The Evil That Men Do

There is far more that I wish to say about the Kabbalah and those that pursue its mysteries thinking that it will unlock unworldly rewards and unlimited pleasures. Such is the pursuit of fools and magi, which by most other historical societies were classified as alchemists and esoterics, although during various periods of history the references were far worse and punishments far more severe. Those that choose to ignore my warnings may do so at their own peril, but let me provide you with a better perspective of those that you herald as great Kabbalists and loved by God. For not all the righteousness in the universe will mask the one great evil performed by a man and the evil I speak of is no less than a man portraying himself as a god. I’ve already pointed out how it is that the Kabbalah tries to teach its followers to learn the language and key words to command both angels and other divine creatures but it is guilty of far worse. A crime committed by someone no less prestigious in their own eyes than Rabbi Judah ben Loew, who they consider one of their great masters and teachers.

The Maharal

Who was Rabbi Loew, referred to by many as the Maharal and what did he have to do with the Kabbalah? He certainly is not the man that has been currently portrayed and recently celebrated back in the Prague festivities of September 2009 celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death. And contrary to the publicized claim that Loew was the chief rabbi of Prague after he had served for 20 years as a chief rabbi of Moravia which is now a region of the Czech Republic he never actually held that distinction. Twice turned down for the position of Chief Rabbi of Prague the community actually feared the power grabbing attitude and mystical bent of the man therefore denying him the honour which is now falsely claimed for him. Just so his supporters and false biographers can’t pretend any longer that this was true, I’ll provide you with the two men that the community deemed worthier than Rabbi Loew for the position. The first time the position became available the community and council elected Rabbi Isaac Melling and the second time when he put his name up for election in 1604 with the hope that he’d come out of exile in Poland and return to Prague, the community unanimously selected Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim. The Jews of Prague didn’t want the Maharal anywhere near their city. “Exile?” you ask. Exactly what happened to him as he packed his bags and left the city just weeks after his private meeting with the Emperor Rudolf II in February 1592. After all, if he was as great as his followers claimed, he would hardly have left the city after being praised as they claimed by the Emperor and asked to tutor this monarch in the ways of the Kabbalah.
The truth is that he was a man constantly in conflict with his own community and who committed specific forbidden acts under the guise of religious mysticism or the Kabbalah as these Rabbis wish to call their esoteric and forbidden arts. What exactly was this black art that he performed to cause his expulsion from Bohemia and earn the antagonism of his own community? Like Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelly’s book, he allegedly created a monster that terrorized the city and caused the death of a dozen people. Commonly referred to as the Golem, as much as we’d like to discuss this creation of animate matter as utter nonsense we as Karaites cannot because this ‘nonsense’ infests our Rabbanite brethren to the point of blackening Judaism with its heresy and affront to the Almighty. To ignore it is to watch the demise of Judaism as the spread of these Kabbalistic teachings which are in vogue in today’s society, take both heart and mind of the confused, desperate and dissatisfied that are constantly searching for God but don’t know where to find Him


The Golem

Both Singer and Rosenberg based their books on the original legend of the Golem of Prague and Rabbi Loew as it was passed down by Katz who just happened to be the Maharal's son-in-law. Obvious distortions occurred as a result of their reliance on a relative that owed his position and income to the Maharal but the flatteries and claims of greatness were more so out of necessity to cover up the truth than by an intention of bias. Yes, just as both their versions testify, there was a banker involved, as was the mayor and several other prominent people from the Prague Jewish community just as these mythological tales reveal but what they overlooked to tell their readership was that the Emperor did have very good reasons to lay charges and as historical documents point out, to not only take possession of the mayor of Josefov’s fortune as well as his property, but even to have his two nephews arrested. Points of law which Emperor Rudolf did do after Meisel's death but for which the authors accuse one of the most benign and tolerant monarchs of his time as being both criminal and anti-Semitic. The latter accusation which is entirely incongruous with Katz’s claim that Rudolf was enthralled by the Maharal and couldn’t praise him enough with the hope that he would become his teacher in the Kabbalah. The story as presented by Singer, although quaint and enchanting, does not provide the history behind the actual events. The crimes committed by the banker, the printing house and the Golem were more than legend but reality evident in historical facts but buried in fables. And since the art of fables is well mastered by the rabbis as proven in their Talmud it should not be to anyone’s surprise that they have created something of such magnitude that it defies the imagination though concealing the perpetration of the crime quite effectively.
Challenging God

