I, Dynamo

A Review:  Dylan And Me, 50 Years of Adventure by Louis Kemp

Review by R.E. Prindle

In Dylan and Me, Louis has faithfully and unconsciously written nothing less than a historical work, a modern day version of Tom Sawyer’s adventures with Huckleberry Finn….These uniquely American escapades, both before and after, Bobby became Bob, make fun, entertaining and very enlightening reading.

Kinky Friedman

From the forward.

To understand Louis Kemp’s memoir Dylan And Me  I think it necessary to put the immigrant generation of Bobby Zimmerman into the context of immigration.  Robert Zimmerman is of course Bob Dylan’s family name that he changed to Bob Dylan to make it in the entertainment world.

Bob Dylan is third generation immigrant, his grandparents arriving in the US near the turn of the twentieth century.  They chose to settle in the Great North of Minnesota for some peculiar reason; Bob’s mother and father were born in Duluth, second generation.  The family is of course Jewish.

Immigration is usually told from the point of view of the immigrants, the natives being shoved aside as bigots.  A key text of the twentieth century was Gustavus Myers, ‘The History of Bigotry In The United States’ that portrayed natives as bigots persecuting immigrants, especially Jewish immigrants.  Myers book was published in 1943 just as the Jewish holocaust was beginning although unknown in the US at the time.  The consequences of both the book and the extermination begin in the 1950s just as Bob was passing through puberty.

The Jews wherever they were have always considered themselves  a separate people living among strangers, hence their manners and customs bear little resemblance to those of their neighbors.  Oppressed in their home countries they celebrated America as the land of freedom which they immediately set about to subvert.  In the US, certainly up to the twentieth century there had been few Jews so there was no tradition of inter-group relations but the power of the native culture was overwhelming. Thus all immigrant groups seeking the ‘freedom’ they cherished were expected to meld into American culture leaving their oppressive past and customs behind on Ellis Island.

That was the expectation, but the reality was that it takes more than one generation to become acclimatized.  Bob’s second generation parents began the process.  They, their generation, as Myer’s book demonstrates, believed themselves to be discriminated against.  They sort of cowered, especially in the years following the end of the Jewish-German War in Europe.

Then, when the news of the extermination camps became known they were terrified seeking to hide their identity as Jews because they believed that the holocaust would soon begin in the US.  This was a quite serious reaction to European events.  William Paley of CBS- Columbia Broadcasting System-  and his associates, in a panic set up, a plan to ensure that Jewish entertainers might survive the imagined coming holocaust.

Now, television  became a commercial reality after the war.  The radio networks, CBS and NBC were Jewish owned so that the industry belonged to the Jews simply adding TV.  They began to systematically give shows to prominent Jewish entertainers such as Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny and many others.  That is why all these Jewish showbiz types, mostly vaudeville performers owned the airwaves for a couple decades.

The post war Jewish generation then entered more closely into American manners and customs but the distance remained to the point that the Jewish kids appeared to be imitating Americans while retaining their Jewish identity.   In you follow this evolution from immigration to imitation and observe the third generation Jews attentively you can readily see the gap between the two cultures.

This gap and its consequences is readily apparent in Louis Kemp’s memoir.  Hibbing was a mélange in immigrant cultures.  The town had a population of about sixteen thousand of which about three or four hundred were Jewish.  They maintained a separate identity within the community.  Whether Bob was excluded from mingling or whether he excluded himself the exclusion is clear causing him serious social problems.  His hatred of Hibbing may now have been somewhat blunted but it was very strong in his younger days.

At the same time Bob to some extent became assimilated through country and western music which he knows thoroughly.  Hence he adopted a false country persona for his stage presence.  This was altered a great deal when he arrived in NYC and had to familiarize himself with Negro Culture, but that is later.

The Jews in Hibbing attended the Theodor Herzl Summer Camp in Wisconsin and it was at the summer camp that Dylan and Kemp cemented their friendship along with that of Larry Kegan.  The Herzl camp kept the area’s Jews within the Jewish atmosphere emphasizing the separaton.

Bob was enraptured by the actor James Dean and his performance in ‘Rebel Without A Cause which forms much of his pesona; in addition he was swept up in the rock and roll craze that was a universal American experience with a small Jewish presence at first.  Bob himself was swept up by the astonishing music of the great Little Richard, a Negro entertainer whose career at the time changed the direction of the universe.  He, along with Elvis epitomized the decade and Bob was enamored of both.  He wanted to be a rock and roll star, imitating Little Richard in his high school bands.  Little Richard was a little beyond his reach so he turned to folk music adopting Woody Guthrie as his musical role model.  However he never lost the desire to be a rock star.  His 1961 song ‘Mixed Up Confusion’  was an attempt to blend folk and Little Richard that failed.

Bob never did find a rock and roll groove.  He was able to create contemporary sound that was neither rock nor folk, something almost unique for the times.  It didn’t conquer American but became essential to a particular sub-culture.  A Bohemian culture.  Bohemia became Beat and then Hippie with a strong Negro influence.  Bob was home.

To some extent Bob maintained a relationship with Kemp and Kegan.  Busy with his own affairs in New York he slowly became a phenomenon.

At the same time Louis was busy working on his own success that was quite remarkable, he developed a major fish business.  Two boys from Hibbing making it big.  Having made it the relationship was renewed.  The third member of triumvirate, Larry Kegan’s life took a tragic turn.  While in Florida  during high school he was in Florida and made the mistake of diving into shallow water thereby breaking his neck and becoming a quadriplegic.  But Bob drew him back into the relationship even taking him on stage a time or two to sing along.

Time passes, Bob’s career has some ups and downs but he remains the voice of his generation or part of it and they stick with him whether they buy his records or not.  Then in 1976, Bob having become a  legend in his own time, during a low point in his career, he came up with a rather strange idea, that of the Rolling Thunder Review.  Here we come back to the immigrant integration theme.

Notice that Kinky Friedman in the introduction to ‘Dylan And Me’ attempts to pre-empt the ultimate American Tom Sawyer and replace him with Dylan and Kemp thus blending the two cultures.  Bob and Kemp were dressed in the clothes that Tom Sawyer once wore; he had to change their faces and give them brand new names, to paraphrase Bob.

.2.

Because of the Jewish holocaust by White people the Jews were given incredible moral power which was transformed into hatred for the United States.  The US went from the being the world saving moral arbiter to the most bigoted society the world had ever seen within the space of fifteen years according to the Jews. White was equated with Fascist.  Israel was established in 1948 and the 1956 Arab-Israeli war blew Jewish confidence up. 

In 1976 the US celebrated its two hundredth anniversary as the Viet Nam war was ending.  The Rolling Thunder revue was named after the last major US campaign in Viet Nam.  Rolling Thunder referred to the incessant bombing of that campaign.  Thus, the Revue was a negative criticism of the US by The Conscience of the Generation, Bob Dylan.

From another angle it was Bob and Louie’s revenge on Hibbing Minnesota.  The Revue, or possibly campaign, began at the site of the landing of the Puritans in Massachusetts, Plymouth Rock.  There with much mocking of the landing, Jack Eliot climbed the mast of the Mayflower replica, the campaign began.  It represented a new beginning.

The target audience of the Revue was the hippie counter-culture.  I suppose the Revue might be considered the harbinger of a second American Revolution.  That is corny but the answer might be found blowing in the wind.

The Revue was stellar.  Major talent in the persons of Bob, Joan Baez, Joanie Mitchell, Roger McGuinn and quite a few others.  The notion was that it was a band of wandering minstrels doing impromptu shows across New England and into Canada.  There was no real itinerary, the Revue drifted into town, put up some posters announcing the date and location.  There were no advance tickets, fans just showed up at the gate.  According to reports the concerts sold out as fans dropped everything and paid their fare.

I wasn’t there, I can only report impressions from video clips.  It was noisy and unprofessional.   Mocking the Pilgrims Bob often donned White Face, referencing the Black Face minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. They used burnt cork, Bob used white grease paint.

As might be expected the shows employed a disorganized, chaotic approach attempting to appear impromptu.  Just a bunch of wild and crazy boys and girls spreading joy throughout the land at a price.  Nothing is free.

Bob reinforced his reputation as the conscience of his generation by injecting racial politics into the mix when he began campaigning to have Hurricane Carter released from jail.  Carter was a Black boxer arrested and convicted on a murder charge.  On slim, if any, evidence Bob claimed that Carter was innocent.  Innocent or not, the hoopla Bob created secured Carter’s release.  With that the Revue ended on a successful note.

A Southern tour was scheduled for the next year, 1977, but it didn’t come off.  Enthusiasm faded, one hopes, when the ridiculousness of the venture became apparent.

The Revue was the highlight of Louie’s memoir.  There isn’t really much more than that.  Still, a contribution to the Dylan saga.  Unless you’re a real, a devoted fan, save your money.

A Review:

Bob Dylan: On A Couch And Fifty Cents A Day

By Peter McKenzie

With An Assist From Dylan’s Chronicles

Review by R.E. Prindle

As an addition to the Dylan library this year brings us a valuable memoir by Peter McKenzie who has intimate knowledge of the Bob in 1961 as he was threading his way through anonymity to fame.  To this point in time the Mckenzie family seems to have escaped the scrutiny of all biographers.  And yet they are an important missing piece of the Dylan puzzle.

In May of ’61 Bob moved in on the McKenzie family that included a fifteen-year-old by the name of Peter, or Pete, McKenzie.  Pete in his memoir relates a lot of details that clarify many misrepresented or inaccurate accounts.  Bob’s arrival in New York in the January of ’61 is one of them.  The chronology  from then until Albert Grossman becomes his manager can be now put in order.

Dylan left Minneapolis, he says, hitchhiking in a frozen Minnesota winter.  Daring enough.  His ride took him into Madison Wisconsin where the university is located.  The stay in Madison is as confused as well as his journey down to and stay in Chicago.  Pete clears that up.  In an almost miraculous manner Bob hooks up with a kid one year younger than himself named Kevin Krown.  Until reading Pete’s memoir I had never heard of Kevin Krown but now he appears to have been a key figure in Bob’s success.  Mr. Krown is amazing.  On the streets of Chicago he  recognizes Bob’s immense potential as a folk singer, it seems with a single look, deciding then and there to become his advocate.  Remember Kevin is only eighteen at this point.  Takes Bob around Chicago and even gets him a couple gigs.  Then he, Bob and Kevin’s friend Mark Eastman get in a car and drive to New York City.  So Bob didn’t catch a ride with strangers as his biographers would have it but two simpatico new friends.

In NYC it will turn out that Kevin comes from a wealthy family living in the Hamptons on Long Island.  Pete doesn’t explain Kevin’s situation in Chicago or even in New York.  His hooking with Bob can only be described as incredibly fortuitous.  A dream. 

The ride to NYC is usually represented as Bob being picked up as a hitchhiker, while using his later developed singing voice he howls from the back seat driving his companions silly who dump him off in NYC thankfully.  Actually Bob’s natural singing voice is quite pleasant, or was, and smooth.  I once saw a clip on the internet in which he and Joan Baez were running through some tunes and Bob was an excellent singer.

Thus a slightly different chronology emerges from Bob’s arrival through his signing by Albert Grossman, his manager in August of ’62.  According to Bob himself, from his arrival in NYC to his emergence in Greenwich Village in February of ’61, he spent the time scoping out the scene, apparently working out his persona, voice and plan of attack.  This occurred in four stages:  establishing credibility by visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital in New Jesey, sponging off Dave Van Ronk, transferring to the McKenzies  and then living with Suze Rotolo in their own apartment on Fourth Street.

If you’re reading this I presume you know the cast of characters but, if you don’t, I’ll give short explanations.  Woody Guthrie was the major folk figure from the Depression through the fifties.  He contracted  Huntingdon’s disease and lay dying in ’61 when Bob paid him several visits.

Dave Van Ronk who earned the sobriquet The Mayor of Greenwich Village was a leading folky of the fifties and early sixties.  He was an accomplished singer, arranger and guitar player.  These were the reasons Bob swooped down on him, forced his presence on him, and moved into his apartment, sleeping on his couch for a while until he had the milk the cow could give.  This behavior became Bob’s modus operandi.  He says he  stayed on many couches perhaps for a night or two or perhaps several days  in his memoir of 2004, Chronicles.  Bob was a lad from the Canadian border town of Duluth, then moving a few miles away to Hibbing, Minnesota on the Iron Range.  That’s way up North for those who aren’t keen on geography.

Hibbing was very small town, the transition from Hibbing through Minneapolis to NYC required some serious adjusting on his part.  He solved that problem by pretending to be an Okie from Muskogee in imitation of Woody Guthrie, at nineteen he pretended that he had been working in the circus for a while.  Untruthful but rather clever.  He was walking a mile in Woody’s shoes.  He had developed  a faux Okie dialect which he used for his singing voice.

Thus having completed the first stage of his entry by visiting Woody for some creds he next moved to the second stage, his association with Dave Van Ronk and his wife.  Dave was important because of his high status in the Village, his guitar playing and arranging skills.  His voice was worse than Bob’s.  For my tastes Dave’s voice makes some hard listening but the talent is there.

With Dave, Bob improved his technique while learning a lot of songs from him while developing his top creds further.  First Woody, then Dave.  Dave had an extra fillip, he was the main attraction at the Gaslight Club.  The Gaslight Club was the premier club of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets in the Village.  Dave and about five other singers monopolized the Gaslight as a closed circle.  Bob says in his memoir he used Dave to break into that circle.  Cultivating Dave he mooched a guest appearance, quickly becoming a regular.  That would have been a paying gig.

The Van Ronk episode covers the time from late February through the first part of May.  In May Bob transferred from Dave’s couch to that of the McKenzies.  In that same May he met Suze Rotolo.

Bob successfully maintained his pose as a penniless drifter, or maybe grifter, even baffled Suze until, after they had taken their apartment, returning from a party, he drunkenly dropped his ID that Suze picked up and learned his real name, Robert Zimmerman.

In point of fact Bob was never hard up for cash.  As he says he could pick up a few dollars at the basket houses and even a as much as twenty dollars busking on the streets.  This was a different America as you may surmise, while at the time 50 cents was still money putting a little distance between your situation and absolute poverty.  In addition, Bob was on a short leash with his parents.  He had committed that he would have a year to try to make it as a singer and if not to return to school to learn a regular manner of living.  He phoned home several times a month and received money from home.

Thus his pose as a penniless busker was pure fraud.  His imposition on the McKenzies was fraudulent although Pete didn’t know it and still doesn’t.   The question here is why the move on the McKenzies?  Woody and Dave are easy to see but the McKenzies are a surmise on my part.  The second Chapter of Dylan’s memoir is titled The Lost Land.  The lost land apparently begins with the McKenzies as indeed we get a brief introduction before moving on.  Bib is never a plain speaker so he creates a couple named Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel instead of Howard and Eve McKenzie.  Pete gets written out of the part.  Howard and Eve seem to be enclosed in Ray and Chloe, although Dylan does mention the McKenzies in this way, p.66:

Quote:

These guys at Camilla’s place weren’t like that, though they looked more like tugboat captains or baggy pantsed outfielders or roustabouts.  Mack Mackenze had been an organizer on the Brooklyn waterfront.  I met him and his wife Eve who was an ex- Martha Graham dancer.  The lived on [W.] 28^th St. Later on I’d be their houseguest, too…sleep on their living room couch.

Unquote.

That’s all Bob has to say about the McKenzies, unless you include his comments on Gooch and Kiel, although according to son Pete McKenzie Bob was there for a four month stay in 1961, Spring, all of Summer into September and that leaves no room for Gooch and Kiel in the time frame.

The period was very important, even essential, to a young fifteen year old  hero worshipping Pete.  Dylan being then twenty  hero worship was inevitable.  Bob let him wear a shirt or two of his, play his guitar and gives him a pair of worn out boots, those Bob is wearing on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album. 

Eve, who Bob mentions correctly, became a surrogate mother to him which he acknowledges in his memoir.  Howard McKenzie must have been somewhat a legend in the Village.  He was an important labor organizer, a founding member of the NMU and officer.  NMU=National Maritime Union.  ‘During WWII,’ Pete writes, ‘my father was on the National War Labor Board under Eleanor Roosevelt.’ And he was Chief negotiator  for all labor contracts.’

So once again Bob is establishing creds.  In addition Howard had the fabulous library Bob attributes to Ray Gooch.  Gooch is problematic because there seems to be no record of him except in Bob’s mind.  For me, Gooch and Howard are one as are Eve and Chloe.

Now, following Bob to the McKenzies were Bob’s two companions on the drive to NYC, Kevin Krown and Mark Eastman.  Kevin’s parents lived out in the Hamptons and were rich.  Eastman plays a minor role.  Kevin is quite the character at eighteen years of age.  Himself Jewish he is chutzpah on a stick.  Bob certainly has chutzpah but he is a dwarf beside Kevin on that score.

Why Kevin took such an interest in Bob isn’t clear.  He appears to be acting as an agent of some sort.  Following Pete’s description he actually bullies Bob as though Bob was his charge.

Pete does partially clear up one mystery, that of Robert Shelton’s laudatory review in the NYTimes of which Shelton was the music reviewer.  Bob had scarcely established himself as a character around the Village while building somewhat of a reputation as a performer.  At this time in his career you either got him or you didn’t.  The talent was not so obvious.

