REPRINTED VERBATIM
FROM A COPY OF A RARE PAMPHLET,
DATE CIRCA 1836
reprinted
from “Theosophical Siftings” Volume 1 -
[Page
3] THE
present number of the T.P.S. pamphlets, a reprint of
a curious and very rare work, may not appear to some
readers to have a very direct bearing on theosophical
teachings. Those who have got beyond the A B C of Theosophy,
however, will find in this issue a good deal of material
for serious thought. It deals with one of the most puzzling
and deeply interesting problems which the past has left
for solution to the future — the destiny of the
Jewish race, and the fate of the Holy Land. The plot of
the work (if that expression be allowed) is based upon
two ideas, which taken singly are so well known as to
be almost tiresome; namely, the ancient belief of the
Jews, based upon prophecy and national pride, that eventually
they will recover possession of Judea, and gather together
once more at Jerusalem, after their long exile from the
land of their ancestors — a belief only
less intense than the longing for its realization. The other
idea is that contained in the legend of the Wandering Jew — firmly
believed in by all Christendom from the apostolic ages until
but recently, still half-believed by millions, and to which
the doctrine of reincarnation, especially immediate reincarnation
for a specific purpose, lends, if not plausibility, at
least a new intellectual interest. These two ingredients
of the plot when put together enter, as it were, into chemical
combination, for they give rise to an idea which differs
in its characteristics from both of the components. As a
punishment for a thoughtless word spoken by a foolish and
ignorant mortal even to a god (in disguise at the time),
the eternal and miserable activity of the Wandering Jew is
a purposeless piece of unworthy revenge, as little credible
in this more humane and enlightened age as the miracle required
to consummate it. As a practical settlement of the Jewish
question, the return of the Hebrew nation, or even a considerable
part of the Jews, to Syria seems patently absurd. All travellers
describe the Holy Land as barren and poor in the extreme,
a land which, if it ever flowed with "milk and honey", has for centuries
been believed to have withered under the terrible curse of
an angry God. Could anyone but a child imagine for one instant
that so thoroughly practical a people as the Jews, a race,
moreover, pre-eminently fond of the luxuries of life, would
voluntarily abandon the various countries which for centuries
have been their homes, abandon their hereditary occupations,
abandon civilization, and undertake the frightful labour
of reclaiming a rocky and arid district, a labour from which
even back-woods pioneers inured to hardship would shrink — and
all for a religio-sentimental idea ?
But put these
two incredible notions together, and all is changed. What
if it be the mission of the so-called Wandering Jew to
preserve in the Hebrew mind the recollection of the former
glories of the race, and to keep alive the longing once
more to revive them ? The moment that idea finds entry
to the mind, the legend ceases to be childish, and the
longing is no longer unaccountable. The two things explain
each other, and taken together they raise the Jewish question
to a level far above that occupied by the superstitions
of the ignorant, or the calculations of individual self-interest.
To the Jew himself it is no less than the finger of Jehovah
that [Page
4] becomes manifest from this larger point of view.
Through all the centuries, as they believe, He has been disciplining
and preparing them for their final triumph. Already the despised
outcasts of a thousand years ago are the masters of kings
and republics alike. There are a score of Jews today each
one of whom is a greater power in the world than an army
of a hundred thousand men. Were they to combine they could
purchase Palestine ten times over, and then keep a million
of Christian workmen joyfully slaving at starvation wages
for twenty years in doing the work of making the country
once more a garden while they stood by to superintend. Perhaps
the Jews are right. It may be that the finger of Jehovah
is guiding their destinies in the direction of Jerusalem.
We know that to be worshipped there, and by them alone, was
once His greatest glory. Far be it from theosophists to deny
that such may still be the case, and if it so be, then, for
the Jews themselves, all that need be done to complete his
purposes will be accomplished. To the theosophist, however,
Jerusalem, even Judea, is not the whole of this earth, nor
this earth the whole Universe. And a higher guidance than
that by human will in the case of the Jews, does not imply
a monopoly of divine solicitude for one little tribe of people,
nor a monopoly of power and wisdom for the celestial being
who has chosen them for his special favour. If it be true
that the affairs of the Jewish race are under higher guidance,
then logic and justice require us to believe that a similar
guidance is vouchsafed to all mankind, and to the inhabitants
of the myriad worlds that roll in space. Is it so ? Is there
being enacted before our eyes a tremendous drama of creation,
in which individual men are as microscopic animalculi ? Does
it get rid of the idea of a directing power to call "spontaneous
development" what our ancestors, equally ignorant,
called Divine Providence ? Who is to ask these questions
? And of whom can they be asked ? Will the Christian listen
for their answer from the mouth of a Jew ? Will a theosophist
seek it from a theologian ? Will those who know go to school
to those who invent fables ?
Above, behind,
inside of every material thing there is a great, an eternal,
incomprehensible, sustaining power — absolute
and impersonal, the Divine Spirit. Far lower in the scale
of existence there are powers, personal and non-eternal, creatures who
had a beginning and will have an end. Men call these lower
fashioning powers collectively a personal God; not only jumbling
them together, but confounding them with the unknowable Absolute.
Is one of these minor powers, the Jehovah of the ancient
Hebrews, now pulling the wires that attach his people to
him, and turning their steps towards the "promised land" once
more ? It is said that wealthy Jewish bankers have at this
moment actual legal right of possession to Palestine, holding
it in mortgage from the Sultan. It is said that Jewish statesmen
have arranged for the completion and ratification of the
transfer of the property to the mortgagees, upon the fulfilment
of certain diplomatic conditions which events are rapidly
bringing about. At the present moment a large part of Palestine,
and nearly the whole of Jerusalem, is said to be owned by
Jews. What does it all mean ?
The T.P.S in republishing
this little work, disclaims all political purpose, as needs
hardly to be said. It contains some bitter sayings concerning
people long since dead, and events now almost "ancient history",
all of which the T.P.S. would gladly have omitted in the
reprint, had it not been that to do so would have spoiled
the consecutiveness of the argument or narrative therein
contained.
From internal
evidence the Hebrew Talisman was written about 1836. No
one ever discovered who the writer was. The edition was
soon exhausted, and till now has never been reprinted. [Page
5]
THE HEBREW TALISMAN
IT has been lately
asserted that so much had been said and sung about the
Wandering Jew that nothing further could be made of the
subject by any writer, however highly gifted with the quality
of invention. Insolent Gentiles! Learn to be more humble
in thought and less peremptory in assertion: I am the
Wandering Jew, I am that doomed one of whom so many
have written; and / have smiled in very scorn at the description
given of me, and of my mode of being, by personages who
are nearly as ignorant of all that relates to me as are
those stolid worthies who pronounce me to be a nonentity;
and my perpetuated misery a fable and a figment.
I am spoken of
as being an undying exception to all human rule; yet has
my body died and been consigned to the loathsome vault
and the sleek damp worm upwards of two score times
since that awful day when the veil of the temple was rent
in twain, when the earth groaned and was convulsed in her
agony of sympathy with the dying one; and when He,
turning his effulgent orbs in anger upon me exclaimed, "Tarry
thou until I come!" Undying! I have been wept over in
most of the nations which exist, and in many which have long
ceased to be; I have been the victim of the rack and of the
block; I have pined in the terrible dungeon of the Inquisition
which shuts out hope and which echoes to no sound save the
moan of the miserable captive or execration of the brutal
gaoler; my body has blazed in the Auto da Fe of Spain and
Portugal, where hecatombs of my miserable long suffering
race, the youth, the maiden, the matron, the elder, have
been immolated; living, burning, sacrifices, offered on
the altars of Christian meekness. Undying ! Take but a brief
portion of my long and awful history, and put an end to the
senseless figments of lively imaginations; to the absurd
belief that the mortal portion of man can outlast the rock,
and what is frail can remain for long centuries unbroken,
or what is destructible remain undestroyed.
Years, long, agonised
years, have flown, yet it seems but as yesterday! God!
how happy, how haughty in gladness, was I then. My house,
overlooking the sea and shaded on the land side by groves
of oranges and myrtles, was on an eminence at the extremity
of one of the most delightful [Page
6] of
the Grecian Isles. Though I was fully twenty years, in
the world's estimation, what knew the world of my age? — older
than my beloved Zoe, I was dear to her as the gushing fountain
to the Pilgrim of Zahara. Our daughter, fairest among even
the sunny-eyed daughters of Greece, and our son, the noblest
boy that ever gave fair promise of heroic manhood, were even
as a proverb for beauty, as we ourselves were for prosperity
and concord.— Happy days ! Too happy, by far, to be
the permanent lot of him who had mocked at the prophet of
Calvary, and who has seen empires smitten down, and wept
his own repeated ruin in the ruin of successive nations.
