21. The Orientalists

Athenaeum Club

In 1891, in A Traveller’s Narrative, E.G. Browne celebrated the success of the Bahai movement and reminded British leaders of the value of the first-hand knowledge gained by carrying out such an experiment of creating a religion and of its political utility:

 

Now it appears to me that the history of the Babi movement must be interesting in effort ways to others besides those who are directly engaged in the study of Persian. To the student of religious thought it will afford no little matter for reflection; for here he may contemplate such personalities as by lapse of time pass into heroes and demi-gods still unobscured by myth and fable he may examine by the light of concurrent and independent testimony one of those strange outbursts of enthusiasm, faith, fervent devotion, and indomitable heroism—or fanaticism, if you will—which we are accustomed to associate with the earlier history of the human race; he may witness in a word, the birth of a faith which may not impossibly win a place amidst the great religions of the world. To the ethnologist also it may yield food for thought as to the character of a people who, stigmatised as they often have been as selfish, mercenary, avaricious, egotistical, sordid, and cowardly, are yet capable of exhibiting under the influence of a strong religious impulse a degree of devotion, disinterestedness, generosity, unselfishness, nobility, and courage which may be paralleled in history, but can scarcely be surpassed. To the politician, too, the matter is not devoid of importance; for what changes may not be effected in a country now reckoned almost as a cypher in the balance of national forces by a religion capable of evoking so mighty a spirit? Let those who know what Muhammad made the Arabs, consider well what the Bab may yet make the Persians.[1]

 

An important facilitator of these initiatives was the primary agent of British designs on the Ottoman Empire, the famous Hungarian-Jewish Orientalist and Zionist Arminius Vambery (1832 – 1913), an agent of Lord Palmerston, and who wrote Meine Wanderungen und Erlebnisse in Persien (“My Travels and Experiences in Persia”), published in 1867, which discussed the Bab and his followers, and eventually became the first Hungarian convert to the Bahai faith.[2] Vambery was a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Budapest, and a lifelong admirer of the famous Hungarian revolutionary and friend of Mazzini, Lajos Kossuth.[3] By the age of sixteen, Vambery had a good knowledge of Hungarian, Hebrew, Latin, French, and German, and was also rapidly acquiring English, the Scandinavian languages, Russian, Serbian, and other Slavic languages.

In 1844, when he was barely twenty-two, Vambery gained the support of the Hungarian Minister of Education, Baron Jozsef Eotvos (1813 – 1871), who in 1840 had published his classic work A zsidók emancipatiója (“Emancipation of the Jews”), where he refuted the arguments of those who rejected emancipation of the Jews unconditionally. Eotvos provided Vambery with a bursary to go to Istanbul where, soon after his arrival, the Foreign Minister of Turkey, Mehmet Fuad Pasha (1814 – 1869), a member of the Masonic lodge Union de l’Orient and Progress, employed him as his private secretary. Vambery also met the future Sultan, Abdul Hamid II. In order to become fully accepted, Vambery converted to Islam.[4] It was at this time that Vambery established his lifelong connections with the leading members of the Young Ottomans, who would eventually evolve into the Young Turk movement. Describing his time in Istanbul, Vambery recalled:

 

Rising, step by step, I first came into the house of the Chief Chancellor of the Imperial Divan, Afif Bey, whose son-in-law, Kamil Bey, I taught for about twelve months, and where I had daily intercourse with the élite of Porte society. Our house, opposite the mausoleum of Sultan Mahmud II, not far from the High Porte, was the rendezvous of men of wit and genius, celebrated authors, and high society generally. Here I made the acquaintance of Midhat Pasha, afterwards celebrated in Europe as the father of the Turkish constitution. He was then Midhat Effendi, and occupied the position of secretary to my Pasha.[5]

 

