11. Unknown Superiors

Zoharists

According to Karl H. Frick, the Masonic lodge founded in Florence in 1733, by Philipp von Stosch—a friend of Cardinal Albani who sponsored the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann—along with Charles Sackville, a member of the Society of Dilettanti, and a further unnamed Jew, was allegedly the source for some of the key documents and books that were used in the Golden and Rosy Cross, founded in 1747 or 1757 by Hermann Fictuld (1700 – c. 1777), as a revival of the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians organized by Samuel Richter.[1] Golden and Rosy Cross was closely associated with the Sabbatean Masonic order known as the Asiatic Brethren, which involved numerous followers of Moses Mendelssohn, and would go on to contribute to the founding of Frankfurt Judenloge, which through the influence of Edward-Bulwer Lytton, became the source of the Occult Revival of the eighteenth century and the influential Golden Dawn.

Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697 – 1776), a leading German rabbi and champion of Orthodox Judaism, and a fierce opponent of the Sabbateans, is well known as a protagonist in the Emden-Eybeschütz Controversy, a momentous incident in Jewish history of the period, that followed the accusations against Rabbi Eybeschütz.  Emden described a violent altercation that took place at his home with two defenders of the Sabbatean sect, one of them being named as Jacob Rothschild.[2] Rabbi Jacob Emden accused Samuel Jacob Falk, of being a Sabbatean, as he invited Moses David of Podhayce, a known Sabbatean with connections to Jonathan Eybeschütz (1690 – 1764), to his home.[3] Some Masons believed that Falk was the “Old Man of the Mountain,” the traditional name of the leader of the Ismaili Assassins.[4] From 1764 onward, Falk received the patronage of the wealthy Goldsmid brothers, from a family of Anglo-Jewish bankers, who also became Masons.[5]

The founder of the Frankists, Jacob Frank (1726 – 1791), a self-proclaimed successor of Zevi, rejected the Talmud in favor of Zohar. Frank claimed to come to rid the world of the Talmud and Jewish law, a law he regarded as oppressive. Frank claimed instead that the Redemption would be fulfilled through a reversal of the Torah, affirming that for the “Good Lord” to appear, it would be necessary to precipitate chaos.[6] As summarized by Abba Eban, Frank “taught a strange idea that God would not send a Messiah until the world had become as evil as it could possibly be. So, said Frank, it was his duty as a follower of Shabbetai Zevi to bring about a time of pure evil.”[7] Frank taught a doctrine of the “holiness of sin,” claiming that with the arrival of the messiah, everything was permitted. Among the more radical Frankists, explains Gershom Scholem, there developed a “veritable mythology of nihilism,” in which the new messianic dispensation “entailed a complete reversal of values, symbolized by the change of the thirty-six prohibitions of the Torah… into positive commands.”[8]

Despite their conversion to Christianity, the Frankists continued to be viewed with suspicion. Frank was arrested in Warsaw on February 6, 1760, and delivered to the Catholic Church’s tribunal. He was convicted of teaching heresy, and imprisoned in the monastery of Czestochowa, in southern Poland, which became home to the Frankist movement. The shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, with its miraculous “Black Madonna” icon of the Virgin Mary, was one of the most important centers of the Marian cult in the world and the most important religious site for all Roman Catholics in Poland. Frank appropriated Marian symbolism into his own teachings, equating the Black Madonna with the “Maiden”, the personification of the Shekinah, the divine feminine of the Kabbalah, who is identified in the Zohar with the female demon Lilith, the black harlot.[9] As summarized by Pawel Maciejko, “Frankism was not about a male God who took a human body upon himself through a human woman, but about a feminine goddess who acquired a human form.”[10]

Falk collaborated with a Frankist network in England, Holland, Poland, and Germany.[11] According to Glenn Dynner, it was possibly at this time that the Moravians and Rabbi Eybeschütz discovered their mutual interests.[12] Zinzendorf was so fascinated by Frank’s mission, that after thousands of Frankists converted to Catholicism in Poland, he sent missionaries among this Jewish followers who converted to Moravianism to meet with Frank’s disciples.[13] Zinzendorf then adopted the antinomianism of the Frankists by elaborating Kabbalistic sex rites into bizarre Christian teachings.[14]

