Emden-Eybeschütz Controversy 

The Judengasse, the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt am Main, Holy Roman Empire, was one of the earliest ghettos in Germany. It existed from 1462 until 1811 and was home to Germany’s largest Jewish community in early modern times. Initially, some 15 families with about 110 members lived in Frankfurt’s Judengasse when they were forcibly removed from the city and relocated to the ghetto by decree of Frederick III in 1462. Frederick III Holy Roman Emperor (1415 – 1493), a member of the Order of the Dragon also a member of the Order of the Garter, and married Eleanor de Aviz, Princess of Portugal, the daughter of Eleanor of Aragon, whose brother, Alfonso V King of Aragon and Naples, was a member of the Order of the Dragon. The central role of Frankfurt’s Jews in Jewish spiritual life is best illustrated in the Rabbinical Conference held in Frankfurt in 1603. Many of the most important Jewish communities in Germany, including Mainz, Fulda, Cologne and Koblenz, sent representatives to Frankfurt for this conference.

The most famous resident of the Judengasse was Amschel Mayer Bauer (1744-1812), who took on the name Rothschild to found the famous banking dynasty. The Rothschilds have been referred to as a “founding father of international finance,” and ranked seventh on the Forbes magazine list of “The Twenty Most Influential Businessmen of All Time” in 2005.[1] According to Rabbi Antelman in To Eliminate the Opiate, the Rothschilds were the true founders of the Bavarian Illuminati. The dynasty was founded by Amschel Mayer Bauer (1744-1812), who took on the name Rothschild, for “red shield” in German. According to Antelman, the Rothschilds were members of the Sabbatean sect known as the Frankists. Jacob Emden described a violent altercation that took place at his home with two defenders of the Frankists, one of them being Jacob Rothschild.[2]

Genealogy of the House of Rothschild

• Mayer Amschel Rothschild (built fortune as banker to William I, Elector of Hesse, brother of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel, member of Illuminati and Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren)

  • Amschel "Anselm" Mayer Rothschild (1773–1855, Frankfurt branch. Died childless, his brothers assumed responsibility for the business from 1855)

  • Salomon Mayer von Rothschild (1774–1855, Austrian branch, retained ties with Prince Metternich, whose father, Franz Metternich (1746 – 1818), had been a member of the Illuminati. Joined the “the Nascent Dawn,” known as the Judenlodge, founded in Frankfurt-on-Main in 1807 by Illuminati member and Rothschild agent Siegmund Geisenheimer, assisted by Daniel Itzig, and headed by Franz Joseph Molitor, both members of Asiatic Brethren. In 1817, the Judenlodge obtained a new charter from Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel)

    • Anselm Salomon von Rothschild (1803 – 1874) + Charlotte Nathan Rothschild

      • Nathaniel Meyer von Rothschild (1836 – 1905, in homosexual relationship with Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, close friend of friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, who shared his interest in the occult. Eulenburg summoned Theodor Herzl to Liebenberg to announce that Wilhelm II wanted to see a Jewish state established in Palestine)

  • Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836, London branch, founder of N. M. Rothschild & Sons) + Hannah Barent-Cohen (sister of wife of Moses Montefiore, Freemason who founded Alliance Israëlite Universelle with Benjamin Disraeli and Adolphe Crémieux, member of Memphis-Mizraim and Grand Commander of the Grand Lodge of France)

    • Lionel Nathan (1808–1879) + Charlotte von Rothschild (cousin of Nanette Salomon Barent-Cohen, grandmother of Karl Marx)

      • Baron Lionel de Rothschild (1808 – 1879, friend of Benjamin Disraeli) + Charlotte von Rothschild

        • Baron Nathan “Natty” Rothschild (1840 – 1915, friend of Cecil Rhodes and funded founding of the Round Table. Friend of Lord Randolph Churchill (1849 –1895), father of Winston Churchill. Friend of Prince of Wales, father of Prince Albert Victor (1864 – 1892), who had an illegitimate child with Mary Jean Kelly, whose friends numbered among Jack the Ripper’s victims) + Emma Louise von Rothschild

          • Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild (1868 – 1937, close friend of Weizmann, who helped to draft the Balfour Declaration presented to him, written by Round Table member Lord Balfour, along with the help of Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and Rabbi Stephen Wise, all leading Zionists and known Sabbateans)

        • Alfred Rothschild (1842 – 1918, tutored by Wilhelm Pieper, Karl Marx’s private secretary. Friend of Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. Friend of Round Table member, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener (1850 – 1916), who Lanz von Liebenfels claimed was a member of his Order of New Templars (ONT) and a reader of his anti-Semitic magazine Ostara, a magazine avidly ready by a young Hitler) + Marie Boyer

        • Leopold de Rothschild (1845 – 1917) + Marie Perugia

          • Lionel de Rothschild (1882 – 1942, close friend of Winston Churchill) + Marie Louise Eugénie Beer

  • Calmann "Carl" Mayer Rothschild (1788–1855, Naples branch)

  • James Mayer de Rothschild (1792–1868. Paris branch. Reported as defender of Sabbateanism by Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697 – 1776). Patron of Rossini, Chopin, Balzac, Delacroix, and Heinrich Heine)

    • Alphonse James de Rothschild (1827 – 1905)

    • Edmond James de Rothschild (1845 – 1934, supporter of Zionism, his large donations lent significant support to the movement during its early years, which helped lead to the establishment of the State of Israel. Backed founding of Hovevei Zion by Leon Pinsker (1821 – 1891). In Jerusalem, Theodor Herzl and Kaiser Wilhelm II met at Mikveh Israel, a village and boarding school, founded in 1870 by Charles Netter, an emissary of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, with Baron Edmond James de Rothschild contributing)

Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697–1776), 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 Eybeshütz (1690 – 1764). A list of ordination from a certificate held in the Schiff Collection at the New York Public Library, ranks Rabbi Eybeshütz as a successor of Sabbatai Zevi.[3] First to succeed was Nathan of Gaza (1643 – 1680) who was anointed a prophet by Sabbatai Zevi. Next was Solomon Ayllon (1655 – 1729), his disciple and a Rabbi in London and Amsterdam where he tried to hide his Sabbatean leanings. Ayllon’s successor was Nechemiah Chiyon (1655 – 1729), who was excommunicated in several communities and wandered over Europe and North Africa. Chiyon ordained his successor Judah Leib Prossnitz in Moravia. Prossnitz was known as a Kabbalist and charlatan healer who confessed to sacrificing to the devil and demons, after which he was publicly banished into exile for several months. Following his ordination as successor to Zevi, after first proclaiming himself the Messiah, Judah Leib then passed on the title to Rabbi Eybeshütz (1690 – 1764).

In 1751, Emden accused Eybeschütz of being a secret follower of Sabbetai Zevi, citing the evidence of some amulets written by Eybeschütz which contained Sabbatean formulas. In 1753, Eybeschütz was exonerated by the Council of the Four Lands in Poland, and his halakhic works remain in use today, despite strong suspicions among modern historians that Emden’s accusation may have been justified.[4]

Hasidism 

Although Emden did not approve of the Hasidic movement which evolved during his lifetime, his books are highly regarded amongst the Hasidim.[5] The “Hasideans” of the Bible, also known as Kasideans, are identified by the Freemasons with the Essenes, who hold a particular place of importance in the order. In The History of Free Masonry published in 1804, Alexander Lawrie, who is regarded as an excellent authority on Scottish Freemasonry, claims that the Kasideans—on the basis of the French historian Joseph Scaliger, who conducted research into early Jewish mystical sects—were descended from the Essenes. Scaliger, a friend of Isaac Casaubon and Guillaume Postel, utilized the Plantin press, which many historians have argued operated as a front for a kind of “pre-Freemasonry.”[6]

