13. Neoclassicism

German Socrates

As the ideas of the Enlightenment swept across Europe and the United States, the period saw in the arts a shift to neoclassical standards of style away from baroque religiosity and rococo “decadence.”[1] Goethe, along with fellow Illuminati member Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803), was a leader of the literary and cultural movement known as Weimar Classicism, whose practitioners established a new humanism from the synthesis of ideas from Romanticism, Classicism, and the Age of Enlightenment. Goethe, like many others of the German Romantic period, including Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786)—the central figure in the development of the Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment”—and his friends Lessing and Herder, was an admirer of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717 – 1768), a German art historian and archaeologist who had a decisive influence on the rise of the Neoclassical movement. As explained by Bernd Witte, in “German Classicism and Judaism,” contrasting the secularizing trends of the Enlightenment with the emergence of the influence Mendelssohn, that “Jewish monotheism first entered into the realm of modern occidental culture at the precise historical moment that the German cultural memory became obsessed with Greek antiquity.”[2] As it cast away Christianity, the Enlightenment, or the Illuminati, replaced the icons of the past with a fraudulent religious experience based on contemplation of art and music, with the example of the ancient Greeks—a non-Christian or Jewish people—provided as the epitome, an epoch known as Romanticism. 

The leading personalities of Weimar Classicism were admirers of Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786), the central figure in the development of the Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The post-modernist philosopher Michel Foucault proposed that the Enlightenment is bound up with the Jewish Question, the debate about the appropriate status of the Jews that began during the Age of Enlightenment and after the French Revolution. In a clear attack against religious authority, Kant published his famous answer to Was ist Aufklärung? (“What is Enlightenment?”) in the Berlinische Monatschrift in 1784:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is man’s inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”[3]

For Foucault, the Enlightenment, indeed the beginning of modernity itself, didn’t begin with Kant’s essay, but as a combination with Mendelssohn’s essay published a few months earlier, in the same publication, in answer to the very same question. Kant’s more famous answer, “marks” according to Foucault, “the discreet entrance into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering, but it has never managed to get rid of, either.” With the two essays, continues Foucault, “the German Aufklärung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history.”[4]

Sabbatean Illuminatus Joseph von Sonnenfels invited Mendelssohn to embrace Christianity, but when he was rebuked in Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem in 1783, he apologized in 1784 by making him a member of his German Scientific Society and the Vienna Academy of Sciences.[5] According to a list of ordination, in a certificate held in the Schiff Collection at the New York Public Library, Mendelssohn was a successor of Shabbetai Zevi.[6] The certificate, which was mentioned briefly by Jewish historian Jacob Katz in Out of the Ghetto, was preserved by Mendelssohn’s friend, the notorious Illuminati publisher Friedrich Nicolai. Mendelssohn was a close friend of another Illuminatus, the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781), who together with Bode in 1767 created the J.J.C. Bode & Co. publishing firm and store in Hamburg.[7]

First to succeed was Shabbetai Zevi’s mentor, Nathan of Gaza (1643 – 1680). Next was his disciple Solomon Ayllon, the Sabbatean rabbi of Bevis Marks. 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 (c. 1670 – c. 1730/1750) 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. He had relations with Jonathan Eybeschütz and the Sabbatean Mordecai Eisenstadt (c. 1650 – 1729). Following his ordination as successor to Zevi, after first proclaiming himself the Messiah, Judah Leib then passed on the title to Rabbi Eybeschütz. In 1761, Mendelssohn met in Hamburg with Eybeschütz, who wrote an essay extolling him.[8] Mendelssohn’s teacher David Fränkel (c. 1704 – 1762) was a student of Rabbi Michael Chasid, the chief rabbi of Berlin and a Sabbatean.[9]

Lessing modeled Mendelssohn as the central figure of his drama Nathan the Wise, which features the Masonic theme of a universal religion. Set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, the book describes how the wise Jewish merchant Nathan, the enlightened sultan Saladin, and the initially anonymous Templar, bridge their gaps between Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The drama is also believed to have been in reference to Sabbatai Zevi’s patron, Nathan of Gaza. It has also been suggested that the inspiration for the character might also have been Jacob Falk, who was referred to in another work of Lessing, Ernst and Falk, his famous essay about Freemasonry.[10]