But in their efforts to mix myth and alchemy into the true practice of Judaism they have willingly overstepped the bounds of mortal men until they have proclaimed themselves as superior and in their own minds as being gods themselves. For they have said as much in the Talmud and made no effort to hide their perfidy though the size of their egos would have made that virtually impossible. For it is written in their Talmud that Rava said, “If the righteous wished, they could create a world, as it is written [Isaiah 59:2]: "it is your iniquities that have separated you from your God" (i.e., made a distinction between you and God). Rava created a man and sent him to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him but he [the man] did not answer. Then he [Rabbi Zera] said to him: You are from the companions (i.e., a creature created by the rabbis). Return to your dust.” Here we have proof of their efforts to practice the black arts, to create living beings that they could command, and in so doing openly declaring that they have the right to play God because it was their dues for being righteous as promised in Isaiah. For any man to see himself as a god is the establishment of a false image, a graven statue to one owns glory, and in thinking themselves lofty and having the power of gods, they have condemned themselves to the greatest heresy possible. Their fate is no different from that of Nimrod as he built his tower into the heavens in order to challenge God. When men who are thought of us the spiritual leaders of Judaism have chosen a path into darkness then it can be no wonder that the world has come to see the Children of Israel as being abandoned by the Lord. Let us look no further than the Babylonian Talmud, in Sanhedrin 65B where it states, “Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaia spent every Sabbath eve studying the Book of Creation (Sefer Yezirah); a third-grown calf was created for them, and they ate it.” Remember carefully what I said in my article http://hubpages.com/hub/39-Lashes-Karaite-Sabbath in regards to what is banned and not banned on the Sabbath and that which is referred to as melakha. If it has to do with creation then it certainly is banned work and by God’s own words ‘the creation’ is punishable by death. When we examine that ruling we realize that God was not talking about people doing simple tasks but instead exactly what these two fools were doing. Using the Sabbath to create a living creature, practicing black arts on the Sabbath and then sacrificing the animal not to God as would have been the Sabbath sacrificial right but eating it themselves as if they themselves were accepting the burnt offering. Not only was the entire act sacrilegious, it is obviously praised by their rabbinic colleagues that have incorporated it into the Talmud. This one act alone renders the Talmud a thing of evil, the antithesis of Judasim, and a blasphemy before God.

Telling It Like It is

But returning to the matter at hand, the reality was that in the year of 1588, the city of Prague was held in the grip of terror, victim to the murderous rampage of an inhuman monster created from the seeds of hatred and sown through religious intolerance and mortal greed. Not 1580 as the legend presented by Singer and Roseberg would have you believe based on Katz’s notes. Rabbi Loew was still in Morovia in that year and didn't travel to Prague until 1586, the same time the Roman Catholic priest Taddeush was leading the mobs against the Jewish community. Therefore the legend of the Golem must be viewed from this perspective to appreciate it fully. Persecutions and murders of Jewish citizenry were taking place and in defence a creature or something even more sinister was let loose on the city but in so doing, not only those guilty of the murder of Jews were in turn killed but innocents as well. And therein lies the dilemma, for at what point do we as God’s light to the world end up as corrupt and evil as the rest of the world? When have we become no different from them? I’m not saying I have the answer but it certainly wasn’t the one these Kabbalists including Rabbi Judah Loew arrived at. According to Prague’s Chabad rabbi, Manis Barash, he claims the Maharal was one of the first rabbis to popularize Kabbalah, If this is what the Kabbalah was intended to achieve, then a curse upon all of them. Sherwin, the director of doctoral studies at Chicago's Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, says Rabbi Loew achieved fame as the golem’s creator because of his greatness but there were many other rabbis of his era who are also well documented as trying to animate golems. Greatness? Since when is evil and the practice of black arts deemed greatness? How misguided have these Kabbalists and their Jewish followers have become to see what they are doing as greatness and no longer view it as the great sin it truly is.

