7. The Invisible College

Menasseh ben Israel

It was through its promotion of the “Great Instauration” initiated by Francis Bacon, that the Royal Society provided the philosophical underpinnings of the Scientific Revolution, which marked the emergence of modern science in Europe towards the end of the Renaissance and continued through the late eighteenth century, influencing the Enlightenment. The expression “knowledge is power” is commonly attributed Bacon, occurring as scientia potestas est (“knowledge itself is power”) in his Meditationes Sacrae (1597). Paradoxically, the Scientific Revolution begins with the study of magic as “natural philosophy” initiated by Bacon, who was believed to represent the advent of Elias Artista. “This transformation of both Elias and Elisha from prophets into magi and natural philosophers,” observed Allison P. Coudert, “reveals the way apocalyptic and messianic thought contributed to the emerging idea of scientific progress.”[1] As explained by Herbert Breger, in “Elias artista—a Precursor of the Messiah in Natural Science”:

A common association in the 19th century and one which has persisted into the 20th century, was to link the development of natural science with the improvement of the human condition. Thus, it would appear that the figure of Elias artist a was a forerunner of the liberal definition of progress in natural science: scientific advancement as vehicle of social advancement, individual well-being and as a means of attaining a more humane society.[2]

The Oxford scholar Richard Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), documented that the early Rosicrucians expected the coming of the master alchemist Elias Artista (Elijah the Artist), advanced by Kabbalist Guillaume Postel. Paracelsus, one of the most famous figures in the history of alchemy, made a famous prophecy based upon his knowledge of the special planetary conjunctions and configurations that were due to occur in 1603: namely, that they would mark the advent or appearance of Elias Artista (“Elias the Artist”), a master alchemist and a “great light” who would revive the arts and sciences, teach the transmutation of all the metals, and reveal many things. The Rosicrucians’ announcement of themselves to the world in 1623, was timed with the Great Conjunction, which in astrology was associated with the advent of the Messiah, including the star of the Magi that signaled the birth of Jesus. According to their calculations, the next date of great significance would be the year 1666, which was the year that Shabbetai Zevi proclaimed himself the messiah expected by the Jews, and succeeded in duping, by some estimates, half of the world’s Jewish population.

As reported by Richard Popkin, in “The religious background of seventeenth-century philosophy,” recent discoveries have pointed out that Louis de Bourbon, the Great Condé—one of the pre-eminent generals of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” working with cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin—Oliver Cromwell and Queen Christina were negotiating to create a world government of the Messiah, with Prince Condé as his regent, based in Jerusalem, after assisting the Jews in liberating the Holy Land rebuilding the Temple.[3] Before he travelled to England in 1655, to plead with Cromwell for the readmittance of the Jews, who had been banned from the country by Edward I in 1290, Menasseh ben Israel (1604 – 1657), a leader of the Jewish community of Amsterdam, first made a stop in Belgium, where he met with Queen Christina and with Isaac La Peyrère (1596 – 1676), the secretary of the Prince of Condé, one of Louis XIV’s pre-eminent generals. La Peyrère is best known for his Pre-Adamite hypothesis, which argued that there had been two creations: first the creation of the Gentiles and then that of Adam, who was father of the Jews. La Peyrère is also considered an early proponent of Zionism, for advocating a Jewish return to Palestine. As Richard Popkin noted:

Recent findings indicate that Conde, Cromwell, and Christina were negotiating to create a theological-political world state, involving overthrowing the Catholic king of France, among other things. La Peyrère had been proclaiming that the Jewish Messiah would soon arrive and would join with the king of France (the prince of Conde), and with the Jews to liberate the Holy Land, to rebuild the Temple, and to set up a world government of the Messiah and his regent the king of France.[4]

As he was married to Rachel Soeiro, a descendant of the Abarbanel family, Menasseh was proud of his children’s ancestry from the line of King David, from which the messiah was expected to arise.[5] In his 1650 Hope of Israel (“Mikveh Israel”), Menasseh proclaimed the necessary dispersal of the Jews to all countries of the world, including America, before their final return to the Holy Land as a fulfillment of the prophecies of the Last Days. But he also saw the Jews as bringing “profit” to the lands in which they live: “they do abundantly enrich the Lands and Countrys of strangers, where they live.” It was for that purpose that Menasseh worked towards the readmittance of the Jews to England, who had been banned from the country in 1290 by Edward I of England.

The spread of the fervor of the movement Sabbatean was coordinated by the Rosicrucian followers of Menasseh ben Israel, also teacher of Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677), who was excommunicated for heresy in 1655. Known as the Hartlib Circle, they included a group of millenarians active in England, including Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600 – 1662), John Dury (1596 – 1680) and John Amos Comenius (1592 – 1670), referred to as the “three foreigners,” whose chief sponsor was Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V of the Palatinate, of the Alchemical Wedding.[6] Hartlib had been the head of a mystical group like Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christian Unions, a cover for the Invisible College, which pursued Rosicrucian idea.[7] All three “millenarian Baconians” and members of a Rosicrucian “Invisible College,” they were responsible in fanning millenarian ideas among the English Puritans about the approach of the Messianic time that became popular in the seventeenth century.[8]