Many wrote him off.  Howard McKenzie in an attempt to move Bob’s career along wrote to famous leftist talent agent Harald Leventhal, enclosing a tape for his consideration.  Howard was playing on an old relationship.  Harald, who should have been able to recognize talent, listened and returned the tape politely wishing Bob luck but not then. So Shelton’s rave review contrasts sharply with that of Leventhal.

I, myself, having heard the first three albums, had no use for Dylan until he went electric.  I couldn’t get the first three then and I can’t now.

Thus, before Shelton his career needed a boost.  Kevin Krown was there and at eighteen he either knew what to do or someone was guiding him.  Notice Shelton, Dylan, Krown, Eastman and later Albert Grossman are all Jews.  Kevin began making phone calls to Shelton.  At first he was blocked by Shelton’s secretary but, he was so persistent, calling dozens of times a day, that she finally put him through.  That’s what’s called chutzpah.

Given Shelton’s ear Kevin was unstoppable. He dogged Shelton, pitched and pitched.  Finally bob obtained a commitment at Gerde’s Folk City, the club of clubs in the Village.  The date was 9/26/61.  Kevin turned up the heat, bullying Shelton to make an appearance and write a review.  Shelton was there on 9/26 and his review appeared in the Times of 9/29/61 lauding Bob.  He had three days to think about it and here’s a quote:

“A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerdes Folk City.  Although only twenty years old, Bob Dylan is one o the most distinctive stylists to play a Manhattan cabaret in months.  [remember, this is September, Dylan arrived in January, call it February.]

Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a huck Finn black corduroy cap.  His clothes may need a bit of tailoring but when he wails his guitar, harmonica or piano or composes new songs faster than he can remember them there is no  doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.

Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty.

Unquote.

The review put Bob on his feet and running.  The astonishingly positive review amazed everyone.  While in retrospect, after Dylan’s also astonishing career, the review may not seem out of place, at the time however Dylan was no universal favorite, many could not see the talent, performing talent that is, although Bob’s song writing was in a different class.  People were walking around in a daze asking how that happened.

While there are still some unresolved questions it is possible that the record producer John Hammond was also in the audience, plus he would probably have read the Shelton review, he may then have viewed Dylan differently.  At any rate, within a month he had signed Bob to a recording contract.

This astonished the people at Columbia records, especially after Dylan’s first record laid an absolute egg.  He become known as Hammond’s folly around Columbia.  Once again time alters all attitudes but Bob’s first record found no listeners.  He did not burst upon the scene.  Nor did he with his second.

More importantly, his future manager, Albert Grossman, may have had his attention directed to Dylan, I suspect not for his performances but for the fact that he was a budding song writer, writing them ‘faster than  he could remember them.’  Grossman, a fellow Jew, was blessed with lots of chutzpah, he was at that time organizing  his soon to be successful folk super group Peter, Paul and Mary.  While two of the members were actually named Peter and Mary there was no Paul.  Grossman was seeking a singer to change his name to Paul.  Dylan says that he was among the people offered the role of Paul which he declined if for no other reason that he would he would have to be billed as Paul Dylan.

A Village habitue by the name of Noel Stookey accepted the offer and became Paul Stookey.

At the same time Pete Seeger, the doyen of Village folkdom might also have had his opinion reshaped.  Seeger was a Leftist who had been blacklisted back in the fifties.  Dylan at the time was writing songs that appealed to leftist tendencies so that Seeger believed that Dylan was sincere and represented the New Wave of Leftism.  Dylan then was spotlighted at the Newport Folk Festivals.

During his time with the Mckenzies Bob began to mature as a song writer, coming up with the sensation of the moment, ‘Blowin’ In The Wind.’  When Grossman realized that Bob was going to be a good songwriter, the man fitted perfectly with Grossman’s plans.  Dylan boomed as a song writer while his performance career dragged along.

Grossman signed him in August of ’62.  Peter, Paul and Mary recorded the song in their, or Grossman’s, pop folk style so that Blowin’ In The Wind was a big radio hit.  Now Bob was the lead horse in the race.  In fact there was no folkie who could touch him.

I don’t think it widely known but the big money is not in the performance or even touring when you become known.  The big money is in the writer’s royalties because many artists could cover songs, include them on their albums, adding perhaps millions or more sales.  Grossman, who knew the ropes didn’t miss a beat.

Now watch this.

In point of fact, Dylan would have been a blip on the national folk scene without Grossman’s masterful promotion.  Peter Yarrow, the Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary, has stated that without Albert Grossman there not only would have been no PP&M but also no Bob Dylan.  That’s how important Grossman was to Bob’s career.

As Bob’s manager, Grossman took a commission of 25% and that was considered high at the time when 10% was normal but Grossman was worth it as Dylan agrees. Consider Elvis’ manager Colonel Parker. It appears that he took everything and more while giving Elvis only what he had to.  Fifty percent in Bob’s case would have been fair.  But here’s the catch, playing on Bob’s trust and innocence, Albert wrote in the contract that he got 75% of the publishing royalties to Bob’s 25%.  Dylan was naturally outraged when he found out.

But, and there’s always a but, Albert was a maniac after those dollars.  Without his songwriting Bob was a noisy nobody.  His record sales were never that high, he had a specific audience of misfits not unlike himself.  He churned out songs and Albert got them recorded by everybody.  If you were there at the time you were astonished at how ubiquitous Dylan’s songs were.  Albert had everyone recording his stuff. And I mean everybody, he had actors reading the lyrics on thirty-three and a third RPMs.  Many of the records were hits so that publishing proceeds rolled in and because his of his publishing Bob’s own record sales responded but cut back because of his raucous voice.  Many, many people could not tolerate Bob’s voice.

Toward the end of his sponging off the McKenzies Bob was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

He created quite a scene at the McKenzies according to Pete McKenzie  while by end of Bob’s mooch, the fifteen year old hero worshipper had stars in his eyes.  Bob had linked up with Suze Rotolo in May and he introduced her into his circle at the Mckenzie where she was beloved.

Suze was a very attractive seventeen year old and no girl is ever more attractive than at seventeen.   She also apparently had a lovely personality so that everyone loved Suze.  Young Pete especially.

When Dylan checked out with the McKenzies it was to move in with Suze beginning the fourth phase of establishing himself.  All of a sudden Bob had enough money to pay rent and spend, for a fellow without a job, fair amounts of money.

As Pete describes it he played the poverty role with the McKenzies pretending to be fundless.  Eve especially took a maternal interest in the lad.  In the first place, Bob was living in a comparatively luxurious apartment, was fed, and accepted charity from the McKenzies of 50 cents a day, hence the fifty cents of the title. In  today’s  inflated dollars that 50 cents might be five or ten dollars, possibly even a twenty, and he was given that gratis every single day.

Dylan was not broke.  He received money from home while at the same time scrounging money as a busker, playing the basket houses, and also playing paid performances.  It would be difficult to estimate his income but I don’t think a hundred or two a week would be an excessive guess.  That’s four to eight hundred a month when three hundred and fifty a month was a pretty good wage.  Thus he treated the McKenzies rather fraudulently.  He could have paid rent for his spot on the couch.

Dylan, to touch on another side was ravenous for education.  I believe that that is where Howard McKenzie came in.  Pete has a chapter titled ‘A History Lesson.’  Bob was a bourgeoning history buff.  Much of his time at this period was spent at the New York public library.  He had an interest in the life in the Southern States at about 1855 to 1865.  He went right to the source reading newspapers of the time and he came away with a pretty solid idea of how it really may have been.

Howard McKenzie was also a history major who had lived long enough in tough circumstances to put history into perspective while becoming very well read but mainly probably in general historical literature although his library was well stocked in biographies, and an eclectic collection.  Bob picked Howard’s mind.  He profited mightily by his stay.

For those who care, Bob’s creds began with his visits to the dying Woody Guthrie, having been taken under the wing and having slept on the couch of the most respectable of the folk musicians, the mayor of Greenwich Village, Dave Van Ronk.

Bob slept on many couches during his sponging period as he boasts in his memoir and each couch was a notch on his belt placing himself above them.  Then to actually have been admitted to the family of Howard Mckenzie, adopted by Howard’s wife Eve, gave him incredible creds bolstered by the unheard of laudatory review of the reviewer of reviewers, Robert Shelton of the newspaper of newspapers, the New York Times, and then signed to the then top label, Columbia Records by the top talent finder, John Hammond, why Bob Dylan was royalty, the prince of Greenwich Village.

What a disappointment it must have been to sell only a few copies of his first record and a second.  Even his Village subjects rejected him, just a slight he took on the road to glory from Fourth Street.

From the McKenzies, Bob set up his own household with the first Slum Goddess of Greenwich Village, Suze Rotolo.  Not too bad for a boy from the unknown pits of the Iron Range.

But, this is Pete’s story.  Bob’s story with his family was quite brief although of the most intense duration, for young Pete idolized Bob in only the way a fifteen year old could idolize his adopted older brother.  Pete includes Bob’s stay in his memoir as well as every other incident that Bob figures in his life.

Interestingly during his stay Bob left behind numerous mementoes of his stay in the form of hand written lyrics, drawings he made and even several tapes of him performing for the family.  His faithful amanuenses, Pete, recorded all and kept the slips of paper all of which in Bob’s fame became valuable.

Later, along life’s highway, Howard died and Pete’s mother, Eve’s, health failing required funding.  Then Bob’s mementoes became a little treasure.  By that time Bob’s canoe was far down stream and his early odyssey was long forgotten, the inglorious past was not needed.

Pete, who realized that the mementoes could be turned into fairly substantial cash, not wanting to take advantage of Bob, who had taken advantage of Pete’s own family, notified Bob to advise him that he wanted to sell the items.  Cruelly and insultingly given his earlier relationship Bob said to Pete like this:  ‘Now, look Pete, now that I’m famous and rich I have a lot of people, relations and whatever always trying to sponge on me, you see…’ A couch and fifty cents a day, purloining Howard’s reputation and Eve’s good will, along with Pete’s idolization now meant nothing to Bob.  Pete was crushed.  But, if you want to learn the rest of the story, Pete’s memoir is worth the slight expense of a few dollars, perhaps one of those fifty cent pieces inflated, might even be a gift for Dylanophiles

Wandering And Wanderers

Through The Ages Part One

by

R.E. Prindle

This essay will be about the concept of wandering and the wanderer.  We will begin about the year -2000 and end up in nineteenth century England.  Wandering  excludes the nomad who migrates between summer and winter locations on an annual basis.  The need to wander as such is a mental ailment, a compulsion, an effort to escape oneself.  One leaves an unsatisfactory environment hoping to find satisfaction elsewhere, at least on a temporary basis but one is always drawn back to the home base.

Our first example is the Egyptian Pharoah Sesostris I who flourished c. -2000.  At some point in his reign he felt the need to wander, gathering up an army, quite an extensive entourage, he decided to wander through Asia toward the East end of the Black Sea in what is now called Georgia.  Of course there is no agreement as to why he decided to wander.  Why would the Pharoah of Egypt pull up stakes and wander away.  Remember he and his army were on foot, walking over a thousand miles one way. 

This involves, one imagines, several thousand soldiers with animals and camp followers setting up camp at night and breaking camp every morning, marching perhaps only fifteen or twenty miles per day.  Egypt would be missing its Pharoah for a minimum of two years, perhaps as much as five.  A lot of water passes down the Nile in five years.  As you can see this would be quite a story.

Put yourself back in the time when the skies were crystal clear and you could see clearly.  Mountains seventy miles away would appear would appear much nearer.  Imagine Sistrostris amazement as he and his army reached the western end of Anatolia and there right before him was the gorgeous sight of Mount There a couple years before the revolution.  Imagine Aegean sea and blue and twinking in the sun, dolphins hopping around everywhere.  See the amazing hundreds of islands dotting the expanse.  Four thousand years ago the sea levels were much lower creeping up to today’s level.

Some speculate Sesostris wanted to conquer the world but he wouldn’t have known what the world was or even how extensive Asia was or how many troops he needed.  No. My opinion is that the need to wander took over his mind.  Sesostris was essentially an explorer.  At the time saffron was a very desirable dye substance, the color of royalty only suitable for Pharaohs.  No else was allowed to use it.  The supply was irregular and uncertain back in Egypt.  It was known that it came from far away at the end of an immense sea.

As improbable as it may seem such a frivolous reason may very well have been the reason for his wander as well as his need to explore, to see for himself.  In any event his trek ended in Colchis in whatis now Georgia.  Hopefully he acquired an adequate supply of saffron.  He then turned around and marched back the way he came.

It is said that there are Egyptian genetic markers common in Georgia today.  If so it is probably true that one day Sesostris and his army came marching into town.  Having reached his goal it is likely Sesostris set up camp to recuperate for a few months.  His soldiers would certainly have set about seducing the Colchian maidens dropping a few markers as they did.

Saffron is derived from the stamens of the Saffron crocus.  Two or three little reddish strands growing from the center.  It takes a thousand three hundred strands to form an ounce, consequently a couple tens of thousands to make a pound.  The Egyptians would have needed a little instruction on how to grow and harvest the plants.  One assumes that Sesostris bargained for the plants and a few pounds of stamens preferable to stealing them as the Greeks did.

Returning then to Egypt after perhaps five years one wonders what state of affairs Sesostris found.  Remember what Agamemnon found when he returned to Sparta after being gone for ten years.

.2.

The Egyptian foray of Sesostris was performed at the beginning of Age of Aries .  While the stuff of legend, his wandering must have been absorbed as the triumphs and disasters of Egypt pre-empted its memory.  A series of invasions and conquests between Sesostris’ time and the conquest by Alexander, that greatest of wanderers, may have erased the legend from the minds of the Egyptians except for one scholar crawling around the shelves of the library of Alexander.

As the empire of Alexander dissolved after his death and the Hellenic general Ptolemy took Egypt as his part of the spoils of Alexander’s wandering, about -300, the Ptolemaic reign that ended with Cleopatra and the coming of the Romans at the dawning of the Age of Pisces, the city of Alexandria on the Nile Delta was the academic capitol of the Age with its Library and scholars.  Perhaps searching through the stacks a scholar name Apollodorus of Rhodes may have come upon a record of Sesostris and his journey.   Perhaps he read the account or accounts with great interest and the idea of translating it into a Greek myth occurred to him.  At any rate he did compose one of the more famous Greek myths, that Jason and the Argonauts in pursuit of the Golden Fleece.

The myth was unknown before Apollonius while the myth lacks the genuine feel of Homer’s Iliad or the other Greek myths.  It has more of a novelistic feel.  Let us assume that the myth was an original creation of Apollodorus.  Thus with the account of Sesostris before him he begins to write the story except with Greek heroes.

Instead of the desire to obtain the Saffron crocus he changes the story to read that a Golden Fleece is involved.   Gold for the color of saffron, a fleece for the wool that saffron would dye golden.  Then he has the Fleece stolen from the Greeks by the Colchians.  To retrieve the Fleece he concocts the story of the Argonauts and their talking ship, the Argo.  He assembles a crew of mythological heroes including Heracles (Roman Hercules).  We’re beyond a genuine myth here, this is now fiction.  Jason then commands the Argonauts as they begin their perilous row to Colchis.  On the way they endure a series of preposterous adventures that bear little or no relation to reality.  Arriving at Colchis they learn that the Fleece is placed on the top of a tree heavily guarded as, apparently, there have been numerous attempts to steal it.  They steal it while Jason seduces the king’s daughter Medea and takes her along too.  Medea is a major figure in Greek mythology, he later story is terrifying.

The Argonauts do not return directly home but trace a long geographic circle across the northern shore of the Black Sea, up the Danube to the land of Boreas, the North Wind, in the Alps, down the Adriatic to Libya and back to Greece.  This journey represents the geographical claims of the Greeks.

This is my idea of a story and not a myth.  Apollonius was just an antiquarian scholar writing a novel.  Thus Sesostris’ wander survived the two thousand years of the Arien Age and today as we are entering the Aquarian Age the story has survived the entire Piscean Age, not as a novel, but as a genuine myth with a large scholarly following.  Endless  editions of the novel have been published over he Piscean Age.

.3.

Keeping within the context of the Arien Age the following will take place mid-Age, that is thirty-six hundred years ago. Today the discussion is all about global warming.  The mean temperature of the earth is controlled by the sun and the plane of the ecliptic, that is the tilt of the planet.  The last ice age ended sometime in the Age of Leo as the planet turned from cooling to warming.  While today the glaciers are all but melted thirty-six hundred years ago they were enormous compared to today’s remnants.  Let us bear that in mind.  The earth was cooler then.  The winter’s were ferocious.

At the same time today we believe that sea levels are rising because of the snow melt.  If that be true then it is clear that sea levels were probably substantially lower thirty-six hundred years ago, perhaps by several feet or even a couple dozen or so.  But, they were lower.  It follows that shorelines extended further out to sea.

Aries was the defining Age of the following millennia and centuries.

The concept of history begins in the fifth century BC in the writings of the Greek historian, Herodotus.  Of the time we will be discussing, mid-Age Aries there was no means to record history as history.  There was only the human memory that turned memories into mythology.  The only records are enshrined in mythology.  Natural events can, of course, be historically dated.  The major natural event in the Age of Aries is the eruption of the volcano Thera.  The eruption is all important.

At the transition from the Age of Taurus to Aries the Aryans began their move from Central Asia.  From my understanding I place them living in the now Taklamakan Desert on the Northern slopes of the Himalayas.  It is my understanding that that existence is enshrined in the myth, or memory trace, of Shambala.  As the Aryans came West they passed the North Coast of the Black Sea then turned South into the Greek peninsula gradually making it and the prevailing Minoan Thalassocracy their own.  Thus the ancients believed they came from the North rather than the East.

