5. Brit Shalom

Cosmic Circle 

In 1909, Paul Desjardins, the synarchist who founded the l’Union pour l’Action Morale, to which belonged the founding members of the Action Française, purchased Pontigny Abbey—one of the four daughter houses of Cîteaux Abbey, along with Morimond, La Ferté and Clairvaux—founded in 1114 by Hugh of Mâcon, who later joined his friend St. Bernard of Clairvaux the patron of the Templars, at the Council of Troyes in 1128 to officially approve and endorse the Templars on behalf of the Church. At Pontigny, Desjardins held meetings there every year, known as Décades de Pontigny (“Decades of Pontigny”), from 1910 to 1914 and then from 1922 to the start of the World War II in 1939. The intellectual elite of Europe who participated included Paul Valéry, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Nikolai Berdyaev, Raymond Aron, H.G. Wells, Denis de Rougemont and the Zionist philosopher Martin Buber.[1] Several of these personalities would intersect with members of the Thule Society, Wagner’s Bayreuther Kreis, the Cosmic Circle, the George-Kreis and the famous Eranos Conferences, which linked to the World Congress of Faiths, which was founded to succeed the Parliament of the World’s Religions of 1893, and would play a central role in the emerging Interfaith Movement.

Although these various personalities operated in society without openly identifying themselves as Jewish, they can be confidently characterized as Frankists through the circumstantial evidence of their persistently close connections amongst themselves, participation occult secret societies, most often Theosophy, and involvement in subversive political and cultural activities. Another common element is anti-Semitism. As Abraham Duker summarized:

 

The Frankists were also united by less positive aspects, namely dislike of the Jews who forced them into conversion and thus cut them off from their near and dear ones as well as hatred of the Catholic clergy which had its share in this drastic step… The task of raising a new generation under such condition of double Marranoism was indeed a difficult one and required much cooperation and close-mouthedness. Kinship and the close social relations have made Frankism to a large extent a family religion, that has continually been strengthened by marriage and by economic ties through concentration in certain occupations.[2]

 

As explained by Bernard Susser, “The George-Kreis, frequently cited as one of the nurseries of National Socialist ideology, also produced, alongside its gallery of Nazi supporters and sympathizers, men of very different political persuasions.”[3] Susser adds:

 

Nowhere was this multivalence, and the odd bedfellows it was capable of creating, more strikingly in evidence than when the Nazis cited Buber in support of their racial theories.[4]

 

Martin Buber (1878 – 1965) was an Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher, who despite his dedication to Zionism, was heavily influenced by the völkisch ideology.[5] Buber was a direct descendant of the sixteenth-century rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, known as the Maharam of Padua. Karl Marx is another notable relative. In 1898, he joined the Zionist movement, and in 1902 became the editor of its central organ, the weekly Die Welt. In that year, he published his thesis, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Individuationsproblems, on Jakob Boehme and Nicholas of Cusa. Buber also wrote Tales of the Hasidim, based on the written and oral lore of the founder of Hasidism, Baal Shem Tov. Buber also wrote The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, contrasting Hasidism with biblical prophecy, Spinoza, Freud, Sankara, Meister Eckhart, Gnosticism, Christianity, Zionism, and Zen Buddhism. He maintained close friendships to Zionists and philosophers such as Chaim Weizmann, Max Brod, Hugo Bergman, and Felix Weltsch.

Max Bodenheimer, who had travelled with his close David Wolffsohn with Herzl to the Middle East in 1898 to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm II in Mikveh Israel, to discuss a proposition for Jewish settlement in Palestine, had formed the original leadership of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD), founded in 1897 in Cologne, with Franz Oppenheimer, whose father served for many years as a preacher and teacher at the Jewish Reform temple of the Berlin.[6] During World War I, Bodenheimer and Oppenheimer, along with several other Zionists, travelled to the Eastern Front, where they were received by General Ludendorff (1865 – 1937), a member of the Thule Society member,[7] and later also by Field-Marshal von Hindenburg. Already in the late autumn of 1914, Ludendorff, in his capacity as general Chief of Staff of the Eastern Command of the Imperial Armies, issued an appeal in the Yiddish language “to my dear Jews in Poland.”[8] Bodenheimer wrote about the meeting that Ludendorff:

 

…showed lively interest in our endeavors. He welcomed our intention to inform the Jewish population of the political situation and of the prospect of an improvement in their position in the case of the axis powers achieving victory. To him we proposed sending our trustworthy men into the occupied territory so that understanding between the military and the Jews would be facilitated.[9]

 