In 1861, after spending six years in Istanbul, Vambery embarked on a seven-and-a-half-month journey disguised as a Sufi dervish to Armenia, Persia, Afghanistan, Khiva, Bokhara and Turkestan. In 1864, he went to London and published his Travels in Central Asia, which gained him international renown. In London, Vambery was acquainted with British social elite, and was a frequent guest at Windsor Castle, becoming personally acquainted with the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.[6] The Prince of Wales was also Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England.[7] Vambery was often a guest at the private home of Lord Palmerston, to whom he had sent reports on India and other countries while in Persia, where he established contacts with the British legation.[8] Vambery also met with Randolph Churchill, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, the Duchess of St. Albans, and Lord Chamberlain.[9] Vambery also befriended Lord Granville (1815 – 1891), afterwards Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose sister had urged Vambery to settle in London, where she provided him various invitations. Granville’s father, Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Granville (1773 – 1846) had numerous other love affairs, including with Lady Hester Stanhope, whose brother, the 4th Earl of Stanhope, participated in occult experiments at Gore House with Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli.[10] Vambery also received encouragements from Sir Justin Sheil, British Ambassador in Persia, and his wife, who instructed him in the manners necessary to be  welcomed into elite circles.[11] It was Sheil who, acting as the British minister in Tehran, who successfully negotiated the Aga Khan I’s return to Persia in 1847.[12] Vambery also befriended Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s friend Charles Dickens, whose acquaintance he made at the Athenaeum Club, an exclusive Gentleman’s Club in London.[13]

As recounted in his memoirs, The story of my struggles, at the home of Lord Houghton (1809 – 1885), Vambery met with Henry Stanley, 3rd Baron Stanley of Alderley (1827 – 1903), also known as Abdul Rahman Stanley, a friend of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and convert to Islam who in 1869 and became the first Muslim member of the House of Lords. Stanley engaged in debates about religion with Samuel Wilberforce (1805 – 1873), the son of William Wilberforce, who with Charles Simeon founded the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, whose president was the Earl of Shaftesbury.[14] Samuel Wilberforce is now best remembered for his opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution at a debate in 1860. At Lord Houghton’s home, Vambery also made the acquaintance of Earl of Lytton, the poet Algernon Swinburne, and Sir Richard Burton.

Vambery also met Mary Clarke Mohl (1793 – 1883), who conducted an influential salon in Paris, that included Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Prime Minister of François Guizot and his successor Adolphe Thiers, as well as Madame de Staël’s lover Benjamin Constant.[15] Mary came to know Juliette Récamier, an icon of neoclassicism, who was the great salonniere of the time. She was made famous through a painting of her by Jacques-Louis David. Through Juliette, Mary met literary greats such as Stendhal, Hugo, Chateaubriand and Prosper Mérimée who discovered The Lady and the Unicorn with George Sand.[16] Mary later married the celebrated German Orientalist, Jules Mohl (1800 – 1876), a student of Silvestre de Sacy.[17] As well, Vambery met the famous British explorer David Livingstone and befriended Gifford Palgrave (1826 – 1888), who also travelled across the Middle East, and conducted espionage work on behalf of the Jesuits. Travelling as a Muslim, Palgrave had gone to Najd, where he became friendly with the Wahhabi ruler, Faisal bin Turki Al Saud.[18]

Hugo and Chateaubriand, along with Charles Nodier (1780 – 1844), were members of the circle of the half-German half-Jewish 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.[19] 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.[20]

Éliphas Lévi collaborated closely with Nodier, 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.[21] 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.

