Messianic Fervor Over the Ages and Implications in Modern Times

by Jonas E. Alexis

The death of Christ in the first century was a turning point in human history, particularly in Palestine. It was in that century that Rabbinic Judaism made a solemn pact to reject the man on the cross.

That man was a humble servant who came to proclaim peace instead of perpetual wars, reconciliation between men instead of plundering and pillaging, and salvation and ultimate meaning for humanity. Moreover, the man on the cross proclaimed that every single human being has intrinsic value.

The Jewish leaders, who came to dominate religious Jewish and political life, were looking for a military leader and therefore rejected him.

Yet that rejection had several metaphysical implications, most significantly the fact that Rabbinic Judaism is still waiting for a messianic leader, which leaves its adherents open to revolutionary and apocalyptic figures.

Simon bar Kokhba was one of those figures. When Bar Kochba came on the scene in A.D. 132, he was immediately crowned as the messiah who, like Moses, will lead his people out of bondage. Christians, who professed that Christ was the true Messiah, rejected Bar Kochba.

Of course two Messiahs—Christ and Bar Kochba—cannot coexist in the strict sense of the word. So Bar Kochba had to persecute those who claimed that the Messiah had already come and refused to give allegiance to this new military and apocalyptic figure. Jewish Historian Peter Schafer of Princeton conceded the point that Bar Kochba

“fought against the Christians, who (naturally) refused to support him. There may have been a number of reasons for the Christians’ rejection of Bar Kochba, but the most obvious would have been the fact that the Messiah stood against Messiah, and that the Christians were unable to follow Bar Kochba due to the obviously Messianic nature of his movement.”[1]

Simon Bar Kosiba, or Bar Kochba, was one of the first to be identified as “King Messiah” or “the star that comes forth from Jacob.”[2] Eighty-year-old Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, who actively fanned the flames of Bar Kochba’s revolution, thought that Bar Kochba was “God’s anointed” or the “messiah.”[3]

But his revolt against Rome, which began in AD 132, ended in AD 135. Yet the messianic spirit did not die out then.

Jewish scholar Walter Laqueur proved himself to be an unruly and dishonest historian when he declared that “there had been physical persecution of the Jews under the Roman emperors; reading the Torah, practicing circumcision, etc. were banned in the year 135 CE, and Judaism ceased to be a legal religion.”[4]

What Laqueur failed to mention was that this was the year the Bar Kochba rebellion ended! Walter did not point out that Jewish rebellions were rampant during that age; from 66 to 70 A.D. the Jewish War led to a bloody confrontation which culminated in the destruction of the Temple.

Likewise, in 115 Jewish revolutionaries slaughtered 240,000 Greeks on the island of Cyprus; the Greeks in return rose up and slaughtered virtually every Jew on the island.[5] The Roman emperors finally had to ban Judaism then. All of these historical events are omitted in Laqueur’s analysis. This is not a surprise at all, for this is a recurring theme in Jewish historiography.

Throughout the centuries, the Jewish people have been deceived again and again by false messiahs such as Shabbetai Zevi, Baruchyah Russo, and Jacob Frank.

Eighty-year-old Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, who actively fanned the flames of Bar Kochba’s revolution, thought that Bar Kochba was “God’s anointed” or the “messiah.”[6]

It was right after the Bar Kochba revolt that rabbis began to use the word “Edom” to denote Christianity[7]—a word that symbolically means to them that Rabbinic Judaism will be in perpetual conflict with Christianity.

During the Middle Ages, some Jews viewed this as “a cosmic war between the heavenly archangel of Edom and that of Jacob.” Moreover, this cosmic struggle in some instances was viewed as a “messianic battlefield between the prince of Edom and the prince of Israel.”[8]

In the process, baptism was viewed as a “betrayal of [Jewish] communal values, a rejection of Jewish destiny, a submission to the illusory verdict of history.”[9]

(Once again, here we are seeing the perennial contradiction which never ceases to amaze an astute observer: “Jewishness” is genetic, but Jews reject other Jews precisely because they submit to baptism and embrace the man on the cross! For a person to maintain such an impressively incoherent position while his head doesn’t explode is beyond my comprehension.)

