42. The Forte Kreis

Neuromantik 

Invited to speak in at the 1934 conference was Martin Buber (1878 – 1965), Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher, who despite his dedication to Zionism, was heavily influenced by the völkisch ideology. Buber was a direct descendant of the sixteenth-century rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, known as the Maharam of Padua. Karl Marx is another notable relative. In 1898, he joined the Zionist movement, and in 1902 became the editor of its central organ, the weekly Die Welt. In that year, he published his thesis, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Individuationsproblems, on Jakob Boehme and Nicholas of Cusa. Buber also wrote Tales of the Hasidim, based on the written and oral lore of the founder of Hasidism, Baal Shem Tov. Buber also wrote The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, contrasting Hasidism with biblical prophecy, Spinoza, Freud, Sankara, Meister Eckhart, Gnosticism, Christianity, Zionism, and Zen Buddhism. However, Buber broke with Judaism. He maintained close friendships to Zionists and philosophers such as Chaim Weizmann, Max Brod, Hugo Bergman, and Felix Weltsch.

As George Mosse and Paul Mendes-Flohr have argued, völkisch themes can easily be traced in Buber’s creed.[1] Buber’s Zionism breaks with a century of Jewish-bourgeois symbiosis, “that ‘purified,’ that is, soulless, ‘Judaism’ of a ‘humanitarianism’ embellished with ‘monotheism,’” as he stated.[2] Buber, explains Maor, “advocated a new Jewish religiosity, based on his version of Hasidism, centered around the sanctification of the worldly aspects of life.”[3] As Zionists tended to regard increased Jewish spirituality with the degeneration resulting from exile, they aspired to revive “authentic” ancient Judaism, which was rooted in the soil and corporeality. Thus, Buber advocated that only a return to the material aspects of life could foster the “organic unity” of the people.[4] Buber wrote, “There is nothing that is evil in itself; every passion can become a virtue… Every act is hallowed, if it is directed toward salvation.”[5] Zionist sentiment, according to Buber, is aroused when the individual becomes conscious of “what confluence of blood has produced him, what rounds of begettings and births has called him forth.” The individual should then arrive at the conclusion that, “blood is a deep-rooted nurturing force,… that the deepest layers of our being are determined by blood,” which in turn allows him to leave his inauthentic society and look for “the deeper-reaching community of those whose substance he shares.”[6]

Along with Frieda and D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Alma Mahler, the wife of Gustav Mahler, Buber was a member of the sexual cult of Dr. Otto Gross [7] Buber was also a friend of Karl Wolfskehl of the George-Kreis and the Cosmic Circle.[8] Through Wolfskehl, Buber was introduced to Rainer Maria Rilke, who read most of his books, beginning in 1908 with Legende des Baalshem (“Legend of the Baal Shem”).[9] Along with Margarete Sussman, the Frankist Fritz Mauthner and  Auguste Hauschner, Buber was closest friends of Hedwig Lachmann’s husband, Gustav Landauer. George-Kreis member Richard Dehmel was the first love of Lachmann, whose libretto, a German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde, was used Salome by Richard Strauss, who collaborated with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a member Young Vienna and the George-Kreis.

Buber was a friend of Eugen Diederichs (1867–1930), who was connected to Eranos, and whose publishing house, the Eugen Diederichs Verlag, was the one of the most important organs of völkisch romanticism.[10] Diederichs founded his publishing house with the intention of dedicating himself to “modern endeavors in the field […] of Theosophy.”[11] Diederichs was a crucial factor in the spread of theosophical and völkisch ideas, publishing the works of Paul de Lagarde, Guido von List, Julius Langbehn  and Alfred Schuler of the Cosmic Circle.[12] Diederichs, who was described as an “energetic in championing anthroposophy,” cooperated with Rudolf Steiner.[13] Diederichs published The Thule Collection, a German translation of the Icelandic Edda and poetic writings of the Skaldik in German. At Monte Verità in Ascona, Diederichs became a close contact of OTO member Rudolf von Laban, whose works he published.[14] Diederichs also published the leading feminists of the time, including Rosa Mayreder and Lou Andreas-Salomé. According to Marino Pullio, “Diederichs was the patron saint of those who embraced the counter-culture, the Lebensreform movement, the avant-garde and all forms of alternative ferment, ranging from the nationalist right to the non- Marxist left—all of them sharing the common denominator of a radical criticism of modernity.”[15] From 1913 onward, Diederichs edited and published the journal Die Tat, which became an important platform for thinkers associated with the German Conservative Revolution.[16]

In 1900, just a few months prior to Buber’s call for a “Jewish Renaissance,” Diederichs had issued a circular under the title Zu neuer Renaissance! (“ Towards a new renaissance!”), calling for a new cultural awakening. Diederichs coined the term Neuromantik (“New Romanticism) in 1905 to characterize the new German Renaissance, a reality that is best realized through mysticism and myth. He declared that “the Germans must now pass into mysticism in order again sense the world as a whole.” Similarly, Buber felt challenged by Diederichs to demonstrate the “existence of a Jewish mysticism.” As early as 1903, Buber discussed with Diederichs his plans for an anthology of mystical testimonies. Due to Diederichs initial reservations, the work was postponed until 1909, when it was published under the title Ekstatische Konfessionen (“Ecstatic Confessions”), Buber's seminal essay on mysticism, reproducing texts through the centuries from oriental, pagan, Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim sources.[17]

 

Blut-Bund

Buber worked closely with Bosnian-Serb mystic Dimitrije Mitrinovic (1887 – 1953), who while at Munich University, was linked with Wassily Kandinsky. Along with Franz Marc (1880 – 1916)—a friend of Karl Wolfskehl of the Cosmic Circle and the George-Kreis—Kandinsky was a co-founder of the editorial group Der Blaue Reiter, which opened its first exhibition in Munich in 1911. As a young man Mitrinovic was active in the Young Bosnia movement, inspired by the various Young movements founded by Mazzini. The group, which opposed the Austro-Hungarian empire, sought the assistance of the Serbian government and received assistance by the Black Hand, a covert organization founded by the Serbian Army, and which had ties to Freemasonry. Ostensibly in retaliation against Austria’s 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Serbs had claimed for themselves, the Black Hand was responsible for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 which precipitated World War I.