Franz’s sister Paula married member Richard Dehmel (1863 – 1920), considered one of the foremost German poets of the pre-World War I era. Dehmel was the first love of Hedwig Lachmann, whose libretto, a German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde, was used for Salome by Richard Strauss, who collaborated with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a member Young Vienna and the George-Kreis. Dehmel Richard suggested they live in a “threesome” with his wife Paula. Dehmel did eventually live a threesome with Paula and Ida Auerbach, who had formerly been engaged to his rival Stefan George.[10] George was very close to Ida Auerbach, who was born in Bingen into a prosperous well established Jewish family. Hedwig married Gustav Landauer (1870 – 1919), one of the leading theorists on anarchism in Germany.[11] Landauer’s closest friends included Martin Buber, Margarete Sussman, Fritz Mauthner and  Auguste Hauschner.[12] Fritz Mauthner (1849 – 1923) related in his memoirs, his maternal grandfather was a military officer in the sect of Jacob Frank.[13] Though mainly forgotten, Mauthner’s influence can be found in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.[14] The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who took several of his ideas from Mauthner, acknowledges him in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck would write an entire book about Richard Dehmel published in 1900.[15]  In 1894, Dehmel had co-founded Pan magazine. Contributors included Hermann Hesse, Gustav Meyrink, Fanny zu Reventlow, Jakob Wassermann, Frank Wedekind, Heinrich Kley, Alfred Kubin, Otto Nückel, Robert Walser, Heinrich Zille, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Heinrich Mann, Lessie Sachs, and Erich Kästner. Frank Wedekind (1864 – 1918) belonged to the Wedekind family from Horst, which included suspected Illuminatus Georg Christian Gottlieb Wedekind.[16] Friedrich Eckstein, a friend of Freud, founder of the Theosophical lodge in Vienna and member of the Pernerstorfer Circle,  corresponded with Golden Dawn member Gustav Meyrink (1868 – 1932), founder of the Blue Star theosophical lodge at Prague in 1891, who later achieved renown as an occult novelist. From 1907 to 1914, following E.T.A Hoffmann and Achim von Arnim, Meyrink wrote The Golem, about the Prague legends of Rabbi Loew, and which contains references to Kabbalah, Theosophy, Tarot and alchemy, and the legend of a huge treasure buried by the “Order of Asiatic Brethren.”

In 1910, Dehmel’s Pan was revived by Berlin gallery owner and art dealer Paul Cassirer (1871 – 1926), under whose leadership the magazine printed stories and poems, in the emerging Symbolist and Naturalist movements, and also played an important role in the development of German Art Nouveau. Pan went on to publish contributors like Wedekind, Georg Heym, Ernst Barlach and Franz Marc. Cassirer was the first to exhibit Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin in Germany, and he championed the work of the Impressionists’ German counterparts, like painter Max Liebermann. The group, along with Barlach, Kandinsky, and Max Beckmann eventually made up the core of the avant-garde formation, the Berlin Secession, an art movement established in 1898, who rejected traditional art styles then advanced by both academia and officials, and created the foundation of Modernism.[17]

Reventlow also had a relationship with German-Jewish poet German Karl Wolfskehl (1869 – 1948), met with Herzl  and after reading Der Judenstaat established a Munich chapter of the Zionist movement in 1897.[18] The First Zionist Congress was originally planned in Munich, but because of the vocal opposition by both the Orthodox and Reform communities, it was transferred to Basel instead.[19] Wolfskehl’s friends and associates included Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber.[20] Wolfskehl’s collected poems, first published in 1903, contain a cycle An den alten Wassern (“By the Old Waters”), which both begins and ends with a psalm.  The cycle, Wolfskehl explained, was a direct rendering of the Zionist idea into poetic language.[21]

Wolfskehl was a member of the Cosmic Circle, a group he helped found with occultist Alfred Schuler (1865 – 1923) and philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872 – 1956). In 1899, Schuler sent a reverential letter to Papus, the temporary Parisian “Delegate of Adyar” and founder of the Ordre Martiniste. Schuler received occult study documents from Papus, which he regarded as “secret writings.”[22] The contents of the study documents, the so-called Grüne Hefte (“Green Notebooks”), in Schuler’s possession were a hodgepodge of occultism with a strong theosophical bent. They included excerpts from The Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky, an astrological table, letters on Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, a spell probably written by Schuler, a Gnostic treatise, an Old Norse runic song, and excerpts from Papus’ Traité élementaire sur la Magie pratique (“Elementary treatise on practical magic”). Éliphas Levi, Franz Hartmann, and the occult historian Carl Kiesewetter (1854 – 1895), who was interested in Theosophy and alchemy, are mentioned by name.[23] The latter two belonged to the founding members of the German Theosophical Society and to the circle of authors of The Sphinx, founded by Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, the first German Theosophical Society (GTS).[24]

Jewish professor Friedrich Gundolf (1880 – 1931) had been a member of the George-Kreis since 1899, and subsequently became George’s closest friend and lover.[25] The Swastika also appears prominently on designs of books from the George-Kreis designed by George’s collaborator, the Theosophist Melchior Lechter (1865 – 1937). In April 1903, a greeting card was sent to Lechter from Munich, signed by “Stefan,” Gundolf, Mr. and Mrs. Wolfskehl, Klages and Schuler, signed with the symbol of a swastika. The card referred to the “Devachanic Plane,” which according to Theosophical teachings is a plane of being above the “physical” and “astral” planes. The card stated:

 

THE MUNICH ROSICRUCIANS/SEND THEIR GREETINGS TO THE BROTHER ON THE DEVACHAN/GREETINGS.[26]

 

In October 1910, Melchior Lechter made a trip to India, together with Wolfskehl. Both had already become members of the Theosophical Society. They paid no less than five visits to Adyar, had a private meeting with Annie Besant, accompanied her and her followers on walks, listened to lectures, and met the young Krishnamurti.[27] Lechter was part of an atelier community that included Franz Evers, Moeller van den Bruck and Fidus.[28] Dehmel frequented the café Das schwarze Ferkel, as did Franz Evers (1871 – 1947), and pianist and composer Conrad Ansorge, August Strindberg and Moeller van den Bruck.[29] Evers shared a studio with another theosophist, the artist Fidus (1868 – 1948), who illustrated his Hohe Lieder and Prana of the Guido von List Society.[30] By 1900, Fidus was one of the best known painters in Germany, and had come under the influence of writers such as van den Bruck, and the Wandervogel movements. In 1908, Fidus joined the Germanic Faith Community, a religious group led by the painter Ludwig Fahrenkrog (1867 – 1952), which adopted Germanic neopaganism.[31]

Moeller van den Bruck, together with Adolf Bartels, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Henry Thode and Hermann Hendrich, was one of the founders of the völkisch Werdandi-Bundes. Ludwig Schemann (1852 – 1938), a member of both the Bayreuther Kreis was involved with other race ideologists such as the anthropologist Otto Ammon and the writer Thule Society founder Theodor Fritsch in the Pan-German League.[32] Schemann, who was close to Cosima Wagner and was inspired by her to found the Gobineau Vereinigung (“Gobineau Society”), translated Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races into German between 1893 and 1902, and “did a great deal to bring Gobineau’s term ‘Aryan’ into vogue amongst German racists.”[33] After World War One, Adolf Bartels (1862 – 1945) and his followers formed the Bartelsbund (“Bartels Society”) to promote his ideas, and which would later merged with the Tannenbergbund (“Tannenberg Union”), founded by Thule Society member Erich Ludendorff and his wife Mathilde von Kemnitz.[34] Ludendorff was introduced to Hitler by Max von Oppenheim’s aide and fellow Afbau member Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who took part in the Niedermayer–Hentig Expedition to Afghanistan in 1914, and later participated in the failed Kapp Putsch of 1920 which necessitated his fleeing to Munich, where he became a member of the Nazi Party.[35]

 

Forte Kreis 

Oppenheimer, Landauer and Buber, along with the German Jewish mystical thinker Erich Gutkind (1877 – 1965), the Dutch writer and psychologist Frederik van Eeden (1860 – 1932), Walter Rathenau (1867 – 1922), were members of the Forte Kreis (“Forte Circle), formed in June 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. During World War I, Rathenau, who was one of Germany’s leading industrialists in the late German Empire, played a key role in the organization of the German war economy, and would become an influential figure in the politics of the Weimar Republic. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, after 1880, the Gesellschaft der Freunde (“Society of Friends”)—founded by leading members of the Haskalah, around Moses Mendelssohn—became an organization where leading Jewish bankers, entrepreneurs, merchants, and managers met, including the Mendelssohns, Liebermanns, Ullsteins, Mosses, Rathenaus, and Bleichroeders.[36]

Rathenau was an early proponent of the concept of the “United States of Europe.” Rathenau had become close friends with the businessman Bernhard Dernburg, who was appointed Germany’s first colonial secretary in May 1907. Dernburg, in close cooperation with Berlin’s Ambassador Count Johann, would later assume control of the German Information Bureau on Broadway, which fronted for a secretive Propaganda Kabinett that counted George Sylvester Viereck, Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg, and Hanns Heinz Ewers, who were all intimately acquainted with Aleister Crowley.[37] Correspondence between Ewers and Otto Kahn showed Kahn to have been one of Ewers’ longtime backers.[38] This was despite the fact that Ewers was also an associate of Ariosophists Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels.[39] Students of the occult are also attracted to his works, due to his longtime friendship and correspondence with Aleister Crowley.[40]

The ultimate aim of the Forte Kreis, explained Marcel Poorthuis, which “was to establish a new mankind, was a tributary to Nietzsche as well as to theosophy and the esoteric.”[41] A well-known intellectual, Eeden maintained friendships with Freud and Peter Kropotkin, and corresponded with Hermann Hesse. Eeden, together with Gutkind,  had written Welt-Eroberung durch Helden-Liebe (“World Conquest Through Heroic Love”), to serve as the blueprint of the commune to be founded for the “Kingly of Spirit.” The group first met in Potsdam, outside of Berlin, and came to be known as the Forte Kreis, because of a planned follow-up meeting in Capri, at the Forte dei Marmi. This Blut-Bund (“Blood Brotherhood”) included the Theosophist Wassily Kandinsky, Upton Sinclair, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Poul Bjerre, who fell in love with Freud’s student and friend of Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé.[42] The program of their first meeting included discussions about the future of Europe, the role of women or the metaphysical encounter between the Germanic and Jewish races.[43]