One certainly cannot have a messianic battle without a messianic figure. After the cross, the messianic spirit of Rabbinic Judaism ended up wandering around Palestine. Its religious and revolutionary leaders ended up looking for a political leader who will crush the Gentile. This has been a central theme in revolutionary movements.

Around 1096, it was announced in France and Germany that the Messiah had appeared in the east.

“Men in Turkey said that they had met Elijah, returned in the flesh, and that he had promised that the Messiah was on the way.

“In the land of the Khazars seventeen communities abandoned their possessions and set out to meet the lost tribes who were said to be coming from the east to join him. Jews from all countries began to gather at Salonika to take ship to Palestine to him.

“In both west and east the more responsible leaders seem to have kept their heads; but twenty years later, when Benjamin of Tudela visited Germany, he found the Jews still in a ferment at the Messiah’s expected coming.”[10]

Messianic expectations came and went, and when many were disappointed during the centuries, other expectations took their place. A proselyte named Obadiah claimed that the Messiah

“had been seen in Cordova; men had heard that in Fez he had declared himself. Then in Persia. Then in the Yemen. Always the Messiah was coming; and when hope died the calculations began afresh; fresh figures, fresh dates were examined; and, unheeded, the cautious warned against the belief that the time could be known.

“In the thirteenth century Nachmanides, taking the analogy of the demand of Moses to Pharaoh that he would release the children of Israel, proclaimed that when the Messiah really came it would be known because he would appear before the pope and demand the freeing of his people; and in 1280 the Spanish mystic, Abraham Abulafia, convinced that he was the Messiah or his forerunner, sought to visit Nicholas III.

“The pope ordered that, if he came, he should be seized and burnt at the stake. But on the very night Abraham arrived, the pope died suddenly, and Abraham was saved.”[11]

This messianic anticipation continued through the sixteenth century and beyond, attracting fresh leading figures who proclaimed to be the Messiah. Late philo-Semitic historian James Parkes writes,

“All through the centuries under consideration false messiahs succeeded each other, and sudden rumours sprang up, now from the east, now from the west, that the Messiah had actually manifested himself.

“Rabbinical scholars, even the most eminent, gave themselves to calculations of the time of his coming, though there were some few scholars, equally eminent, who resisted the temptation.

“Three times, in the 11th, the 16th, and the 17th centuries, messianic excitement swelled to a climax which swept all through Jewry, from the furthest communities of the west to North Africa, Arabia, and Tartary.”[12]

These “messianic expectations,” as Heinrich Graetz noted, “were always certain of creating enthusiasts, who aimed at converting their silent belief into fact, and without exactly intending to deceive, attempted to carry away such of the crowd as were of like opinions, and to excite them to such a pitch that they would willingly sacrifice their lives.”[13]

Those messianic enthusiasts were many, playing a deceptive role in Jewish history. At one point, one such man in Crete

“gained as adherents all the Jewish congregations of this important island, through which he had traveled in a year. He promised them that one day he would lead them dry-footed, as Moses had formerly done, through the sea into the promised land…

“This Cretan Moses was able to convince his followers so thoroughly of his divine mission, that they neglected their business, abandoned all their property, and only waited for the day of the passage through the sea.

“On the appointed day, Moses the Messiah marched in front, and behind him came the entire Jewish population of Crete, including women and children. From a promontory projecting out into the sea, he commanded them to throw themselves before them.