In 1762, Mendelssohn won the prize offered by the Berlin Academy for an essay on the application of mathematical proofs to metaphysics, On Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences. Among the competitors were Thomas Abbt (1738 – 1766) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), who came second. In the same year, Frederick the Great granted Mendelssohn the privilege of Schutzjude (“Protected Jew”), which assured him the right to live in Berlin undisturbed. As a result of Abbt introducing him to Plato’s Phaedo, Mendelssohn wrote Phädon oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (“Phaedo or On the Immortality of Souls; 1767”), published by Nicolai, which was an immediate success. In addition to being one of the most widely read books of its time in German, it was soon translated into several European languages, including English. Mendelssohn was hailed as the “German Plato,” or the “German Socrates.”[11] Kant criticized Mendelssohn’s argument for immortality in the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787).

Mendelssohn’s Phädon was the first philosophical work read by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), who is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. The artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, the friend of Martin Luther, who used the winged dragon as his seal, had three daughters, one of whom was Barbara Cranach, who was an ancestor of Goethe. Goethe, a member of the Illuminati, achieved fame as the author of several works that dealt with satanic themes, such as his poem Prometheus, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and of Faust, who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge, considered the greatest work of German literature. His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler. Beethoven, who idolized Goethe, declared that a Faust Symphony would be the greatest thing for art.[12] According to Magee, Goethe’s work “was a major conduit for the indirect influence of alchemy, Boehme, Kabbalah, and various other Hermetic offshoots.”[13] As a young man, he read Paracelsus, Basil Valentine, van Helmont, Swedenborg and the Kabbalah. In several instances, he used the imagery of the rose and the cross in Die Geheimnisse. In 1768, Goethe participated in alchemical experiments with Suzanna von Klettenberg, a follower of Count Zinzendorf.[14] Goethe cited Spinoza alongside Shakespeare and Carl Linnaeus as one of the three strongest influences on his life and work.[15]

Villa Albani

Around 1770, explains Witte, “the young generation of German poets radically rejected the traditional religious beliefs, propagating in its place the new religion of the infinite productivity of man.”[16] Within the aesthetics of Weimar classicism, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey became the paradigms of the literary work of genius. As Bernd Witte explains, in “German Classicism and Judaism”:

 

Moreover, the contemplation of Greek statues replaced the ritual of traditional religious services. It became the ultimate foundation and legitimation of the new anthropological discourse in Germany. The ideal of the human figure, the artistic representation of the human body now acquired a quasi-religious aura.[17]

Goethe first achieved international renown with the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). As Bernd Witte further explains:

The novel’s unprecedented European success rested not only on its introduction of the ideal of soulful love but also on the notion that literature is the medium in which fundamental existential issues are decided. It demonstrated that decisive stations in the life of an individual are no longer determined by metaphysical principles but by literary texts.[18]

 

With the advent of the Grand Tour, a fad of collecting antiquities began that laid the foundations of many great collections spreading a Neoclassical revival throughout Europe.[19] In 1755, Winckelmann published his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (“Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture”), which contained the first statement of the doctrines he afterwards developed, the ideal of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” and the definitive assertion that, “[t]he one way for us to become great, perhaps inimitable, is by imitating the ancients.” The work made Winckelmann famous, and was it was reprinted several times and soon translated into French and English. On the strength of the Gedanken, Augustus III of Poland—who was Jacob Frank’s godfather at his baptism, and for whom Baron von Hund, founder of the Strict Observance, served as Intimate Counselor[20]—granted him a pension so that he could continue his studies in Rome. His first task was to describe the statues in the Cortile del Belvedere: the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the so-called Antinous, and the Belvedere Torso, which represented to him the “utmost perfection of ancient sculpture.”