Gerardus Vossius, Hugo Grotius, Petrus Serrarius, António Vieira and Pierre Daniel Huet and other men of the so-called “Republic of Letters,” were part of Menasseh’s circle of contacts, showing the great reputation he benefitted among non-Jewish intellectuals.[9] Gerardus Vossius (1577 – 1649) was the son of Johannes (Jan) Vos, a Protestant from the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Electorate of the Palatinate. Vossius became the lifelong friend of Hugo Grotius (1583 – 1645), who helped lay the foundations for international law, based on natural law. Grotius studied with some of the most acclaimed intellectuals in northern Europe, including Joseph Scaliger.[10] Christina’s scholarly gatherings in Stockholm were originally arranged in 1649 by Vossius.[11] Also among Menasseh’s circle was Abraham von Franckenberg, a close friend and biographer of Balthasar Walther, who inspired the legend of Christian Rosenkreutz.[12]

Vossius was acquaintances of the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt (1606 – 1669). The art historian Frits Lugt described Menasseh as “Rembrandt’s intimate and highly regarded friend.”[13] Rembrandt moved to the Jewish quarter of Vlooienburg in Amsterdam “to steep himself in local [Jewish] color.”[14] He was apparently so fond of his Jewish neighbors that it changed his art forever. Rembrandt is often said to have had a profound “affinity” and “tenderness” for the Jews, and that, more than was common for other artists, had a genuine interest for the characters of the “Old Testament.”[15] For his Belshazzar’s Feast, which depicts the story of Belshazzar and the writing on the wall from the Old Testament Book of Daniel, Rembrandt derived the form of Hebrew inscription from a diagram in a book by Manasseh with extensive discussions on its prophecies.[16]

The Rosicrucians hoped for the Golden Age foretold by Joachim of Fiore. Nearly a hundred years after Joachim’s predicted date of 1260, the Rosicrucians finally announced themselves in 1623, setting off the “Rosicrucian furor,” timed with the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, which according to Kabbalists was believed to signal the arrival of the messiah.[17] A great conjunction occurred every twenty years when the two planets conjoined in a new sign within a given triplicity. A greater conjunction, which recurred every 200 or 240 years occurred when they moved into a new triplicity, or trigon, which in astrology refers to a group of three signs belonging to the same of one of the four elements. A greater conjunction, which recurred every 200 or 240 years occurred when they. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), who was also associated with the Rosicrucians, speculated that the Star of Bethlehem followed by the Magi was the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC. According to Isaac Abarbanel:

Since the effect of the great conjunction is to transfer the nation or subject that receives its influence from one extreme to the other…, its activity will not affect a nation of average standing and size to enhance it. Of necessity, however, its influence will affect a nation that is at the extreme of degradation, the extreme of abasement, and enslaved in a foreign land. The result is that the conjunction is then able to carry them to the [opposite] extreme of high stature. The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces of 1464 had, then, ushered in an era that, barring divine intercession, would culminate in the Jewish people’s deliverance fifty years later as millennia earlier this same astral configuration had inaugurated the redemption of their ancestors from Egypt.[18]

According to the calculations of the Rosicrucian Paul Nagel, the Great Conjunction of 1623 was associated with the year 1666, the same year that Shabbetai Zevi, inspired by the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, declared himself “messiah.”[19] The city of Salonika (Thessaloniki), in Ottoman Greece, whose population was majority Jewish, became among the major centers for Conversos and Marranos who converted back to Judaism—after Amsterdam and the Italian cities. According to Gershom Scholem, it was there, due the collective trauma of the Expulsion and their experience as Marranos, combined with the messianic expectations fired by the Kabbalist Isaac Luria, that contributed to the fervor that supported rise of the mission of the false prophet Shabbetai Zevi (1626 – 1676).[20] Through their rejection of traditional Judaism, in favor of the mystical interpretations of the Kabbalah, the Sabbatean movement ultimately inspired the rise of Reform and Conservative Judaism, and finally the Zionist movement.

Shabbetai’s name literally meant the planet Saturn, and in Jewish tradition “The reign of Sabbatai” (The highest planet) was often linked to the advent of the Messiah, a connection which was advanced by him and his followers.[21] That the coming of the Messiah will have a special relationship with Saturn, claims Moshe Idel in Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism, is one of the factors explaining both the character and the success of Zevi’s mission. As noted by Idel, during the witch craze some Christians argued that witchcraft had a Jewish origin, and connected the witches’ Sabbat with the Jewish holy day, the Sabbath, both of which started on a Friday. Both Hellenistic and Arab astrologers believed that the planet of the Jews was Saturn, which was associated with the dark arts and witchcraft, and numerous Jewish Kabbalists also associated Saturn with Israel.

The unique feature of the Sabbatean movement was its antinomianism, based on the belief that with the arrival of the messiah, the rules of the Torah no longer applied. This meant that the followers of Zevi believed they were permitted to upturn its moral prescriptions and violate Jewish laws and customs, including engaging in sexual orgies involving adulterous and incestuous relations. Zevi, by some estimates, duped up to half of the world’s Jewish population with his messianic claims, until he converted to Islam. Viewing Zevi’s apostasy as a sacred mystery, some of his followers in Ottoman Turkey imitated his conversion. Sarah, his harlot bride, and a number of his followers, also converted to Islam. About 300 families converted and came to be known as Dönmeh, from a Turkish word meaning “convert.” They practiced Islam outwardly though secretly keeping to their Kabbalistic doctrines. Zevi incorporated both Jewish tradition and Sufism into his theosophy and, in particular, was to have been initiated into the Bektashi Sufi order, which would long had associations with the Dönmeh.[22]

