16. The View From Prindle's Head

16.  The View From Prindle’s Head

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Before I jump ahead to the reformer Jud Suss and the rise of modern Judaism let us first review evolving European society.  While the Jews were sinking into a desperate mysticism characterized by the Kabala, which is to say even into deeper subjectivism, Europeans were developing a more objective appreciation of reality, that is the scientific method of raising the Veil of Isis and revealing nature.

One might say that the Europeans truly discovered the world, both visible and invisible.  Unlike the earlier Marco Polo they didn’t traverse the Eurasian land mass but, blocked by the Moslems on that route, they made an end run around Africa to India, thus proving a water route to the East while beginning the realization that the Earth was indeed a sphere.  Untold vistas were opened up as geographical information rapidly added to the knowledge, thus from the fifteenth century onward the European mind expanded rapidly.

The European brain expanded quickly as the objective world ceased to be less and less mysterious.  Initially Astronomy and Chemistry moved rapidly ahead soon followed by the other sciences.

Judaism stagnated stultifying itself in the nonsense of the Talmud and Kabala.  They took at most a peripheral part in the rapid development until the turn of the twentieth century and then they began to inject Jewish subjectivism into it and corrupting it.  The world was developed in the image of the Europeans.

In about 1740 the Jud Suss made his appearance on the world stage from the German Duchy of Wurttemberg nestled between Bavaria on the East and Alsace of the West and South of Hesse and its capital of Frankfort.  That city was also the center of Jewish operations in Europe at the time.

Not much has been written about Suss in Western Europe.  My account relies on the novel of the Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger.  He first wrote up a play about Suss in the critical year of 1916.  By 1926 the Jews under the guise of Communism were in open revolution against the ancient native German population.  Volkist [folkist] groups of which the National Socialist was the most prominent were defending the Germans and Germany from the Jewish takeover.  A few years later in 1930 Feuchtwanger would write his novel Success that mocked the National Socialist leader Adolf Hitler.  At that time the Jews considered Hitler a joke and no threat.  That was a serious miscalculation.

At that time the future of the National Socialist electoral victory was undreamed of and the events of WWII were unimagined and unimaginable.  Indeed, in 1930 the Jews had little cause to doubt their success as Russia, France, England and the United States were in their pocket.  If needed the US could be held in reserve as they had been in WWI.  How could they lose?  Thus the novel Jud Suss was mocking Germany as losers and was perceived as such.

The novel was a propaganda success.  It sold extremely well in England.  The English made it into a movie also titled Jud Suss which was even more successful than the book.  From my view of the matter, it is difficult to see why either the book or movie was so well received.  Feuchtwanger lays bare the Jewish conspiracy and its methods.  Methods the Jews had used at least since the reign of Suss and which ought to have been known by one and all.  One can only say that like Maxwell Grant’s fictional character, The Shadow, they had the ability to cloud men’s minds.  Perhaps the Jewish bible had indoctrinated and conditioned the West to view the Jews in the light in which they wished to be viewed.

Feuchtwanger chose Suss as his vehicle in part because he represented the demise of the medieval Jew and the rise of the modern Western Jew as would be epitomized  by the Rothschilds who may have emulated Suss to perfect his method.  At the same time as the Western Jews adapted to Aryan ways the Eastern Jews remained dedicated to the ancient ways.  Thus paradoxically the Western Jews despised the Eastern Jews for those very Jewish customs.

It is this transitional moment in time that Feuchtwanger chose to capture.  He could have used the early nineteenth century Rothschilds but he didn’t.  He chose the beginning and foundation of modern Jewish history.  In this passage below Feuchtwanger contrasts the medieval Jew in the character of Isaac Landauer with that of the modern Suss, Joseph Oppenheimer.

Isaac Landauer looked his colleague up and down with amicable amusement.  The elegantly cut brown coat, bordered with silver made of the first cloth, the powdered peruke with its fastidious formal curls and delicately pleated lace ruffles, these alone must have cost forty gulden.  He had always had a weakness for this Suss Oppenheimer, whose eager and adventurous spirit flared so fiercely as his great restless round eyes.  He, Isaac Landauer, had seen a rough and sparing life, the kennels of the Jews’ quarter and the pleasure houses of the great.  Confinement, dirt, persecution, arson, death, oppression, utter helplessness—and pomp, spaciousness, despotism, lordliness and beauty.  He knew the machinery of diplomacy as only three or four others at most within the empire knew it, and his eye could examine down to the smallest detail of the whole apparatus of war, and peace, of the government of men.  His countless business interests had given him a keen eye for the connections between things, and he was aware with a good-humoured and mocking awareness, of the absurd and subtle limitations of the great.  He knew there was only one reality in the world- money.  War and peace, life and death, the virtue of women, the Pope’s power to bind or to loose, the Estates’ enthusiasm for liberty, the purity of the Augsburg Confession, the ships on the sea, coercive power of princes, the Christianizing of the New world, love, power, cowardness, wantonness, blasphemy and virtue, they were all derived from money and they would turn into money, and they could well be expressed in figures.

 

Yes, and usury meant the control of money and hence the control of all.  As the saying goes, follow the money.  In many ways this history is the history of money and usury.

 

But in his [Landauer’s] dress and appearance he clung obstinately to the traditions of his race.  He wore his caftans as he wore his skin.  In it he entered the closets of princes and of the Emperor.  That was the other secret and more profound secret of his power.  He disdained gloves and perukes.  He was indispensable, and this was his triumph, even in his caftan and his ritual curls.

But now there was this Josef Suss Oppenheimer, the younger generation.  There he sat, proud magnificence with his buckled shoes and his lace ruffles, and puffed himself up.  It was not subtle, this younger generation.  It did not understand the refined pleasure of keeping power secret, of possessing it without betraying it, and the still more refined pleasure of relishing its flavour quietly and exclusively by oneself.  Knick knacks and silk stockings, and an elegant traveling carriage with attendants up behind, and the trumpery external signs of possession, these were of more account to it than a jealously-guarded chest containing a bond on the City of Frankfort or on the Margrave of Baden’s Treasury.  A generation without finesse, without taste.

 

Here in Feuchtwanger’s novel we have he Jewish side of the story and it is exactly this image of the most ardent anti-Semite.  It is the reality that Jews deny to the outside world.

It is also the truth about money.  It was the truth that Europeans wouldn’t begin to learn until the nineteenth century when this epoch begins, when the great banking institutions of money developed that reality to the world.  The Duke Karl Alexander of Wurttemberg is secure in his power as the Lord of Wurttemberg  with all its people and its lands, for to the European land was the source of wealth and power not money.

Suss would betray the Duke’s trust and wheedle away his power in land until Suss had both the power of the purse and the land leaving the Duke a mere shadow of a presence.  This was the sneer that Feuchtwanger was giving the German people during the Weimar Republic.

Thus the Jew Suss is an allegory of the stripping of Europe by the Jews.

Continue to 17.  The View From Prindle’s Head.