The Forte Kreis, which also believed in bridging “East and West” included Sun Yat-sen (1866 – 1925), founder of the Kuomintang (KMT), and the Bengali writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941).[44] A Freemason, leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a close friend of Gandhi, Rabindranath was the son of Debendranath Tagore, and brother of Dvijendranath Tagore, a vice-president of the Bengal Theosophical Society.[45] In 1910, Tagore was invited to give the Keshub Chandra Sen anniversary address. This was the first time since 1866 that the schism between Roy’s Brahmo Samaj and Keshu’s breakaway movement was settled. In 1911, Tagore took over the leadership of the Brahmo Samaj. Tagore was particularly influenced by Keshub’s universalism. In “The Service of Brahmo Samaj,” an essay he wrote in May 1911, Tagore wrote that the problem of Europe “is egocentric nationalism, a disease to be cured only by a universal ideal of humanity.” It was the “key role of the Brahmo Samaj to help in saving the world from the ‘madness of nationalism.’”[46] Tagore was among those who met with Bahaullah in America 1911, during this Journeys to the West.[47] While on a trip to London, Tagore shared his poems with admirers, including Golden Dawn member William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats was so impressed that he apparently remarked, “if someone were to say he could improve this piece of writing, that person did not understand literature.”[48] In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize in any category, and also the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Nitish Sengupta stated that the Bengal Renaissance “can be said to have… ended with Rabindranath Tagore.”[49]

 

Anti-Bolshevik League 

Franz Oppenheimer collaborated with Friedrich Naumann (1860 – 1919), a friend of the sociologist Max Weber (1864 – 1920), and a supporter of the Anti-Bolshevik League of Eduard Stadtler (1886 – 1945).[50] Under the guidance Naumann, Ernst Jäckh (1875 – 1959) was a key organizer of the liberal movement in Germany during the early years of the twentieth century.[51] After the retirement Max von Oppenheim from the Foreign Ministry in 1909, his place as the kaiser’s chief adviser on Islam and the Middle East was taken by Jäckh, a strong enthusiast for the Ottoman regime and the Young Turks in particular.[52] While Naumann is not considered a forerunner of the Nazis’ antisemitism, historian Götz Aly accuses him of having “combined social, imperial, and national thought into a cohesive intellectual current that could eventually blend with the NSDAP’s mindset.”[53] The circle around Stadtler and Heinrich von Gleichen (1882 – 1959) operated a magazine called Das Gewissen (“The Conscience”), which included George-Kreis member Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who would go on to become a major figure in the German Conservative Revolution and coin the term “Third Reich.”[54] Gleichen played a leading role in the Kulturbund, founded in 1915 and supported by the Reich government, which included, among others, Max Planck, Walter Rathenau and Max Liebermann of the Berlin Secession movement of artists associated with Dehmel’s Pan magazine.[55]

The Anti-Bolshevik League, founded in 1918 by Stadtler, had begun advocating the creation of a “national socialist” dictatorship.[56] The Anti-Bolshevik League was funded by the Anti-Bolshevik Fund, created on January 10, 1919, at a meeting of around fifty leading representatives of the German industry, commerce and banking, many of them members of  the Gesellschaft der Freunde. Among the participants were industry association head Hugo Stinnes, Albert Vögler, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, Otto Henrich of Siemens-Schuckert-Werke, Ernst von Borsig, Felix Deutsch from AEG, Arthur Salomonsohn from Disconto-Society.[57] Felix Deutsch (1858 – 1928) was a German-Jewish businessman and industrial manager who is considered a co-founder of AEG, one of the world’s largest electrical companies. Arthur Salomonsohn (1859 – 1930) was a German-Jewish banker. Deutsch, Salomonsohn and von Siemens were members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde. At the beginning of the Weimar Republic, Salomonsohn supported Hugo Stinnes and Albert Vögler in their projects to reorganize and vertically concentrate German industry through the formation of interest groups.[58]

According to Etan Bloom, among the important non-Jewish figures in German culture who were attracted to Zionism in the first decade of the twentieth century was Naumann, whose writings appeared in Die Welt, the main publication of Bohenheimer’s ZVfD, by far the largest Zionist organization in Germany, having attracted 10,000 members by 1914.[59] Naumann believed that the Zionists would be helpful to German colonial interests, and that decreasing Europe’s Jewish population would help resolve the Jewish Question.[60] Stadtler was a member of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) until 1933 when he defected to the Nazi Party weeks prior to it being dissolved.[61] The DNVP was formed in December 1918 by a merger of the German Conservative Party and the Free Conservative Party of the old monarchic German Empire. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major conservative and nationalist party in Weimar Germany. Several prominent Nazis began their careers in the DNVP.