There is another story about the events in Prague, a more accurate and definitive story that portrays what occurred in the light in which it should be properly viewed. Yes, it is a Karaite perspective but it is my ancestor’s perspective and he more than anyone had a right to say what really happened. To read his story and understand the dark path that the Kabbalah will lead you down then I recommend reading Shadows of Trinity released by Eloquent Books http://www.eloquentbooks.com/ShadowsOfTrinity.html (Also available from Amazon Books at http://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Trinity-Allen-Goldenthal/dp/1606933337/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275204896&sr=1-1) and Barnes and Noble at http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Shadows-Of-Trinity/Allen-Goldenthal/e/9781606933336/?itm=1&USRI=Shadows+of+Trinity )in order to compare the legend against the historical documentation. I will not state that I did not take some creative leniency in telling of the story but only doing so to make the story flow more easily as historical facts are reeled off one after the other for all to see. For the most part the story preserves each historical fact as it was recorded in the Austrian Royal Archives, familial traditions passed down orally, and details recorded in the legends by both Singer and Rosenberg, revealing a series of strange and shattering events that occurred during the years 1588 and 1589 in Prague as supposedly good men turned evil.

The Trial of Jesus: Toldoth Jeshua

You're probably wondering what am I talking about this time. Well, it's pretty simple. I'm going to talk about another book I happen to have in my collection. You guessed it, it's called “Toldoth Jeshua". But what's it mean. Translated, it means the Generations of Jesus. Odd title you'd think since according to the New Testament, Jesus didn't have any generations to speak of. But this book that was written in about the 14th century and based on material from the second century had a lot of interesting things to say. I came into possession of this document after I wrote and published Caiaphas Letters, so its quite amazing that it confirms many of the statements I make as fact in my book.
One of the most serious libels made against the Jews was the blame for killing Jesus. Pope John Paul II fortunately condemned this libel and expunged it from the Roman Catholic teachings, and this should be appreciated, but it was long in coming and over the last two thousand years the number of Jews that died because of this libel was astronomical, especially when one considers it as a premise to the Nazi holocaust.
Now this may sound a little controversial coming from me but what if I was to say that it wasn’t really all the Church’s fault for fostering this belief in the first place? What if I was to say that the great sages of Judaism in the second century,the Tannim or these Rabbis of reverence that put together the Talmud were responsible for the libel themselves! That in an effort to show the world how strict they were as enforcers of God’s will, they were willing to spread a lie that either because their brains were too addled with age, or as a Karaite I beleive they were only interested in hearing the sounds of their own voices and were more than too happy to tell everyone a lie.”
What most people don't realize is that these so called paragons of virtue and Judaism actually wrote a section into the Talmud concerning their role in Jesus’ death! Let me tell you quickly what it said:
“It is taught that for all others liable for the death penalty, except for the enticer to idolatry, we do not hide witnesses. They light a lamp for him in the inner chamber and place a witness in the outer chamber so that they can see and hear him while he cannot see or hear them. One says to him,” Tell me again what you said to me in private.” If the prisoner repents, then good, but if he says, ‘This is our obligation and what we must do,’ then he is to be brought into the courtroom and stoned. And then they hung him on the eve of Passover.”
If you're trying to follow the connection let me explain that these Rabbis were trying to recall a very special meeting of the Sanhedrin that happened a couple of hundred years earlier. I'll point out some of their controversial comments. It was a night meeting, hence the need for the lamp. The courts of the Sanhedrin were held in buildings that relied on natural light, therefore it was prohibited to meet at night unless it was an emergency. In this case it obviously was one. But they got it wrong. The witnesses placed outside were there to come in and defend the accused. They already had their numbers to make up the tribunal inside. They were the judges, not the witnesses. As we know from the stories about that night, Jesus's witness refused to enter into the chamber and three times Peter denied not knowing him. Without his second witness, (it took two to prove you innocent of the charges), Jesus was condemned. Now the rabbis in this particular paragraph never refer to Jesus, only to an idolator, so the question should be how do I know they’re not talking about another case? Because they refer back in the Toldoth Jeshua to this section of the Talmud as being the trial of Ben Stada. Now I probably have you completely confused. It would have been more correct to refer to what is a Ben Stada in order to understand their play on words. The Rabbis loved to do that back then. They thought they were quite funny. They did it with the next messiah too, Simon Bar Kochba. As soon as he lost the war, they referred to him as Simon Bar Kosiba, or ’the son of lies’. Somehow they forgot that it was one of their own that proclaimed him as the messiah in the first place. So they did the same thing to Jesus as well. He would have been referred to as Jesus Ha Stadlan. The intercessor by his followers. Because that’s what he did. He was the intercessor for people to reach God. Remember that he said everyone seeking God must come through him.
So, now that you have an appreciation for their sense of humor, these rabbis don’t refer to him as an intercessor for God but instead call him Ben Stota or Stada in an alternate dialect; the ‘son of absolute utter nonsense’ or as we would say today, the son of bullshit.”
Also remember that in the Talmud is says that he was taken out and stoned and then hung from a tree on the eve of Passover.”
There are three important things you should notice right there. Firstly, if he was stoned to death, why were they bothering to hang him on a crucifix? Couldn’t kill him twice. And then secondly there’s the matter that the Roman authorities only let the Sanhedrin stone people, they didn’t have the authority to crucify a prisoner. And lastly, notice how it was the eve of the Passover. Just as I described it in Caiaphas Letters. The Gospels all say the crucifixion happened on the Passover. So this passage from the Talmud is in harmony with what I've written.
In another passage of Toldoth Jeshua it is written: ‘On the eve of the Passover they hung Yeshu and the crier went forth for forty days beforehand declaring that Yeshu is to be stoned for practicing witchcraft, for enticing and leading Israel astray. Anyone who knows something to clear him should come forth and exonerate him. But no one came forward in his defense and they hung him on the eve of Passover. Yeshu was different because he was close to government.’ So now you have the Toldoth Jeshua in harmony with that passage from the Talmud and both confirming it was the eve of the Passvoer and that this individual was named Jeshua or Jesus.
Once again the Toldoth Jehsua is providing some interesting aspects that other than in Caiaphas Letters, no one else has ever mentioned. For almost a month and a half there’s this attempt to try and create a case so that he can’t be touched. The emphasis in Toldoth Jeshua was they they tried to prove him innocent asking people to come forward to clear and exonerate him. Very different from the condemning version in the Talmud. But when it came to the night of the trial, those that were supposed to exonerate him never came through. In other words, Peter didn’t do his part of the plan. The writer of the Toldoth Jeshua tries to explain this special treatment of trying to save him was due to the fact that he was close to government. Well, they might as well have said because he was related to the High Priest because the only Jewish government at the time was the High Priest, and to be close was another way of implying a familial relationship. It also says that he was being helped by the High Priest at the time who just happened to be Caiaphas. Again this confirms the High Priest family connection I described in Caiaphas Letters.