“By no people,” Winckelmann asserted, “has beauty been so highly esteemed as by the Greeks,” but by “beauty,” for Winckelmann was homoerotic titillation from depictions of the male nudes.[21] “From admiration I pass to ecstasy…,” he wrote of the Apollo Belvedere.[22] On further conveying his lustful feelings, Winckelmann wrote, “I should have been able to say more if I had written for the Greeks, and not in a modern tongue, which imposed on me certain restrictions.”[23] Susan E. Gustafson, in Men Desiring Men: The Poetry of Same-Sex Identity and Desire in German Classicism, noted how Winckelmann’s letters provide “a set of tropes that signal the struggle to express the male same-sex desire.”[24] The German term griechische Liebe (“Greek love”) appears in German literature between 1750 and 1850, along with socratische Liebe (“Socratic love”) and platonische Liebe (“Platonic love”) in reference to male–male attractions.[25]

In Rome, Winckelmann, who was an open homosexual, had an affair Franz Stauder, a pupil of Anton Raphael Mengs (1728 – 1779), who had been appointed the first painter to Augustus III of Poland.[26] Mengs, like Winckelmann, was supported by the nephew of Pope Clement IX (1649 –1721), Cardinal Albani (1692 – 1779), who commissioned his works. Beginning as librarian-companion to Cardinal Albani, Winckelmann became first Librarian and finally Controller of Antiquities in the Vatican. He was also named librarian to Cardinal Passionei (1682 – 1761), who was impressed by his Greek writing. “Cardinal Passionei, a jovial old man of seventy-eight years,” Winckelmann openly confessed, took him:

…for drives… and he always escorts me home in person. When I accompany him to Frascati, we sit down to table in slippers and night-caps; and if I choose to humour him, in our night-shirts too. This may seem incredible, but I am telling the truth.[27]

Mengs’ pagan-themed fresco painting Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter.[28] The Villa Albani was built to house Albani's collection of antiquities, curated by Winckelmann. Albani developed into one of the most powerful and enterprising collectors of Roman antiquities and patron of the arts of his day.[29] Albani maintained a correspondence with Sir Horace Mann (1706 – 1786), the British envoy at Florence, whose duties included reporting on the activities of the exiled Stuarts, the Old Pretender and the Young Pretender.[30]

Albani also maintained a friendship with Philipp von Stosch (1691 – 1757), a Prussian antiquarian who lived in Rome and Florence. Jonathan I. Israel described von Stosch as “the legendary deist, freemason, and open homosexual.”[31] Stosch was a founder of a Masonic Lodge in Florence in 1733, which Pope Clement IX’s cardinal-nephew Neri Corsini accused of having become “corrupt,” leading to the ban on Catholics becoming Freemasons. As Stosch was employed by the Foreign Office in London and was likely using Freemasonry as a cover to spy on the exiled Stuart cause in Rome, as Pope Clement IX, who was sympathetic to the Jacobites, kept the Old Pretender as his guest in Rome.[32]

Hellfire Club

According to Karl H. Frick, the Masonic lodge, which Stosch founded with Charles Sackville, 2nd Duke of Dorset (1711 – 1769), 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.[33] Along with Hellfire Club founder Sir Francis Dashwood (1708 – 1781), Sackville was member of the Society of Dilettanti, a British society of noblemen and scholars who, inspired by Winckelmann, sponsored the study of ancient Greek and Roman art, and influenced the rise of neo-Classicism.[34] Though the exact date is unknown, the Society is believed to have been established as a gentlemen’s club in 1734 by a group of people who had been on the Grand Tour. In 1743, Horace Walpole denounced the group and described it as “…a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk: the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood, who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy.”[35]

The name Hellfire Club is most commonly used to refer to the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, founded by Dilettanti Sir Francis Dashwood (1708 – 1781), the same year he was elected to the Royal Society. The first official Hellfire Club was founded in London in 1718, by Philip, Duke of Wharton (1698 – 1731), a Freemason, Grand Master of England, and an ardent supporter of the Jacobite cause.[36] Wharton also founded an offshoot of the Hellfire club based in Twickenham, called The Schemers, which inclined more towards debauchery than blasphemy. In 1721, these clubs were disbanded by King George I, who, influenced heavily by Wharton’s political rival Robert Walpole, announced a bill against immorality specifically aimed at the Hellfire Club.[37]

Wharton arranged to be elected the sixth Grand Master in 1722, and appointed Desaguiliers as his Deputy and James Anderson a Grand Warden. However, Wharton apparently abandoned Freemasonry in 1723, and then founded the Ancient Noble Order of the Gormogons, whose he first known Grand Master (or Oecumenical Volgi) was Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, then at Rome in attendance upon the Young Pretender. From the group’s few published articles it is thought that the society’s primary objective was to hold up Freemasonry to ridicule.[38] The Gormogons were first mentioned in the London Daily Post for September 3, 1724, which claimed that the order was “instituted by Chin-Qua Ky-Po, the first Emperor of China (according to their account), many thousand years before Adam, and of which the great philosopher Confucious was Oecumenicae Volgee.” The order was said to have been brought to London by a “Mandarin,” who in turn initiated several “Gentlemen of Honor” into its ranks.

