Heinrich Heine (Maçom que influenciou Marx) fala sobre os Rothschild; Moses Hess (Guru de Marx); Rabinos Maçons e Semelhanças entre o pensamento Judaico e a Maçonaria
Letter XXXI (“Money is the god of our era, and Rothschild is his prophet”)
Lutèce. Paris, Michel Lévy Frères, 1855, from the French edition of his complete works, supervised by Heine;
"Our financiers once again see things through rose-colored glasses. Even the most eminent of them seems to have abandoned himself to this illusion, but not at all times. M. de Rothschild, who for some time looked to be under the weather, is back on his feet again and looks to be in fine health. The oracles of the stock exchange, who work so well together at deciphering the facial expressions of the great baron, assure us that the swallows of peace are nesting in his smile; that any fear of war has disappeared from his face; that he feels well.
We no longer see the least flash of an oncoming storm in his eyes, and consequently the horrible hurricane with its thunder of cannons has completely dissipated. Even the baron’s sneezes, they add, bespeak peace. It is true that the last time I had the honor to pay my respects to M. de Rothschild he was beaming with the greatest well-being and his good humor overflowed in poetry, for at such moments the baron has the habit of letting his humor flow in torrents of rhyme. I found that in this case he was particularly successful in his rhyming, except he was unable to find one for Constantinople and he scratched his head, as all poets do when they can’t find their rhyme. Being myself a bit of poet I took the liberty to propose to my brother in Apollo, M. de Rothschild, that he say Constantinopolis instead of Constantinople, and that he rhyme the word with metropolis, by saying “Constantinopolis, the future Russian metropolis.” But this rhyme appeared to seriously displease the baron. He claimed that England would never allow it and that a European war could result from it that would cost the world much blood and tears, and cost Rothschild himself much money.
M. de Rothschild is in fact the best political thermometer. I would say that when it comes to indicating good or bad weather he possesses a talent as natural and infallible as a frog, but this comparison might be looked upon as disrespectful. And to be sure one must have respect for this man, if only because of the respect he inspires in the majority of those who approach him.
I especially love visiting him in his bank offices, where I have the occasion to observe how men of all classes and religions, gentiles as well as Jews, bow, bend, and prostrate themselves before him. Doing so results in bends and twists of the spine that are better than those of the most agile acrobats. I saw people who upon approaching the great baron flinched as if they were touching a voltaic battery. At the door of his office many are already tremble with veneration like Moses at Mount Horeb when he saw that his foot was resting on holy ground.
Just as Moses removed his shoes, more than one broker or exchange agent who dares set foot in M. de Rothschild’s private offices would remove his boots before entering if he weren’t that he feared that his naked feet smell and that this fetid emanation would discommode the baron. This private office is, in fact, a remarkable place that gives rise to sublime thoughts and feelings, like the view of the ocean, of the starry sky, or of high mountains and great forests. There we see how small man is and how great is God, for money is the god of our era, and Rothschild is his prophet.
When one day I wanted to go to visit M. Rothschild at his home a braided domestic passed through the corridor carrying the baron’s chamber pot and I saw a speculator who was passing at the same moment respectfully remove his hat before the mighty pot. This is the kind of devotion certain people’s respect leads them to. I made a note of the name of that reverential man, and I am certain that in time he will become a millionaire. When one day I told M* that I had dined en famille with M. de Rothschild** in one of the interior apartments of his bank offices he clasped his hands in surprise, telling me I'd tasted an honor that until then had only been granted Rothschilds by blood, or at the very most a few sovereign princes, and that he would gladly purchase this honor at the price of half his nose. I can’t help but note that M***’s nose, even if it shrunk by half, would still be sufficiently long.
M. de Rothschild’s offices are extremely large: they're a labyrinth of rooms, a barracks of wealth. The room where the baron works from morning to night – he has nothing else to do but work – was recently prettied up. At present there can be found on the mantelpiece a marble bust of Emperor Franz of Austria, with whom the house of Rothschild has done much business. But out of friendship the baron also intends to have busts made of all the princes of Europe who have contracted their loans through his house, and this collection of marble busts will form a more grandiose Valhalla than the Valhalla dedicated to illustrious Germans that King Ludwig of Bavaria built in Ratisbonne. I don’t know whether M. de Rothschild will celebrate the heroes of his Valhalla in rhymed verse or in His Bavarian Majesty’s lapidary style, with neither rhyme nor reason."