Like Casaubon, Scaliger owned a copy of the Sefer Hasidim.[7] Scaliger was involved in a debate with the biblical scholar Johannes Drusius (1550–1616) and the Jesuit Nicolas Serarius (1555–1609), where he asserted that the ancient Hasidaeans (Hasidim) became the Essenes. Scaliger believed the Therapeutae were a branch of the Essenes, and that the Hasidim were descended from them.[8] In Scaliger’s opinion, the Hasidaeans were not a sect, but an order or brotherhood, or a corporation “especially dedicated to the observance of the Law,” and whose origin dated back to the period of Ezra.[9] Citing Scaliger, Lawrie writes:

The Kasideans were a religious Fraternity, or an Order of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem, who bound themselves to adorn the porches of that magnificent structure, and to preserve it from injury and decay. This association was composed of the greatest men of Israel, who were distinguished for their charitable and peaceful dispositions, and always signalized themselves by their ardent zeal for the purity and preservation of the Temple. From these facts it appears, that the Essenes were not only an ancient fraternity, but that they originated from an association of architects, who were connected with the building of Solomon’s temple. Nor was this order confined to the Holy Land. Like the fraternities of the Dionysiacs, the Free Masons, it existed in all parts of the world; and though the lodges in Judea were chiefly, if not wholly, composed of Jews, yet the Essenes admitted into their order men of every religion, and every rank in life. They adopted many Egyptian mysteries; and, like the priests of that country, the Magi of Persia, an the Gymnosophists in India, they united study of moral, with that of natural philosophy. [10]

The modern Hasidic movement began in Ukraine with Israel ben Eliezer (1698 – 1760), known as Besht, an acronym for Baal Shem Tov. Baal Shem, in Hebrew meaning “Master of the Name,” refers to a historical Jewish occupation of certain Kabbalistic rabbis with knowledge of using names of God in Judaism for practical kabbalah healing, miracles, exorcism and blessing. The Baal Shem wrote amulets and prescribed cures, and many miracles were attributed to him. Just as the you Baal Shem defeats a werewolf, he also defeats a powerful witch in one tale and a wizard in another.[11] Hasidic legend, as recounted in Shivhei ha-Besht (1815), the first collection of tales about the Baal Shem, has Rabbi Adam Baal Shem, who first introduced the movement of Hasidism, identify the Baal Shem as his successor while he was still a boy. Rabbi Adam is another rabbi portrayed in Jewish legend as a powerful sorcerer, similar to Rabbi Loew, also from Prague, famous for creating the golem. One tale about Rabbi Adam is identical with that of Rabbi Loew, where he is said to have created a palace out of magic, and invited the Emperor Maximilian II (1527 – 1576) to a banquet.[12]

Stories about Rabbi Adam were popular and used by the compiler of Shivhei ha-Besht who transformed him into a Kabbalist in Poland who died close to the birth or in the childhood of the Baal Shem Tov. According to the Shivhei ha-Besht, Rabbi Adam found manuscripts in a cave, containing secrets on the mystery of Kabbalah. Rabbi Adam asked in a dream to whom should he hand down the manuscripts. He was answered to hand them to Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer of the city of Okopy in Poland. After Rabbi Adam died, his son traveled until he arrived at Okopy, where he married the daughter of a wealthy man and eventually handed the manuscripts to the Baal Shem Tov.[13] Apparently, Rabbi Adam was conflated in Hasidic legend with Heshel Zoref (1633 – 1700), the most important figure of the Sabbatean movement in Lithuania, who died in Kracow around the time of Baal Shem Tov's birth. Heshel’s work, Sefer ha-Zoref, on the mysteries of Sabbatean Kabbalah, undoubtedly reached the Baal Shem Tov who ordered them to be copied by his disciple Shabbetai of Raszków.[14] The Baal Shem frequently praised Heshel’s writings, and the tradition of his pupils identified them with those of Rabbi Adam.[15]

Many of Baal Shem Tov’s disciples believed that he came from the Davidic line tracing its lineage to the royal house of King David, and by extension with the institution of the Jewish Messiah.[16] The Besht claimed to have achieved devekut (“adhesion”), meaning that his soul had reached the high level where he could speak with the Messiah, and intervene between humans and God. He had the ability to protect the Jewish community from plague and persecution. He believed that physical pleasure can give rise to spiritual pleasure. A physical act can become a religious act if it is performed as worship of God and the act is performed in a state of devekut.

