15. The Aryan Myth

Mixed Multitude

“The similarities between the Jewish political messianic trend and German Nazism,” conclude Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, “are glaring.”[1] As explained by Gordon R. Mork, “Among the greatest and most tragic ironies of the history of Western civilization is that of the Jews and Germany. As German nationalism grew in strength during the ninetieth century, Jews were among its leading advocates.”[2] What would become Weimar Classicism, a cultural and literary movement based in Weimar that sought to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical and Enlightenment ideas. It was not until the concept of nationalism itself—and the notion of the Volk—was developed by German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803), a member of the Illuminati and a great admirer of Mendelssohn, that German nationalism began.[3] The concept of Volk then became intertwined with the myth of the “Aryan,” a term first coined by Freemason Friedrich von Schlegel, the husband of Mendelssohn’s daughter Dorothea Veit, and who, Leon Poliakov explained, in The Aryan Myth: The History of Racist and Nationalistic, was the chief promoter of the myth of an Aryan race at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Paradoxically, Frankist anti-Semitism and Kabbalistic theories of heredity contributed to the theory of the “Aryan” race, developed by European scholars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Shahak and Mezvinsky clarify, the Halakha—the collective body of Jewish religious laws that are derived from the Written and Oral Torah—although discriminating against them in some ways, treats converts to Judaism as new Jews, a notion rejected in the Kabbalah because of its emphasis upon the cosmic difference between Jews and non-Jews. As the authors indicate, most Jewish authors that have written about the Kabbalah in English, German and French have avoided this topic, and it is only in books written in Hebrew where readers can find a more accurate depiction of the fact that the Kabbalistic texts, as opposed to Talmudic literature, emphasize salvation for the Jews alone.[4] This point, the authors highlight, is well illustrated in studies of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. As Shahak and Mezvinsky state, “One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”[5] As an example, Yesaiah Tishbi, an authority on the Kabbalah who wrote in Hebrew, in his scholarly work, The Theory of Evil and the (Satanic) Sphere in Lurianic Cabbala, cited Rabbi Hayim Vital (1542 – 1620), the chief interpreter of Luria, who wrote in his book, Gates of Holiness: “Souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the satanic sphere. For this reason, souls of non-Jews are called evil, not good, and are created without [divine] knowledge.”[6]

As explained by Charles Novak, in his history of Jacob Frank, the Frankists’ conception of the unfolding of history, following the Sabbatean concept of “defeating evil from within,” conforms to a perception that one of the secrets of the Bible is that it’s true history should be read in reverse: the banished are the true heroes, and the false heroes are the banished of future times. The Frankists could therefore identify with Esau, instead of his brother Jacob, the ancestor of the Jews:

It goes without saying, therefore, that the Frankist ideal—anti-Talmudist—fights for the rehabilitation of Esau at the expense of Jacob, and this rehabilitation is part of an even wider field, for it concerns Leah and Rachel, Melchizedek, Hagar banished by Sarah and above all Ishmael, the ancestor of Islam, expelled in favor of Isaac, son of Sarah. And finally, the supreme extrapolation, the Serpent, Samael and Lilith expelled from paradise, then opposing Adam and Eve and in this case, I come back to the redemption of Evil, Evil that will be forgiven one day.[7]

Thus the Frankists who has converted to Christianity, or the fully assimilated Jew, becomes a true “Aryan,” and superior to the primitive Jew who has failed to transcend his archaic Jewish heritage. When the Frankists were chastised by the rest of the Jewish community, they were denounced as remnants of the “mixed multitude” (erev rav), mentioned in Exodus. Jewish tradition interpreted the phrase erev rav as referring to a group of foreigners who joined Moses and the Israelites in their exodus from Egypt.[8] The majority of rabbinic scholars saw in the erev rav the source of corruption: they were to have enticed Israelites to worship the Golden Calf and angered God by demanding the abolition of the prohibition of incest.[9] As recounted in the Zohar, the erev rav were the impurity that the serpent imparted to Eve. They were offspring of the demonic rulers, Samael and Lilith. They were the Nefilim or “sons of God” who intermarried with the female descendants of Cain prior to the Flood, and produced a race of giants known as Anakim or Rephaim, from whom descended the Canaanites and Amalekites, , the traditional enemies of the early Israelites. They practiced incest, idolatry, and witchcraft. They contributed to the building of the Tower of Babel and caused the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem.[10] According to the Zohar:

It is them [the mixed multitude] who cause the world to revert to the state of waste and void. The mystery of this matter is that because of them the Temple was destroyed, “and the earth was waste and void” [Gen. 1:2], for [the Temple] is the center and foundation of the world. Yet as soon as the light, which is the Holy One, blessed be He, comes, they will be wiped off the face of the earth and will perish.[11]

 

As pointed out by Yaakov Shapiro in The Empty Wagon, according to the Zohar, at the end of the fourth and last galus (“period of exile”), before the arrival of the Messiah, many Jewish leaders will be reincarnations of the erev rav. They will include Amalekites, the ancient enemies of the Israelites, who will be reincarnated as Jews. As Yaakov explains, according to these interpretations, a Jew can be part of erev rav, even though he was born ethnically Jewish, because his soul can change from a Jewish one to one of the erev rav, depending on his actions. There are five types of these imposters who will appear in the last galus: Amalekim, Giborim, Nefilim, Anakim, and Refaim. As explained in the Zohar, “The Erev Rav… among them are apostates (meshumadim), heretics (minim), unbelievers (apikorsim)… and about the Jews it is stated in this respect, “And they mingled with the gentiles and they learned their ways (Tehillim 106:35).”[12]

Indo-Europeans

It was to this same line of descent, back to the “Sons of God,” that European scholars of the early nineteenth century traced the ancestors of the so-called “Aryans.” As explained by Poliakov, as European scholars began discovering the civilization of India, they recognized certain similarities Sanskrit and Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic languages. For convenience, these languages were referred to as Indo-German by most German authors, while other countries preferred the term Indo-European. Though initially asserted as merely a linguistic relationship, it was eventually theorized that, if there had once existed an “original” Indo-European language, there must also have been an “original” Indo-European race. As Robert Drews summarizes:

 

It is an unfortunate coincidence that studies of the Indo-European language community flourished at a time when nationalism, and a tendency to see history in racial terms, was on the rise in Europe. There was no blinking the fact, in the nineteenth century, that most of the world was dominated by Europeans or people of European descent. The easiest explanation for this was that Europeans, or at least most members of the European family, were genetically superior to peoples of darker complexion. It was thus a welcome discovery that the ancient Greeks and Persians were linguistically, and therefore, one could assume, biologically, “related” to the modern Europeans. The same racial stock, it appeared, had been in control of the world since Cyrus conquered Babylon. This stock was obviously the white race. India, it is true, presented a problem and required a separate explanation. Aryans had invaded India no later than the second millennium BC, and successfully imposed their language on the aboriginal population, but the Aryan race had evidently become sterile in that southern clime and was eventually submerged by the aboriginal and inferior stock of the subcontinent.[13]

In 1779, Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736 – 1793, a member, along with Benjamin Franklin, of the Masonic lodge called Neuf Soeurs in Paris, in his Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, based on astronomical calculations, concluded that Atlantis was Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean, from which originated a race of giants who migrated south to Mongolia and then the Caucasus and laid the foundations for all the ancient civilizations of Asia. In 1803, Bory de Saint-Vincent (1778 – 1846) published his Essais sur les iles fortunees et l’antique Atlantide, assumed that Atlantis was the original home of civilization, and when subjected to a cataclysm, its inhabitants were forced to conquer the known world in search of new territories.[14] Francis Wilford (1761 – 1822) equated the “Atala, the White Island,” mentioned in the Vishnu Purana, one of the oldest of the Hindu Puranas, with Atlantis.[15]

Voltaire considered that all occult knowledge was ultimately of Indian origin: “…I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.…”[16] The Encyclopedie of Diderot, in the article on India, suggested that the “sciences may be more ancient in India than in Egypt.” Kant placed the origin of mankind in Tibet, because “this is the highest country. No doubt it was inhabited before any other and could even have been the site of all creation and all science. The culture of the Indians, as is known almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India.”[17] Goethe referred to the “noble and pure” wisdom of the Parsees as a means of escaping the “narrow circle of Hebraic-Rabbinic thought and of reaching the depth and amplitude of Sanskrit.”[18] But, explains Poliakov, it was Herder, “above all who introduced the passion for India into the Germanic lands and who prompted the imagination of the Romantics to seek affiliation with Mother India.”[19]

