From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Due to strong resistance, the banishment of the Jews was not officially lifted before 1690, after the Second English Revolution, but from the early seventeenth century onward it was no longer applied. When England again entered into war with Spain in 1655, and declared her intention to seize on her territory all Spanish or Portuguese property, the Marrano merchants declared themselves to belong to the “Hebrew nation,” and placed themselves under the protection of Cromwell. Many Marranos openly returned to Judaism, while others preferred to maintain nominal Christianity, which had become less binding. Jewish and crypto-Jewish immigration (the distinction was by now insignificant) grew rapidly.217 During the next century, several waves of Ashkenazi immigration joined these Jews and Marranos of Sephardic origin.

  During their civil war against the royalist Anglicans, the Puritans saw themselves as Israel exiled among the Egyptians, and used the image of the Exodus as a rallying cry. For them, Cromwell was not only Moses leading the people out of Egypt, but also Joshua exterminating the Canaanites.218 In reality, the Puritan revolution was more like that of the Maccabees (who had themselves rewritten the story of Moses and Joshua to their advantage). Puritan England was exalted as a new Israel, though this did not deprive the Jews of their privileged status. It was often asserted that the new Chosen People must help the old Chosen People return to their original homeland as a prelude to their conversion at the Second Coming of Christ. Jews enjoyed such prestige in seventeenth-century England that authors vied with each other to prove that the English were the direct descendants of the Jews in general and the famous ten lost tribes of Israel in particular. This strange theory, called British Israelism or Anglo-Israelism, originated in The Rights of the Kingdom (1646), a plea for regicide written by John Sadler, private secretary of Oliver Cromwell, Hebraist and friend of Menasseh Ben Israel. This line of thought remained influential until the Victorian era. In the 1790s Richard Brothers planned to reveal their Jewishness to Jews “hidden” among the English and to lead them, like a new Moses, to their eternal promised land of Canaan.

  Another Judeomaniacal theory was born at the time of Cromwell: a certain Antonio de Montezinos returned from America claiming to have identified descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. The theory ran rampant in England thanks to a book by Thomas Thorowgood, Jews in America, or the Probability that the Indians are Jews (1648). Ben Israel made it his own in his 1650 book The Hope of Israel, and asked Lord Protector Cromwell for support in sending Jews to re-Judaize the Sioux and Comanches.219

  Finally, Freemasonry, born in the British Isles at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was strongly influenced by the philo-Semitism that prevailed among the English aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Masonic jargon, symbolism, and mythology drew heavily from the Torah, the Talmud, and the Kabbalah. Other intellectual streams were, of course, involved in the birth of Freemasonry: philosophical clubs indebted to the humanists of the sixteenth century such as Erasmus, struggling to escape persecution and to promote religious peace by following the path of a “natural religion” emancipated from dogmas and revelations. The Irish John Toland played an important role with his posthumous Pantheisticon published in 1720. It describes the rules and rites of a society of enlightened thinkers who meet secretly to discuss philosophy and search for esoteric truths.220 Jewish lore was transplanted into this tradition in the Grand Lodge of England, which adopted in 1723 Anderson’s Constitution and its kabbalistic mumbo-jumbo. In 1730, initiation rites were enriched with the legend of Hiram, a character barely mentioned in the biblical story of the building of Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 7:13), transformed by kabbalist-masonic imagination into the architect killed by three companions bent on stealing the secret password—a story that suspiciously resembles the Talmudic fable of Jesus entering the Holy of Holies to steal the sacred word. Against such evidence of Jewish influence on Freemasonry, some have objected that, until the end of the eighteenth century, Jews were officially excluded from the lodges. But not the Marranos. It is these crypto-Jews, who had a long experience in secret gatherings, secret means of recognition (handshakes, code words, etc.), and initiation ceremonies, who progressively infiltrated and Judaized Freemasonry. We know, for example, of the influence of Portuguese kabbalist Martinez Paschalis, founder in 1754 of the Order of Cohens, later transformed by his disciples into the Martinist Order. Father Joseph Lémann, a converted Jew, saw in this Masonic order “the prefiguration of an actual liaison between Judaism and secret societies.”221 The influence of crypto-Jews explains in part why, according to the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII in 1884, Freemasonry aims to “completely ruin the religious and social discipline that was born of Christian institutions.”