Members of the ultra-nationalist Organisation Consul (OC), composed of former Kapp Putsch conspirators, were involved in the assassination of Walter Rathenau in 1922. The OC grew out of the ranks of Marine Brigade Ehrhardt, a Freikorps unit formed by Hermann Ehrhardt, after the failure of the Kapp Putsch. The OC played a significant role in the formation of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1921. His assassins explicitly cited Rathenau’s membership in the “three hundred Elders of Zion” as justification for the killing.[62] Rathenau had famously said in a 1909 in Neue Freie Presse: “Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, guide the economic destinies of the Continent and seek their successors from their own milieu.” By 1912, Theodor Fritsch (1852 – 1933), founder of the Reichshammerbund (Reich’s Hammer League), whose members formed the Thule Society in 1918, considered Rathenau’s comment as an “open confession of indubitable Jewish hegemony” and as proof that Rathenau was the “secret Kaiser of Germany.”[63]

 

Eros and Zion

In 1919, Landauer briefly served as Commissioner of Enlightenment and Public Instruction in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic during the German Revolution of 1918–1919. He was murdered by Freikorps soldiers when the republic was overthrown. Soon after his death, Landauer was almost completely forgotten by European socialists and anarchists, though his memory enjoyed a revival in Zionist and Kibbutznik circles thanks to his friend of Martin Buber.[64] Landauer and Martin Buber, explains Nordheimer Nur, in Eros and Tragedy, influenced the leaders of Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, which laid the foundation for Israel’s Kibbutz movement.[65] Hashomer Hatzair was influenced by ideas of Gustav Wyneken (1875 – 1964), one of leaders of the German youth movement, who was ousted from the Wickersdorf Free School Community which he had founded in Thuringia, after being convicted of homosexual contact with students.[66] As revealed by Nordheimer Nur, Hashomer Hatzair was inspired by the theories of Freud and Nietzsche, and was modeled on the concept of the Männerbund, the all-male “warrior-society” of pre-modern cultures, as defined by Wyneken’s friend, Hans Blüher (1888 – 1955). Strongly influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis, Blüher wrote a highly controversial history of the German Wandervogel youth movement, Die Rolle Der Erotik in Der männlichen Gesellschaft (The Role of the Erotic in Male Society), in which he elaborated on the role of homoeroticism and the foundation of human civilization. As a result of the unconventional relations between the sexes developed in the movement, not unlike those of the Jugendkultur movement in Vienna, Hashomer Hatzair were accused by outsiders of being promiscuous societies of “free love.”[67]

Blüher’s work was published by Diederichs (1867–1930), a friend of Matin Buber, whose publishing house, the Eugen Diederichs Verlag, was the one of the most important organs of völkisch romanticism.[68] Diederichs founded his publishing house with the intention of dedicating himself to “modern endeavors in the field […] of Theosophy.”[69] Diederichs was a crucial factor in the spread of theosophical and völkisch ideas, publishing the works of Paul de Lagarde, Guido von List, Julius Langbehn  and Alfred Schuler of the Cosmic Circle.[70] Diederichs, who was described as an “energetic in championing anthroposophy,” cooperated with Rudolf Steiner.[71] Diederichs published The Thule Collection, a German translation of the Icelandic Edda and poetic writings of the Skaldik in German. Diederichs also published the leading feminists of the time, including Rosa Mayreder and Lou Andreas-Salomé. According to Marino Pullio, “Diederichs was the patron saint of those who embraced the counter-culture, the Lebensreform movement, the avant-garde and all forms of alternative ferment, ranging from the nationalist right to the non- Marxist left—all of them sharing the common denominator of a radical criticism of modernity.”[72]

 

Merhavia Co-Operative

When Herzl had asked Max Oppenheimer to help work on the Jewish colonization of Palestine, he submitted a plan to the Zionist Congress of 1903. Oppenheimer, Zelig Soskin (1872–1959) and Otto Warburg, a cousin of the German-based Warburgs, received formal permission and funding from the World Zionist Organization (WZO) to begin planning the colonization of Palestine. Soskin wrote in the proposal: “We need only refer to how the Aryan people colonize. I refer to the Germans in the African colonies, etc.”[73] Based on that plan, Oppenheimer founded the agricultural cooperative Merhavia in 1911, south of Nazareth.[74] In 1914, Oppenheimer was joined by Loe Motzkin (1867 – 1933) and Theodor Herzl’s associate Max Bodenheimer, to create a German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, which was supported by the German Empire.[75] Motzkin participated in the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and became close to Herzl, who sent him on a mission to Palestine to investigate the problems of the Jewish community. In 1902, together with Martin Buber, Motzkin founded Berlin’s Jüdischer Verlag.[76] Motzkin proceeded to establish a Jewish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to represent the interests of Jews across Europe. This committee, which became a permanent institution under the League of Nations, would lead to the founding of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), organized to defend Jewish interests in the US and internationally.[77]

