and several foreign personalities.[3224] When the
original promoters of the Mouvement synarchique d’empire (MSE), the
conspiracy behind the Vichy Regime, were named, they numbered seven, three of
whom were identified as Baron François de Nervo, Maxime Renaudin, and Jean
Coutrot.[3225]
Baron de Nervo (1912 – 1977) was a friend of Antoine Pinay (1891 – 1994), would
go on to found Le Cercle, which would become the umbrella organization of the
Fascist International.
Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont, who had also been a member of Sohlbeg Circle headed by Abetz, were key proponents of the “European Idea.” Jean Luchaire, a co-founder of the Sohlbeg Circle, attended the first Pan-European Congress of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894 – 1972), Austrian politician and philosopher, pioneer of European integration.[3226] Abetz’ key disciples were Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce (1899 – 1983), who both subscribed to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s dream of a United Europe. Coudenhove-Kalergi even asked Fabre-Luce to head his movement’s French section, an offer he declined while assuring Coudenhove-Kalergi of his complete agreement on the need for propaganda for the European idea.[3227] Richard was the great-grandson of Marie Kalergis, Franz Liszt’s contact to Napoleon III and an admirer of Otto von Bismarck.[3228] With Emperor Franz Josef’s permission, Richard’s father, Heinrich von Coudenhove, was allowed to alter his surname to Coudenhove-Calergi, as a tribute to his famous grandmother. Richard’s mother was a Japanese noblewoman, Mitsuko Aoyama.
Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-European Union (PEU) with Otto von Habsburg, the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary, and claimant of the title of King of Jerusalem, as head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, and sovereign of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Pierre Plantard—who formulated the Priory of Sion hoax, whose purpose is to install Nostradamus’ Grand Monarch as world leader—revised his assertions, claiming Otto von Habsburg was the real claimant of the bloodline of the Holy Grail.[3229] Otto von Habsburg was also Opus Dei’s candidate as monarch to rule over a united Catholic Europe.[3230]
Two years after
its foundation in 1922, Karl Anton Prinz Rohan’s Deutscher Kulturbund
became the Viennese outpost of the much larger Fédération des
Unions Intellectuelles, established in Paris to promote European cultural
unity after the World War I, and Rohan thereafter used
the support of Coudenove-Kalergi’s PEU to launch the Europäische Revue, the key journal of the
German Conservative Revolution.[3231] Rohan’s postwar collection of essays, Österreichisch, Deutsch, Europäisch, Rohan revealed his sympathy for the Habsburg monarchy. Like others
who were involved in PEU, Rohan considered a restored Habsburg imperium
integral to his vision of a European federation of European states. Also expressing a sympathy for
the Habsburg’s was another contributor to Rohan’s Europäische Revue, George-Kreis member Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The most widely-distributed
book dealing with this interwar European cultural idea was Das Spektrum
Europas (“The European Spectrum), by Hofmannsthal’s friend, Hermann von Keyserling, founder of the School of Wisdom, published in 1928, containing
the phrase, “all of Europe is of one spirit.”[3232]
Essential to understanding Hofmannsthal’s vision is a
speech he delivered at the University of Munich in 1927, entitled Das
Schrifttum als Geistiger Raum der Nation (“Literature as the Spiritual
Dimension of the Nation”), where he makes references to a “conservative revolution,”
that he believes will
be “of such magnitude that European history has not experienced anything of its
kind until the present time. Its goal will be to form a new German reality in
which the entire nation will participate.”[3233]
In their 1968 Synarchy and Power, André Ulmann and Henri Azeau interviewed one of the members of Jean Coutrot’s MSE, who claimed it had inspired the action of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi and his pan-Europeanism.[3234] Coudenhove-Kalergi was also involved a group called Les Veilleurs (“the Watchers”), founded by a French occultist René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz, and which also included MSE founder Postel du Mas, author of the Synarchist Pact.[3235] In conversation with Maurice Girodias, the founder of the Olympia Press, Postel du Mas named Coudenhove-Kalergi as one of the two major promoters of his and Canudo’s plans. Girodias said of Postel du Mas and Canudo’s magical salons: “I saw at his feet men of science, company directors, and bankers.”[3236] Girodias was told they were “schismatic theosophists with political designs, and they are linked to Count Coudenhove-Kalergi… who is a champion of the United States of Europe… Their aim is to launch a pan-European political party and to institute in the entire world, commencing with Europe, a society obedient to a spiritualist idea.”[3237]
In mid-1925, the master of the Viennese lodge, Richard Schlesinger, sent a circular to the masters of the great lodges of the world asking them to support Coudenhove-Kalergi’s political projects.[3238] The Masonic newspaper The Beacon stated in March, 1925:
Freemasonry, especially Austrian Freemasonry, may be eminently satisfied to have Coudenhove-Kalergi among its members. Austrian Freemasonry can rightly report that Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi fights for his Pan European beliefs: political honesty, social insight, the struggle against lies, striving for the recognition and cooperation of all those of good will. In this higher sense, Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi’s program is a Masonic work of the highest order, and to be able to work on it together is a lofty task for all brother Masons.[3239]
Coudenhove-Kalergi’s father was also a close friend of Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism. Coudenhove-Kalergi writes in his Memoirs:
At the beginning of 1924, we received a call from Baron Louis de Rothschild; one of his friends, Max Warburg from Hamburg, had read my book and wanted to get to know us. To my great surprise, Warburg spontaneously offered us 60,000 gold marks, to tide the movement over for its first three years… Max Warburg, who was one of the most distinguished and wisest men that I have ever come into contact with, had a principle of financing these movements. He remained sincerely interested in Pan-Europe for his entire life. Max Warburg arranged his 1925 trip to the United States to introduce me to Paul Warburg and financier Bernard Baruch.[3240]
At its founding convention in Vienna in 1922, the PEU called for the creation of a single European state, modeled on the Roman and Napoleonic empires. At the opening of the first PEU Congress in 1924, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s wife, the Jewish actress Ida Roland, recited Victor Hugo’s speech on European unification “in the service of propaganda for the Paneuropean idea.” The PEU congresses were decorated by large portraits of great Europeans: Kant, Nietzsche, Mazzini, Napoleon, Dante, and others.[3241] Coudenhove-Kalergi believed that “Nietzsche’s Will to Power is where the foundational thoughts of fascist and Paneuropean politics stand side by side.”[3242] Personalities attending included: Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Konrad Adenauer and Georges Pompidou.[3243] In 1927, Aristide Briand, who served eleven terms as Prime Minister of France during the French Third Republic, was elected honorary president. The first person to join the PEU was Hjalmar Schacht. Carl Haushofer was a guest lecturer at PEU events. When they met in Vienna, Haushofer suggested to Coudenhove-Kalergi that if they had met sooner, Hess would have been a supporter of Pan Europe instead of National Socialism. Coudenhove-Kalergi described Haushofer as, “A man of rare knowledge and culture.”[3244] Coudenhove-Kalergi also collaborated with such politicians as Engelbert Dollfuss, Kurt Schuschnigg, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.
To support the cause for the creation of a united Europe, the CIA used the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). In 1951, President Truman created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), headed by another OSS veteran C.D. Jackson (1902 – 1964, the first Deputy Director of Central Intelligence at CIA. C.D. Jackson and Georgetown Set member and OSS veteran Tom Braden collaborated on coordinating the efforts of the CIA’s front organization, the CCF, which according to Frances Stoner Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, was a plot to contain the influence of the Soviet Union through the recruitment of intellectuals from the “Non-Communist Left.”[3245] For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin show trial marked their final break with communism and even turned the first three into passionate anti-Communists eventually.[3246] As communist or left-leaning intellectuals who were nevertheless opposed to the Stalinism of the Soviet Union, they could be used to steer the political debate away from support for the Soviets. Stonor Saunders revealed a broad list of intellectuals also on the CIA payroll, including Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, John Dewey, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel and Diana Trilling, Julian Huxley, Arthur Koestler, Robert Lowell, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Melvin J. Lasky, Tennessee Williams and Sidney Hook. The British Foreign Office subsidized the distribution of 50,000 copies of Darkness at Noon, Koestler’s anti-Communist classic.[3247] The president of the CCF’s Executive Committee was Swiss national Denis de Rougemont.
Funding for the CCF was provided by Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, both of which, explained Stonor Saunders, “were conscious instruments of covert US foreign policy, with directors and officers who were closely connected to, or even themselves, members of American intelligence.”[3248] John Foster Dulles was a president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and his brother Allen was a close friend to David Rockefeller. As Stonor Saunders noted, “At times it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects.”[3249] Richard Bissell, a Marshall Planner and Georgetown Set member, became president in 1952, and met often with Dulles and other CIA officials. Bissell became a special assistant to Allen Dulles in 1954. Under Bissell, the Ford Foundation was the “vanguard of Cold War thinking.”
John McCloy, who had been a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1946-1949, also became president of the Ford Foundation, and created an administrative unit within it specifically to deal with the CIA. By that time, McCloy had already been Assistant Secretary of War, president of the World Bank and High Commissioner of Germany. At the time, McCloy was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), to be succeeded by David Rockefeller, who had worked closely with him at the Chase Bank.
Prior to the war, McCloy had been legal counsel to IG Farben. He became friendly with W. Averell Harriman, and worked as an advisor to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. In his dealings with Germany, McCloy worked closely with Paul Warburg, as well as his brother James in America. In 1936, he traveled to Berlin where he met with Rudolf Hess, and shared a box with Hitler and Göring at the Berlin Olympics. In 1941, Skull and Bones member Henry L. Stimson selected McCloy to become his assistant Secretary of War under President Roosevelt. McCoy forged a pact with the Vichy Regime of Darlan, displaced Japanese-Americans in California to internment camps, refused to recommend the bombing of Nazi concentration camps to spare the inmates on grounds that “the cost would be out of proportion to any possible benefits,” and refused Jewish refugees entry to the US.[3250] In 1951, as German Chancellor, Adenauer met with McCloy to argue that executing the Landsberg prisoners would ruin forever any effort at having the Federal Republic play its role in the Cold War. In response, McCloy reduced the death sentences of most of the 102 men at Landsberg—hanging only seven of the prisoners while the rest of those condemned to death were spared.[3251] McCloy commuted the death sentences of a number of Nazi war criminals, and gave early releases to others. This included Fritz Ter Meer, the senior executive of IG Farben.
Braden, who was placed in charge of the CCF, was the head of the International Organizations Division (IOD), a division of the CIA set up in 1950 to promote anti-communism by manipulating international psychological warfare operations. Braden oversaw the funding of groups such as the National Student Association, Communications Workers of America, the American Newspaper Guild, the United Auto Workers, National Council of Churches, the African-American Institute and the National Education Association. Braden also supported the work of Jay Lovestone, who had served as leader of the Communist Party USA and then as foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO.[3252]
The chief activities of the CCF also
involved festivals featuring American entertainers, as well as the promotion of
the Abstract Expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock, in order to
confront Soviet influence by countering prevailing impressions about the
quality of American culture. In April of 1952, CCF held a month-long festival
in Paris entitled Masterpieces of the 20th Century. To convince the
world of the superiority of America’s culture to that of the Soviets, the CIA
sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals and European tours of the
Boston Symphony Orchestra. The CIA also sponsored tours of African-American
opera star Leontyne Price, who referred to herself as the Wisners’ “chocolate
sister.”[3253]
The treasurer of the BSCF was Frederic Warburg, whose publishing company Secker
& Warburg published Orwell’s Animal
Farm (1945) as well as Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949), and works by other leading figures such as Thomas Mann
and Franz Kafka. The CIA
obtained the film rights to Animal Farm
from Orwell’s widow, Sonia, after his death and covertly funded the production
to the animated version of the book. Some sources assert that the ending of the
story was altered by the CIA, where only the pigs remain, instead of joining
forces with the humans, to emphasize an anti-communist message.[3254]
The principal group advocating for a united Europe in partnership with the United States was the European Movement, an umbrella organization focusing their efforts upon the Council of Europe, and counting the “founding fathers” of the European Union, Winston Churchill, Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak, Konrad Adenauer, Leon Blum and Italian president Alcide de Gasperi, as its five Presidents of Honour. The cultural arm of the European Movement was the Centre européen de la culture, whose director was the CCF’s Denis de Rougemont.[3255]
When the original promoters of the Mouvement synarchique d’empire (MSE), the conspiracy behind the Vichy Regime, were named, they numbered seven, three of whom were identified as Baron François de Nervo, Maxime Renaudin, and Jean Coutrot.[3256] In 1952-53, a year before the founding of Bilderberg, Baron de Nervo’s friend of Antoine Pinay founded Le Cercle with Konrad Adenauer, Franz Josef Strauss, under the name Cercle Pinay. Pinay was also a friend of Raymond Abellio (1907 – 1986), an expert in occultism and the Cathars, and the leader of the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR), the successor organization of La Cagoule.[3257] In 1940, Pinay had voted to give the Marshall Pétain’s regime full authority to draw up a new constitution, effectively ending the French Third Republic and establishing Vichy France. In 1941, Pinay was appointed to the Conseil National of the Vichy Regime, and also awarded the Order of the Francisque, an order and medal which was awarded by the Vichy Regime.
However, Pinay later resigned from the Conseil National and refused any official position with the Vichy regime, and an official commission in 1946 recognized his opposition to the Nazis and help to the Résistance and absolved him of blame. Pinay and Adenauer, the first chairmen, appointed former Cagoule member and SDECE and BND agent Jean Violet, who founded Le Cercle.[3258] Violet was arrested after World War II for having collaborated with the Nazis, but was released “on orders from above.”[3259] He helped create a conservative party, the National Center of Independents and Peasants (CNIP). He acquired the reputation as one of France’s more spirited politicians and in 1952 became prime minister by virtue of being the most popular elected CNIP official. Serving as Violet’s patron was Otto von Habsburg.[3260]
Also included in Le Cercle were the founding fathers of the European Union: Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet. Robert Shumann, a supernumerary member of Opus Dei.[3261] According to Jonathan Marshall, writing for Lobster Magazine, Opus Dei “was said to have influenced Robert Schumann, Antoine Pinay and Paul Baudoin, former President of the Banque d’Indochine and Vichy Foreign Minister.[3262] Baudoin, a major figure in Opus Dei, was identified as one of the original members of the MSE.[3263] In 1955, Pinay was one of the participants of the Messina Conference, which would lead to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which brought about the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), the best known of the European Communities (EC). The original idea was conceived by Jean Monnet, and was announced by Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, in a declaration in 1950.