Along with a number of prominent Fabians, Mitrinovic was a contributor to the magazine The New Age, which became one of the first places in England in which Freud’s ideas were discussed before World War I. The magazine’s editor, Alfred Richard Orage (1873 –1934), was a friend of Aleister Crowley, and also personally knew George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. In 1896, Orage married Jean Walker who was a passionate member of the Theosophical Society, and together they met Annie Besant.[18] Orage also worked with George Gurdjieff after he had been recommended to him by Gurdjieff’s leading student, P.D. Ouspensky.[19] Under the editorship of Orage, The New Age according to a Brown University press release, “helped to shape modernism in literature and the arts from 1907 to 1922.”[20] The circle of The New Age contributors widely influential, and included Aleister Crowley, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Havelock Ellis, Filippo Marinetti, H.G. Wells, Florence Farr, George Bernard Shaw, Marmaduke Pikthall, C.H. Douglas, Hilaire Belloc and Ezra Pound.

Along with the German Jewish mystical thinker Erich Gutkind (1877 – 1965), the Dutch writer and psychologist Frederik van Eeden (1860 – 1932), Walter Rathenau and Gustav Landauer, Buber was a member of the Forte Kreis (“Forte Circle), whose ultimate aim, explained Marcel Poorthuis, “was to establish a new mankind, was a tributary to Nietzsche as well as to theosophy and the esoteric.”[21] A well-known intellectual, Eeden maintained friendships with Freud and Peter Kropotkin, and corresponded with Hermann Hesse. Eeden, together with Gutkind,  had written Welt-Eroberung durch Helden-Liebe (“World Conquest Through Heroic Love”), to serve as the blueprint of the commune to be founded for the “Kingly of Spirit.” The group first met in Potsdam, outside of Berlin, and came to be known as the Forte Kreis, because of a planned follow-up meeting in Capri, at the Forte dei Marmi. This Blut-Bund (“Blood Brotherhood”) included Franz Oppenheimer, Wassily Kandinsky, Upton Sinclair, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rabindranath Tagore and Poul Bjerre, who fell in love with Lou Andreas-Salomé.[22] The program of their first meeting included discussions about the future of Europe, the role of women or the metaphysical encounter between the Germanic and Jewish races.[23]

The group influenced Mitrinovic, who identified Gutkind among the bearers of revelations, along with  Rudolf Steiner, Helena Blavatsky and Vladimir Solovyov, and promoted his work in Orage’s The New Age.[24] Mitrinovic interpreted the concept of the Blut-Bund as an “organization for a pan-human little brotherhood of the most world-worthy bearers of present day culture,” to comprise the leadership of the future.[25] Mitrinovic believed that only Europe and the Aryan race could “establish a functional world system in which each of the races and nations is called upon to play its natural and organic part.”[26] Despite the anti-Semitic overtones of his theories, Mitrinovic placed particular attention on the role played by the nation of the Jews, which “was ‘chosen’ for the ‘mission’ of becoming White… in preparation for their role as the inheritors or ruling race of the kingdom of the world.”[27] To contribute the Forte Circle, Mitrinovic maintained correspondence with Henri Bergson, H.G. Wells, Maxim Gorky, Maurice Maeterlinck, Pablo Picasso, Filippo Marinetti, Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, Knut Hamsun, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.[28]

Mitrinovic founded the Adler’s Society (the English Branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology), with Hungarian-born Jew, Alfred Adler, who was a first cousin of Victor Adler of the Pernerstorfer Circle and who apparently worked with Aleister Crowley. Adler was also well-acquainted with Dr. Leopold Thoma, one of the closest collaborators of Erik Jan Hanussen, Hitler’s Jewish clairvoyant.[29] Adler had also been assisted in his work with his patients by Aleister Crowley.[30] In collaboration with Freud and a small group of Freud’s colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. To Freud, Adler was “the only personality there.”[31] Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics, and thus to be one of the three great psychologist/philosophers of the twentieth century.

Walter Rathenau, a member of the Kulturbund, was an early proponent of the concept of the “United States of Europe.” Rathenau had become close friends with the businessman Bernhard Dernburg, who was appointed Germany’s first colonial secretary in May 1907. Dernburg, in close cooperation with Berlin’s Ambassador Count Johann, would later assume control of the German Information Bureau on Broadway, which fronted for a secretive Propaganda Kabinett that counted George Sylverster Viereck, Hugo Münsterberg, Hanns Heinz Ewers, who were all intimately acquainted with Aleister Crowley.[32] Already before the war, Rathenau made the case for the establishment of a Central European customs union, which became a reality in 1957 as the European Economic Community. After the war, Rathenau pursued the normalization of the relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union and the allied victorious powers as well as a settlement with Soviet Russia, and insisted that Germany fulfil its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles. Perceiving his actions to be evidence of the “power of international Jewry,” Rathenau was assassinated by members of the Organisation Consul (OC), composed of former participants in the Kapp Putsch.”[33]

 