In 1751, Dashwood, leased Medmenham Abbey, which incorporated the ruins of a Cistercian abbey founded in 1201. Dashwood had the abbey rebuilt, but to look like a ruin, and decorated with various pornographic scenes. Rabelais’ motto Fais ce que tu voudras (“Do what thou wilt”) was placed above a doorway in stained glass. After the Black Mass, club members entered the Abbey where were waiting professional prostitutes dressed as nuns and masked from whom they selected to participate in an orgy. However, a few of the participating women were wives or relatives of the club members. John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, inventor of the sandwich, boasted that he seduced virgins to enjoy the “corruption of innocence, for its own sake.”[39]

In addition to the prostitutes were amateurs known as “dollymops,” some of them prominent society women, such as a Jewess named Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston (1721 – 1788).[40] One of the duchess’s most infamous incidents took place in 1749, when she attended a masquerade ball during the King’s Jubilee Celebration dressed as the Greek mythological character Iphigenia, ready for sacrifice, in flesh-colored silk that made her appear virtually naked. Long known as an “adventuress” and sexual intriguer at royal court, the duchess is the only woman in British history to be tried and convicted of bigamy in an open trial before the House of Lords. Chudleigh was forced to leave the country and went to the continent where she had houses in Paris and Rome, befriended the Pope Clement XIV. She lived with Frederick the Great, and several of the French and Russian nobility, and bought a large estate outside St. Petersburg.[41]

The duchess was also the mistress of the James Hamilton, 6th Duke of Hamilton (1724 – 1758), a Freemason and cousin of another member of the Society of Dilettanti, British diplomat Sir William Hamilton (1730 – 1803).[42] Sir William Hamilton collaborated with Richard Payne Knight (1751 –1824) a classical scholar and archaeologist, on A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786/87). The central claim of the book was that an international religious impulse to worship “the generative principle” was articulated through phallic imagery, and that this imagery has persisted into the modern age. Knight’s Discourse originated in Hamilton’s report in 1781 on phallic rituals to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society and Secretary-Treasurer of the Dilettanti. Knight lead the Dilettanti to write the Society’s ultimate work, Specimens of Antient Sculpture, whose various homoerotic tributes to Greek works of art owed a debt to the influence of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art.[43]

Sir William Hamilton was the husband of the infamous Emma Hamilton (1765 – 1815). Also known as Lady Hamilton, she was an English model and actress, who is remembered as the mistress of Admiral Lord Nelson (1758 – 1805), regarded as one of the greatest naval commanders in history. Emma had also been a mistress of the politician Charles Greville (1749 – 1809). However, when Emma stood in the way of a search for a wealthy wife, Greville pawned her off on his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, from whom she derived her title.[44] Lady Hamilton became famous for a form of striptease she developed, what she called her “Attitudes,” or tableaux vivants, in which she portrayed semi-nude sculptures and paintings before British visitors. Emma’s performances were a sensation with visitors from across Europe and even attracted the attention of Goethe. In 1800, Emma became Dame Emma Hamilton, a title she held as a member of the Order of Malta, awarded to her by the then Grand Master of the Order, Tsar Paul I, in recognition of her role in the defense of the island of Malta against the French.[45]

Greek Love

Winckelmann’s major work, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764, “The History of Ancient Art”), which deeply influenced contemporary views of the superiority of Greek art, was translated into French in 1766 and later into English and Italian. Lessing, based many of the ideas in his Laocoön (1766) on Winckelmann’s views on harmony and expression in the visual arts. Reviewing the 1756 edition in the first issue of Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, the journal he had recently co-founded with Moses Mendelssohn, the young Friedrich Nicolai—who would later become the Illuminati publisher—praised “Herr Winckelmann, who has now embarked upon a voyage to Rome,” as a man “from whom the fine arts will undoubtedly derive great benefit.”[46]

Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717 – 1799), who studied with Mengs and Winckelmann, was the drawing teacher of Goethe, with whom he kept up friendly relations afterwards at Weimar. Winckelmann subsequently exercised a powerful influence over Goethe. For example, Goethe’s journey to the Italian peninsula and Sicily from 1786 to 1788 was of great significance on the development of his aesthetic and philosophy. During the course of his trip, Goethe met and befriended the Swiss Neoclassical painter Angelica Kauffman (1741 – 1807) and the German painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751 – 1829), as well as encountering Lady Hamilton and Cagliostro.[47] In 1783, upon the recommendation of Goethe, Tischbein had received a stipendium from Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1745 – 1804), a friend of Adam Weishaupt, who was the great-grandfather of Prince Albert the husband of Queen Victoria.[48]

In Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert (“Winkelmann and his Century”), Goethe claimed that literary classicism owed its ideal of beauty to Winckelmann who was able to develop to convey because of his homosexuality.[49] Goethe’s relationship with his male servant, Philipp Seidel, which was certainly described by Seidel as homoerotic.[50] Goethe also defended pederasty: “Pederasty is as old as humanity itself, and one can therefore say that it is natural, that it resides in nature, even if it proceeds against nature. What culture has won from nature will not be surrendered or given up at any price.”[51] Goethe published his famous poem about Ganymede (1789), the myth that was a model for the Greek social custom of paiderastia, the romantic relationship between an adult male and an adolescent male. It immediately follows Prometheus, and the two poems together should be understood as a pair, Ganymed—who is seduced by God (or Zeus) through the beauty of Spring—expressing the sentiment of “divine love,” and the other misotheism, the “hatred of the gods” or “hatred of God.”

In a letter to Johann Georg Zimmermann in 1784, Moses Mendelssohn pictured “the ideal man […] who would do for the cause of God what Winckelmann did for paganism.”[52] Winckelmann also posited the existence of an art tradition in ancient Israel, that would have preceded anything in Greece, recalling the wrought images in the Bible. As Winckelmann believed that artistic excellence was conditioned by climate and physiology, he speculated that the physical conformation of the ancient Jews would have been suitable for the expression of ideas of beauty. Hebrew art, Winckelmann surmised, must have achieved a degree of excellence, if not in sculpture, than in drawing and other art forms, taking note that Bible recorded that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar exiled from Jerusalem a thousand artists expert in inlaid work.[53]

About Egypt and Egyptian art, however, Winckelmann expressed only contempt. The opinion was therefore reciprocated in Mendelssohn. for similar reasons. According to Braiterman, “Although he never would have admitted it to others or seen it himself, Mendelssohn’s Jewish thought was part of the neoclassical rebellion against ‘tradition,’ which in this context means the fusion of parts in seventeenth-century baroque art and culture.” Braiterman notes that in his book on Mendelssohn, David Sorkin makes made reference to “baroque Judaism,” by which he meant Judaism of Talmud and Kabbalah, and that Gershom Scholem compared Sabbateanism to the contemporary European baroque. Mendelssohn’s interest in the neoclassicism of Winckelmann was, therefore, seen as a reform of ancient Judaism by proposing that there were new ways of interpretating the beauty it was capable of producing, that could compete with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on “reason” of its new artforms.[54]


[1] Zachary Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion: Moses Mendelssohn, Neoclassicism, and Ceremonial Aesthetics” in Christian Wiese & Martina Urban (eds.) In Honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr (Berlin: de Guyer, 2012), p. 11.

[2] Bernd Witte. “German Classicism and Judaism.” In Steven E. Aschheim & Vivian Liska. The German-Jewish Experience Revisited. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts, Volume 3 (De Gruyter, 2015), p. 50.

[3] Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklarung?,” Kants gesammelte Schriften. Akademie-Ausgabe (Berlin, 1904 ff.), hereafter “AA,” VIII, 35, tr. H.B. Nisbet in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge, 1970), 54; Cited in James Schmidt. “The Question of Enlightenment: Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Mittwochsgesellschaft,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 50: 2 (April – June, 1989), pp. 269.

[4] Miriam Leonard. “Greeks, Jews, and the Enlightenment: Moses Mendelssohn’s Socrates.” Cultural Critique, 74 (Winter 2010), pp. 197.