We sat one evening in luxurious ease, exchanging glances
of mingled love and pride, as our beautiful children abandoned
themselves to their innocent mirth and displayed some new
grace in every new attitude. Of a sudden the air felt leaden
in its oppressiveness, a dire consciousness rushed upon my
mind, and I once more became aware of my terrible identity.
I gasped for breath, and vainly attemped to give utterance
to my agony; the metempsychosis of the ancients, fabulous
to them, was no longer a fable; and I, who in outward appearance
and corporeal members was a merchant of Greece, the husband
of a loving wife and the father of beloved children, was
once more aroused to the maddening truth, that in soul I
was the accursed one of Judea; the survivor of many ages
! the unpitied mourner of innumerable relatives — the
dead of divers nations! This fatal, this abhorred, consciousness
comes upon my soul in the fortieth year of whatsoever body
it inhabits; and to this consciousness some terrible calamity
certainly and speedily succeeds.
As I stood with dilated nostrils, glazed eyes, and stricken
limbs, my Zoe started suddenly from the anxious and endearing
posture she had assumed on witnessing the horrible change
which had come over me, and, shrieking, "The Osmanlie!" rushed
towards our children. A struggle a piercing shriek, the wild
war-cry of the bloody brood of Mahomet; and I was childless
and wifeless! How I reached the sea side I know not; but
I did reach it and was speedily on board a vessel of my own,
and bounding over the blue waters. Days and nights passed
by, the good ship cleft her way through the heaving waters;
but no pang for wife or child, no thought for my present
preservation or future course once crossed my mind. A dry
and burning agony oppressed my brain; and but one thought
was existent there — my horrible my accursed identity;
and when my lips gave utterance to my thoughts their sole
accents were "Tarry thou until I come !"
At length this
one horror made way for the accumulated reminiscences of
eighteen hundred years of misery! Aye, that, that is the
surpassing curse of my tremendous doom! No sooner have my
forty years of untortured [Page 7] existence
passed away, no sooner do I awaken to a consciousness of
what I am, than I am goaded to despair by distinct and harrowing
remembrance of all that I have been, done, and suffered.
All who loved me and are lost to me rise up again to my mental
view; and the moral evils of long centuries are superadded
to the tremendous curse which extends my spiritual evil to
the crack of doom.
The good ship
bounded on, and the very excess of my misery aroused me
to an activity of which I had previously been incapable.
Of maritime affairs, I had, in this one of my many lives,
had abundant experience; and as the horizon gave tokens
of an approaching tempest, I took the helm, and the command
of the vessel. If I had not already felt aware that my
bodily existence was about to undergo another change, a
phenomenon which I now observed would have persuaded me
of that fact. Our ship defied alike the wind and the waves,
and swept rapidly through the latter in the face of the former
! I then knew that I was approaching my death place; that
I was speeding towards land which should afford me another
grave, and my spirit, my doomed spirit! another body. Oh,
that terrible chill, that paralysis of the heart, that numbing
yet agonising sinking of the soul, which precede the mortal
pang ! All, all were with me and upon me; yet I gazed in
pity upon my devoted crew who, poor fools! were pitting their
manhood and their skill against inexorable fate. They knew
not, alas ! that to be attached to me was to die; to be
bound up with my lot but another phrase for miserably perishing.
Seamen by nature, you insular people are familiar, at least
by description, with every phase of ocean's rage and ocean's
convulsion. No new description of ship-wreck is necessary
to you. Let it suffice then to say that I saw my shipmates,
without an exception, swallowed up by the howling waters,
and was myself dashed upon the coast which we had long been
approaching, and which I had long recognized as the once
barbarous land in which, when a Roman centurion, I had combated
the fierce and savage inhabitants; and which I had more recently
visited as a merchant, and marvelled at for its wealth, its
luxuries, and its civilization. Need I name your England.
The valour and the wisdom of their ancestors, had encircled
her brows with the diadem of empire and had placed within
her hands the Sceptre of maritime dominion, and clasp'd around
her waist the golden girdle of the world. She had become
the mart of nations, and her ships covered the waters of
the globe, and her immense metropolis was the emporium of
the earth.
The last fell
pang was over, and my spirit once more freed from mortality, [Page
8] to seek
another mortal residence. Impelled by the resistless but
unseen hand which scourges me, my disembodied spirit glided
onward till it reached a small but beautiful cottage, and
there at an open casement, it paused; and stood dim, shadowy,
and invisible to mortal eye, though silvered and shining
in the full calm beams of the moon. In the room sat a young
and beautiful woman gazing in agony which could not weep,
upon the pale and waxen visage of her dead boy — her
beautiful, her only one. Anon came the felt, though
unspoken, fiat; and my spirit entered the lifeless body.
The infant's feeble cry, and the mother's shriek of frantic
joy announced the reanimation of the mourned one. The father
and the domestics rushed in, and the wonderful event is talked
of to this hour in the beautiful village of ———.
I have already shown that during the first forty years of
each bodily existence, I am unconscious of aught that distinguishes
me from the rest of my race. I have but lately been roused
from my ignorance: the curse of consciousness came over
me ere I wept above the grave of her who had wept her child's
death, and knelt in gratitude for his recovery. I am once
more alone in the world, and once more aware that I am the
accursed one of Judea.
Reader you have seen me though you know it not. A single
night has bleached my hair, I wear the haggard features of
three score, and as my mean person, and worn yet intelligent
features are contrasted, as I pass through the populous streets
of your new Babel, with my sordid garments and my anxious
and almost ferocious looks, the passengers turn and gaze
upon me in wonder, as to my pursuits, my circumstances, and
my character.
I am aged; but
I cannot again die until my mission be complete. Hitherto,
in all my bodily lives I have silently suffered; and in
all my bodily deaths I have
"Died,
like the wolf, in silence."
But the time has
at length come when the cause and the object of my marvellous
and doomed existence must be made knovvn; that the pride of
the Gentiles may be abated, and that the scattered people of
Israel may know that they verily shall be a kingdom mighty
to save and to destroy, and that they shall see the advent
of their Messias, and the utter confusion and abasement
of the insolent and false followers of the Nazarine!
"Tarry!" Aye,
I have indeed tarried; and I must tarry yet a little while
ere the mighty spell can be utterly broken, and the Lion
of Judah triumphant over the nations. In what nation have
I not lived and [Page 9] suffered
? In what nation have I not exerted a mighty, though unseen,
power, in producing that gradual rise of my scattered and
erring, but still sacred and peculiar, people, which will
so shortly terminate in the rebuilding of the Temple of
Jerusalem — in
the subjection of the Kings of the Gentiles to the sway of
the long tried, long suffering, and at length restored, people
of the Most High ? The false powers will at length be smitten
down by the true; and the temporal triumph of God's chosen
people illustrated and consummated by the veritable advent
of the veritable Messias. "Tarry!" Tyrant! I
have tarried; I have wielded the power of the thousand powers
which may not resist the word of authority spoken
by him who has looked unmoved and unrebuked upon the glories
of the Shechinah, who has lifted the veil of the temple,
penetrated into the holy of holies, and learned the words
of power engraven upon the signet of the master of all wisdom,
and of all demons, good and evil — the marvellous,
the glorious Solomon.
Ill taught, as
are the myriads who put their vain trust in the prophet
who died on Calvary, and led away as they are by a thousand
vain conceits and cunningly devised fables, even they have
some faint understanding of the wisdom of the great Solomon, — whose
name be reverenced ! Selah ! But they have only a glimmering
of light; they can see only an atom of the vast whole of
his wisdom and his might; it is needful therefore that
they should learn from me what their false philosophy would
never teach them, what their false faith shall vainly forbid
them to believe. They must believe the truth, for it shall
chastise them; the word is spoken, Judah shall rejoice
over their confusion, yea, Israel shall be very glad.
Though the bigoted and vain Nazarenes know that the great
Solomon builded to the Most High a temple of exceeding beauty
and exceeding costliness, marvellous to think of, though
they know that his wisdom filled the nations of the earth
with wonder, and caused King Hiram and the Queen of Sheba
to look upon him with much reverence; though they know that
in wealth, as in wisdom, Solomon was pre-eminent among the
mighty ones of the earth, insomuch that none other prince
than he could have builded that temple, which he dedicated
to the worship of the one only God; yet, so narrow-minded
and grovelling are these Nazarenes, that they divine not,
neither will they confess, that the wealth and power of the
great Solomon were but the natural consequence of that ineffable
wisdom which was bestowed upon him when his ,soul, in a night
dream, replied wisely and worthily to the question that was
vouchsafed to him from above.