 

Gobinism

When Vambery arrived in Tehran on July 13, 1862, he immediately went to visit Haidar Efendi, the Ottoman ambassador to Persia, through whom he met the British and French ambassadors, Sir Charles Alison and Arthur de Gobineau (1816 – 1882)—a friend of Jules Mohl—whose study of Babism inspired the work of E.G. Browne.[22] Gobineau was a French writer and diplomat who, in immediate aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, wrote An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, considered to be one of if not the earliest example of scientific racism.[23] Through Gobineau, Babism was also at the outset regarded as a kind of Gobinism,[24] an ethnically pro-Germanic, anti-national and particularly anti-French ideology, the movement influenced German nationalists and intellectuals such as Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche and Moses Hess, the precursor of Zionism.[25] The philosophy of Gobineau has been described as “undoubtedly the most influential academic racist of the nineteenth century,”[26] becoming “cult-like”[27] among “racial aristocracy,” and strongly influencing Nietzsche, Wagner, his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the pan-German movement.[28] Blunt, who visited Gobineau in 1871, described him in his diary:

 

Gobineau is a man of about 55, with grey hair and moustache, dark rather prominent eyes, sallow complexion, and tall figure with brisk almost jerky gait. In temperament he is nervous, energetic in manner, observant, but distrait, passing rapidly from thought to thought, a good talker but a bad listener. He is a savant, novelist, poet, sculptor, archaeologist, a man of taste, a man of the world.[29]

 

One hypothesis put forward by a German author in 1926 suggested that Gobineau was initiated into the mysteries of race by Benjamin Disraeli during meetings they might have had in Paris.[30] As noted by Ivan Poliakov, in The Aryan Myth, Disraeli’s philosophy of history might be summed up in the formula: “All is race; there is no other truth.”[31] But he also included the Jews in the “Caucasian race.” In Coningsby, published in 1844, Disraeli 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…[32]

 

Gobineau came to believe race determined culture. Of the three races—“black,” “white,” and “yellow”—whites, he argued, were alone capable of intelligent thought, creating beauty and were the most beautiful.[33] “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.[34] These Aryans colonized ancient India, Egypt, and Greece. As for the Persians, explained Robert Irwin:

 

Gobineau classed them as Aryans, which, of course, was mostly what they were. But, whereas most nineteenth-century scholars who worked on the comparison of races and language traced the Indo-Aryan group of races and languages to Indian and Sanskrit origins, Gobineau believed that the Persians originated in Central Asia. The originally heroic status of the Aryan Persians was attested to by various well-known medieval Persian heroic epics—romances which Gobineau tended to read as if they were sober historical chronicles. The most beautiful people were those closest to the Aryans—that is to say the Indians and Persians (even though their stock had degenerated). The bloodstock of the Persians was eventually ruined by admixture with that of the Semitic Assyrians and Arabs.[35]

 

In 1841, Gobineau scored his first major success when an article was published by Revue des deux Mondes (“Review of the Two Worlds”), a monthly French-language magazine that has been published in Paris since 1829. At the time, the journal was one of the most prestigious in Paris, and also published George Sand, the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil (1805 – 1876), one of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime. George Sand also serialized her novel Mauprat in the magazine in 1837. With Prosper Mérimée (1803 – 1870), Sand discovered the series of tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn, created woven in Flanders from designs drawn in Paris around 1500, on display in the Musée de Cluny in Paris.

From June 1875, Gobineau went on travels through Russia, Turkey, and Greece. But it was his two Persian missions which provided the stimuli and the material for his interest in the east, enabling him to write his three best Oriental works. Trois ans en Asie (“Three Years in Asia,” 1859), Les religions et philosophies dans l’Asie centrale (“The Religions and Philosophies in Central Asia, 1865), influenced by racial theories and esoteric views, and based on personal contacts and observations, notably on Babism and its recent evolution. Third was Nouvelles asiatiques (“The New Asians,” 1876). His fictional “Gamber-Aly” was a replica of Hajji Baba.[36] The adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan was written in 1824 by James Justinian Morier (1782 – 1849), a former British envoy who lived in Qajar Iran in 1808–1809 and 1810–1814, amidst the diplomatic difficulties that the country had with European nations. It was followed by a sequel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England in 1828.

