35. Der Judenstaat

Sick Man of Europe

A major source for the Protocols was Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), which was referred to as “Zionist Protocols” in its initial French and Russian editions.[1]  As Polkehn noted, “From the time Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896, the Zionist movement was aware of the fact that its goals could only be achieved by the help of one or more of the imperialist powers.”[2] In 1901, on instructions from Herzl, Joseph Cowen (1868 – 1932) had asked William T. Stead—founding member of the Round Table and a close friend of H.P. Blavatsky and Annie Besant—to arrange a meeting with Cecil Rhodes, highlighting his excellent relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm II.[3] Cowen was persuaded to attend the First Zionist Congress by his relative, Israel Zangwill (1864 – 1926), and thereafter devoted himself to the Zionist movement, becoming Herzl’s chief associate in all matters concerning the Jewish community in Britain.[4] Known as “the Dickens of the Ghetto,” Zangwill 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. Cowen was the moving spirit behind the foundation of the British Zionist Federation in 1899, serving several times as its president, which would later be the recipient of the Balfour Declaration by way of Walter Rothschild.[5]

Herzl’s plan was to convince Rhodes and his partners to buy up the debt of the Ottoman Empire, which he could present as an offer to Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in exchange for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.[6] Herzl model his own political career on the example of Rhodes:

 

Naturally, there are big differences between Cecil Rhodes and my humble self, the personal ones very much in my disfavor; the objective ones are greatly in favor of the Zionist movement.[7]

 

As the cliché goes, the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of Europe.” Its Achilles heel was its debilitating debt to foreign powers. Faced with its needs to finance the Crimean War (1853–1856), the empire was forced to seek foreign loans on the money markets of London and Paris. This results were fatal:

 

Hereafter the issue of foreign loans became the accepted practice of meeting the financial needs of the Empire. In 1875 the Porte failed to pay the charges on a foreign debt of 200 million pound sterling. Six years later it was forced to permit its creditors to take charge of certain imperial revenues—salt, tobacco monopolies, silk, and fisheries—in order to redeem their money.[8]

 

The body assigned to carry out this task was the Administration of the Ottoman Public Debt. While purportedly intended to serve as an administrative role, it actually became a means for outside political control:

 

The Public Debt, technically a department of the Ministry of Finance, functioned as an independent body. Its executive members were elected by the foreign bondholders in their respective countries, and it was to them that the executive was responsible. In 1881 the Public Debt had at its disposal more than 300 revenue collectors; by 1911 its total staff numbered 8,931—more than that of the Ottoman finance ministry. Moreover, this body had become powerful enough to exercise great influence on the political, social and economic life of the Empire. Such was its influence that the Porte found it difficult to raise a foreign loan without the guarantee of the Public Debt.[9]

 

Herzl first attempted to appeal to the nobility of Jewish England, including the Rothschilds, Sir Samuel Montagu, later cabinet minister, to the Chief Rabbis of France and Vienna, the German financier Maurice de Hirsch and especially Edmond James de Rothschild, was already independently funding the establishment of Jewish colonies in Ottoman Palestine in collaboration with Adolphe Crémieux, Moses Montefiore, and Albert Cohn, the friend of Hammer-Purgstall. 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.[10] 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.[11]

 

Burschenschaft Albia

In preparatory notes for his appeal to Baron 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, a student fraternity movement inspired by Father Jahn of the Tugendbund. [12] During the 1880-1881 semester, when Herzl joined Albia at the University of Vienna, Georg von Schönerer (1842 – 1921), the most influential pan-German in Austria, who exerted a significant influence on young Hitler, delivered a speech that was enthusiastically received.[13] 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.[14]