Nay, so infatuated
are they, so surrounded by the outermost gloom of [Page
10] a more than Cimmerian darkness, that they — they!
in the petty pride of the ten thousand contradictions which
they call philosophy, take upon themselves to deny the interference
of the supernal powers in the progress of mundane affairs;
though a single glance at their own version of the history
of the wise son of David would, one would suppose, suffice
to show them that only by the aid of those powers,
subjected to his unspeakable wisdom, could Solomon have amassed
and expended the treasures which upreared the temple. From
the cedar that is on Lebanon to the hyssop that groweth upon
the wall, Solomon knew the nature and the properties of every
thing that springeth up from the pregnant earth; and, divinely
taught and divinely authorised, he had elixirs potent for
all purposes, and words of might which the demons hear in
their far abodes, and which, hearing, they must obey.
As an instance
of the unbelieving and deceitful nature of the scribes
who from the day of Calvary even to the present hour have
laboured in their vocation to hoodwink the worldly and
fat-hearted generations, and to keep them unaware of the
powers of that magic which, partially revealed to Moses,
was entirely unveiled to the steadfast and eagle glance of
Solomon, I may demand, who among the multitudinous sects
of the Nazarene has any knowledge of that wondrous and invaluable
root, BAARA ? That wondrous root which could only be drawn
from its parent earth, on being sprinkled with human blood,
unless at the expense of the instant death of the animal
compelled to draw it ? I venture affirm that not one, save
Fabricius, has ever alluded to this wondrous root, except
in what the Christians as ignorantly as insolently term " Talmudical
fables". And yet it is perfectly true that it is the
quality of this root, as is averred by sundry writers of
our despised and persecuted race, to cast out evil demons
from people possessed; — and, though it is never known
to more than one person of our race, a preparation of this
root, aided by the words of might engraven upon the signet
of Solomon, is potent excedingly in tasking the hidden powers,
and in discovering the most hidden things.
Poor fools! these
Gentiles! But by magic divinely taught and divinely authorised,
how deem they that Moses, that mighty chieftain in Israel,
foiled the Egyptian Magii at their own weapons, and vexed
the land of Egypt with many plagues, even until the peculiar
people of God made a glorious Exodus from the land of bondage
? Do they deem that by any other means than magic, so taught,
and so authorised, Joshua the son of Nun could have made
the sun stand still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley
of Ajalon ?
Touching the root
Baara, even the secular learning of the false worshipping
[Page 11] people who call themselves
Christians, might teach them that its power in the casting
out of devils, was well known to our fathers, and demonstrated
even to those appointed scourges of Judah, the heathen
Romans, whose names be Anathema, Anathema Maranatha. For
the priest Eleazer did cast out by its means the demon
which had possessed a certain man ; and that the bloody
and sagacious Vespasian who was there present when this
merciful deed was done, might be convinced that the demon
did indeed depart, though the exceeding tenuity of spiritual
existences will not allow them to be visible to other eyes,
than those from which occult science has removed the scales — the
venerable Eleazer commanded that a vessel should be placed
at a considerable distance from the person possessed, the
which vessel, in obedience to the commands of Eleazer,
the demon, in departing did forcibly throw down and empty.
But my proper
task will not allow me to bestow further time upon the
crude notions or the blind and fanatical bigotry of the
detested Nazarenes. The all but omnipotent signet of Solomon was deposited
by that greatest of earthly princes in the Temple of Jerusalem;
and in the Holy of Holies, entered only by the great High
Priest, reposed that gem of price and power unspeakable.
When the temple
was plundered by the heathen, and when our people were
despitefully treated and led into captivity for their sins — the
vessels of silver and the vessels of gold were grasped
by the unholy hands of the conquering soldiery — Nebuchadonozor
and Cyrus bore away the wealth of Jerusalem; but not the
signet, which was from the beginning destined to work out
the salvation of Judah when her sins should be fully expiated,
and her people once more an acceptable people in the sight
of the Lord.
But though the
dim light of tradition caused every successive high priest
carefully to guard against the discovery of the precious
treasure, even the high priest knew not all the
wonders of that treasure. It was reserved for me, the doomed,
the mysterious, the ever-changing in body, the unchangeable,
the everlasting in spirit, to learn, even while hosts barbaric
pressed towards the Holy of Holies, the saving wealth that
rested therein. And thus it happened. In the seventieth year
after the death of him whom the Nazarenes call Messias, and
on the seventeenth day of the month called Panemus, in the
Syro-Macedonian tongue, but in the Hebrew Jamuz, the dread
enemy of our nation, the Roman Titus had so far reduced the
doomed defenders of the Holy City, that the daily sacrifice
could no longer be offered; and then knew all those in whom
the only true religion had produced the spirit of prophecy
that the temple would indeed fall.[Page
12]
I need not recount
the horrors of the succeeding days or the siege; or is
it not written in the book of the apostate Josephus how
the temple was polluted by the blood of our people, shed
by each other as well as by the Romans ? How that famine
was abroad glaring with fierce eyes, and made horribly
visible in gaunt and spectral forms ? How that a mother
maddened by famine slew her child, yea, her first-born
and her only one, and banquetted in horrible eagerness
upon his roasted body ? Alas ! the apostate Jew and divers
writers among the Nazarenes, have dilated but too truly
and too sufficiently upon the awful scenes that passed
in every street, aye, in every house in the devoted city
of the living God. Let me then hasten to that concluding
scene, which gave the Holy of Holies to the flames; but
at the same time gave to me that Talisman, which, eighteen
hundred years later, was to rebuild the city and the temples,
and prepare the people of God for the dominion of the whole
earth, and for the advent of the veritable Messias. Selah
! Let it be done. It is about to be done.
Urged by I know
not what divine fury, I had descended from the Upper City,
where I had been gazing upon the flaming sword, which illuminated
the heavens, even at mid-day. I passed unscathed through
the outer court of the temple, now polluted by the bodies
of the dying and the dead, and slippery with much blood.
Scarcely had I made my way beyond the partition wall, which
had been erected for the separation of the Jews from the
unbelieving Gentiles; when, from one of the many apartments
that were on the north side of the holy house, a lurid
pillar of fire suddenly shot upward, and in an instant
ten thousand fiery tongues darted from it in every direction,
and a cry of horror and alarm arose from ten thousand combatants
within and around the temple. To cleave to the earth the
destroying Roman, who was in the very act of leaping into
the inner court, after snatching from its blaze the torch
with which he had now fired the holy house, was but the work
of an instant; that done, I pressed forward up the acclivity
which led to the altar of Burnt Offering, where the High
Priest, who had succeeded the fugitives, Joseph and Jesus,
was surrounded by combatants, and in an evident agony of
anxiety to make his way into the Holy of Holies. With a loud
cry I threw myself forward into the throng and the strife;
but though I was swift, I was too tardy to save the venerable
man, who, at the very moment that I gained his side, was
transfixed by a Roman dart. I raised him and bore him towards
the Sanctuary, but though life was fast gushing forth from
his ghastly wound, he was a Jewish priest still — true
to his God, his faith, and his office. "Pollute not
the holy place! Forbear, set me down here, he exclaimed;
and in a niche, which was as yet unthreatened by the devouring
element, I set him down, and raised his drooping head, and
wiped the big damps of [Page 13] death
from his lofty brow, all tenderly, as would a nursing mother
support and tend a dying child.
His breathing
came shorter and shorter, and his limbs became rigid; but
the agonies of death had no power over the energies of
religion ; and he did not expire till he had commanded
me to penetrate the Holy of Holies, and to snatch thence
and from the very centre of the ark, the Talisman of our
people, even the signet of the wise Solomon — the Shem-ama-phorah.
Not even the behest of the high priest would have caused
any other Jew to enter that mysterious and most sacred place.
But I! what had I, the wanderer, to fear ?
I passed the brazen
pillars, Joachim and Booz, and I reached the golden cherubim,
ten cubits in height, whose outspread wings, reaching from
the southern wall to the northern wall of the Holy of Holies,
had hitherto concealed for ages its sacred mysteries from
unpermitted eyes.
I paused, but
for a moment; the golden gates were passed, the cherubim
no longer hid the ark from my gaze; and, God ! by what
a galaxy of glories was I dazzled ! The floor and the walls
were of fine gold, glittering with the splendour of ten
thousand fires, and reflecting back the many coloured and
living lights that flashed from Onyx and from Sapphire;
from Chrysolite and from Amethyst; and from every precious
stone from every part of the earth. Having drawn aside with
resolute hand the embroidered veil of purple and scarlet,
behold ! I stood within the Holy of Holies; and there over
against the eastern end I beheld an altar of solid and unornamented
gold. Upon either side of the altar was a hollow candlestick
of gold, adorned with lilies and pomgranates of gems and
fretted gold. But upon the table! Even I shook in
every fibre with much awe, as I looked upon the ark of shittim
wood, which in Hebrew is called Eron. It was five spans long
by three in height and breadth; and was strongly ornamented
with plates of fine gold, and on the top were two cherubims
of the like precious material. In that lay the palladium
of our people — the seal of Solomon; and I — I
! was to stretch forth my hand and seize it.