Schlegel advanced a theory of Aryan origins that purported descent, typical to Gnosticism, from Cain, and which he connected to the “Mountain of the North” of an Indian flood legend found in the Rig-Veda, to be equated with Atlantis.[20] Schlegel supposed that, as a result of mingling, a new people had formed itself in northern India, and that this people, motivated “by some impulse higher than the spur of necessity,” had swarmed towards the West. Wishing to trace the origin of this people back to Cain, he then theorizes, “must not this unknown anxiety of which I speak have pursued fugitive man, as is told of the first murderer whom the Lord marked with a bloody sign, and have flung him to the ends of the earth?”[21] To Schlegel, “everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin.” He carried his conviction a step further, suggesting that even the Egyptians were educated by Indian missionaries. In turn, Egyptians founded a colony in Judea, though, the Jews were only partially indoctrinated with the Indian truths, since they seemed to have been ignorant of a significant doctrine of the occult tradition, the theory of reincarnation, and especially, of the immortality of the soul.[22]

Völkism

Herder was among those chiefly responsible for the rise of romantic nationalism, which fundamentally influenced the formation of the myth of the Aryan race.[23] Herder developed the conception that a nation was not defined by a shared ideology or religion—which a citizen could choose of their own free-will—but rather by inherited factors such as language, race, ethnicity, culture and customs, which came to be associated with the Aryan race, supposed ancestors of the German Volk (“people”). According to Herder: “The most natural state is one nationality with one national character… Nothing therefore appears so indirectly opposite to the end of government as the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixing of all kinds of people and nationalities under one scepter.”[24] Fichte called on Germans to revere the German Volksgeist (“national spirit”) as the foundation of all good culture and civilization, and warned against the evils of Jewish emancipation and suggested the return of the Jews to Palestine.[25]

Thus, Jacob Grim (1785 – 1863) and his brother Wilhelm (1786 – 1859) compiled the famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a collection of volk tales thought to represent the occult lore of the German people, which included Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel. Inspired by their law professor, Friedrich von Savigny (1779 – 1861), who aroused in them an interest in history and philology, the brothers studied medieval German literature.[26] In 1804, Savigny married Kunigunde Brentano, sister of Bettina von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. It was under direction of Clemens Brentano that the brothers Grimm began collecting fairytales.[27] During Napoleon’s rule over Germany, Brentano, and fellow Illuminati member Achim von Arnim, published the most famous German folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boys Magic Horn”). Through Savigny and his circle of friends, including Brentano and Ludwig Arnim, the Grimms were introduced to the ideas of Herder, who thought that German literature should revert to simpler forms, which he defined as Volkspoesie (“natural poetry”)—as opposed to Kunstpoesie (“artistic poetry”).[28]

Grimm, according to Poliakov was most influential promoter of the Indo-German or Aryan myth.[29] Grimm wrote the classic History of the German Language (1848) which Grimm described as a “political work to the marrow of its bones.” It contains a chapter entitled Einwanderung (“Immigration”), where he explains:

All the people of Europe and, to begin with, those which were originally related and which gained supremacy at the cost of many wanderings and dangers, emigrated from Asia in the remote past. They were propelled from East to West by an irresistible instinct (unhemmbarer Trieb), the real cause of which is unknown to us. The vocation and courage of those peoples, which were originally related and destined to rise to such heights, is shown by the fact that European history was almost entirely made by them.[30]

 

Driven by the völkisch movement, Pan-Germanism was influenced by the notion of a German “volk” expressed by Romantic nationalists like the brothers Grimm, Herder and Fichte. According to Arash Abizadeh, “If only a handful of texts can rightly claim to rank amongst the foundation texts of nationalist political thought, Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation) is surely is surely one of them.”[31] Fichte write in the Addresses: “This then is a Volk in a higher meaning of the word, as from the point of view of a spiritual world: the totality of men continuing to live with each other in a society and un- endingly creating themselves naturally and spiritualty out of themselves—that totality arises from and is guided by a certain special law of the Divine evolution.”[32]