Merhavia

Forte Kreis member Franz Oppenheimer (1864 – 1943) collaborated with Friedrich Naumann, a friend of Max Weber, and a supporter of the Anti-Bolshevik League of Eduard Stadtler.[34] The Anti-Bolshevik League was funded by the Anti-Bolshevik Fund, composed of Jewish financiers like Arthur Salomonsohn and Felix Deutsch, both members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, originally founded by leaders of the Haskalah around Moses Mendelssohn.[35] According to Etan Bloom, among the important non-Jewish figures in German culture who were attracted to Zionism in the first decade of the twentieth century was Naumann, whose writings appeared in Die Welt, the main publication of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (“German Zionist Organization,” ZVfD), by far the largest Zionist organization in Germany, having attracted 10,000 members by 1914.[36] Naumann believed that the Zionists would be helpful to German colonial interests, and that decreasing Europe’s Jewish population would help resolved the Jewish Question.[37]

Oppenheimer, the editor-in-chief of the magazine Welt am Morgen, was the brother of Paula Oppenheimer, the wife of Richard Dehmel, who had a love affair with Gustav Landauer’s wife Hedwig Lachmann. Franz and Paula’s father, Dr. Julius Oppenheimer (1827 – 1909), served for many years as a preacher and teacher at the Jewish Reform temple of the Berlin.[38] Like many assimilated Zionists, Oppenheimer excused his German nationalism as a virtue that would serve for the elevation of the Ostjuden. In 1910, in his article Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein (“ethnic consciousness and national consciousness”), for the Oestereichische Rundschau, he wrote:

 

We are, collectively, [either] Germans by culture or French by culture and so on...because we have the fortune to belong to cultured communities  that stand in the forefront of nations… We cannot be Jewish by culture because Jewish culture, as it has been preserved from the Middle Ages in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, stands infinitely lower than the modern culture which our [Western] nations bear. We cannot regress nor do we want to.[39]

 

Max Bodenheimer, who formed the original leadership of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD) with Franz Oppenheimer, explains Jay Ticker, “was the chief advocate of the pro-German policy for the Zionist movement.”[40] Bodenheimer had been president from its foundation in 1897 until 1910, and when the war began, he served as head of the Jewish National Fund. Bodenheimer and Oppenheimer, along with several other Zionists, travelled to the Eastern Front, where they were received by Aufbau member General Ludendorff and later also by Field-Marshal von Hindenburg. Already in the late autumn of 1914, Ludendorff, in his capacity as general Chief of Staff of the Eastern Command of the Imperial Armies, issued an appeal in the Yiddish language “to my dear Jews in Poland.”[41] Bodenheimer wrote about the meeting that Ludendorff:

 

…showed lively interest in our endeavors. He welcomed our intention to inform the Jewish population of the political situation and of the prospect of an improvement in their position in the case of the axis powers achieving victory. To him we proposed sending our trustworthy men into the occupied territory so that understanding between the military and the Jews would be facilitated.[42]

 

When Herzl asked him to help work on the Jewish colonization of Palestine, Oppenheimer submitted a plan to the Zionist Congress of 1903. Oppenheimer, Zelig Soskin (1872–1959) and Otto Warburg (1859 – 1938), a cousin of the German-based Warburgs, received formal permission and funding from the World Zionist Organization (WZO) to begin planning the colonization of Palestine. Soskin wrote in the proposal: “We need only refer to how the Aryan people colonize. I refer to the Germans in the African colonies, etc.”[43] Based on that plan, Oppenheimer founded the agricultural cooperative Merhavia in 1911, south of Nazareth.[44] In 1914, Oppenheimer was joined by Loe Motzkin (1867 – 1933) and Theodor Herzl’s associate Max Bodenheimer, to create a German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, which was supported by the German Empire.[45] Motzkin participated in the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and became close to Herzl, who sent him on a mission to Palestine to investigate the problems of the Jewish community. Motzkin proceeded to establish a Jewish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to represent the interests of Jews across Europe. This committee became a permanent institution under the League of Nations.[46]

 

Eros and Tragedy

In 1919, Landauer briefly served as Commissioner of Enlightenment and Public Instruction in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic during the German Revolution of 1918–1919. He was murdered by Freikorps soldiers when the republic was overthrown. Soon after his death, Landauer was almost completely forgotten by European socialists and anarchists, though his memory and heroic example enjoyed a revival in Zionist and kibbutznik circles thanks to his friend of Martin Buber.[47] Landauer and his disciple Martin Buber, explains Nordheimer Nur, in Eros and Tragedy, influenced the leaders of Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, which laid the foundation for Israel’s kibbutz movement, and their adoption of the notions of Gemeinschaft and Bund, which they renamed in Hebrew as eda. Over the course of his intellectual development, Landauer refined his socialist thinking, moving from a focus on improving the plight of the urban proletariat to aspirations of communal agrarian communities, described in 1900 as a way for the German volk to reinvigorate itself as a nation of peasants and craftsmen. Landauer believed that each nation contributes equally to a common humanity, and that an individual who wishes to lead an authentic life must live with his own volk.[48]

The ideas of Gustav Wyneken (1875 – 1964), one of leaders of the German youth movement, also influenced Hashomer Hatzair. The Wandervogel, with its precursor the Bündische Jugend, together are referred to as the German Youth Movement, is often regarded as a part of the Germany Conservative Revolution.[49] Wyneken’s books were published by Eugen Diederichs, who was an avid devotee of Nietzsche, and saw the Youth Movement as producing a new culture for the Nietzschean Übermensch.[50] In 1920, Wyneken was ousted from the Wickersdorf Free School Community which he had founded in Thuringia, after being convicted of homosexual contact with students.[51]