Hasidism draws heavily on Lurianic Kabbalah. “One abiding legacy” of the Sabbatean controversies, explains Martin Goodman in The History of Judaism, “was the popularization of the language of the Lurianic kabbalah in common liturgy which we have already seen. That in turn was to shape the most lasting movement of the early modern period, Hasidism.”[17] Rabbi Nahman of Kosow—who had sided with Eybeschütz, and was also suspected by Emden of being a secret Sabbatean—became a committed devotee of the Baal Shem Tov.[18] Many scholars, including Gershom Scholem, see the roots of the Hasidic movement of Judaism within the Sabbateanism.[19] In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem defined Luranic Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, and Hasidim as three different stages in the same process of the historical development of Jewish mysticism, arguing that Hasidism was a direct reaction to the Sabbatean movement, and that its primary theological inspiration came from Lurianic Kabbalah.[20]

Although the Hasidic movement is regarded now as a part of Orthodox Judaism, it had often been condemned as heretical by traditional Jews. It was Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (~1720–1797), known as the Vilna Gaon, and those who followed his classic Talmudic and Halakhic scholasticism, who put up the fiercest resistance to the Hasidim. They were called Mitnagdim, meaning “[those who are] oppose/d [to the Hasidim].” The efforts of the Mitnagdim to suppress the Hasidim lasted for three decades, accompanied by written and oral denunciations, which described Hasidism as a deviant sect and sometimes even identified it with Sabbateanism.[21]

The kernel of truth to these accusations lay in the Hasidic doctrine which suggested that one should serve God not only with the “good impulses” but also with the bad.[22] This notion is quite similar to that sometimes cited in the context of Sabbateanism of “redemption via sin.”[23] This belief is linked with the Lurianic doctrine of the raising of the holy sparks (niẓoẓot), though Besht limited this concept to the salvation of the individual soul. Hasidim believed that the immanence of God in everything meant that even great evil or pollution had a spark of the divine hidden somewhere within it. The Hasidim took this to mean that one must not only redeem and raise the holy sparks from the hand of evil, but that it was imperative to correct and uplift the evil itself. As the Besht’s disciple and successor, Rabbi Dov Baer ben Avraham of Mezeritch, also known as the “Great Maggid,” explained it, since the evil once resided in the Godhead itself, it must have been good originally. if we can return it to the source, it will not only be cleansed of its evilness but its force will be added to the good of the Divine.[24]

The Maggid is regarded as the first systematic exponent of the mystical philosophy underlying the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, and through his teaching and leadership, the main architect of the movement.[25] The Maggid’s inner circle of disciples, known as the Chevraia Kadisha (“Holy Brotherhood”), included Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi—an adept in Isaac Luria’s system of Kabbalah, and the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidism—who contemporaries accused of being a Sabbatean.[26] Shneur Zalman was the son of Baruch, great-grandson of the mystic and philosopher Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the “Maharal of Prague.”[27] The name “Chabad” is a Hebrew acronym for Chochmah, Binah, Da’at (“Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge”), the top three Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, below Keter (“Crown”). “Lubavitch” is the Yiddish name for the originally Belorussian village Lyubavichi, now in Russia, where the movement’s leaders lived for over a hundred years. The Zohar and the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, are frequently cited in Chabad works.

Jacob Frank

Rabbi Eybeschutz’ son Wolf was an open follower of the Frankists.[28] Judah Leibes raises the possibility that the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, died in 1760 of sorrow over the conversion to Christianity of the Sabbatean sect known as the Frankists a year earlier, since he viewed them as an organ of the mystical body of Judaism.[29] The founder of the Frankists was Jacob Frank (1726 – 1791), originally Jacob Leibowicz. Jacob Frank is believed to have been born in Eastern Poland, now Ukraine, in about 1726 into a Sabbatean family. As a traveling merchant he often visited Ottoman Greece where he earned the nickname “Frank,” a name generally given in the East to Europeans. He also lived in Smyrna and Salonika where he was initiated into the Sabbatean Kabbalah by the radical Dönmeh circle that emerged from Osman Baba (Baruchya Russo). In 1755, he reappeared in Poland, gathered a group of local adherents and began to preach the “revelations” which were communicated to him by the Dönmeh in Salonika.