Schönerer was an ally of another admirer of Wagner, Engelbert Pernerstorfer (1850 – 1918), who headed a group of German nationalist intellectuals inspired by the composer. Also affiliated with the Pernerstorfer Circle was Frederick Eckstein (1861 – 1939), an Austrian polymath, Theosophist born into an upper-class Jewish family.[15] 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.[16] Eckstein’s friend, Franz Hartmann (1838 – 1912), one of the founding members of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) went to visit Blavatsky at Adyar, India, travelling by way of California, Japan and South-East Asia in late 1883. A German Theosophical Society (GTS), as a branch of the International Theosophical Brotherhood, had been established in 1896, with Hartmann as its president. Another member of the GTS was Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925), founder of Anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools. Hartmann’s periodical Lotusblüten (“Lotus Blossoms”) was the first German publication to use the Theosophical swastika on its cover.[17]

According to Goodrick-Clarke, Eckstein, “cultivated a wide circle of acquaintance amongst the leading thinkers, writers and musicians of Vienna.”[18] 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 in the late nineteenth 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 included Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876 – 1925), whose Das Dritte Reich (“The Third Reich”), strongly influenced the Nazi movement. Figures such as writer Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942), psychologist Alfred Adler and 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.”[19] Zweig had a warm relationship with Herzl, 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.[20]

The Pernerstorfer Circle, which comprised some of Nietzsche’s first influential admirers, was nicknamed “Nietzsche’s Society in Vienna.”[21] In Nietzsche and Zion, Jacob Golomb identified a list of Grenzjuden (“marginal Jews”) who were caught in an existential crisis concerning their identities as Jews, and who were all admirers of Nietzsche, and who included, in addition to Herzl, Else Lasker-Schiller, Arthur Schnitzler, Jakob Wassermann, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Benjamin, Carl Sternheim, Karl Kraus, Ernst Toller, Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud, Max Nordau, and many others.[22] In addition to his interest in Nietzsche, in his Jugendtagebuch I882-I887, Herzl referred to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Franz Brentano (1838 – 1917), the nephew of Clemens Brentano.[23] Herzl attended Brentano’s lectures on practical philosophy at the University of Vienna, which were also attended by Sigmund Freud, who held a well-known interest in Nietzsche.[24] Nietzsche had a common acquaintance with Freud’s pupil Lou Andreas-Salomé, whom he met through Malwida von Meysenbug and his Jewish friend Paul Rée.[25] Freud and Herzl were actually neighbors without, however, actually becoming friends.[26]

In his memoirs, Arthur Schnitzler (1862 – 1931)—a friend of both Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) and Herzl—recalled a popular saying in those days, that: “Anti-Semitism did not succeed until the Jews began to sponsor it.”[27] Eckstein became a life-long friend of Freud, who shared with him membership in the Pernerstorfer Circle.[28] Along with Eckstein and Freud, Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911)—who was member of Eckstein’s Theosophical lodge in Vienna—was also affiliated with the of Pernerstorfer Circle. Also in the list of Pernerstorfer’s Jewish supporters were Victor Adler, a founding figure of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria; Heinrich Friedjung, who became Austria’s foremost German nationalist historian; Freud’s friends Arthur Schnitzler and Heinrich Braun, later a prominent Social-Democrat in Germany. Adler married Braun’s wife Emma, and their son Friedrich became a close friend of Albert Einstein.[29]

Adler is considered, along with Freud and Carl 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. Adler was also well-acquainted with Dr. Leopold Thoma, one of the closest collaborators of Erik Jan Hanussen (1889 – 1933), Hitler’s Jewish clairvoyant.[30] Adler had also been assisted in his work with his patients by Aleister Crowley.[31] 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.”[32]

However, Schönerer’s increasingly antisemitic policies 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.[33] 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.”[34] 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.”[35] 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.”[36] 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.”[37] 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.”[38]

 

Jewish Chartered Company

When Baron de Hirsch refused to hear him out, Herzl wrote his famous pamphlet, The Jewish State, the foundational document of the modern Zionist movement.[39] 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. It was subtitled with Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (“Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question”) and was originally called “Address to the Rothschilds,” as Herzl planned to deliver it as a speech to the Rothschild family. But no common approach could be agreed to.[40] Rothschild preferred a “quiet” settlement effort in Palestine, and only after World War I the Zionist Organization after World War I.[41]