The Merhavia co-operative was founded with the assistance of Arthur Ruppin (1876 – 1943), a friend of Chaim Weizmann, and whose protegee was Chaim Arlosoroff, the former lover of Goebbels’ wife Magda, and an attendee at meetings at the house Yisrael Dov Frumkin, who was in contact with Hitler’s Mufti al-Husseini.[78] Ruppin’s main intellectual influences included Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Nietzsche and Gustav Wyneken.[79] Ruppin joined the Zionist Organization (ZO, the future World Zionist Organization, WZO) in 1905. At the Zionist Congress of 1907 in Hague, Otto Warburg recommended  nominating Ruppin to make a pilot study of the possibilities for colonization in Palestine. He was sent by David Wolffsohn, the President of the ZO, to study the condition of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, then under Ottoman control. After eleven weeks, Ruppin presented a concrete plan to the Restricted Executive Committee (REC), who decided to establish a Palestine Office (PO), eventually becoming the Jewish Agency, that would function as the official representation of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Ruppin was appointed its director. Following Ruppin’s ideas, Warburg suggested the establishment of the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC), which the board of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) approved.[80] The PLDC worked to purchasing land, to train Jews in agricultural pursuits, and to establish Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. Ruppin’s work made Practical Zionism possible and shaped the direction of the Second Aliya, the last wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine before World War I. The PLDC become one of Israe’s largest conglomerates.[81]

Ruppin was a member of Brit Shalom (“covenant of peace”), a group of Jewish Zionist intellectuals in Mandatory Palestine, founded in 1925, and whose supporters and founders included Martin Buber, Hugo Bergmann, Gershom Scholem, historian Hans Kohn, Henrietta Szold, Israel Jacob Kligler. Albert Einstein also voiced support. Judah Leon Magnes, one of the authors of the program, never joined the organization. Brit Shalom sought peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews, to be achieved by renunciation of the Zionist aim of creating a Jewish state. The alternative vision of Zionism was to create a center for Jewish cultural life in Palestine, echoing the earlier ideas of Ahad Ha’am, a purported member of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and proposed author of the Protocols of Zion.[82] At the time, Brit Shalom supported the establishment of a bi-national state, also known as the one-state solution, as a homeland for both Jews and Palestinians.

In his autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem, Scholem, a regular participant in the Eranos conferences, reports about his involvement in the Forte Kreis as a group he terms “anarchistic aristocrats of the spirit.”[83] It is interesting to note, as Boaz Huss indicated, that Scholem chose the term “theosophy” as the most appropriate term to describe Kabbalah.[84] Scholem went to visit the occult novelist and Golden Dawn member Gustav Meyrink, and expressed a positive opinion about the parapsychological investigations of Emil Matthiesen (1875 – 1939).[85] Of great importance for Scholem was Franz Joseph Molitor, a member of Asiatic Brethren, and according to whom the order drew on the magic of the Sabbateans, “such as Shabbetai Zevi, Falk (the Baal Shem of London), Frank, and their similar fellows.”[86] As discovered by Konstantin Burmistrov, not only did Scholem possess many classics of occultism, including the works of Éliphas Lévi, Papus, Francis Barrett, McGregor Mathers, A.E. Waite, Israel Regardie, and so on, but his handwritten marginal notes show that he studied these works intensively. According to Burmistrov, the essay on “Alchemie und Kabbala” reveals the strong influence of A.E. Waite.[87]

 


[1] Emmanuelle Hériard Dubreuil. The personalism of Denis de Rougemont: Spirituality and politics in 1930s Europe (St John’s College, 2005), p. 40.

[2] Abraham G. Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration: From Cabbalistic Judaism to Roman Catholicism and From Jewishness to Polishness,” Jewish Social Studies, 25: 4 (1963: Oct) p. 301.

[3] Bernard Susser. “Ideological Multivalence: Martin Buber and the German Volkish Tradition.” Political Theory, 5: 1 (1977), p. 76.

[4] Ibid., p. 77.

[5] Zohar Maor. “Moderation from Right to Left: The Hidden Roots of Brit Shalom.” Jewish Social Studies, 19: 2 (Winter 2013), p. 85.

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

[7] K.D. Bracher. The German Dictatorship (Harmondsowrth: Penguin, 1971), p. 170.

[8] Klaus Polkehn. “Zionism and Kaiser Wilhelm.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1975), p. 88.

[9] Ibid., p. 87.