Wyneken was defended by his friend Hans Blüher (1888 – 1955), listed by Armin Mohler as an early exponent of the German Conservative Revolution.[52] As revealed by Nordheimer Nur, Hashomer Hatzair was inspired by the theories of Freud and Nietzsche, and was modeled on the concept of the Männerbund, the all-male “warrior-society” of pre-modern cultures, as defined by Blüher. Strongly influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis, Blüher wrote a highly controversial history of the German Wandervogel youth movement, Die Rolle Der Erotik in Der männlichen Gesellschaft (The Role of the Erotic in Male Society), published by Eugen Diederichs, in which he elaborated on the role of homoeroticism and the foundation of human civilization. Blüher earned fame with the publication in 1912 of a trilogy, whose third volume, titled “The Wandervogel Youth Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon,” outraged the movement leaders. In order to facilitate the acceptance of his interpretations, Blüher sought professional support: “For this purpose, I appropriately approached two particularly distinguished authorities in the field of sexual science: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the foremost expert on the subject matter, in Berlin, and Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud, the greatest sexual theorist, in Vienna.” His interpretation was “recognized and deemed good” by both of them, which Hirschfeld even agreeing to provide a foreword to third volume.[53]

Hashomer Hatzair’s encounter with Eros, the Greek god of love and sex, began through the influence of Siegfried Bernfeld (1892 – 1953), who had studied psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna. While still a student, Bernfeld was involved in the psychoanalytical movement, and later became an important member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. During the war years and the 1920s, he had access to the most prestigious intellectual circles in Vienna, frequently visiting Freud’s home, where he participated in a study group with Anna Freud, who was reportedly in love with him.[54] Bernfeld was active in the Psychoanalytic Society and, in the early 1920s, was Buber's secretary and assistant. Bernfeld was also active in the German movement for educational reform inspired by Wyneken, and edited and published Der Anfang. In reaction to the rise völkisch ideology emergent in some aspects of the German Youth Movement during the war, Bernfeld decided to focus his efforts on Jewish youth. Becoming a Zionist, he became involved in Jerubbaal, a journal was associated with a secret order, the Kreis Jerubbaal (“Jerubbaal Circle”) which functioned as an Order of Jewish Youth. This order, of which very little is known, included degrees, oaths, and secret signs much like the Freemasons.[55] Several leaders of Hashomer Hatzair became contributors to the journal, which appeared only in 1918–1919. From 1922 until 1925, he practiced psychoanalysis in Vienna, and from 1925 to 1932 he worked at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.

The members of Bitania Ilit, the community founded by Hashomer Hatzair in Palestine, hung on the wall of their dining hall a reproduction of Plato’s Symposium—which featured panegyrics on Eros and the virtues of pederasty—painted by Anselm Feuerbach, the nephew of Ludwig Feuerbach.[56] Meir Yaari (1897 – 1987), one of the early leaders of Hashomer Hatzair—who would eventually become a member of the Knesset as the founder of the Mapam political party—later recalled how he first became acquainted with Freud in one of the groups of the Jugendkulturbewegung, also known as the Anfang circle around Bernfeld. Yaari, who was and the most influential theoreticians of the movement, envisioned the eda as a Männerbund. As Yaari described:

 

Our erotic attachment bursts out of our unified soul, spreading everywhere and covering all—the land, work, the landscape from which come color, symbol, and piety. It tears our souls open and fuses us with the entire cosmos.[57]

 

As a result of the unconventional relations between the sexes developed in the movement, not unlike those of the Jugendkultur movement in Vienna, Hashomer Hatzair were accused by outsiders of being promiscuous societies of “free love.”[58] Eros had not only a positive aesthetic role but a subversive one as well, understood as a means to undermine the bourgeois family by building an alternative, erotic community. When he published “The Youth Movement” in July 1922, in Hapoel Hatzair, the most popular weekly among Palestine’s workers, Hashomer Hatzair member and another Der Anfang editor, David Horowitz, presented Eros as one of the most fundamental elements in the ideal community. The essay, written as a socialist manifesto for all workers in Palestine, represented one of the first attempts ever to bring together the ideas of Marx and Freud. “Erotic life,” Horowitz explained, “created major social communities which found expression in spiritual life and in the eternal values of humanity.” As examples of these social communities Horowitz listed the Essenes, the biblical prophets, and the early Christians.[59]

 

Freud in Zion 

Otto Fenichel (1897 – 1946), one of the most influential psychoanalysts in Europe in the 1920s, also supported Hashomer Hatzair’s efforts to integrate Marxism with psychoanalysis.[60] Fenichel was among the many psychoanalysts who worked at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute founded in 1920, before later becoming the Göring Institute, who developed a philosophical combination of Marxist dialectical materialism and Freudian psychoanalysis. These included Wilhelm Reich (1897 – 1957), Ernst Simmel (1882 – 1947), Franz Alexander (1891 – 1964), and Otto Fenichel (1897 – 1946), as well as Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980), who would go on to become one of the founders of the Frankfurt School. Simmel diagnosed Princess Alice of Battenberg—the mother Elizabeth II’s husband Prince Philip, and a student of Keyserling’s School of Wisdom—with schizophrenia in 1930, after she had reported communicating with Christ and Buddha.[61]

Shmuel Golan reported to Max Eitingon (1881 – 1943) that eighty Hashomer Hatzair teachers were in the psychoanalytic training programme that he and Moshe Wulff had started.[62] During the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, the Nazi rise to power in Germany, and the Anschluss of Austria, disciples of Freud began arriving in Palestine and laying a foundation for the psychoanalytic movement in the country. They included Dorian Feigenbaum, Montague David Eder, Max Eitingon, Moshe Wulff, Josef Friedjung, and Grete Obernik-Reiner. Eitingon, Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel ran the secret Psychoanalytic Committee until the rise of Nazism in 1933.[63] Eitingon was invited by Freud to join the committee after he settled in Berlin after the war.[64] Eitingon was cofounder and president from 1920 to 1933 of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. Ernst Simmel, Hanns Sachs, Franz Alexander, Sándor Radó, Karen Horney, Siegfried Bernfeld, Otto Fenichel, Theodor Reik, Wilhelm Reich and Melanie Klein were among the many psychoanalysts who worked at the institute.