Published 1896 to immediate acclaim and controversy, Herzl’s Der Judenstaat argued that the Jewish people should leave Europe for Palestine, as their only opportunity to avoid anti-Semitism, and practice their religion without hindrance. In his pamphlet, Herzl discussed the creation of a Jewish Chartered Company with the power to acquire land to conduct colonial activities. The plan was modelled on the old Dutch East India Company, Dutch West India Company, and the Levant Company.[42] The Jewish Company, Herzl explained, “is partly modelled on the lines of a great acquisition company. It might be called a Jewish Chartered Company, though it cannot exercise sovereign power, and has no other than purely colonial tasks.”[43] It was to be established in London in accordance with English laws and subject to its jurisdiction and protection. Its capitalization was to be in the range of 1000 million German marks or 50 million British pounds or 200 million US dollars. For raising funds, “The three methods of raising capital are: (1) Through big banks; (2) Through small and private banks; and (3) Through public subscription.”[44] As Herzl confesses:

 

Many latent political forces lie in our financial power, that power which our enemies assert to be so effective. Many latent political forces lie in our financial power, that power which our enemies assert to be so effective. It might be so, but actually it is not. Poor Jews feel only the hatred which this financial power provokes; its use in alleviating their lot as a body, they have not yet felt. The credit of our great Jewish financiers would have to be placed at the service of the National Idea. But should these gentlemen, who are quite satisfied with their lot, feel indisposed to do anything for their fellow-Jews who are unjustly held responsible for the large possessions of certain individuals, then the realization of this plan will afford an opportunity for drawing a clear line of distinction between them and the rest of Jewry.[45]

 

Herzl wrote in Der Judenstaat, “If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should form there part of a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”[46] An important facilitator of these initiatives was Herzl’s friend, the primary agent of British designs on the Ottoman Empire, the famous Hungarian-Jewish Orientalist and Zionist Arminius Vambery. Between 1896 and 1902, Herzl visited Istanbul five times in order to try to persuade the Sultan allow the Jews to settle in Palestine. As Herzl knowingly admitted, since Palestine was then part of the Ottoman Empire, that the “decision is in the sole hands of His Majesty the Sultan.”[47] Having heard that the Polish nobleman, Count Philip de Newlinski, a Frankist,[48] was one of the European spies of the Sultan, Herzl won him over to the cause of Zionism, and persuaded him to act as a mediator between himself and the Ottoman leaders. Newlinski was appointed to the staff of the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Istanbul where he established contacts with the royal houses, and gained influence with the Sultan. Herzl came to Istanbul in the middle of June 1896, and through Newlinski he requested the Sultan to issue a charter, enabling the Jews to colonize Palestine in return for twenty million pounds. Newlinski also facilitated a meeting with the Grand Vizier, Halil Rifat Pasha (1820 – 1901), but he declined the project as well. The Sultan told Newlinski:

 

If Mr. Herzl is as much your friend as you are mine, then advise him not to take another step in this matter. I cannot sell even a foot of land, for it does not belong to me, but to my people. My people have won this empire by fighting for it with their blood and have fertilized it with their blood. We will again cover it with our blood before we allow it to be wrested away from us. [49]

 

Having failed in these overtures, Herzl would turn to Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859 – 1941) for assistance in helping to convince the Sultan. Wilhelm was a direct descendant of Frederick William II of Prussia, a member of the Berlin Illuminati who had been inducted into the Golden and Rosy Cross by Wöllner and Bischoffwerder.[50] Wilhelm was the son of Prince Frederick William and Victoria, Princess Royal, the eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Through his mother, he was the eldest of the 42 grandchildren of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Wilhelm was the eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria. His first cousins included King George V of the United Kingdom, as well as of queens Marie of Romania, Maud of Norway, Victoria Eugenie of Spain and Empress Alexandra of Russia, the wife of Tsar Nicholas II. In 1889, Wilhelm’s younger sister Sophia married Constantine, Crown Prince of Greece.