 

Western Civilization

As a young man, explained Michael Baur, Hegel aspired to be a Volkserzieher (“educator of the volk”), in the tradition of thinkers such as Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Schiller, who were all admirers of Winckelmann.[33] It was largely under the appeal of  Winckelmann that many German philosophers began to develop an appreciation for the ancient Greeks, including those who went on to influence of Hegel, who had numerous associations with the Illuminati. In his essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”) of 1796/1797, Schiller not only conceived of ancient Greece as the preeminent cultural paradigm for advancement of humanity. The works of Friedrich Schlegel, Vom Wert des Studiums der Griechen und Römer (“On the Value of the Study of the Greeks and Romans,” 1795/1796) and Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (“On the Study of Greek Poetry,” 1797), emphasizes the merit of a return to the classical ideal. Studying Greek and Roman antiquity essentially leads to an understanding of everything that is “grand,” “noble,” “good,” and “beautiful,” and therefore it also establishes an ideal of humanity to which modern society should aspire.[34] Hölderlin believed that Greece was the birthplace of all positive revolutions of mankind, and saw Ancient Greece as reborn in the Germany of his time.[35]

Hegel, a friend of Hölderlin  and a colleague of Friedrich Schlegel at the University of Jena, admitted it was Winckelmann who opened “a whole new way of looking at things.”[36] Thus, combined with the theory of the Aryan race, the notion of inevitable progress, derived from the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria through Hegel, led to the development of the Eurocentric history of Western Civilization, which celebrates Europeans and the vanguards of human intellectual progress. It was due to Hegel, that Greece’s debt to the Ancient Near East was minimized, favoring its society as a “miracle,” and as the so-called “cradle” of Western Civilization. As demonstrated by Glenn Alexander Magee in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Hegel’s philosophy was derived from the Luria’s Kabbalah—mediated through the thought of Jacob Boehme—positing that history was the unfolding and progression of “Spirit” (Geist). According to Hegel:

World history is the record of the spirit’s efforts to attain knowledge of what it is in itself. The Orientals do not know that the spirit or man as such are free in themselves. And because they do not know that, they are not themselves free. They only know that One is free… The consciousness of freedom first awoke among the Greeks, and they were accordingly free; but, like the Romans, they only knew that Some, and not all men as such, are free… The Germanic nations, with the rise of Christianity, were the first to realize that All men are by nature free, and that freedom of spirit is his very essence.[37]

Hegel was introduced to the ideas of Boehme through his reading of Illuminati member Franz von Baader (1765 – 1841), who was also influenced Franz Joseph Molitor of the Asiatic Brethren. Hegel was also influenced by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 – 1782), a follower of Boehme, who was in contact with Kabbalists who introduced him to Knorr von Rosenroth’s Cabala Denudata and the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. This knowledge helped him attempt a synthesis of Boehme and Kabbalah.[38] In 1730, Oetinger visited the Moravian Brethren and their founder Count Zinzendorf, and remaining there some months as teacher of Hebrew and Greek.[39] Oetinger was also in contact with Hermann Fictuld (1700 – c. 1777), one of the leaders of the Golden and Rosy Cross.[40]

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, “Hegel is important for Jewish history for two reasons: first, for his attitude to Judaism, which, because of his importance, was of major interest for many Jews throughout the first half of the 19th century; second, for his philosophy of history and religion in general, which influenced Jewish and other thinkers for an even longer period.”[41] Hegel had a lifelong interest in Judaism and supported Jewish emancipation. Hegel nevertheless conformed to a Kantian critique of Judaism. According to Hegel:

All the conditions of the Jewish people, including the wretched, abjectly poor, and squalid state they are still in today, are nothing more than the consequences and developments of their original destiny—an infinite power that they desperately sought to surmount—a destiny that has maltreated them and will not cease to do so until this people conciliates it by the spirit of beauty, abolishing it as a result of this conciliation?[42]