Eitingon established and underwrote the first psychoanalytic outpatient clinic in Berlin, which attracted young students sponsored by Hashomer Hatzair. On Freud’s advice, compelled by the Nazi threat, Eitingon left Germany in September 1933 and emigrated to Palestine. In 1934 he founded the Palestine Psychoanalytic Association in Jerusalem. Anna Freud was extremely interested in the fate of the psychoanalytic group established by Max Eitingon in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Anna made several trips to Israel, including a trip accompanying her father in 1934, where they met with Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion.[65]

Arnold Zweig (1887 – 1968), a friend of Freud and Martin Buber, and who lived in Haifa, met with Max Eitingon regularly.[66] In 1933, after spending some time with Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers and Bertolt Brecht in France, he set out for Mandatory Palestine, then under British rule. In Palestine, Zweig became close to a group of German-speaking immigrants who felt distant from Zionism and viewed themselves as refugees or exiles from Europe, where they planned to return. This group included Max Brod, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and Else Lasker-Schüler, a friend of Karl Wolfskehl.[67]

“In the latter half of the 1930’s,” wrote Stephen Schwartz, “a gang of killers appeared in Western Europe whose accumulated crimes—considering their impact on history—are probably unequaled in the annals of murder.”[68] Schwartz was referring to a special unit that included Eitingon, who has been described by several researchers as a member of a group of Soviet agents who conducted high profile assassinations in Europe and Mexico. Although there is no direct proof of his involvement in the murders, grounds for suspicion included his financial interests in the Soviet Union and connections with all key members of team, including his brother Leonid Eitingon, who acted as an intermediary between NKVD and Gestapo in Tukhachevsky Case, a 1937 secret trial of the high command of the Red Army, a part of the Great Purge.[69] As Robert Conquest established, to contrive evidence against the highest leaders of the Soviet Army, including the chief army commissar and eight generals, this special unit connived with Reinhard Heydrich.[70] Max’s brother, Leonid Eitingon (1899 – 1981), was a Soviet intelligence officer, who gained prominence through his involvement in several NKVD operations, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Max Eitingon is said to have been pulled into the work of a “special unit [which] connived with Reinhard Heydrich of Hitler’s intelligence service.”[71]

After settling in Los Angeles in 1938, Fenichel helped found the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. His training analysands included Ralph R. Greenson (1911 – 1979), Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist at the time of her death. Before Greenson, Monroe would undergo psychoanalysis regularly from 1955 until her death, with psychiatrists Margaret Hohenberg (1955–57), Anna Freud (1957), her friend Marianne Kris (1957–61), the daughter of a friend of Freud, Oscar Rie. Marilyn left her belongings to Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio, whose actress daughter, Susan, was her friend and confidante. Strasberg’s third wife, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, hosted elegant soirées in the Central Park West apartment and in the Brentwood house, joined Hedwig Lachmann and Gustav Landauer’s grandson, famous Broadway and Hollywood director Mike Nichols, as well as Carly Simon and Al Pacino.[72]

 

Brit Shalom 

Marcel Poorthuis, in “The Forte Kreis: an Attempt to Spiritual Leadership over Europe,” noted: “It is striking how especially the Jews in Germany were eager to demonstrate their loyalty to Germany.”[73] Buber, initially, celebrated the advent of World War I as a “world historical mission” for Germany along with Jewish intellectuals to civilize the Near East. He now felt that the concept of volk had become a reality. “Millions have applied for voluntary service, among them Wolfskehl and Gundolph,” Buber wrote. Buber was disappointed to have failed the medical exam, but tried to contribute in other ways: “If not at the front, that still in the neighbourhood,” he wrote to his Hans Kohn (1891 – 1971).[74] Buber’s friend, the Jewish writer Hugo Bergmann (1883 – 1975), avowed in the midst of the war, that he feels “how deep we Jews are entrenched in German culture, now that we fight for it. Our generation has only an artificial relationship towards the Bible and Hassidic Judaism, whereas our attitude to Fichte or any other European thinker who shows us the way is far more natural.”[75]

Buber was a member of Brit Shalom (“covenant of peace”), a group of Jewish Zionist intellectuals in Mandatory Palestine, founded in 1925, and whose supporters and founders included economist and sociologist Arthur Ruppin, Hugo Bergmann, Gershom Scholem, historian Hans Kohn, Henrietta Szold, Israel Jacob Kligler. Albert Einstein also voiced support. Judah Leon Magnes, one of the authors of the program, never joined the organization. Brit Shalom sought peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews, to be achieved by renunciation of the Zionist aim of creating a Jewish state. The alternative vision of Zionism was to create a center for Jewish cultural life in Palestine, echoing the earlier ideas of Ahad Ha’am, a purported member of the Alliance Israëlite Universelle and proposed author of the Protocols of Zion.[76] At the time, Brit Shalom supported the establishment of a bi-national state, also known as the one-state solution, as a homeland for both Jews and Palestinians.