Schuman became the first president of the European Parliament in 1958. But it was Jean Monnet who became president of the new body, called the High Authority and who was the primary influence behind the movement. According to Vivien Postel du Mas, a purported author of the Synarchist Pact, along with Coudenhove-Kalergi, Monnet was an influential promoter of the synarchist agenda.[3264] Another of Ulmann and Azeau’s MSE informants described Monnet as a “true synarch… whose membership of the movement was never in doubt for the true initiates.”[3265] Monnet encouraged the creation of an international European bank to finance Third World projects by Hipolyte Worms—founder of Banque Worms that financed the MSE—and Jean-Pierre Francois, who had been introduced to Pinay by Raymond Abellio leader of the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR), the successor organization of La Cagoule.[3266] Francois, whose real name was Joachim Pick Felberbaum, the son of a Romanian Jew, was inspired by Coudenhove-Kalergi’s PEU.[3267] Monnet was at the time the most influential businessman and economist in post-war Europe. Monnet has been called “The Father of Europe” as the key to establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of the European Union.[3268]
Retinger was also one of the founding members of the super-secret Bilderberg Group, an annual private conference of the world’s political, intellectual and industrial elite, including many members from the Round Table, RIIA and the CFR. In 1952, Retinger expressed his concern over the growth of anti-Americanism in Western Europe, and proposed an international conference at which leaders from European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim of promoting Atlanticism. Retinger approached former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Van Zeeland, and the then leader of the Unilever consumer goods group, the Dutch Paul Rijkens. Prince Bernhard in turn contacted his friend Walter Bedell Smith, the then-head of the CIA, who asked C.D. Jackson to execute the recommendation.[3269]
One of Retinger’s key German partners in his efforts to set up the CIA-funded European Movement and the Bilderberg group was Hermann Abs, a leading figure in pursuing the preservation of Nazi power after the war, who had been a been a comrade of Walter Benjamin before joining the Nazis. The most powerful commercial banker of the Third Reich, Abs had joined the board of Deutsche Bank during the rise of the Nazis and also sat on the supervisory board of IG Farben. It was Abs who was put in charge of allocating Marshall Aid to German industry and by 1948 was effectively managing Germany’s economic recovery. When Konrad Adenauer took power in 1949, Abs was his most important financial adviser. Adenauer was considered one of the three “founding fathers of the European Union,” along with Robert Schuman and Henri Spaak. According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reporting from declassified American government documents, “The leaders of the European Movement—Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian Prime Minister Henri Spaak—were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation.”[3270]
Although Bernhard stated, “I was never a
Nazi,” according to Stephen Dando-Collins, “He was lying. It was the convenient
lie of many Germans who had joined the Nazi Party and Nazi organizations to
further their careers in the 1930s.”[3271]
However, Bernhard’s membership in the Nazi Party, to SA, to the Reiter-SS (SS
Cavalry Corps), and to the NSKK, are now well-documented. A 1976 Newsweek
article reported that, during the Nuremberg Trial, it came out that Bernhard
was a member a special secret Nazi overseas intelligence set up within IG
Farben, in which he worked as a spy for the German government in Paris. In
1936, Bernhard paid a farewell visit to Hitler before setting off to Holland
for the official announcement of his engagement to Princess Juliana of the
Netherlands. Although Hitler later described Berhnard as “In the Führer’s
opinion, the prince was “an absolute imbecile oaf,” Hitler gave his blessing,
and the German Government would even claim the marriage cemented an alliance
between Holland’s House of Orange and Germany, a claim that Queen Wilhelmina
did not hesitate to publicly deny.[3272]
A preparatory meeting was held on September 25, 1952, at MSE founder Baron François de Nervo’s mansion in Paris, in the presence of Retinger, Van Zeeland, Prince Bernhard, then French prime minister Antoine Pinay, and Guy Mollet, patron of the SFIO, and several foreign personalities. The inaugural meeting was held from May 29 to 31, 1954, at the Bilderberg Hotel, located in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands. Fifty delegates from eleven Western European countries attended, along with eleven Americans including David Rockefeller. [3273] The founding group also included important European politicians like Alcide De Gasperi of ACUE, French Socialist politician Guy Mollet and later Prime Minster of France, and British Labour Party members Lord Denis Healy and Hugh Gaitskell, who were both associated with the CCF. In 2001, Healey, who remained a steering committee member of Bilderberg for 30 years, confessed, “To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.”[3274]
The term “neoliberalism” was coined at
the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, which inspired the founding of the Mont Pelerin
Society, a sister organization of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European Union (PEU),
which included Otto von Habsburg. Ludwig von Mises (1881 – 1973), an important
exponent of the Geneva School, later economic adviser to Otto von Habsburg, and a member of the PEU.[3275]
In the inter-war period, von Mises was secretary of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce
and organizer of one of the most prominent Privatseminars,
which included Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992), and attracted many foreign
scholars, such as Lionel Robbins, Frank Knight, and John van Sickle. At that
time, von Mises and Hayek earned their money at a research institute funded by
the Rockefeller Foundation to supply economic data to Austrian firms.[3276]
In 1940 von Mises and
his wife fled the German advance in Europe and emigrated to New York City under
a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation.[3277]
The Lippmann Colloquium was a conference of intellectuals held in Paris in 1938, organized by French philosopher Louis Rougier. In 1934, the Rockefeller Foundation sent Rougier on a research trip on the situation of intellectuals in central Europe. He taught at the Frankfurt School’s New School for Social Research in New York from 1941–43. Rougier was initially refused membership in the Mont Pelerin Society because of his former association with the Vichy Regime. In 1940, Pétain had sent Rougier on a secret mission to London, and claimed to have brokered an agreement between Vichy and Churchill. Rougier was finally elected to the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1957 through the personal intervention of Friedrich von Hayek.[3278]
Another former Vichy collaborator involved in the Colloquium was Alexandre Marc, who had been a member of the Sohlberg Circle, founded by SS member Otto Abetz. Abetz’ key disciples were Alfred Fabre-Luce and Bertrand de Jouvenel, who both subscribed to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s dream of a United Europe.[3279] In his memoirs, The Invisible Writing, Arthur Koestler recalled that in 1934, Jouvenel was among a small number of French intellectuals who promised moral and financial support to the newly established Institut pour l'Étude du Fascisme. Israeli anti-fascist historian Zeev Sternhell published Neither Right nor Left, accusing De Jouvenel of fascist sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s. De Jouvenel sued in 1983, claiming nine counts of libel, two of which the court upheld. Jouvenel was supported by friends he knew from the post-war period: prominent names like Henry Kissinger, Milton Friedman and Raymond Aron, a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Leo Strauss.[3280] However, Sternhell was neither required to publish a retraction nor to strike any passages from future printings of his book.
De Jouvenel was also among the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society, in 1947 with Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman, was funded by the Volker Fund.[3281] After World War II, because of the excesses of fascism, the right had been largely discredited, and communism was gaining widespread popularity in Western Europe. Many considered the nationalization of industries as a positive direction. To counter these tendencies, Hayek derived his strategy from Carl Schmitt, to whom he openly acknowledged his debt. According to Hayek, “The conduct of Carl Schmitt under the Hitler regime does not alter the fact that, of the modern German writings on the subject, his are still among the most learned and perceptive.”[3282] In Road to Serfdom, following Schmitt, Hayek characterized state intervention in the economy as tantamount to totalitarianism.[3283] Hayek notes that the “flawed” conception of a welfare state “was very clearly seen by… Carl Schmitt, who in the 1920s probably understood the character of the developing form of [interventionist] government better than most people.”[3284] Hayek therefore articulated the basis of neoliberal thought, which repudiated all forms of government involvement in economic affairs, calling for absolute free enterprise, deregulation of industry and the removal of social programs.
Many of the individuals who supported by the Volker Fund saw themselves as a “remnant,” a term from Isaiah, coined by Albert Jay Nock (1870 – 1945) to refer to anti-statists who resisted the nation’s adherence to the socialism of the New Deal Era.[3285] The William Volker Fund, which was founded in 1932 by businessman and home-furnishings mogul William Volker (1859 – 1947), was instrumental in bringing Friedrich Hayek to the University of Chicago, and also helped support many other classical liberal scholars who at the time could not obtain positions in American universities, such as Hayek and von Mises.[3286]
Following Volker’s death in 1947, Volker’s nephew, Harold W. Luhnow (1895 – 1978) continued the fund’s philanthropic mission, but also used the fund to promote and disseminate ideas on free-market economics. Luhnow also used Volker Fund assets to support bringing schools associated with the Austrian School of economics to US institutions. Under Luhnow’s management, the fund helped the then small minority of Old Right scholars to meet, discuss, and exchange ideas. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law, and Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty were all influenced by the ideas discussed at such meetings. Luhnow’s commitment to liberal economic ideas grew, he used the Volker Fund to give sizable contributions to libertarian and conservative causes. Through its subsidiary the National Book Foundation, the Volker Fund distributed books by wide range of influential authors, including Hayek, von Mises, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and many others. The Volker Fund had helped Friedrich von Hayek, until then an obscure Austrian economist, become a national celebrity in America by subsidizing editions of his Road to Serfdom.[3287]
Ultimately, with the establishment of the United Nations on October 24, 1945, a month after the end of World War II, and replacing the failed experiment of the League of Nations, the Zionists saw the creation of a mechanism through which they would become closer to achieving the world domination they believed they were promised in Bible prophecies of the messianic age. According to Steven Patton, the concepts of state sovereignty, mediation between nations, and diplomacy, all find their origin the Peace of Westphalia of 1848, which provided the basis for international communities like the European Union and the United Nations.[3288] As explained by Leo Gross, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Congress of Vienna of 1815 represented the first attempts to “establish something resembling world unity on the basis of states exercising untrammeled sovereignty over certain territories and subordinated to no earthly authority.”[3289]
Understandably, one of the most important first actions of the United Nations was the recognition of the State of Israel, which proclaimed its independence on May 14, 1948, by David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Thus, the Zionists, and their interpretation of Jewish identity, based on a rejection of Judaism, in favor of recognizing it as a shared cultural and genetic heritage, a “race,” gained the political foothold on the world stage to illegitimately usurp the right to represent the Jewish people.
As Ben-Gurion stated callously, referring to the Holocaust: “What Zionist propaganda for years could not do, disaster has done overnight.”[3290] As explained by award winning Israeli journalist and historian Shabtai Teveth, in his apologetic biography, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886-1948, that in regard to rescue to Jews from the Nazis, Ben-Gurion adhered to a “philosophy of what might be called the beneficial disaster.”[3291] In 1928, Ben-Gurion told the Histadrut Executive Committee (HEC) that “in order to start a movement in America, a great disaster or upheaval is needed.”[3292] After Hitler came to power, Ben-Gurion maintained it was necessary to “turn a disaster… into a productive force,” and asserted that “distress” could also provide “political leverage,” as “the destruction” would contribute in “expediting our enterprise [and] it is in our interest to use Hitler, [who] has not reduced our strength, for the building of our country.”[3293] Ben-Gurion read Mein Kampf, having bought a copy August 1933, and he told the HEC in 1934: “Hitler’s rule endangers the entire Jewish people… Who knows, perhaps just four or five years—if not less—stand between us and that terrible day.” In 1939, Ben-Gurion wrote in Davar, “Our strength is in the lack of choice.” And in 1941, writing to Mapai’s Central Committee, “We have no power… All we have is the Jewish people, beaten, persecuted, diminished, impoverished.” He told the Jewish Agency Executive (JAE): “The harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism.”[3294] According to Teveth:
For nearly two years—from March 1941, when Italy entered the
war, until Rommel’s
defeat in December 1942—Ben-Gurion
was more concerned for the fate of the Yishuv than for that of European Jewry.
Ben-Gurion repeatedly stressed that the importance of the Yishuv went far
beyond the individual Jews of Palestine. As people they were not more worthy of
salvation than the Jews of Poland, and Zionism’s
first consideration was not their individual fate. The Yishuv’s importance lay solely in its being “the vanguard in the fulfilment of the hope
for the rebirth of the people.” Its
destruction would be a greater catastrophe than that of any other community of
Jews, for one reason: the Yishuv was a “great
and invaluable security, a security for the hope of the Jewish people.”[3295]
In 1962, Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, outlined what would be the consequences of the Holocaust and the ensuing founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the Zionist vision of the fulfillment of Bible prophecy, in light of the current political arrangements in the world:
The image of the world in 1987 as traced in my imagination: The Cold War will be a thing of the past. Internal pressure of the constantly growing intelligentsia in Russia for more freedom and the pressure of the masses for raising their living standards may lead to a gradual democratization of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the increasing influence of the workers and farmers, and the rising political importance of men of science, may transform the United States into a welfare state with a planned economy.
Western and Eastern Europe will become a federation of autonomous states having a Socialist and democratic regime. With the exception of the USSR as a federated Eurasian state, all other continents will become united in a world alliance, at whose disposal will be an international police force. All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars.
In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.[3296]
In other words, Ben-Gurion is referring to the “New World Order” that is a fixation of so-called “conspiracy theories” proffered by the “anti-Semites.” By such characterizations, it’s clear that Zionists—by helping the world ignore that they are just one of many movements within the rich and multi-faceted Jewish culture and heritage—aim to absolve themselves of their crimes by claiming that all criticism directed at them represents criticism of the entire meaning of Jewish identify and existence. These tactics are clearly a blatantly dishonest ploy which uses the fear of public humiliation to shield the state of Israel from criticism. Ultimately, public opinion is to be manipulated where possible, and when not, as Ben-Gurion noted, “What matters is not what the goyim [non-Jews] say, but what the Jews do.”[3297]
Many of the Zionists and their collaborators who coordinated with the Nazis to rescue Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880 – 1950) in 1939, were also involved in the founding of the United Nations, which made possible the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Schneersohn was the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, and the son of the Rashab who was treated by Freud. As discovered by Bryan Mark Rigg, also the author of Rescued from the Reich, following Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, with the intercession of the US Department of State and with the lobbying of many Jewish leaders, including Justice Louis Brandeis—a known Sabbatean—of the Supreme Court, the United States government used its diplomatic relations to convince the Nazis to rescue Rebbe Schneersohn. During the interwar period, following Bolshevik persecution, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, under the Yitzchak, was centered in Riga and then in Warsaw. Chabad hired a young Washington lobbyist named Max Rhoade to advocate their cause, emphasizing Schneersohn’s role as the world’s leading Torah scholar with an enormous influence worldwide. On September 22, US Senator Robert Wagner (1877 – 1953) sent a telegram to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1871 – 1955), stating, “Prominent New York citizens concerned about whereabouts of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, … present location unknown.”[3298]
At Harvard in 1925, Rhoade and Joseph Shalam Shubow (1899 – 1969) founded Avukah, the national student Zionist organization. From 1924 to 1931, Shubow was a journalist for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, but then entered the Jewish Institute of Religion to study under Rabbi Stephen Wise. Upon his ordination in 1933, he was installed as the first rabbi of Temple B’nai Moshe in Brighton, Massachusetts. In June 1934, at a Harvard alumni reunion, Shubow publicly confronted Hitler’s close friend Ernst Hanfstaengl, who had been invited as a guest of honor. Shubow questioned Hanfstaengl as to what he had meant by his statement that the Jewish problem would soon be restored to normal, asking, “Did you mean by extermination?”[3299] The executive head of American Chabad, Rabbi Samuel Jacobson, told Rhoade:
I need not emphasize the importance of the work we are doing because I understand that you are fully aware of the great and outstanding role the celebrated Rabbi Schneersohn has in the life of the Jewish people, and thus I am sure that you will please continue your excellent work and help us to bring about the speedy rescue of the Lubavitcher Rabbi.[3300]
Oscar Rabinovitz, a lawyer and one of US Chabad’s leaders, who had arranged the Rebbe’s meeting with President Hoover in 1930, asked Brandeis contact Attorney General Benjamin Cohen (1894 – 1983), one of Roosevelt’s close advisers. Cohen headed the National Power Policy Committee and belonged to several influential Jewish interest groups. Cohen, a student of Felix Frankfurter, served as counsel for the American Zionist Movement and attended the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and helped to negotiate the League of Nations mandate for Palestine. Cohen also worked for Brandeis as a law clerk. Cohen was as a member of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, which in addition to Wagner, also included Brandeis and James Warburg, son of Paul Warburg and a member of the CFR. Wagner was part of a later group that consisted of Harvard colleagues invited by Frankfurter in 1933, including Thomas Corcoran (1900 – 1981), and James M. Landis (1899 – 1964). In 1925, Landis was also a law clerk to Brandeis. From 1934 to 1941, Corcoran was liaison to Henry Morgenthau (1891 – 1967), then economic adviser to Roosevelt, and represented him at board of directors of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). Together, Corcoran and Cohen were known as the “Gold Dust Twins” and were on the cover of Time.[3301]
Rhoade pressured Brandeis and Cohen, who in turn put pressure on men like Henry Morgenthau. Cohen was aware that US diplomat Robert Pell had attended the Evian conference in 1938 and had made friends with the German diplomat Helmut Wohlthat (1893 – 1982). Hjalmar Schacht brought Wohlthat into the Reich Ministry of Economics and the Prussian Ministry of Economics and Labor in 1934 as a General Consultant. In early 1938, when the Ministry of Economics was reorganized under Walther Funk, Wohlthat was named Ministerial Director for Special Projects in Hermann Göring’s Four-Year Plan, reporting directly to Göring. In that role, Wohlthat negotiated with Roosevelt’s representative, George Rublee (1910 – 1918), about financing and organizing the emigration of Jews from Germany. In 1938, Roosevelt requested Rublee become director of the London-based Inter-Governmental Committee on Political Refugees, which attempted to arrange for the resettlement of German and Austrian Jews prior to the outbreak of World War II. The result was the so-called Rublee-Wohlthat Agreement in February 1939, that would have permitted the emigration of 150,000 Jews, but it was never implemented due to the outbreak of the war in September.[3302]