According to Paul Rose, “It was Hegel’s historical philosophy that provided revolutionary antisemitism with one of its theoretical pillars…” Hegel espoused Kant’s philosophical denunciation that Judaism was not truly moral because it entailed obedience to the external commandments of a remote God, rather than to man’s inner inclinations to love, freedom, and morality like Christianity. Judaism, according to Hegel, was superseded by the movement of the “world spirit” from the ancient to the modern Christian world, and in the process the Jewish people mere marginalized outside the current of world history. Thus the Jews were seen as incapable of historical development, a “fossil nation,” a “ghost-race.” Being outside of the normal course history, the Jews became a “parasite race,” whose only access to freedom and redemption would be in their disappearance from a historical stage on where they no longer had a role.[43]




[1] Israel Shahak & Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Pluto Press, 1999), p. 65.

[2] Gordon R. Mork. “German Nationalism and Jewish Assimilation: The Bismarck Period.” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 22: 1 (January 1977), p. 81.

[3] Alexander J. Motyl (2001). Encyclopedia of Nationalism, Volume II. Academic Press, pp. 189–190.

[4] Shahak & Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, p. 62.

[5] Ibid., p. ix.

[6] Ibid., p. 58.

[7] Novak. Jacob Frank (trans. DeepL), p. 113.

[8] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude (translated by DeepL), p. 3.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Zohar 1:28b. 13–16;  Zohar Hadash, 645, 31d. 17;  Zohar 1:25a–25b; 1:25b. 19; 2:191a, passim. 20.  Tikkune Zohar, Tikkun 19; cited in Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 3.

[11] Zohar 1:25b; cited in Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude.

[12] Raya Mehemna, 2:120b; cited in Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro. The Empty Wagon: Zionism's Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (Bais Medrash Society, 2017).

[13] Robert Drews. The Coming of the Greeks (Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 5.

[14] de Camp, Lost Continents, p. 81.

[15] Francis Wilford. Journal of Asiatic Researches, Vol. VIII (Calcutta, 1808).

[16] Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 185.

[17] Ibid., p. 184.

[18] Ibid., p. 195.

[19] Ibid., p. 186.

[20] Ignatius Donnelly. Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882)

[21] Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 192.

[22] Ibid., p. 191.

[23] Christopher Dandeker, ed.. Nationalism and Violence (Transaction Publishers, 1998). p. 52.

[24] Robert Ergang. Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism, pp. 243-244. Cited in Francis R. Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (University of Texas Press, 1985), p. 17.

[25] Laqueur. History of Zionism, p. 20; Friedman. Germany, p. 6. Cited in Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 20.

[26] Jack Zipes. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, 1st ed. (Routledge, 1988), p. 35.

[27] Ibid., p. xxiv.

[28] Ibid., pp. 7–8.

[29] Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 198.

[30] Ibid., p. 198.

[31] Arash Abizadeh. “Was Fichte and Ethnic Nationalist? On cultural Nationalism and its Double.” History of Political Thought, 26: 2 (Summer 2005), p. 334.

[32] Reden an die deutsche Nation, Sämmtliche Werke, 7, p. 38. Cited in Michael D. McGuire. “Rhetoric, philosophy and the volk: Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s addresses to the German nation.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 62:2 (1976), p. 141.

[33] Michael Baur. Hegel and the Tradition (University of Toronto Press, 1998).

[34] Christian J. Emden. “The Invention of Antiquity: Nietzsche on Classicism, Classicality, and the Classical Tradition.” In (ed.) Paul Bishop. Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition (Boydell & Brewer, 2004), p. 377.

[35] Hannu Salmi. Imagined Germany: Richard Wagner’s National Utopia (New York: Peter Lang, 2020), p. 72.

[36] Alex Potts. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 13, 24.

[37] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Lectures on the philosophy of world history. Introduction, reason in history (translated from the German edition of Johannes Hoffmeister from Hegel papers assembled by H. B. Nisbet) (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

[38] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 65.

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

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

[41] “Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/hegel-georg-wilhelm-friedrichdeg

[42] Theologische Jugendschriften, p. 260.

[43] Cited in Paul Lawrence Rose. German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism From Kant to Wagner (Princeston: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 112.

Zionism