By the -seventeen hundreds their occupation of Greece was well in progress while the Asians, or Semites, of the Mediterranean coast noted their intrusion.   In myth then a Phoenician king by the name of Agenor decided to pre-empt their invasion while taking care of the competing Minoans at the same time.  Naturally the cause of the war had to placed on the victims.  So a story was invented that the Minoans envied their religion so that they appropriated it.  Mythologically this was told as the Minoan god Zeus disguised as a bull swimming to Phoenicia and seducing the lovely woman Europa, representing the religion, luring her to take a ride on his back which when she did he plunged into the sea and carried her to Crete.  This was Agenor’s casus belli.  In mythology he had threes sons Sarpedon, Cadmus and Cilix.  That is three armies.  He sent Sarpedon to Crete, Cadmus to Greek Boeotia and Cilix north to what became Cilicia.  Sarpedon was defeated by the Cretans fleeing to Cilicia to join his brother.  Cadmus, by a ruse, set the Greeks and native Pelasgians to fighting.  When they exhausted themselves in battle he picked up the pieces and ruled them in harmony according to the myth.

The seduction of Europa by Zeus places the event sometime in early Aries, possibly in the early -nineteenth  century, sometime in the -eighteenth century or late -seventeenth because Zeus was born at the cusp of Taurus and Aries but before the eruption Mount Thera c. -1640.

As mentioned Cilix succeeded in placing Cilicia under his rule with the country named after hm.  Cilicia was in Southern Anatolia, today’s Turkey as the coast bends sharply to the South.  In close association with the Greeks the Cilician Semites adopted the structure of the Aryan religion while retaining a Northwest Semitic, or Hebrew, dialect.  NB, note the Northwest Semitic or Hebrew dialect.

Now, sometime close to the early part of the -seventeenth century, just to give it a date, say 1630, the volcano Thera blew.  While we associate volcanic activity with lava flows, volcanoes differ.  Mt. Etna, in Sicily for instance, emits lava flows.  Mt. St. Helens in Washington State, USA, blew the top off in a northerly direction, then emitted gas and ash for several days.  Thera s that type of volcano but its eruption is believed to have been of a much greater magnitude than St. Helens.  St. Helens was somewhat over 9000 feet when it blew, the gases and ash emission wearing away three thousand feet of the mountain so that St. Helens is 6000 feet today.

Thera may have been a 15,000 foot volcano.  The eruption continued below sea level creating a lagoon surrounded by remants.  Today the highest and largest remnant is at an elevation of approximately 2000 feet.  At that age, mid-Aries Thera would have been snow capped year round, perhaps as much as the upper five thousand feet.  The island which would have been relatively large would have been idyllic, tempering from the heat is summer while in the winter the South side would have been protected from the ferocious North wind, or Bodreas as the Greeks called it.  The mountain would have luxuriated with streams and lakes, home to varied wild life as well as human cities, one of which has been excavated.

As the southern most island in the Aegean Sea it would have dominated the entrance, a real monitor.  The major island of Crete, home to the Minoan civilization. Lay only seventy miles to the South,  with the Greek mainland and the Anatolian mainland about a hundred miles distant on either side.

  Thera would have been part of the Minoan thalassocracy.  The island must have been a beautiful sight from Crete and the mainlands.

Placed midway between the Greek mainland and Anatolia not to mention the various inhabited islands of the Aegean sea the day Thera blew would definitely have been a notable day.  The explosion must have approximated a sonic boom calling everyone’s attention to the mountain.  At the same time a huge black column of ash would have risen from the top of the mountain rising quickly out of sight in the stratosphere, with a deafening roar.  Within seconds as the ash pushed up, ash would come pouring down.

Let me point out that I do have some experience with an eruption of this sort.  I lived, and live, in Portland Oregon about seventy miles from St. Helens so I witnessed that memorable event.  Fortunately for Portland when the mountain blew the wind was due East thus heading out  over Yakima toward Spokane and Idaho.  A few days later the wind shifted bringing ash to Portland. 

The city of Yakima due East of the volcano received eighteen inches of ash while Spokane two hundred some miles further East received six inches.  We waited for colorful sunsets but didn’t get them.

The city of Portland had a mere dusting, a quarter of an inch yet it brought the city to a standstill and the ash was so fine that it remained in rain gutters, for instance, for years.  In the case of Thera the ash fell to a thickness of two hundred feet.  Places as distant as Cilicia may have had several feet.  Of course, in the twentieth century we had accurate information about the eruption while in mid-Aries people must have been out of their minds with fear, especially as the ash rained down for as much as two weeks or more until the mountain was worn down below sea level.

Naturally as the upward pressure of the subterranean gas was expended the land subsided somewhat.  I have found no information on how deep the lagoon the eruption formed is but shortly after the gas was expended two little spires erupted.  They may not have broken water at the time but later eruptions sent them above lagoon level.

The same happened at St. Helens when a spire rose in the caldera.  Another example is the caldera of Mount Mazama in Southern Oregon that contains the famous Crater Lake.  It too has the afterthought spire.

Herodotus had not yet put pen to paper so there was no history of the event.  There was no paper. Writing had not yet penetrated Greece so that the only method of reporting the event was a through a myth.  The myth could only have been preserved in the memories of bards.  It would be interesting to know how it was first composed and imparted to the bards.

The myth went something like this:  The eruption was a war between the Earth Goddess Gaia and Zeus.  As females are the weaker sex Gaia needed a male champion and she surely got one in the character of the fearsome dragon Typhon.  It’s interesting that an anagram of Typhon is Python or, the great snake.  Snakes being an attribute of the Earth goddess.

As the volcano roared and blotted out the sky and sun so Typhon’s assault on Zeus blotted out the sun as it tried to destroy the sky god.  Typhon was not someone you wanted after you.  He succeeded in destroying Zeus, that is he dismembered Zeus and put the remains in a sack in a cave.  This implies that the humans watching this great battle though they were goners.

As the eruption diminished and it appeared that Zeus was defeating or had defeated Gaia and Typhon a happy ending was required so the gods Hermes (Mercury in Roman mythology) and Apollo searched out the cave, entered and put Zeus back together again.  Things had returned to normal.

.4.

In order to understand the nature of the eruption of Thera let us take a time trip back three thousand six hundred years in the history of the planet.  The time period of the event was formerly assigned to fifteen hundred years before the transition from the Age of Aries to the Age of Pisces.  More recent analyses move the date back  to about -1600.  The more or less exact time can be determined from the history of the Hittites who were located in the middle of Anatolia.  Having heard of the eruption of Thera and its obliterating ash the king of the Hittites announced that he wanted to go to the coast to see the damage.  I imagine he was talking about Cilicia.

This bit tells a couple things:  one, the eruption had been going on long enough so that word got to Central Anatolia, probably by refugees, a journey of a week or two.  More importantly the sky over Central Anatolia was clear so that the ash was not spreading North even though it was blowing East.

Geographically Thera (today known as Santorin or Santorini) is midway between the Greek mainland and Anatolia (today known as Turkey.)  The Southeasterly direction might have impacted Egypt but by then the heavier parts would have been deposited.  I know nothing of the possible direction of the wind currents.

Seventy miles to the South of Thera lay the major island of Crete; the irruption must have been an imposing sight with that amazing whirling column of ash rising nearly out of sight.  Thera must have been a largish island rising in all probability to about fifteen thousand feet above sea level.  The Aegean Sea is about ten thousand feet deep in the area so we are talking about an enormous foundation perhaps twenty-five thousand feet from foundation to the top.  Today the eastern face of the island is a sheer cliff rising near two thousand feet.  That can’t be the shape of the island mid-Aries.  It must have sloped down to beaches perhaps several miles away.  Some sudden submarine subsidence must have sheared from the cliff face probably causing a tidal wave.  It must have seemed like the end of the world.

Previous to this event the island would have abounded in streams and lakes with abundant flora and fauna.

Bear in mind this is thirty-six hundred years ago.  The ice age proper ended sometime in the Age of Leo six thousand years earlier.  The South side of the island was shielded from the North wind coming down from the Alps while the ice cap of the island tempered the heat of the summers.  The island must have been a paradise.

As the ash blew East and South there was probably a Zephyr or southwest wind blowing as ash apparently fell on Palestine.  Hence the eruption probably occurred in Summer.

Standing on Crete, seventy miles away no lava was present as there was no flow.  Cretans going about their business would have heard the equivalent of a sonic boom when she blew.  Looking up they would have seen a massive black column  growing in width that rose straight up into the stratosphere,  if they knew what the stratosphere was, probably called it heaven.  The eruption was on.

The eruption of St. Helens in Washington State was big enough but relatively small compared to Thera.  The subterranean gaseous pressure  mut have been beyond comprehension.  You have to see it to believe it.  St. Helens only erupted for four days while Thera went of for at least two weeks.  St. Helens only eroded three thousand feet of the mountain lowering its height from approx. nine thousand to six thousand feet.

Thera eroded away fifteen thousand feet of mountain to below sea level.  This is really astonishing.  The whole mountain except for the Eastern slope and a few northern and western islets just disappeared. 

As the ash column reached the stratosphere it should have flattened out so that ash in lessened amounts would have fallen on the mainland of Greece and the island of Crete.  Remember that eighteen inches fell on the city of Yakima from St. Helen’s with no special ill effects.

The area mainly affected was the Anatolian mainland  extending through Cilicia.  Probably two or three feet or several feet may have fallen in the eastern direction but apparently on the coast as the Hittite areas were unaffected.  The Cilicians may very well have thought it was the end of the world fleeing North and South.

There was no historian in mid-Aries to record the eruption.  Herodotus was in the distant future.  Even Homer was down the road aways and he worked from traditional memory.  But there must have been mythmakers around because an amazing myth exists.

It is important to consider the set and setting as the people at this time were intellectually less evolved while being 99.9 per cent illiterate.  They had the same intelligence but less knowledge, no geology, no meteorology, little geographical understanding, no psychology as we know it.  That being the case the event had to be explained in religious, or mythological terms.  Here is how they did it.

Aries witnessed the transition from the Matriarchal religious system to the Patriarchal so the myth was cast into a war of the sexes. The Matriarchal was chthonic or earth based while the Patriarchal was astronomical or heavenly.  The former was that of the Pelasgian or ‘native’ population and the latter the religion of the invading Aryans.  Therefore, the gods must have been angry as they fought to the death.

The earth, or chthonic, goddess, Gaia employed her agent Typhon, as physically weaker women need a champion, while the astronomical opponent was the great sky god, Zeus.  The monster Typhon being of the earth was probably some great snakelike beast.  Perhaps coincidentally Typhon is an anagram of Python.

Typhon begins the attack when he and Gaia hurl great columns of earth into the sky attacking Zeus on his throne, that is, blotting out the sun and the beautiful cerulean sky.  Zeus fights back valiantly but for a couple of weeks, at least, the sun and sky are obliterated.  It looks really bad for Zeus.

Zeus himself is said to have had the muscles and tendons disconnected and put In a sack and the sack hidden in a cave on the Anatolian mainland.  Thus, the main ash fall was toward the East.

All seemed lost until the sky gods Hermes (in Roman mythology, Mercury) and Apollo discovered the cave, emptied the sack and restored Zeus to virility again.  By the time that was done the volcano had expended its energy, Zeus reigned again in a clear blue sky and a beaming benevolent sun.  It was a close one though.

Nor was the Matriarchal/Patriarchal situation resolved.  The earth religion governed by the goddess Demeter continued as a secondary religion throughout ancient Greek history while Zeus was perpetually troubled by his consort Hera.  At one time Hera led another revolt against Zeus but without a champion like Typhon, Zeus literally hung her out to dry.

There must have been consequences to the Theran eruption, especially in Cilicia that took a major hit.  Remember that the Cilicians spoke a Northwest Semitic or Hebrew dialect but had assumed the forms of the Aryan religion.  In the terror of the eruption bands of them had packed up heading South for a breath of fresh air.

While the Aryans externalized their religion emphasizing the outside world, that his developed a scientific mindset, the Semitic Cilicians internalized their religion adopting a magical subjective format.

Just as some people were ready to flee Portland to escape the falling ash of St. Helens, at least one or more bands did flee Cilicia.  As the Levant was then is a disturbed state there were other wandering bands styled Hebrews roaming about.  One had fled Ur of the Chaldees according to Jewish mythology, put up in Padam-Aram for a couple hundred years, left, and were now wandering around trying to find a place.

There were other bands about so that the tribes began to agglomerate until twelve bands came together in a loose confederation.  This would have been a troublesome disruptive force in Palestine so that to rid themselves of these troublemakers the settled peoples drove them out, that is, there was a ‘famine’, so the tribes drifted South into Egypt which was in turmoil, probably from other peoples displaced by Thera, thus becoming wanderers.

All of the proto-Jewish tribes didn’t have to arrive in Egypt at the same time.  In fact, the Josephites are said to have arrived first, opening the door for the other tribes to enter Egypt.  The Hebrews settled in and were apparently comfortable and happy for nearly four hundred years until an unhappy, troubled Egyptian noble gathered the tribes around him and suggested they head out for greener pastures.  In their enthusiasm the tribes fled Egypt but, oh, how they regretted those fat times and the fleshpots of Egypt.  The time is now about -1200 in Aries.

Now began one of the most incredible stories in the history of the world.  The wandering Jews in search of their destiny.

.5.

The story continues in part two following.

An Open Letter To The Anti-Defamation League

Attn: Johnathan Greenblatt, Pres.

Greetings and regards:

Let me introduce myself:  I am R.E. Prindle an historian and blogger who has come to some attention by your organization.  Your org. has defamed me as an anti-Semite.  The charge is completely erroneous and malicious.  I am an historian, but not your sycophant.

In my studies I have found it necessary to study the history of the Jews because of their undeniable impact on world affairs during all times and Ages. Like all peoples they have positive and negative points.  Your organization obviously doesn’t wish to have attention called to the negative points.  However, to fully integrate history it is necessary to include a key player, namely, the Jews.  They cannot be omitted without stultifying and falsifying history.  Nor can I stultify myself by excluding the negative facts.

Your organization’s methods have been to act as a vigilante group on a search and destroy mission.  Actual manhunts.  As vigilantes your organization has been judge, jury and executioner, that is, your organization has lynched, that is discredited your victims. solely on your own whim without defense.

Recently our President, Joseph Biden has passed an anti-lynching law and that changes the situation.  That is, your org.’s method of character assassination, equivalent to lynching, is now illegal, a crime, and a crime of some magnitude.  Quite frankly, the ADL is now a criminal organization.

I consider myself to have been lynched by the ADL.  There is nothing in my historical writings that isn’t factual.  That the history of Jewish activities may be unpalatable to the Jewish intellect, history without those negative facts you wish to excise is incomplete inaccurate and defamatory.  This cannot stand.

While an apology is small compensation for what you have done to me, I expect at least that compensation for myself.  To prevent further crimes your org. should reevaluate your methods and change them.  There can be no exception for your organization to continue its vigilantism and intimidation, indeed, terrorism, while lynching, or character assassination, has now been confirmed as a crime with criminal consequences.

Hoping for the best,

Sincerely,

R.E. Prindle

An Open Letter to the American Jewish

Committee

David Harris C.E.O.

Harriet Schleifer President

Sir and Madam:

Greetings and Regards,

Let me introduce myself:  I am R.E. Prindle, an historian and internet blogger as well as user of the social media.  I have over five hundred scholarly articles, posted over fifteen years on my blogs.  As an historian I post the results of studies without fear or favor.  What is, is.

The comments I have received have been more often than not favorable. For some time now I have been branded an anti-Semite by your associates at the ADL and the SPLC.  The claim that I am an anti-Semite is blatantly false.  I am an historian.  I cannot censor accurate results.  Neither the ADL or SPLC has ever contacted me to question my results. Nor do I think it proper to exclude from the results of my studies the activities of a major global player such as the Jews.  Yet, the two organizations have acted as vigilantes and falsely portrayed me as an anti-Semite.  As you know being labeled as an anti-Semite is a defamation of the strongest sort.  Imagine an anti-defamation organization that defames. As vigilantes they have lynched my character.

As you know vigilantism is discouraged by US mores while President Joe Biden has just passed an anti-lynching law.  Consequently I  feel that I have the authority to complain to the AJC as the central Jewish organization in the US and the world.

I ask you therefore to restore my articles to their original state and to lift the censorship, known as shadow banning, preventing them to be found

I don’t propose legal action at this time.  I will be content to have my articles restored by the search engines.

I cannot tolerate my works and efforts being  silenced on false charges that have never been investigated.  I have written nothing that cannot be verified from Jewish sources.  No ‘conspiracy theorizing’ is involved.  Just pure history.

Thanking you in advance, I remain,

Yours truly,

R.E. Prindle

Time Traveling #19

George W. M. Reynolds And Politics

by

R.E. Prindle

One thing that seems to have escaped we Reynolds Scholars is just how political Reynolds’ novels are; nor do we realize how revolutionary the years from 1830 to 1848 were.  English society was undergoing a huge political transformation.  Since the introduction of the potato into the diet the population had exploded and the people of the time understood it.   The potato without the Industrial Revolution would have been a disaster.

Was it not inevitable that Malthus made his dire prediction at this time?  To the casual observer Malthus’ view must have seemed inevitable.  The excess unemployed and unemployable was huge both in England and Ireland.