“Several of these fanatics met their death in the waves; others were rescued by sailors. The false Moses is said, however, never to have been found again.”[14]

This messianic anticipation continued through the sixteenth century and beyond, attracting fresh leading figures who proclaimed to be the Messiah.[15]

The Messiah was again predicted to appear in 1648, but that year passed without a sign of him.[16]

One who seemed to fulfill Jewish messianic signs was Shabbetai Zevi, born in 1626 in Smyrna and a devoted student of Kabbalah.[17]

As a young man, Zevi “confided to the intimate circle of his friends that he was the expected Messiah,” but “in 1651 he was banished from the synagogue of the city for his pretensions, and for ten years he led a wandering life.”[18]

In 1665, Zevi feared that he was possessed and sought the help of a man named Nathan, who “was reputed to be able to read souls and dispel demons.”[19]

Zevi journeyed to Gaza to meet him. “Nathan, a young rabbi of flawless reputation, had experienced a vision of Shabbetai Zevi as the Messiah…[and] informed [him] that there was no demon in his soul and that he was indeed the Messiah.”[20]

Though relieved and flattered, Zevi was reluctant at first to proclaim himself the Messiah. The two men

“journeyed together to the holy places in Hebron and Jerusalem, then returned to Gaza. There, on May 31, 1665, Shabbetai Zevi was suddenly seized by a sense of elation. Urged on by Nathan, the Sephardic rabbi revealed himself publicly as the Messiah. He was close to forty years old at the time.”[21]

At Zevi’s proclamation, “the news spread like wildfi re…Jews everywhere prepared for their departure for Palestine.”[22]

Intoxicated by their hopes,[23] many Jews

“abandoned their houses and property, refusing to do any work and claiming that the Messiah would soon arrive and carry them on a cloud to Jerusalem.

“Others fasted for days, denying food even to their little ones, and during that severe winter bathed in ice-holes, at the same time reciting a recently-composed prayer.

“Faint-hearted and destitute Christians, hearing the stories of the miracles performed by the false Messiah and beholding the boundless arrogance of the Jews, began to doubt Christ.”[24]

It was such a massive delusion of ecstatic and imaginary vision that Zevi was further declared to be God in some Kabbalist circles.[25]

Surrounded by such religious fervor, Zevi quickly gathered numerous followers. The era was so dynamic that many

“married their children of twelve, ten, and even younger, to one another—seven hundred couples in all—that, according to Kabbalistic ideas, they might cause the souls not yet born to enter into life, and thereby remove the last obstacle to the commencement of the time of grace.”[26]

To conform to messianic visions, Zevi “appointed twelve men to be apostles and judges of the soon-to-be-reconstituted twelve tribes of Israel. [But] a number of leading Jerusalem rabbis regarded it all as dangerous nonsense and banished him from the Holy City.”[27]

If Zevi took on the role of the Messiah, Nathan almost certainly played his Elijah. Nathan quickly became “the John the Baptist and the Paul of the new messiah.”[28]

While Zevi was busy proclaiming his messiahship and gathering followers, Nathan “sent letters to Italy, Holland, Germany, Poland announcing the Messiah.”[29]

Within a few months, the hysteria came to a head as Zevi set himself up in Smyrna as the Messiah.

“All through the days that followed people were dancing in the streets ecstatic with joy. Many experienced trances. Prophets wandered about the streets of Smyrna describing Shabbetai Zevi seated on a throne…

“The hysteria was general throughout the Jewish community of the city; rich and poor, learned and unlearned, were caught up in it.”[30]

Fearing that public opposition to Zevi’s messianic movement would lead to chaos in their communities, those rabbis who doubted his claims stayed quiet for a while, even though they privately renounced Zevi.[31]

Eventually Zevi caused such a stir that, while on a visit to Constantinople, he was arrested by Turkish authorities. Given the choice to either convert to Islam or lose his life, Zevi renounced his “Messiahship” and chose Islam. The choice was suggested to the Sultan by a Jewish advisor in order “to make the Sabbatian movement ineffective.”[32]

Graetz declares that although the fear of death was used as a pretext, the Turks had no intention of putting him to death, for doing so would create “a fresh martyr”[33] who would energize the spirit of insurrection among the Jews.

