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For a few years before his death in 1791, a stout gentleman of medium height could be seen in Offenbach, a small town near Frankfurt in Germany. The old Señor wore a long red silk cloak, trimmed with ermine and had had a tall cap of fur on his head, decorated with gold cords and topped by a white egret feather.’1
The cape was no mere act of flamboyance. It was the colour red because edom, the Hebrew word for red was synonymous with Edom, the abode of Esau but also, since the days ofHerod the Great, the common Jewish epithet for Christianity.2 This was the ‘cloak’ of Esau with which Jacob deceived Isaac.
The man was Jacob Frank, who proclaimed himself to be the direct successor to Sabbatai Zevi and thus the Messiah of the Jews. Following the precepts of his predecessor, salvation would be found in sin and apostasy.
Frank’s sense of public relations lifted the veil on Sabbatian attitudes to sexual morality. The unloading of sexual taboos was regarded as the gateway to messianic freedom.
Frank adopted the religion of Edom, Christianity. In doing so, he affixed the emblem of red to the tradition of Marrano deception.
Whether this was the flag of revolution, or the red shield (Roth-schild) atop the banking houses of money trafficking and globalised finance, is not of immediate importance. In the red mist of deception, it is too easy tofall into the murky abyss of speculation about the events leading up to the French Revolution.
Sufficien thas been written already, starting with the great works by Augustin Barruel and John Robison, about the alliance of Frank, Rothschild, Weishaupt and the Illuminati for me to add any more.
However,I do return to the fact that a motive for deception can be discovered in the metaphors of exile and return in the Lurianic Kabbalh adopted by the Marrano exiles.
Oncethe Marrano interpretation of Lurianic Kabbalah is understood as anti-humanism, revenge against the Renaissance nation state and recovery from the ‘shattering of the vessels’ which culminated in the Peace of Westphalia, then other elements fit into place. Tikkun was the anti-humanist Spinozism targeted against the Renaissance state.
In addition there was an outcome that was consistent with the motive; the actual fall of a sovereign Renaissance state, broken by debt and intrigue, leading to the eventual rise across Europe of ‘The Republick of Merchants’.
Some Sabbatian-Frankists were active during the French Revolution, such as Moses Dobruška, a son of Frank's Sabbatian cousin in Offenbach Shendl Dobruska.
However, the opposition to the ancient regime was on a far wider front than this and drew upon the philosophical and socio-economic legacy of Sarpi, Spinoza and Locke. Jonathan Israel has especially highlighted the influence of Spinoza’s philosophy in this context. However, I contend that the Messianism and the Marrano heritage of crypto-identities and intrigue were crucial parts of this Enlightenment cultural milieu too.
The metapolitical struggle in France was won by the heirs of Sarpi, Spinoza and Locke and their weapon of deception was the Encyclopedia. D’Alembert remarked in a letter to Voltaire:
No doubt we have some bad articles in theology and metaphysics, but with theologians as censors...I defy you to make them better. There are other articles less open to the light, where all is repaired. Time will enable people to distinguish what we have thought from what we have said.3
Diderot explained a more esoteric form of deception which used cross-references to ‘secretly attack, unsettle, overturn certain ridiculous opinions which one would not dare to insult openly’.4
Indeed, the the revolution was born of deception. The state was undermined by the clandestine activities of freemasonic lodges and the Jacobin Clubs by a class of men who openly paid lip-service to the liturgy of the Church, whilst secretly paying homage to the kabbalistic symbols of masonic ritual.
The leading Encyclopedists, Diderot, Louis de Jaucourt and D'Alembert were freemasons. Baron d’Holbach was not initiated, but traveled in masonic circles.
Other notable French revolutionaries who were Freemasons, included Voltaire, Marquis de Lafayette, Marquis de Condorcet, Mirabeau, Georges Danton, the Duke of Orléans, and Hébert. Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, a leader of theLiberal Aristocracy, was the Grand Master of the Grand Orient lodge at the time of the French Revolution. In some parts of France, the Jacobin Clubs were continuances of Masonic lodges from the Ancien Régime, and according to historian Alan Forrest 'some early clubs, indeed, took over both the premises and much of the membership of masonic lodges, before rebadging themselves in the new idiom of the revolution'.5
Ina messianic fervour that was Sabbatian in its intensity, the revolutionary calendar was reset to year 1 and as the forces unleashed were spinning out of control in the Terror, a new messiah arose. Lauded as such by many Jews,6 Napoleon opened the ghettos wherever his armies advanced and the Jews spilled out into wider society, many to convert and assimilate.
Napoleon met his nadir in the Renaissance state that had been modelled by Peter the Great on Louis XIV’s France. Nevertheless, the Edomite red flag would eventually be raised in Russia just over one hundred years later, launching the ultimate social experiment in unimpeded exploitation and extraction of surplus value, which by-passed the employer and taxation stages. And this was done in the name of the Spinozist Karl Marx.
The Age of Revolutions (recognised as the period up to and including 1848), heralded the modern age of trade, central banking and national debt secured against enforced taxation.
Absolutist monarchies fell to constitutionalist states and republics. Freedom of internal trade and encouragements to technical innovation allied the state with commercial growth.
Napoleon’s conquests cemented the spread of French revolutionary legislation to much of western Europe. The powers of the Roman Catholic church, guilds, and manorial aristocracy came under the gun as the goal of an unimpeded borderless movement of money came into view. Traditions crumbled. 'All that is solid melts into air’, wrote Marx in a Sabbatian fervour, ‘all that is holy is profaned'.7
Money was free to cross borders. Pre-Renaissance unimpeded economic activity returned. Tikkun was nearly done. Spinoza had led his people home; but a Marrano return from exile was not without reaction, and this was expressed as Romanticism.
1 H. Lenowitz, ‘The Charlatan at the Gottes Haus in Offenbach’, Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume I, ed. M. Goldish, R.H. Popkin, see p.192
2 In the Talmudic period, Edom became associated with Rome, perhaps because Herod the Great, the Rome-appointed vassal king of Judea, was an Idumean (Edomite). Rome eventually became the centre of Christianity. The Christian world developed into what is now referred to as Western Society, and so Western Christian society is referred to in Jewish sources as Edom. http://www.jewishtreats.org/2014/07/ishmaelites-and-edomites.html cited 11.6.18
3 A. M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, University of Chicago Press, 2014, p.29
4 Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines, p.29
5 A. Forrest, Paris, the Provinces and the French Revolution, Oxford University Press, 2004 p.108
6 R. Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815, University of California Press, 2003, pp.200-201
7 K.Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, Verso Books, Reprint edition, London, 2012, p.38
© John Dunn.
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