Oliver Cromwell

Dury arranged for an English translation and publication of Menasseh’s work, with a dedication to the English Parliament. Dury and others then convinced Cromwell’s government to invite Menasseh to England to negotiate on behalf of world Jewry on the terms for the re-admission. Cromwell had led the forces of Parliament against Charles I of England (1600 – 1649), brother of Elizabeth Stuart, in the English Civil Wars, which challenged his attempts to negate parliamentary authority, while simultaneously using his position as head of the English Church to pursue religious policies which generated the animosity of reformed groups such as the Puritans. Charles was defeated in the First Civil War (1642 – 45), after which Parliament expected him to accept its demands for a constitutional monarchy. Charles I had remained defiant by attempting to forge an alliance with Scotland and escaping to the Isle of Wight. Cromwell then ordered Colonel Pryde in 1648 to purge Parliament of those members who had voted in favor of a settlement with the King, known as “Pryde’s purge.” The remaining members were known as the “Rump Parliament.”

Lord Alfred Douglas, who edited Plain English, in an article of September 3, 1921, explained how his friend, Mr. L.D. Van Valckert of Amsterdam had come into possession of a letter written to the Directors of the Synagogue of Muljeim, dated June 16, 1647, had stated:

From O.C. [Olivier Cromwell] to Ebenezer Pratt: In return for financial support will advocate admission of Jews to England. This however impossible while Charles living. Charles cannot be executed without trial, adequate grounds for which do not at present exist. Therefore advise that Charles be assassinated, but will have nothing to do with arrangements for procuring an assassin, though willing to help in his escape.[23]

On July 12, 1647, Ebenezer Pratt replied, “Will grant financial aid as soon as Charles removed, and Jews admitted. Assassination too dangerous. Charles should be given an opportunity to escape. His recapture will then make trial and execution possible. The support will be liberal, but useless to discuss terms until trial commences.”[24] Eventually Charles I surrendered and finally, in 1649, he was tried and beheaded. With no king to consider, Parliament established an interim period of Commonwealth. In 1653, Oliver Cromwell terminated both his Parliament and the Commonwealth and, appointing himself Lord Protector, ruled by military force alone.

In pursuit of his reforms, as reported by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Cromwell based his policies on the ambitions of the “three foreigners,” Hartlib, Dury and Comenius.[25] The Cromwellian government was commonly regarded as a Rosicrucian circle. Samuel Butler (1612 – 1680), in his satire of the Restoration, Characters, tells of “the Brethren of the Rosy-Cross” as having attempted a misguided reformation of “their government.” A character in Butler’s other work Hudibras explains: “The Fraternity of the Rosy-Crucians is very like the Sect of the antient Gnostici who called themselves so, from the excellent Learning they pretend to, although they were really the most ridiculous Sots of all Mankind.”[26] According to Paul Benbridge, Cromwellians also referred to themselves as Rosicrucians, such as Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678), a metaphysical poet who sat in the House of Commons.[27]

Menasseh ben Israel came to England in 1655 to petition Parliament for the return of the Jews to England. The result was a national conference held at Whitehall, which declared that “there was no law which forbade the Jews’ return to England.” Henry Jessey, a contact of both Menasseh and Serrarius (1600 – 1669), worked behind the scenes of the Whitehall Conference. Serrarius was also the man chiefly responsible for communicating the mission of Shabbetai Zevi, to the English millenarians and Rosicrucians of the Hartlib Circle.[28] In 1662, Serrarius had published a treatise claiming that the eighth conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, to occur in that same year, prodded the greatest event of all: the establishment of the millennium, where Christ would gather the dispersed Jews, abolish the man of Sin, and create his kingdom of Earth.[29] Serrarius had been able to convince both John Dury and Comenius of Sabbatai Zevi’s messiahship.[30]

Queen Christina’s tutor, Johannes Matthiae, was influenced by John Dury and Comenius. In 1642, Comenius was in Sweden to work with Queen Christina and the Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, Axel Oxenstierna, on reorganizing the educational system in Swedish. Queen Christina became so fascinated with the claims of Sabbatai Zevi that she nearly became a disciple. In late 1665, Christina, who abdicated her throne in Sweden, converted to Catholicism and had moved to Rome, went to see her Jewish banker, Diego Teixeira (1581 – 1666), in Hamburg, and she arrived just as the news of Zevi’s announcement reached the Jews of Hamburg. She was reported to have danced in the streets of Hamburg with Jewish friends in anticipation of the apocalyptic event.[31]

Bevis Marks

In 1656, after Cromwell granted the Jews permission to meet privately and lease a cemetery, Menasseh’s followers established the Creechurch Lane synagogue, which became known as Bevis Marks Synagogue, the oldest Jewish house of worship in London, which was often led by Sabbatean Rabbis, and became intimately connected with the early founders of the Royal Society, many of whom were Freemasons, inspired the work of Francis Bacon.[32] The Royal Society was founded in 1660, when it was granted a royal charter by Charles II of England (1630 – 1685), brother of Elizabeth Stuart of the Alchemical Wedding. In 1649, after the execution of Charles I (1600 – 1649) and the establishment of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, his exiled son Charles II was initiated into Freemasonry.[33] As “Mason Kings,” explains Schuchard, James and his son Charles I and grandson Charles II, considered themselves Solomonic monarchs and employed Jewish visionary and ritual themes while they sought to rebuild the “Temple of Wisdom” in their kingdoms.[34] In 1665, the identification of Stuart Masons with Jews was expressed in a rare manuscript, “Ye History of Masonry,” written by Thomas Treloar.[35] Treloar portrayed Charles II as the restored and anointed king who now reigned over “the Craft.”[36]