Falk was one of the “Unknown Superiors” of the Rite of Strict Observance, which claimed to be a revival of the Templar Order, and which was founded in the 1760s by Karl Gotthelf, Baron Hund (1722 – 1776).[15] Baron von Hund (1722 – 1776), the founder of the Strict Observance, was a Counselor of State to Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis I, as well as Intimate Counselor of the husband of Maria Theresa’s first cousin, Augustus III of Poland, a patron of Johann Joachim Winckelmann who influenced the Dilettanti, and who was Jacob Frank’s godfather at his baptism.[16] It is even said that Maria Theresa and Francis’ eldest son Joseph II (1741 – 1790) had an affair with Eve.[17] It is also possible that Frank first met his patron Prince Wolfgang Ernst II of Isenburg-Birstein in Offenbach through Joseph II, to whom he served as an adjutant.[18]

In his famous article, “Redemption Through Sin,” Gershom Scholem explained, “Toward the end of Frank’s life the hopes he had entertained of abolishing all laws and conventions took on a very real historical significance.”[19] Concerned with the political activism of the Frankist sect, Frederick William III of Prussia instructed his chargé d’affaires in Frankfurt, Councillor Formey, to conduct an investigation in Offenbach who reported that “The Frankist sect is rumored to be in close contacts with the Freemasons, Illuminati, Rosicrucians, and Jacobins.”[20] As Frank’s own nephew, Moses Dobruschka, took part in the upheavals, as Scholem further noted, “as a result of the French Revolution the Sabbatian and Frankist subversion of the old morality and religion was suddenly placed in a new and relevant context, and perhaps not only in the abstract…”[21] Government officials who intercepted the communications among the Frankists led them to suspect that the many references to a man named “Jacob” were dealing with the Jacobins, who were intent on radicalizing the Jews of the ghetto.[22]

It is reputed that the ground plan for the French Revolution was discussed at the Grand Masonic Convention in 1782 at Wilhelmsbad, at which Comte de Mirabeau (1749 – 1791), leader of the revolutionary Jacobins, attended as an observer.[23] The congress was convoked by Wilhelm I of Hesse-Kassel (1743 – 1821), while his brother, Illuminatus and Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren, Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel (1744 – 1836) was main organizer.[24] Both Prince Charles and his brother William I were members of a family descended the “Alchemical Wedding” and from Maurice of Hesse-Kassel, the chief supporter of the Rosicrucian cause, and was linked closely to the Rothschilds. Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744 – 1812), the founder of the famous banking dynasty, built his fortune as banker to William I.[25] Among the topics discussed at Wilhelmsbad were the linkage between Jacob Frank and Samuel Jacob Falk.[26]

 

Illuminati 

Adam Weishaupt (1748 – 1830), who founded the Bavarian Illuminati in 1776, was referred to by his closest associate Adolph Freiherr Knigge (1752 – 1796) as “a Jesuit in disguise.”[27] Several authors of the time shared a conclusion that the Illuminati were the source of the French Revolution. In 1796, The Tomb of Jacques de Molay claimed that the French Revolution was the work of anarchists who traced their lineage back to the Templars and the Assassins. In 1797, the Abbé Augustin de Barruel (1741 – 1820), an ex-Jesuit who came to Britain following the September Massacre, published the first volumes of his four-volume account of the French Revolution, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, traced the survival of the Manichean heresy through the Cathars, the Assassins, the Templars, and the Freemasons and said it was responsible for the French Revolution. That same year, John Robison (1739 – 1805), professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, published his own history of the Revolution, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe. Like Robison, Barruel claimed that the French Revolution was the result of a deliberate conspiracy to subvert the power of the Catholic Church and the aristocracy, hatched by a coalition of philosophes, Freemasons and the Illuminati.

Weishaupt had decided to infiltrate the Freemasons to acquire material to expand his own ritual and establish a power base towards his long-term plan for political change in Europe. Weishaupt was persuaded by one of his early recruits, his former pupil Xavier von Zwack (1756 – 1843), that his own order should enter into friendly relations with Freemasonry, and obtain the dispensation to set up their own lodge. A warrant was obtained from the Grand Lodge of Prussia called the Royal York for Friendship, and the new lodge was called Theodore of the Good Counsel, which was quickly filled with Illuminati.[28] Lodge Theodore formed a particular system of its own, by instructions from the Martinist Loge des Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cité sainte (“Beneficent knight of the Holy City”) at Lyons, with which it was in correspondence.[29] Within the CBCS there was even a higher degree with the title Chevalier de la Cabale” (Knight of the Kabbalah”). Another degree, the Chevalier du soleil (“Knight of the Sun”), was also characterized as “Cabalistes” (“Kabbalistic”).[30]