Gobineau befriended and corresponded with many intellectuals and politicians, and most notably with Alexis de Tocqueville, the Earl of Lytton, Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, and with Richard Wagner. Pedro II (1825 – 1891) was a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and Knight of Malta.[37] 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.[38] Pedro II’s daughter Isabel married Gaston, Count of Eu (1842 – 1922), the grandson of Louis Philippe I, the son of Illuminatus Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, Philippe Égalité, a friend of Jacob Falk.[39] Gaston’s brother, Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Alençon (1844 – 1910), was married to the famous Empress Sisi of Austria. 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. Through Isabel’s marriage to Gaston, a cadet of the Orléans line, their descendants, known as the Orléans-Braganza, were in the line of succession and expected to ascend its throne had the monarchy not been abolished by a coup in 1889.

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. Hugo was also a friend of the Earl of Lytton. In 1876, Pedro II accompanied Gobineau on his trip to Russia, Greece and the Ottoman Empire, and 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.[40] During his visit to Rome, Gobineau met and befriended the Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima.[41]

 

Bayreuther Kreis

Gobineau is said to have exerted the greatest formative influence on Wagner, who was deeply interested in Gobineau’s theory of racial decay through miscegenation.[42] Although Wagner expressed anti-Semitic views in Jewishness in Music, he had Jewish friends, colleagues and supporters throughout his life, usually connected with the Frankists of the Judenloge and the Forty-Eighters. Cosima’s mother was Comtesse Marie d’Agoult (1805 – 1876), a friend of Mazzini, with whom she corresponded.[43] Marie was married in 1827 to the comte Charles d’Agoult. In Paris, she gathered round her a salon which included Frankist personalities like Frédéric Chopin, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Heinrich Heine and others. She was separated from her husband, and became the mistress of the composer Franz Liszt, a Freemason as well as another Frankist.[44] 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.[45] 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.[46] Bettina was the sister of Clemens Brentano, who married Achim von Arnim, who belonged to the Gesetzlose Gesellschaft with Tugendbund member, Ernst Moritz Arndt.[47]

By Liszt, Marie had Cosima, who married first Hans von Bulow and later the composer Richard Wagner. Wagner was born in 1813 in Leipzig’s Jewish quarter, as the ninth child of Freemason Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner and his wife Johanna.[48] Richard was influenced by his uncle, Ludwig Wagner, who studied with Fichte and Schelling, but his philosophical outlook was mostly shaped by Hegel.[49] 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.[50]

At their first meeting, Wagner read to Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791 – 1864) from the libretto of Rienzi, based on one of novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which Meyerbeer subsequently recommended for performance at Dresden. The opera became a formative influence on the young Adolf Hitler in Vienna.[51] Meyerbeer’ father was the wealthy financier Judah Herz Beer, a leader of the Berlin Jewish community, and a supporter of Israel Jacobson, founder of the Hamburg Temple.[52] 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).[53] Through a recommendation from Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778 – 1837)—a member of the Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen Masonic lodge[54] 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.[55]

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 by his uncle, Adolph, who knew Hoffmann quite intimately.[56] 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.[57] 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.[58] Wagner on the other hand, hailed Sand as a German hero for having killed the “buffoon.”[59]

According to Ernest Newman, Wagner’s ideas were nothing new, but originated with the Father Jahn[60]—a leader of the Tugendbund, which the French imperial police of the time connected to the Illuminati.[61] Wagner and Cosima replaced 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 “Forty-Eighter” Julius Fröbel, a disciple of Father Jahn.[62] 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.[63]

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, Illuminatus and Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren. 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. 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.[64]

 

Laws of Manu

After she moved to Paris in 1860, Malwida met Wagner for the first time and also corresponded with Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), whose philosophy, particularly his pessimism and emphasis on the will and music's power, profoundly influenced Wagner’s artistic and intellectual development.[65] As a young man, Schopenhauer and his family had visited Fanny Itzig’s home.[66] 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.[67] 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.[68] 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—the Illuminati member who was chiefly responsible for sponsoring Weimar Classicism—and he wrote to her his only known love poem.[69] Schopenhauer was also a friend of Friedrich Laun, author of the  Gespensterbuch collection with August Apel.[70]