The Merhavia co-operative was founded with the assistance of Arthur Ruppin (1876 – 1943), a friend of Chaim Weizmann, and whose protegee was Chaim Arlosoroff, the former lover of Goebbels’ wife Magda. Ruppin joined the Zionist Organization (ZO, the future World Zionist Organization, WZO) in 1905. At the Zionist Congress of 1907 in Hague, Otto Warburg recommended  nominating Ruppin to make a pilot study of the possibilities for colonization in Palestine. He was sent by David Wolffsohn, the President of the ZO, to study the condition of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, then under Ottoman control. After eleven weeks, Ruppin presented a concrete plan to the Restricted Executive Committee (REC), who decided to establish a Palestine Office (PO), eventually becoming the Jewish Agency, that would function as the official representation of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Ruppin was appointed its director. Following Ruppin’s ideas, Warburg suggested the establishment of the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC), which the board of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) approved.[77] The PLDC worked to purchasing land, to train Jews in agricultural pursuits, and to establish Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. Ruppin’s work made Practical Zionism possible and shaped the direction of the Second Aliya, the last wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine before World War I.

Ruppin’s main intellectual influences included Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Nietzsche and Gustav Wyneken.[78] Inspired by works of anti-Semitic thinkers, including some Nazis, Ruppin believed that the realization of Zionism depended on the “racial purity” of Jews.[79] For Ruppin, what Zionism required was to weed out inferior, “semitic” racial elements among Ostjuden, to select only those biologically adapted to life in Palestine. To that end, he drew up a hierarchy of Jewish racial types which distinguished Ashkenazi—allegedly not Semitic but Aryans descended from Hittites and Amorites—from the inferior Bedouin-related Sephardim.[80] Ruppin drew such ideas from Heinrich Himmler’s mentor, Hans F.K. Günther (1891 – 1968), also known as Rassenpapst (“Race Pope”), who greatly influenced Nazism.[81] Ruppin met with Günther in Jena in 1933, and recalled:

 

Günther was very kind, rejected the authorship for the concept of Aryans, he agreed with me that the Jews are not inferior [minderwertig], but just different [anderswertig] and that the Jewish question had to be settled in a decent fashion.[82]

 

In his autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem, Scholem, a regular participant in the Eranos conferences, reports about his involvement in the Forte Kreis as a group he terms “anarchistic aristocrats of the spirit.”[83] In his youth, Scholem carried out practical exercises based on Abraham Abulafia’s mystical techniques. In 1928, he published an essay entitled “Alchemie und Kabbala” in the journal Alchemistische Blätter, published by Otto Wilhelm Barth, probably the most important occult publisher and bookseller in Germany at the time, along with the Pansophist Heinrich Tränker, with whom Barth collaborated. As discovered by Konstantin Burmistrov, not only did Scholem possess many classics of occultism, including the works of Éliphas Lévi, Papus, Francis Barrett, McGregor Mathers, A.E. Waite, Israel Regardie, and so on, but his handwritten marginal notes show that he studied these works intensively. According to Burmistrov, the essay on “Alchemie und Kabbala” reveals the strong influence of A.E. Waite.[84] Scholem was also apparently interested in chiromancy, a subject he discussed with three women he called “witches,” all of whom were associated with Eranos: the graphologist and student of Jung and Ludwig Klages, Anna Teillard-Mendelsohn; Hilde Unseld, first wife of Siegfried Unseld, the influential publisher of Suhrkamp; and Ursula von Mangold, a niece of Walther Rathenau and later director O.W. Barth publishing house, which in 1928 had planned the publication of a journal with the title Kabbalistische Blätter.[85]

Scholem went to visit the occult novelist and Golden Dawn member Gustav Meyrink, and expressed a positive opinion about the parapsychological investigations of Emil Matthiesen (1875 – 1939).[86] Of great importance for Scholem was Franz Joseph Molitor, a member of Asiatic Brethren, and according to whom the order drew on the magic of the Sabbateans, “such as Shabbetai Zevi, Falk (the Baal Shem of London), Frank, and their similar fellows.”[87] According to Joseph Dan, holder of the Gershom Scholem Chair of Kabbalah at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Scholem was first and foremost a Jewish nationalist and not a mystic. However, there have been differing views on this point. Scholem was deliberately cryptic about his interest in the occult, feigning scientific disinterest: “I am certainly no mystic, because I believe that science demands a distanced attitude.”[88] As explained by Joseph Weiss, one of Scholem’s closest pupils, “His esotericism is not in the nature of an absolute reticence, it is a kind of camouflage.”[89]

Before immigrating to Palestine, Buber’s protégés, Hans Kohn, Hugo Bergmann, and Gershom Scholem shared a critical stance toward the legacy of the Enlightenment, a stance they shared with the Conservative Revolution. Scholem would become a renowned twentieth-century expert on the Kabbalah, being regarded as having founded the academic study of the subject. Scholem’s career as a researcher of mysticism originated in the mystical experiences had as a young man, and in idiosyncratic Kabbalistic interpretations. “Reason is a stupid man’s longing,” wrote Scholem.[90] The development of mystical or psychic abilities that were discredited by the Enlightenment, such as experience, intuition, and clairvoyance, could create a new mentality that might heal the ailments of modern times.[91]

Bergmann and Kohn were attracted to mysticism as well. In Prague, Bergmann was introduced by Berta Fanta (1865 – 1918) to the Theosophical Society.[92] Fanta was the hostess of a famous salon, attended by Albert Einstein, philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, Bergmann’s school friend Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Rudolf Steiner. Berta was a great fan of German culture, especially Goethe, Wagner and Nietzsche.[93] Bergmann married Berta’s daughter Else and translated several of Steiner’s books about Threefold Social Order into Hebrew. Bergmann immigrated to Palestine in 1920 and served as the director of the Jewish National Library between 1920 and 1935. He brought Gershom Scholem from Germany to serve as the head of the Judaica Division. Bergmann became a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later on the dean of the university. It is interesting to note, as Boaz Huss indicated, that Scholem chose the term “theosophy” as the most appropirate term to describe Kabbalah.[94]