Frank claimed to come to rid the world of the Talmud and Jewish law, a law he regarded as oppressive. Frank rejected the Talmud in favor of the Kabbalistic Zohar. 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.[30] As summarized by Aba 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 Sabbetai Zevi to bring about a time of pure evil.”[31] 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.”[32] Like the ancient Gnostics, they therefore indulged in orgiastic and sexually promiscuous and even incestuous rites. The Frankists, like the Dönmeh, each held sexual-religious rituals, ranging from wife-swapping to kissing the naked breasts of a girl as the embodiment of the Torah/Shekinah.[33]

As a consequence, the congress of rabbis in Brody excommunicated the Frankists, and made it obligatory upon every pious Jew to seek them out and expose them. The Sabbateans informed Dembowski, the Catholic Bishop of Kamieniec Podolski, Poland. The bishop took Frank and his followers under his protection and in 1757 arranged a religious disputation between them and the orthodox rabbis. The bishop sided in favor of the Frankists and also ordered the burning of all copies of the Talmud in Poland.

At this critical juncture Frank proclaimed himself as a direct successor to Sabbatai Zevi and Osman Baba, and assured his followers that he had received revelations from Heaven, which called for their conversion to Christianity. According to the story recorded in the hagiographic collection Shivhe ha-BeSh’T, the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, laid the blame for the eruption of the controversy on the orthodox Jewish establishment, and was “very angry with the rabbis and said that it was because of them, since they invented lies of their own.”[34] The Ba’al Shem saw Frank and his group as part of the mystical body of Israel and presented their baptism as the amputation of a limb from the Shekhinah: “I heard from the rabbi of our community that concerning those who converted [in Lwów], the Besht said: As long as the member is connected, there is some hope that it will recover, but when the member is cut off, there is no repair possible. Each person of Israel is a member of the Shekhinah.”[35]

As revealed in The Sayings of Jacob Frank, Frank warned his followers of immanent and violent persecution, and advised them of the need to adopt the “religion of Edom,” by which he meant Christianity, leading eventually to the adoption of a future religion called das (“knowledge”), to be revealed by Frank. The conversion to Christianity, however, was to serve as a means to achieve Christianity’s ultimate defeat. Frank, as the reincarnation of the patriarch Jacob, was destined to rise as Israel’s leader in its war against Edom. In 1759, negotiations for the conversion of the Frankists to Roman Catholicism were carried out with the higher representatives of the Polish Church. The baptism of the Frankists was celebrated with great solemnity in the churches of Lwów, with members of the Polish nobility acting as god-parents. Frank himself was baptized in 1759.

Black Madonna

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 Frankism movement in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. 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. The icon, which was housed at the Jasna Gora Monastery in Czestochowa, has been intimately associated with Poland for the past 600 years. According to legend, the icon had been painted by Luke the Evangelist on a fragment of the table of the Last Supper and subsequently been brought to Constantinople from Jerusalem by Constantine the Great. Several Pontiffs have recognized the venerated icon, beginning with Pope Clement XI who issued a Canonical Coronation to the image on September 8, 1717, via the Vatican Chapter.

Frank was fascinated by the Czestochowa icon and the worship accorded to it by the pilgrims coming to the monastery. 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.[36] 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.”[37] For Frank, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa became not merely a depiction of the sacred femininity but the site of her actual “indwelling.” Frank’s coming to Czestochowa was “to liberate” the Maiden from the icon and thus to bring the revelation of divine femininity to accomplishment. As Frank announced, when this happened, the “Maiden who is there [that is, the miraculous icon] . . . will lead you [the Frankists] to another Maiden.”[38] The final and complete revelation of Frankism amounts to the true incarnation of the divine Maiden in a true human maiden: Frank’s daughter Eve. From the very outset, Frank presented her as a semi-divine being and a future leader of the group.