Immediately after “converting” to Islam, Zevi was “given a royal pension for the remainder of his life.”[34] His wife Sarah also “received rich presents from the sultana. Some of Shabbatai’s followers also went over to Islam.”[35]

This betrayal shocked many of his followers, as did the revelation of Zevi’s homosexual proclivities. Rabbi Chayim Benvenisti, who spent an enormous part of his life in support of Zevi, “almost died of shame” after hearing the news.[36]

To explain his reversal, Zevi stated that he moved from Judaism to Islam because the time of the Messiah had not yet come.

More importantly, he told his followers, the real Shabbetai Zevi never converted to Islam, but had ascended to heaven; the person who got converted to Islam was simply “a human image” of Zevi.[37]

Yet even after all these ridiculous explanations, zealous followers did not lose hope in their messiah, for Kabbalistic teachings dictated that the coming of the Messiah was near at hand, and Zevi was still an ideal candidate.[38] Chaim Potok writes that

“all through his final months in 1665 letters had come from Palestine, Egypt, Aleppo, and Smyrna telling of Shabbetai Zevi and the prophet Nathan. There was messianic fervor throughout Europe.”[39]

In 1667 and 1668, cities like Adrianople, Sofia, Kastoria, and Salonika were full of Jews who were more than ready to be deceived by Zevi once again.

Zevi died in 1676, followed by Nathan his prophet three years later. The movement he helped create became “the most important messianic movement in Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple.”[40]

Zevi’s legacy was not one of political or spiritual victory; Palestinian Jewry suffered and “sank to its lowest level of physical and intellectual misery.”[41] Potok writes that

“to reduce the collective shame of the people before the eyes of future generations, communal records containing even the faintest echo of the messianic debacle were removed and destroyed—by order of the rabbis and elders.”[42]

The next two generations brought a number of similar leaders who arose in Europe, North Africa, and Palestine, “each with a message more bizarre than the others.”[43]

Jacob Querido claimed to be the son of Shabbetai Zevi and the bearer of Zevi’s soul, and in 1740 Jacob Frank proclaimed himself Shabbetai Zevi reincarnate. These events, Grayzel lamented, “almost brought misfortune upon all the Jews of Poland.”[44]

In 1720, another false messiah by the name of Barukhyah Russo, known as Osman Baba, rose to preeminence in the Jewish community. Baba claimed that he was Zevi reincarnate, and this “was widely noticed by Polish Sabbateans who established contact with Barukhyah and accepted the doctrine for themselves.”[45]

Yet with the death of each of these false messiahs, people became more disgruntled about the Jewish messiah. Though many Jews never lost hope in the coming messiah, others began to doubt that he would ever come, being worn out by individuals seeking fame or power.

Jewish scholar David Bakan writes that though the Shabbetai Zevi movement was thwarted, its spirit lingered within many Jews, for

“after the French Revolution, it was the Sabbatian groups still within the Jewish fold that fostered the movements toward reform, liberalism, and the enlightenment. Sabbatianism articulated with rationalism in several ways.”[46]

One of those ways, as Bakan argues, is in the rationalization of psychoanalysis as propounded by Sigmund Freud. Many of Freud’s ideas in The Interpretation of Dreams are quite similar to Kabbalaistic teachings, which fueled Shabbetai Zevi’s movement as well. Bakan further maintains that

“Freud’s use of the idiom of sexuality as the basic one for the expression of all the deeper and more profound problems of mankind is entirely in the spirit of the Kabbala.”[47]

The_Mass_Psychology_of_FascismOne must never forget that the Sabbatean movement, like Freudian psychoanalysis, included weird sexual teachings.

Some Sabbateans taught that it was permissible “to have sexual intercourse with someone else’s wife or one’s own sister, or even—though only in secret—with one’s own mother.”[48]

Jewish scholar Pawel Maciejko of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem writes the Sabbatians were accused of all kinds of sexual perversion.