After the suppression of Weishaupt’s order in 1787, the title illuminati was given to the French Martinists.[31] The Martinists, or French Illuminés, were founded by Martinez Pasqually (1727? – 1774) a Rose-Croix Mason who founded the Ordre des Chevalier Maçons Elus-Coën de L’Univers (Order of the Knight Masons, Elected Priests of the Universe) in 1754. Pasqually knew Kabbalah, and legend has it that he travelled to China to learn secret traditions.[32] Pasqually had frequently been described as a Jew. A Martinist named Baron de Gleichen (1733 – 1807) wrote that, “Pasqualis was originally Spanish, perhaps of the Jewish race, since his disciples inherited from him a large number of Jewish manuscripts.”[33] Gershom Scholem has called attention to the contacts between the Ordre de Elus-Coën and the Sabbateans.[34]

Martinism was later propagated in different forms by Pasqually’ two students, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743 – 1803) and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz (1730 – 1824), who was a member of the Rite of the Philalethes. Saint-Martin was interested in Swedenborg and was the first to translate the writings of Jakob Boehme from German into French. In the 1770s, Willermoz came into contact with Baron Hund, founder of the Strict Observance, which he joined in 1773. Willermoz was the formulator of the “Inner Order” of the Rectified Scottish Rite, or Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cité-Sainte (CBCS), founded in 1778 as a variant of the Rite of Strict Observance, including some items coming from the Elus-Coën of his teacher Pasqually. The order oversaw numerous lodges, including the Strict Observance and the Lodge Theodore of Good Counsel in Munich.[35]

 

Asiatic Brethren

The Grand Constitutions of 1786, which were issued in the name of Frederick II the Great of Prussia (1712 – 1786) as titular head of the rite, brought The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite into formal existence, enlarging the number of degrees to thirty-three, with the 33rd degree as a governing Supreme Council.[36] The signatories of the Grand Constitutions included Johann August Starck (1741 – 1816), and Johann Christoph von Wöllner, Frederick William II of Prussia’s Minister of Justice, who led the Golden and Rosy Cross, and was a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[37] Johann Christoph von Wöllner (1732 – 1800), a member of the Strict Observance, along with Johann Rudolf von Bischoffwerder (1741 – 1803), was chiefly responsible for inducting Frederick William II into the Golden and Rosy Cross. From 1766 to 1781, Wöllner worked as an employee of Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, founded by Moses Mendelssohn’s friend, the Illuminati publisher Friedrich Nicolai. Wöllner became a member of the Lodge Zur Eintracht in 1768. Bischoffwerder was also a friend of the son Rabbi Eybeschütz, Wolf Eybeschütz, who was an open follower of the Frankists.[38]

The Golden and Rosy Cross was founded in 1747 or 1757 in Berlin, as a revival of the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians organized by Samuel Richter (Sincerus Renatus), a Protestant pastor from Silesia, who reported in 1710 that “all Rosicrucians have left Europe and gone to India.”[39] It was Renatus’ Die wahrhafte und volkommene Bereitung des philosophischen Steins der Brüderschaft aus dem Orden des Gülden und Rosen Kreutzes, published in Breslau in 1710, which sparked off the renewal of interest in Rosicrucianism in the eighteenth century. Here, the Rosy Cross now became the Golden and Rosy Cross, demonstrating a new alchemical emphasis.[40] The Rosicrucian or alchemical theme is reflected in the badge of the order, which depicts Masonic objects encircled by an ouroboros, the ancient Gnostic symbol of the serpent biting its own tail.[41] Its members claimed that the leaders of the Rosicrucian Order had invented Freemasonry and only they knew the secret meaning of Masonic symbols. The Rosicrucian Order, they also claimed, had been founded by Egyptian named “Ormusse” or “Licht-Weise” who had emigrated to Scotland, with the name “Builders from the East.” Then the original Order disappeared and was supposed to have been resurrected by Oliver Cromwell as “Freemasonry.”[42]