The lid of the
ark yielded to my mere touch, and mine eyes fell upon the
precious signet. It consisted of a single cincture of massive
gold, set with a single gem; but such a gem. Well
might the fiends, well might the powers of earth and hell
shrink from the steadfast gaze of its possessor, and busy
themselves in doing his behest. In the centre of the gem
was [Page
14] engraven the ineffable name of God, and around
it in mingled radiance Diamond, of Sapphire, of Ruby, and
Emerald, the seeming of ten thousand
eyes gleamed with divine ardour to which the lurid lightnings
of the stormiest heaven are but as a meteor that dances upon
the morass. I stood
as one fascinated, terrified, petrified; I would fain have
stretched out my hand, but my arm was paralyzed; I would
have cried aloud, but my tongue clove to the root of my mouth.
As I stood thus entranced a shout in the outer portion of
the temple announced the arrival of Titus and his followers.
In a few moments the Holy of Holies, the Ark, the very Seal
of Solomon, would be bared to the gaze of the profane, violated
by the hands of the foeman and the robber. I stretched forth
my hand and grasped the signet; a report as of ten thousand
thunders shook the whole fabric around me, and I felt myself
seized by a giant hand, whose grasp deprived me of my senses
at the very moment that I saw the majestic though somewhat
corpulent form of Titus within the hitherto sacred place.
How long I remained entranced I know not. When I at length
awakened to a sense of my situation, I was far, far away
from the bloodshed and tumult, from the trampling of the
victors, and the passionate but unheeded entreaties of the
dying and the captive. The moon, the pale-visaged Astarte
of the Phoenicians, was high in heaven, shedding around a
flood of silvery light such as she can never bestow upon
this land of cloud and fog. I lay beneath a majestic palm,
and close beside me gushed a fountain, making a delightful
music in the otherwise unbroken silence of the night. It
was by slow degrees that all the scenes through which I had
so recently passed became clearly and completely recalled
to my memory; and, oh God! with what horror did I not thrill
when I discovered that the signet of Solomon was no longer
in my possession!
I should have
raved, Heaven pardon me, I believe I should have blasphemed;
but before I could give utterance to my agony, there arose
beside me a low, sweet, musical, but withal, most solemn
and majestic voice — and the mighty change
that had come over my spirit and freed it from the dull and
inapprehensive obtuseness of mere mortality, enabled me to
know that that voice came from no created mortal. I knew
that the voice was a voice from above, and my heart leaped
with an exceeding gladness, for I heard much mercy, and was
blessed with a most wondrous mission, and with a trust which
they who sit upon the blood-stained thrones of the perverted
earth might envy — with a power to which they must
speedily bow down in humility and in dread.
It was revealed
to me that though the curse of him of Nazareth must for
a time have power, and though, until the regeneration of
our people [Page 15] should
be at hand, his power should go on increasing among the
nations, the curse his hate and tyranny has laid upon me
should be converted into a saving mercy to Israel, a pillar
of light to guide and guard the wanderers of Judah. Words
of might were graven upon my soul, even the words of the
signet of Solomon which all Genii must obey, and I was
sent forth to live the bodily life and die the bodily death
in divers places; but with ever one task, one trust — to
teach the trampled Jew to become very mighty in despoiling
his oppressors, very cunning in availing himself of their
hearts' leprosy — avarice. Ages upon
ages have rolled by; where populous cities and the palaces
of kings once stood, the bat and the owl and all obscene
and grovelling reptiles are now the sole lords, the sole
tenants; and where I have battled with the gaunt wolf, and
disputed with the bear his forest haunt, hundreds of thousands
of human beings dwell in cities of strength and splendour;
the many wearing out their lives in squalor and in toil,
that has little recompense and no cessation, the few looking
down in insolent and unsparing scorn upon those who starve,
that the tyrant and the cheat may fare sumptuously every
day. All nations have been in turn the scene of my exertions;
all ranks, all pursuits, have in turn been made subservient
to the Holy and Appointed end; Jerusalem, Oh beloved Jerusalem,
I have toiled to uprear thee in power and in great splendour
! The appointed hour is at hand; and then HE cometh, at
whose benignant and resistless word the curse of my foe,
the fell curse that was pronounced upon me on Calvary, shall
be removed, and my spirit shall have rest.
Whether leading
the war galley of Venice to the discomfiture and slaughter
of the Paynims, or pursuing the business of a merchant
in Spain, with the terrors of the Inquisition ever before
me, if discovered in my secret practice of the sacred faith
of my forefathers; whether passing my youth in the sweet
tranquility of an Alpine valley, or amid the roar of waters
and the crash of battle; whether in one age wielding the
sword and the lance of the condottieri in the cause now
of one and now of the other of the venomous little republics
of Italy, or in another aiding the revolt of Massaniello
at Naples, or catering to the amusements of Louis XIV at
Paris; in all times, in all characters, in all places, from
the instant that my spirit, in each new body has been
called anew to self-knowledge, by the sweet low whisper — oh!
how full of hope to the Wanderer! — "Tarry thou
until I come", all my energies have been devoted to
the performance of my task.
The bigotry of
a whole people, and the cupidity of their tyrant could
easily degrade the Jew in social condition; debar him
from this or that privilege, condemn him to this or that
burthen, and brand him with an outward and visible token
of his debasement; — but the Jew could always amass
wealth, preserve wealth, and by his wealth, he, the trampled
slave, [Page 16] could always
mock the sufferings and sway the fate of the haughtiest and
bloodiest of his oppressors. Aye! the Talismanic power has
ever been at work; in every land hath its influence at some
time been felt, in every land have I at some time made one
of my people a mighty man, in the despoiling of the princes
and the people who believe in the prophet of Nazareth.
Jehovah! how have I scorned the enemies of thy people, when
I have seen them waiting with pallid cheek and downcast eyes
for the fiat of the enriched Jew to consign them to instant
and utter beggary, or to aid them to struggle on a little
longer in the hope of gain to themselves, but in reality
only to swell his gains and add to the righteous usury which
shall raise up thy peculiar people, and make glorious the
towers of Zion.
Alas! how easier far it is to give the Talisman by which
riches can be commanded, than it is to inspire a human heart
with that intense love of the antique abiding place of our
race, which alone can justify me in bestowing the potency
and the splendour of riches ! How often have I not had to
lament the backsliding, and the degenerate self-love of my
chosen instruments ? With what disgust have I not taken from
them their abused trust; with what scorn have I not seen
them reduced to despair and self-destruction, by the deprivation
of that which I bestowed on them, not for their own petty
purposes, but that Israel might be redeemed from her debasement.
Ask who enabled
Neckar for a time to support the boundless extravagance
of the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and history,
the jest book of wise men and the oracle of fools, will
tell you that it was his genius. I can tell another
tale ! It was I, it was the talismanic power which
I gave him for a brief breathing space, to inspire his
friends with admiration and his enemies with envy. I withdrew
that power, and there arose that scene of bloodshed and
confiscation which was especially necessary to enable my
people to spoil all the nations of Europe, even as our
forefathers by divine commandment did spoil their Egyptian
task-masters. Verily the Jews have had their revenge! From
the revolution of France sprang bloody and expensive wars;
from those wars sprang royal indigence and national extremity,
which raised up that Christian Moloch of loan jobbery and
public debts wherein the present race battens on the spoils
and devours the labour of its offspring; and now, now was
the time when the Jewish people might banquet in the halls
of princes, where once their very presence would have been
deemed pollution. Now was the time when the aggrandisement
of my people could not without sin be neglected. England
became the resort of thousands of our oppressed people;
and if England insulted and spat upon them in theory, it
at least supplied them with [Page
17] wealth boundless and with dupes innumerable. A
chieftain of our people became as necessary, then, in England,
as formerly in Venice, in Genoa, in Antwerp, in Bruges, or
more recently in Paris. From the death of Louis XVI to the
consulship of Napoleon Buonaparte, I rarely conferred the
visible talisman, for however brief a space of time, upon
any one; it was necessary that ALL my people should be up
and doing, that each should be amassing his portion; there
was a harvest too large for any single reaper; and leaving
to themselves the native wit of the Jew and the native propensity
of the Gentile to overshoot his mark, by indulging his own
bad passions, I looked calmly on, seeing in every bloody
battlefield the precursor of a new loan — in every
new loan the most perfect of human inventions for the transfer
of the wealth of the Gentile to the strong boxes of the Jew.
The result fully
justified my reliance on the self-destroying talents of
the Nazarenes; the Jews of England amply avenged the Norman
atrocities of the older day; and what the Norman took from
the Saxons by the stroke of the battle-axe and the broad
sword, the Jews now took from the at once insolent and
ignorant descendants of those Normans by the stroke of
that far mightier weapon — the pen.