According to Maor, “the influence of Buber’s ‘rightist’ völkism on young Scholem, Kohn, and Bergmann was decisive; they all adopted, for a while, some of the aggressive facets of his creed.”[95] Their völkism, according to Maor, “was not of the moderate type; it legitimated political violence and denigrated so-called bourgeois morality.”[96] Kohn’s long-standing attraction to bouts of violence and Nietzschean immoralism found its expression during the war in his identification with the vision of the redemptive power of violence. For Kohn, violence and power are morally condemned only when they are exercised in the service of particularist interests. When they are employed for the sake of the “absolute,” “coming in Divine grace,” on the other hand, they bring forth redemption.[97]

Scholem saw Buber as the herald of the Messiah, and as the only Zionist thinker who truly grasped Judaism’s depth.[98] In The Founding Myths of Israel, Ze’ev Sternhell explains that Scholem not only did not abandon Buber’s völkism, but even adopted its most hazardous aspect: its immoralism.[99] In an unpublished draft essay, Politik des Zionismus (“Politics of Zionism”), Scholem argued: “Morality is a little nonsense [Geschwätz] (when it is rightly understood; when wrongly understood it is most essential).” As explained by Sternhell, Scholem defined politics as a realm in which actions are principally regarded as means. In effect, politics is a closed system where external considerations are irrelevant. Scholem argued, “The demand for equivalence of the political and the ethical, not to speak of the popular demand for their identification… is a conceptual confusion.”[100] For that reason, Scholem wrote, “Sometimes I start to think that Friedrich Nietzsche is the only one in modern times who said anything substantial about ethics.”[101]

Buber was invited to speak at Eranos in 1934, alongside Jung’s friend Jakob Wilhelm Hauer.[102] A discussion between Buber and Hauer was recorded in the files of the SD, about a possible agreement between the Third Reich and the leaders of the Zionist movement, according to which the Jewish influence in Germany would be restricted.[103] Years later, when he was asked for his opinion on Hauer, Buber said, “Hauer is someone who lives according to an earnest and deeply religious worldview. This has led him to a passionate longing for a renewal of the German nationhood from its essential roots.”[104] Froebe-Kapteyn invited Hauer to come again in 1935, but he was obliged to refuse. As Froebe-Kapteyn later explained, Martin Buber’s participation in the 1934 Eranos conference led to difficulties with the German Ministry of Education, which in 1936 forbid German speakers to travel abroad. In 1935, Hauer was forced to issue a press communiqué denying his membership in the Eranos circle, and he stated that he had not been aware of any “Judaeo-Masonic machinations or occult exercises.”[105]

 

 


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

[2] Martin Buber, “Judaism and the Jews,” in On Judaism, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York, 1977), p. 13. Cited in Maor. “Moderation from Right to Left,” p. 85.

[3] Maor. “Moderation from Right to Left,” p. 86.

[4] Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism, p. 85.

[5] Cited in Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism, p. 86.

[6] Buber. “Judaism and the Jews,” p. 15. Cited in Maor. “Moderation from Right to Left,” p. 85.

[7] Michael Minnicino. “The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’,” (Fidelio, Winter 1992).

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

[9] Mandel, Siegfried. “Rilke’s Readings and Impressions from Buber to Alfred Schuler.” Modern Austrian Literature 15: 3/4 (1982), p. 263.

[10] Hakl. Eranos, p. 142.

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

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

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

[14] Laure Guilbert. Danser avec le IIIème Reich (Complexe, 2000), p. 54.

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

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

[17] Martina Urban. “The Anthology and the Jewish Renaissance.” In Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber's Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik (University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 38.

[18] Tom Steele. Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club 1893-1923 (The Orage Press, 1990), pp. 33–34.

[19] Peter Washington. Madame Blavatsky’s baboon: a history of the mystics, mediums, and misfits who brought spiritualism to America (Schocken Books, 1995) p. 170.

[20] “Modernist Journals Project Has Grant to Digitize Rare Magazines.” Brown University press release (April 19, 2007)

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

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

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

[24] Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 230.

[25] Shulamith Behr. “Wassily Kandinsky and Dimitrije Mitrinovic; Pan-Christian Universalism and the Yearbook ‘Towards the Mankind of the Future through Aryan Europe.’” Oxford Art Journal, 15: 1 (1992), p. 85.

[26] Andrew Rigby. Initiation and Initiative: An Exploration of the Life and Ideas of Dimitrij Mitrinovic (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1984) p. 80.

[27] Ibid., p. 78.

[28] Behr. “Wassily Kandinsky and Dimitrije Mitrinovic,” p. 86; van Hengel. “World Conquest Through Heroic Love,” p. 191.

[29] Spence. Secret Agent 666, pp. 214-215.

[30] Crowley to Schneider October 5, 1944 GJY Collection, cited in Richard Kaczynski. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (North Atlantic Book, 2010) p. 448.

[31] Freud, cited in Ernest Jones. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964), p. 353.

[32] Spence. Secret Agent 666.

[33] “The Idea of Europe.” The Last Europeans. Retrieved from https://www.lasteuropeans.eu/en/jewish-perspectives-on-the-crises-of-an-idea/1-the-idea-of-europe/

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

[35] Gerald D. Feldman. Hugo Stinnes. Biographie eines Industriellen 1870–1924 (München: Beck, 1998), p. 553

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

[37] Ibid.

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

[39] Poppel. Zionism in Germany, p. 58; cited in Etan Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 122.