Wöllner and von Bischoffwerder were also members of the Asiatic Brethren, founded by Moses Dobruschka (1753 – 1794), the cousin of Jacob Frank.[43] As Franz Thomas von Schoenfeld, Dobruschka entered into Austrian Freemasonry and became involved with Hans Heinrich von Ecker und Eckhoffen (1750 – 1790 who had been a leader of the Golden and Rosy Cross. Having been expelled in 1780 from the order, Eckhoffen created the Ritter des Lichts (“Knights of Light”) or Fratres Lucis (“Brothers of Light”), later reorganized in 1781 as the Asiatic Brethren.[44]  The full name of the order was the Knights and Brethren of St. John the Evangelist of Asia in Europe. The Asiatic Brethren’s meetings were called Melchizedek lodges, and unlike other Masonic orders, they allowed Jews to join, as well as Turks, Persians and Armenians. The Asiatic Brethren were influenced by the ideas of St. Martin, whom Ecker and Schoenfeld had met, and according to Gershom Scholem, mixed Kabbalistic and Sabbatean ideas with Christian theosophical ones.[45]

Ecker und Eckhoffen was Chancellor of the Order of Saint Joachim, founded in 1755. A member of the Illuminati who was also a founding member of the Order of Saint Joachim was Leopold Reichsgraf von Kollowrat-Krakowsky (1727 – 1809), who was also the Commander of the Priory of Bohemia for the Sovereign Order of Malta. In his 1883 work, A Historical Inquiry In Regard To The Grand Constitutions Of 1786, Albert Pike stated that the disbanded Illuminati continued on through the various branches of the Rosicrucian Order, including the later versions of the Gold Rosicrucians, namely, the Asiatic Brethren, and the various Orders of Light, specifically mentioning “The Order of Saint Joachim (St. Jonathan).”[46]

According to Franz J. Molitor (1779 – 1860) member of the order, the Jewish initiates drew on the theurgic traditions of “Shabbetai Zevi, Falk, Frank, and their similar fellows.”[47] By 1785 the Asiatic Brethren had spread far beyond Vienna, mostly in central Europe and Germany, as well as Prague, Innsbruck, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and could possibly have counted as many as several thousand members at the time. Quite a number were aristocrats or high-ranking dignitaries, including Duke of Liechtenstein, Count Joseph von Thun, a Minister of Justice in Austria, Prince Joseph von Linden, Prince Otto von Gemmingen and Count Joachim von Thurn und Taxis.[48] The Asiatic Brethren also composed a Sanhedrin, over which presided the Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick (1721 – 1792), who was also Grand Master of the Strict Observance.[49]

Moses’s sister Schoendl was a friend Wolf Eybeschütz, who stayed in her home in 1761 where he was reputed to have worked miracles.[50] According to Pawel Maciejko, along with Jacob Frank, Wolf is “one of the two most important Sabbatian leaders in mid-eighteenth century East-Central Europe.”[51] Wolf Eybeschütz was also associated with Count Joseph Carl Emmanuel Waldstein, the patron of the notorious “womanizer,” Giacomo Casanova (1725 – 1798).[52] Hans-Josef Irmen suspected that the composer Mozart (1756 – 1791) may have been a member of the Frankist secret society, the Asiatic Brethren.[53] Mozart was also a close friend of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734 – 1815), a German Freemason and physician and associate of Count Cagliostro, who became widely popular for artificially inducing trance-like states, today known as hypnotism.

 

Frankfurt Judenloge 

Moses Mendelssohn was the central figure in the development of the Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Gershom Scholem, the twentieth century’s leading authority on the Kabbalah, as summarized by Elisheva Carlebach, “Sabbateanism is the matrix of every significant movement to have emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, from Hasidism, to Reform Judaism, to the earliest Masonic circles and revolutionary idealism.”[54] The Haskalah led by Mendelssohn inspired a reinterpretation of Jewish orthodoxy by contributing to the emergence of the Reform and the Conservative Jewish movements. Reflecting the Frankist rejection of the Torah, according to Reform Judaism, almost everything connected with traditional Jewish ritual law and custom is of the ancient past, and thus no longer appropriate for Jews to follow in the modern era.