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Judeus na Maçonaria
Jews and Freemasonry in the nineteenth century: An overview of current knowledge
“L’Aurore Naissante” (later the Zur aufgehenden Morgenröte), was recognized in 1807 by the Grand Orient thanks to the people skills of Max Cerfbeer,**[5] [5]**Daniel Ligou, ed., Dictionnaire de la franc maçonnerie… and its first lodge master was Siegmund Geisenheimer, an associate of the Rothschild family. The historians Jacob Katz and Paul Arnsberg have shown that its members included almost all the leading families of the old Jewish community in Frankfurt along with those who had rapidly climbed the social ladder—such as the Hanau, Goldschmidt, and Rothschild families, and in particular their younger members.
[…]
It was this Jewish Masonic bourgeoisie in Frankfurt that managed the affairs of a community increasingly attracted to a liberal, reforming vision of Judaism, and thus played a key role in the cultural and religious history of nineteenth-century German Judaism. [10][10]**Jacob J. Petuchowski, “Frankfurt Jewry. A Model of Transition… All of its leading figures were Masons from 1817 to 1832, a period of significant community change—raising the question of the influence of their membership of the Masons on this reforming attitude. Far from being short-lived, the Jewish presence continued into the second half of the century, when the Creizenach, Goldschmidt, Hahn, and Lehberger families, for example, were both community leaders and members of several Frankfurt lodges.
[…]
Jacob Katz is right therefore to claim that the Jews played a decisive role in the history of German Masonry, including in the transfer of jurisdiction of some lodges from the conservative mother lodges of Berlin to their more liberal counterparts in Frankfurt and Hamburg. Such liberalization, around 1848, was however short-lived. Once the Revolution was over, after the power of mother lodges and state control over Prussian Freemasonry was restored, the rebel lodges returned to their bosom and once again excluded their Jewish members. While they did not have a complete monopoly over German Masonry, the Prussian mother lodges were extremely powerful. Their bans therefore endured, even if time gradually weakened their impact.
[…]
O Pensamento Judaico e a Maçonaria; Moses Hess, Sionista Maçom e Guru de Karl Marx - Hess fez parte da Loja fundada por Siegmund Geisenheimer, associado dos Rothschild.
There was also clearly a link worthy of greater investigation between membership of the Masons and the modernization of Jewish society: its innovators, reformers, radicals, and even marginal figures were sometimes if not often Masons. There are therefore striking similarities between Masonic discourse and liberal Jewish discourse. The ideology of “regeneration,” while driven by ideological and economic objectives, also suited a key concern of Masonry: to create “new men” through initiation. This similarity is more than merely symbolic.
Affinities can also be identified between the Masonic model and Jewish education. The Philanthropin, for example, a model school and showcase for Jewish reform in Germany, was created in 1804 by Siegmund Geisenheimer, who would later found the Jewish lodge in Frankfurt. It included a number of Masons among its leaders and teachers, with some playing a non-negligible role in the cultural and religious development of German Judaism and in the Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums), such as the writer Moses Hess, the historian Isaac Marcus Jost, and the mathematician Michaël Creizenach. [12]
The Masons also included Reform Jewish members who were close to the Masons in philosophical and ideological terms. Liberal rabbi Leopold Stein, for example, who was admitted in 1867 into the Frankfurt lodge Zur Einigkeit—Franz Liszt’s lodge—had steered the Reform synod of 1845, then led the Frankfurt community before stepping down from his rabbinical functions in 1862. He was then replaced by a leading figure of German Reform Judaism, Abraham Geiger.[13] [13]**Arnsberg, Die Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden, 239.
There was also Gotthold Salomon, leader of the Reform temple of Hamburg, initiated into the Frankfurt Morgenröte in 1837, who had previously advocated stripping Freemasonry of its Christian additions in Masonic orations**[14] [14]**Orations published under the title: Stimmen aus Osten, eine…; Isaac Bamberger, rabbi of the Reform community of Königsberg between 1865 and 1896 [15]
[15] Jean-Philippe Schreiber, “Le grand-rabbin de Belgique Élie…; Solomon Formstecher,rabbi in Offenbach, who was a member of the Zum Frankfurter Adler; and Samuel Hirsch, rabbi in Offenbach, who was a member of the Zum Frankfurter Adler; and Samuel Hirsch, a member of the Enfants de la Concorde Fortifiée lodge and chief rabbi of Luxembourg—as well as his successor Isaac Blumenstein, also initiated into this lodge in 1874. **[18][18]**Alexandre Marius Dées de Stério, Essai d’histoire de la… Jacob Katz has highlighted the figure of Samuel Hirsch, trained in the
yeshivasof Metz and Mainz and the universities of Bonn and Berlin, who was initiated in 1843, the year he was appointed chief rabbi of Luxembourg—which he left in 1866 for Philadelphia, where he became a leading figure in American Reform Judaism. **[19] [19]**Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform…
Finally, the pattern of Reform rabbis having membership of the Masons was even more marked in Great Britain.