Charles II’s mother, Henrietta Maria of France, the daughter of Marie de Medici, and widow of Charles I, patronized Jewish scholars who “practised divination through the medium of the Cabbalah.”[37] Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of John IV of Portugal (1604 – 1656), whose accession established the House of Braganza on the Portuguese throne.[38] Catherine’s mother as Luisa de Guzmán, who was from the ducal house of Medina-Sidonia of allegedly crypto-Jewish background. According to the genealogical studies of Edward Gelles, The Jewish Journey:

There was some Jewish admixture in the earlier Stuart line as in most European ruling houses. Some goes back to the descendants of Davidic Exilarchs. Mary of Guise and the ducal house of Lorraine have such a David-Carolingian connection and so did the d’Este of Ferrara and Modena. The mother-in-law of Charles II was from the ducal house of Medina-Sidonia of allegedly crypto-Jewish background.[39]

In 1641, Henrietta Maria, accompanied by her daughter Mary, left England for The Hague, where her sister-in-law Elizabeth Stuart, widow of Frederick V of the Palatinate—whose marriage to Elizabeth Stuart was the basis of the Alchemical Wedding of the Rosicrucians—and mother of her old favorite, Prince Rupert (1619 – 1682), had been living for some years already. The Hague was the seat of William II, Prince of Orange (1626 – 1650), Mary’s first cousin, which she was to marry shortly afterwards. William II’s father was Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange (1584 – 1647), the son of William the Silent. Frederick Henry’s step-sister, Countess Louise Juliana of Nassau, was the mother of Frederick V.

While the English Royal Family was in exile on the Continent, they had ample opportunity to meet members of the local Jewish community. Henrietta Maria had long enjoyed good relations with Jews. As explained by A.L. Shane, “the support of the Jewish merchants extended throughout the Royal Family’s exile and it was the Jewish merchants of Amsterdam who provided the money which the English Royal Family needed to finance their return to England, a fact which was gratefully acknowledged by Charles II, who promised to extend his protection to the Jews when he was restored to his kingdom.”[40] But the best demonstration of the Henrietta Maria’s interest in the Jewish community was her Royal visit to the Amsterdam Synagogue in 1642, accompanied by Frederick Henry, William III and new daughter-in-law. The visit was the occasion of the famous Address of Welcome of Menasseh ben Israel, which included a eulogy of the Queen, who was described as the “Worthy consort of the Most august Charles, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland.”[41]

Soon after, Henrietta Maria visited the residence of Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon Templo (1603 – after 1675), a close friend of Rabbi Jacob Abendana (1630 – 1685), the first head of Creechurch. Rabbi Templo was a Jewish Dutch scholar, translator of the Psalms, and expert on heraldry, of Sephardic descent, who was famous for his design of the Temple of Jerusalem.[42] His fascination with the Temple gained him the appellation, “Templo.” Templo was assisted in his design by Adam Boreel (1602 – 1665), a Dutch theologian and Hebrew scholar, counting among his close associates the Peter Serrarius, Baruch Spinoza, John Dury, and Dury’s son-in-law Henry Oldenburg (c. 1618 – 1677), an original member of the Hartlib Circle, and the first secret of the Royal Society.[43] Oldenburg was painted in 1668 by Jan van Cleve (1646 – 1716) gesturing the Marrano hand-sign.

According to Willem Surenhuis (c.1664 – 1729) a Dutch Christian scholar of Hebrew, Templo “won the admiration of the highest and most eminent men of his day by exhibiting to antiquaries, and others interested in such matters, an elaborate model of the Temple of Jerusalem, constructed by himself.”[44] Templo’s last work, a Spanish paraphrase of the Psalms, was dedicated to Isaac Senior Teixeira, financial agent of Menasseh ben Israel’s co-conspirator, Queen Christina of Sweden.[45] Templo’s renown inspired Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1579 – 1666)—a close friend of Johann Valentin Andreae—to have his Hebrew treatise on the Temple translated into Latin, and to have Leon’s portrait engraved.[46] Augustus married Dorothea of Anhalt-Zerbst, the niece of Christian of Anhalt (1568 – 1630), a German prince of the House of Ascania, and the chief sponsor of the Rosicrucian movement. Christian’s brother, Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Plötzkau, led a Rosicrucian court, that included the millenarian Paul Nagel, a collaborator of Baltazar Walther.[47]

Templo’s model was exhibited to public view at Paris and Vienna and afterwards in London. According to Jewish and Masonic historians in the eighteenth-century, Templo was welcomed by Henrietta Maria’s son, Charles II of England, as a “brother Mason,” and he designed a coat of arms featuring Kabbalistic symbols for the restored Stuart fraternity.[48] Henrietta Maria herself examined Templo’s model of the Temple and studied his explanatory pamphlet.[49] Laurence Dermott (1720 –1791), who founded the Ancient Grand Lodge of England, now called the “Antients,” in 1751, as a rival Grand Lodge to the Premier Grand Lodge of England, called the “Moderns,” took the coat of arms designed by Rabbi Templo as the basis for the coat of arms of the Antients.