Reform Judaism was closely associated with the order of the Asiatic Brethren. According to G. van Rijnberk, based on archives of the family, Prince Charles Hesse-Kassel, who became a Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren, first introduced the Buddhist symbol of the swastika into the Asiatic Brethren—to represent the doctrine of reincarnation, as it was similar to a belief called Gilgul in the Kabbalah—alongside the Star of David, the Sabbatean symbol in the Order, introduced by its founder Moses Dobruschka.[55] A friend of Molitor, Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld (1755 – 1820), a Frankist and activist in Mendelssohn’s circle, and Moses Dobruschka, the founder of the Asiatic Brethren, met with Louis Claude de Saint Martin in 1793.[56] In 1784, Ecker und Eckhoffen took up residence in Vienna and he and Hirschfeld reorganized the Asiatic Brethren. Hirschfeld wrote of the Masonic Magic Flute by “the immortal Mozart,” a suspected member of the Asiatic Brethren, that it “will remain in all eternity: the canticum canticorum or the Sanctum sanctorum.”[57] Hegel was introduced to the ideas of the Lurianic Kabbalah via the theosophist Jacob Boehme through his reading of Illuminati member Franz von Baader (1765 – 1841), who was also influenced Franz Joseph Molitor of the Asiatic Brethren. Hegel was also influenced by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 – 1782), a follower of Boehme, who was in contact with Kabbalists who introduced him to Knorr von Rosenroth’s Cabala Denudata and the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. This knowledge helped him attempt a synthesis of Boehme and Kabbalah.[58] In 1730, Oetinger visited the Moravian Brethren and their founder Count Zinzendorf, and remaining there some months as teacher of Hebrew and Greek.[59] Oetinger was also in contact with Hermann Fictuld, one of the leaders of the Golden and Rosy Cross.[60]

Molitor became the Grand Master of the Frankfurt Judenloge. Rothschild banking house’s head clerk, Illuminati member Siegmund Geisenheimer (1775 – 1828), aided by Isaac Daniel Itzig (1723 – 1799), a court Jew of Kings Frederick II and Frederick William II of Prussia, founded the Masonic Judenloge in Frankfurt in 1807, which became the headquarters of leaders of the early Jewish Reform movement.[61] Itzig’s son-in-law was David Friedländer (1750 – 1834), Moses Mendelssohn’s favorite disciple, who kept close contacts with Mendelssohn and the circle of the Haskalah, and shared his emancipatory ambitions. The lodge was chartered as the Loge zur aufgehenden Morgenrothe (“Lodge of St. John of the Rising Dawn”). The Judenloge admitted both Jews and Gentiles, raising the Jewish members up to the degree of Master Mason, while the Christian members were permitted to progress through the “higher degrees” of the Scottish Rite, which barred Jewish members due to their Christian basis.[62] Jacob Katz and Paul Arnsberg have shown that its members included almost all the leading families of the old Jewish community in Frankfurt, such as the Hanau, Goldschmidt, and Rothschild families.[63] Salomon Mayer Rothschild, the third son of Amschel Mayer, and the founder of the Austrian branch of the dynasty, joined the lodge for a short time.[64]

Despite the stipulation that the office of “Grand Master of the Chair” be reserved for Christians, a Jew, Carl Leopold Goldschmidt (1787 – 1858), of the influential Goldschmidt family of bankers and merchants, was elected to it. Prince Charles then withdrew his authorization and ordered the lodge to disband. Goldschmidt succeeded in communicating with the Mother Lodge of London. On May 22, 1817, he reported having received a letter of authorization signed by August Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773 – 1843)—the sixth son of King George III of England, another descendant of the Alchemical Wedding, and godson of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel—which empowered the Frankfurt Judenloge to operate as a Masonic lodge without any restriction.[65] Another of August Frederick’s godparents was Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1745 – 1804), an Illuminatus and protector of Weishaupt, and the great-grandfather of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.[66] August Frederick’s uncle, Prince Edward, Duke of York and Albany, who was initiated into the Grand Lodge of Prussia called the Royal York for Friendship.[67]