What saved England was first the emergence of railroads. The iron rails absorbed the idle creating a huge new workforce where none was before.  Further applications of steam also required new brigades of workmen and they were handy.  A large proportion of labor was skilled, requiring a fair education and demanding higher pay thus creating the phenomenon of the middle class which hadn’t existed before.

Railroads worked so well in England that it was assumed they would do the same for Ireland so rails were laid.  Ireland had no industry, being an agricultural economy, so very poor results.

Out of this English economic activity commerce developed apace.  English society was being overturned.  These money based businesses had a tendency to displace the old balance of the country on agriculture.  This challenged the old institution of aristocracy.  With numerous new workers clamoring for parliamentary representation the power of the old aristocracy was breaking.

Even as Reynolds in his novels railed against an hereditary aristocracy, and this was constant, he didn’t realize that his object was very near realization.  As he lay down his pen in 1860, Disraeli was proclaiming that the Reform Act of 1832  had rendered the aristocracy obsolete; they were toothless tigers.

In this transitional period (1830-48) the problem of a new political arrangement was paramount.  Contrary to Reynolds who found democracy sufficient there was much unease in accepting such an unpalatable solution.

As Disraeli examined political systems, he saw a descent from monarchy to Aristocracy to Parliament to a coming democracy with England in a mixture of all leading to the triumph of democracy and from there to total political failure such as we have now in both England and the US.

Political thinkers of doctrine all decried democracy.  Disraeli, learning from his father, believed the Jews had once had the perfect political system, and that the Jews had the true aristocracy, thus he despised democracy.

In the four series of Mysteries of London through the career of Richard Markham Reynolds devised utopian visions of the perfect democracy that was located in the Italian principality of Castelcicala.  Perfect democracy along with a perfect environment.  And, one might add, perfect people.

As Reynolds looked out at the squalor of London he divided the population into two classes, the rich and the poor.  The plight of the poor was desperate indeed.  Sanitation in the poor neighborhoods was deplorable indeed.  Reynolds’ picture of young children playing in  the streets of decaying garbage and filth, picking morsel from here there from the filth to eat are terrifying to today’s reader.

The scrounging class was very large, remember the population was struggling for the means of sustenance at the time Reynolds was writing. People earned what they could in any way they could, often quite despicable, the scourge of prostitution was everywhere prevalent.  At the time the Thames was so filthy that the stench from the pollution was such that a horrid odor spread from its banks.  At the time the sewers drained directly into the river.  A class of scroungers entered the sewer mouths at low tide penetrating as far as they safely could before the tide turned .  They rooted about in the oozing muck of frightful consistency to find objects of value.  They did find enough to actually make a satisfying living. 

A curious thing was in the dark tubes of insufficient oxygen they never caught any of the respiratory diseases, no flues, no colds.  The obvious lesson for us in the age of covid 19 is that the cure for flues and colds and respiratory viruses is to deny them oxygen.

Reynolds along with many others then and now believed that the raging crimes of London could be solved by sanitation, good jobs and education.  In his ideal democracy of Castelcicala mere democracy turned the principality around overnight, actually it only took the announcement that Castelcicala was a democracy.  Reynolds’ millennium had arrived.

Of course, as we know today, in a society of affluence, good education and good to excellent jobs, the criminal impulse is not rooted in poverty but in the souls of a portion of mankind.  Large portion.

Richard Markham’s story is actually a fantasy or fairy tale.  A sci-fi story that might as well be taking place in a parallel universe.  However, the progression of Markham’s life in terms of virtue vs. vice is an interesting tale, or, actually a novel within the novel.  The story begins with a good boy and bad boy, two brothers Richard and Eugene. (Eugene could be a tip of the hat to Eugene Sue and his Mysteries of Paris). 

Eugene, after an angry quarrel with his father over money, quits the house going off to make his fortune by any available means, which is to say criminal, or vice.  He is the bad boy.  Richard implores him not to leave but saying virtue would be his own way in life.  Just like Justine representing virtue in De Sade’s novel everything goes wrong for him.  In the opening segment of Series one he, a naif, is lured into a criminal group, set up as the fall guy, is arrested, tried and sent to prison for two years while having been fleeced of most of his fortune leaving him only two hundred pounds a year to get by on.

I’m going to have to insert some spoilers along the way but the writing of the story is the essential part.  As Rudyard Kipling said in his poem ‘When ‘Omer Smote His Bloomin’ ‘Arp’ all the stories were old already.  Since Eugene had already disappeared into numerous aliases his name doesn’t appear again until the end of Series Two.

It is obvious that he must be some other character in the novel which Reynolds skillfully conceals.  Suspicion falls on Montague/Greenwood.  Reynolds’ use of names was the giveaway for me.  Montague in the type of name he would have used.  His use of names would be a good study.  Laura for instance is the lovable girl gone bad.  Yes, Montague/Greenwood is Eugene.  Green wood, always trying, always failing because in Reynold’s book Vice must lose although Eugene has a memorable ride.  George Reynolds enjoys what is vulgarly known as the low life.  ‘This sportin’ life ain’t no life, but it’s my life…’ as the song says.  It was Montague/Greenwood, through ignorance that nearly destroyed his brother’s life.

Richard and Eugene, or two sides of Reynold’s personality.  An alter-ego also enters the story in the character of Tony Tidkins, the Resurrection Man.  Reynolds tries desperately to kill off Tidkins, ever going so far as to blow him up but Tony hangs on and turns on Reynolds/Richard much as in William Wilson’s dual personaity in Edgar Allan Poe’s story.  The duel between the two is the most interesting story in the Mysteries.

For those who may not know a Resurrection Man was a criminal who exhumed newly deceased bodies to sell to physicians for scientific study.  As a dual personality one might consider the Resurrection Man/Doctor as a parallel to Richard/Eugene.  Reynolds really likes his doctors with whom he is unfailingly admiring.  Each has his cabinet of curiosities, freaks of nature rising, as it were, from the dead. And, in fact, in The Crimes of Lady Saxondale one does.

‘Don’t go out tonight, they’re bound to take your life.’  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow knows.  George the Shadow.

.3.

Mysteries of London quickly turned into an autobiographical fantasy in which Reynolds seeks redemption for his youthful criminality.  When his father returned into England from Guernsey his intent was to settle in Kent near the Cinque Ports, thus the recurring locality of Walmer, one of the ports and an important naval base, figures prominently in Reynold’ imagination.  In 1854 he moved from London to Ramsgate, one of the Cinque Ports.  He and his family lived there in some style until his wife, Susannah passed away in 1858.

Back to Walmer.  That town was a major naval station with a large hospital attached.  Reynolds’ father, who died upon his return in 1822, had a great friend, a naval physician named Duncan McArthur, hence George William McArthur Reynolds.  Dick Collins in his preface to the Valancourt edition of The Necromancer speculates that McArthur was a physician living in Walmer who experimented on dead bodies provided by Tidkins’ father.  Thus, Tidkins was initiated into exhuming dead bodies, condemned thereby to the criminal life as he was permanently excluded from polite society.

Reynolds gives a very sympathetic biography of Tidkins, extended biography.  This in my estimation means that he identified in some way with the Resurrection Man as his alter-ego.  In one resurrection within a church, described in great detail, the resurrectionists, accompanied by the doctor and a young boy exhume a young girl.  It could be just a good story or the doctor could have been McArthur and the boy Reynolds.  In any event there appears to be a love/hate relationship with Tidkins but Tidkins must be destroyed.

The first two years, 104 issues of Mysteries was an extended war between Richard/Reynolds and Tidkins/Reynolds. The story is a terrific psychological thriller.  Ultimately as the two series end Richard personally finally succeeds in ridding himself of Tidkins who had been the monkey on his back through five thousand pages.

An interesting thing, I digress,  is that the listings of his works on the title page of his books does and sometimes doesn’t list the first two series of Mysteries but he never ever mentions series three and four.  Probably why these two are so little known.  He also consistently mentions a book entitled Louisa the Orphan that is listed in his works nowhere else.  I’m dying to have a copy of Louisa, The Orphan. I have located a 1798 book titled Louisa the Lovely Orphan which is either a coincidence or perhaps George read it and rewrote it.

Perhaps when George finished series one and two he thought he had finished the story. But, then, perhaps George Stiff, his employer, didn’t want to give up a roaring success., so he asked for series three and four.  Reynolds wouldn’t have had worked out a story line so he had to scramble to come up with something.  Series three and four give evidence of such a situation.  While good, even excellent in parts, they show a fair amount of improvisation.

In the latter two stories of which the story of the Norwood Builder is a major stream one wonders where he got the story.  His contemporary and friend James Malcolm Rymer also included a short version of the Builder in his Varney the Vampire.  And then fifty years later, Conan Doyle retold the story in his Case of the Norwood Builder, based closely on that of Rymer.  Was the builder a real person?

A second stream is the continuation of Richard Markham’s career as the democratic leader of Castelcicala.  In this stream Reynolds  goes wild with fantasies of democracy.  While the earlier story in the first two volumes seemed to end satisfactorily, George now revives the story elaborating all his ideas on the perfection of democracy as a political system.  Now, a recap of how Richard arrived in the Italian principality of Castelcicala.

Richard, his early life destroyed, now an ex-con, stumbled around while waiting to turn playwright.  He hit the jackpot right out of box penning the only successful tragedy in modern English history.  Apparently after Shakespeare, no successful English tragedy succeeded, although not from trying.  As he stood up to honor the request for Author, Author Tidkins stood up bellowing ‘That’s Richard Markham who spent two years in Newgate Prison.  He is a felon.’  That, of course, ruined Richard’s theatrical career just as the wheel of fortune was turning in his direction.  Back to the drawing board.

.4,

At this point Richards star begins to rise, once again almost blighted by the Resurrection Man.  Richard is almost sunk in despair.  At this point the Duke of Castelcicala and his beautiful daughter Isabella arrive in exile in England.  Richard and Isabella are attracted to each other but Richard has his past hanging over his head that Tidkins does not fail to exploit.

Richard’s fortunes take a bound as the Duke recognizing his innate merit accepts his explanation of his past embracing him as his future son-in-law.

During this period Eugene under his various aliases pursues his criminal career. At first successful enough to put on a show of wealth, as time goes by and people become familiar with his style he slowly descends from a successful con man to the point where no one believes him.  The descent is skillfully handled by Reynolds.  Here Vice shows its true face.  It might be noted that the avatar of Vice, the Marquis de Sade himself spent a large amount of his adult life behind bars or in insane asylums, so, while touting vice, vice did little for him.  Justine and Juliette are astonishing stories nevertheless.

Castelcicalan affairs metamorphose so that the Duke is recalled to assume control bringing Richard with him.   Richard follows, engaging in a wild and successful military career exhibiting genius that Napoleon could have died for.   From this point on Richard is a made man.  Virtue triumphs in Spades.

The story closes back in London where Richard is pursuing the Resurrection Man.  He succeeds in terminating Tidkins’ career.  Hopefully for Reynolds that side of life dies with him.

Eugene returns to the old homestead to keep the appointment he made with Richard twenty years before to see whose career had been the most successful.  However as he arrives a man Eugene swindled sometime in the past chances to ride by.  He leaps out of the coach, pulls the trigger, Eugene lies dead.  Vice does not pay.

As noted earlier, the Mysteries were a roaring success, selling as many as forty thousand copies weekly.  One imagines that perhaps George Still his publisher and George Vickers the printer were reluctant to give up such a gold mine.  He or they implored Reynolds to write another series or two.

Reynolds was reluctant, wishing to branch off on his own, as he will soon but not affluent enough as yet. He must balance his aspirations against a reliable five pounds a week.  He accepted the task.  It would be interesting to know whether he had already worked out a plan for his next big project the Mysteries of the Court of London, at any rate he had to come up with something for the present.

As Stiff had the rights, he and Vickers could do with the Mysteries as they liked. I haven’t seen the printing history of the Mysteries but as Reynolds will to on to dominate the Penny Dreadfuls for eight years with his equally successful Mysteries of the Court of London one imagines that they sold well in book form.  Perhaps Reynolds decision to leave at the end of the Mysteries with the loss of future income irritated Stiff and Vickers enough that they filed bankruptcy proceedings against Reynolds in 1848 in what appears to have been a malicious act.

If Reynolds thought that he had ended the Mysteries at the end of series four he now had to quickly invent a continuation from scratch.  Series five and six  (Vols. three and four) definitely show a writer struggling to find a story line as there is a certain looseness and lack of real continuity such as was found in series one-four.  Reynolds falls back on the old reliable highway man to begin the new series in what seems to be a middle.  Might be called, in media res.

George needs a horrible villain to match the Resurrection Man so he fixes on naming his Old Death.  Rather lame.  I found the name repellant so that it took a second reading to begin to get into the story, or stories.  The two volumes turn into a rather discontinuous series of episodes while when stuck George throws in long short stories, almost novellas such as the very long tale of Tim the Snammer.  A good story but reminiscent of Capt. Marryat.

George does manage to weave the adventures of his hero, Tom Rain, into a few interlocking series of adventures- Tom and the Jews, Tom and Lady Georgiana, Tom and Old death, Tom and the Norwood Builder and the Norwood Builder without Tom.  Apparently up against the wall for copy he reintroduces Richard Markham and his further adventures as the savior of Castelcicala.  While barely kept within the story context, not sure that it was, this section is a very long tract on Reynolds’ utopian vision of democracy. As with all utopias the scheme depends on human beings acting as angels who are each a puppet on strings.

Of course, this was written in ’46 or ’47 while the revolutionaries were quivering in anticipation of the Revolution of ’48.  This revolution was no secret.  Karl Marx who lived in London at there time where he wrote the Communist Manifesto literally announced the revolution.  There is no evidence that Reynolds met Marx but Marx knew who he was.  Marx described him as a rich capitalist, this description must come from the 1850s.

Now, according to Benjamin Disraeli the ’48 was wholly planned and executed by the Jews so its advent would been no surprise to him.  Already in Parliament for ten years one wonders if he advised his fellows of the shape of things to come.  If not, he was complicit.

While bloody and difficult to suppress on the continent, in England it was only a series of wild demonstrations.  Reynolds took part to the extent of making public speeches which were so well received in Trafalgar Square that he was carried home on the shoulders of the demonstrators where he made another speech from his balcony.

In England the Jewish element was silent.  Instead, Reynolds as a Chartist was the star of revolutionary England.  In England the revolution was led by a political group called the Chartists.  Chartists because they had a list of demands compiled as a chart.  The Chartists were more an evolutionist group while Reynolds was a Red Republican, that is he favored a violent takeover of the government not unlike the 1793 Jacobin phase of the first French revolution or what was happening on the Continent of ’48.  He was shunned by the Chartist leaders.

Reynolds must have known the ’48 revolution was imminent, probably at the same time that he began writing the Mysteries in ’44.  The coming revolution was more or less an open secret.  Thus his writings are anti-monarchy and anti-aristocracy.  From the Reform Act of ’32 there was a steady drum roll to enfranchise the entire male population, that is for democracy. 

The desire for democracy was not universal however.  Democracy did not enjoy the sacred status it has today.  Disraeli who was about to lead the Conservative Party was adamantly opposed to democracy and throughout his long ascendency tried to prevent it.  The history of democracy was such that it always ended in disaster, something like socialism does, and, for that matter, what has happened today as chaos envelopes us.

Reynolds was strictly utopian.  He wanted democracy and democracy now. He had always favored a compete break with the past, an abrupt overturn of society wiping away the old and installing the new.  He applauded the first French Revolution for its violence.  Victor Hugo, the French writer, known today for his two novels, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, writing in 1874 published his novel 1793, written after the disappointment of the Paris rising of 1870, called the Paris Commune, Hugo openly advocated the extermination of counter-revolutionaries as he believed the ‘old’ mentality would never accept revolutionary ideals.

In writing his Castelcicalan fantasy Reynolds disposed of such gory details.  He does portray a complete break with Castelcicala’s monarchy and aristocracy but they voluntarily surrender their stations to accept pure democracy

In this vision Richard Markham steps into the role of a savior who is embraced by an adoring population.  In a couple years he would actually enjoy this sort of adulation on the shoulders of the Chartists carrying him to his home.  One wonders how long it took him to come down from that elation and how it affected his attitude as he began his magnum opus The Mysteries of the Court of London that castigate the monarchy and aristocracy.

The population, of which perhaps the majority may have never even heard of democracy, rose in a universal shout of joy.  As a true democrat Richard rejected all emoluments becoming as the Roman Emperor Augustus did, the first among equals.  He even insisted on a first name basis.  Crime, ignorance and civil disobedience disappeared under his rule, or perhaps, counsel or just the shout of democracy. 

The failure of ’48 probably damped his ardor, but his novel is a great fairy tale.

.5.

We usually think of Reynolds as a novelist but he was also a very successful newspaper man with both a paper and a magazine, The Reynolds Miscellany.  As the newspaper was considered a radical sheet it therefore follows that he would be politically well informed.  As some of his novels deal with the Jewish presence, his journalism must have been attentive to Jewish activities.

Make no mistake English society was sensitive to the Jewish presence.  As fate would have it the lives of Reynolds and the most famous Jews of the period ran parallel, the top politican and novelist Benjamin Disraeli and the top Jewish financier, Lionel Rothschild who all died within two years of each other’

As they were working at cross purposes Reynolds and they would have been at odds.  Disraeli and Rothschild would have come under close scrutiny from Reynolds’ eye.  The question concerning Disraeli is, was he simply a Jewish politician or was he a prime agent in the Jewish conspiracy to win Europe for themselves.  Remember that Disraeli said that the Revolution of ’48 was wholly a Jewish enterprise.  Would they have shared the fruits with the Europeans if the revolution had been successful?  Not very likely.