  From the time of Cromwell can also be traced the birth of a complex of anthropological and sociological ideas that reached maturity in the Victorian era and then radiated throughout the West. This trend was propelled by Thomas Hobbes, author of the famous Leviathan (1651). Hobbes was a Puritan, but his religious ideas are so typically Jewish that many have speculated on his Marrano origin. For example, Hobbes reduces the Christian faith to the assertion that “Jesus is the Messiah,” and defends a political vision of a Messiah who owes everything to the Old Testament. Like Maimonides, he sees the coming of the Messiah (in his case, the return of Christ) as the coming of a new Moses. For Hobbes, “the Kingdom of God was first instituted by the ministry of Moses over the Jews,” since at that time, “God alone is king”; the misfortunes of Israel began with Samuel, the first king of the Hebrews, installed on the throne against the advice of Yahweh.222 Whether or not Hobbes was of crypto-Jewish origin, his philosophical materialism is compatible with Judaism and not with Christianity: “The universe is corporeal; all that is real is material, and what is not material is not real.” Hobbes breaks with the political tradition inherited from Aristotle (and renewed by Thomas Aquinas), according to which man is a naturally political being. For Hobbes, man is sociable not by nature, but by necessity. Driven mainly by the instinct of self-preservation and living permanently in the anguished fear of violent death, “man is a wolf for man” in the state of nature, and human relations are summarized as “war of all against all.” In order to avoid extinction, mankind invents social order, which is a contract between individuals by which everyone transfers his natural rights to a sovereign. The political conception of Hobbes, and its anthropological underpinning, had an immense impact on later “contractualist” republican philosophers of the Enlightenment.

  In the wake of Hobbes came Bernard Mandeville, born of Huguenot parents in Holland, and settled in London in 1693. In 1714, he published The Fable of the Bees, or : Private Vices, Publick Benefits, which argues that vice is the indispensable motive that produces a society of luxury, while virtue is of no use, and even detrimental to public prosperity.

  After Hobbes and Mandeville came Adam Smith, the great theorist of mercantile liberalism. In The Wealth of Nations (1776)—a title strangely echoing Isaiah 61:6—Smith substituted the Market for the Sovereign of Hobbes. Postulating, like Hobbes, that the human being is motivated exclusively by his own profit, he wagered nevertheless that in a society of free competition, the sum of individual selfishness is enough to create a just society: “Every individual […] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” This “invisible hand” (an expression borrowed from Mandeville) is, in reality, that of the god Mammon reigning over a world totally subject to the mercantile spirit. Karl Marx, born in a converted Jewish family, and of English economic formation, well understood that the reign of money inaugurated by the liberalism of Smith represents the ultimate and hidden triumph of Judaism. “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” For Marx, money is the force of alienation par excellence: “Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, an
d this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.” Therefore, the only real emancipation of the Jews would be if Jews emancipated themselves from money. “The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews. […] The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails. […] The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”223 In other words, Judaism had conquered Christianity from within.

  Beginning in the seventeenth century, it was the Jews who made London the world’s foremost financial center, on the model of Amsterdam. The death of Cromwell in 1657 was followed by the restoration of Charles II, son of Charles I, who was succeeded by his brother James II, Catholic and pro-French, later overthrown by the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) that brought to power his son-in-law William III of Orange, with the help of the Huguenots of Amsterdam. William of Orange, responsible to his bankers, authorized them to found the Bank of England in 1694. He granted the Bank a monopoly on the issue of money, that is to say, on the public debt, ordering the British Treasury to borrow 1,250,000 pounds from his bankers.

  The Bank of England is in essence a cartel of private bankers, who have the exclusive privilege of granting the government interest-bearing loans guaranteed by taxes. This institution was the first of its kind. (Napoleon created the Bank of France on the same model in 1800). The Bank of England laid the foundations for the financial domination of the world by the usurers of the City of London.

  The Rothschild saga began in Germany, when Mayer Amschel Bauer (1744–1812) transformed his father’s pawn shop into a bank, adopted the name of Rothschild, and became the manager of the fortune of William I, elector of Hesse-Cassel. Rothschild sent each of his five sons to create or head a subsidiary of the family bank in London, Paris, Vienna, Naples, and Frankfurt. Inter-branch marriages enabled the family to maintain control, diversify its banking activities and increase its financial capacity by participating in the development of mining and railroads during the nineteenth century. Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836), founder of the English branch, profited greatly by financing the English war against Napoleon. Through audacious manipulations during the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, he multiplied his fortune by twenty in a few days by buying up for pennies on the dollar the same shares whose prices he had previously caused to collapse by falsely broadcasting indications that England had lost the battle, at a time when, with the exception of his agents, nobody knew the outcome. Thus did Nathan Rothschild gain control of the Bank of England.224

  The influence of Puritanism on many aspects of British society, and in particular on its commercialism, naturally extended to the United States, which lacked any ingrained culture capable of stemming it. In American national mythology, everything began with the first colony founded by the Mayflower “Pilgrim Fathers” in 1620 in Massachusetts. They were Puritans who defined themselves as the new chosen people fleeing from Egypt (Anglican England) and settling in the Promised Land. Twenty thousand others followed them between 1629 and 1640. They multiplied at an impressive rate, doubling in each generation for two centuries: there were one hundred thousand in 1700, more than one million in 1800, six million in 1900, and more than sixteen million in 1988.225 Puritanism is the matrix that, through several transformations and mutations, produced American “evangelical” Christianity. One of its most curious emanations is the Mormon Church, which today has more than six million followers. Mormonism was founded in 1830 by a certain Joseph Smith, who claimed to have received from an angel an ancient book engraved on gold plates, written by prophets of Jewish origin who lived on the American continent between 600 BCE and 420 CE. The Book of Mormon takes up the Judeomaniacal theory of the Jewish origin of Native Americans.