Rublee was also a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). At the same time as the CFR was organizing its War-Peace Study Groups, the Department of State created its own internal structure for postwar planning. In mid-September 1939, after a series of meetings with council leaders, Cordell Hull appointed a special assistant, Leo Pasvolsky (1893 – 1953), to guide government postwar planning. Shortly thereafter, on December 12, Pasvolsky drafted a plan for a new departmental division to study the problems of peace and reconstruction. Then, in late December, the department formed a policy committee named the Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations, with Undersecretary Sumner Welles (1892 – 1961) as chairman. All members were officers of the State Department except Norman Davis (1878 – 1944), who had served as President Wilson’s chief financial advisor at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and had become president of the CFR in 1936. The committee came about after Pasvolsky wrote a memorandum calling for a need to deal with “problems of peace and reconstruction” that would review fundamental principles of a “desirable world order.” The committee came up with tentative ideas about a world organization, reviving some aspects of the League of Nations design.[3303] As indicated by G. William Domhoff, the policies discussed in the War-Peace Study Groups in 1940 and 1941 provide the contributed to American post-war monetary policy and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established in 1945.[3304]
Pell became vice-director of the United
States supported Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (ICG), created after
the Evian conference, and met several times with Wohlthat. Pell then contacted
US Secretary of State Cordell Hull to tell him: “[Cohen]… appealed to me
because of the arrangement which I had with Wohlthat last winter. … Wohlthat
had assured me that if there was any specific case in which American Jewry was
particularly interested, he would do what he could to facilitate a solution.”[3305]
On October 3, 1939, Pell, authorized by Hull, wrote Raymond Geist (1885
– 1955), the American
consul general in Berlin. While in Berlin, Geist
cultivated a number of high-level contacts within the Nazi party, including
Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.[3306]
Geist has been credited with helping Jews and anti-Nazis to emigrate from
Germany during 1938–1939, including Jews and others who were under imminent
threat of deportation to concentration camps. However, between 1933 and 1939,
the four US Foreign Service Officers in Germany, including Geist, denied 75% of
visa requests by German Jews and filled only 40% of immigration quotas from
Germany, in a concerted effort to limit Jewish immigration.[3307] Pell wrote to Geist:
Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn known as Lubavitcher Rebbe, one of the leading Jewish scholars of the world and a Latvian citizen, has been trapped in Warsaw. The most influential Jewish leaders and others in this country, including The Postmaster General, Justice Brandeis and Mr. Benjamin Cohen, have asked our assistance in obtaining permission from the German Military Government of Warsaw for the safe egress of the Rabbi to Riga via Stockholm. While the Department does not wish to intervene in the case of a citizen of a foreign country you might in the course of a conversation with Wohlthat inform him as from me and in view of our previous relationship of the interest in this country in this particular case. Wohlthat, who evidently wishes to maintain contact with the Inter-governmental Committee, might wish to intervene with the military authorities.[3308]
Geist finally telegraphed Hull and Pell that he had met Wohlthat, who had ‘‘promised to take the matter up with the competent military authorities.’’[3309] According to Winfried Meyer, Göring also knew about the rescue operation.[3310] Wohlthat contacted Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, who although a high-ranking Nazi official, often helped Jews.[3311] Canaris recruited Major Ernst Bloch, a decorated German army officer of Jewish descent, who was put in command of a group of Mischlinge (“mixed-breeds”) officers, assigned to locate Schneersohn and escort him safely to freedom. According to Bryan Mark Rigg, author of Rescued From the Reich, Canaris told Bloch that he had been approached by the U.S. government to locate and rescue the head of Lubavitch, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. “You’re going to go up to Warsaw and you’re going to find the most ultra-Jewish Rabbi in the world, Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak Schneersohn, and you’re going to rescue him. You can’t miss him, he looks just like Moses.”[3312] They eventually rescued over a dozen Chabad Jews from the Rebbe’s family or who were associated with him.[3313] Schneersohn was finally granted diplomatic immunity and given safe passage to go via Berlin to Riga, Latvia and then on to New York City, where he arrived on 19 March 1940.[3314]
In 1943, in response to growing recognition of the Holocaust, Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department approved the plan of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) to rescue Jews through the use of blocked accounts in Switzerland, but the State Department and the British Foreign Office procrastinated further. In December 1917, the American Jewish Congress (AJC) adopted a resolution calling for the “convening of a World Jewish Congress,” “as soon as peace is declared among the warring nations” in Europe.[3315] The AJC was created in 1918 by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, all known Sabbateans. Its leadership overlapped with that of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
Within two years after the revelations of the horrors of the Holocaust, activist of the AJC would play a leading role in the formation of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, which were both intended to protect humanity through international law. According to Carsten Wilke, in “Who’s Afraid of “Jewish universalism,” referring to Adolphe Crémieux’s vision of a messianic world order based on the rule of law:
It is certainly more than a coincidence that the realization of this vision in the form of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was conceived by another French jurist, René Cassin (1887–1976), who happened to be Crémieux’s successor at the presidency of the Alliance israélite universelle.[3316]
As reflected in the 1948 adoption of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the idea was intended “to replace the discredited minority rights ideal” with a broadly applicable manifesto. The Minority Treaties are treaties, League of Nations mandates, and unilateral declarations made by countries applying for membership in the League of Nations that conferred basic rights on all the inhabitants of the country without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion. With the decline of League of Nations in the 1930s, the treaties were increasingly considered unenforceable and useless.
In August 1927, sixty-five Jewish leaders
from thirteen countries convened in Zurich to try and change those faults. The idea of crafting a declaration
of human rights,” explained James Loeffler, “emerged from a peculiarly American
Jewish mixture of pride and self-consciousness about political activism.”[3317]
According to Loeffler, while the role of Zionists is
important to understand the emerging debate about human rights, it had little
to do with the
Holocaust or Nazi ant-Semitism. Rather, Loeffler
explains, “The era of
international minorities protection had ended. In its place arose a new vision
of individual human rights etched ambiguously into the structure of an
American-led global order.[3318]
The conference was organized by Loe Motzkin, and AJC leaders Julian Mack (1866 – 1943) and Stephen Wise. Mack, a United States circuit judge, was a supporter of the NAACP and the Civil Liberties Union. In 1902, together with Martin Buber, Motzkin founded Berlin’s Jüdischer Verlag (“Jewish Publishing House”).[3319] In 1914, Motzkin joined Forte Kreis member Franz Oppenheimer to create a German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, which the German Foreign Ministry supported. Oppenheimer collaborated with Friedrich Naumann, a friend of Max Weber, and a supporter of the Anti-Bolshevik League of Eduard Stadtler.[3320] Oppenheimer’s sister Paula was married to Richard Dehmel of the George-Kreis. Motzkin had gone on to establish a Jewish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to represent the interests of Jews across Europe.
The AJC’s first international Conference
for the Rights of Jewish Minorities in 1927 included six members of the Polish
Sejm (parliament), the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, Simon Dubnow (1860 – 1941) from
Berlin, Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin (1863 – 1941) from Jerusalem and head
of the Jewish National Fund, Rabbi Wise from New York, and Maurice L. Perlzweig
(1895 – 1985), from London, a British Reform rabbi and founding member of American
Jewish Committee (AJC). Ussishkin’s daughter Rachel married Friedrich Simon
Bodenheimer, son of Zionist Max Bodenheimer, who founded the Zionist Federation
of Germany (ZvFD) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The Polish Zionist leader
Nahum Sokolow—a friend of Weizmann and one of the authors of the Balfour
Declaration—opened the conference with a declaration of purpose: “Our slogan is
not fight, but defense,” he announced. “We consider this conference a
continuation of the work begun in 1919 when Jewish leaders rendered the
historic service of formulating and securing rights not only for Jews but for
all minorities whose number is not less than 40,000,000.”[3321] By the end of the meeting, the
delegates had agreed to create a new international organization to be
headquartered in Geneva.[3322]
The Jewish rights group slowly took shape beginning later in 1927, with Sokolow as its president and Jacob Robinson (1889 – 1977), as a member of its executive committee. Robinson is known as “one of Europe’s foremost champions of minority rights” and “the ultimate internationalist.”[3323] He left Lithuania at the early 1940, and later reached New York, where, in 1941, he established the Institute of Jewish Affairs sponsored by the American and the World Jewish Congress. He headed the Institute for seven years, in the course of which he undertook a number of special assignments as special consultant for Jewish affairs to the U.S. chief of counsel, Robert H. Jackson (1892 – 1954), in the trial of the major war criminals in Nuremberg, and as consultant to the UN Secretariat in the establishment of the Human Rights Commission.
The First Preparatory World Jewish Conference was held in Geneva in August 1932. A preparatory committee was headed by Zionist Nahum Goldmann (1895 – 1982), who was one of the leading advocates of the establishment of an international Jewish representative body. The conference approved plans to set up the new organization in 1934, with headquarters in New York and European offices in Berlin, Germany. After two more preparatory conferences in 1933 and 1934, the First Plenary Assembly, held in Geneva in August 1936, established the World Jewish Congress as a permanent and democratic organization. The WJC chose Paris as its headquarters and also opened a liaison office to the League of Nations in Geneva. The WJC has special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Goldmann attended the Evian Conference, convened by Roosevelt in 1938, as an observer for the WJC.[3324]
By the end of 1943, Roosevelt was also getting intense pressure to act on the issue of Jewish immigration from members of Congress, including Sol Bloom (1870 – 1949), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Emanuel Celler (1888 – 1981), a member of the United States House of Representatives; Jewish organizations, most notably Rabbi Wise and the American Jewish Congress (AJC), and Hillel Kook (1915 – 2001). Known as Peter Bergson, Kook was the son of Rabbi Dov Kook, the younger brother of Abraham Isaac Kook. While studying at the Hebrew University, he became a member of Sohba (“Comradeship”), a group of students who would later become prominent in the Revisionist movement, including David Raziel (1910 – 1941) and Avraham Stern (1907 – 1942). Hillel joined the Haganah militia in 1930, helped found the terrorist Irgun in 1931, and eventually became close friends with Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
As head of the “Bergson Group,” Kook led the Irgun’s efforts in the United States during World War II to promote Zionism and mainly to save the abandoned Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. The Bergson Group was composed of a hard-core cadre of ten Irgun activists from Europe, America and Palestine, including Aryeh Ben-Eliezer, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, Alexander Rafaeli, Shmuel Merlin, and Eri Jabotinsky. Morgenthau and his staff persisted in bypassing State and ultimately confronting Roosevelt in January 1944 with the Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews, which helped convince Roosevelt to approve the creation of the War Refugee Board.
Credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi-occupied countries, through the efforts of Raoul Wallenberg (1912 – 1945), serving as Sweden’s special envoy in Budapest, and others, the War Refugee Board was the only major civilian effort undertaken by the American government to save the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.[3325] Already in April 1942, Soviet Navy Intelligence in Stockholm reported to Moscow about a meeting between the influential Swedish banker Jacob Wallenberg, the brother of Raoul Wallenberg’s cousin once removed, and a prominent German contact, Count Waldemar von Oppenheim (1894 – 1952). Waldemar was related to the Wallenbergs through the marriage of Count Ferdinand Arco-Valley (1893 – 1968), a son of Waldemar’s cousin Emmy von Oppenheim, to Jacob’s sister Gertruda.[3326] Count Ferdinand was the brother of Anton Arco-Valley, who murdered Kurt Eisner after being rejected from the Thule Society, and whose cell at Landsberg Hitler took over.[3327] Under the Nazi racial laws, Oppenheim’s family bank was Aryanized in 1938 becoming the Pferdmenges & Co. Bank, and in 1941, Waldemar was recruited to the Abwehr to escape further harassment as a “Mischling.”[3328]
The League of Nations lasted for 26 years, until it was deemed ineffective and replaced by the United Nations in 1946, and situated in New York on land donated by John D. Rockefeller. In 1944, Benjamin Cohen also assisted in the drafting of the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks agreements leading to the establishment of the United Nations. In 1945, Cohen served as the United States’ chief draftsman at the Potsdam Conference. Cordell Hull received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 for his role in establishing the United Nations, and was referred to by President Roosevelt as the “Father of the United Nations.”[3329] Sol Bloom oversaw Congressional approval of the United Nations was a member of the American delegation at its creation in San Francisco in 1945 and at the Rio Conference of 1947.
Despite being “the brainchild of American
policy makers and intellectuals,” the pursuit of human rights involved five Zionist
leaders linked with the WJC. On December 15, 1944, American newspapers
published the AJC’s “Declaration on Human Rights,” signed by signed by more
than “1300 distinguished Americans of all faiths,” including Vice President
Henry Wallace, Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, two Supreme
Court justices, thirty-seven Catholic and Protestant bishops, and the leaders
of the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Federation of Labor, and the NAACP.
To achieve world peace, the declaration announced, the forthcoming United Nations
must “guarantee for every man, woman and child, of every race and creed and in
every country, the fundamental rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.”[3330] However, according
to WEB DuBois, who was at the same time a founding member of the NAACP whose
board included Jacob Schiff, and a student to anti-Semite Eugen Dühring, “[T]his
is a very easily understood Declaration of Jewish Rights.” [3331]
The AJC also commissioned a volume titled An International Bill of the Rights of Man, by Polish-born jurist Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht (1897 – 1960), widely regarded as the greatest international lawyer of the twentieth century and the founding father of international human rights law, who crafted influential drafts of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the European Convention on Human Rights. Lauterpacht, who coined the term “crimes against humanity,” also advised Zionist leaders on their legal strategies for statehood at the same time that he advised the American prosecutors at Nuremberg.[3332] With the failure of the League of Nations, European democracy, and notions of natural moral law, Lauterpacht now claimed that the “ultimate” safeguard for human rights, the “power superior to the supreme power of the State,” was “international law.”[3333]
Jacob Robinson was critical of the AJC’s declaration, writing that: “Once more an attempt is being made to disguise Jewish demands under the mask of general ones. This is not only a self-deception but also shows a lack of dignity and self-respect.”[3334] Robinson and Jacob Blaustein (1892 – 1970) both disagreed with Lauterpacht’s internationalist vision. Both believed rights meant nothing unless backed by power. For Blaustein, it would be American power, while for Robinson, it was Zionist. Blaustein, the founder of the American Oil Company (AMOCO) and chairman of the AJC, was an ardent supporter of human rights, the rights of Jewish people, and an advocate for multilateralism through the United Nations, serving as a United States delegate to the UN under five U.S. presidents.
The Polish-Jewish lawyer responsible for the word “genocide” and the U.N. Genocide Convention, was Zionist activist Raphael Lemkin (1900 – 1959).[3335] Lemkin also worked on the legal team of Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Throughout 1947, Lemkin relied heavily on the intervention of the WJC on his behalf and at other times on the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Alliance Israélite Universelle.[3336] Maurice L. Perlzweig (1895 – 1985), a British Reform rabbi and founding member of American Jewish Committee (AJC), created the modern international NGO at the League of Nations and the UN. From 1942 he was the WJC representative at the United Nations. Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson (1921 – 2005), a Zionist youth activist who sympathized with Palestinian Arab refugees, a convert to Catholic mysticism, and a lawyer disenchanted with the law.[3337]
In 1945, a few weeks after the end of World War II, Winston Churchill advised his own closest Zionist friend, Chaim Weizmann, that as both the Conservative and Labor parties in Britain were hostile to Jewish statehood, the Zionists should enlist American and international political support.[3338] Just prior to the creation of the State of Israel, President Harry S. Truman, had been increasingly irritated by lobbying from Zionists, and had issued instructions that he did not want any more meetings with Jewish leaders. B’nai B’rith President Frank Goldman (1890 – 1965) convinced fellow B’nai B’rith member Eddie Jacobson (1891 – 1955), long-time friend and business partner of the president, to appeal to Truman for a favor. Jacobson told Truman, “Your hero is Andrew Jackson. I have a hero too. He’s the greatest Jew alive. I’m talking about Chaim Weizmann. He’s an old man and very sick, and he has traveled thousands of miles to see you. And now you’re putting him off. This isn’t like you, Harry.”[3339] Jacobson convinced Truman to meet secretly with Weizmann in a meeting said to have resulted in turning White House support back in favor of partition, and ultimately to de facto recognition of Israeli statehood.[3340]
In 1946, at a meeting held between the heads of the Haganah, David Ben-Gurion predicted a confrontation between the Arabs of Palestine and the Arab states. In February 1947, the British proposed that the United Nations consider the future of Palestine and take over relations in the region amid ongoing tension. Zionist lobbying in the United States resulted in an outpouring of Jewish American support in preparation for voting the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, which preceded the Israeli Declaration of Independence. President Truman later noted:
The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me.[3341]
The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created on May 15, 1947, to “make recommendations under article 10 of the Charter, concerning the future government of Palestine.” While the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Council cooperated with UNSCOP in its deliberations, the Arab Higher Committee charged UNSCOP with being pro-Zionist, and decided to boycott it. UNSCOP also met twice with Begin and other commanders from the Irgun. During the hearings, the Haganah’s intelligence branch SHAI conducted an extensive operation to eavesdrop on committee members so as to ensure that Zionist leaders would be better prepared for the hearings.[3342] October 2, 1947, seven members of the UNSCOP endorsed a partition plan favored by the Zionist leadership. The United Nations finally adopted a resolution to split Palestine into two independent states: a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State” with Jerusalem, a city with religious significance to many groups, under UN trusteeship, despite opposition from Palestinian Arabs of the region. Palestinians refused to recognize the resolution, leading to violent conflict between the two groups.