When the crisis came in ’48 Disraeli had been successful in upsetting parliamentary organization, put it into confusion.  In vicious verbal attacks he had been successful in removing Prime Minister Robert Peel as the leader of the opposition.  Peel’s probable successor George Bentinck, a close associate of Disraeli’s, died a mysterious death while out walking thus leaving the way open for Disraeli to seize the opportunity to become leader of the Tory, Conservative, Party for the rest of his life.

It is a fact that Disraeli was tight with the Rothschilds. I don’t think it should offend anyone to say that the Rothschild family lacked integrity.  Disraeli was a habitue at the dwelling of Lionel Rothschild, who died in the same year as Reynolds, 1879,.  Disraeli also lived in Alfred Rothschild’s house after his wife Maryanne died. So there was a close relationship between Disraeli and the Rothschilds who were considered Messiahs who would return the Jews to Jerusalem in which they actually succeeded.

As I have pointed out in other articles Benjamin Disraeli’s father, Isaac D’Israeli, wrote a book titled The Genius of Judaism in which he posited that Jesus came to fulfill the Law and that having done so the Old Testament and the New Testament become the fulfillment of the Law in two volumes.  Thus Jesus was the completion of the law and thus Jews could assume a dual identity as Jew and Christian.  But Jesus was only a Jewish prophet while the Christ was a Greek notion attached to Jesus only much later to satisfy the gentiles.  Christian then is not a Jewish concept but they both use the same figurehead.

Is it coincidental that Ewald whose text is central to this essay was also a ‘complete’ Jew who had accepted Christianity as his second religious identity?  As always the Jews needed a huge propaganda unit to counter the antipathy they aroused.  There were many outfits set up to proselytize to Christianity, such as the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews.  Is it a coincidence that the men who ran these organizations were most frequently Jewish completist Christian converts.

Was not their intent to convince as many Jews as possible to disguise themselves as Christians?  Thus they would open doors to society as Christians while remaining Jews.  That was how Disraeli lived his life although the Jewish side of the coin was always uppermost.  That said, would they not have conspired together with interested parties such as Disraeli and the Rothschilds as well as other rich and influential Jews in England and on the Continent?  In fact, they would have been connected to Disraeli through his father’s book perhaps forming a Jewish sub-group..

Disraeli certainly performed miracles for his Jewish people while actually undermining and injuring the prospects of England and his Christian fellows. To fathom Reynolds and clearly understand Reynolds’ novels would require a thorough examination of his journalism over the decades.  It

Group Psychology And The Ukraine

by

R.E. Prindle

Let us ask ourselves a single question about the situation in the Ukraine.

That question is, who is the central player in this enormous critical game?  Who is the motive force?  Which nation is directing the action and to what goal?  It is an easy answer, but one that will still surprise you and which you will immediately deny.  Yes, you guessed it,  the Jews.

This issue is not specifically the Ukraine but includes it; nor is it Russia; nor the US; nor Europe.  This issue is all of them streaming out of Germany in the eighteenth century of the Affaire Jud Suss.  Of a people that cherishes grievances, this issue in the Ukraine represents Ultima Judaica.  Nor is this the first time in the last hundred years that the Jews have tried to destroy all.  They almost succeeded with the one-two punch, WWI and WWII.  Totally shattered by the results of the latter of those two wars the Jews needed a few decades to regroup.  If this is intended to be WWIII it may succeed where the first two wars failed.

The whole of Europe West from England, East to the Soviet Union the continent then lay in ruins.  The unexpected collateral damage was that both Hitler and Stalin nearly terminated the Jewish career.  Amid the holocaust of Europe there was the Jewish holocaust.

The result was that they played a revived Germany, Europe and the US to finance their own recovery.  Then they had to figure out a way to continue the destruction of Europe, Russia, the US and perhaps Western Civilization.  Jewish civilization must not only reign supreme but alone.

Events transpired in their favor.  When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s and disintegrated, a window was opened.

Israel, established in 1948 was now a mature State, over populated to the gills.  The State had to move people to other shores,  they had to populate another country.  The US, Russia and Western Europe were out.  That left the Ukraine, an old haunt of theirs going back hundreds of years.  Jews began migrating to the Ukraine.

Accordingly if accounts are correct they have created the largest and most vibrant Jewish colony in Europe.  Europe had, or has, a loose confederation of States under the government of the EU combined with that of NATO, both heavily infiltrated by Jews.  NATO then was used as an irritant against Russia.  Jews hatred of Russia prevented the new Russian State, now that the USSR had disappeared, from prospering so that NATO and Europe were their enemies.  The Ukraine was then a Jewish colony, historically a Russian province i.e. Ukraine was placed within historically Russian borders. 

The Ukraine under Jewish domination then cultivated a relationship with the US and NATO to install missiles essentially within Russia around the perimeter of the Ukraine facing Russia. 

I don’t know whether the missiles were only planned or actually installed but I suspect the latter.  If one looks at Russian war plans they seem very odd.  Russia attacked Ukraine along the entire perimeter within Russia and then bombed the entire perimeter at once.  Why?  Very probably to destroy those very missiles before they could be fired.

As Ukraine was not supposed to have the missiles they would naturally be disguised in public buildings, perhaps hospitals.  It appears that Russia has destroyed them so that that game is up.

But now, using a different tactic that dates back to the Semite, Cadmus and Grecian Thebes in ancient Boeotia about 1700 BC, used again in Sarajevo in WWI, that is, as a third party getting two other parties fight each other to extinction then picking up the pieces, the Jews have or are setting up a fratricidal war between NATO and Russia that will, at the very least, flatten the entire continent from England to Russia leaving only the US to be finished later if it wasn’t lost as collateral damage.

Israel will remain standing.  Thus a project dating back a millennium will have been achieved.  Remember the Amalekites.

Note #13:  George W. M. Reynolds

A Curious Reference

by

R.E. Prindle

The following quotation is taken from Alexander Charles Ewart’s ‘The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl Of Beaconsfield, K.G. And His Times, Div. 3 of 5. Vol. II. P.25.

I have no dates for Ewald, but since he died in his nineties in the 1890s it must have been c. 1800.  He was born in Jerusalem and like Disraeli, possibly in emulation of him, he also accepted Jesus of Nazareth as completing the Jewish ethos.  He makes no point of being Jewish and/or Christian.  He is, however, a near worshipper of Disraeli.

If he had been born c. 1800 he was forty-eight  in ’48 and a witness to the Trafalgar Square demonstrations.  In 1883 he was still indignant.

Quote:

Mr. Disraeli had, as we have seen, expressed himself with equal caution upon the subject, though in more encouraging tones; but the masses, turbulent, ignorant, and out of work, and completely under the influence of their unscrupulous agents, had made up their minds that the Conservative party was hostile to the cause of reform, and that their object could only be attained  by assuming a threatening  attitude.  Meetings were held at Primrose Hill and at Trafalgar Square, where speakers who could obtain notoriety after no other fashion than a base and disloyal agitation, vehemently denounced the policy of the government, of which they knew nothing, to a rabble composed of the scum and outcasts of London, who no more represented the sober, intelligent working classes desirous of the franchise than our convicts represent the honesty and industry of the country.  It was arranged that a monster meeting should be held in Hyde Park, when certain conclusions, based upon spite and inspired by ignorance, which were termed “resolutions,”  were to be passed condemnatory of all opposition to the cause of reform.  The government, however, fully alive to the dangers which might ensue from the assembling in our chief public park of all that was vile and disorderly, promptly forbade the meeting.  A notice to that effect was delivered  to Sir Richard Mayne, the chief commissioner of police.  “There is nothing,’ said Mr. Walpole the home secretary, in defence of the instructions he had issued,  ‘there is nothing in the notice signed by Sir Richard Mayne to imply that processions, orderly conducted, are illegal–to prevent persons from holding meetings in the usual way for the purpose of discussing politics or ;any other subject but I think that any one holding the office which I have the honour I hold is bound to attend to the public peace of this metropolis; and if he believes that the parks, which are open by the permission of Her Majesty for benefit of all Her Majesty’s subjects, are little to be devoted to any purpose that would interfere with the quiet recreation of the people, and might lead to riot and disorderly demonstrations, he would be most blamable if he did not issue an order similar to that which I have given.”

Unquote.

You will notice that there was no reference to the ’48 revolution going on in Europe.  Nor did he mention any names, although George W.M. Reynolds’ name must have been on his mind.  Reynolds as the key speaker who was carried home on the shoulders of the Demonstrators must have called attention to himself as a key agitator ‘having no other way to call attention to himself.’  Likely that Ewald couldn’t force himself to eighter speak or write the name

Anyway, there is an official account of the demonstrations.

A small point of interest.

Note #12:  George W.M. Reynolds: Passing Through Time.

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:  Ewald, Alexander Charles, The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD, K.G. And His Times, William MacKenzie, 1883

Reynolds, George W.M., Works 1844-1860

.1.

In order to understand an author correctly one must have some idea of his cultural milieu.  I am offering some here, I am not being comprehensive.  I am going to take a longish quote from Alexander Charles Ewald’s ‘The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, First Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G., And His Times to begin.

Ewald was especially suited to interpret Disraeli in great detail and length.  The work is divided into five divisions, two volumes in a beautifully designed book designed to honor Ewald’s great man.  Each page is a wonderfully detailed, almost day by day, hour by hour, account of Disraeli’s political career. The social, cultural and historical context is amazing.

Ewald was especially suited to interpret Disraeli as he too was a converted, or in Disreali’s term, ‘completed Jew’, observing both the new and old testament.  His understanding is that Jesus came to fulfill the law.  Ewald was born in Jerusalem, converting to, or assuming a complementary, Christianity.  Something like the contemporary Jews for Jesus.  I’m just guessing but I’m going to put his assumption at about the age twenty after he had time to recognize Disraeli and imitate him.  In his book her he assumes the role of Disraeli’s Boswell.

He provides magnificent detail, worshipping every word the Disraeli spoke in Parliament.  Below he is setting the stage, discussing electoral matters.  Division 1, p. 47

Quote:

During the present generation the House of Commons, owing to the development of the reforms that have been effected in its constitution, has lost many of the characteristics which it formerly possessed.  It is now a practical, business-like, but, it must be confessed, a somewhat dull assembly.  The elements of youth and wit are conspicuous by their absence, while municipal eloquence and vestry-like personalities reign in their stead.  Before the abolition of nomination boroughs, a young man of great ability—like the second Pitt, Canning, Macauly and others—was taken by the hand by some powerful minister, and launched upon a parliamentary career in the easiest and most inexpensive fashion.  The leaders of the great parties, who swayed the opinions of parliament were always on the watch for talent that might serve their political ends.  Many a young man by his clever speeches at the debating-club of his university, by a happy pamphlet, or by a bitter and opportune squib, found himself safely seated on the green benches of the House of Commons as a representative of a borough in the hands of a powerful lord, or of a large-acred  squire without his election having cost him more than the issue of his address or the delivery of a few speeches before a sympathetic audience.  Commerce had not then assumed the high position it now occupies, nor had the banker’s book usurped the influence of  the pedigree chart.  The lower house was in a large measure, filled by the representatives of the landed gentry, who knew little of science of the laws of political economy, but who shuddered if they heard a false quantity, and piqued themselves that they were as familiar with the classics as a priest is with his breviary.  A few merchants of the highest class, a few successful lawyers, a few Irish, then as now not held in much esteem, and several clever young men who were the little deities of their university, completed the list. The constitution of such an assembly, though it might not offer the same scope as now exists for the exercise of those talents which especially appeal to what Mr. Disraeli called the “parochial mind,” yet afforded every opportunity for the display of culture.  A classical and a literary flavour penetrated the parliamentary eloquence of those days.  A speech delivered in the House was a solemn undertaking, and not to be lightly entered upon; its periods were carefully dismissed in stately terms worthy of the occasion; the gestures and attitudes of the speaker were studied with a Chatham-like view of effect; whilst his words were listened to by an assembly which never forgot, even in the most feverish times of party heat, that it represented the gentry of England.  Then on the following day the details brought forward were fully reported and discussed in the leading journals.  Eloquence was thus the most powerful weapon that could be wielded in parliamentary warfare, and it consequently became the favorite and most cultivated of all studies.  To be a showy speaker or a ready debater, no matter how incorrect or superficial the sentiments expressed, was to be on the high road to the cabinet; whilst the erudite and the thinker, who could never address a few words to the Speaker without confusion, were completely ignored. 

The Reform Bills and the development of a newspaper press have, however, ushered in a new state of things. The abolition of pocket boroughs has rendered it impossible for clever but impecunious youth to obtain a seat in parliament.  The competition that arises upon every vacancy in the House of Commons, and the rigid measures now most properly dealt out of those guilty of bribery and corruption, make it a matter of necessity at the present day for the candidate for parliamentary honours  to be not only a rich man, but one who has long been courting the favours of a constituency.  Those who derive their wealth from industry seldom have attained to fortune till past middle age and consequently the House of Commons will become more and more the assembly of elderly men; in other words, more grave, more practical, more dull.

Unquote.

.2.

What Ewart describes is the grey ease of the transition point between a change of scale, the changing of the guard.  As Greg Allman lyricist for the Allman Bros. Band described it:  ‘See that clock upon the wall?  Time can make it fall.’  Time flows it doesn’t run.  One era was ending, another beginning.

Disraeli’s career can be divided into two parts, 1837 to 1860 and from 1860 to his death.  The first period ended in success as in 1858 he and Lionel Rothschild breached the British square to allow Jews to seated in Parliament as Jews and not English thus creating the real Two Nations contending for mastery.  The Rothschilds succeeded in extending their power over all Europe while operating in the US initially through their agent August Belmont, who proved to independent and after  with the full cooperation of the J.P. Morgan organization and Kuhn-Loeb on the Jewish side.

By then Disraeli had established himself as the leader of the Conservative Party.  He was then instrumental in managing English political affairs until his death.

Reynolds’ destiny seems to have been written out of both literature and history.  The deeper I get into his study the more convinced I am that he was much more influential in promoting his agenda than he has been accredited for even by his literary admirers.  His entire political agenda was effected by the time he died.  The Chartist program which I am sure he must have had a hand in forming and which in his utopianism he thought was going to produce the perfect world had been realized.

  Disraeli seemed aware, as he was promoting the change was able to transition from one period to the other with some success.  Ewart in his political biography quotes from a Disraeli speech: Division II, p.423:

Quote:

But I think that the reform of the House of Commons in 1832 greatly added to the energy and public spirit in which we had then become somewhat deficient.

But, sir, it must be remembered that the labours of the statesmen who took part in the transactions of 1832 were eminently experimental.  In many respects they had to treat their subject empirically, and it is not to be wondered at if in the course of time it was found that some errors were committed in that settlement; and if, as time rolled on, some, if not many deficiencies, were discovered.   I beg the House to consider well those effects of time, and what has been the character of the twenty-five years that have elapsed since 1832.  They form no ordinary period.  In a progressive country and a progressive age, progress has been not only rapid, but perhaps precipitate.  There is no instance in the history of Europe of such an increase of population as has taken place in this country during this period.  There is no example in the history of Europe or of America, of a creation and accumulation of capital so vast as has occurred in this country in those twenty-five years.  And I believe the general diffusion of intelligence has kept pace with that increase of population and wealth.  In that period you have brought science to bear on social life in a manner no philosopher in his dreams could ever have anticipated; in that space of time you have, in a manner, annihilated both time and space.  The influence of the discovery of printing is really only beginning to work on the multitude.  It is, therefore, not surprising that in a measure passed twenty-five years ago, in a spirit necessarily experimental, however distinguished were its authors, and however remarkable their ability, some omissions have been found that ought to be supplied, and some defects that ought to be remedied.  In such a state of things a question in England becomes what is called a public question.

Unquote.

Disraeli seems to handle space and time well is that excerpt.  Satisfied me anyway.

 Reynolds on the other hand was fairly rooted in the departing era that he examined in great detail handling time and space well for the period 1826 to 1848 .  When the break point came in 1859-60 he knew he couldn’t adapt to the new era.  Gave it up, handed his pen and ink to the younger generation to drift off ostensibly to do newspaper work on his newspaper, involving himself in political affairs anywhere he was welcome, wandering in the wilderness for nearly twenty years, while the new generation of novelists such as Anthony Trollope took his place as political and social commentators.  His earthly travails ended at seventy-nine.  His time had been well spent.

Disraeli died a couple years later, if I’m not mistaken, a bitter vengeful old man nursing his delusions of being a ‘great man.’  Lionel Rothschild also died in 1980 thus topping off the period.

Time Traveling 18:

George W. M. Reynolds And The Two Nations

by

R.E. Prindle

The Forties were a momentous period in nineteenth century England. It was one of their transition points from one societal organization to another.  The people of England were stumbling out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth with all its technological and scientific revelations. The Napoleonic wars had put a period to the eighteenth and the nineteenth blossomed.

Perhaps unnoticed for what it was the emancipation of the Jews begun by Napoleon was about to transform the face of Europe and England.  Nowhere was this more clearly evident than in the country of England.