 

German Protectorate

In 1885, when Hans von Wolzogen, the editor of Wagner’s review Bayreuther Blätter, wrote to Kaiser Wilhem II’s friend and also his suspected lover, Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg (1847 – 1921), asking that he allow his letters to Gobineau to be published in the Bayreuther Blätter, Eulenburg wrote back to say that he could not publish his correspondence with Gobineau as their letters “…touch on so many intimate matters that I cannot extract much from them which is of general interest.”[51] Eulenburg became very close to Gobineau, whom Eulenburg was later to call his “unforgettable friend.”[52] Eulenburg was deeply impressed by An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, where Gobineau expounded the theory of an Aryan master-race and that the people who had best preserved Aryan blood were the Germans. Eulenburg later recalled how he and Gobineau had spent hours during their time in Sweden under the “Nordic sky, where the old world of the gods lived on in the customs and habits of the people as well in their hearts.”[53] Gobineau would later to write that only two people in the world who properly understood his racist philosophy were Richard Wagner and Eulenburg.[54] Eulenburg spent the rest of his life promoting racist and anti-Semitic views, writing in his 1906 book Eine Erinneruung an Graf Arthur de Gobineau (“A Memoir of Count Arthur de Gobineau”) that Gobineau was a prophet who showed Germany the way forward to national greatness in the twentieth century.

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 (1774 – 1855), founder of the Austrian branch of the family.[55] Eulenburg was a diplomat and composer of Imperial Germany who achieved considerable influence through his friendship with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who shared his interest in the occult.[56] Kaiser Wilhelm II as well was a known anti-Semite. Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm’s biographer noted that in 1888 a friend of Wilhelm “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.[57]

 

Prior to meeting Wilhelm II, Herzl had attempted to interest several influential Germans in his argument that Jewish settlement in Palestine would offer Germany an important foothold in the Middle East. Herzl had first approached Eulenburg and Kaiser’s uncle, the Frederick I, Grand Duke of Baden (1826 – 1907), both of whom showed themselves sympathetic his cause.[58] Herzl’s contact with the Grand Duke was arranged through his close friend, Reverend  William Hechler (1845 – 1931), chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna, whose wife had been a student of Eulenburg. Hechler’s interest in Jewish studies and Palestine evolved under the influence of Restorationism, a term that was eventually replaced by Christian Zionism. 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 the Kaiser’s uncle, the Duke of Baden. Through Grand Duke’s son Ludwig, Hechler developed a relationship with the young Wilhelm II.

On March 10, 1896, Herzl was visited by Hechler, who had read his Der Judenstaat. Herzl later wrote in his diary:

 

Next we came to the heart of the business. I said to him: I must put myself into direct and publicly known relations with a responsible or non responsible ruler—that is, with a minister of state or a prince. Then the Jews will believe in me and follow me. The most suitable personage would be the German Kaiser.[59]

 

The Grand Duke spoke with the Kaiser in October 1898 about the Zionists’ ideas. On October 7, 1898, through an introduction arranged by Hechler, Eulenburg summoned Herzl to Liebenberg to announce that Wilhelm II wanted to see a Jewish state established in Palestine, under a German protectorate, in order to “drain” the Jews away from Europe, and thus “purify the German race.”[60] David Wolffsohn reported the talk between the Grand Duke and the Kaiser: “The Kaiser was even said to have been ready to assume protectorate powers over the new state. He was said to have expressed the wish to receive a Zionist deputation in Jerusalem so that he could disclose this to it.”[61] The Zionist leader decided that Herzl, Max Bodenheimer (1865 – 1940) and his close friend David Wolffsohn (1855 – 1914) should head for the Near East.[62] Bodenheimer and Franz Oppenheimer (1864 – 1943), formed the original leadership of the ZVfD, founded in 1897 in Cologne. Franz’s father, Dr. Julius Oppenheimer (1827 – 1909), served for many years as a preacher and teacher at the Jewish Reform temple of the Berlin.[63] During the trip, Herzl commissioned Bodenheimer to work on a declaration that would be presented to the Kaiser. Herzl tasked Bodenheimer with putting together an exposition that would be presented to the Kaiser. Bodenheimer later commented:

 

Our imagination had been urged on unchecked on account of the extraordinary event. So following the word of God in the Bible, I demanded the land stretching between the brook of Egypt and the Euphrates, as the region for Jewish colonization. In the transitional period the land would be divided into districts which would come under Jewish administration as soon as a Jewish majority was reached.[64]

 

Herzl publicly met Wilhelm II three times during the voyage, once in Istanbul, on October 15, 1898, and twice in Palestine, on October 29 and November 2. In Jerusalem, Herzl and the Kaiser met at Mikveh Israel, the village founded in 1870 by Charles Netter of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, one of the founders of the first Masonic lodge in Jerusalem. As was his intent, the meetings significantly advanced Herzl’s and Zionism’s legitimacy in Jewish and world opinion.[65] During the Istanbul audience, the Kaiser asked Herzl what he wished him to ask of the Sultan: “Tell me in a word what I am to ask the Sultan,” to which Herzl replied: “A Chartered Company–under German protection.” The Kaiser brought the subject up twice with Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The Sultan refused, even in return for the Jews assuming the sizable Turkish foreign debt.

 

Greatest Blunder 

While Max Nordau claims that it was he who first introduced Herzl to Vambery in 1898, Herzl identified Hechler as the one who introduced him to Vambery in 1900 in his efforts to meet with the Sultan.[66] In 1897, the Aga Khan III, had befriended the Russian-Jewish Zionist, Waldemar Haffkine (1860 – 1930), to battle an outbreak of the bubonic plague in Bombay. Haffkine, a developer of the first vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague, was knighted to the Companion of the Indian Empire (CIE) in the same year. In 1898, two years after Herzl published his Zionist manifesto, The Jewish State, Haffkine saw an opportunity to exploit his friendship to Aga Khan III to petition Sultan Abdul Hamid II for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine within the Ottoman Empire. According to the Aga Khan III, Zionism:

 

…was something which I had had a long and by no means unsympathetic experience. My friend of early and strenuous days in Bombay, Professor Haffkine, was a Zionist—as were many other brilliant and talented Russian Jews of his generation who escaped into Western Europe from the harsh and cruel conditions imposed upon them by Czarist Russia. Haffkine, like many of the earlier Zionists, hope that some arrangements could be made with the Turkish Sultan whereby peaceful Jewish settlement could be progressively undertaken in the Holy Land… As Haffkine proposed, I thought this sort of Zionism useful and practical.[67]

 

In 1898, the Aga Khan III visited Paris, where he met Haffkine’s friends, Zadoc Kahn (1839 – 1905), Chief Rabbi of France, and Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845 – 1934). After the death of Adolphe Crémieux in 1880, the Jews of France had no recognized secular leader, and institutions and individuals turned to Kahn for leadership.[68] From 1870, Rabbi Zadoc had entered the steering committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. He encouraged Moses Montefiore and the creation of Mikveh Israel by Charles Netter.[69] When the first settlements in Palestine faced serious financial crisis, the leaders of Rishon le-Zion turned to Baron Edmond de Rothschild, together with Samuel Mohilewer through the mediation of Rabbi Zadoc. The result of these appeals was Rothschild’s support for the settlements Rishon le-Zion and Zikhron Ya’akov and afterward the founding of the settlement Ekron. During 1883–84, the first settlements began to be patronized by Rothschild.[70] Against Herzl, Zadoc Kahn presented Baron de Hirsch with the project of setting up a Jewish settlement in Argentina, before the Jewish Colonisation Association was created in 1891. Rabbi Zadoc organized the relief movement on behalf of the Jews expelled from Russia subsequent and gave much of his time to the work of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which elected him honorary president in recognition of his services.