“The famed Frankish ‘orgies’ were, in fact, the custom of sexual hospitality, which was not a singlular ritual but a daily practice; according to the testimonies, it was upheld by the Sabbatians for years before Frank’s appearance in Poland and was in no way connected to his activity…

As for the specific practices involved, stories about a Sabbatian who wanted to ‘copulate with a married woman while she was menstruant’ and another one, who publicly masturbated in the study hall, had already emerged in 1725; the concerned congregants went to their rabbi who ‘replied that he knew of many worse acts’ and did nothing.”[49]

One Sabbatean admitted, “As I am old now, I no longer do it, but twenty years ago (and I have professed this faith for twenty-four years), I had carnal relations with the wife of my son…”[50]

Maciejko writes,

“Other testimonies described the braking of the prohibition of incest—having sexual relations with menstruating women—as well as the practice of ‘sexual hospitality,’ whereby a host offered his wife or daughter to a stranger coming as a guest to his house.”[51]

“Under the veil of their sham piety, the Sabbatians engaged in secret antinomian rites: they practiced necromancy, masturbated and then smeared the whole body with the semen, permitted or even encouraged incest, practiced wife swapping and group sex, advocated a complete sexual freedom, and ‘permitted perjury, theft, and adultery.”[52]

The rabbinate began to panic because Christian symbols were used in what seemed to be a blasphemous ceremony. “The participation of several communal rabbis in the rite further complicated the situation.”[53]

The Frankish movement went underground at the end of the eighteenth century, but that again was no problem precisely because the revolutionary spirit never rested on one particular sexual movement. It got revived in the writing of Sigmund Freud, who put an “intellectual” flavor to it.[54] The end product, however, was sexual ideology.

Freud’s writing ended up having an enormously powerful influence on Wilhelm Reich, who actually was one of the fathers of the sexual revolution.

In short, the sexual virus traveled from major centers of Europe—France, England,[55] and Germany in the 1920s and 30s[56]–to America in the 1960s during the sexual revolution.

By the time we reach the 1960s—with the spread of Freudian and Reichian ideology—the West, most specifically America, was under the guiding hands of the dreadful few, who ended up taking over Hollywood and progressively producing subversive films.

Don’t take my words. Listen to the following interview with David Cronenberg, during which he subtly admitted that “real art must be subversive to the status quo to some extent.”

We also must keep in mind that the sexual revolution would have been almost impossible without the dreadful few. Wilhelm Reich is a case in point. Reich deconstructed the moral order and replaced it with sexual ideology. He wrote,

“The first prerequisite for healthier human and sexual relationships is the elimination of those moral concepts which base their demands on allegedly supernatural commands, on arbitrary human regulations, or simply on tradition…

“We do not want to see natural sexual attraction stamped as ‘sin,’ ‘sensuality’ fought as something low and beastly, and the ‘conquering of the flesh’ made the guiding principle of morality!”[57]

Jewish philosopher Paul Edwards later declared “for some years many of my friends and I regarded [Reich] as something akin to a messiah.”[58] In a BBC interview, Edwards declared,

“I concede that Reich had no real competence as a physicist… At the same time I am quite convinced that the orgone theory cannot be complete nonsense. For a number of years, largely out of curiosity, I sat in an orgone accumulator once a day.”[59]

Edwards was not alone, for Reich ended up receiving many accolades from Jewish intellectual luminaries, writers, producers and musicians such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, Isaac Rosenfeld, and of course Woody Allen and Bob Dylan.[60] Even Psychology Today ended up praising Reich.[61]

Finally, Reich ended up producing what he called “sex-economy” in order to attack the Catholic Church. If priests and nuns ended up embracing sexual revolution and pedophilia, it was largely because Reich was deliberately involved in seducing those priests and nuns.

Those who keep writing about sexual degeneracy among Catholics do not want seem to be interested in examining this issue from its root because it requires deep psychological analysis and self-reflection.

No one is denying that many priests and nuns are engaged sexual crimes. But how did that come about? Again, let us hear from Reich himself in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism:

“A girl of some seven years of age who was consciously brought up without any idea of God suddenly developed a compulsion to pray. It was compulsive because she really didn’t want to pray and felt it to be against her better judgment. The background of this compulsion to pray is as follows:

“the child was in the habit of masturbating before going to sleep every night. One night, for some reason, she was afraid to do so; instead she had the impulse to kneel down in front of her bed and to recite a prayer…

“Whence this self-renunciation? She told her father, who had her complete confidence, that a few months earlier she had had an unpleasant experience while on vacation. As so many children, she and a boy had played at having sexual intercourse (‘had played Mommy and Daddy’).