Jewish Christians

These Frankists were at the forefront of the revival of Catholic mystical and devotional practices centered on Our Lady and the Eucharistic Lord such as the Rosary, novenas, devotion to the Sacred and Immaculate hearts, Benedictions, the forty hours devotions and Perpetual Eucharistic adoration. Devotion to the Sacred Heart developed out of the devotion to the Holy Wounds, in particular to the Sacred Wound in the side of Jesus, The Five Holy Wounds or Five Sacred Wounds are the five piercing wounds Jesus suffered during the Crucifixion. These practices grew from the influence of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, patron of the Templars, and Saint Francis of Assisi, who according to Steven Runciman was influenced by the Cathars.[39] Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus marked the spirituality of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century and of Saint Bonaventure and St. Gertrude the Great in the thirteenth.[40] This devotion was strongly opposed in and out of the Church and suppressed in many places.

Following his release, Frank and his entourage relocated to Moravia, and in particular to the city of Brünn, where a Sabbatean stronghold had remained, and which was closely connected to the local nobility. Accompanied by his daughter Eve, Frank repeatedly traveled to Vienna and succeeded in gaining the favor of Empress Maria Theresa, the last of the House of Habsburg who regarded him as a disseminator of Christianity among the Jews.[41] Ultimately, Frank was deemed unmanageable and he was forced to leave Austria. He and his circle of followers moved to Offenbach, Germany, beginning in 1786. Assuming the title of “Baron of Offenbach,” he adopted a style of regal opulence, receiving financial support from his Polish and Moravian followers, who made frequent pilgrimages to him. Frank died in Offenback in 1791, after which Eve became the “holy mistress” and leader of the sect. In November 1813, after the battle of Leipzig, Tsar Alexander I, then emperor of Russia, rode from Frankfurt to Offenbach to visit Eve.[42]

The Frankists scattered in Poland and Bohemia eventually intermarrying into the aristocracy and middle class. Maria Szymanowska, a piano virtuoso, came from a Frankist family.[43] Wanda Grabowska, the mother of Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski, also descended from Frankists.[44] The greatest men of Poland Frédéric Chopin, Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, were also reportedly descendants of the Frankist sect.[45]

The baptized Catholic Frankists followed the other daughters of Frank from his first marriage, whose leadership became based in Italy, Spain and Ireland where they contributed to a mystical, liturgical and devotional renewal of Catholicism. The Frankists who went to Ireland were to bring this intense Marian focus with them and under the Papal Frankist priests, Bishops, nuns and laity they inaugurated a new era of Marian fervor in Irish Catholicism. It was the hidden Frankists in the Church of Europe that pushed for the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and Papal infallibility. Frankist women were prominent in the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity and Presentation Sisters. They guarded the maternal Jewish lineage assuring that their sons married women of Frankist families.[46]

The first wave of European Frankists came to Ireland in 1761 after the arrest and imprisonment of Jacob Frank in Czestochowa in late 1760. Many of them were members of Frank’s family. They mixed with the already existing crypto-Jewish community of Ireland. It is only with this Frankist conversion that these crypto-Jewish families became truly Catholic. The Frankist families took Irish names and identity. Some of the names were Murray (Murzynski), Cullen (Cohen), Murphy (Morpurgo), O’Connor/ Connor (Kinnor/ Konarski), Kinsella (Kaplinski), Maher (Mayer), Doyle (D’Oliveira), McCabe (Maccabi), Lynch (Luntz), Flood (Folda), Brennan (Brainan), Lavin (Zaslavski), Carroll (Karlin), Nolan (Nolen), Neill (Nehlhans), Walsh (Wolowski) etc.[47]