By the 1840s it was clear to the perceptive that there was a coming cultural clash between the Jews and English. As is usual with great changes, artists and writers were the first to grasp that there was a culture war in progress.  Pre-eminent among the writers concerned with the two nations was the great novelist George W. M. Reynolds, the author of Mysteries of London.

From the Jewish side the most overt writers were the future Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli and his father Isaac D’Israeli.  Both writers blazed across the decade of the Forties.

In this essay we will be concerned with Reynolds’ four series of Mysteries of London.  I follow the Valancourt two series, two volumes  edition.  The first two series or volumes have current publication  while the latter two series have been eclipsed by the passage of time.  Reynolds himself had been eclipsed by the passage of time but English scholar Louis James’ effort seems headed for a revival of interest.  Valancourt Press has released  : The Mysteries of London Series I&II, Wagner the Wehrwolf and The Necromancer.  In 1919 a San Bernardino firm with no name published a printing of III and IV, which I have, but the edition has sold through and is no longer available at this time.  Several different volumes published by the British Library can still be had, they are discontinued, the Library seems to have lost interest in Reynolds and remaindered the lot.  Some are still readily available at Ebay and possibly Amazon.

A problem might be that the end of second series seems to indicate the end of the Mysteries but such is not the case for while Series Three doesn’t pick up where Series Two ended is nevertheless a long continuation along with Series Four bringing the total number of pages of the four series  to nearly five thousand.

The volumes of Benjamin Disraeli to figure prominently in this essay will be his trilogy Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred.  Benjamin Disraeli was of course the most prominent politician of the English nineteenth century. Being in Parliament in the forties he published these three political novels then ended his writing career until 1870 when Lothair appeared followed in 1980 by his Endymion.

Of stellar importance will be his father Isaac D’ Israeli’s, Genius of the Jews, whose teaching formed his son’s understanding of the Jewish Nation.  The book was also meant a manual for non-Jews as to how they were to perceive the Jewish Nation.  At this time in England little was known of the Jewish Nation.

.2.

 From the year 1290 to 1660 Jews were banned from England.  Allowed re-entry in 1660, immigration to England began slowly, by the end of the eighteenth century there was a small colony of perhaps several thousand who, staying within their colony in the East End were not disrupting English society.  That situation had changed dramatically by the 1840s when the culture clash arrived with a bang.

By the 1840s the Rothschild banking family of the Nation was the richest family in England eclipsing preeminent families of the English Nation by far.  The modern palace of Mentmore Towers built in 1854 excelled all English manors in splendor.  Built in the Vale of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, the Vale became the location of many Rothschild mansions.  Isaac D’ Israeli establish himself at Bradenham in Bucks. while his son would establish himself at neighboring Hughenden.  Thus the Vale became a Jewish principality.  The Vale would figure prominently in the writings of Reynolds.

The rise of the English Jewish Nation began in 1806 when the dynasties founder, Nathan Rothschild, made his first coup by smuggling English gold across France and Spain to General Wellington’s army on the Spanish Peninsula.  Nathan’s next coup, that established the family fortune, came with the success of British arms against Napoleon at Waterloo.

When Nathan died in 1836 he turned the dynasty over to his son Lionel who was a worthy successor.  Lionel would rule the roost from 1836 to 1880 paralleling the career of Benjamin Disraeli in the heart of the nineteenth century.  It was he who broke the British square.  Shortly after Nathan’s death Disraeli was given a safe seat in Parliament in 1837, after having placed last in balloting four consecutive elections.

The Rothchild/Disraeli link would last until Lionel died.  Now linked with the Rothschilds and in Parliament Disraeli quickly wrote the trilogy that outlined the Jewish Nation’s position- Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred.  These novels lauded his Nation while in Tancred he proposed a New Crusade leading from Palestine across Europe to England.

Every member of Parliament had to take an oath as a Christian, while Disraeli, as a Jew, took Jesus’ view that he came to fulfil the law of the Old Testament.  Thus, while accepting Jesus as a Jewish savior becoming a nominal Christian he could take the oath in good conscience while maintaining a dual religiosity.

There were already Jewish members of Parliament but they had falsely taken the oath.  Lionel ran for Parliament, was elected to one of the six City seats, but refused the oath desiring to be admitted as member of the Jewish Nation only.  He was refused but repeatedly ran and was reelected as one of the six City members.  Finally in the mid fifties he was able to corrupt the procedures of the English Nation seating himself as a member of the Jewish Nation, but not the English Nation.  The Jews at this point had parity as the Jewish Nation functioning within the English Nation.  The two nations had come into existence.

.3.

George W.M. Reynolds was also a revolutionary but an English national.  Born in 1814 to an English Navy Captain, he spent the years between two and eight on the island of Guernsey where his father was stationed.  The family returned to England in 1822 in which year his father died.  The next five years he was under the guardianship of his father’s best friend, Duncan McArthur, who was a Naval physician stationed at Walmer, Kent.  At the end of the period McArthur placed the thirteen year old boy as a cadet at the Sandhurst Military Academy.  George had apparently been at odds with his father, but hated Duncan McArthur, who, as his father and mother’s executor, probably defrauded him of a large part of his inheritance.

No longer able to stand military discipline, after his mother died in March of 1830, Reynolds removed himself from Sandhurst.  He exiled himself to France at the end of 1830.  Eighteen-thirty was the year of the second French revolution, called the July Revolution, with its three glorious days. In France, Reynolds became a thorough revolutionary favoring violent revolution.  In 1836 he was asked to leave France under a criminal cloud.  Returning to England he began his literary career as the editor of the Monthly Magazine.

In 1832 the first Reform Act was made law in England.  As a consequence of the Reform Act a worker’s party called the Chartists emerged in which Reynolds served a prominent role.  Having written several creditable novels between 1835 and 1842 but which failed  to establish him as a successful author he was invited by the publisher George Stiff to serialize a novel for his magazine the London Journal.  The novel was to be patterned on The Mysteries of Paris by the French author Eugene Sue.  Reynolds accepted the offer and began the serialized Mysteries of London.  The series lasted for four years, 1844-48.

Probably to the wonderment of Reynolds, and maybe all, his writing was a runaway success.  Mysteries of London sold as many as forty thousand copies per weekly installment.  Made his eyes sparkle.  He now had a platform to promulgate his social ideas and  political platform.

By 1844, when the series began, the Jews were pushing off English social mores seeking to create a counter Jewish Nation within the English Nation.

The significance of the Jewish Nation within England was recognized in 1809 by the reformer William Wilberforce.  While Wilberforce was battling to end slavery he also helped found the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.  Thus the presence of the Jews has become conspicuous.  By the 1840s their presence had been duly noted.  While the Jews received scant notice in the first two series of Mysteries of London, in the third and fourth the Jewish issue quite emphatically took Reynolds attention.

Disraeli’s trilogy was published in 1844, ’45 and ’47 so that Reynolds obviously read them but doesn’t reference Disraeli by name although he does reference Lionel Rothschild.

.4.

The years 1830 through 1848 were years of revolution and revolutionary schemes in Europe and England.  In Europe the revolutions were violent indeed with perhaps a hundred thousand or more meeting their deaths until the revolutionary period from1789 through 1848 was vanquished, until 1903 and the first Russian Revolution.

In England the violence was minimized while the revolution was compelled to accept limited success.  Both the crown and the aristocracy were stripped of most of their privileges while the Commons became the most important of the three estates. 

Reynolds remained a dedicated violent revolutionary believing that only a revolution such as France’s 1793 episode in which the past was swept away in one fell swoop.  Reynolds admired and approved of this most violent revolution as it swept away the past allowing for an attempt to build back better.  Thus when the Chartist movement after 1839 was formed Reynolds was a charter member of the extremist sort.  While every effort has been employed to reduce his importance in the movement the rumbles are that he was positively disliked for his extremism, while the main body favored fabian tactics.  Disraeli, now a member of Parliament was content to bore from within.

I quote from Monypenny and Buckle’s The Life of Disreali, six volumes in two p.141:

Quote:

The quintessential issue was between an aristocratic government in its proper sense of the term—that is a government of the best men in all classes—and a democracy.  The English were a peculiar people.

Disraeli wrote:  ‘You have an ancient, powerful, richly endowed Church and perfect religious liberty.   You have unbroken order and complete freedom.  You have landed estates as large as the Romans, combined with commercial enterprise such as Carthage and Venice united never equalled.  And you must remember that this peculiar country, with these strong contrasts, is not governed by force; it is not governed by standing armies; it is governed by a most singular series of traditionary influences, which generation after generation cherishes because it knows they embalm custom, represent law.  And with these, what have you else?  You have created the greatest empire of modern time.  You have amassed a capital of fabulous amount. You have devised and sustained a system of credit still more marvelous.  And abroad, you have established and maintained a scheme so vast and complicated of labor and industry that the history of the world affords no parallel to it.  And all these mighty creations are out of all proportion to the essential and indigenous elements and resources of the country.  If you destroy that state of society, remember this—England cannot begin again.

Unquote, unquote.

Disraeli might as well have been describing the United State of the twentieth century.  Disraeli would then set about to dismantle what he had just described as his fellow Jews have done to the United States.  It must be remembered that the Old Testament of the Bible predicts that the Jews will inhabit houses that they didn’t build.  That means that they will move country to country (The House of Egypt, The House of England, France, Germany, the US etc.) and trash each moving on to the next.  Next in line is China.

Reynolds, on the other hand, favored a utopian fantasy of Chartist democracy.  A vision as absurd an any democratic fantasy as all democracies must ultimately fail as they dumb down the population to the lowest level.  Thus, the Jews while demanding an aristocracy of Judaism promotes democracy for everyone else.  The elite of a Nation and the Jewish Nation within the Nation ultimately work toward the same end with different results.

As of 2020 both England and the US have been trashed,

Reynolds then, ignorant of the inevitable results of democracy, and the tendencies of Judaism, wrestles with the problems in Series III and IV of the Mysteries of London.

.5.

Perhaps the trigger that led to the content of Series III & IV was the publication of Coningsby in 1844 at the same time that Reynolds was beginning Mysteries of London.  Coningsby was subtitled the New Generation, probably meaning the arrival of the Jews, while the meaning of Coningsby is that of the king’s manor or village, two significant names.  Compare the terms with Nathan Rothschilds, New Court.  Coningsby, the hero, then means a natural king. The story line of the two volumes must have begun germinating after that book’s,

 publication.  The second of Disraeli’s trilogy, Sybil was published in 1845 adding its impetus.  Thus Reynolds; mind masticated  the stories when he began the third series in 1846.

Coningsby must have been a startling book for England as Disraeli raved about the natural superiority of the Jews.  His portrait of Sidonia was based on Lionel Rothschild.  Sidonia was so outrageous as to be unbelievable.  Sidonia was characterized as a real superman; while Disraeli’s description of Jewish infiltration of all European governments must have been as shocking as Reynolds’ reaction indicates.

Indeed, those Jews were so many spies collecting information to be sent to the Rothschilds as the new messiahs of Europe.  The Rothschild story is so fabulous that they might well be considered the Jewish redeemers. With those means of collecting information it is no wonder that the Jews were informed of political developments almost before they were put into execution.  Inside information was a major source of their financial wizardry.

This Jewish seeming prescience was considered wonderful and baffling to Europeans.  The reasons are quite obvious today.  Only in the matters of the Dreyfus case in France was anyone caught.  The French correspondingly accused Dreyfus of passing info to the Germans which he certainly was not doing; he was passing info to the synagogue which used it for their own ends.

The cultural conflict in England more or less began when Charles Dickens published his novel Oliver Twist which featured the Jewish criminal character, Fagin.  It was not the portrayal of a Jew as a thief that directly set the Jews off as we all believe.  No, it was the fact that Fagin suffered the shame of being executed on the scaffold.  This was taken as an insult for all Jewry.  As Disraeli expressed it, all nations had criminals, Jews were to be seen everywhere with the exception of never, never being seen on the scaffold.  This was a crucial matter.  In twentieth century US when New York DA Thomas Dewey finally managed to arrest the originator of Murder Inc., the master criminal Lepke Buchalter, his fellow Jews worked like demons to prevent his conviction.  Once convicted on Federal offense and sentenced to be electrocuted, in a frenzy Jewish operative worked to their utmost to prevent the execution.  One can only imagine the machinations behind the scenes to send Buchalter to the chair.  Resistance failed and Buchalter was burned.

The indignity of a public execution as a common criminal was too much for them to endure.  That very likely explains what was the supreme insult when the aristocratic Jewish criminal Joseph ‘Jud Suss’ Oppenheimer not only was hanged but the authorities used a thirty foot high scaffold and an iron cage that could be seen for miles and remained up for years that was a constant shaming not to be endured without revenge.

Dicken’s was compelled, that is ordered, to remove the passage describing Fagin’s exposure from all future editions.  Undoubtedly word was put out to the literary community to not offend again.  The culture war was on.  The Jewish right to censorship was quietly established.

While Dickens either buckled, or his publishers did,  Reynolds was made of sterner stuff.  The only question was what course to take.  In Series III then,  He tried to show the Jews how to integrate into English society.   This they couldn’t take as they saw themselves as superior to the English.  Both father and son published books demanding English submission.  At the same time Isaac D’Israeli explained that they wished to remain exclusive in his book, The Genius of Judaism.  While the Frankfort ghetto, from when the Rothschild came, was certainly exclusive it was also demeaning. 

Now, in England, with their already enormous wealth the Rothchilds began creating dozens of palaces that outrivaled the English estates putting them far above the English aristocrats to maintain obvious exclusivity.

Reynolds then laid out an example of how to integrate with the English. As his Mysteries was selling tens of thousands of copies weekly his message was noticed by the Jewish community.  He was well read there and noted in the Jewish newspapers.  From their side, it is suspect that they resented this attempted indoctrination as much as they did the hanging of Fagin.  After all Reynolds was essentially telling them to integrate, that is, to abandon Jewish mores for English.  This was probably too close to the Catholic Church’s age old attempt to convert them.

Whether pressure was put on Reynolds I can’t say, nevertheless as the novel approached its end in a petulant outbreak Reynolds drew an extremely deprecating portrait of the meanest Jewish usurer that he could imagine.  Quite shocking really.  Devastating.

.6.

In the first and second series Reynolds was heavily under the influence of De Sade’s Justine and Juliette.  Virtue and vice.  Richard Markham then, was the male counterpart of Justine, or virtue, while Eugene Markham represented vice, or Juliette.  As the second series closes Eugene in assassinated as the result of his vice while Richard is exalted by his virtuous activities in Italian Castelcicala.  Thus Reynolds reversed De Sade’ notion of the superiority of vice.  For the story to be plausible it must be remembered that Italy was not yet united into a single State.

The ending of Series two implies the end of the story so that there is no reason to expect more hence a complete surprise when a reader discovers two more series or volumes.  Volumes that history had more or less swept under the rug.

In Reynolds’ terms he is redeeming himself for his youthful criminality as recorded in The Youthful Impostor, or a Youths Career In Crime.  In 1847 he  rewrote that book, first written when he was eighteen, as The Parricide, a much darker version.

Richard Markham’s redemption at the end of Series Two was imperfect and not completely satisfying to him so that Series Three begins with a complete mystery and surprise.  The new series built around the continuation of Richard Markham in Castelcicala and Reynolds’ fantasy of a complete and perfect triumph of democracy.

The main character amid  a host of very strong characters Serie three is a criminal by the name of Thomas Rainford, the last of the highwaymen. As the story opens Thomas Rainford, known as Tom Rain, stops a coach that contains Lady Georgiana  Hatfield and her friend.  Rain gallantly relieves Lady Hatfield of her cash but allows her to keep her jewellery.  As he disguises his voice while robbing the women we are left with the impression that he knows Lady Hatfield, she too thinks there is something familiar about the man.  Thus the story begins with a mystery that will take some time to resolve.

There may be some dark humor here that one will only get if one can connect the resolution of the mystery with this beginning.  Remember that Rain left the Lady with her jewels.  As we will learn Rain had robbed the Lady Georgiana once before.  At that time her beauty was so great that he lost control of himself and forced himself on her, raped her, that left her pregnant.  She bore the child but gave it way to conceal the fact that the greatest treasure of a women, her must valuable jewel, is her virginity, her purity.  Rain smirkingly telling her that he will leave her her jewels is a naughty reference to the fact that he had taken her most valuable jewel from her earlier.  While the joke is definitely in the text, if Reynolds planned that, he was a first rate genius.

Rain proceeds to London where he links up with the international criminal, Old Death—hideous looking fellow.  Old Death, perhaps the least impressive of Reynolds, great criminals—Tony Tidkins, the Resurrection Man, Old Death, Chiffen the Cannibal of the Lady Saxondale volume, and the Burker of the Fortunes of the Ashtons.  The Burker is closest in evil to the best, The Resurrection Man.  These criminals will leave you gasping for breath.

Through Old Death we learn that Rain  has a mistress, the beauteous Jewess, Tamar.  A little alarm goes off when we learn she is a Jewess, that this isgoing to be a Jewish story in the heart of the forties and in the middle of Disraeli’s trilogy.  Subsequently we are introduced to her sister Ester de Medina and her fine old Jewish parents Mr. and Mrs. de Medina.

Tamar and Ester are not twins but as the two were born nine months apart, perhaps they were almost twins because they were so close to each other in birth that they didn’t completely differentiate as Reynolds amusingly speculates.  So Ester and Tamar only appear to be twins to the careless eye.

So, now that we can connect the rest of the family to Tamar it looks like a full fledged Jewish story, and they do occupy three or four hundred pages of the mammoth novel.