As explained by Ivan Poliakov, Schopenhauer formulated a “system which was undoubtedly to become the most important philosophical corpus of pro-Indian or pro-Aryan-and at the same time anti-Jewish or anti-semitic-arguments. Soon afterwards the terminological weapons began to be forged.”[71] “We may hope,” he wrote, “that Europe will free itself some day of all Jewish mythology. Perhaps the century is approaching when the peoples of Japhetic stock, originating in Asia, will find the sacred relics of their native land, because, after going astray for so long, they have reached sufficient maturity for this.”[72] Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by and held a high regard for Indian philosophy, particularly the Upanishads and Buddhism. He considered India as “the land of the most ancient and most pristine wisdom, the place from which Europeans could trace their descent and the tradition by which they had been influenced in so many decisive ways,” and regarded the Upanishads as "the most profitable and elevating reading which [...] is possible in the world. It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death.”[73]

Between 1873 and 1876, during  time in the circle of the Wagners, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) published “Schopenhauer as Educator,” and met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von Bülow. Nietzsche had published The Birth of Tragedy (1972), a work deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, which 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. 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 led 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.”[74]

According to Dorothy M. Figueira, “Nietzsche constructed a myth of the Aryan from the discussion of caste found in Manu that would play a significant role in his philosophy of the Übermensch.”[75] Nietzsche identified Les législateurs religieux Manou-Moïse-Mahomet by Louis Jacolliot (1837 – 1890) as a source reference for his understanding of Manu.[76] Jacolliot was a popular French writer who served as a magistrate in Chandernagor, South India, and produced a trilogy on Indian mythology and its relationship with Christianity. Jacolliot hailed India as, “the birthplace of the human race and ageless mother with bountiful breasts.”[77] In Occult Science in India, written during the 1860s and published 1875, Jacolliot searched for the “Indian roots of western occultism,” and made reference to an otherwise unknown Sanskrit text he called Agrouchada-Parikchai, which according to J.B. Hare was a “pastiche” of elements taken from Upanishads, Dharmashastras and a bit of Freemasonry,” and “does not seem to exist except in Jacolliot’s imagination.”[78] In his La Bible dans l’Inde, Vie de Iezeus Christna (“The Bible in India, Life of Jezeuz Krishna”), he linked Moses etymologically with Manu and Jesus from Zeus. Jacolliot believed to have identified several similarities between the life of Bhagavan Krishna with that of Jesus Christ, and therefore concluded that the Gospels is a myth based on the mythology of ancient India.

Supported by apocryphal Laws of Manu, which he claimed to have discovered, Jacolliot was able “to ascribe the origins of the Bible to the highlands  of Asia and to prove that, the influence and memories of the birthplace having been prolonged throughout the ages, Jesus Christ had come to regenerate the new world as Iezeus Christna had regenerated the old.”[79] From Jacolliot, Nietzsche derived the false conception that notion that Manu was the oldest scripture of the Aryan heritage, dating its compilation at 13,000 BC. Its purported author was believed to be the original man and the son of the god “Brahma.” Manu serves as an absolute authority of both Hindu knowledge and practice, and codifies belief in the fourfold caste system. Nietzsche’s reading of Manu focused exclusively on caste and its relationship to breeding, the only thing that he found appealing in India at all.[80]

As a code of morality based on the Veda, Nietzsche regarded Manu as the racially purest Aryan law book.[81] Nietzsche develops his myth of the Aryan in the Genealogy of Morals, where he notes that the connotation of the term arya as “the wealthy” or the “owners,” rather than its conventional meaning of “honorable” or “noble,” points to the Aryans’ true nature as masters. Although Nietzsche believed that the Western Aryan had all but disappeared, he felt that the Indian Aryan had largely escape such a fate due to his adherence to the caste system dictated in the Laws of Manu. However, having rejected the anti-Semitism of his former idol Wagner, Nietzsche viewed the Jews racially as the strongest and purest race in Europe. He claimed that the venerated purity of the German soul was actually a mix of Slav, Celt, and Jew.[82] Nietzsche believed that, if that had so made it their goal, the Jews could have conquered Europe, but they chose to focus elsewhere, in finding a homeland, and he called upon Europe to accommodate them in this legitimate aspiration.[83]