[10] Dr. Klaus Lichtblau. “Chronik: Franz Oppenheimer (30. März 1864 – 30. September 1943).” Stand: 6 (Februar 2015). Retrieved from https://www.fb03.uni-frankfurt.de/54043985/

[11] Patrick Jordan. “A Life of Dialogue: Martin’s Buber’s Path to a Believing Humanism.” Commonweal (June 8, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/life-dialogue

[12] Cedric Cohen-Skalli & Libera Pisano. “Farewell to Revolution! Gustav Landauer’s Death and the Funerary Shaping of His Legacy.” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 28: 2 (2020), p. 198.

[13] Fritz Mauthner. Erinnerungen (München: Georg Müller, 1918), p. 111.

[14] Silvia Dapía. Die Rezeption der Sprachkritik Fritz Mauthners im Werk von Jorge Luis Borges (Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 1993); Linda Ben-Zvi. “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner and the Limits of Language.” PMLA, 95: 2 (1980), pp. 183–200; Maria Kager. “James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner: Multilingual Liberators of Language.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 93:1 (2018), pp. 39–47.

[15] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Die moderne Literatur (Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler, 1902), p. 440; cited in Alain de Benoist. “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.”  Retrieved from https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/arthur_moeller_van_den_bruck.pdf

[16] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[17] Emily D. Bilski. Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918 (New York: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 51–53.

[18] Wolfskehl in a letter to Siegfried Guggenheim dated 19.9.1947 (Briefe aus dem Exil), p.348; Cited in Gerti Blumenfeld. “Karl Wolfskehl 1869 - 1948: Exul Poeta.” In: Ann Gluckmann. Identity and Involvement Auckland Jewry, Past and Present (Dunmore Press, 1990), p. 205; Retrieved from https://www.oocities.org/infotaxi/wolfskehl.html

[19] “Zionist Congress: First Zionist Congress & Basel Program.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/first-zionist-congress-and-basel-program-1897

[20] “Das Affenherz ist so etwas Vielgestaltiges.” Albert Schweitzers Briefwechsel mit Karl Wolfskehl. In Sinn und Form, 64:4 (2012), p. 516–531.

[21] Blumenfeld. “Karl Wolfskehl 1869 - 1948: Exul Poeta,” p. 205

[22] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie,, p. 87.

[23] Ibid. p. 88.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Thomas Karlauf. Stefan George. Die Entdeckung des Charisma (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 2007), p. 284. Cited in “Friedrich Gundolf.” Via Monuentum. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20160720164825/https://www.via-monumentum.de/index.php?article_id=77

[26] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, p. 102.

[27] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, p. 211.

[28] Jost Hermand & and Gregory Mason. “Meister Fidus: Jugendstil-Hippie to Aryan Faddist.” Comparative Literature Studies 12: 3 (1975), p. 292.

[29] Alain de Benoist. “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.”  Retrieved from https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/arthur_moeller_van_den_bruck.pdf

[30] G. L. Mosse. “The Mystical Origins of National Socialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 22: 1 (1961), p. 87.

[31] Carrie B. Dohe. Jung’s Wandering Archetype: Race and religion in analytical psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 111.

[32] Richard J. Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich (London 2003), p. 33.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Roderick Stackelberg. “Bartels, Adolf.” in Richard S. Levy (ed.) Antisemitism: a historical encyclopedia of prejudice and persecution (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), p. 59-60.

[35] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 52.

[36] Herman Rosenthal & Peter Wiernik. “HASKALAH.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[37] Spence. Secret Agent 666.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Stephen E. Flowers. “Introduction.” Hanns Heinz Ewers. Strange Tales (Lodestar Books, Mar. 3, 2011).

[40] Bob Herzberg. The Third Reich on Screen, 1929-2015 (McFarland, 2016), p. 27.

[41] Marcel Poorthuis. “The Forte Kreis: an Attempt to Spiritual Leadership over Europe.” Religion and Theology: A Journal of Contemporary Religous Discourse (2017), p. 51.

[42] Birgit Neumann & Jürgen Reulecke. Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendliche im “Zeitalter der Jugend” (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), p. 38; Poorthuis. “The Forte Kreis,” p. 41.

[43] Guido van Hengel. “World Conquest Through Heroic Love : How the Forte-Kreis Inspired Dimitrije Mitrinović.” In Slobodan G. Markovich (ed.). A Reformer of Mankind : Dimitrije Mitrinovic Between Cultural Utopianism and Social Activism (Zepter Book World, 2023), p. 185.

[44] Marcel Poorthuis. “The Forte Kreis: an Attempt to Spiritual Leadership over Europe.” Religion and Theology: A Journal of Contemporary Religous Discourse (2017), p. 51.

[45] Strube. Global Tantra, p. 94.

[46] “Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941).” The Brahmo Samaj. Retrieved from https://www.thebrahmosamaj.net/founders/rabindra.html

[47] Kazemzadeh. “ʻAbdu’l-Bahá 'Abbás (1844–1921).”