“Another boy had suddenly come upon them and had shouted ‘shame’ at them. Though she had been told by her parents that there was nothing wrong with such games, she felt ashamed and, in place of the game, masturbated before going to sleep.

“One evening, shortly before the appearance of the compulsion to pray, she had walked home from a house party with several other children. Along the way they had sung revolutionary songs.

“An old woman passed them who reminded her of the witch in Hansel and Gretel. This old woman had called out to them: ‘May the Devil take you—you band of atheists.’

“That evening, when she wanted to masterbate again, it struck her for the first time that perhaps there really was a God who sees and punishes. Unconsciously, she had associated the old woman’s threat with the experience with the boy.

“Now she too began to struggle against masturbation, became afraid, and to allay her fear began to pray compulsively. Prayer had taken the place of sexual gratification…

“the compulsion to pray disappeared when she was made aware of the origin of her fear; this awareness made it possible for her to masterbate again without feelings of guilt. As improbable as this incident may appear, it is pregnant with meaning for sex-economy. It shows how the mystical contagion of our youth could be prevented.”[62]

“This idea, indeed, is pregnant with sex-economy. Reich discovered pretty quickly that the best way to sexualize priests and nuns and in the process diminish their spiritual calling and moral power is to spread sexual perversion among them and encourage them to act upon their sexual impulses without restraint. He continued to say,

“We do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of God; we merely eliminate the sexual repressions and dissolve the infantile ties to the parents….The inescapable conclusion of all this is that a clear sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life must foredoom every form of mysticism; that, in other words, natural sexuality is the arch-enemy of mystical religion.”[63]

As Jones puts it,

“By getting people to act contrary to the Church’s teaching on sexual morals, Reich and his followers automatically limited its political influence.

“The logical conclusion of this is also clear: the total sexualization of a culture would mean the total extinction of the Church and the classical state based on the moral law.

“The real revolutionaries could triumph over repression—and this was the program of the 1960s—just by having a good time, by smoking dope, getting laid and listening to subversive music. Their political agenda came directly from Reich.”[64]

Reich continued to make his point unambiguous:

“The uncovering of the sex-economy processes, which nourish religious mysticism, will lead to practical elimination, no matter how often the mystics run for tar and feathers. Sexual consciousness and mystical sentiments cannot coexist.”[65]

Reich did make it clear that “Sexual potency and physical vigor and beauty must become the permanent ideals of the revolutionary freedom movement.”[66]

One of the first victims during the sexualization period was a former Catholic by the name of Lisa Palac, who ended up writing The Edge of the Bed. Palac remembered, “I tell them I was raised Catholic. We all have a good yuk over that one. Ah, Catholicism. Where sex is dirty and the thrill of transgression is endless!”[67]

Having taken her clues from Reich’s sexual culture, Palac declared,

“Pop culture glued me to my friends, expanded my vocabulary and, of course, tipped me off to the big world of sexual possibilities. It was the type of sex education where I learned through suggestion and nuance.”[68]

In short, sexual ideology changed the culture and had a huge impact on Seminarians and priests. Priests and nuns did not pay much attention to that powerful weapon largely because forgot the principle as articulated in Euripides’ The Bacchae: no city or moral institution can survive when sexual ideology is unleashed.

Jewish writers and revolutionaries have known this for centuries. For example, Jewish writer Elizabeth Wurtzel told us years ago that Delilah trapped Samson into “sexual politics” because Samson was “enslaved to his dick,” and that story offers “the first example of what we now call sexual politics.”[69]

Delilah, according to Wurtzel, had “pussy power,” and no hero can remain a hero when he gets trapped in that sexual matrix.