Eva Frank had six half-sisters from her father’s first marriage, Rachel Chayah, Dinah Ruth, Esther Matrona, Rivka Shoshana, Miriam Hannah, Leah Golda and Sarah Judith. Miriam Chana married David Menke Kinnor in 1756. Dinah Ruth married Stanilaus Rostowski, a Frankist descendant of the Sabbatean teacher Rabbi Baruchiah Russo. They moved to England then Scotland where they embraced the Presbyterian faith. Rivka Shoshana married in 1754 to Nathan Mayer of Frankfurt, and they moved to Ireland in 1760/61 where they took the names William and Annie Maher. In 1760, Leah Golda Frank married in Poland to Edmund Roche of Ireland. Edmund returned to Poland regularly to visit Jacob at Czestochowa and he returned in 1773 to live in Frank’s court. Sarah Judith Jacob married in Ireland in 1763/4 to John Cassin (a.k.a. Frances John Kissane) of Dublin and Kerry a son of a merchant and crypto-Jewish Rabbi.[48]

The father of Daniel Murray, the Archbishop of Dublin, was Tam (Tomek) Muzynski (Thomas Murray), who came to Ireland with his brother Pinchus (Piotr) Murzynski (Patrick Murray) with their wives Judith and Honaria Maher, the sisters of Nathan Mayer. Daniel Murray ordained to the priesthood two of the Murphy (Morpurgo) family, Francis and Daniel Murphy who were to become Australian Archbishops. Nathan Mayer’s daughter Catherine Maher married the Frankist Peter (Isaac) Leon Morpurgo, the son of Rabbi Elia Hayyim Morpurgo of Italy. Peter took the name of Peter Murphy in Ireland. Another daughter of Nathan Mayer was Miriam Mayer (Mary Maher), who married David Kinnor (David Connor) the Frankist son of Daniel Menke Kinnor (Harf) and his wife Chana Loeb. David and Mary Connor were the parents of two American Bishops, Bishop Michael O’Connor and Bishop James O’Connor of Omaha, Nebraska. Bishop Michael O’Connor was instrumental in the wording of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854.[49] The Immaculate Conception, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, is the conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary free from original sin by virtue of the foreseen merits of her son Jesus Christ.

Another son of Joseph Mayer and Hannah Rothschild was Pinchus Mayer (aka Patrick Mayer). His daughters Mary and Judith married into the Frankist Cullen (Cohen) family. Mary married Hugh Cullen, the father of Paul Cullen, the first Cardinal of Ireland. Hugh’s mother belonged to the Kaplinski (who took the Irish name Kinsella in Ireland) family who were close relatives of Jacob Frank’s second wife Chana. Under the Frankist Irish Bishops culminating in the work of Hugh’s son, Cardinal Cullen, Irish Catholicism was transformed in what has been termed the “Irish devotional revolution.”[50] Cullen took part in the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and crafted the formula for papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council. His relatives, friends, and students, referred to as “Cullenites,” exerted great influence overseas, with Patrick Francis Moran, archbishop of Sydney, one notable example.[51]

[1] Michael Noel. “The Twenty Most Influential Businessmen of all Time.” Forbes (July 29, 2005).

[2] Novak. Jacob Frank.

[3] Rabbi Antelman, To Eliminate the Opiate. Volume 2 (Jerusalem: Zionist Book Club, 2002). p. 102.

[4] Martin Goodman. A History of Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 413.

[5] Harvey Falk. “Rabbi Jacob Emden’s Views on Christianity.” Journal of ecumenical studies, Volume 19, no. 1 (Winter 1982), pp. 105–11.

[6] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 178-179.

[7] Anthony Grafton & Joanna Weinberg. I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 289.

[8] G. Vermes. “Essenes and Therapeutia.” Revue de Qumrân, Vol. 3, No. 4 (12) (October 1962), p. 500.

[9] Joseph J. Scaliger (1605) Elenchus Trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii; cited in Francis Schmidt. “The Hasideans and the Ancient Jewish ‘Sects’: A Seventeenth-Century Controversy.” in Sacha Stern, Sects and Sectarianism in Jewish History (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 196.

[10] Alexander Lawrie. The History of Free Masonry (Edinburgh: Grand Lodge of Scotland, 1804), p. 38.

[11] Howard Schwartz. Lilith’s Cave: Jewish tales of the supernatural (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 15.

[12] Howard Schwartz. Lilith’s Cave: Jewish tales of the supernatural (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 16.