So, Reynolds engages the Jews.  I speculate that Reynolds had read Isaac D’Israeli’s ‘The Genius Of Judaism’, and his son’s Coningsby and possibly Sybil, Tancred not have been issued at the time of writing,  and that he is in reaction to those writings.  Jews will occupy his attentions in III and IV as well as in The Wehrwolf also of 1847 and The Necromancer of 1851.

While he characterizes different types of Jews in his volumes, at this point, perhaps in reaction to The Genius of Judaism he appears to be showing the Jews how to integrate into English society rather than maintaining the complete separation described by Isaac in The Genius of Judaism. His son’s version of Jews and English is a reflection of Isaac’s vision.

According to Isaac in his The Genius of Judaism a whole set of procedures were put in place to guarantee separation of Jews and Gentiles.  Actually, since Jews inhabit Houses they don’t build, that is other nations, a rigid set of regulations is necessary.  Yet, every year a large percentage falls away else the Jewish population would be much larger.  Only the dedicated remain; those who recognize the fatuousness of the belief system move on.

The Rothschilds themselves were considered messiahs, with some justification, by the faithful.   Thus, Reynolds attempting to show his set of Jews how to assimilate perfectly is committing the Catholic crime of proselytizing.  His attitude seems somewhat ambiguous.  The greatest challenge to Mr. de Menil, who by the way, appears to be Sephardic not Ashkenazi.  The difference is important since non—Jews considered the Sephardics much more respectable than the Ashkenazi, as did  Jews themselves.  The de Menils may have lived in England for four hundred years, living in disguise.  The D’Israelis themselves according to Benjamin must have been Sephardics because their ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492, exiled to Venice, while arriving in England about 1740 where the picking were better, I mean, for a better life.  The Rothschilds were Ashkenazi so that Isaac’s ancestry was superior to the Rothschild’s riches.

Reynolds was a Liberal and he exhibited all the faults that Liberals do today.  For instance he had some very strange notions of criminal reformation.  In a critical situation he had imprisoned his adversary, Old Death in one of Old Death’s subterranean cells completely denied light.  Apparently Reynolds’ sincere belief was that that if a criminal was imprisoned in darkness for a period he would ponder the error of his ways and hence reform when the blessed light was restored.  Then he could be guided to complete restoration of honesty if treated decently.  Old Death had been imprisoned with a few of his gang.  According to Reynolds, his scheme of reformation worked perfectly, except for Old Death.  The rest were completely reformed and released into society ever thankful to Rain.

So, Rains scheme worked well for those former criminals.  Old Death however was an inveterate, hardened criminal.  He knew well how to dissimulate and fool Rain.  The next part is so nutty that one would have to question Reynolds’ intelligence.  Believing that the tender attention of the female sex might jolly Old Death along he employed the beautiful and sympathetic Ester de Menil to lead Old Death on.  Ester speaks to Old Death through a grate in the door.  Old Death is laughing up his sleeve as he deludes Ester and Rain that the plan to convert him is succeeding.  The great prize of having the door opened is obtained by Old Death.

However  before this circumstances call Rain and Ester away so that he substitutes his wife Tamara for Ester  Remember she looks like a twin.  Tamara without instructions is naïve.  Old Death persuades her to open the door and actually come inside.  He then pounces on her and beats her to death, smashing her beautiful face in on vengeance to Rain.  Because the two women look so alike he believes he is killing Ester not Tamar.

What is going on in Reynolds’ mind here?  In a few months Rain and Georgiana Hatfield will become reconciled and marry.  It is necessary then for Tamara to be put aside some how and murdering her was the solution.  Old Death’s hatred of Rain would explain the brutal murder of Tamar and her defacement as Old Death believed Esther was Rain’s wife but still the murder is so repulsive that one is led to believe that Reynolds had an ulterior motive.  The irony of Old Death thinking that Ester was Rain’s wife and then killing his actual wife by mistake is one of those little twists that Reynolds employs continually that keeps the reader on his toes.

.7.

After having turned the grateful De Menils into English people Reynolds goes on into a longish diatribe on Judaism.  While Reynolds is supposed to have been read mainly by the working class or read to illiterates by professional readers that may been exaggerated.  Consider this passage:

Quote:

We have been much gratified in observing that our attempts to vindicate the Jews against most of the unjust charges that it seems to be a traditionary fashion to level against them, haven’t passed unnoticed.  All the Jewish papers have quoted the passage at page 172 of the series of “The Mysteries of London”.  Many provincial journals have transferred it to their columns; and in No. 173 pf Chambers Edinburgh Journal (New Series) it was printed with the following record of approval on the part of the editors of that well considered periodical: 
 We cordially agree in the openly defense of a cruelly misrepresented people.

Unquote.

Obviously his readers included a fair number of Jews including Jewish newspaper editors which may indicate that he was being monitored to detect anti-Jewish tendencies.  In the Shires he also must have had a readership among those following literature.  If editors of the Two Nations snipped excerpts out of the installments he was taken quite seriously.

Indeed, in these two series he frequently appears to preach and in quite elevated language and concepts.  It is difficult to believe that installments that professional readers read to illiterate listeners could be understood by them.  Or perhaps they ended up like Richard Markham’s butler who admired and humourously mispronounced big words but little understood them.

I, myself, have dealt with illiterates who quite cleverly listened closely to what I was saying and then cleverly paraphrased my words and contents back seeming to further the conversation.  Remarkable to myself, while if they heard me and repeated me I was quite impressed with my own original delivery.

Having then done the honors to the Jews, he later in the volume  presents the Jews that were not righteous and apparently not misrepresented.  He turns to a usurer, which type he seems to be very familiar with, who grinds his debtors into the dust with great pleasure and no remorse.  A quite savage attack compared to his adulation of the de Menils.  One wonders how Jewish editors reacted to this version of the Jew.  The Jewish usurer is represented many times in the corpus, each of a different type.

But English society was evolving.  Coningsby was published in 1844 while his Tancred was published in 1847 that cast the Jewish situation in an updated light just before the revolution of 1848.  One must believe that Disraeli was aware of the machinations set to occur in 1848. The coming of that revolution seems to have been an open secret. In ‘Tancred or the New Crusade’ the new crusade was to originate in the Middle East and roll over Europe reversing the old crusade.  While, to my knowledge the 1848 revolution didn’t originate in the Middle East it was certainly difficult to suppress.  Disraeli says the ’48 was originated and executed wholly by the Jews, for what that’s worth.

Floods of defeated revolutionaries fled for the safety of the United States.  That was the first really large number of Jews to emigrate to the US.  As fortune would have it the US was in the midst of an unparalleled   industrial, technological and territorial expansion that provided unheard of opportunities.  The ’48 Jews prospered accordingly so that when the Eastern Jews of the Pale began to be transferred from Europe to America in the 70s and 80s they were rapidly absorbed in what become Jewish industries, among them the needle trades and movies.

With the failure of ’48 hope seemed to vanish from Reynold’s breast.  Terminating his Mysteries of London in 1848 he began his next great work, moving back from a disappointing present to the days of George III and the Regency of George IV. 

His fantastic vision of Richard Markham’s successes in Castelcicala and utopian views of the perfect democracy freed from hereditary aristocracy and monarchy by Richard take up a fair portion of  Series III and IV.

While his mind was occupied by those visions, the Jewish situation was reaching crisis proportions.  His novel was apparently read, discussed and pondered by the Jewish population but they disregarded his assimilationist advice.  He became disillusioned and an alarmist when he realized that the Jewish desire was, for the nonce anyway, a dual monarchy.  Remember that Nathan Rothschild’s establishment was titled The New Court.

Lionel bullied his way into Parliament as a Jew on his own terms in the mid-fifties.  The probability was noted as early as 1851 when George published his novel The Necromancer.  Using an allegorical approach, placing the novel in the time of Henry VIII he warned of the arrival of the dual kingship.

Perhaps warned away, one can’t confirm it as yet, George turned more to historical romances and his ‘biographical’ novels.

By 1860 England had entered into a more mature or post phase of the Industrial Revolution moving into the Scientific Revolution heralded by Darwin’s Origin of Species published in 1859.  Reynolds was no futurist, he left that to men like Jules Vern, his specialty was the past. George ended his career as a novelist to concentrate on his famous newspaper that survived until 19, that’s nineteen, 67.  Disraeli  prospered through the period realizing his life’s dream to become Prime Minister.  Reynolds died in 1879 having realized his dream of becoming a Man of the World.  Disraeli died in 1881, Lionel Rothschild in 1880, closing the era.

Time Traveling 18:

George W. M. Reynolds And The Two Nations

by

R.E. Prindle

The Forties were a momentous period in nineteenth century England. It was one of their transition points from one societal organization to another.  The people of England were stumbling out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth with all its technological and scientific revelations. The Napoleonic wars had put a period to the eighteenth and the nineteenth blossomed.

Perhaps unnoticed for what it was the emancipation of the Jews begun by Napoleon was about to transform the face of Europe and England.  Nowhere was this more clearly evident than in the country of England.

By the 1840s it was clear to the perceptive that there was a coming cultural clash between the Jews and English. As is usual with great changes, artists and writers were the first to grasp that there was a culture war in progress.  Pre-eminent among the writers concerned with the two nations was the great novelist George W. M. Reynolds, the author of Mysteries of London.

From the Jewish side the most overt writers were the future Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli and his father Isaac D’Israeli.  Both writers blazed across the decade of the Forties.

In this essay we will be concerned with Reynolds’ four series of Mysteries of London.  I follow the Valancourt two series, two volumes  edition.  The first two series or volumes have current publication  while the latter two series have been eclipsed by the passage of time.  Reynolds himself had been eclipsed by the passage of time but English scholar Louis James’ effort seems headed for a revival of interest.  Valancourt Press has released  : The Mysteries of London Series I&II, Wagner the Wehrwolf and The Necromancer.  In 1919 a San Bernardino firm with no name published a printing of III and IV, which I have, but the edition has sold through and is no longer available at this time.  Several different volumes published by the British Library can still be had, they are discontinued, the Library seems to have lost interest in Reynolds and remaindered the lot.  Some are still readily available at Ebay and possibly Amazon.

A problem might be that the end of second series seems to indicate the end of the Mysteries but such is not the case for while Series Three doesn’t pick up where Series Two ended is nevertheless a long continuation along with Series Four bringing the total number of pages of the four series  to nearly five thousand.

The volumes of Benjamin Disraeli to figure prominently in this essay will be his trilogy Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred.  Benjamin Disraeli was of course the most prominent politician of the English nineteenth century. Being in Parliament in the forties he published these three political novels then ended his writing career until 1870 when Lothair appeared followed in 1980 by his Endymion.

Of stellar importance will be his father Isaac D’ Israeli’s, Genius of the Jews, whose teaching formed his son’s understanding of the Jewish Nation.  The book was also meant a manual for non-Jews as to how they were to perceive the Jewish Nation.  At this time in England little was known of the Jewish Nation.

.2.

 From the year 1290 to 1660 Jews were banned from England.  Allowed re-entry in 1660, immigration to England began slowly, by the end of the eighteenth century there was a small colony of perhaps several thousand who, staying within their colony in the East End were not disrupting English society.  That situation had changed dramatically by the 1840s when the culture clash arrived with a bang.

By the 1840s the Rothschild banking family of the Nation was the richest family in England eclipsing preeminent families of the English Nation by far.  The modern palace of Mentmore Towers built in 1854 excelled all English manors in splendor.  Built in the Vale of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, the Vale became the location of many Rothschild mansions.  Isaac D’ Israeli establish himself at Bradenham in Bucks. while his son would establish himself at neighboring Hughenden.  Thus the Vale became a Jewish principality.  The Vale would figure prominently in the writings of Reynolds.

The rise of the English Jewish Nation began in 1806 when the dynasties founder, Nathan Rothschild, made his first coup by smuggling English gold across France and Spain to General Wellington’s army on the Spanish Peninsula.  Nathan’s next coup, that established the family fortune, came with the success of British arms against Napoleon at Waterloo.

When Nathan died in 1836 he turned the dynasty over to his son Lionel who was a worthy successor.  Lionel would rule the roost from 1836 to 1880 paralleling the career of Benjamin Disraeli in the heart of the nineteenth century.  It was he who broke the British square.  Shortly after Nathan’s death Disraeli was given a safe seat in Parliament in 1837, after having placed last in balloting four consecutive elections.

The Rothchild/Disraeli link would last until Lionel died.  Now linked with the Rothschilds and in Parliament Disraeli quickly wrote the trilogy that outlined the Jewish Nation’s position- Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred.  These novels lauded his Nation while in Tancred he proposed a New Crusade leading from Palestine across Europe to England.

Every member of Parliament had to take an oath as a Christian, while Disraeli, as a Jew, took Jesus’ view that he came to fulfil the law of the Old Testament.  Thus, while accepting Jesus as a Jewish savior becoming a nominal Christian he could take the oath in good conscience while maintaining a dual religiosity.

There were already Jewish members of Parliament but they had falsely taken the oath.  Lionel ran for Parliament, was elected to one of the six City seats, but refused the oath desiring to be admitted as member of the Jewish Nation only.  He was refused but repeatedly ran and was reelected as one of the six City members.  Finally in the mid fifties he was able to corrupt the procedures of the English Nation seating himself as a member of the Jewish Nation, but not the English Nation.  The Jews at this point had parity as the Jewish Nation functioning within the English Nation.  The two nations had come into existence.

.3.

George W.M. Reynolds was also a revolutionary but an English national.  Born in 1814 to an English Navy Captain, he spent the years between two and eight on the island of Guernsey where his father was stationed.  The family returned to England in 1822 in which year his father died.  The next five years he was under the guardianship of his father’s best friend, Duncan McArthur, who was a Naval physician stationed at Walmer, Kent.  At the end of the period McArthur placed the thirteen year old boy as a cadet at the Sandhurst Military Academy.  George had apparently been at odds with his father, but hated Duncan McArthur, who, as his father and mother’s executor, probably defrauded him of a large part of his inheritance.

No longer able to stand military discipline, after his mother died in March of 1830, Reynolds removed himself from Sandhurst.  He exiled himself to France at the end of 1830.  Eighteen-thirty was the year of the second French revolution, called the July Revolution, with its three glorious days. In France, Reynolds became a thorough revolutionary favoring violent revolution.  In 1836 he was asked to leave France under a criminal cloud.  Returning to England he began his literary career as the editor of the Monthly Magazine.

In 1832 the first Reform Act was made law in England.  As a consequence of the Reform Act a worker’s party called the Chartists emerged in which Reynolds served a prominent role.  Having written several creditable novels between 1835 and 1842 but which failed  to establish him as a successful author he was invited by the publisher George Stiff to serialize a novel for his magazine the London Journal.  The novel was to be patterned on The Mysteries of Paris by the French author Eugene Sue.  Reynolds accepted the offer and began the serialized Mysteries of London.  The series lasted for four years, 1844-48.

Probably to the wonderment of Reynolds, and maybe all, his writing was a runaway success.  Mysteries of London sold as many as forty thousand copies per weekly installment.  Made his eyes sparkle.  He now had a platform to promulgate his social ideas and  political platform.

By 1844, when the series began, the Jews were pushing off English social mores seeking to create a counter Jewish Nation within the English Nation.

The significance of the Jewish Nation within England was recognized in 1809 by the reformer William Wilberforce.  While Wilberforce was battling to end slavery he also helped found the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews.  Thus the presence of the Jews has become conspicuous.  By the 1840s their presence had been duly noted.  While the Jews received scant notice in the first two series of Mysteries of London, in the third and fourth the Jewish issue quite emphatically took Reynolds attention.

Disraeli’s trilogy was published in 1844, ’45 and ’47 so that Reynolds obviously read them but doesn’t reference Disraeli by name although he does reference Lionel Rothschild.

.4.

The years 1830 through 1848 were years of revolution and revolutionary schemes in Europe and England.  In Europe the revolutions were violent indeed with perhaps a hundred thousand or more meeting their deaths until the revolutionary period from1789 through 1848 was vanquished, until 1903 and the first Russian Revolution.

In England the violence was minimized while the revolution was compelled to accept limited success.  Both the crown and the aristocracy were stripped of most of their privileges while the Commons became the most important of the three estates. 

Reynolds remained a dedicated violent revolutionary believing that only a revolution such as France’s 1793 episode in which the past was swept away in one fell swoop.  Reynolds admired and approved of this most violent revolution as it swept away the past allowing for an attempt to build back better.  Thus when the Chartist movement after 1839 was formed Reynolds was a charter member of the extremist sort.  While every effort has been employed to reduce his importance in the movement the rumbles are that he was positively disliked for his extremism, while the main body favored fabian tactics.  Disraeli, now a member of Parliament was content to bore from within.

I quote from Monypenny and Buckle’s The Life of Disreali, six volumes in two p.141:

Quote:

The quintessential issue was between an aristocratic government in its proper sense of the term—that is a government of the best men in all classes—and a democracy.  The English were a peculiar people.

Disraeli wrote:  ‘You have an ancient, powerful, richly endowed Church and perfect religious liberty.   You have unbroken order and complete freedom.  You have landed estates as large as the Romans, combined with commercial enterprise such as Carthage and Venice united never equalled.  And you must remember that this peculiar country, with these strong contrasts, is not governed by force; it is not governed by standing armies; it is governed by a most singular series of traditionary influences, which generation after generation cherishes because it knows they embalm custom, represent law.  And with these, what have you else?  You have created the greatest empire of modern time.  You have amassed a capital of fabulous amount. You have devised and sustained a system of credit still more marvelous.  And abroad, you have established and maintained a scheme so vast and complicated of labor and industry that the history of the world affords no parallel to it.  And all these mighty creations are out of all proportion to the essential and indigenous elements and resources of the country.  If you destroy that state of society, remember this—England cannot begin again.