 

Bayreuther Blätter

The anti-Semitic German philosopher Eugen Dühring (1833 – 1921), in The Jewish Question, insinuated that Nietzsche was a Jew.[84] In 1879, Dühring was given a leadership role in the publication of Wagner’s Bayreuther Blätter.[85] 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.[86]

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 (“Bayreuth pages”). In 1878, Wagner founded the Bayreuther Blätter, 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 the son of Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who married Lea Salomon, a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig.[87] Their son was Felix Mendelssohn.

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. Although he never met Wagner, Chamberlain married Wagner’s daughter Eva von Bülow. Chamberlain’s 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, and later influenced the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy. Chamberlain envisioned the struggle between the Aryans and the Semites as the driving force of history. Modern Europeans, he proposed, suffer from cultural decay due to their mongrel origins in the form of present-day Völkerchaos. For Chamberlain, it was the mission of the Teutons (Aryans) to correct the chaos by rescuing Christianity by purging it of its Semitic elements. Chamberlain, whose interest in India was piqued by the study of Sanskrit and contact with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Chamberlain believed that the Vedas and the Upanishads provided evidence that the ancient Teutons possessed holy books that were superior the Old Testament.[88]

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 Eugen Dühring’s book of the same name.[89] In addition, references and quotations in Herzl’s own diaries, letters, and other writings provide substantial evidence to his knowledge of Nietzsche.[90] Herzl, who was described by his cousin as having “absorbed [Nietzsche’s] style,” got ahold of every Nietzsche volume available.[91] Herzl’s idea of the “new Jew” was profoundly similar to that of Nietzsche’s “new European man” or Übermensch.[92] 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.[93] 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.”[94]

 


[1] E.G. Browne. A Traveller’s Narrative (1891). pp. 8-9. Retrieved from https://www.bahai-library.com/books/dawnbreakers/footnotes/epilogue/663-1.html

[2] “A Draft Summary of the History and International Character of the Hungarian Bahá’í Community.” National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahai Community of Hungary, 2011). Retrieved rom https://web.archive.org/web/20120421012216/http://www.bahai.hu/english/draft-summary-history-international-character-hungarian-bahai-community/#toc-abdul-bah-and-arminius-vmbry

[3] David Mandler. Arminius Vambéry and the British Empire (London Lexington Books, 2016), p. xvii.

[4] “‘Magyar Jew or Jewish Magyar?’ A Unique Symbiosis.” In The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 344.

[5] Arminius Vambery. The story of my struggles: the memoirs of Arminius Vambéry, Volume 2 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), p. 129–130.

[6] “‘Magyar Jew or Jewish Magyar?’ A Unique Symbiosis.” In The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 344.

[7] Deschamps. “Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond.”

[8] “‘Magyar Jew or Jewish Magyar?’ A Unique Symbiosis.” In The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 344.

[9] Mary Jeune. Memoirs of Fifty Years (London: Edward Arnold, 1909), p. 277–278.

[10] Kirsten Ellis. Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope (2008) p. 77-90.

[11] Vambery. The story of my struggles, p. 252.

[12] Daftary. The Ismailis, p. 472.

[13] Vambery. The story of my struggles, p. 258.

[14] Kelvin Crombie. For the Love of Zion (Hodder & Stoughton Religious, 1991).

[15] Kathleen O’Meara. “Madame Mohl, Her Salon and Her Friends: Second Paper.” The Atlantic (February 1885). Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1885/02/madame-mohl-her-salon-and-her-friends-second-paper/632431/

[16] Hugh Schofield. “The most fashionable Englishwoman in Paris.” BBC (March 18, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39128908

[17] O’Meara. “Madame Mohl, Her Salon and Her Friends: Second Paper.”