The first of my
people whom I pitched upon to wield the Talismanic influence
in England was one whose name will in an instant be recognized
by all the votaries and high priests of Mammon, whether
Jew or Christian. I allude to Solomon Salvador. I found
him a comparatively poor man; I made him in a brief space
the marvel of all who knew him. The wildest speculation
he could undertake was sure to prosper; and the magnates
of the nation sought his advice when troubled with the
common and very painful disease of Impecuniosity.
This success was
as brief as it was brilliant. The fool! did he suppose
that power was entrusted to him, that wealth was placed
within his reach for the bidding, merely that he should
call a mountainous mass of brick and mortar after his name,
fill it with luxuries from every quarter of the globe,
and then spread the banquet and illuminate the saloon to
welcome the high-born fool and the high-born harlot, and
make glad their hearts with wine and music, while the towers
of Jerusalem lay in ruin, and the remnant of our people sat
cowering beneath the insolent trampling of the the men of
blood ? Fool, thrice foolish! I deprived him of the talismanic
power, and his wealth melted away from him fast as the snow
melts beneath the ardent beams of the sun. His familiar friends
saw that he waxed poor, and in the short-sighted wisdom of
this world they attributed his downfall to imprudent speculation,
to extravagant expenditure, to [Page
18] anything and everything
except the true cause; and he died poor, neglected, forgotten.
Possessed of the words of power which the genii must obey,
and using those words of power for the great end to which
I am ordained, I can convert any thing into a talisman omnipotent
in the accumulation of wealth for its possessor. The merest
trinket, the commonest article of either use or ornament,
under the influence of these resistless words, becomes in
the hands of its possessor, a weapon mighty as the sceptre
of Nisroch.
After I had withdrawn
the talisman from Salvador, I cast my eyes about among
the young men of Israel, seeking one upon whom I might
confer the power which my degenerate protege had proved
himself unworthy to be possessed of. Alas ! to find one
in all respects worthy of so high and so holy a trust was
no light task. Ability, indeed, I found in great abundance
among my people: but one was prone to the use of wine,
another looked all too fondly on the blue eyes and fair
tresses of the daughters of the Gentiles, even of the men
whom we call the English; one wasted his time in the light
and profane buffooneries of the theatre; while another,
though innocent of all these things, though clever, industrious,
and frugal, even to parsimony, was wedded to his own base
interests, and incapable of casting a thought upon the degradation
of his ancient race, or upon the ruin of the city of the
temple of God — even Jerusalem.
It chanced that as I on a day took my stand on that grandest
of all the money marts of the world, the Exchange of London,
my attention was attracted by the saddened yet intelligent
aspect of one whom I knew at a glance to be one of our ancient
and fallen people, who in the midst of all their degradations
cannot lose that peculiar physiognomy which distinguishes
them from all other races, and in the very perpetuation of
which the Nazarenes, had not God hardened their hearts and
deadened their understandings, would see a proof, among many,
that the Jewish nation is not wholly cast off, but will,
in the good and appointed time, be gathered together from
all parts, and reinstated in the sovereignty of Palestine.
Drawing nigh to
the person of whom I had thus taken notice, I overheard
some few words he interchanged with an acquaintance; and
those few words led me to believe that I had at length
found the very man I wanted, for he spoke Hebrew with the
purity and energy of a high priest of the time when the temple
was in its pride of place, and ministered in by the very
flower of our people. Moreover, though his aspect had but
so lately been saddened and downcast, his eyes now glowed,
his mien was erect, his gestures were energetic, and above
all, in deciding my opinion in [Page
19] his favour, he cursed
the Nazarenes both deeply and bitterly, and vowed to avenge
his wrong upon them hereafter. What was that wrong ? Faugh
! What had I to do with the individual wrongs of any one?
He hated the Christians, and burned to injure them; that was
all I cared for; and I vigilantly watched him until, the
Exchange closing for the day, he retired to a neighbouring
tavern to dine.
What a guttling
and guzzling set of swine your mere worldlings are ! A
tavern in the good City of London is neither more nor less
than a compendious system of damnation; where gluttony
and strong wines make sinners of all sorts and size on
the six days of the week; their temples, which they call
churches, being hermetically sealed to the Nazarenes on
every day save the seventh. Gluttony, strong drink, and
the sinful thoughts and unclean deeds which they inspire,
have the six days — prayer
and repentance only one ! Ah ! this is surely a people whom
it is especially lawful and praiseworthy to lay under contribution,
that the temple may be rebuilt, and that our ancient faith
may extend through the whole earth and purify it.
Much as I abhor the devouring and the wassail, which make
men to resemble the unclean swine rather than the chief creation
and most wonderful masterpiece of God, I sat patiently in
this scene of ecstatic and egregious devouring until I found
an opportunity to hold converse with the young man upon whom
I had fixed my attention. What passed between us it needs
not now to particularize; suffice it to say, that on the
very next day he netted a hundred thousand pounds, two Christian
speculators slew themselves in despair, and ten times that
number of the smaller fry took their leave of the Exchange
with a very sincere resolution to return to it no more.
For a time my
new protege was all that I could desire; but with wealth
came luxury, and with luxury come an indifference to the
grand object for which I had raised him up from comparative
penury; and made him sought, flattered, followed, all but
worshipped by the great herd of those who traffic in gain
for the sake and for the love of things worldly and perishable.
It was in vain that I urged him, ever and anon, to busy
himself for the restoration and the triumph of his long-suffering
and widely dispersed people. Pomp and luxury, flattery and
ease, had done their work, and he too was destined to experience
that what the Lord giveth, that also the Lord can take away.
Charitable he was, but it was in the wise of the blind Gentiles;
looking with dull dead eyes upon the great wrongs and [Page
20] great afflictions of the multitude, and frittering away
time, and feeling, and hard gold, upon the petty relief of
the petty miseries of individuals.
Charitable ! why Jew and Gentile, the free man and the bond
slave, of this most anomalous metropolis of this most anomalous
nation, upon the face of God's beautiful, but wrong fraught
earth, would shout in contradiction, were I to deny the charity
of the great Abraham Goldsmid!
Aye, let the Nazarene
dogs lift their hands and eyes in ignorant wonder; the
great Goldsmid was my very and mere instrument; I raised
him because I deemed him worthy. I found him incompetent
to the vast and sacred duty I designed him for, and I dashed
him down even as we cast aside the gourd when we no longer
require a drinking cup. Who among the elder frequenters
of the great temple of mammon, which is called the Exchange,
does not remember the golden box with which the hand of
Goldsmid was perpetually occupied in his busiest and most
important moments ? It was his talisman.
The words of power
had been pronounced above it; with it he could encounter
a world and be triumphant; without he was as the stripling
David, without God, would have been to the giant
champion of Philistia. I had warned him again and again;
I had menanced, I had entreated, but in vain: I found him
incorrigible in his neglect of the cause of our people
and our God; and even while he was wassailing at his luxurious
villa in the neighbourhood of Morden, the words of power
went forth from my lips, and his talisman had departed
from him for ever. Large rewards were vainly offered for
what all but himself supposed to be a mere toy, a mere
thing of effeminate luxury; but those rewards were offered
in vain. He appeared upon the Exchange without his palladium;
bargained — lost — and
saw absolute ruin looking at him with steadfast and unpitying
eyes. Ten days he bore this, AND THEN BLEW HIS BRAINS OUT
! None can be false to our cause and prosper.
The progress of
that most marvellous of modern characters Napoleon Buonaparte
soon diverted my thoughts from the vexations caused by
the folly and consequent ruin of my deceased protégé;
and hastily leaving England, I arrived at Frankfort just
as that city was invested and occupied by the French troops.
I have seen so many towns taken by storm, and, when taken,
delivered up to all that the utmost license and cruelty of
the most licentious and cruel troops could inflict, and that
fate of Frankfort seemed by comparison, to be a mild one.
And yet even there I saw enough to make the blood of an ordinary
man boil with indignation, or curdle with horror.[Page
21]
With all the
politeness of the French as individuals, large bodies of
them are usually among the most ferocious of all assemblages.
They seem to resemble those chemical substances which,
though separately quite harmless, cannot be brought into
contact without producing disaster and destruction to every
one and every thing in their vicinity. In their revolution
I have seen individuals in one hour comporting themselves
towards the helpless with all the courage of antique chivalry,
and with all the touching delicacy and tenderness of modern
politeness; and I have seen those self-same individuals
in the next hour hideous with blood, and roaring with stentorian
lungs for more victims. Separately good, they no sooner became
part of a multitude than the mania of fierceness fell upon
their souls, and they became even as the fiends in unsparing
cruelty.