On May 14, 1948, the day before the expiration of the British Mandate, Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.” The following day, the armies of four Arab countries—Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq—entered what had been British Mandatory Palestine, launching the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. On December 10, 1948, the same Zionists involved in the Declaration of Independence were also involved in the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and on December 11, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, that brought Arab-Jewish hostilities to a temporary close.
Concerning the “principle of purity of arms,” Ben-Gurion stressed that: “The end does not justify all means. Our war is based on moral grounds.”[3343] According to Avi Shlaim, this condemnation of the use of violence is one of the key features of “the conventional Zionist account or old history” whose “popular-heroic-moralistic version” is “taught in Israeli schools and used extensively in the quest for legitimacy abroad.”[3344] Benny Morris adds that “[t]he Israelis’ collective memory of fighters characterized by ‘purity of arms’ is also undermined by the evidence of [the dozen cases] of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages.” According to him, “after the 1948 war, the Israelis tended to hail the “purity of arms” of its militiamen and soldiers to contrast this with Arab barbarism, which on occasion expressed itself in the mutilation of captured Jewish corpses.” According to him, “this reinforced the Israelis’ positive self-image and helped them ‘sell’ the new state abroad and (...) demonized the enemy.”[3345]
The declaration of independence had been followed by the establishment of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and the process of absorbing all military organizations into the IDF started. An agreement had been signed between Menachem Begin and Yisrael Galili for the absorption of the Irgun into the IDF.[3346] The Irgun had fought the in 1947–48 Civil War and its chief Begin was described as “leader of the notorious terrorist organisation” by British government and banned from entering United Kingdom.[3347] In November 1948, when Begin visited the US on a campaigning trip, a letter signed by Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook of the CCF, Hannah Arendt, and other prominent Americans and several rabbis was published which described Begin’s Herut party as a terrorist, right-wing organization “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” and accused his group and the Stern Gang of preaching “racial superiority” and having “inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community.”[3348] Rabbi Stephen Wise denounced the movement as, “Fascism in Yiddish or Hebrew.”[3349]
At Begin’s orders, the Irgun in the diaspora formally disbanded on January 12, 1949, with the Irgun’s former Paris headquarters becoming the European bureau of the Herut movement, later led by Yitzhak Shamir (1915 – 2012), a former commander of the Lehi underground. According to Shamir:
There are those who say that to kill [T.G.] Martin [a CID sergeant who had recognised Shamir in a lineup] is terrorism, but to attack an army camp is guerrilla warfare and to bomb civilians is professional warfare. But I think it is the same from the moral point of view. Is it better to drop an atomic bomb on a city than to kill a handful of persons? I don't think so… So it was more efficient and more moral to go for selected targets. In any case, it was the only way we could operate, because we were so small. For us it was not a question of the professional honour of a soldier, it was the question of an idea, an aim that had to be achieved. We were aiming at a political goal. There are many examples of what we did to be found in the Bible—Gideon and Samson, for instance. This had an influence on our thinking. And we also learned from the history of other peoples who fought for their freedom—the Russian and Irish revolutionaries, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Josip Broz Tito.[3350]
The Arab–Israeli War led to the establishment of the 1949 cease-fire agreement, with partition of the former Mandatory Palestine between the newborn state of Israel with a Jewish majority, the Arab West Bank annexed by the Jordanian Kingdom and the Arab All-Palestine Protectorate in the Gaza Strip under Egypt. Around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in the area that became Israel, and became refugees in what they refer to as the Nakba (“the catastrophe”). As a result of the war, the State of Israel controlled the area that UN General Assembly Resolution 181 had recommended for the proposed Jewish state, as well as almost 60-percent of the area of Arab state proposed by the 1947 Partition Plan. Israel was admitted as a member of the UN by majority vote on 11 May 1949.
June 1948, after consulting with Reuven Shiloah (1909 – 1959) and Chaim Herzog (1918 – 1997), David Ben-Gurion decided to create three intelligence organizations, which ended up being the three main entities in the Israeli Intelligence Community, along with Aman, the military intelligence arm that supplies information to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF); Shin Bet, responsible for internal intelligence, counter-terror and counter-espionage; and the Mossad, which deals with covert activities outside of Israel. Ben-Gurion kept all of the agencies under his control, and from the beginning, it was kept officially hidden from the Israeli public. In fact, mentioning the name Shin Bet or Mossad in public was prohibited until the 1960s.[3351] As Ben-Gurion prevented the legal recognition of the agencies, no law defined its operations. As Rosen Bergman explained:
In other words, Israeli intelligence from the outset occupied a shadow realm, one adjacent to, yet separate from, the country’s democratic institutions. A deep state.
In this shadow realm, “state security” was used to justify a large number of actions and operations that, in the visible world, would have been subject to criminal prosecution and long prison terms. The most notable example was targeted killing. In Israeli law, there is no death penalty, but Ben-Gurion circumvented this by giving himself the authority to order extra-judicial executions.[3352]
While also dealing with ex-Nazis, the CIA
was establishing relationships with the Zionist leadership in Israel. In May 1951, at the invitation of
Jewish organizations, Ben Gurion went on an unofficial trip to the United Sates.
He used the opportunity for a secret meeting with General Walter Bedell-Smith,
then head of the CIA. Until then, the Americans had rejected every Israeli offer
to establish a covert liaison between the two countries, for fear that it would
harm their ties with the Arab world. Another reason was the fear that Israel
the kibbutzim that were established by immigrants from Eastern Europe were
permeated Soviet agents. In the end, Bedell-Smith agreed, on the condition
that it would remain an absolute secret, which Ben-Gurion agreed to. Shortly afterwards, Shiloah was sent to Washington to draw up a
formal U.S.-Israeli agreement on intelligence cooperation.[3353] James Jesus
Angleton was assigned to “the Israel desk” as liaison with Israel’s Mossad and
Shin Bet agencies.[3354]
As Wolf Blitzer reported in the Washington Post:
Mr. Angleton, in fact, had a very dramatic impact on his counterparts in Israel in persuading them to take the necessary precautions to make certain that the Soviet Union could not penetrate the Israeli intelligence community He was always suspicious of Soviet operations, and is credited with being the first to recognize the dangers of the Soviet Union’s “disinformation” campaign to subvert the West. Israel learned much from him.[3355]
On September 14, 1952, Shiloah retired, leaving the organization in the hands of the 40-year-old Isser Harel (1912 – 2003), who became one the most famous Israeli spymasters, also heading Shin Bet, and becoming chairman of the secret services’ coordinating committee. Harel recruited a large number of former Irgun and Stern Gang members, including Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister. After the establishment of the Israeli state, Shamir served in the Mossad between 1955 and 1965 and as a Knesset member. Under Harel, Shamir became Mossad’s chief of European operations, a position he held for ten years. Harel became one of Israel’s most powerful figures, heading Mossad and Shin Bet and becoming chairman of the secret services’ coordinating committee. In 1969, Shamir joined Begin’s Herut party.
Harel continued to pursue Shiloah’s dream of a “peripheral alliance” between Israel and potential non-Arab allies in the Middle East. In 1957, he became friends with the first head of Iran’s notorious intelligence agency, Savak, and later prime minister, Taimur Bakhtiar. A year later, he formed the Trident network with Savak and Turkey’s National Security Services as “a dam to stop the Nasser-Soviet flood.” He also armed and trained Iraqi Kurds, and built bases and airfields in Turkey and Ethiopia, under the cover of the fictitious CIA-funded Reynolds Concrete Company.[3356]
Harel personally commanded some of Mossad’s most famous operations, the abduction from Argentina of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, who was subsequently found guilty of war crimes in a widely publicized trial in Jerusalem, where he was executed by hanging in 1962. As Polkehn noted, given the extent of the collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis, “one reason why the Israeli government was so anxious about holding the trial of Eichmann in Israel and in no other place becomes clear; only in Israel could Zionist contacts with the Nazis be kept out of public view.”[3357] Advancing the narrative, Hannah Arendt would later write Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. Arendt’s subtitle famously introduced the phrase “the banality of evil.” In part, the phrase refers to Eichmann’s deportment at the trial as he displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply “doing his job.”
The Rothschilds also played a significant part in the funding of Israel’s governmental infrastructure. Baron Edmond James de Rothschild is known in Israel simply as “the Baron Rothschild” or “the Benefactor,” for the large donations and significant support he lent to the Zionist movement during its early years, which helped lead to the establishment of the State of Israel. In Tel Aviv, the Rothschild Boulevard is named after him, as are a number of localities throughout Israel which he assisted in founding, including Metulla, Zikhron Ya’akov, Rishon Lezion and Rosh Pina. The main building of the Knesset, the state legislature, completed in 1966, was financed by his son, James de Rothschild, as a gift to the State of Israel. James married Dorothy Mathilde Pinto, a close friend of Chaim Weizmann. Dorothy was the first chairperson of the Yad Hanadiv (“The Rothschild Foundation”) who donated the building for the Supreme Court of Israel, which features a Masonic-inspired pyramid. The foundation memorializes her husband’s father, Edmond James de Rothschild.
Yad Hanadiv was chaired by Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild (1936 – 2024), a close friend of David Rockefeller. Jacob was the son of eldest son of Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild (1910 – 1990), whose mother, Rózsika Rothschild, was the one who drove and created the relationship between Weizmann and the Rothschilds, having introduced his cause to her husband Charles Rothschild and his brother Walter, to whom the Balfour Declaration was dedicated.[3358] Victor joined the Cambridge Apostles, where he became friends with Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby, members of the Cambridge Spy Ring. During World War II, Victor was recruited to MI5. Anthony Blunt was the son of Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the British intelligence handler of Jamal ud din al Afghani. When Anthony Blunt was unmasked as a Soviet agent in 1964, Victor was questioned by Special Branch, but was cleared of any wrong-doing, and continued working on projects for the British government. Victor became a senior executive with Royal Dutch Shell and N.M. Rothschild & Sons, and an advisor to the Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher governments of the UK.
In Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders alleges that Victor, as the principal conduit for MI6, channeled funds to Encounter, the magazine of the CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Jacob Rothschild was educated at Eton College and then at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was tutored by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, a founding member of the CCF.[3359] In 1945, Trevor-Roper was ordered by British counter-intelligence to investigate the circumstances of Hitler’s death, and to refute the Soviet propaganda that Hitler was alive and living in the West. The filmmakers, Noam Shalev and Pablo Weschler, makers of the documentary film Revealed: Hitler in Argentina, believe that Trevor-Roper’s investigation was rushed and “unprofessional.” Trevor-Roper was also the author of an article published in the February 1960 issue of Encounter, titled “Three Foreigners and the Philosophy of the English Revolution,” about the influence of the Hartlib Circle, the circle of Rosicrucians who supported the missions of Menessah ben Israel and Shabbetai Zevi.
In 1961, Rothschild married Serena Mary Dunn, the paternal granddaughter of the Canadian financier Sir James Dunn, and the maternal granddaughter of James St Clair-Erskine, 5th Earl of Rosslyn (1869 – 1939), whose earldom included the famous Rosslyn Chapel, and whose family were long-standing Grand Masters of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. James was the son of Robert St Clair-Erskine, 4th Earl of Rosslyn, who was Grand Master of Scotland.[3360] James’ wife, Blanche Adeliza FitzRoy, was described as “one of the last survivors of the great Victorian hostesses” and personally knew many of the most famous people of the Victorian era, including Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone.[3361]
On June 5, 1967, after a prolonged attrition war between Israel and Egypt, the Six-Day War broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbors. After six days of war, Israel captured Palestinian Arab territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Sinai Peninsula, as well as the Syrian territory of Golan Heights. Israeli settlements or colonies are civilian communities where Israeli citizens live, almost exclusively of Jewish ethnicity, built on lands occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War. As early as September 1967, Israeli settlement policy was progressively encouraged by the Labor government of Levi Eshkol. The basis for Israeli settlement in the West Bank became the Allon Plan, named after its inventor Yigal Allon, a politician and general in the IDF. It implied Israeli annexation of major parts of the Israeli-occupied territories, especially East Jerusalem, Gush Etzion and the Jordan Valley. The settlement policy of the government of Yitzhak Rabin was also derived from the Allon Plan.
As noted by Yotam Berger, writing for Haaretz, “It has long been an open secret that the settlement enterprise was launched under false pretenses, involving the expropriation of Palestinian land for ostensibly military purposes when the true intent was to build civilian settlements, which is a violation of international law.” In minutes of meeting in then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s office, top Israeli officials discussed such a plan in building the settlement of Kiryat Arba, next to Hebron. Many settlements were established by Nahal, a paramilitary program of the IDF, as military outposts and later expanded and populated with civilian inhabitants. The method was an open secret in Israel throughout the 1970s, but publication of the information was suppressed by the military censor.[3362] In the 1970s, Israel’s methods also included requisitioning for ostensibly military purposes and spraying of land with poison.[3363]
“For the Likud,” explained Yossi Klein Halevi in the New York Times, “the settlers are an extension of itself.”[3364] The Likud (“The Consolidation”) was founded in 1973 by Begin and Ariel Sharon in an alliance with several right-wing parties. Sharon, an Israeli general who Yitzhak Rabin called Sharon “the greatest field commander in our history,” had been instrumental in the 1953 Qibya massacre, as well as in the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War of 1967, the War of Attrition, and the Yom-Kippur War of 1973. Although many Israelis revere Sharon as a war hero and statesman, Palestinians and Human Rights Watch have criticized him as a war criminal.[3365] Likud’s landslide victory in the 1977 elections was a major turning point in the country’s political history, as Begin was able to form a government with the support of the religious parties, consigning the left-wing to opposition for the first time since independence. Begin signed the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty. In the 1981 election, the Likud won 48 seats, but formed a narrower government than in 1977.