Rabino Isaac: ”A Maçonaria é uma instituição judaica…”
For philosophical, spiritual, and religious, but also historical and symbolic reasons, Freemasonry generally disseminated a positive image of Judaism, and thus contributed, in conjunction with other drivers of the new society, to accelerating the change in mentalities toward it. Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, a Mason and pioneer of Reform Judaism in the United States, thus enthusiastically declared: “Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords and explanations are Jewish from the beginning to the end”—a maxim that anti-Masons took great delight in exploiting. [21]
Conversely, the process of Jewish emancipation came later in places where Freemasonry was prohibited. [22] In Austria, lodges were forced to cease their activities at the…
The example of Tsarist Russia, where Freemasonry survived only in secrecy after being outlawed by Alexander I in 1822, is revealing in this respect. This ban effectively ended the mass entry of Jews into lodges that had begun in 1815, particularly in Warsaw, which might have constituted a modernizing factor for Judaism in eastern Europe. According to Artur Eisenbach, a large element of Warsaw’s Jewish bourgeoisie, namely members of the enlightened elite, influenced by the Haskalah, who were active as leaders of the Jewish community and its educational and social institutions, had participated in Masonic life for the decade and a half prior to its prohibition.
Daniel Tollet has also shown that a number of Polish Jewish revolutionaries exiled after 1831 joined Masonic lodges in Paris or provincial France. [24] Daniel Tollet, Histoire des Juifs en Pologne, du XVIe siècle à… Historian Joachim Lelewel, elected to the Diet in 1828 and the likely intellectual inspiration behind the Polish Uprising of 1830 before he was forced to seek exile in France, thus maintained, through Masonry, a link between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish democrats.
[…]
Heinrich Heine, a Jew by origin and a Mason, thus saw his own conversion in a way that rejected any form of betrayal.
[…]
Moreover, through a range of different routes depending on whether it was spiritualist or materialist, Freemasonry, like some sectors of liberal Judaism—and Protestantism—sought to overcome faith-based divides in order to reach a single, universal religion or philosophy.
[…]
Yet if we take the example of France and in particular Belgium, it is clear that the close relationship that developed between some enlightened Jewish elites and Masonry must have contributed both to the socialization of these elites within that part of the bourgeoisie adhering to Enlightenment principles and to the consolidation of consistorial doctrine in its universal values, its social doctrine, and its return to the Mosaic and Prophetic sources of the Jewish religion.
[…]
But there were more lodges with a majority of Jewish members in South America.
[…]
Finally, there were also many Sephardi in South American lodges in the nineteenth century, particularly in Venezuela, Colombia, and Chile.
[…]
Meanwhile, Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue have demonstrated the role played by Jewish elites in the lodges of Istanbul and Thessaloniki during the period of Freemasonry’s expansion in the Ottoman Empire, between 1850 and 1875. [29] French, Italian, English, Greek, and German lodges all coexisted in these two cities, all linked to countries that played a key role in the Empire’s astonishing economic development. Later on, many members of Alexandria’s Jewish bourgeoisie were also Masons. Lodges affiliated to the Grand Orient of France and the Grand Orient of Italy in particular disseminated liberal ideas throughout the cities of the Empire, helping to make native Jews receptive to western ideas. Here again, these lodges played an active role in breaking down community barriers and were also places for dialogue, in particular between Jews and Muslims, in a context where such relations were not always easy. Jewish elites had a particular presence in the lodges of the highly cosmopolitan city of Thessaloniki, the “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” where the Jewish population constituted a majority.
Lucien Sabah is one of the few authors to have demonstrated the role played by Freemasonry as a place of integration for Mediterranean Jews into French culture and the republican spirit. He cites the example, among others, of a Mason in Algiers who was both the lodge master and the president of the Jewish consistory.
In Oran, where an old, very poor, Arabized Jewish community present before the French conquest lived alongside a more recent community mostly originally from Livorno and closer to the authorities, the Jews were both westernized and stigmatized by Masonry, which was closely entangled with local political issues.
[…]
The Free University of Brussels, founded by Masons, had four Jewish rectors in the nineteenth century, all Masons: Gottlieb Gluge, Martin Philippson, Adolphe Prins, and Paul Errera. [39]
[…]
The same was also true in Great Britain, where Moses Montefiore, initiated in 1812 to the Jewish lodge Mount Moriah, gave his name to two Masonic lodges. The second Jew to enter the UK parliament, he acquired the status of an international Jewish leader and was head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1838 to 1874.
[…]
Whether or not through primarily Jewish lodges, English Jews thus acquired status, respectability, and familiarity with British culture. This was welcomed by the English Jewish press—such as the monthly Jewish Chronicle, founded by Mason Isaac Vallentine—which published information on lodge activities in its pages and reported the passage of Jewish Masons toward higher degrees or major roles and responsibilities.