What is true of
the French people is no less true of the French soldiery,
who certainly have never shown en masse any of
that forbearance which few indeed among them would fail
to show as individuals. And if at Frankfort murder, and
the other disgusting violence which the conquered sometimes
have to endure from the homicidal hirelings, who make a glory
and an honour of their most feculent and debased trade in
blood; if these were not among the sins to be charged upon
the soldiery of France, they amply made up for any inconvenience
they experienced from balking their lust and love of bloodshed.
It is impossible to conceive anything more complete than
the plunder of the unhappy people of Frankfort. Every thing
that was portable was carried off; every marauding soldier
had his two or three watches; diamonds glittered on the
dirty fingers, or still dirtier linen of those ruffians;
family plate, consecrated by a thousand tender reminiscences,
was melted openly in the streets, and transferred in unsightly
lumps to the knapsacks of its new owners. The skill of man
was in vain employed to conceal the spoil, the tears and
supplications of women were in vain employed to move the
spoilers to moderation in their marauding.
The people of
Frankfort were a conquered people, the brave French soldiers
were conquerors; and though glory, no doubt, is a very
fine thing, your thorough soldier enjoys it not a jot the
less for being accompanied by a goodly proportion of plunder.
The few people
who succeeded in saving some trifling amount of money,
were, for the time, scarcely better off than those who
were plundered to the very last thaler. For your heroes
have prodigious appetites; and the vast consumption of food
of every description by the French troops, the terror which
kept the country people from bringing their produce into
[Page 22] the city, and the
blessed propensity of all dealers and shopmen, in all times
and countries, to raise their prices in the exact ratio
of the wretchedness and suffering of their fellow creatures,
speedily reduced five out of every six families in Frankfort
to absolute want. In saying this I speak of those ranks
of people to whom, previously, want had been utterly unknown,
save as a thing which (as their individual disposition
chanced to be) they pitied and relieved, or despised and
insulted in the persons of their inferiors. Want being
thus introduced to homes, where previously it had been
unseen and unfelt, it needs no elaborate argument to show
that where want had always existed, absolute famine now
made its appearance. All trade, save in articles of food,
was at a standstill; and at the very moment when the poor
were thus cut off from earning the poor pittance to which
they had been accustomed, every article of food was tripled,
and many articles quadrupled in price.
Fearful, oh ! very fearful, were the scenes which I witnessed
during the brief stay of the marauding Gauls in Frankfort.
Jew as I am, and detesting, as I do detest, the followers
of the Nazarene, with a most holy and fervent detestation,
even I pitied the unhappy wretches, and relieved their miseries
in more instances than I can now look back upon with anything
short of the most sovereign contempt for my temporary compassion.
But if I, on some few occasions, tarried by the wayside to
relieve some of the more extreme cases of privation and suffering,
among the Nazarenes, I was neither forgetful of my proper
mission, nor weary in forwarding the great work.
It is well known
to all the world that Frankfort has long been the abiding
place of not a few of the people of my race; and there
are few European cities in which the blessing has more
manifestly been bestowed upon their industry and talents.
Among the wealthiest of the inhabitants of Frankfort, were
certain Jews; I need not add that they were also among the
first who were laid under contribution by the unprincipled
and avaricious invaders. Finding vast stores of wealth in
the possession of some Jews, the French positively, though
somewhat illogically, concluded that to be very wealthy was
an inseparable consequence of being a Jew, and the whole
of our people, even down to those who obtained their daily
bread by the lowest toils, and the utmost possible difficulty,
were harassed by domiciliary visits — questioned by
the officers — insulted, and sometimes even beaten
by the men; and, finally, enjoined severally to provide the
most preposterous sums of money by a certain given day.
Avoiding, as far as possible, attracting the attention of
the tyrants, I [Page 23] passed from house to house, leaving
no very large sum of money at any one house at any one time;
but taking especial care that however the followers of the
Nazarene, because born in different countries, and speaking
different tongues, might inflict upon each other the awful
agonies attendant upon absolute want of food, no Israelite
should lack wherewith to feed himself and his wife, and the
little ones that were with them, and the man servant, and
the maid servant, and the stranger that was within his gates.
What mattered
it that the thaler should be reduced to a tenth part of
its value by the abundance of money suddenly brought into
circulation by the French marauders, and that the price
of every article of food should be multiplied by twenty
? Even then should my people be exempt from absolute famine, — for
could I not command gold ? Yea, should the city at length
become absolutely destitute of food, had I not the talisman
? — Had I not the ineffable words? — Could
I not buy the whole evil race, from the false prophet even
to the lowest among the evil genii? — Could
I not task them in the midnight incantation, and, lo ! would
not plenty make the hearts of my people glad at sunrise ?
So I went from
house to house; and while I gave present aid, I spoke words
of comfort and encouragement as to the future; and thus
from day to to day I visited the houses of the Jews that
were in Frankfort. But my motive was not merely the
desire to afford them temporal aid; contrariwise, while
alleviating the temporal sufferings of my people, I was,
day by day, scanning the young men with an intelligent
and vigilant eye; for where, if not among the shamefully
plundered and trampled Hebrews of Frankfort, might I hope
to find a zealous hater of the Nazarenes, — a man
exceedingly desirous of working their degradation and destruction
? All men are in some sort the creatures and the victims
of their own bad passions, even patriotism itself; yea,
even religious zeal, to the very verge of ferocious bigotry,
can be called into a fiery and active existence by personal
wrong, and the personal hate which that infallibly engenders.
An Englishman
may read with horror and with detestation the bloodstained
records of the bloody and relentless Inquisition of old
Spain; but faint, indeed, are his horror and detestation
compared to those that tear the heart and madden the brain
of him who has seen and borne the Inquisition's unimaginable
tortures. It is only the wrong which man himself endures
that he can thoroughly appreciate; and here, even while
want and sorrow were at work, and famine itself but barely
kept at arm's length: here it was that I might most hopefully
seek for a champion to avenge the wrongs of Israel. I sought
carefully, and I did not seek in vain; a case soon came
to my knowledge which abundantly contained all the elements
requisite for my purpose.[Page
24]
Among the number
of Israelitish families to which my gold and my sympathy
gave me a ready admission and a very glad welcome, there
was one to which I was especially attached, both for its
own sake and for the sake of associations of eighteen centuries
duration. I speak of the family of Solomon De Milheim.
If ever modern countenance bore the stamp and impress of
our patriarchs of the old time assuredly it was the countenance
of the old man, De Milheim; if ever the beauty of the manly
youth of Jerusalem, when Jerusalem was happy, was exactly
represented in the rising age, it was represented by his
sons; and in his daughters the sunny-
eyed and ebon-haired maidens of ancient Judah seemed once
more to adorn and glorify the earth with their bright presence.
But it was not
from such general resemblance that I became so peculiarly
attached to this family. Alas ! no; I was drawn thitherward
by a most melancholy pleasure; for in the elder daughter
of De Milheim I gazed upon the very counterpart of my adored
and most lovely Leah — of the stag-eyed wife of my
young bosom, whose pure spirit fled the sinful and hard world
on the very day on which he, the avenging one of Nazareth,
doomed me to long ages of agony and of travail.
It was during
one of my visits to the family of De Milheim that I heard
of a worthy instrument for upholding and forwarding of
my sacred and high cause; and I forthwith departed in quest
of him, and speedily reached his abode.
Without, it was
dingy, and uninviting as the abodes of even the wealthiest
of our persecuted, and therefore politic, people are wont
to be;
and when I crossed the now unprotected threshold, all within
was dismantled and disordered, as formerly it had been sumptuous
and tasteful.
Unquestioned and unseen I passed through the various apartments,
when on a sudden, just as I had reached the little sanctum
of the now solitary tenant of the once crowded house, I heard
the clash of arms in the hall beneath; and I had but just
time to pronounce the words of great power, which render
me invisible to mortal ken, when a French officer passed
within a foot of the spot upon which I stood, and threw open
the door of the little study with the insolent violence of
irresponsible and unprincipled power. As he entered I glided
in, and he shut the door as violently as he had opened it.
Seated at an antique writing table was the unhappy master
of this desolated house. His eyes were red as with much weeping,
and his cheeks were pale and haggard, as with much sorrow
and long vigils. [Pager 25]
The rude and sudden advent of the Nazarene man
of blood and tyranny did not seem to alarm him; it simply
and utterly stupefied him. His limbs were stiffened, and
his eyes fixed and leaden; and thus he sat, until aroused
to consciousness by the martial and haughty tones of the
stranger, commanding him to give gold. This demand effectually
recalled the scattered senses of the unhappy man.
"God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob! " he exclaimed,
as, kneeling, he lifted up his trembling hands to the east, "how
long, O God! how long ? Have they not desolated thy servant's
hearth, carried away his young men captive, and spoiled him
even to the last thaler ? Have they not stricken him with
many stripes, and cursed him with many curses ? How long,
O Lord, how long shall the unbeliever triumph, and thy people
be a jest and a bye word, Samsons shorn of their hair, and
blind, but without the strength to draw down upon these new
Philistines the roofs of their palaces, and crush them in
the hour of their tyranny and their scorn? "
"Jew!" said
the Nazarene warrior, and the whole fabric shook as he
strode across the apartment, "Jew!