The Likud government of Menahem Begin, from 1977, was more supportive to settlement in other parts of the West Bank, by organizations like Gush Emunim and the Jewish Agency/ World Zionist Organization (WZO), and intensified the settlement activities. Since 1967, government-funded settlement projects in the West Bank were implemented by the WZO.[3366] Likud declared in a government statement that the entire historic Land of Israel is the inalienable heritage of the Jewish people and that no part of the West Bank should be handed over to foreign rule.[3367] In the same year, Ariel Sharon declared that there was a plan to settle two million Jews in the West Bank by 2000. The government abrogated the prohibition from purchasing occupied land by Israelis; the “Drobles Plan,” WZO a plan for large-scale settlement in the West Bank meant to prevent a Palestinian state under the pretext of security became the framework for its policy.[3368]
During the last decade of Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn’s life, from 1940 to 1950, after he had been rescued from the Nazis with the help of Nazi general Canaris, he settled in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in New York City. Working with the government and the contacts Schneersohn had with the US State Department, Chabad was able to save his son-in-law Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (1902 – 1994), Russian Empire-born, American Chabad-Lubavitcher Jewish rabbi known to many as “the Rebbe” from Vichy France in 1941 before the borders were closed down.[3369] Between 1984 and 1988, Benjamin Netanyahu served as the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. At the time, Netanyahu formed a relationship during the 1980s with the Rebbe Schneerson, whom he referred to as “the most influential man of our time.”[3370]
Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, was a professor of Jewish history at Cornell University, editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, and a senior aide to Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Pendant la guerre, lui et Hillel Kook ont servi d'émissaires pour le mouvement sioniste révisionniste à New York. En 1953, il publie une biographie intitulée Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher. Regarding the cause of the Palestinian people, he stated:
That they won’t be able to face [anymore] the war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more. They won’t be able to exist, and they will run away from here. But it all depends on the war, and whether we will win the battles with them.[3371]
In July 2006, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center organized a conference to mark the 60th anniversary of the King David Hotel bombing. The conference was attended by past and future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former members of Irgun. The British Ambassador in Tel Aviv and the Consul-General in Jerusalem protested that a plaque commemorating the bombing stated, “For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated.”[3372] Netanyahu, then chairman of Likud and Leader of the Opposition in the Knesset, opined that the bombing was a legitimate act with a military target, distinguishing it from an act of terror intended to harm civilians since Irgun sent warnings to evacuate the building. He said, “Imagine that Hamas or Hizbullah would call the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and say, ‘We have placed a bomb and we are asking you to evacuate the area.’ They don’t do that. That is the difference.”[3373]
[1] Defamation. Yoav Shamir Films. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTAjc1OSrmY&t=4818s.
[2] Defamation. Yoav Shamir Films. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTAjc1OSrmY&t=4818s.
[3] Edward E. Grusd. B’nai B’rith: the story of a covenant (New York: Appleton-Century, 1966) xix, 315 p. 21 cm. Retrieved from https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/bnaibrith.html
[4] Peter Grose. Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Houghton
Mifflin, 1994).
[5] Lord Alfred Douglas. Plain English (1921); Kerry Bolton, The Protocols of Zion in Context, 1st Edition, (Renaissance Press: Paraparaumu Beach, 2013).
[6] Victor Marsden. The Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion (Chicago: Patriotic Pub. Co., 1934), p. 100.
[7] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. Vol. 1, edited by Raphael Patai, translated by Harry Zohn, p. 83-84
[8] Benyamin
Matuvo. “The Zionist Wish and the Nazi
Deed.” Issues (Winter 1966/7), p. 9;
cited in Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (London:
Croom Helm, 1983), p. 37.
[9] Chaim
Weizmann to Ahad Ha’am, in Leonard Stein (ed.), The
Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol. VII, p. 81; cited in Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
(London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 37.
[10] Edwin Black. The Transfer Agreement (Dialog Press, 1983), p.
359–360.
[11] Henry L. Feingold. The Jewish People in America (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
[12] Cited in Faris Yahya. Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Research Center, January 1978), p. 53.
[13] “David S. Wyman. Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), 49.
[14] Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983), p.149.
[15] Michael Burleigh. Moral Combat Good and Evil in World War (HarperCollins,
2011), p. 148.
[16] Naomi Shepherd. Wilfrid Israel: German Jewry’s Secret Ambassador (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1984), pp. 133-34.
[17] John Quigley. Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice (Duke
University Press, 1990).
[18] David Vital: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939 A People Apart (Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 894.
[19] Gulie Ne’eman Arad. America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism
(Indiana University Press, 2000). p. 197.
[20] Michael Laitman. The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism:
Historical facts on anti-Semitism as a reflection of Jewish social discord (Laitman
Kabbalah Publishers, 2019), pp. 156–157.
[21] John Quigley. The International Diplomacy of Israel’s Founders
(Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 40–41.
[22] Martin Gilbert. “Israel was Everything.” New York Times
(June 21, 1987).
[23] Michael Blakeney. “Proposals for a Jewish Colony in Australia:
1938-1948.” Jewish Social Studies 46:3/4 (1984), pp. 277-292.
[24] Hassan S. Haddad. “The Biblical Bases of Zionist Colonialism.” Journal
of Palestine Studies, 3, 4 (1974), pp. 98–99.
[25] Morals and Dogma.
[26] Ethel Stefana Drower. The Haran Gawaita and the Baptism of
Hibil-Ziwa (Biblioteca Apostolica Vatican, 1953).
[27] Werner Sundermann. “Mani.” Encyclopædia Iranica (Encyclopædia
Iranica Foundation, 2009).
[28] Charles Häberl. The Neo-Mandaic Dialect of Khorramshahr (Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009). p. 18. , p. 1
[29] David Margoliouth. “Harranians,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.
[30] Bernard Lewis. The Jews of Islam (Princeton University
Press, 1984), p. 104.
[31] Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality (Hackett
Publishing, 1998), p. 109.
[32] Geoffrey Herman. A Prince Without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era (Mohr Siebeck, 2012), p. 211.
[33] Louis Ginzberg. “Aaron ben Samuel ha-Nasi (called also Abu Aaron ben Samuel ha-Nasi of Babylonia).” Jewish Encyclopedia.
[34] R.W.M. Vindication of the Mosaic Ethnology of Europe. Primitive or Japhetic Europe; its race, language and topography (Wertheim, Macintosh and Hunt, 1863), p. 15; An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present; Compiled from Original Authors and Illustrated with Maps, Cuts, Notes, Chronological and Other Tables, Volume 3 (Symon, 1738), p. 827.
[35] Michael Brenner. A short history of the Jews (Princeton
University Press 2010).
[36] Gustave Saige. Les Juifs du Languedoc antérieurement au XIVe siècle (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1881), p. 44.
[37] Norman Golb. The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 15.
[38] Arthur J. Zuckerman. A Jewish Princedom in Feudal France, 768-900 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1972).
[39] Ibid.
[40] Edward Gelles. The Jewish Journey (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle
Edition), p. 57.
[41] Karen Ralls. The Templars and the Grail: Knights of the Quest (Quest Books, 2003), p. 38.
[42] Rashi
Bereishit 1:1.
[43] Aryeh Grabois. “The Hebraica Veritas and Jewish-Christian Intellectual Relations in the Twelfth Century.” Speculum, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Oct., 1975), pp. 618.
[44] Bernhard Blumenkranz. “Cluny, France.” Jewish Encyclopedia.
[45] Samuel John Eales. A St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux (Society for promoting Christian knowledge, 1890), p. 38.
[46] Morals and Dogma.
[47] “Freemasonry and the Holy Grail.” Masonic Trowel. Retrieved from
http://www.themasonictrowel.com/books/the_square_and_compasses_falconer/files/chapter_43.htm
[48] M. Ben-Dov. In the Shadow of the Temple (Harpercollins, 1985), p. 347.
[49] Louis I. Newman. Jewish
Influences on Christian Reform Movements (Columbia University Press, 1925) p. 142-43.
[50] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 38.
[51] Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 44.
[52] Sefer Hegyon ha-Nefesh, ed. G. Wigoder, (Jerusalem, 1969), as cited in Joseph Dan (ed.). The Early Kabbalah (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 28.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Tom Block, “Towards an Understanding of the Jewish/Sufi,” Speech to the Jewish Community Relations Council, Ratner Museum, May 2, 2007 [http://www.tomblock.com/published/shalom_jewishsufi2.php]
[55] Richard Gottheil, Stephen S. Wise, Michael Friedländer. “Ibn
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[120] Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 75.
[121] Barber. The Trial of the Templars, p. 20.
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[126] Cecil Roth. The Jews of Medieval Oxford (Clarendon Press, 1951).
[127] John Maddicott. “The Crusade Taxation of 1268–70 and the Development of Parliament.” In P. R. Coss; S. D. Lloyd (eds.). Thirteenth Century England. 2 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1989). pp. 107–110.
[128] Ibid., p. 187.
[129] Bettina L.
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[130] Hugh Chisholm, ed. “Sigismund.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911).
[131] Newman. Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements (Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 437.
[132] Ibid., p. 441.
[133] E. H.
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[134] Raymond T. McNally. “In Search of the Lesbian Vampire: Barbara von Cilli, Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” and the Dragon Order.” Journal of Dracula Studies 2 (2001).
[135] Ibid.
[136] “Legend
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[137] Stanislav Južnič. “[Chemical
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[139] Matei Cazacu. Dracula (Leiden: Brill, 2017), p. 17.
[140] Ivan Mirnik. “The Order of the Dragon as Reflected in Hungarian and
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[141] Salo Wittmayer Baron. A Social and Religious History of the Jews: Late Middle Ages and the era of European expansion, 1200-1650 (Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 389.
[142] Stefanie Beth Siegmund. The Medici State and the Ghetto of
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[143] Ralph Oppenhejm. Spain in the looking-glass, trans. K. John
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[145] Cecil Roth. History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932), p. 271.
[146] Ibid.
[147] Ezer Kahanoff. “On Marranos and Sabbateans: A Reexamination of Charismatic Religiosity – Its Roots, Its Place and Its Significance in the Life of the Western Sephardi Diaspora.” כתב עת לעיון ומחקר (Journal for Research and Research), vol. 8.
[148] Ibid.
[149] Joachin Prinz. The Secret Jews (New York: Random House, 1973) p. 5.
[150] Al Imran 3: 72.
[151] Julio-Inigues de Medrano. La Silva Curiosa. (Paris Orry, 1608), pp. 156-157, with the following explanation: “This letter following was found in the archives of Toledo by the Hermit of Salamanca, (while) searching the ancient records of the kingdoms of Spain; and as it is expressive and remarkable, I wish to write it here.”
[152] Samuel Usque. Consolation for the Tributations of Israel,
trans. A.M. Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1965), p. 193;
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[153] The Menorah, Volumes 20-23, (Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 1932), p. 163; Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. The Borgias: or, At the feet of Venus (P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1930), p. 242, 313; Sarah Bradford. Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy.
[154] Moshe Idel. Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988).
[155] Ziyyur. quoted from Moshe Idel. “Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Neoplatonism and Jewish though, p. 333
[156] Fabrizio Lelli. “Hermes Among the Jews: Hermetica as Hebraica from Antiquity to the Renaissance.” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, University of Pennsylvania Press, Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 2007, pp. 133.
[157] Mazref la-Hokhmah, chap. 25, quoted from Idel, “Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Neoplatonism and Jewish though, p. 336.
[158] Hanegraaff, Wouter. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected
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[159] Jean Seznec. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological
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[160] Baigent, Michael, & Leigh, Richard. The Elixir and the Stone: The Traditions of Magic and Alchemy
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[161] Ibid., p. 77.
[162] Ibid.
[163] “The History of the Order of the Fleur-de-Lys.” Retrieved from
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[164] Natalie Jayne Goodison. Introducing the Medieval Swan (University of Wales Press, 2022).
[165] “The History of the Order of the Fleur-de-Lys.” Retrieved from
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[166] “Rene I King of Jerusalem and the 2 Sicilies.” The Order of the Fleur de Lys. Retrieved from https://www.orderofthefleurdelys.org.uk/order-history/rene-i-king-of-jerusalem-and-the-2-sicilies/
[167] “The History of the Order of the Fleur-de-Lys.”
[168] “Cosimo de Medici and the Sforzas.” Retrieved from
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[169] John Plummer. The Hours of Catherine of Cleves (New York,
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[170] Franco Pratesi. “Italian Cards - New Discoveries.” The Playing-Card, 18, 1, 2 (1989), pp. 28–32, 33–38.
[171] Edward Gelles. The Jewish Journey: A Passage through European History (The Radcliffe Press, 2016), p. 154.
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[176] Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln. Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
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[178] Peter Lemesurier. Nostradamus: The Illustrated Prophecies (O
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[182] Christopher Prendergast. A History of Modern French Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 61.
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[184] Samuel Guichenon. Histoire généalogique de la royale Maison de
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[185] Eugène Defrance. Catherine de Médicis, ses astrologues et ses
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[186] Michael Heyd. Be sober and reasonable: the critique of
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[188] Franca Trinchieri Camiz. “Music and Painting in Cardinal Del Monte's
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[190] Diana Zahuranec. “Turin Legends: Royal Alchemy.” (August 23, 2015). Retrieved from https://dianazahuranec.com/2015/08/23/turin-legends-royal-alchemy/
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[196] Usque. Consolation for the Tributations of Israel, p. 195;
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[197] Cited in Jerome Friedman. “The Reformation in Alien Eyes,” p. 32.
[198] H.H. Ben-Sasson, “The Reformation in Contemporary Jewish Eyes,” in: PIASH, 4 (1970); S.W. Baron, in: Diogenes, 16, no. 61 (1968), 32–51; “Reformation,” Jewish Virtual Library.
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[200] Newman. Jewish Influences on Christian Reform Movements, p. 625.
[201] “Letter From Paracelsus to Erasmus.” Prov Med J Retrosp Med Sci. 7 (164): 142.
[202] Karl Engel. Faust-Schriften vom 16. Jahrhundert bis Mitte 1884 (1885), pp. 2-4.
[203] Leo Ruickbie. Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2009).
[204] Michael Haag. The Templars. The History & the Myth (Profile Books, 2008), p. 257.
[205] “Trent, Council of” in F. L. Cross, (ed.) The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford University Press, 2005).
[206] Kahanoff. “On Marranos and Sabbateans.”
[207] Antonio Domingues Ortiz (Ediciones ISTMOS: Madrid). Retrieved from http://www.amijewish.info/crypto-names2.html
[208] Robert A. Maryks. The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
[209] Marjorie Reeves. Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (New York: Sutton Publishing, 1999).
[210] Baigent & Leigh. The Temple and the Lodge (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1989).
[211] Pietro Tacchi Venturi. Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia, 5 vols (Rome: La Cività Cattolica, 1950), I.2:278–81; cited in Barton T. Geger, S.J. The First First Companions: The Continuing Impact of the Men Who Left Ignatius. Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 44/2, Summer 2012, p. 18.
[212] Paul Van Dyke. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1926), p. 128.
[213] “Enique Garcia Hernan. The Borgia redeemed? The Life and work of St. Francis Borgia (1510-1572)” The Ninth Portsmouth. Ramon Perez de Ayala Lecture on Spanish Civilisation. p. 18.
[214] E. William Monter. Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 134.
[215] “The Borgia who became a Jesuit in secret.” Catholic Herald (October 10, 2012).
[216] Emanuel Buttigieg. “Knights, Jesuits, Carnival and the Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century Malta.” The Historial Journal, 55:3 (September 2012), p. 572.
[217] John W. O’Malley, S.J. “The Jesuits, St. Ignatius, and the Counter Reformation.” Studies in the Spirituality of the Jesuits. Vol. XIV, n. 1 (January 1982).
[218] Ibid.
[219] Francesco Bonazzi. Elenco dei Cavalieri del S.M. Ordine di S. Giovanni di Gerusalemme, 1136-1713 (in Italian) (Naples: Libreria Detken & Rocholl, 1897). p. 37.
[220] “Pole, Reginald.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press.
[221] Frances Yates. The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 36.
[222] Franz Dittrich. Gasparo Contarini 1483-1542 (Nieuwkoop, 1972), p. 456; Yates. The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age, p. 35; Jutta Gisela Sperling. Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 77.
[223] Yates. The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age, p. 33.
[224] Ibid., p. 34.
[225] Ibid., p. 46.
[226] Yates. The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age, p. 37.
[227] Yates. The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age, p. 37, p. 88.
[228] Ibid., pp. 198-199.
[229] Frances Yates. Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 93.
[230] Ben Jonson. The Alchemist, II.i.89-104, edited by H. C. Hart (London: De La More Press, 1903).
[231] Yates. The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age, p. 88.
[232] From the 1944 Clark lectures by C. S. Lewis; Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954) p. 1.
[233] Ibid., p. 90.
[234] Ibid., p. 112.
[235] Ibid., p. 131-132.
[236] Ibid., p. 131-132.
[237] “Gray’s Inn.” Bar Council. Retrieved from http://www.barcouncil.org.uk/about/innsofcourt/graysinn/
[238] William Dugdale & William Herbert. Antiquities of the Inns of court and chancery: containing historical and descriptive sketches relative to their original foundation, customs, ceremonies, buildings, government, &c., &c., with a concise history of the English law (London: Vernor and Hood, 1804), p. 191.