In 1656, a delegation of prominent Jews in Amsterdam called on the Scottish agent John Middleton to pledge their secret financial and organizational assistance for the restoration effort.[50] In turn, Charles II promised them freedom to live and worship as Jews in Britain. To consolidate Jewish financial support, Charles called upon Sir William Davidson (1614/5 – c. 1689), a Scottish merchant and spy based in Amsterdam, who collaborated with Jewish trading partners.[51] Davidson’s tolerance was greatly admired by Abendana.[52] Davidson worked closely with Sir Robert Moray (1608 or 1609 – 1673), Alexander Bruce (1629 –1681).[53] Moray was also well known to the cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. Moray was probably familiar with Abendana’s work on Judah Halevi’s Kuzar (“Book of the Khazars”), for he praised the writings of medieval Jews on mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology in his letters to his Masonic protégé, Alexander Bruce.[54]

Mason Word

As early as 1638, a hint as to a connection between Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry was published, with the earliest known reference to the “Mason Word,” in a poem at Edinburgh in 1638:

For what we do presage is not in grosse,
For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse:
We have the Mason word and second sight,
Things for to come we can foretell aright…[55]

In 1689, a Williamite bishop, Edward Stillingfleet (1635 – 1699), asked his Scottish visitor, Reverend Robert Kirk, about the Scottish phenomenon of second sight and the Mason Word. Rejecting Kirk’s explanation of second sight, Stillingfleet called it “the work of the devil” and then scorned the Mason Word as “a Rabbinical mystery.”[56] Provoked by this conversation, Kirk visited the Bevis Marks synagogue in London order to observe the ceremonies, which were led by its Haham or Chief Rabbi, Solomon Ayllon (1660 or 1664 – 1728), a follower of Sabbatai Zevi from Salonika.[57] After returning to Scotland, Kirk published his findings in 1691:

The Mason-Word, which tho some make a Misterie of it, I will not conceal a little of what I know; it’s like a Rabbinical tradition in a way of comment on Jachin and Boaz the two pillars erected in Solomon’s Temple; with an addition of some secret signe delivered from hand to hand, by which they know and become familiar with another.[58]

Among the first Freemasons on record were Moray and Elias Ashmole (1617 – 1692) who became original members of the Royal Society. His diary entry for October 16, 1646, reads in part: “I was made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire, with Coll: Henry Mainwaring of Karincham [Kermincham] in Cheshire.”[59] In 1652, Ashmole befriended Solomon Franco, a Jewish convert to Anglicanism who combined his interest in Kabbalah and the architecture of the Temple with support for the English monarchy.[60] Franco instructed Ashmole in Hebrew and was probably the source for his manuscript “Of the Cabalistic Doctrine.”[61] Also Stuart supporter, Franco believed in the Hebrew traditions of anointed kingship, and he looked for spiritual portents in the life of Charles II, with whose eventual restoration he was greatly pleased.[62] After the Restoration, Franco converted to Christianity, persuaded by his belief that God had a divine plan for Charles II. He gave a copy of his book to Ashmole.

Ashmole copied in his own hand an English translation of the Fama and the Confessio, and added a letter in Latin addressed to the “most illuminated Brothers of the Rose Cross,” petitioning them to be allowed him to join their fraternity. Ashmole had a strong Baconian leaning towards the study of nature.[63] He was an antiquary with a particular interest in the history of the Order of the Garter. Ashmole revered John Dee, whose writings he collected and whose alchemical and magical teachings he endeavored to put into practice. In 1650, he published Fasciculus Chemicus under the anagrammatic pseudonym James Hasolle. This work was an English translation of two Latin alchemical works, one by Arthur Dee, the son of John Dee.

Royal Society

Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691), a friend of Samuel Hartlib, was one of the founding members of the Royal Society, which was influenced by the “new science,” as promoted by Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis.[64] Bacon suggests that the continent of America was the former Atlantis where there existed an advanced race during the Golden Age of civilization. Bacon tells the story of a country ruled by philosopher-scientists in their great college called Solomon’s House. Hartlib specifically mentions Solomon’s House with reference to the kinds of institutions he would like to see created, such as his Invisible College, which inspired the founding of the Royal Society.[65] In 1647, Robert Boyle had written to Samuel Hartlib mentioning his “Invisible College” and that he wished to support “so glorious a design.”[66] In 1663, the Invisible College became the Royal Society and the charter of incorporation granted by Charles II named Boyle a member of the council. Alexander Bruce was one those making up the 1660 committee of 12, also attended by fellow freemason Sir Robert Moray, that led to formation of the Royal Society, which also included Freemason Elias Ashmole.

The first secretary of the Royal Society was Henry Oldenburg, who forged a strong relationship with John Milton (1608 – 1674) and his lifelong patron, Robert Boyle. Dury was connected to Boyle by his marriage to Dorothy Moore, an Irish Puritan widow. Their daughter, Dora Katherina Dury, later became the second wife of Henry Oldenburg. When Menasseh ben Israel arrived in London in 1650, Cromwell appointed a committee of important millenarian clergymen and government officials to receive him. Lady Ranelegh, Robert Boyle’s sister, had dinner parties for Menasseh, and Oldenburg met with him as well.[67]