I am not here to listen to your lying adjurations, I want
gold, I will have gold; or, look you, not content with making
you as bald and as blind as Samson; by the mother of God,
I'll make you as dead as that stalwart worthy! "
" Now, as
my soul liveth", replied the Hebrew, "I
am spoiled to the last thaler, yea, for this whole day have
my lips not tasted of bread, from my sheer and very poverty".
"Bah!" cried
the Nazarene, "what be these?
Sacre! why they're fine gold and weigh a French pound to
a sous!" and so saying, he laid violent hand upon
the teraphim, even the images which the heathen of the old
day would have termed Lares. In the extremity of his grief,
and in the delusive hope that the Nazarene plunderers had
paid him their last visit, the unhappy young man of Israel
had drawn the teraphim from their secure hiding place, and,
lo ! the hand of the spoiler was upon them, and the soul
of the young man was bowed down, stricken to the very earth
with this consummation of the calamity of his house. It was
in vain that the pitiless plunderer blasphemed, and all in
vain that he threatened many tortures, and even death; for
the young man spoke truly in that he was verily and indeed
despoiled of all that remained to him on earth, save the
clothes he wore and the dismantled house which he inhabited.
Wearied at length with his unprofitable violence, and perhaps,
for a desultory life of war and rapine makes the eye very
skilful in discovering [Page 26] between truth and falsehood,
convinced by the excess of the young man's agony, that the
words which he spake were indeed the words of truth, the
Nazarene cursing with many and deep curses, yet looking with
no un-pleased eyes upon the golden teraphim which he bore
away, departed, and the young man found himself once more
alone, and in the solitude of his sorrow he poured forth
his unavailing lamentations and cursed the Nazarenes, and
prayed in fervent tones that he might have power to crush
them, and vowed by the ineffable name of Jehovah to lose
no opportunity of despoiling their wealth, and trampling
down, yea, utterly bruising, their black and unsparing, as
unbelieving hearts.
That was a glad
moment to me. I would suffer over again the most bitter
misery of the most bitter of any of my many lives to enjoy
but once in each day one such rapturous, such exulting
moment. Here was a servant fit for the great master — here
a champion fit for the great cause. His wrongs, his agony,
his fervour, his utter and hopeless poverty; aye, his own
passions and his own circumstances would make him a faithful
and very zealous foeman to the Nazarene of whatever nation.
Here was, at length, the man, the long hoped, the long sought,
who should build up the the temple of the Lord, and make
Israel and Judah feared and obeyed in all the quarters of
the earth.
As the young man prayed to the God of Abraham, and cursed
the despoiling and tyrannous followers of the Nazarene, I
observed that he kept his eyes constantly fixed upon the
niche from which the man of blood had recently drawn the
teraphim. Placing myself, therefore, while still invisible,
immediately between him and that spot, I spake in my soul
the words of power, and lo! on the instant I stood visible
before him, tall in stature as Saul when he was singled forth
from the young men, but pallid as a corpse, and with hoary
hair and beard contrasting with ghastly effect the supernatural
glare of great black eyes that shot forth lurid fires upon
which no mortal could look and not tremble.
The sudden appearance
of such a figure, clad in the flowing robes of the far
East, and seeming to spring up from the bowels of the earth,
might well appal even the most courageous, and the young
man fell down before me, and exclaimed, "As
my Lord liveth, his servant is despoiled, yea, utterly undone;
as my soul liveth, I have not a coin; yea, even the bonds
of parchment which bound many Nazarenes in the power of thy
servant, behold, they also are stolen — gone — for
ever gone!"
And, as he thus
spake, he wrung his hands, and the big drops of perspiration
burst forth from his agonized countenance. I raised him
from [Page 27] the earth, and
spake to him many comfortable words. He proposed to fly
from the wretched city, but I forbade him; he spake in
hopelessness — and I
commanded him to hope; he spake in doubt — and I compelled him to believe. I spake the words of power, and the talisman
was once more committed to a man of my persecuted race.
It chanced that
there lay on the table before him a ring holding the keys
of his rifled drawers; and having spoken the words of power,
and adjured the demons by the ineffable name, I gave to
that ring the influence and the might of the signet of
the wise Solomon. Having done this, I commanded the young
man to name some wish for instant accomplishment; and
ere he had thrice, according to my instructions, whirled
round the ring upon his forefinger, steps were heard as of
one heavily laden, and I had scarcely become again invisible,
when a man carefully disguised, and bearing a large and very
heavy bag, laboured slowly and painfully into the room.
"Donner
and Blitzen", said the new comer, as
he threw down, with a mighty crash as of much gold, the bag
he had so sorely travailed under , " I would scarcely
play porter again to save my thalers! Time presses, the
villains are on the search once more wherever they deem that
they have left a coin or a coin's worth. You, I know, are
for the present safe, for they are sure you are not worth
their time. I know your honesty; and to your biding, until
better times come, I commit all the cash I have within fifty
leagues, save so much as will prevent the fellows from cutting
my throat in sheer disappointment". And having thus
spoken, while wiping the big drops from his forehead, he
waved his hand and took his departure. The young man opened
the bag, counted the several packets it contained and found the very sum for which he had wished aloud while making his
first essay of the power of his talisman.
Men of the accursed
and plundering race! —Ye, whose
estates were within a brief space to have been within his
grasp; ye whose equipages and whose liveried lacquies I
so lately saw following to his premature grave the man of
Israel whom I thus enabled to war upon ye in your most vulnerable
quarter, — accursed and detested Nazarenes — the
young Israelite, to whom I thus committed the Talisman, and
who thus early and thus fully experienced its mighty power, — he
who for years despoiled you of the gold which you make to
yourselves, even as a god — that man whom ye fawned
upon, even while you hated him, and knew that he despised
you — that
man was NATHAN MEYER ROTHSCHILD!
Thus the man Nathan
waxed wealthy, more wealthy than any who had [Page
28] gone before him, his riches astonished the gentiles,
and very justly they said, such amazing wealth could not
be amassed by one man, in so short a time by any human
agency, — they were right, it was the agency of
the talisman, directed for a high and holy purpose, — to
redeem the holy land from the pollution of the infidel, and
to raise thy fallen towers, O Zion, from the dust.
Carefully concealing the treasure thus entrusted to him,
by burying it beneath a tree in his little garden, while
the murderous and plundering French vexed the city with their
presence, and using it subsequently for a brief space, with
the certain and rapid success ensured to him by the talisman,
the young man Rothschild waxed wealthy; and when he had restored
the treasure to the prince who had reposed trust in him,
he came by my direction, to this paradise of loan-contracting
and speculating fools, and became the leviathan of the money
markets of Europe. Thus Nathan became the loan contractor,
the jobber, the money lender to the gentile kings.
Leaving him to amass wealth, and devoutly praying that he
might prove more worthy of the talisman than those who had
before held it, I once again made my way to France, for there,
too, I had most important work to do in forwarding the great
cause.
Superior in other
respects to all the men of his time, the Emperor Napoleon,
so often favoured with what verily seemed to be a fated
and inevitable good fortune, was much prone to belief in
auguries and tokens, in predictions, and in the whole paraphernalia
of the imperfect notions of fatality formed by the Nazarenes
of an elder day, and still universally held by the bloody
and brutal brood of Mahomet, whose name be anathema!
He held up to
the admiration of the French people the phantom of military
glory; he played upon their imaginations by the splendours
of his intellectual despotism; he displayed the fire of
genius and the cool collected judgment of a statesman;
and with him seems to repose the secret of governing the
restless Gauls.
Availing myself
of this, I caused it to be made known, as if by accident;
that in the Bois de Boulogne, a man of red skin and horribly
huge bulk and tall stature, dressed in the garb of the
wandering children of the Arabian deserts, was at times
met with by benighted travellers on that road; and that
to all whom he met he spake strange words of truth, both
in narrating all that they had experienced, and predicting
that which was about to come to pass. [Page
29]
The curiosity
of the Emperor was excited, and, leaving his capital privately
and by night, he repaired to the part of the wood which
had been indicated to him, armed, indeed to the teeth,
for he was sagacious as the hill fox, but unattended, for
he was brave as the Nemaean lion.
That was a fatal
interview for him. I found him of this world, worldly;
crafty, bold, a lover to intensity of his own nation, a
still more intense lover of his own power and his own fame; — all
this was well; but so far from deeming the despised and
long suffering Jews worthy to build their holy temple and
re-establish their antique kingdom, that he, the Nazarene
by birth, the infidel by election and in belief, he, HE
! panted to possess and to colonise our Palestine ! I discerned
that and he was doomed. From that hour he was as virtually
lost as was Belshazzar, the King of Chaldea, when the mystic
writing gleamed forth, from the walls of the house of wassail
and of revelry.