[18] Peter Hobday. Saudi Arabia Today. An Introduction to the Richest Oil Power, 2nd ed. (London: The Macmillan Press, 1986). p. 16.

[19] Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 202.

[20] Ibid., p. 202.

[21] Pingaud. La Jeunesse de Charles Nodier, p. 39. Cited in Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, p. 134.

[22] “Vambery’s Second Eastern Journey.” Retrieved from http://vambery.mtak.hu/en/03.htm

[23] John H. Moore. Encyclopedia of race and racism (Thomson Gale, Macmillan Publishers, 2008). p. 4.

[24] “GOBINEAU, Joseph Arthur de.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Retrieved from https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gobineau

[25] Martin Buber. “Moses Hess. Jewish Social Studies, 7:2 (1945), pp. 137–148.

[26] Stephen Jay Gould. The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 359.

[27] Ernest R. Trattner. Architects of Ideas: The Story of the World's Great Thinkers (New Home Library, 1942), p. 359.

[28] Margaret Crossland. Simone De Beauvoir: The Woman and Her Work (Arrow, 1992), p. 15.

[29] Robert Irwin. “Gobineau, the Would-Be Orientalist.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 26: 1/2 (2016), p.  321.

[30] Karl Koehne. “Untersuchungen über Vorläufer und Quellen der Rassen-theorie des Grafen Gobineau.” Archiv fur Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie, XVllI (1926), pp. 369-96; cited in Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 233.

[31] Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 232.

[32] D’Israeli. Coningsby (London 1844), pp. 182-3; cited in Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 232.

[33] Gregory Blue. “Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the ‘Yellow Peril’ and the Critique of Modernity.” Journal of World History, 10: 1 (1999), p. 100.

[34] Ibid., p. 101.

[35] Robert Irwin. “Gobineau, the Would-Be Orientalist.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 26: 1/2 (2016), p. 322–323.

[36] “GOBINEAU, Joseph Arthur de.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Retrieved from https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gobineau

[37] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 177.

[38] Pawel Maciejko. “Sabbatian Charlatans: the first Jewish cosmopolitans.” Revue européenne d’histoire, 17: 3 (June 2010), p. 367.

[39] Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 217.

[40] Blue. “Gobineau on China,” pp. 96–7.

[41] Ibid., p. 115.

[42] Ethel Celeste Johnston. Nietzsche and Wagner: Their Influence on National Socialism (Greensboro: Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, 1949).

[43] Lettres de J. Mazzini à D. Stern (1874) and Letters of the Countess d’Agoult a G. Mazzini (1927).

[44] Michal 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).

[45] “Pereira, Pereira-Arnstein, Henriette, Henrietta (Jette) (Judith) Freiin von, geb. von Arnstein.” Europäische Instrumentalistinnen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Sophie Drinker Institut. Retrieved from https://www.sophie-drinker-institut.de/pereira-henriette

[46] Nigel Cawthorne. The Mammoth Book of Sex Scandals (Little, Brown Book Group, 2012).

[47] “Schloss Scharfenberg.” Schloss Scharfenberg. Retrieved http://www.schloss-scharfenberg.de/

[48] “Richard Wagner – sein Leben und seine Werke” Retrieved from http://www.internetloge.de/arstzei/mswagn.htm

[49] Joachim Köhler. Richard Wagner (Yale University Press, 2004), p. 10.

[50] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[51] Deathridge. Wagner’s Rienzi: A Reappraisal Based on the Study of the Sketches and Drafts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), pp. 22–23; cited in Landes. Heaven on Earth, p. 357.

[52] Meyer. The Origins of the Modern Jew, pp. 133-137.

[53] “Hiller, Ferdinand.” Encyclopedia Judaica, Second Edition, Volume 9.

[54] “Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen (Weimar).”