Planned Parenthood is learning pretty fast that in order to deconstruct the moral fabric of teenagers in America, they ought to push sexual politics. And guess who was praising Planned Parenthood for having done a “great work” over the years? Susan Freudenheim, executive editor of Jewish Journal. She wrote,

“Planned Parenthood has become the new curse word for some on the campaign trail, as well as among Catholic bishops and on the pulpits of some churches…”

“Amid all the hubris and rancor flying around the subject of women’s reproductive rights these days, I suggest we stop for a moment and send a word of thanks to Planned Parenthood for its 100 years of caring for both women and men with nowhere else to turn — almost 50 of those years in Los Angeles.”[70]

Does Planned Parenthood really deserve that accolade? Well, you be the judge (viewer discretion is advised) :

CITATIONS

[1] Peter Schaefer, The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World (New York: Routledge, 2003), 154-155.

[2] Oskar Skarsaune, In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influence on Early Christianity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 52.

[3] Solomon Grayzel, A History of the Jews, 182.

[4] Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 50.

[5] Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 2: 396; Grayzel, A History of the Jews, 180.

[6] Solomon Grayzel, A History of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 182.

[7] See Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).

[8] Ibid. See also Ruth Langer, Cursing the Christians?: A History of the Birkat HaMinim (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[9] Pawel maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 1.

[10] Parkes, A History of Palestine, 175.

[11] Ibid., 175-176.

[12] James Parkes, A History of Palestine: From 135 A.D. to Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 174-175.

[13] Heinrich Hirsch Graetz, History of the Jews, Vol. I (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893),610.

[14] Ibid., 1:610-611.

[15] See David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 138-140.

[16] Parkes, A History of Palestine, 177.

[17] See Graetz, History of the Jews, 5:118-121; Parkes, A History of Palestine, 177.

[18] Parkes, A History of Palestine, 177-178.

[19] Chaim Potok, Wanderings: History of the Jews (New York: Ballantine Book, 1978), 440.

[20] Ibid., 441.

[21] Ibid

[22] Parkes, A History of Palestine, 178.

[23] Graetz, History, 5:132.

[24] David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Dover, 1984), 98; Graetz, History, Vols. 5:134.

[25] Graetz, History, 5:142-143.

[26] Ibid., 5:135.

[27] Potok, Wanderings, 441.

[28] Maciejko, Mixed Multitude, 4.

[29] Potok, Wanderings, 441.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Bakan, Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, 98.

[33] Graetz, History, 5:148.

[34] Potok, Wanderings, 442.

[35] Graetz, History, 5:154.

[36] Ibid., 5:155.

[37] Grayzel, A History of the Jews, 516.

[38] Graetz, History, 5:148-151, 156-163; Parkes, A History of Palestine, 178.

[39] Potok, Wanderings, 442.

[40] Gershom Gerhard Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, , ix, 1.

[41] Parkes, A History of Palestine, 178.

[42] Potok, Wanderings, 446.

[43] Grayzel, A History of the Jews, 517.

[44] Ibid., 518-519.

[45] Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 171.

[46] Bakan, Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, 101.

[47] Ibid., 272.

[48] Maciejko, Mixed Multitude, 33

[49] Ibid., 38.

[50] Ibid., 33.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Ibid., 250.

[53] Ibid., 39.

[54] See David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Dover Publications, 2004).

[55] See for example E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2000).

[56] See for example Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2006); Maria Tartar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

[57] Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 53.

[58] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich.

[59] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Edwards_(philosopher).

[60] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich.

[61] Mark Borigini, “Wilhelm Reich: Orgasm as Analgesic,” Psychology Today, September 9, 2008.

[62] Quoted in Jones, Libido Dominandi, 258, 260.

[63] Ibid., 261.

[64] Ibid., 262.

[65] ibid.

[66] Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 267.

[67] Jones, Libido Dominandi., 263.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Quoted in Jones, Libido Dominandi, 510.

[70] Susan Freudenheim, “Thank You Planned Parenthood,” JewishJournal.com, February 15, 2012.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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