Unquote, unquote.

Disraeli might as well have been describing the United State of the twentieth century.  Disraeli would then set about to dismantle what he had just described as his fellow Jews have done to the United States.  It must be remembered that the Old Testament of the Bible predicts that the Jews will inhabit houses that they didn’t build.  That means that they will move country to country (The House of Egypt, The House of England, France, Germany, the US etc.) and trash each moving on to the next.  Next in line is China.

Reynolds, on the other hand, favored a utopian fantasy of Chartist democracy.  A vision as absurd an any democratic fantasy as all democracies must ultimately fail as they dumb down the population to the lowest level.  Thus, the Jews while demanding an aristocracy of Judaism promotes democracy for everyone else.  The elite of a Nation and the Jewish Nation within the Nation ultimately work toward the same end with different results.

As of 2020 both England and the US have been trashed,

Reynolds then, ignorant of the inevitable results of democracy, and the tendencies of Judaism, wrestles with the problems in Series III and IV of the Mysteries of London.

.5.

Perhaps the trigger that led to the content of Series III & IV was the publication of Coningsby in 1844 at the same time that Reynolds was beginning Mysteries of London.  Coningsby was subtitled the New Generation, probably meaning the arrival of the Jews, while the meaning of Coningsby is that of the king’s manor or village, two significant names.  Compare the terms with Nathan Rothschilds, New Court.  Coningsby, the hero, then means a natural king. The story line of the two volumes must have begun germinating after that book’s,

 publication.  The second of Disraeli’s trilogy, Sybil was published in 1845 adding its impetus.  Thus Reynolds; mind masticated  the stories when he began the third series in 1846.

Coningsby must have been a startling book for England as Disraeli raved about the natural superiority of the Jews.  His portrait of Sidonia was based on Lionel Rothschild.  Sidonia was so outrageous as to be unbelievable.  Sidonia was characterized as a real superman; while Disraeli’s description of Jewish infiltration of all European governments must have been as shocking as Reynolds’ reaction indicates.

Indeed, those Jews were so many spies collecting information to be sent to the Rothschilds as the new messiahs of Europe.  The Rothschild story is so fabulous that they might well be considered the Jewish redeemers. With those means of collecting information it is no wonder that the Jews were informed of political developments almost before they were put into execution.  Inside information was a major source of their financial wizardry.

This Jewish seeming prescience was considered wonderful and baffling to Europeans.  The reasons are quite obvious today.  Only in the matters of the Dreyfus case in France was anyone caught.  The French correspondingly accused Dreyfus of passing info to the Germans which he certainly was not doing; he was passing info to the synagogue which used it for their own ends.

The cultural conflict in England more or less began when Charles Dickens published his novel Oliver Twist which featured the Jewish criminal character, Fagin.  It was not the portrayal of a Jew as a thief that directly set the Jews off as we all believe.  No, it was the fact that Fagin suffered the shame of being executed on the scaffold.  This was taken as an insult for all Jewry.  As Disraeli expressed it, all nations had criminals, Jews were to be seen everywhere with the exception of never, never being seen on the scaffold.  This was a crucial matter.  In twentieth century US when New York DA Thomas Dewey finally managed to arrest the originator of Murder Inc., the master criminal Lepke Buchalter, his fellow Jews worked like demons to prevent his conviction.  Once convicted on Federal offense and sentenced to be electrocuted, in a frenzy Jewish operative worked to their utmost to prevent the execution.  One can only imagine the machinations behind the scenes to send Buchalter to the chair.  Resistance failed and Buchalter was burned.

The indignity of a public execution as a common criminal was too much for them to endure.  That very likely explains what was the supreme insult when the aristocratic Jewish criminal Joseph ‘Jud Suss’ Oppenheimer not only was hanged but the authorities used a thirty foot high scaffold and an iron cage that could be seen for miles and remained up for years that was a constant shaming not to be endured without revenge.

Dicken’s was compelled, that is ordered, to remove the passage describing Fagin’s exposure from all future editions.  Undoubtedly word was put out to the literary community to not offend again.  The culture war was on.  The Jewish right to censorship was quietly established.

While Dickens either buckled, or his publishers did,  Reynolds was made of sterner stuff.  The only question was what course to take.  In Series III then,  He tried to show the Jews how to integrate into English society.   This they couldn’t take as they saw themselves as superior to the English.  Both father and son published books demanding English submission.  At the same time Isaac D’Israeli explained that they wished to remain exclusive in his book, The Genius of Judaism.  While the Frankfort ghetto, from when the Rothschild came, was certainly exclusive it was also demeaning. 

Now, in England, with their already enormous wealth the Rothchilds began creating dozens of palaces that outrivaled the English estates putting them far above the English aristocrats to maintain obvious exclusivity.

Reynolds then laid out an example of how to integrate with the English. As his Mysteries was selling tens of thousands of copies weekly his message was noticed by the Jewish community.  He was well read there and noted in the Jewish newspapers.  From their side, it is suspect that they resented this attempted indoctrination as much as they did the hanging of Fagin.  After all Reynolds was essentially telling them to integrate, that is, to abandon Jewish mores for English.  This was probably too close to the Catholic Church’s age old attempt to convert them.

Whether pressure was put on Reynolds I can’t say, nevertheless as the novel approached its end in a petulant outbreak Reynolds drew an extremely deprecating portrait of the meanest Jewish usurer that he could imagine.  Quite shocking really.  Devastating.

.6.

In the first and second series Reynolds was heavily under the influence of De Sade’s Justine and Juliette.  Virtue and vice.  Richard Markham then, was the male counterpart of Justine, or virtue, while Eugene Markham represented vice, or Juliette.  As the second series closes Eugene in assassinated as the result of his vice while Richard is exalted by his virtuous activities in Italian Castelcicala.  Thus Reynolds reversed De Sade’ notion of the superiority of vice.  For the story to be plausible it must be remembered that Italy was not yet united into a single State.

The ending of Series two implies the end of the story so that there is no reason to expect more hence a complete surprise when a reader discovers two more series or volumes.  Volumes that history had more or less swept under the rug.

In Reynolds’ terms he is redeeming himself for his youthful criminality as recorded in The Youthful Impostor, or a Youths Career In Crime.  In 1847 he  rewrote that book, first written when he was eighteen, as The Parricide, a much darker version.

Richard Markham’s redemption at the end of Series Two was imperfect and not completely satisfying to him so that Series Three begins with a complete mystery and surprise.  The new series built around the continuation of Richard Markham in Castelcicala and Reynolds’ fantasy of a complete and perfect triumph of democracy.

The main character amid  a host of very strong characters Serie three is a criminal by the name of Thomas Rainford, the last of the highwaymen. As the story opens Thomas Rainford, known as Tom Rain, stops a coach that contains Lady Georgiana  Hatfield and her friend.  Rain gallantly relieves Lady Hatfield of her cash but allows her to keep her jewellery.  As he disguises his voice while robbing the women we are left with the impression that he knows Lady Hatfield, she too thinks there is something familiar about the man.  Thus the story begins with a mystery that will take some time to resolve.

There may be some dark humor here that one will only get if one can connect the resolution of the mystery with this beginning.  Remember that Rain left the Lady with her jewels.  As we will learn Rain had robbed the Lady Georgiana once before.  At that time her beauty was so great that he lost control of himself and forced himself on her, raped her, that left her pregnant.  She bore the child but gave it way to conceal the fact that the greatest treasure of a women, her must valuable jewel, is her virginity, her purity.  Rain smirkingly telling her that he will leave her her jewels is a naughty reference to the fact that he had taken her most valuable jewel from her earlier.  While the joke is definitely in the text, if Reynolds planned that, he was a first rate genius.

Rain proceeds to London where he links up with the international criminal, Old Death—hideous looking fellow.  Old Death, perhaps the least impressive of Reynolds, great criminals—Tony Tidkins, the Resurrection Man, Old Death, Chiffen the Cannibal of the Lady Saxondale volume, and the Burker of the Fortunes of the Ashtons.  The Burker is closest in evil to the best, The Resurrection Man.  These criminals will leave you gasping for breath.

Through Old Death we learn that Rain  has a mistress, the beauteous Jewess, Tamar.  A little alarm goes off when we learn she is a Jewess, that this isgoing to be a Jewish story in the heart of the forties and in the middle of Disraeli’s trilogy.  Subsequently we are introduced to her sister Ester de Medina and her fine old Jewish parents Mr. and Mrs. de Medina.

Tamar and Ester are not twins but as the two were born nine months apart, perhaps they were almost twins because they were so close to each other in birth that they didn’t completely differentiate as Reynolds amusingly speculates.  So Ester and Tamar only appear to be twins to the careless eye.

So, now that we can connect the rest of the family to Tamar it looks like a full fledged Jewish story, and they do occupy three or four hundred pages of the mammoth novel.

So, Reynolds engages the Jews.  I speculate that Reynolds had read Isaac D’Israeli’s ‘The Genius Of Judaism’, and his son’s Coningsby and possibly Sybil, Tancred not have been issued at the time of writing,  and that he is in reaction to those writings.  Jews will occupy his attentions in III and IV as well as in The Wehrwolf also of 1847 and The Necromancer of 1851.

While he characterizes different types of Jews in his volumes, at this point, perhaps in reaction to The Genius of Judaism he appears to be showing the Jews how to integrate into English society rather than maintaining the complete separation described by Isaac in The Genius of Judaism. His son’s version of Jews and English is a reflection of Isaac’s vision.

According to Isaac in his The Genius of Judaism a whole set of procedures were put in place to guarantee separation of Jews and Gentiles.  Actually, since Jews inhabit Houses they don’t build, that is other nations, a rigid set of regulations is necessary.  Yet, every year a large percentage falls away else the Jewish population would be much larger.  Only the dedicated remain; those who recognize the fatuousness of the belief system move on.

The Rothschilds themselves were considered messiahs, with some justification, by the faithful.   Thus, Reynolds attempting to show his set of Jews how to assimilate perfectly is committing the Catholic crime of proselytizing.  His attitude seems somewhat ambiguous.  The greatest challenge to Mr. de Menil, who by the way, appears to be Sephardic not Ashkenazi.  The difference is important since non—Jews considered the Sephardics much more respectable than the Ashkenazi, as did  Jews themselves.  The de Menils may have lived in England for four hundred years, living in disguise.  The D’Israelis themselves according to Benjamin must have been Sephardics because their ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492, exiled to Venice, while arriving in England about 1740 where the picking were better, I mean, for a better life.  The Rothschilds were Ashkenazi so that Isaac’s ancestry was superior to the Rothschild’s riches.

Reynolds was a Liberal and he exhibited all the faults that Liberals do today.  For instance he had some very strange notions of criminal reformation.  In a critical situation he had imprisoned his adversary, Old Death in one of Old Death’s subterranean cells completely denied light.  Apparently Reynolds’ sincere belief was that that if a criminal was imprisoned in darkness for a period he would ponder the error of his ways and hence reform when the blessed light was restored.  Then he could be guided to complete restoration of honesty if treated decently.  Old Death had been imprisoned with a few of his gang.  According to Reynolds, his scheme of reformation worked perfectly, except for Old Death.  The rest were completely reformed and released into society ever thankful to Rain.

So, Rains scheme worked well for those former criminals.  Old Death however was an inveterate, hardened criminal.  He knew well how to dissimulate and fool Rain.  The next part is so nutty that one would have to question Reynolds’ intelligence.  Believing that the tender attention of the female sex might jolly Old Death along he employed the beautiful and sympathetic Ester de Menil to lead Old Death on.  Ester speaks to Old Death through a grate in the door.  Old Death is laughing up his sleeve as he deludes Ester and Rain that the plan to convert him is succeeding.  The great prize of having the door opened is obtained by Old Death.

However  before this circumstances call Rain and Ester away so that he substitutes his wife Tamara for Ester  Remember she looks like a twin.  Tamara without instructions is naïve.  Old Death persuades her to open the door and actually come inside.  He then pounces on her and beats her to death, smashing her beautiful face in on vengeance to Rain.  Because the two women look so alike he believes he is killing Ester not Tamar.

What is going on in Reynolds’ mind here?  In a few months Rain and Georgiana Hatfield will become reconciled and marry.  It is necessary then for Tamara to be put aside some how and murdering her was the solution.  Old Death’s hatred of Rain would explain the brutal murder of Tamar and her defacement as Old Death believed Esther was Rain’s wife but still the murder is so repulsive that one is led to believe that Reynolds had an ulterior motive.  The irony of Old Death thinking that Ester was Rain’s wife and then killing his actual wife by mistake is one of those little twists that Reynolds employs continually that keeps the reader on his toes.

.7.

After having turned the grateful De Menils into English people Reynolds goes on into a longish diatribe on Judaism.  While Reynolds is supposed to have been read mainly by the working class or read to illiterates by professional readers that may been exaggerated.  Consider this passage:

Quote:

We have been much gratified in observing that our attempts to vindicate the Jews against most of the unjust charges that it seems to be a traditionary fashion to level against them, haven’t passed unnoticed.  All the Jewish papers have quoted the passage at page 172 of the series of “The Mysteries of London”.  Many provincial journals have transferred it to their columns; and in No. 173 pf Chambers Edinburgh Journal (New Series) it was printed with the following record of approval on the part of the editors of that well considered periodical: 
 We cordially agree in the openly defense of a cruelly misrepresented people.

Unquote.

Obviously his readers included a fair number of Jews including Jewish newspaper editors which may indicate that he was being monitored to detect anti-Jewish tendencies.  In the Shires he also must have had a readership among those following literature.  If editors of the Two Nations snipped excerpts out of the installments he was taken quite seriously.

Indeed, in these two series he frequently appears to preach and in quite elevated language and concepts.  It is difficult to believe that installments that professional readers read to illiterate listeners could be understood by them.  Or perhaps they ended up like Richard Markham’s butler who admired and humourously mispronounced big words but little understood them.

I, myself, have dealt with illiterates who quite cleverly listened closely to what I was saying and then cleverly paraphrased my words and contents back seeming to further the conversation.  Remarkable to myself, while if they heard me and repeated me I was quite impressed with my own original delivery.

Having then done the honors to the Jews, he later in the volume  presents the Jews that were not righteous and apparently not misrepresented.  He turns to a usurer, which type he seems to be very familiar with, who grinds his debtors into the dust with great pleasure and no remorse.  A quite savage attack compared to his adulation of the de Menils.  One wonders how Jewish editors reacted to this version of the Jew.  The Jewish usurer is represented many times in the corpus, each of a different type.

But English society was evolving.  Coningsby was published in 1844 while his Tancred was published in 1847 that cast the Jewish situation in an updated light just before the revolution of 1848.  One must believe that Disraeli was aware of the machinations set to occur in 1848. The coming of that revolution seems to have been an open secret. In ‘Tancred or the New Crusade’ the new crusade was to originate in the Middle East and roll over Europe reversing the old crusade.  While, to my knowledge the 1848 revolution didn’t originate in the Middle East it was certainly difficult to suppress.  Disraeli says the ’48 was originated and executed wholly by the Jews, for what that’s worth.

Floods of defeated revolutionaries fled for the safety of the United States.  That was the first really large number of Jews to emigrate to the US.  As fortune would have it the US was in the midst of an unparalleled   industrial, technological and territorial expansion that provided unheard of opportunities.  The ’48 Jews prospered accordingly so that when the Eastern Jews of the Pale began to be transferred from Europe to America in the 70s and 80s they were rapidly absorbed in what become Jewish industries, among them the needle trades and movies.

With the failure of ’48 hope seemed to vanish from Reynold’s breast.  Terminating his Mysteries of London in 1848 he began his next great work, moving back from a disappointing present to the days of George III and the Regency of George IV. 

His fantastic vision of Richard Markham’s successes in Castelcicala and utopian views of the perfect democracy freed from hereditary aristocracy and monarchy by Richard take up a fair portion of  Series III and IV.

While his mind was occupied by those visions, the Jewish situation was reaching crisis proportions.  His novel was apparently read, discussed and pondered by the Jewish population but they disregarded his assimilationist advice.  He became disillusioned and an alarmist when he realized that the Jewish desire was, for the nonce anyway, a dual monarchy.  Remember that Nathan Rothschild’s establishment was titled The New Court.

Lionel bullied his way into Parliament as a Jew on his own terms in the mid-fifties.  The probability was noted as early as 1851 when George published his novel The Necromancer.  Using an allegorical approach, placing the novel in the time of Henry VIII he warned of the arrival of the dual kingship.

Perhaps warned away, one can’t confirm it as yet, George turned more to historical romances and his ‘biographical’ novels.

By 1860 England had entered into a more mature or post phase of the Industrial Revolution moving into the Scientific Revolution heralded by Darwin’s Origin of Species published in 1859.  Reynolds was no futurist, he left that to men like Jules Vern, his specialty was the past. George ended his career as a novelist to concentrate on his famous newspaper that survived until 19, that’s nineteen, 67.  Disraeli  prospered through the period realizing his life’s dream to become Prime Minister.  Reynolds died in 1879 having realized his dream of becoming a Man of the World.  Disraeli died in 1881, Lionel Rothschild in 1880, closing the era.