In addition to Rabbi Zadoc, Edmond was very much influenced by his religious teachers, Albert Cohn, friend of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, but also by Michel Erlanger and Charles Netter, two of the founders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle.[71] Rabbi Kahn, who was president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, organized the relief movement for Jews expelled from Russia.[72] Rabbi Kahn prepared a statement on the Zionist plan of settling Jews in Palestine. With these proposals the Aga Khan approached the Sultan through Munir Pasha, the Turkish Ambassador in Paris, and through Ahmed Izzet Pasha, the Sultan’s confidential secretary and a confidant of Abdul Baha, and eventual Grand Vizier of the Empire. The scheme, which was rejected by the Sultan, the Aga Khan thought was his “greatest blunders.”[73] Vambery arranged renewed attempt in May 1901 at meeting with the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II and a Zionist delegation to obtain from him a charter for an independent Jewish settlement in Palestine, in exchange for “his friends” to pay off the interest on the Empire’s enormous debts. Acting again as an intermediary was Izzet Pasha. But the attempt, which spanned over five meetings, until July 1902, proved unsuccessful.[74]

 


[1] De Michelis. The Non-Existent Manuscript, p. 47.

[2] Klaus Polkehn. “Zionism and Kaiser Wilhelm.” Journal of Palestine Studies, 4: 2 (1975), p. 76.

[3] Israel Cohen. Thedor Herz: Founder of Political Zionism (New York: Thomas Yoseloff), p. 251.

[4] “Cowen, Joseph.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/cowen-joseph

[5] Ibid.

[6] Israel Cohen. Thedor Herz: Founder of Political Zionism (New York: Thomas Yoseloff), p. 251.

[7] Theodor Herzl. Diaries, Vol. II, p. 793. Ralph Schoenman. The Hidden History of Zionism ( Santa Barbara: Veritas Press, 1988).

[8] Feroz Ahmad. The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics 1908–1914 (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 75; cited in Muriel Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire: Armenia-Iraq-Palestine, from Wrath to Reconciliation (Garnet Publishing Limited, 2009), p. 47.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Bernard Postal. “B’nai B’rith: A Century of Service.” The American Jewish Year Book, 45 (1943), p. 106.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Kornberg. Theodor Herzl, p. 52.

[13] Cited in McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” p. 196.

[14] Joseph Jacobs & S. Mannheimer. “Schönerer, Georg von.” Jewish Encyclopedia (1906).

[15] Karl Baier. “Occult Vienna: From the Beginnings until the First World War.” In Hans Gerald Hoedl, Astrid Mattes & Lukas Pokorny, (eds.). Religion in Austria, Vol. 5 (Vienna: Praesens, 2020), p. 30.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, pp. 25, 26.

[18] Ibid., p. 28.

[19] Eileen M. Lavine. “The Stimulating Story of Jews and Coffee.” Moment (Sunday 2, 2016)

[20] Gabe Friedman. “Meet the Austrian-Jewish novelist who inspired Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’.” Haaretz (January 17, 2015). Retrieved from http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.637453

[21] Golomb. Nietzsche and Zion, p. 26.

[22] Ibid., p. 4.

[23] Ibid., p. 26.

[24] Ibid., p. 4.

[25] R. J. Hollingdale. Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, 2 ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 149.

[26] Jacob Golomb. Nietzsche and Zion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 4.

[27] Cited in Jacques Kornberg. Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 47.

[28] Baier. “Occult Vienna: From the Beginnings until the First World War,” p. 30.

[29] Peter Galison. “Assassin of Relativity (Lecture).” Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlONXXn9_QI

[30] Spence. Secret Agent 666, pp. 214-215.

[31] Crowley to Schneider October 5, 1944 GJY Collection, cited in Richard Kaczynski. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (North Atlantic Book, 2010) p. 448.

[32] Freud, cited in Ernest Jones. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964), p. 353.

[33] McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” p. 201.

[34] Ibid., p. 199.

[35] Cited in Ibid., p. 199.

[36] McGrath. “Student Radicalism in Vienna,” p. 200.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ben-Gurion. “Theodor Herzl.”

[40]  “Rothschild, Baron Edmond James de.” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/rothschild-baron-edmond-james-de

[41]  Ibid.