Milton, who was among the extensive network of the Hartlib Circle, was painted by Flemish painter Pieter van der Plas (c.1595 – c.1650) gesturing the Marrano hand-sign. In addition to his famous Paradise Lost, Milton was author of the masque titled Comus, featuring the Lord of Misrule. According to Matthews in Modern Satanism, “Shorn of all theistic implications, modern Satanism’s use of Satan is firmly in the tradition that John Milton inadvertently engendered—a representation of the noble rebel, the principled challenger of illegitimate power.”[68] Lucifer’s statement in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n,” became an inspiration for those who embraced the rebellion against God. As noted by Frances Yates, that there was an influence of Kabbalah on Milton is now generally recognised. Denis Saurat believed that he had found traces of Lurianic Kabbalah in Paradise Lost.[69] In 1955, the eminent Hebrew scholar Zwi Werblowsky stated that, although the influence of Lurianic Kabbalah on Milton could not be proved, there was decidedly an influence of Christian Kabbalah upon him: “Milton is influenced not by the Lurianic tsimtsum, still less by the Zohar, but by Christian post-Renaissance Cabala in its pre-Lurianic phase.”[70]

According to Laursen and Popkin, “The publication of Henry Oldenburg’s and Robert Boyle’s correspondence has made it clear that millenarianism was at the center of the concerns of the Royal Society in its founding years.”[71] Oldenburg, first secretary of the Royal Society, had kept a close watch on Shabbetai Zevi’s mission, due to his interest in the restoration of the Jews.[72] Petrus Serrarius had been able to convince both Dury, Oldenburg’s father-in-law, and Comenius of Sabbatai Zevi’s messiahship.[73] Oldenburg had probably heard of Spinoza through their common friend, Serrarius.[74] By the beginning of the 1660s, Spinoza’s name became more widely known, and he was eventually paid visits by Gottfried Leibniz, Hobbes and Oldenburg.[75] Spinoza was also aware of Shabbetai’s mission, and entertained the possibility that with these events the Jews might reestablish their kingdom and again be the chosen of God.[76] When he heard of the excitement about Sabbatai Zevi, Oldenburg wrote to Spinoza to enquire if the King of the Jews had arrived on the scene: “All the world here is talking of a rumour of the return of the Israelites… to their own country… Should the news be confirmed, it may bring about a revolution in all things.”[77]

Adam Boreel—whose associates included Serrarius, the Hartlib Circle and Rabbi Templo—was also the founder of the Collegiants, which included Spinoza and was closely associated with the movement of the Quakers, founded by George Fox (1624 – 1691) and his wife, Margaret Fell, popularly known as the “mother of Quakerism.” Lady Anne Conway (1631 – 1679), whose work was an influence on Leibniz, became interested in the Lurianic Kabbalah, and then was introduced by the Rosicrucian alchemist Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614 ‑ 1699) to Quakerism, to which she converted in 1677.[78] Van Helmont and Christian Kabbalist Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636 – 1689) were also both in contact with Serrarius.[79] Rosenroth is famous for his Kabbala Denudata (“Kabbalah Unveiled”), whose editors included Henry Oldenburg.[80]

Van Helmont and Knorr von Rosenroth led a Kabbalistic group that gathered at the court of Count Christian August von Pfalz-Sulzbach (1622 – 1708), whose mother, Anna of Cleves, was the niece of Martin Luther’s friend, John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony,[81] who commissioned the Luther Rose. That group was connected to the circle around Rotterdam merchant Benjamin Furly (1636 – 1714), a Quaker and a close supporter of George Fox known as the Lantern, which included Lady Conway, Henry More, Adam Boreel and John Locke.[82] John Locke, (1632 – 1704), a prominent member of the Royal Society and a Freemason,[83] is the person normally considered as the founder of empiricism, a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.[84] Locke is regarded as the “Father of Liberalism.”[85] Locke, who also spent time in Amsterdam, was influenced by Spinoza.[86] Most scholars trace the phrase “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” in the American Declaration of Independence, to Locke’s theory of rights.

Jacob Abendana’s brother Isaac who taught Hebrew at Cambridge and knew Locke, as well as Henry More and Robert Boyle.[87] Charles Cudworth’s daughter Damaris Cudworth (1659 – 1708), was a friend of Locke, and also a correspondent of Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716).[88] Van Helmont was a friend of Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716), who wrote his epitaph and introduced him to von Rosenroth in 1671.[89] Leibniz had visited Queen Christina shortly before her death in 1689, and subsequently became a member of her Accademia fisico-matematica in Rome, which included many Rosicrucian elements.[90]

Allison Coudert proposed that van Helmont and von Rosenroth, and to varying extents seventeenth-century natural philosophers who knew them or their work, including Leibniz and Locke’s friend Isaac Newton (1642 – 1726/27), took a keen interest in Lurianic Kabbalah.[91] Newton, a president of the Royal Society,  was painted by the English painter Sir James Thornhill (1675 or 1676 – 1734) gesturing the Marrano hand-sign. Newton was committed to interpretations of the “Restoration” of the Jews to their own land of Palestine and spent the remaining years of his intellectual life exploring the Book of Daniel. In his library, Newton kept a heavily annotated copy of The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity R.C., Thomas Vaughan’s English translation of The Rosicrucian Manifestos. Newton also possessed copies of Themis Aurea and Symbola Aurea Mensae Duodecium by the alchemist Michael Maier. As a Bible scholar, Newton was initially interested in the sacred geometry of Solomon’s Temple, dedicating an entire chapter of The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended.[92]


[1] Allison P. Coudert. “Kabbalistic Messianism versus Kabbalistic Enlightenment.” in M. Goldish, R.H. Popkin. Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture: Volume I: Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World (Springer Science & Business Media, Mar. 9, 2013), p. 117.