The Duke of Sussex had spent his youth wandering around Europe, meeting Sir William Hamilton in Naples and attending Göttingen University, where he began a lifelong interest in Hebrew and biblical studies.[68] In 1813, the Duke of Sussex became Grand Master of the Premier Grand Lodge of England, and later that year his brother, Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, became Grand Master of the Antient Grand Lodge of England. Laurence Dermott (1720 –1791), who in 1751 founded the Ancient Grand Lodge of England, now called the “Antients,” as a rival Grand Lodge to the Premier Grand Lodge of England, called the “Moderns,” took the coat of arms designed by Rabbi Templo, which featured two winged cherubim from the Ark of the Covenant, as the basis for the coat of arms of the Antients. When the two Grand Lodges were merged in at Freemasons’ Hall, London, in 1813, to form the current United Grand Lodge, with the Duke of Sussex as Grand Master, the same design was incorporated as its coat of arms.[69] Between 1830 and 1838, the Duke of Sussex was president of the Royal Society. His large personal library contained over 50,000, including a thousand editions of the Bible, and many valuable Hebrew manuscripts.[70] The two of Goldsmid brothers, who were patrons of Rabbi Jacob Falk, became intimates of the Duke of Sussex.[71] Escorted by Abraham Goldsmid, the Duke of Sussex and the other royal dukes visited the Great Synagogue of London in 1809.[72]

The Jewish Reform movement, that began in Hamburg, was inspired by the activities of Israel Jacobson (1768 – 1828), a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde inspired by Moses Mendelssohn. Jacobson married into the Samson family, through whom he became friends with Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick (1735 – 1806), a favorite nephew of Frederick the Great and nephew of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, Grand Master of the Strict Observance, and member of the Illuminati and Asiatic Brethren.[73] While the Jewish reform movement emerged in the nineteenth century, its beginnings lay really through the secular schools that began to be founded among the Jews in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.[74] The first of these schools was the Jewish Free School of Berlin, founded in I778 by David Friedländer and Daniel Itzig. The first permanent Reform synagogue was the Hamburg Temple in Germany, where the New Israelite Temple Society (Neuer Israelitischer Tempelverein) was founded in 1817, founded by Israel Jacobson. In 1844, Moses’s grandson Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847) wrote a cantata based upon Psalm 100 for the dedication service.

 


[1] Licht und Finstemis. Second Edition (1978). Cited in Milko Bogard. Of Memphis and of Misraim: The Oriental Slicing of the Winged Sun, Version 1.6 (2018).

[2] Novak. Jacob Frank.

[3] Karl-Erich Grözinger & Joseph Dan. Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991).

[4] Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Falk, Samuel Jacob.” In Wouter J. Hanegraaff ed. Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2006). p. 357.

[5] Ibid., p. 216.

[6] Charles Novak. Jacob Frank, Le Faux Messie: Déviance de la kabbale ou théorie du complot (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012)., p. 47.

[7] Abba Eban. My People: Abba Eban’s History of the Jews. Volume II (New York, Behrman House, 1979), p. 29.

[8] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 272-74.

[9] Zohar, III: 69a. Cited in Schwartz. Lilith’s Cave, p. 19 n. 12.

[10] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 176.

[11] Keith Schuchard. “Why Mrs. Blake Cried.”

[12] Glenn Dynner. Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press, 2011).

[13] Erich Beyreuther. “Zinzendorf und das Judentum,” Judaica, l9 (l963), pp. l93-246; Markus Schoop. “Zum Gespräch Zinzendorfs mit Israel,” Reformatio, 16 (l967), p. 240; Cited in Keith Schuschard, “Why Mrs Blake Cried.”

[14] Raphael Patai. The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Ktav, l967), pp. 101-03, 120-22.

[15] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements.

[16] Picknett & Prince. The Sion Revelation, p. 319.

[17] Pawel Maciejko. “Sabbatian Charlatans: the first Jewish cosmopolitans.” European Review of History—Revue européenne d’histoire, Vol. 17, No. 3 (June 2010), p. 367.

[18] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 233.

[19] Gershom Scholem. The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schocken Books, 1971).

[20] Pawel Maciejko. The mixed multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist movement, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, p. 242.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Howard. Secret Societies, pp. 73-74.

[24] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[25] Amos Elon. Founder: Meyer Amschel Rothschild and His Time (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 65.

[26] C. Porset. Philalethes, p. 502; cited in Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 220.

[27] “Illuminati.” Catholic Encyclopedia.

[28] René le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, Book 3 (Paris, 1914), pp. 193–201.

[29] John Robison. Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798).

[30] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 277.

[31] Editors. “illuminati.” Encyclopedia Britannica (March 13, 2025). Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/illuminati-group-designation.