I poured forth
into his astonished ear the most secret thoughts of his
past life; I ministered to his pride, his ambition, his
own impious confidence in his own power, and trust in his
own fortune. I became his nightly visitant and his nightly
counsellor. The result of my counsels was the march of four
hundred thousand of the very flower of the French to attack
the Scythian barbarians. Borodino was won; Moscow taken
by the Gaul and burned by the patriotism or passion of Rostopschin;
the retreat commenced, and — God is great ! — fatigue,
famine, and winter, the winter of the North ! did all the
rest of the business. Napoleon had accomplished his destiny.
Rothschild was right speedily to make that ruin utter and
inevitable — not to be repaired.
Though the ruin
of Napoleon was decided, and inevitable from the very moment
of his determining upon his mad, and thrice madly-timed
expedition to Russia, it was by no means expected, or even
deemed possible by his supporters, i.e., by nine
of every ten of the adult men of France. His marvellous
escape amid the hellish fire at the bridge of Lodi; his
still more marvellous escape from Egypt, when he sailed
through a fog which seemed as if made on purpose to hide
him from his fierce and eager foemen of England; these
and a thousand other seemingly fated occurrences of good
fortune, and, to set aside all the REAL benefits which
he conferred upon France, a tithe of which might have upheld
the throne of even that honest bigot, Charles X.— his
bombastic but felicitous eloquence, and the consummate
tact with which he contrived to confirm the French in the
notion which they were only too ready to indulge — that
every Frenchman was a partner in the glory of Napoleon — made
that most adroit as well as profound man the very Mahomet
ofFrance. The followers
of the fierce and [Page 30] politic
impostor of Araby did not more implicitly and entirely believe
in the validity and sanctity of that impostor's pretensions
than did the mass of the French people in the certainty,
the FATED inevitability, of Napoleon's ultimate success.
And, accordingly, the indescribable horrors and waste of
blood and treasure at Moscow did not deprive him of their
affections; nay, even the treaty of Fontainebleau, which
consigned the Emperor to the petty island of Elba, and restored
the incapable and gourmand Bourbon to the throne of France,
could not abate one jot of heart or hope in the true Buonapartists
of France. " He'll
return with the violet", was the phrase; and the phrase
gave vigour to old men, and increased hope and anticipative
exultation to the young men.
He came, and the
throne of France bid fair to be his until his death; by
whom was his hope blasted? By the talents of Blucher and
Wellington ? By the boasted discipline of the Prussians
? By the sheer, brute, dogged, unyielding bull-dogism of
the soldiery of England? By the treachery of Grouchy (to
whom the Aide-de-Camp never delivered the Emperor's
order ?) By the genius of the allied generals ? By the
strength of the allied troops ? Not to any one or the other
of these did the first warrior and statesman of modern
times owe his ruin: but simply Nathan Meyer Rothschild — armed
with the talisman !
The British minister
was driven almost to distraction for money; the first houses
in London refused to aid him with a shilling. They were
doubtful of the success of the allied powers; and the
very doubt was within a little of being, like many other
auguries, the cause of its own completion, and its own
justification. Without money from England, not a small
portion of the troops which fought upon the blood-stained
plains of Waterloo would have been unable to reach that scene
of strife and carnage, in time to take part in the sanguinary
business of the three days. This would have been something
in favour of the Emperor. But even this was the smallest
part of what England's want of money would have achieved
in favour of "Le Petit Corporale”, but for
the English minister obtaining gold, THE GENERALS
AND THE SENATORS OF FRANCE WOULD HAVE GONE UNBRIBED: THEY
WERE bribed, — (to
the honour of the frequently shallow and flash, but always
honest, Benjamin Constant, I must admit that he, and he alone,
of all the Chamber of Deputies, refused and scorned the proffered
gold); and Napoleon fell a victim to their cupidity. Where
did the English minister obtain the means of bribing the
constituted authorities of France, and of thus destroying
a man, who, but for that bribery, would, to all human seeming,
have beaten the armed hosts of his crowned foemen ? There
was but one man on earth who both COULD and would provide
the millions of golden pounds, required for the instant purposes
of the English [Page 31] minister.
That man was ROTHSCHILD. By my instructions he let the Minister
have the hard gold; he had my instructions at the same time
to do so, only on one condition. Alas ! that he should suppose
that a half obedience would satisfy me ! As if the
wanderer of Jerusalem could know any medium; as if anything
could satisfy ME but the full and zealous performance of
the Jew's part in the re-establishment of Judah's kingdom — the
rebuilding of thy Towers, oh, Jerusalem !
That most elaborate of bad jokes, history, will, no doubt,
say that the Jew Rothschild lent the Nazarene elder called
Lord Liverpool, the sum necessary to crush Napoleon Buonaparte,
in consideration of some such Judean motive as twenty-five
per cent, interest. The writers of history, in that case,
will, as usual, lie; the readers of it will, as is also
usual, be very egregiously and very deservedly deceived.
Rothschild was commanded to lend the money on terms very
different indeed from exorbitant interest. Nazarenes! those
terms were said in a few words! The restoration of Judea
to our ancient race; the guarantee of England for the independence
of the kingdom of Judea. Ruin stared the English minister
in the face if he refused! but he hesitated; Rothschild knew
that the minister had already been refused by Barings, Reid
and Irving, and all the other chief capitalists, and, therefore,
with an expressive sneer advised him to try them. The sneer
struck home and the minister went to the council. In twelve
hours the millions were in the possession of the minister,
and a secret agreement, guaranteed by the sign manual of
royalty, was in the possession of Rothschild, for the restoration
of Judea in twenty-one years from the day on which Napoleon
should be finally driven from France. This very year my task
should have been completed; would have been completed; but
he, Rothschild, who for six-and-twenty years had proved himself
even as one of the elders in Israel for wisdom and faithfulness,
he, HE, at the twelfth hour, proved false, deferred my hope
yet once more, and compelled me, all reluctant as I was,
to consign him to inevitable ruin of fortune, or to instant
exile and speedy death. Though he originally obeyed my behest
au pied de la lettre, his long round of success (unchecked
save once when I reproved his presumption with the loss of
a hundred thousand pounds in a single day's business in Spanish
Stock, and then restored his lost talisman in such wise as
to lead him to suppose he had merely mislaid it), and his
profound ignorance of my having the power of, at any instant,
recalling the talisman, made him more and more purse proud — more
and more utterly and incurably devoted to the art of deluding
the Nazarenes, not as a means to a high and hallowed end,
but as a source of fortune and power to himself, that it
was rather with grief than surprise that I recently heard
from his own lips that he had basely sold the agreement for
the restoration of Judea for the promise of a petty English
Emancipation Bill for our people, and [Page
32] a petty English
peerage for himself. This delectable job, this high-minded
bargain, was to be completed in the ensuing years by which
time the purse-proud, haughty renegade reckoned upon being
worth £5,000,000 of money. He was already worth above
four; — his talisman disappeared, and I took care he
should know that it had disappeared for ever.
He never ventured upon the Exchange again, or the scribe
who wrote his will should have been saved much trouble and
time.
Did I give him
the talisman, to enable him like Sampson Gideon to intrude
his family and found a Peerage among the Normans ? or to
stifle his conscience with the weight of riches? or to
flatter it with ostentatious charities? No Israelite can
put his hand to the plough of this great work, look back
and live!
He returned to Germany and was stricken with disease at
Frankfort, his recovery precluded, by his dread lest my resentment
should involve his remaining property. He died within the
walls of that very city which had witnessed his dawning fortunes.
For have I not
in a nightdream seen Elias? and have I not been commanded
to make a new talisman and to bear it to one shown to me
and named to me by Elias? and has not this instrument,
thus immediately appointed by heaven already made essay of
the power of the talisman, and should not the vast fortune
of Rothschild have swelled the already numerous triumphs
of Israel's new and heaven appointed champion ? Yea, verily.
Accursed Nazarenes
! The issue is now no longer uncertain; even as the stars
in their course fought against Sisera, even so henceforth,
even until the restoration of Palestine, shall the course
of seemingly human events fight against and weaken all
Nazarene nations, and greatly strengthen and aggrandize
my people. In the luxurious and inviting east, in the barbarous
and revolting north; among the degenerate dwellers in
Italy; among the senseless bigotry of Spain and Portugal;
in every land and among every people the Jewish cause shall
be unconsciously but potently forwarded; the cause of the
Nazarene as unconsciously but as potently beaten backward.
Selah, Selah, let it be Jehovah ! THOU hast said it SHALL
be.