[2] Herbert Breger. “Elias artista - a Precursor of the Messiah in Natural Science.” in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Everett Mendelsohn and Helga Nowotny, Sociology of the Sciences, vol. 8 (New York: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), p. 49.

[3] Richard Popkin. “Chapter 14: The Religious Background of Seventeenth Century Philosophy.” In Daniel Garber, Michael Ayers, (eds.). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 407.

[4] Richard Popkin. “Chapter 14: The Religious Background of Seventeenth Century Philosophy.” In Daniel Garber, Michael Ayers, (eds.). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 407.

[5] Albert Montefiore Hyamson. A History of the Jews in England (1908), p. 182.

[6] Frances Yates. “Science, Salvation, and the Cabala” New York Review of Books (May 27, 1976 issue); Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1967).

[7] Yates. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.

[8] Frances Yates. “Science, Salvation, and the Cabala” New York Review of Books (May 27, 1976 issue); Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1967).

[9] Ernestine G.E. van der Wall. “Petrus Serrarius and Menasseh ben Israel,” p. 164.

[10] Hamilton Vreeland. Hugo Grotius: The Father of the Modern Science of International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1917), Chapter 1.

[11] Åkerman. “Queen Christina’s Esoteric Interests as a Background to Her Platonic Academies.”

[12] See Penman, “A Second Christian Rosencreuz?” p. 163.

[13] Fritz Lugt. Wanderlingen met Rembrandt in en om Amsterdam (Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen, 1915); cited in Steven Nadler. Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

[14] Cecil Roth. A Life of Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), p. 168

[15] Steven Nadler. Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

[16] Steven Nadler. Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

[17] Roy A. Rosenberg. “The ‘Star of the Messiah’ Reconsidered.” Biblica, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1972), pp. 105.

[18] Cited in Eric Lawee. “The Messianism of lsaac Abarbanel, ‘Father of the [Jewish] Messianic Movements of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’.” in Richard H. Popkin. Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650-1800: Clark Library Lectures 1981-1982, Volume I (Brill Academic Publishers, 1997), p. 8.

[19] Penman. “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” pp. 201-226.

[20] Gershom Scholem. The Messianic Idea in Judaism, p. 221.

[21] Pawel Maciejko. The mixed multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist movement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 45.

[22] Elli Kohen. History of the Turkish Jews and Sephardim: memories of a past golden age (Lanham: University Press of America, 2007), p. 120.

[23] Lord Alfred Douglas. Plain English (September 3, 1921).

[24] Ibid.

[25] Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, p. 261.

[26] Samuel Butler. Hudibras, op. cit., Butler’s note to pt. 1, canto I, 527-544.

[27] Paul Benbridge, “The Rosicrucian Resurgence at the Court of Cromwell,” in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited, p. 225.

[28] Daniel Frank. History of Jewish Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 607.

[29] Van Der Wall. “An Awakening to the World of the Soul,” p. 76.

[30] Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie & Timothy Raylor, editors. Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 134.

[31] Popkin. Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650-1800, p. 93.

[32] Cecil Roth. History of the Great Synagogue (1950). Retrieved from https://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/susser/roth/chone.htm

[33] Keith Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry.”

[34] Vaughan Hart. Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London: Routledge, 1994); Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 207.

[35] John Thorpe. “Old Masonic Manuscript. A Fragment,” Lodge of Research, No. 2429 Leicester. Transactions for the Year 1926-27, 40-48; Wallace McLeod. “Additions to the List of Old Charges,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 96 (l983), pp. 98-99.

[36] Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry.”

[37] James Picciotto. Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History, ed. Israel Finestine (1875; rev. ed. Soncino Press, l956), 41; Cecil Roth. “The Middle Period of Anglo-Jewish History (1290-1655) Reconsidered,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 19 (1955-59), p. 11.

[38] John Reville. “Antonio Vieira.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912). Retrieved from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15415d.htm

[39] Edward Gelles. The Jewish Journey: A Passage through European History (The Radcliffe Press, 2016), p. 154.

[40] A. L. Shane. “Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon (Templo) of Amsterdam (1603—1675) and his connections with England.” Transactions & Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England), 1973-1975, Vol. 25 (1973-1975), pp. 120-123.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Geoffrey F. Nuttall. “Early Quakerism in the Netherlands: Its Wider Context.” Bulletin of Friends Historical Association, 44: 1 (Spring, 1955), p. 5.

[43] Geoffrey F. Nuttall. “Early Quakerism in the Netherlands: Its Wider Context.” Bulletin of Friends Historical Association, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 1955), p. 5.

[44] Shane. “Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon (Templo) of Amsterdam (1603—1675) and his connections with England,” pp. 120-123.

[45] Gotthard Deutsch & Meyer Kayserling. “Leon (Leao).” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[46] John T. Young. Faith, Alchemy and Natural Philosophy (Routledge, 2018), p.47.

[47] Donald R. Dickson. “Johann Valentin Andreae's Utopian Brotherhoods.” Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 760-802.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Arthur Shane, “Jacob Judah Leon of Amsterdam (1602-1675) and his Models of the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 96 (1983), pp. 146-69.

[50] C.H. Firth. Scotland and the Protectorate (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1899), pp. 342-43.

[51] Wilfrid Samuel. “Sir William Davidson, Royalist, and the Jews.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 14 (l940), pp. 39-79.