[32] Edmund Mazet. “Freemasonry and Esotericism,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality. ed. A. Faivre (New York: Crossroad, 1993), p. 256; cited in Hugh Urban, “Elitism and Esotericism: Strategies of Secrecy and Power in South Indian Tantra and French Freemasonry.” Numen, 44 (1997), p. 34 n. 22.

[33] Souvenirs du Baron de Gleichen, p. 151, cited from Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 169.

[34] Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration,” p. 312

[35] John Robison. Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798).

[36] “History of the Rite.” Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry of Canada. Retrieved from https://scottishritecanada.ca/about-us/history/

[37] R.S. Lindsay. The Scottish Rite for Scottland (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1958), p. 5.

[38] Pawel Maciejko. “Sabbatian Charlatans: the first Jewish cosmopolitans.” European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’histoire, Vol. 17, No. 3 (June 2010), p. 362.

[39] Cited in Jeff Bach. Voices in the Wilderness: The Sacred World of Ephrata (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2003), p. 188.

[40] Christopher Mcintosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (SUNY Press, 2012), p. 30.

[41] Ibid., p. 66.

[42] Eugen Lennhoff & Oskar Posner. “Rosenkreuzer.” Internationales Freimaurerlexikon.

[43] Mcintosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, p. 163; Katz. Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723-1939.

[44] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 121.

[45] Mcintosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, p. 168; Katz. Jews and Freemasonry in Europe 1723-1939.

[46] A Historical Inquiry In Regard To The Grand Constitutions Of 1786 (1883).

[47] Franz Joseph Molitor, cited in Gershom Scholem. Du Frankisme au Jacobisme (Paris: Le Seul Gallimard, 1981) p. 39.

[48] Katz. Jews and Freemasonry, cited in McIntosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, p. 166; Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 117.

[49] Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 121.

[50] “Dobruschka-Schoenfeld.” Encyclopaedia Judaica (January 8, 2025). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/dobruschka-schoenfeld

[51] Pawel Maciejko. “Sabbatian Charlatans: the first Jewish cosmopolitans.” European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’histoire, Vol. 17, No. 3 (June 2010), p. 362.

[52] Maciejko. “A Portrait of the Kabbalist as a Young Man,” pp. 521-576.

[53] M.F.M. Van Den Berk. The Magic Flute (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 507.

[54] Elisheva Carlebach. The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 15.

[55] G. van Rijnberk. Épisodes de la vie ésotérique, 1780-1824 : Extraits de la correspondance inédite de J. B. Willermoz, du prince Charles de Hesse-Cassel et de quelques-uns de leurs contemporains (Lyon: Derain, 1948); Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 61.

[56] Katz. Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723-1939, p. 53.

[57] M.F.M. Van Den Berk. The Magic Flute (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 507.

[58] Glenn Alexander Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornel: Cornell University Press, July 2001), p. 65.

[59] Ernst Benz. Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy, (Eugene, Oregon: Prickwick Publications, 1983) p. 29.

[60] Christopher Mcintosh. The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Occult Order, 2nd rev. ed (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1987), pp. 47.

[61] Rabbi Marvin Antelman. To Eliminate the Opiate, vol. 1 (Zionist Book Club, 2004).

[62] Jacob Katz. Emancipation and Assimilation (Westmead, 1972) p. 61.

[63] Jean-Philippe Schreiber. “Jews and Freemasonry in the nineteenth century: An overview of current knowledge.” Archives Juives, 43: 2 (2010), pp. 33.

[64] Antelman. To Eliminate the Opiate, vol. 1.

[65] Katz. Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723-1939, p. 69.

[66] Vernon Stauffer. New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (Columbia University, 1918).

[67] McIntosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, p. 43.

[68] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 79.

[69] Leon Zeldis. “Leon Templo: Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon.” Masonic Papers (Pietre Stones Review of Freemasonry). Retrieved from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/zeldis22.html

[70] Paul H. Emden. “The Brothers Goldsmid and the Financing of the Napoleonic Wars.” Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England) 14 (1935), p. 237.

[71] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 95.

[72] Emden. “The Brothers Goldsmid and the Financing of the Napoleonic Wars,” p. 237.

[73] Jacob Rader Marcus. Israel Jacobson: The Founder of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Hebrew Union College Press, 1972), p. 17.

[74] David Philipson. “The Beginnings of the Reform Movement in Judaism.” The Jewish Quarterly Review,  Vol. 15, No. 3 (Apr., 1903), p. 485.

Divide & Conquer