[239] Robert Richard Pearce. History of the Inns of Court and Chancery: With Notices of Their Ancient Discipline, Rules, Orders, and Customs, Readings, Moots, Masques, Revels, and Entertainments (R. Bentley, 1848). p. 219
[240] Tucker Brooke (December 1946). “Latin Drama in Renaissance England.” A Journal of English Literary History. 13 (4): 233–240.
[241] Ibid., p. 346.
[242] Henry Glassie. All Silver and No Brass, An Irish Christmas Mumming (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976). p. 224.
[243] “Francis Bacon and the Origins of an Ancient Toast at Gray’s Inn.” Graya no. 131, p. 41. Gray’s Inn. Retrieved from https://www.graysinn.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/members/Gray%27s%20Inn%20-%20Graya%20131%20Bacon.pdf
[244] Jacqueline Simpson & Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English
Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 119–120.
[245] 3.4.114-16.
[246] Amelie Deventer von Kunow. Francis Bacon, last of the Tudors (Bacon society of America, 1924).
[247] Peter Dawkins. “The Life of Sir Francis Bacon.” Francis Bacon Research Trust (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.fbrt.org.uk/pages/essays/Life_of_Sir_Francis_Bacon.pdf
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[249] David Wiles. “The Carnivalesque in A Midsummer Night's Dream.” In Harold Bloom & Janyce Marson. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages (New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2008), pp. 208–23.
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[348] Ibid., p. 127.
[349] Ibid., p. 126-127.
[350] Ibid., p. 505.
[351] Håkan Håkansson. “Alchemy of the Ancient Goths: Johannes Bureus’ Search for the Lost Wisdom of Scandinavia.” Early Science and Medicine 17 (2012), p. 502.
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[353] Ruth Stephan. “Christina, Queen of Sweden.” Encyclopedia Britannica.
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[356] John Edward Fletcher. A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, ‘Germanus Incredibilis’: With a Selection of His Unpublished Correspondence and an Annotated Translation of His Autobiography (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
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[368] Herbert Breger. “Elias artista - a Precursor of the Messiah in Natural Science.” in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Everett Mendelsohn and Helga Nowotny, Sociology of the Sciences, vol. 8 (New York: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), p. 49.
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[389] Lord Alfred Douglas. Plain English (September 3, 1921).
[390] Ibid.
[391] Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, p. 261.
[392] Samuel Butler. Hudibras, op. cit., Butler’s note to pt. 1, canto I, 527-544.
[393] Paul Benbridge, “The Rosicrucian Resurgence at the Court of Cromwell,” in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited, p. 225.
[394] Daniel Frank. History of Jewish Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 607.
[395] Van Der Wall. “An Awakening to the World of the Soul,” p. 76.
[396] Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie & Timothy Raylor, editors. Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 134.
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[408] Geoffrey F. Nuttall. “Early Quakerism in the Netherlands: Its Wider Context.” Bulletin of Friends Historical Association, 44: 1 (Spring, 1955), p. 5.
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[411] Gotthard Deutsch & Meyer Kayserling. “Leon (Leao).” Jewish Encyclopedia.
[412] John T. Young. Faith, Alchemy and Natural Philosophy (Routledge, 2018), p.47.
[413] Donald R. Dickson. “Johann Valentin Andreae's Utopian Brotherhoods.” Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 760-802.
[414] Ibid.
[415] Arthur Shane, “Jacob Judah Leon of Amsterdam (1602-1675) and his Models of the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 96 (1983), pp. 146-69.
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[417] Wilfrid Samuel. “Sir William Davidson, Royalist, and the Jews.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 14 (l940), pp. 39-79.
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[420] NLS: Kincardine MS. 5049, ff. 117, 151; MS. 5050, f. 28.
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[449] Michael Zuckert. The Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame University Press, 1996), pp. 73–85; The Freemason’s Monthly Magazine, Volume 2 (Boston: Tuttle & Dennett, 1843), p. 10.
[450] Stathis Psillos & Martin Curd. The Routledge companion to philosophy of science (1. publ. in paperback ed.) (London: Routledge, 2010). pp. 129–38.
[451] Nancy J. Hirschmann. Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 200), p. 79.
[452] Cornel West. “The spirit of Spinoza.” Boston Globe (28 July 2006).
[453] Matt Goldish. “Maimonides, Stonehenge, and Newton’s Obsessions.” Jewish Review of Books, Volume 9, Number 2 (Summer 2018), p. 12.
[454] M. Knights. “Masham, Sir Francis, 3rd Bt. (c. 1646–1723), of Otes, High Laver, Essex,” in D. Hayton, E. Cruickshanks and S. Handley (eds), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1690–1715 (Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, 2002).
[455] Allison Coudert. Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Springer, 1995). p. 6.
[456] W. Totok & C. Haase, (eds.) Leibniz (Hanover, 1966), 46; Leibniz, SS, s. I, vol. 11, pp. 647–49.
[457] J.H (Yossi) Chajes. “Kabbalah and the Diagramatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution.” Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dorhmann, Adam Shear and Elchanan Reiner (eds.). Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press) p. 110.
[458] Matt Goldish. “Maimonides, Stonehenge, and Newton’s Obsessions.” Jewish Review of Books, 9: 2 (Summer 2018), p. 12.
[459] Frederick A. Ober. Amerigo Vespuci (New York: Harper
Brothers, 1907), p. 28.
[460] Samuel Eliot Morison. Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Read Books,
2008), pp. 37-39
[461] David Brion Davis. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) p. 55; Cf. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, pp. 17-22;27;36-49.
[462] As cited in Benjamin Braude. “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” p. 128.
[463] Braude. “The Sons of Noah,” p. 128.
[464] Edith R. Sanders. “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective.” The Journal of African History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1969), pp. 524.
[465] Drescher. “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” p. 107.
[466] Ibid.
[467] Pirenne. Mohammed and Charlemagne. p. 99.
[468] Solomon Grayzel. A History of the Jew: From Babylonian Exile to the End of World II (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), p. 312.
[469] Lady Magnus. Outlines of Jewish History, revised by M. Friedlander (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1890), p. 107.
[470] Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht. The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics (New York: Times Books, 1983), p. 39: Also, Jewish Encyclopaedia, vol. 11, p. 402.
[471] Seymour Drescher. “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Strangers & neighbors: relations between Blacks & Jews in the United States, Maurianne Adams (Ed.), (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 109.
[472] Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1967), p. 232.
[473] Ibid., p. 233.
[474] Ibid., p. 249.
[475] G. H. Turnbull. “Samuel Hartlib’s Influence on the Early History of the Royal Society.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Apr., 1953), pp. 103.
[476] Nicholas Hagger. The Secret Founding of America: The Real Story of Freemasons, Puritans, & the Battle for The New World (Watkins, 2009)..
[477] La vie d’un exploer (Paris: Laperouse, 1625) cited in Graham Philips, Merlin and the Discovery of Avalon in the New World (Rochester, Vermont: Bear & Company, 2011).
[478] C. Oman. The Winter Queen (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), ch. 50; cited in Graham Phillips. Merlin and the Discovery of Avalon in the New World (p. 169) (Inner Traditions/Bear & Company). Kindle Edition.
[479] Ibid., p. 103.
[480] Du Gua’s autobiography survives in two volumes in La vie d’un exploer (Paris: Lapérouse, 1626). Cited in Graham Phillips. Merlin and the Discovery of Avalon in the New World (Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition).
[481] D. Simmons. Henri of Naverre (London: Blakewell, 1941), p. 67–78.
[482] Frederick Samuel Boas. Christopher Marlowe: a biographical and critical study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940).
[483] Yates. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 226.
[484] Ibid.
[485] Neil
Kamil. Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the
Huguenots’ New World, 1517-1751 (JHU Press, 2020), p. 243.
[486] Laursen & Popkin. “Introduction.” In Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume IV, p. xvii.
[487] “Winthrop,
John, Jr.” Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Encyclopedia.com
(January 25, 2022). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/winthrop-john-jr
[488] Elaine Pryce. “‘A New Order of Things’: Benjamin Furly, Quakers and Quietism in the Seventeenth Century.” Quaker Studies, vol. 23/2 (2018); Marion Balderston. “The Mystery of William Penn, The Royal Society, and the First Map of Pennsylvania.” Quaker History, 55: 2 (Autumn 1966), p. 79.
[489] J. Thomas Scharf. History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884
(Philadelphia: L. H. Everts & co., 1884), p. 155.
[490] Quaker History, Volumes 58-59 (Friends Historical Association, 1969), p. 29 n. 20.
[491] Linda S. Schrigner, et al. Bacon’s “Secret Society” – The Ephrata Connection: Rosicrucianism in Early America (1983)
[492] Julius Friedrich Sachse. The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1895; New York, 1970 [reprint]), p. 258.
[493] ‘doctissimus Astrologus, Magus et Cabbalista’, cited in Levente Juhász, “Johannes Kelpius (1673–1708): Mystic on the Wissahickon,” in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-9.
[494] Elizabeth W. Fisher. “‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German
Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography, 109:3 (1985), p. 318.
[495] Ibid.
[496] Ibid., p. 300.
[497] Israel Shahak & Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in
Israel (Pluto Press, 1999), p. 58.
[498] Elisheva Carlebach. The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 15.
[499] Liebes, “Ha-tikkun ha-kelali shel R’ Nahman mi-Breslav ve-yahaso le-Shabbeta’ut,” in Shod ha-emunah ha-Shabbeta’it, pp. 238–61, esp. pp. 251–52; as cited in Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude.
[500] Charles Novak. Jacob Frank, Le Faux Messie: Déviance de la kabbale ou théorie du complot (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012).
[501] Michael Noel. “The Twenty Most Influential Businessmen of all Time.” Forbes (July 29, 2005).
[502] Martin Goodman. A History of Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 413.
[503] Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 47.
[504] Abba Eban. My People: Abba Eban’s History of the Jews. Volume II (New York, Behrman House, 1979), p. 29.
[505] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 272-74.
[506] Abraham G. Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration: From Cabbalistic Judaism to Roman Catholicism and From Jewishness to Polishness,” Jewish Social Studies, 25: 4 (1963: Oct) p. 301.
[507] Ibid., p. 176.
[508] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 232.
[509] Ibid.
[510] David Biale. “Masochism and Philosemitism: The Strange Case of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.” Journal of Contemporary History, 17: 2 (1982), p. 321, n. 16.
[511] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 238.
[512] Scholem. Kabbalah,
p. 304.
[513] Ibid.
[514] Michał Galas. “The Influence of Frankism on Polish Culture.”
in Antony Polonsky (ed.), Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 15: Focusing
on Jewish Religious Life, 1500-1900 (Liverpool, 2002; online edn, Liverpool
Scholarship Online, 25 Feb. 2021).
[515] Sławomir Dobrzański. “Maria Szymanowska: pianist and composer.” Polish Music Center at USC (2006), p. 27.
[516] Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration,” p. 319.
[517] Ibid., p. 320.
[518] WIEM Encyklopedia, Filomaci. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20120218152011/http://portalwiedzy.onet.pl/60999,,,,filomaci,haslo.html
[519] Pawel Smolikowski. Historja zgromadzenia Zmartwychwsta panskiego (“History of the Order of the Lord’s Resurrection”), vol. iii (Krakow, 1896), pp. 427–428, cited in Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration,” p. 312.
[520] Heinrich Grätz. Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis
auf die Gegenwart, Volume 2. p. 273. See also pp. 240-374; Volume 3, pp. 2,
7, 83, 99.
[521] Kaufmann Kohler & Louis Ginzberg. “Baer (Dov) of Meseritz.” Jewish Encyclopedia.
[522] Cited in Eban. My People, p. 30.
[523] Eban. My People, p. 30.
[524] Immanuel Etkes. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Origins of Chabad Hasidis (Brandeis University Press, 2015), p. 185.
[525] Donald M. Lewis, Richard V. Pierard. Global Evangelicalism: Theology, History & Culture in Regional Perspective (InterVarsity Press, 2014); Evan Burns. “Moravian Missionary Piety and the Influence of Count Zinzendorf.” Journal of Global Christianity (1.2 / 2015); Jonathan M. Yeager. Early Evangelicalism: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2013); Mark A. Noll. The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (InterVarsity Press, 2004).
[526] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (Vintage, 2013).
[527] Ibid.
[528] Dickson. The Tessera of Antilia, p. 19; Popkin, Laursen, Force. Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume IV, p. 108.
[529] Elizabeth W. Fisher. “‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German
Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography, 109:3 (1985), p. 311.
[530] Matt Goldish. The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), p. 17.
[531] Glenn Dynner. Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press, 2011).
[532] Erich Beyreuther. “Zinzendorf und das Judentum,” Judaica, l9 (l963), pp. l93-246; Markus Schoop. “Zum Gespräch Zinzendorfs mit Israel,” Reformatio, 16 (l967), p. 240; Cited in Keith Schuschard, “Why Mrs Blake Cried.”
[533] Raphael
Patai. The Hebrew Goddess (New York:
Ktav, l967), pp. 101-03, 120-22.
[534] Schuchard. Why Mrs Blake Cried.
[535] Karl-Erich Grözinger & Joseph Dan. Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991).
[536] Keith Schuchard. “Why Mrs. Blake Cried.”
[537] Ibid., p. 216.
[538] Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 15.
[539] Ibid., p. 15.
[540] Ibid.
[541] Tim O’Neill. “The Erotic Freemasonry of Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf,” in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed. Jim Keith (Feral House, l993), pp. 103-08.
[542] Elizabeth W. Fisher. “‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German
Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography, 109:3 (1985), pp. 299-333.
[543] “Great Awakening.” Encyclopedia Britannica.
[544] David B. Green. “This Day in Jewish History 1788: Benjamin Franklin Helps Save Floundering Philly Synagogue.” Haaretz (April 30, 2015).
[545] A.J. Lewis. Zinzendorf the Ecumenical Pioneer (London, UK: SCM Press, 1962), pp. 149-50.
[546] Alan Sica. The Anthem Companion to Max Weber (Anthem Press, 2016), p. 77.
[547] John Joseph Stoudt. “Count Zinzendorf and the Pennsylvania Congregation of God in the Spirit: The First American Oecumenical Movement.” Church History Vol. 9, No. 4 (Dec., 1940), p. 370.
[548] Mark A. Noll. The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (InterVarsity Press, 2004), pp. 87, 95.
[549] Kai Dose. “A Note on John Wesley’s Visit to Herrnhut in 1738.” Wesley and Methodist Studies. 7 (1) 2015: 117–120.
[550] Bro. W.J. Chetwode Crawley, LL.D. Senior Grand Deacon, Ireland. “The Wesleys and Irish Freemasonry.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (Volume XV, 1902).
[551] E. Swedenborg. True Christianity, Containing a Comprehensive Theology of the New Church That Was Predicted by the Lord in Daniel 7:13–14 and Revelation 21:1, 2 (Swedenborg Foundation, 2006, Translator’s Preface, Vol. 2, p. 36 ff.)
[552] The Freemason’s Repository, Volume 18 (E. L. Freeman & Son, 1889), p. 557; The Freemason’s Chronicle, Volume 30, (W.W. Morgan., 1889) p. 90.
[553] Stephen Tomkins. The Clapham Sect: How Wilberforce’s circle changed Britain (Oxford: Lion, 2010), p. 248.
[554] Ibid., p. 1.
[555] William Hague. William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London: HarperPress, 2007), pp. 53–55.
[556] Zachary Macaulay. Anti-slavery Monthly Reporter, Volume 3 (London Society for the Mitigation and Abolition of Slavery in the British Dominions, 1831), p. 229.
[557] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 242.
[558] Gershom
Scholem. The Messianic Idea in Judaism.
[559] Ibid.
[560] Ibid.
[561] Keith A.P. Sandiford. “Great Britain And The Revolutions of 1848.” Encyclopedia
of Revolutions of 1848. Retrieved from
https://www.ohio.edu/chastain/dh/greatbri.htm
[562] Yirmiyahu Yovel. Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of
Reason (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 351.
[563] William Uzgalis. “John Locke.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.).
Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/locke/
[564] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements.
[565] Henri Martin. Histoire de France, Vol. XVI. p. 531; cited in Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 233.
[566] Melanson. “Murdoch’s Illuminati.”
[567] Terry Melanson. Perfectibilists: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati (Trine Day).