[48] “Literature: Mythologising a ‘mystic’:W.B. Yeats on the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.” History Ireland. Retrieved from https://historyireland.com/literature-mythologising-a-mysticw-b-yeats-on-the-poetry-of-rabindranath-tagore/

[49] Nitish Sengupta. History of the Bengali-speaking People (New Delhi, Delhi: UBS Publishers' Distributors, 2001), p. 211.

[50] Peter Mentzel. “Franz Oppenheimer (March 30, 1864).” Online Liberty Library. Retrieved from https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/franz-oppenheimer-birthday-biography-march-1864

[51] Peter Weber. “Ernst Jäckh and the National Internationalism of Interwar Germany.” Central European History (2019), pp. 406–407.

[52] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 30.

[53] Götz Aly. Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden?: Gleichheit, Neid und Rassenhass (S. Fischer Verlag, 2011).

[54] Hans-Joachim Schwierskott. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und der revolutionäre Nationalismus in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1962).

[55] Dirk Stegmann. “Die deutsche Inlandspropaganda 1917/18.” In: Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 2/72, p. 78 f. m. Anm. 25.

[56] Gerald D. Feldman. Army, industry, and labor in Germany, 1914-1918 (Providence, Rhode Island, US; Oxon, England, UK: Berg Publishers, Inc., 1992), p. 529.

[57] Jörg-R. Mettke. “Das Große Schmieren.” Der Spiegel (December 3, 1984). Retrieved from https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13510803.html

[58] Martin L. Müller. “Salomonsohn, Arthur Moritz.” In Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). Band 22, (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005), p. 395 f.

[59] Etan Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 144.

[60] Ibid.

[61] Hermann Beck. The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: the Machtergreifung in a New Light. First Paperback Edition (Berghahn Books, 2010), p. 246.

[62] Mark Swartzburg. “The Three hundred,” in Richard S. Levy (ed.). Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Babara, California; ABC-CLIO, 2005), p. 706.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Cedric Cohen-Skalli & Libera Pisano. “Farewell to Revolution! Gustav Landauer’s Death and the Funerary Shaping of His Legacy.” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 28: 2 (2020), p. 227, n. 123.

[65] Ofer Nordheimer Nur. Eros and Tragedy, Hashomer Hatzair: Jewish Male Fantasies and the Masculine Revolution of Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014), p. 107.

[66] Jutta Neupert. “Wyneken, Gustav, Pädagoge.” In Benz, Wolfgang; Graml, Hermann (eds.). Biographisches Lexikon zur Weimarer Republik (Munich: C. H. Beck., 1988), p. 375.

[67] Ibid., p. 180

[68] Hakl. Eranos, p. 142.

[69] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, p. 98.

[70] G. L. Mosse. “The Mystical Origins of National Socialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 22: 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1961), p. 82.

[71] Peter Staudenmaier. Between Occultism and Fascism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race and Nation in Germany and Italy, 1900-1945. PhD dissertation (Cornell University, 2010).

[72] Marino Pullio. Une modernité explosive: La revue Die Tat dans les renouveaux religieux, culturels et politiques de l’Allemagne d’avant 1914–1918 (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2008), p. 420. Cited in Hakl. Eranos, p. 272.

[73] Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des sechsten Zionisten-Kongresses (Vienna, 1903), p. 272. Cited in Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture, p. 140.

[74] “Co-operation in Palestine.” New York Times (March 17, 1914). Retrieved from https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1914/03/17/101754909.pdf

[75] Sean McMeekin. The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (2010), p. 346.

[76] “Leo Motzkin (1867 - 1933).” Israel and Zionism. Department of Jewish Education. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20071113200527/http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/people/BIOS/motzkin.html

[77] Ibid.

[78] Y. Wallach. “Jerusalem between Segregation and Integration: Reading Urban Space through the Eyes of Justice Gad Frumkin.” In S.R. Goldstein-Sabbah and H.L. Murre-van den Berg (ed.). Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East (Brill, 2016), p. 225, n. 57.

[79] Etan Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture. Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Vol. 31 (Brill, 2011), pp. 86–88, 97–98.

[80] Ibid., p. 148.

[81] “Israel land development co (ILDC:Tel Aviv).” BusinessWeek. Retrieved from https://archive.ph/20131117005305/http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?ticker=ILDC:IT#selection-3061.2-3073.1

[82] Cesare G. De Michelis. The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, trans. Richard Newhouse (Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004) p. 115.

[83] Ofer Nordheimer Nur. Eros and Tragedy, Hashomer Hatzair: Jewish Male Fantasies and the Masculine Revolution of Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014), p. 142.

[84] Scholem. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 206; cited in Boaz Huss, “‘The Secret Doctrine of the Jews’: Jewish Theosophists and Kabbalah.” Ben-Gurion University YouTube channel, 27:33. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--dl6zYMuEA

[85] Hakl. Eranos, p. 158.

[86] Scholem. Du Frankisme, p. 39; cited in Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 220.

[87] Hakl. Eranos, p. 156–158.

Divide & Conquer