[55] “Ferdinand Hiller.” Hyperion. Retrieved from https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/c.asp?c=C1251

[56] Linda Siegel. “Wagner and the Romanticism of E. T. A. Hoffmann.” The Musical Quarterly, 51: 4 (1965), p. 597.

[57] Katz. Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723-1939, p. 82.

[58] Köhler. Richard Wagner, p. 11.

[59] Ibid., p. 24.

[60] Carl Euler. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Sein Leben und Wirken (1881), p. 368, This and the following citations are from Jahn’s Deutsches Volksthum (1810). Cited in Ernest Newman. The Life of Richard Wagner. Volume Four: 1866 – 1883 (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 1961).

[61] le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, p. 693.

[62] Euler. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Sein Leben und Wirken, p. 368; Cited in Newman. The Life of Richard Wagner.

[63] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 105.

[64] Birgit Mikus. “Untangling the Heroic from the Sacrifice: Malwida von Meysenbug’s Attempt to Appropriate a Common Femal Topos in and for her Political Novel Phädra (1885).” In: Andreas Schlüter, Carolin Hauck, Monika Mommertz, Thomas Seedorf (eds.). Tracing the Heroic Through Gender (Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag, 2018), p. 26.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Hilde Spiel. Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment (trans.) Christine Shuttleworth (New York: New Vessel Press, 2013), p. 191

[67] David E. Cartwright. Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 232.

[68] Martin Dönike. Altertumskundliches Wissen in Weimar (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2013).

[69] Cartwright. Schopenhauer, p. 232.

[70] Cartwright. Schopenhauer.

[71] Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 193.

[72] Arthur Schopenhauer. Parerga und Paralipomena. “Zur Ethik,” § 115; cited in Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 248.

[73] John James Clarke. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1997), p. 68.

[74] David Conway. “‘A Vulture is Almost an Eagle’… The Jewishness of Richard Wagner.” Jewry in Music. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20121203090712/http://www.smerus.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/vulture_.htm; Robert W. Gutman. Richard Wagner: The Man, his Mind and his Music (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1990).

[75] Dorothy M. Figueira. Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity (State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 52.

[76] Ibid., p. 53.

[77] L. Jacolliot. La Bible dans l’Inde, Vie de Iezeus Christna, 4th Ed. (Paris 1873), p. 7; cited in Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 209.

[78] J. B. Hare. “Introduction.” in Louis Jacolliot. Occult Science in India (Evinity Publishing, 2009). Retrieved from https://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/osi/index.htm

[79] Jacolliot. La Bible dans l’Inde, pp. 64, 141; cited in Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 209.

[80] Twilight of the Idols, 7.3; cited in Figueira. Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, p. 54.

[81] Figueira. Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, p. 51.

[82] Frederich Nietzsche. Kritische Studienausgabe. G. Colli & M. Montinari (ed.) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), 11.702); cited in Figueira. Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, p. 58.

[83] Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966a), p. 261; cited in Figueira. Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, p. 58.

[84] Eugen Dühring. Die Judenfrage, 6th ed., p. 93; cited in Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 300.

[85] Christopher Nicholson. Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust? (Gefen Publishing House, 2007), p. 154.

[86] “Herzl – A Man of His Times.” Ruffle. Retrieved from http://www.herzl.org/english/Article.aspx?Item=515&Section=491

[87] L. Violinist. History of the Jews in Berlin, Volume 2, pp. 194–197.

[88] Figueira. Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, p. 74.

[89] Christopher Nicholson. Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust? (Gefen Publishing House, 2007), p. 154.

[90] Jacob Golomb. Nietzsche and Zion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 25.

[91] Benjamin Silver. “Twilight of the Anti-Semites.” Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2017). Retrieved from https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2397/twilight-of-the-anti-semites/#

[92] Jacob Golomb. “‘Thus Spoke Herzl’,” pp. 23–45.

[93] Steven E. Aschheim. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (University of California Press, 1992), p. 102.

[94] Kaufmann Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Divide & Conquer