[568] Hugh Chisholm, ed. “Dalberg § 2. Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 7, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911). pp. 762–763; Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[569] Amos Elon. Founder:
A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time (Viking Adult, 1996), pp. 75-76; cited in Melanson.
“Murdoch’s Illuminati.”
[570] Howard. Secret Societies, pp. 73-74.
[571] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[572] Lloyd Strickland (ed. and transl.). Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011).
[573] George Rude. The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 215. Cited in Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[574] Joscelyn Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, (State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 101.
[575] Ibid., p. 101.
[576] J.S. Tuckett. “Savalette de Langes, les Philaletes, and the Convent of Wilhelmsbad, 1782.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 30 (1917), pp. 153-54; cited in Schuchard, “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk.”
[577] Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Falk, Samuel Jacob.” In Wouter J. Hanegraaff ed. Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2006). p. 357.
[578] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements.
[579] Ibid.
[580] Christopher McIntosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: The Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment (SUNY Press, 2012), p. 170.
[581] Isabel Cooper-Oakley. The Comte de St. Germain (Milan, Italy: Ars Regia, 1912).
[582] Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, p. 239.
[583] Isabel Cooper Oakley. The Comte de St. Germain: the secret of kings (Milan: Sulli-
Rao, 1912), pp. 21-22. Cited in David
Hunter. “Monsieur le Comte de Saint-Germain: The Great Pretender.” The
Musical Times, 144 (1885), pp. 40–44.
[584] Elizabeth W. Fisher. “‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German
Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography, 109:3 (1985), p. 306.
[585] William Thomas Walsh. Philip II (New York, Sheed & Ward,
Inc., 1937).
[586] Catholic Jew. “Frankists and the Catholic Church.” alternativegenhist.blogspot.ca (April 15, 2014).
[587] Ibid.
[588] Edward Gelles. The Jewish Journey: A Passage through European History (The Radcliffe Press, 2016), p. 151.
[589] Facsimile of the ms Minutes, Renaissance Traditionnelle, 114 (April 1998):110-111; cited in Ramsay’s Life, The Beginnings of French Freemasonry, The Two Main Versions of the Discours by W. Bro. Alain Bernheim, PS Review of Freemasonry. Retrieved from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/bernheim_ramsay01.html
[590] E. J. Castle. Proceedings against the Templars, A.Q.C., Vol. XX. Part III.
[591] F.-T. B.-Clavel. Histoire pittoresque de la Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris: Pagnerre, 1843), p. 166.
[592] Supreme Council, 33 ̊ U.S.A. Condensed History of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Masonry from Its Introduction Into the United States (Drummond & Neu, 1887), p. 5.
[593] Richard Popkin. “Chapter 14: The Religious Background of Seventeenth Century Philosophy.” In Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers, (eds.). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy, Volume 1. (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
[594] Henry Wilson Coil. Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia (Richmond, Virginia: Macoy Publishing Co., 1961).
[595] Ibid., p. 213.
[596] David Murray Lyon, “The Royal Order of Scotland,” The Freemason (September 4, 1880), p. 393; cited in Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 305.
[597] Albert G. Mackey. A Lexicon of Freemasonry (Philadelphia: Moss, Brother & Co., 1860), p. 267.
[598] G. Hills. “Notes on the Rainsford Papers in the British Museum,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 26 (1913 ), pp. 98-99; Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 211.
[599] Schuchard. “Why Mrs. Blake Cried.”
[600] Ibid.
[601] Keith Schuchard. “The Secret Masonic History of Blake’s Swedenborg Society.”
[602] Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk.”
[603] Ibid., p. 204.
[604] Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 511.
[605] “Eckleffsche Akten.” Freimaurer-Wiki. Retrieved from
https://www.freimaurer-wiki.de/index.php/Eckleffsche_Akten
[606] Edmund Mazet, “Freemasonry and Esotericism,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality. ed. A. Faivre (New York: Crossroad, 1993), p. 256; cited in Hugh Urban, “Elitism and Esotericism: Strategies of Secrecy and Power in South Indian Tantra and French Freemasonry.” Numen, 44 (1997), p. 34 n. 22.
[607] Souvenirs du Baron de Gleichen, p. 151, cited from Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 169.
[608] Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration,” p. 312
[609] J. M. Roberts. The Mythology of Secret Societies (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972) p. 104.
[610] J.E.S. Tuckett. “Savalette de Langes, Les Philaléthes, and the Convent of Wilhelmsbad, 1782,” AQC (1917), pp. 131-71; series of articles in Le Monde Maçonnique, 14-15 (1873-74); cited in Keith Schuchard. “The Secret Masonic History of Blake’s Swedenborg Society.”
[611] Margaret C. Jacob. Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) p. 109.
[612] Karl R. H. Frick. Die Erleuchteten: Gnostisch-theosophische und alchemistisch-rosenkreuzerische Geheimgesellschaften bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der Neuzeit (1973), p. 574 ff., originally included as an appendix at the end of McBean and Gabirro. A Complete History Of The Ancient And Primitive Rite (2002). Cited in Terry Melanson, “Karl R. H. Frick on The Philalèthes.” Bavarian-Illuminati.com.
[613] Jacob. Strangers Nowhere in the World, p. 109.
[614] J.S. Tuckett. “Savalette de Langes, les Philaletes, and the Convent of Wilhelmsbad, 1782.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 30 (1917), pp. 153-54; cited in Schuchard, “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk.”
[615] In-Ho Ly Ryu. “Freemasonry Under Catherine the Great: a Reinterpretation” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1967), 136, 145-59; and “Moscow Freemasons and the Rosicrucian Order,” in J.G. Garrard (ed.) The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), p. 215; cited in Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 217.
[616] McIntosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, p. 43.
[617] “La Royale York de l’Amitiè Berlin.” Musée virtuel de la musique
maçonnique. Vincent Lombardo (trans). Retrieved from
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[618] René le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la
franc-maçonnerie allemande, Book 3 (Paris, 1914), pp. 193–201.
[619] John Robison. Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798).
[620] Ibid.
[621] Vera Keller. Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725
(Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 89.
[622] le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, pp. 343–88.
[623] Ibid., pp. 453, 468–469, 507–508, 614–615.
[624] Collectif. Encyclopédie de la franc-maçonnerie (Le Livre de poche, 2008).
[625] Webster. Secret Societies and Subservive Movements, p. 234.
[626] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[627] C. Porset. Philalethes, p. 502; cited in Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 220.
[628] Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Freemasonry, Secret Societies, and the Continuity of the Occult Tradition in English Literature.” Ph.D. diss., (University of Texas, Austin, 1975).
[629] Bode. Travel Journal; cited in Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[630] Ibid.
[631] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[632] Michael Howard. Secret Societies: Their Influence and Power from Antiquity to the Present Day (Simon and Schuster, 2007), pp. 74.
[633] James H. Billington. Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (Basic Books 1980), p. 96.
[634] Marco di Luchetti. Illuminati Manifesto of World Revolution (1792) (Booksurge Publishing, 2011), p. 235-239; Le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, p. 654.
[635] Howard. Secret Societies.
[636] “Falk, Hayyim Samuel Jacob (also known as De Falk, Dr. Falk, or Falkon),” Jewish Encyclopedia (1906)
[637] George William Speth. Royal Freemasons (Masonic Publishing Company, 1885), p. 12.
[638] Ibid.
[639] Rebold Emmanuel. Histoire des Trois Grandes Loges (Collignon, 1864). p. 49.
[640] Eban. My People, p. 27.
[641] William Pencak. “Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Pennsylvania” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 126, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), pp. 365-408.
[642] Menasseh ben Israel. Hope of Israel, 142–43, section 24; cited in Natalie Zemon Davis. “Regaining Jerusalem: Eschatology and Slavery in Jewish Colonization in Seventeeth-Century Suriname.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 3,1 (January 2016).
[643] Natalie Zemon Davis. “Regaining Jerusalem: Eschatology and Slavery in Jewish Colonization in Seventeeth-Century Suriname.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 3,1 (January 2016), p. 15.
[644] Eli Faber. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York University, 1998), p. 16.
[645] “The Number of Jews in Dutch Brazil.” Jewish Social Studies, 16 (1954), p. 107‑114.
[646] Gil Stern Zohar. “Jewish pirates of the Caribbean.” Jerusalem Post (April 9, 2016); Meyer Kayserling. “AGUILAR (AGUYLAR), MOSES RAPHAELDE.” Jewish Encyclopedia.
[647] Samuel Oppenheim. “The Jews and Masonry in the United States Before 1810.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, Vol 19 (1910).
[648] William Pencak. “Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Pennsylvania” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 126, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), pp. 365-408.
[649] Menasseh ben Israel. Hope of Israel, pp. 142–43, section 24; cited in Natalie Zemon Davis. “Regaining Jerusalem: Eschatology and Slavery in Jewish Colonization in Seventeeth-Century Suriname.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 3,1 (January 2016).
[650] “The Stars on the American Flag and the Great Seal.” GreatSeal.com [Retrieved 13 February 2013].
[651] “Knights of the Golden Circle.” Encyclopaedia Britannica (November 03, 2017); “Today in Masonic History: The Sons of Liberty.” Masonry Today (accessed December 28, 2017).
[652] Samuel Adams Drake. Old Boston Taverns and Tavern Clubs (Boston: W. A. Butterfield, 1917).
[653] Cyrus Adler & Herbert Friedenwald. “Salomon, Haym.” Jewish Encyclopedia.
[654] Olivia B. Waxman. “George Washington and the Real History Behind a Yom Kippur Legend.” Time (September 29, 2017).
[655] Charles Reznikoff. “A Gallery of Jewish Colonial WorthiesSome Loyalists, Some Patriots: II.” Commentary (January 1955). Retrieved from https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/charles-reznikoff/a-gallery-of-jewish-colonial-worthiessome-loyalists-some-patriots-ii/
[656] Charles Reznikoff. “A Gallery of Jewish Colonial WorthiesSome Loyalists, Some Patriots: II.” Commentary (January 1955). Retrieved from https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/charles-reznikoff/a-gallery-of-jewish-colonial-worthiessome-loyalists-some-patriots-ii/
[657] “Guide to the Papers of the Franks Family 1711–1821, [1965–1968].” American Jewish Historical Society (2003).
[658] Toni Pitock. “Commerce and Connection: Jewish Merchants, Philadelphia, and the Atlantic World, 1736-1822.” PhD dissertation. University of Delaware (Spring 2016).
[659] David Franks to Naphtali Franks, March 14, 1743, in Gelles, Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 119, 119n. p. 58.
[660] Samuel Oppenheim. “The Jews and Masonry in the United States Before 1810.” American Jewish Historical Society, No. 19 (1910), p. 7.
[661] William L. Fox. Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle: Two centuries of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in America's Southern Jurisdiction (University of Arkansas Press, 1997).
[662] Zimmerman. “Men of Honour and Honesty,” p. 47.
[663] Julius F. Sachse. Ancient Documents relating to the A. and A. Scottish Rite in the Archives of the Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: The New Era Printing Company, 1915), p. 19.
[664] Sachse. Ancient Documents, p. 21.
[665] William Pencak. Jews & Gentiles in Early America, 1654-1800 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 92.
[666] “From the East Cometh Light,” in Henry W. Rugg, History of Freemasonry in Rhode Island (Providence: E.L. Freedman & Son, State Printers, 1895), p. 44.
[667] “Rhode Island, United States.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rhode-island-jewish-history
[668] 1776, June, Session of Assembly, M. M. Hayes; cited in “Jews and the American Revolution.” American Jewish Archives, Vol XXVII, No. 2 (November, 1975).
[669] Dan Pine. “Descendant of rabbi born in 1745 to relive inauguration of George Washington.” The Jewish News (April 18, 2014).
[670] Cyrus Adler, L. Hühner, Frederick T. Haneman. “Seixas.” Jewish Encyclopedia.
[671] Ibid.
[672] Samuel Oppenheim. “The Jews and Masonry in the United States Before 1810.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, Vol 19 (1910).
[673] Hannah Lee. “An Odyssey From Amsterdam to Philadelphia.” Philadelphia Jewish Voice (October 12, 2011).
[674] Cyrus Adler, A.S.W. Rosenbach, Frederick T. Haneman & Clarence I. de Sola. “Hart.” Jewish Encyclopedia.
[675] Ibid.
[676] “Early American Jews.” Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr. Visitor Center. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20090106145312/http://www.loeb-tourovisitorscenter.org/jll_jews.shtml
[677] Samuel Oppenheim. “The Jews and Masonry in the United States Before 1810.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, Vol 19 (1910).
[678] “Early American Jews.” Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr. Visitor Center. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20090106145312/http://www.loeb-tourovisitorscenter.org/jll_jews.shtml
[679] Jacob Marcus. “Jews and the American Revolution A Bicentennial Documentary.” American Jewish Archives, 27, 2 (1975), p. 111.
[680] D. de S. Pool. Portraits Etched in Stone (1952).
[681] William Pencak. “Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Pennsylvania” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 126, No. 3 (July, 2002).
[682] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[683] Sachse. Ancient Documents, p. 29.
[684] Ibid., p. 22.
[685] “Minute Book for the Lodge of Grand Elect Perfect & Sublime Masons in the City of Philadelphia,” in Sachse, Ancient Documents, p. 41.
[686] Charles T. McClenachan. The Book Of The Ancient And Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Masonica, 2020), p. 20.
[687] “Minute Book for the Lodge of Grand Elect Perfect & Sublime Masons in the City of Philadelphia,” pp. 41-161.
[688] Oppenheim. “The Jews and Masonry in the United States Before 1810.”
[689] Ibid.
[690] Ibid.
[691] Ibid.
[692] Barnett A. Elzas. The Jews of South Carolina (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott Company), p. 35.
[693] B.A. Elzas. The Jews of South Carolina (1905), index; C. Reznikoff and U.Z. Engelman. The Jews of Charleston (1950), passim; J.R. Marcus. Early American Jewry (1953), index; J.R. Rosenbloom. A Biographical Dictionary of Early American Jews (1960), pp. 28–29; Aubrey Newman. “Jews in English Freemasonry.” Transcript of a lecture delivered by Professor Aubrey Newman, Emeritus Professor of History at Leicester University, England, to the Israel Branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England in Jerusalem, Israel, on 14 April 2015.
[694] Henry L. Feingold. Zion in America: The Jewish Experience from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Twayne Publishing, Inc., 1974), p. 42.
[695] Barnett A. Elzas. The Jews of South Carolina (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott Company), p. 36.
[696] Sara A. Zimmerman. “‘Men of Honour and Honesty’: Connections Between Jews and Freemasons in Early America” (March 19, 2014) CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/curej/186.
[697] Samuel Oppenheim. “The Jews and Masonry in the United States Before 1810.” American Jewish Historical Society, No. 19 (1910).
[698] Historia Judaica, vol. 13 (October, 1951), p. 160.
[699] Jeffery Kaplan. “The Chosen People in the Holy City: Three and a quarter centuries of Jewish life in Charleston.” Charleston Mercury (January 8, 2020).
[700] Edith Queenborough. Occult Theocracy (Jazzybee Verlag, 2012).
[701] A.C.F.Jackson. Rose Croix: A History of the Ancient and Accepted Rite for England and Wales (rev. ed. 1987) (London: Lewis Masonic Publishers, 1980), pp. 66-68.
[702] Mark Stavish. Freemasonry: Rituals, Symbols & History of the Secret Society (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2007), p. 126.
[703] Margiotta. Adriano Lemmi; cited in Queenborough. Occult Theocracy.
[704] Hagger. The Secret Founding of America.
[705] “The Story of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim of Charleston, SC.” Retrieved from https://images.shulcloud.com/1974/uploads/Documents/The-Story-of-KKBE
[706] “Scottish Rite History” WebCite Scottish Rite California. Retrieved from https://www.webcitation.org/6EUOU3dHW?url=http://www.scottishritecalifornia.org/scottish_rite_history.htm
[707] Pierre Mollier (2004), “The Double-Headed Eagle: Iconographic Sources of the Masonic Symbol” (PDF), The Chain of Union (Special issue No.3): 5–15, archived (PDF) from the original on 2011-09-16, retrieved 2011-10-30
[708] “Double-headed Eagle (Eagle of Lagash).” Symbol Dictionary. Retrieved from http://symboldictionary.net/?p=2443
[709] Albert C. Mackey. “Knight of the East and West.” Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences; see also Baron de Tschoudy. L’Étoile Flamboyante, I. 20 (1766), pp. 24-9.