[13] Shivhei HaBesht. Translated and edited by Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). pp. 13–18.

[14] Dan Cohn-Sherbok. A Dictionary of Kabbalah and Kabbalists (Aelurus Publishing, 2020).

[15] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 453.

[16] Immanuel Etkes. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Origins of Chabad Hasidis (Brandeis University Press, 2015), p. 149.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Gershon David Hundert. Essential Papers on Hasidism (New York University Press, 1991), p. 78.

[19] Shaul Magid. Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. xi.

[20] Gershom Scholem. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York 1995), pp. 320-325.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Yoram Jacobson. Hasidic Thought (MOD Press, 1998).

[23] Yeshayahu Balog & Matthias Morgenstern. “Hasidism: A Mystical Movement Within Eastern European Judaism.” European History Online (EGO), (Mainz: Institute of European History (IEG), December 3, 2010).

[24] George Robinson. “Hasidic Mysticism.” MyJewishLearning.com (accessed April 28, 2018).

[25] Kaufmann Kohler & Louis Ginzberg. “Baer (Dov) of Meseritz.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[26] Immanuel Etkes. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Origins of Chabad Hasidis (Brandeis University Press, 2015), p. 185.

[27] Hayom Yom, introduction.

[28] Shaul Magid. “Jacob Frank and the Heresy We Forgot.” Forward (June 1, 2011).

[29] Liebes, “Ha-tikkun ha-kelali shel R’ Nahman mi-Breslav ve-yahaso le-Shabbeta’ut,” in Shod ha-emunah ha-Shabbeta’it, pp. 238–61, esp. pp. 251–52; as cited in Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816 (Jewish Culture and Contexts), p. 267). University of Pennsylvania Press. Kindle Edition.

[30] Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 47.

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

[32] Gershom Scholem. Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., l974) p. 272-74.

[33] Jay Michaelson. “Why I Study Sabbateanism.” ZEEK: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, (June 2007)

[34] Dov Baer ben Samuel. In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, trans. and ed. Ben-Amos and Mintz, p. 59; as cited in Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 267.

[35] Cited in Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 2.

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

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

[38] Jacob Frank. Zbiór Słów Pańskich (“The collection of the words of the Lord”), no. 597; cited in Pawel Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 177.

[39] Ean Begg. The Cult of the Black Virgin (London: Arkana, Penguin Books, 1985).

[40] Frederick Holweck. “The Five Sacred Wounds.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912).

[41] Ben Zion Wacholder, “Jacob Frank and the Frankists Hebrew Zoharic Letters.” Hebrew Union College Annual, Vol. LIII (1982).

[42] Lothar R. Braun. “1788: Ein Messias im Isenburger Schloss - die ‘Frankisten’.” Offenbach, (www.offenbach.de).

[43] “Album Musical de Maria Szymanowska (review).” Journal of Music and Letters (2002).

[44] “Między dwiema trumnami.” Rzeczpospolita (January 9, 1999).

[45] Биографический очерк_ Борис Клейн, РОДОСЛОВНАЯ ШОПЕНА, Не только версия.

[46] Catholic Jew. “Frankists and the Catholic Church.” alternativegenhist.blogspot.ca (April 15, 2014).

[47] Ibid.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid.

[50] “Hugh Cullen, of Prospect.” Geni. Retrieved from https://www.geni.com/people/Hugh-Cullen-of-Prospect/6000000025571185805

[51] James Buckley, Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, & Trent Pomplun. The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism (John Wiley & Sons. 2010). p. 223.

Volume Two

1. The Elizabethan Age

2. The Great Conjunction

3. The Alchemical Wedding

4. The Rosicrucian Furore

5. The Invisible College

6. 1666

7. The Royal Society

8. America

9. Redemption Through Sin

10. Oriental Kabbalah

11. The Grand Lodge

12. The Illuminati

13. The Asiatic Brethren

14. The American Revolution

15. Haskalah

16. The Aryan Myth

17. The Carbonari

18. The American Civil War

19. God is Dead

20. Theosophy

21. Shambhala