[40] Jay Ticker. “Max I. Bodenheimer: Advocate of Pro-German Zionism at the Beginning of World War I.” Jewish Social Studies, 43:1 (Winter, 1981), p. 12.

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

[42] Ibid., p. 87.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[49] Robbert-Jan Adriaansen. The Rhythm of Eternity: The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900-1933 (Berghahn Books, 2015), p. 13.

[50] Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 265.

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

[52] Ulfried Geuter. Homosexualität in der deutschen Jugendbewegung. Jugendfreundschaft und Sexualität im Diskurs von Jugendbewegung, Psychoanalyse und Jugendpsychologie am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main 1994), p. 209 f.

[53] Hans Blüher. Wandervogel. Geschichte einer Jugendbewegung. Zweiter Teil: Blüte und Niedergang. Second edition (Berlin-Tempelhof, 1912), p. 114 f.

[54] Ofer Nordheimer Nur. Eros and Tragedy, Hashomer Hatzair: Jewish Male Fantasies and the Masculine Revolution of Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014), p. 35.

[55] Ofer Nordheimer Nur. Eros and Tragedy, Hashomer Hatzair: Jewish Male Fantasies and the Masculine Revolution of Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014), p. 37.

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

[57] Ibid., p. 167.

[58] Ibid., p. 180

[59] Ibid., p. 58.

[60] Eran J. Rolnik. Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (London: Karnak), pp. 160–164.

[61] Hugo Vickers. Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece (St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2013).

[62] Eran J. Rolnik. Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (London: Karnak), p. 161.

[63] Guido Liebermann. Merav Datan (trans) The Origins of Psychoanalysis in Israel: The Freudian Movement in Mandatory Palestine 1918-1948 (Israel Academic Press, 2019).

[64] Richard Lourie. “Hit Men, Freudians and Furriers.” New York Times (July 23, 2010).

[65] Saul Jay Singer. “The Judaism And Zionism Of Holocaust Survivor Anna Freud.” JewishPress.com

(July 5, 2023). Retrieved from https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/the-judaism-and-zionism-of-holocaust-survivor-anna-freud/2023/07/05/

[66] Theodore H. Draper. “The Mystery of Max Eitington.” New York Review (April 14, 1988). Retrieved from https://archive.ph/haaSY

[67] Rolnik. Freud in Zion, p. 107.

[68] Stephen Schwartz. “Intellectuals and Assassins – Annals of Stalin’s Killerati.” New York Times Book Review (January 24, 1988), pp. 3, 30–31.

[69] Robert Conquest. “Max Eitingon: another view.” New York Times (3 July 1988).

[70] Stephen Schwartz. “Intellectuals and Assassins – Annals of Stalin’s Killerati.” New York Times Book Review (January 24, 1988), pp. 3, 30–31.

[71] Theodore H. Draper. “The Mystery of Max Eitington.” New York Review (April 14, 1988). Retrieved from https://archive.ph/haaSY

[72] Patricia Bosworth. “The Mentor and the Movie Star.” Vanity Fair (June 1, 2003). Retrieved from https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/06/marilyn-monroe-and-lee-strasberg-200306

[73] Marcel Poorthuis. “The Forte Kreis: an Attempt to Spiritual Leadership over Europe.” Religion and Theology: A Journal of Contemporary Religous Discourse (2017), p. 49.

[74] Martin Buber to Hans Kohn, September 30, 1914. Cited in Marcel Poorthuis. “The Forte Kreis,” p. 49.

[75] Letter 11 May 1914, quoted by Grete Schaeder, “Ein biographischer Abriss,” in Martin Buber, Briefwechsel, 66. Cited in Marcel Poorthuis. “The Forte Kreis,” p. 49.

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

[77] Etan Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture. Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Vol. 31 (Brill, 2011), p. 148.

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

[79] Tom Segev. “The Makings of History: Revisiting Arthur Ruppin.” Haaretz (October 8, 2009). Retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/1.5309866

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

[81] Steven E. Aschheim. Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 125, n.19.

[82] Ruppin. Tagebücher (August 16, 1933). Cited in Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture, p. 341.

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

[84] Hakl. Eranos, p. 156–158.

[85] Hakl. Eranos, p. 158.

[86] Hakl. Eranos, p. 158.

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

[88] Elisabeth Hamacher. Gershom Scholem und die Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 60. Cited Hakl. Ouranos, p. 155.

[89] Yedioth Hayom (December 5, 1947); cited in Hakl. Eranos, p. 156.

[90] Diary entry, Jan. 29, 1915, in Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 50. Cited in Maor. “Moderation from Right to Left,” p. 82.

[91] Maor. “Moderation from Right to Left,” p. 82.

[92] EAJS-Web-1. “One Biography, Multiple Places: The Life and Work of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann; Between Prague and Jerusalem (1883-1975).” European Association for Jewish Studies (January 6, 2022). Retrieved from https://www.eurojewishstudies.org/conference-grant-programme-reports/one-biography-multiple-places-the-life-and-work-of-shmuel-hugo-bergmann-between-prague-and-jerusalem-1883-1975/

[93] “Fanta, Berta.” The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Retrieved from http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Fanta_Berta

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

[95] Maor. “Moderation from Right to Left,” p. 86.

[96] Ibid., p. 84.

[97] Ibid., p. 89.

[98] Ibid., p. 86.

[99] Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism.

[100] Gershom Scholem. “Politik des Zionismus,” in Tagebücher, 2: 626; cited in Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism, p. 90.

[101] Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism, p. 90.

[102] Hakl. Eranos, p. 79.

[103] Hakl. Eranos, p. 85.

[104] Hakl. Eranos, p. 82.

[105] Hakl. Eranos, p. 98.

Zionism