[42] Samir Abed-Rabbo. “Herzl’s Zionism and Settler Colonialism in Palestine.” Arab Studies Quarterly, 46: (2024), p. 45.

[43] Theodor Herzl. The Jewish State (Jewish Virtual Library). Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-jewish-state-quot-theodor-herzl

[44] Theodor Herzl. The Jewish State, Texts Concerning The Jewish Company, 1896; cited in Abed-Rabbo. “Herzl’s Zionism and Settler Colonialism in Palestine,”p. 45

[45] Theodor Herzl. The Jewish State (Jewish Virtual Library). Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-jewish-state-quot-theodor-herzl

[46] Ibid.

[47] Mim Kemal Oke. “The Ottoman Empire, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine (1880-1908).” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 14: 3 (August, 1982),  p. 330.

[48] Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 110.

[49] Oke. “The Ottoman Empire, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine (1880-1908),” p. 330.

[50] Katz. Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723-1939, p. 47.

[51] John Röhl. The Kaiser and His Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 54.

[52] Ibid., pp. 33 & 54.

[53] Ibid., p. 171.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Norman Domeier. The Eulenburg Affair: A Cultural History of Politics in the German Empire (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), p. 176.

[56] Röhl. The Kaiser and His Court, pp. 61-62, 66.

[57] Lamar Cecil. Wilhelm II: Prince and Emperor, 1859–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

[58] Desmond Stewart. “Herzl’s Journeys in Palestine and Egypt.” Journal of Palestine Studies, 3: 3 (1974), p. 18.

[59] Marvin Lowenthal (ed.). The Diaries of Theodor Herzl (Gloucester, Massachusetts, Peter Smith Pub., 1978), p. 105.

[60] Domeier. The Eulenburg Affair, p. 177.

[61] Dr. Max Bodenheimer. So Wurde Israel (Frankfurt on the Main, 1958), p. 94.

[62] Klaus Polkehn. “Zionism and Kaiser Wilhelm.” Journal of Palestine Studies, 4: 2 (1975), p. 78.

[63] Claudia Willms. Liberale Erziehung im Milieu (Bohlau Verlag, 2018), pp. 78–91.

[64] Dr. M. I. Bodenheimer. So Wurde Israel (Frankfurt on the Main, 1958), p. 100; cited in Polkehn. “Zionism and Kaiser Wilhelm,” p. 79.

[65] London Daily Mail (November 18, 1898).

[66] David Mandler. Arminius Vambéry and the British Empire: Between East and West (Lexington Books, 2016), p. 146.

[67] The Aga Khan. The Memoirs of Aga Khan (London, Cassels and Co. Ltd., 1954), p. 38; cited in Ahmad, Syed Barakat. “INDIA AND PALESTINE 1896-1947: THE GENESIS OF A FOREIGN POLICY.” India Quarterly, 29: 4 (1973), p. 301.

[68] “Khan Zadoc.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kahn-zadoc

[69] “Khan Zadoc.” Federation des Societes d’histoire & d’archeologie d’Alace. Retrieved from https://www.alsace-histoire.org/netdba/kahn-zadoc/

[70] “Rothschild, Baron Edmond James de.” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/rothschild-baron-edmond-james-de

[71] Elizabeth Antébi. Edmond de Rothschild: L’homme qui racheta la Terre sainte (Du Rocher, 2003); cited in https://www.crawfordhouse.com.au/catalogue.php?isbn=8

[72] “Zadoc Kahn.” The Life of the Synagogue. Retrieved from https://lifeofthesynagogue.charleston.edu/section/4-rabbis/zadoc-kahn/

[73] The Aga Khan. The Memoirs of Aga Khan p. 150–151; cited in Ahmad. “INDIA AND PALESTINE 1896-1947: THE GENESIS OF A FOREIGN POLICY,” p. 301.

[74] Ferenc Csirkés. “Armin Vambery and International Politics.” Retrieved from http://vambery.mtak.hu/index-en.html; Yoram Mayorek. “Herzl and the Ottoman Empire.” CEMOTI, 28 (1999), pp. 13-18.

Divide & Conquer