[710] Bro. Gregory H. Peters 32°. “Solve et Coagula: Alchemical Symbolism of the Double-Headed Eagle.” Pietre Stones Review of Freemasonry. Retrieved from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/double-headed-eagle.html
[711] Mcintosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason.
[712] “Johann August, Freiherr von Starck (1741-1816).” The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, ed. Heiner F. Klemme & Manfred Kuehn (Bloomsbury, 2010).
[713] A Historical Enquiry in Regard to the Grand Constitutions of 1786 (Freemasons. United States. Scottish Rite. Supreme Council for the Southern Jurisdiction, 1883), p. 144.
[714] Albert Pike. Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry: The Grand Constitutions and Regulations of 1762 (New York, Masonic Publishing Company), p. 164.
[715] Ben Zion Wacholder, “Jacob Frank and the Frankists Hebrew Zoharic Letters.” Hebrew Union College Annual, Vol. LIII (1982).
[716] Lynn
Picknett & Clive Prince. The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the
Guardians of Christ’s Sacred Bloodline (Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 319.
[717] Pawel Maciejko. “Sabbatian Charlatans: the first Jewish cosmopolitans.” European Review of History—Revue européenne d’histoire, Vol. 17, No. 3 (June 2010), p. 367.
[718] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 233.
[719] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[720] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 195 n. 95.
[721] Pawel Maciejko. “Sabbatian Charlatans: the first Jewish cosmopolitans.” European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’histoire, Vol. 17, No. 3 (June 2010), p. 362.
[722] Pawel Maciejko. “A Portrait of the Kabbalist as a Young Man,” p. 570.
[723] Mcintosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, p. 163; Jacob Katz. Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723-1939 (Harvard University Press, 1970).
[724] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 121.
[725] Mcintosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, p. 168; Katz. Jews and
Freemasonry in Europe.
[726] Franz Joseph Molitor, cited in Gershom Scholem. Du Frankisme au Jacobisme (Paris: Le Seul Gallimard, 1981) p. 39.
[727] G. van Rijnberk. Épisodes de la vie ésotérique, 1780-1824 : Extraits de la correspondance inédite de J. B. Willermoz, du prince Charles de Hesse-Cassel et de quelques-uns de leurs contemporains (Lyon: Derain, 1948); Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 61.
[728] Gershom Scholem (1949). “The Curious History of the Six-Pointed Star. How the ‘Magen David’ Became the Jewish Symbol.” Commentary. Vol. 8. pp. 244.
[729] Ibid.. pp. 243–251.
[730] Ibid. pp. 247.
[731] Ibid. pp. 247.
[732] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 228, n. 190.
[733] Ibid. (Kindle Locations 5719-5720).
[734] M.F.M. Van Den Berk. The Magic Flute (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 507.
[735] Terry Melanson. “Roots of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.” Conspiracy Archive (July 28, 2015).
[736] Casanova. The History of My Life, 2: 195; Pawel Maciejko. The mixed multitude, pp. 222.
[737] Maciejko. The mixed multitude, pp. 224-225.
[738] Casanova. Briefwechsel, pp. 333-34; and Patrizi e avventurieri, pp. 416-17; Casanova. The History of My Life, 2: 195; Maciejko. The mixed multitude, pp. 223.
[739] Maciejko. The mixed multitude, pp. 224.
[740] Maciejko. “A Portrait of the Kabbalist as a Young Man,” pp. 521-576.
[741] Ibid.
[742] P. G. M. Dickson (2007). “Count Karl von Zinzendorf’s ‘New Accountancy’: the Structure of Austrian Government Finance in Peace and War, 1781–1791.” International History Review. 29 (1), pp. 22–56.
[743] Erol Araf. “Mozart, Casanova and a Jewish Poet.” Canadian Jewish News (June 2, 2016).
[744] Andrew Steptoe. “Mozart, Mesmer and ‘Cosi Fan Tutte’” Music & Letters, 67, 3 (1986), pp. 248–255.
[745] Bruce Alan Brown. W. A. Mozart: Così fan tutte (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 10.
[746] Maynard Solomon. Mozart: A Life (HarperCollins, 1995), p.
321.
[747] Ibid. (Kindle Locations 5858-5860).
[748] Ibid. (Kindle Locations 5864-5867).
[749] Katherine Thomson. The Masonic Thread in Mozart (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), p. 14.
[750] Nicholas
Till. Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in
Mozart’s Operas (W. W. Norton & Company,
1995), p. 297.
[751] Katz. Jews and Freemasonry, cited in McIntosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, p. 166.
[752] “Otto Heinrich von Gemmingen.” Epoche Napoleon. Retrieved from https://www.epoche-napoleon.net/bio/g/gemmingen.html
[753] Ibid.
[754] Pawel Maciejko. “A Portrait of the Kabbalist as a Young Man: Count Joseph Carl Emmanuel Waldstein and His Retinue.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Fall 2016), p. 568.
[755] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[756] “Otto Heinrich von Gemmingen.” Epoche Napoleon. Retrieved from https://www.epoche-napoleon.net/bio/g/gemmingen.html
[757] Peter Clive. Beethoven and His World: A Biographical Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 367.
[758] Nicholas Till. Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 297. Cited in Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[759] Otto Jahn & Pauline D.Townsend & George Grove. Life of
Mozart (London, Novello, Ewer & Co. 1882).
[760] Maynard Solomon. Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination
(University of California Press, 2004), p. 143.
[761] Ibid. (Kindle Locations 1432-1433).
[762] Ibid. (Kindle Location 5720).
[763] “Maximilian Von Habsburg.” The Order of the Fleur de Lys. Retrieved from https://www.orderofthefleurdelys.org.uk/order-history/maximilian-von-hapsburg/
[764] Anonymous. Rituals of the Fratres Lucis.
[765] Howard. Secret
Societies, p. 113.
[766] Mehmet Sabeheddin. “The Secret of Eurasia: The Key to Hidden History and World Events.” New Dawn (68).
[767] Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. The Occult in Russian and Soviet
Culture (Cornell University, 1997), p. 46.
[768] Walter Moss. A History of Russia: To 1917 (Anthem Press, 2002), pp. 163–166.
[769] George William Speth. Royal Freemasons (Masonic Publishing Company, 1885), p. 70.
[770] Rachel Elior. “Frank, Eva.” Encyclopedia Judaica.
[771] Boris Telepnef. Outline of the History of Russian Freemasonry
(Kessinger Publishing, 2003), p. 21.
[772] Mcintosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (SUNY Press, 2012), pp. 153–154.
[773] Schuchard, Marsha Keith. Why
Mrs. Blake Cried.
[774] McIntosh.
The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, p. 158.
[775] Ibid.
[776] Léon Maury. Le Réveil religieux dans l’Église réformée à Genève et en France (Paris, 1892), pp. 316-319.
[777] Timothy C.F. Stunt. From awakening to secession: radical evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815-35 (illustrated ed.), (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000), p. 30.
[778] Zachary Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion: Moses
Mendelssohn, Neoclassicism, and Ceremonial Aesthetics” in Christian Wiese &
Martina Urban (eds.) In Honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr (Berlin: de Guyer,
2012), p. 11.
[779] Bernd Witte. “German Classicism and Judaism.” In Steven E. Aschheim
& Vivian Liska. The German-Jewish Experience Revisited. Perspectives
on Jewish Texts and Contexts, Volume 3 (De Gruyter, 2015), p. 50.
[780] Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklarung?,” Kants gesammelte Schriften. Akademie-Ausgabe (Berlin, 1904 ff.), hereafter “AA,” VIII, 35, tr. H.B. Nisbet in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge, 1970), 54; Cited in James Schmidt. “The Question of Enlightenment: Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Mittwochsgesellschaft,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 50: 2 (April – June, 1989), pp. 269.
[781] Miriam Leonard. “Greeks, Jews, and the Enlightenment: Moses
Mendelssohn’s Socrates.” Cultural Critique, 74 (Winter 2010), pp. 197.
[782] M. B. Goldstein. The Newest Testament: A Secular Bible (ArchwayPublishing, 2013), p. 592.
[783] Rabbi Antelman. To Eliminate the Opiate. Volume 2 (Jerusalem: Zionist Book Club, 2002). p. 102.
[784] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[785] Kerem Chemed. Volume III, pp. 224-225.
[786] David Shavin. “Philosophical Vignettes from the Political Life of Moses Mendelssohn” FIDELIO Magazine, Vol . 8, No. 2, Summer 1999; Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 195 n. 95.
[787] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 192.
[788] Israel Abrahams. “Mendelssohn, Moses.” In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 18 (11th ed.). (Cambridge University Press, 1911) pp. 120–121.
[789] Oscar Thompson. “If Beethoven Had Written ‘Faust.’” The Musical
Quarterly 10:1 (1924), pp. 13–20.
[790] Glenn Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornel: Cornell University Press, July 2001), p. 61.
[791] Ibid., p. 59.
[792] “What people have said about Linnaeus.” Linné on line. Linnaeus.uu.se. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110513033923/http://www.linnaeus.uu.se/online/life/8_3.html
[793] Bernd Witte. “German Classicism and Judaism.” In Steven E. Aschheim & Vivian Liska. The German-Jewish Experience Revisited. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts, Volume 3 (De Gruyter, 2015), p. 47.
[794] Ibid, p. 48.
[795] Ibid., p. 46.
[796] Stephen L. Dyson. In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of
Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Yale
University Press, 2006), pp. xii.
[797] Picknett & Prince. The Sion Revelation, p. 319.
[798] Alex Potts. Flesh and the Ideal :
Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 116.
[799] “Apollo Belvedere.” The Classical Tradition (Harvard
University Press, 2010), pp. 55–56.
[800] David Irwin (ed.) Winckelmann: Writings on Art (London:
Phaidon, 1972), pp. 105–106. Cited in Crompton. Byron and Greek Love,
pp. 87–88.
[801] Susan E. Gustafson. Men Desiring Men: The Poetry of Same-Sex
Identity and Desire in German Classicism (Wayne State University Press,
2002), p. 63.
[802] Ibid., p. 63.
[803] “Winckelmann, Johann Joachim.” Dictionary of Art Historians.
Retrieved from https://arthistorians.info/winckelmannj/
[804] Daniel J. Boorstin. The Discoverers (New York: Random House,
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[805] George Williamson. “Anthon Rafael Mengs.” The Catholic
Encyclopedia, Vol. 10. Retrieved from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10189a.htm
[806] Seymour Howard. “Some Eighteenth-Century ‘Restored’ Boxers.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56 (1993, pp. 238-255) p. 238f.
[807] Lesley Lewis. Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in
Eighteenth-Century Rome (1961).
[808] Jonathan I. Israel. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the
Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2011), p. 133.
[809] “A Concise History of Freemasonry.” Old Epsomian Lodge. Retrieved
from http://www.oelodge.uklinux.net/history.htm
[810] Licht und Finstemis. Second Edition (1978). Cited in Milko
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[811] Bruce Redford. Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in
Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008), 164.
[812] Horace Walpole; cited in Jeremy Black. The British and the Grand Tour (1985), p. 120.
[813] Ibid., p. 62.
[814] “The Gorgomons.” The Square Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.thesquaremagazine.com/mag/article/202006the-gormogons/
[815] Ibid.
[816] Horace Walpole; cited in Jeremy Black. The British and the Grand Tour (1985), p. 31.
[817] James Shelby Downard. “Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism,” in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed. Jim Keith (Feral House, l993), p. 59.
[818] “Chudleigh, Elizabeth (1720–1788).” Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia.
[819] John Isbell. “Introduction,” Germaine De Stael, Corinne, or, Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Worlds Classics, 1998), p. ix.
[820] Redford. Dilettanti, p. 164.
[821] D. Constantine. Fields of Fire: a life of Sir William Hamilton (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), p. 137.
[822] T.J. Pettigrew. Memoirs of the Life of Vice-admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, vol. i. (London: T. & W. Boone, 1849), p. 324.
[823] Friedrich Nicolai (1757), p. 65.
[824] Will D. Desmond. Hegel’s Antiquity (Oxford University Press,
2020), p. 10.
[825] Robert Tobin. “German Literature.” Gay Histories and Cultures:
An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 2000).
[826] W. Daniel Wilson. “Diabolical Entrapment: Mephisto, the Angels, and
the Homoerotic in Goethe’s Faust II.” in Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of
Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 177.
[827] Ibid., p. 176.
[828] Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche (Zürich: Artemis Verl, 1976) p. 686.
[829] Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion,” p. 18.
[830] Winckelmann. The History of Ancient Art, 31, 108–109. Cited
in Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion,” p. 15.
[831] Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion,” p. 19.
[832] Stefanie Kellner. “Die freiheitliche Geisteshaltung der Ernestiner
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[833] Ibid.
[834] In-Ho Ly Ryu. “Freemasonry Under Catherine the Great: a Reinterpretation” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1967), 136, 145-59; and “Moscow Freemasons and the Rosicrucian Order,” in J.G. Garrard (ed.) The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), p. 215; cited in Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 217.
[835] “Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen (Weimar).” Musée virtuel de la musique maçonnique.
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Tagebuch aus den Jahren 1776–1782 (Veit, 1875), p. 69.
[837] Christine A. Colin. “Exceptions to the Rule: German Women in Music in the Eighteenth Century.” UCLA Historical Journal (1994). p. 242.
[838] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[839] H.-J. Schings. Die Brüder des Marquis Posa. Schiller und der
Geheimbund der Illuminaten (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996); cited in Laura Anna
Macor. “Friedrich
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[840] “Freimaurerliteratur.” Klassik-Archivs der Herzogin Anna Amalia
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[841] Nicholas Till. Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and
Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 276; cited in Melanson.
Perfectibilists.
[842] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[843] Robert Tobin. “German Literature.” Gay Histories and Cultures:
An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 2000).
[844] Kurt R. Eissler. Goethe: Eine psychoanalytische Studie 1775–1786 (trans.) Peter Fischer and Rüdiger Scholz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag), 1987, 1446–62. Cited in W. Daniel Wilson. “Diabolical Entrapment: Mephisto, the Angels, and the Homoerotic in Goethe’s Faust II.” in Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 175.
[845] Wilson. “Diabolical,” p. 176.
[846] “Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen (Weimar).”
[847] W. Daniel Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French
Revolution: Goethe and the Spectre of Illuminati Conspiracy.” Goethe
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[848] Yves Hivert-Messeca. L’Europe sous l'acacia, Tome 2: Histoire
des franc-maçonneries européennnes du XVIIIème siècle à nos jours (Dervy,
2012), pp. 122–5.
[849] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[850] Robert Tobin. “German Literature.” Gay Histories and Cultures:
An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 2000).
[851] le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie
allemande, p. 397 n. 1.
[852] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[853] Ibid.
[854] Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution,” pp.
166.
[855] Walter Müller-Seidel & Wolfgang Riedel. Die Weimarer Klassik
und ihre Geheimbünde (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2003).
Cited in https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11678
[856] Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution.”
[857] Robert Tobin. “German Literature.” Gay Histories and Cultures:
An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 2000).
[858] W. Daniel Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French
Revolution: Goethe and the Spectre of Illuminati Conspiracy.” Goethe
Yearbook, Volume 5, (1990), pp. 166.
[859] Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution,” pp.
169, 182 n. 29.
[860] Ibid., pp. 166.
[861] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[862] Hermann Schüttler. “Die ‘Schwedenkiste’” Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20070623203757/http://www.2hap.org/Geheime-Gesellschaften/Illuminaten/schwk.html
[863] “Das Geheime Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz.” GStA PK.
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[864] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[865] Ibid.
[866] Isidore Singer & A. Kurrein “Friedländer, David.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=398&letter=F
[867] Andreas W. Daum. “Social Relations, Shared Practices, and Emotions:
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to Science around 1800.” Journal of Modern History. 91:1 (2019), p.
1–37.
[868] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 7 n. 12.
[869] Isaiah Berlin. The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1993), p. 2-3; cited in Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 77.
[870] Ibid.
[871] Melanson. Perfectibilists.
[872] Magee.