[5] M. B. Goldstein. The Newest Testament: A Secular Bible (ArchwayPublishing, 2013), p. 592.

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

[7] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[8] Kerem Chemed. Volume III, pp. 224-225.

[9] David Shavin. “Philosophical Vignettes from the Political Life of Moses Mendelssohn” FIDELIO Magazine, Vol . 8, No. 2, Summer 1999; Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 195 n. 95.

[10] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 192.

[11] Israel Abrahams. “Mendelssohn, Moses.” In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 18 (11th ed.). (Cambridge University Press, 1911) pp. 120–121.

[12] Oscar Thompson. “If Beethoven Had Written ‘Faust.’” The Musical Quarterly 10:1 (1924), pp. 13–20.

[13] Glenn Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornel: Cornell University Press, July 2001), p. 61.

[14] Ibid., p. 59.

[15] “What people have said about Linnaeus.” Linné on line. Linnaeus.uu.se. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110513033923/http://www.linnaeus.uu.se/online/life/8_3.html

[16] Bernd Witte. “German Classicism and Judaism.” In Steven E. Aschheim & Vivian Liska. The German-Jewish Experience Revisited. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts, Volume 3 (De Gruyter, 2015), p. 47.

[17] Ibid, p. 48.

[18] Ibid., p. 46.

[19] Stephen L. Dyson. In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. xii.

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

[21] Alex Potts. Flesh and the Ideal : Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 116.

[22] “Apollo Belvedere.” The Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 55–56.

[23] David Irwin (ed.) Winckelmann: Writings on Art (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 105–106. Cited in Crompton. Byron and Greek Love, pp. 87–88.

[24] Susan E. Gustafson. Men Desiring Men: The Poetry of Same-Sex Identity and Desire in German Classicism (Wayne State University Press, 2002), p. 63.

[25] Ibid., p. 63.

[26] “Winckelmann, Johann Joachim.” Dictionary of Art Historians. Retrieved from https://arthistorians.info/winckelmannj/

[27] Daniel J. Boorstin. The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), p. 585.

[28] George Williamson. “Anthon Rafael Mengs.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 10. Retrieved from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10189a.htm

[29] Seymour Howard. “Some Eighteenth-Century ‘Restored’ Boxers.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56 (1993, pp. 238-255) p. 238f.

[30] Lesley Lewis. Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth-Century Rome (1961).

[31] Jonathan I. Israel. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2011), p. 133.

[32] “A Concise History of Freemasonry.” Old Epsomian Lodge. Retrieved from http://www.oelodge.uklinux.net/history.htm

[33] 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).

[34] Bruce Redford. Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008), 164.

[35] Horace Walpole; cited in Jeremy Black. The British and the Grand Tour (1985), p. 120.

[36] Ibid., p. 62.

[37] “The Gorgomons.” The Square Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.thesquaremagazine.com/mag/article/202006the-gormogons/

[38] Ibid.

[39] Horace Walpole; cited in Jeremy Black. The British and the Grand Tour (1985), p. 31.

[40] James Shelby Downard. “Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism,” in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed. Jim Keith (Feral House, l993), p. 59.

[41] “Chudleigh, Elizabeth (1720–1788).” Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia.

[42] John Isbell. “Introduction,” Germaine De Stael, Corinne, or, Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Worlds Classics, 1998), p. ix.

[43] Redford. Dilettanti, p. 164.

[44] D. Constantine. Fields of Fire: a life of Sir William Hamilton (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), p. 137.

[45] T.J. Pettigrew. Memoirs of the Life of Vice-admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, vol. i. (London: T. & W. Boone, 1849), p. 324.

[46] Friedrich Nicolai (1757), p. 65.

[47] Will D. Desmond. Hegel’s Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 10.

[48] Robert Tobin. “German Literature.” Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 2000).

[49] W. Daniel Wilson. “Diabolical Entrapment: Mephisto, the Angels, and the Homoerotic in Goethe’s Faust II.” in Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 177.

[50] Ibid., p. 176.

[51] Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche (Zürich: Artemis Verl, 1976) p. 686.

[52] Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion,” p. 18.

[53] Winckelmann. The History of Ancient Art, 31, 108–109. Cited in Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion,” p. 15.

[54] Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion,” p. 19.

Zionism