[52] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 550.

[53] On Moray’s collaboration with Davidson, see NLS: Kincardine MS. 5049, ff.3, 28; MS. 5050, ff.49, 55. On  the Jewish initiations, see Samuel Oppenheim, “The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 19 (1910), pp. 9-17; David Katz. Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, l988), pp. 155-64.

[54] NLS: Kincardine MS. 5049, ff. 117, 151; MS. 5050, f. 28.

[55] Yates. Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 268.

[56] Robert Kirk. The Secret Commonwealth (1691), ed. S. Sanderson (London, l976), 88-89; D. Stevenson, Origins of Freemasonry, pp. 133-34.

[57] David Katz. The Jews in the History of England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), pp. 161-62, cited in Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry”; Louis Ginzberg. “Ayllon, Solomon ben Jacob.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[58] Kirk. The Secret Commonwealth, pp. 88-89.

[59] C. H. Josten, (ed.). Elias Ashmole (1617–1692). His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, his Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to his Life and Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), vol. II, pp. 395–396.

[60] Stevenson. Origins, 219-20; C.H. Josten. Elias Ashmole (Oxford: Clarendon, l966), I, 92; II, 395-96, 609. On seventeenth-century ambulatory military lodges, see John Herron Lepper, “‘The Poor Common Soldier,’ a Study of Irish Ambulatory Warrants,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 38 (l925), 149-55.

[61] Edward Bernard. Catalogus Librorum Manuscritorum Angliae et Hiberniae (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1697), I, “Ashmole’s MSS.,” p. 351.

[62] Solomon Franco. Truth Springing Out of the Earth (London, 1668).

[63] Vittoria Feola (2005). “Elias Ashmole and the Uses of Antiquity,” Index to Theses, Expert Information Ltd.

[64] R.H Syfret. “The Origins of the Royal Society.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. The Royal Society. 5:2 (1948), p. 75.

[65] Chloë Houston. The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 138.

[66] Margery Purver. The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (1967), Part II Chapter 3, “The Invisible College.”

[67] Richard Popkin. “Chapter 14: The Religious Background of Seventeenth Century Philosophy.” In Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers, (eds.). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy, Volume 1. (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[68] Chris Mathews. Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Radical Subculture (Wesport: Praeger, 2009) p. 54.

[69] Denis Saurat. Milton: Man and Thinker (London, 1944); cited in Frances Yates. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (New York & London: Routledge, 1979). p. 208.

[70] R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Milton and the Conjectura Cabbalistica,” Journal of the Warburg Courtauld Institutes, XVIII (1955), p. 110. etc.; cited in Frances Yates. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (New York & London: Routledge, 1979). p. 208.

[71] J.C. Laursen & R.H. Popkin. “Introduction.” In Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume IV, ed. J.C. Laursen & R.H. Popkin (Springer Science+Business Media, 2001), p. xvii.

[72] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven (Leiden: Brill, 2011) p. 22.

[73] Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie & Timothy Raylor (eds.) Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 134.

[74] Richard H. Popkin. “Benedict de Spinoza.” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. May 12, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benedict-de-Spinoza

[75] P. G. Lucas. “Some Speculative and Critical Philosophers,” in I. Levine (ed.), Philosophy (London: Odhams, 1960).

[76] Kaufmann Kohler & Henry Malter. “Shabbethai Zebi B. Mordecai,” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[77] Kohler & Malter. “Shabbethai Zebi B. Mordecai,”

[78] Allison Coudert. Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Springer, 1995). p. 36.

[79] Jonathan Israel. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford University Press, 1995). p. 589.

[80] Victor Nuovo. Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment: Interpretations of Locke (Springer, 2001) p. 130

[81] Elizabeth W. Fisher. “‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 109:3 (1985), p. 306.

[82] John Marshall. John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and 'early Enlightenment’ Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006). p. 494.

[83] Michael Zuckert. The Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame University Press, 1996), pp. 73–85; The Freemason’s Monthly Magazine, Volume 2 (Boston: Tuttle & Dennett, 1843), p. 10.

[84] Stathis Psillos & Martin Curd. The Routledge companion to philosophy of science (1. publ. in paperback ed.) (London: Routledge, 2010). pp. 129–38.

[85] Nancy J. Hirschmann. Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 200), p. 79.

[86] Cornel West. “The spirit of Spinoza.” Boston Globe (28 July 2006).

[87] Matt Goldish. “Maimonides, Stonehenge, and Newton’s Obsessions.” Jewish Review of Books, Volume 9, Number 2 (Summer 2018), p. 12.

[88] M. Knights. “Masham, Sir Francis, 3rd Bt. (c. 1646–1723), of Otes, High Laver, Essex,” in D. Hayton, E. Cruickshanks and S. Handley (eds), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1690–1715 (Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, 2002).

[89] Allison Coudert. Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Springer, 1995). p. 6.

[90] W. Totok & C. Haase, (eds.) Leibniz (Hanover, 1966), 46; Leibniz, SS, s. I, vol. 11, pp. 647–49.

[91] J.H (Yossi) Chajes. “Kabbalah and the Diagramatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution.” Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dorhmann, Adam Shear and Elchanan Reiner (eds.). Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press) p. 110.

[92] Matt Goldish. “Maimonides, Stonehenge, and Newton’s Obsessions.” Jewish Review of Books, 9: 2 (Summer 2018), p. 12.

Zionism