  The Disraeli Enigma

  A few decades after the end of the Napoleonic wars, Europe once again entered a period of global conflict, from which it would not extricate itself for a century. In 1853 the Crimean War broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the latter receiving the aid of France and the United Kingdom. The war ended in 1856 with the Treaty of Paris, which aimed at limiting Russian expansionism for the benefit of the Ottoman Empire. Twenty years later, in 1877, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, declaring himself protector of the Christians, went to war once more against the Ottomans, who had drowned the Serb uprising in the bloodbath of 1875, and likewise the Bulgarian uprising the following year. With the Russians at the gates of Constantinople, the Ottomans were forced to grant independence to many of the people they previously dominated. By the Treaty of San Stefano, signed in 1878, the Tsar founded the autonomous principalities of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania, and amputated the Ottoman Empire of territories populated by Georgians and Armenians. The Sultan was also forced to commit to ensuring the safety of Christian subjects who remained under his authority.

  This treaty, however, displeased Britain and Austria-Hungary, both hostile to the expansion of Russian influence. England was especially unhappy, since Alexander II undertook the conquest of territories in Central Asia, where the English owned many colonies. In 1878, England and Austria-Hungary convened the Congress of Berlin, which resulted in the Berlin Treaty, canceling that of San Stefano. The independence of the Christian states of the Balkans was replaced by a gradual and conditional emancipation. Russian conquests were relinquished and Armenia was returned, for the most part, to the Ottoman Empire. The independent principalities of the Balkans were fragmented into weak, rivalrous, and ethnically divided small states, and part of Bulgaria was put back under Ottoman vassalage. This territorial redistribution (the prototype of future “balkanizations”) elicited profound nationalist resentments that helped spark the First World War, as well as the Armenian genocide with its 1,200,000 victims.

  The Treaty of Berlin’s main objective was to save what could be saved from a weakening Ottoman Empire in order to counter pan-Slavism and Russian influence. England, the first maritime power, wanted to prevent Russia from getting closer to the Bosphorus. The British obtained the right to use Cyprus as a naval base, while protecting the colonial roads and monitoring the Suez Canal. Thus was launched the so-called “Great Game” for colonial rule in Asia, which, for the British Empire, entailed containing Russian expansion, and leading in particular to the creation of Afghanistan as a buffer state. (The same policy would be promoted by Zbigniew Brzezinski 120 years later, this time on behalf of American hegemony.)

  There are several ways to interpret this historical episode that carries the seed of all the tragedies of the twentieth century, several possible viewpoints about the forces shaping history at this crucial time. But in the end, history is made by men, and it can be understood only if one identifies the main protagonists. One name stands out among the instigators of this pivotal era’s British imperial policy: Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), prime minister under Queen Victoria from 1868 to 1869, and again from 1874 to 1880. Disraeli was the man who made the takeover of the Suez Canal by England possible in 1875, through funding from his friend Lionel Rothschild, son of Nathan (in an operation that at the same time consolidated the Rothschilds’ control over the Bank of England).

  Disraeli has been called the true inventor of British imperialism, since it was he who, by introducing the Royal Titles Act in 1876, had Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India by Parliament. What is more, Disraeli was the main inspiration for the 1884–1885 Berlin Congress, where the Europeans carved up Africa. Lastly, Disraeli can be considered one of the forerunners of Zionism. Well before Theodor Herzl, Disraeli tried to add the “restoration of Israel” to the Berlin Congress’s agenda, hoping to convince the Sultan to concede Palestine as an autonomous province. Zionism was for him an old dream: soon after a trip to the Middle East at the age of
twenty-six, Disraeli published his first novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, and made his hero, an influential Jew of the Middle Ages, say: “My wish is a national existence which we have not. My wish is the Land of Promise and Jerusalem and the Temple, all we forfeited, all we have yearned after, all for which we have fought, our beauteous country, our holy creed, our simple manners, and our ancient customs.”

  Disraeli wrote these lines even before the beginnings of biblical archeology; it was not until 1841, after a trip to Palestine, that Edward Robinson published his Biblical Researches in Palestine. The first excavations of the Palestine Exploration Fund sponsored by Queen Victoria began in 1867. However, wealthy British Jews had taken an interest in Palestine long before that. Disraeli’s interest was influenced by that of his neighbor and friend of forty years, Moses Montefiore, like him of Sephardic origin, and like him closely related to the Rothschilds. (Montefiore married Judith Cohen, the sister-in-law of Nathan Mayer Rothschild). After a trip to Palestine in 1827, Montefiore devoted his immense resources to helping his coreligionists in the Holy Land, notably by buying land and building housing.