The question one has to answer is why, if as in the Toldoth Jeshua there is recorded a definite attempt by the officials in Judea to save Jesus, and this book was based on original documentation from much earlier times, why would a group of supposedly educated men, paragons of virtue write such a stupid and inaccurate thing in the Talmud that actually suggests the Sanhedrin wanted to kill Jesus. The answer is simple; they couldn’t stop themselves. The whole idea behind the Talmud was to write as much down as they could remember because there was no central stores or archives left following the destruction of the Temple. Then they would analyze and embellish what they had written. But in a lot of the cases, this embellishment was merely the addition of hearsay and innuendo. Their memories of events may have been poor, but their imaginations certainly were not. They were in overdrive. They didn’t even try to be accurate. By the time the Talmud was being written, Christianity was already becoming the new power and Jews were already being persecuted by this new religion. So why not tell a very disparaging story and gloat about the death of the Christian messiah. Human nature has remained a constant throughout history. And this was one way of saying, “in your face, buddy! Stupid, yes, but then these supposedly intelligent men never thought the Talmud would be read by anyone that wasn't Jewish.
In their minds they were disproving the claims of Christianity by saying they were responsible for the death of Jesus. After all, how could he be the son of God, or for that matter, even the messiah, if they could kill him? So this invented story of theirs became our own undoing. We suffered because they gloated. But worst of all, they gloated over an entirely false and ludicrous story that they created for their own personal egos.”
Now one might point out that as a Karaite, I have no fondness for the Rabbis of old, I certainly don't give any credence to the Talmud and therefore I view them in a negative light. True, I admit it. We suffered for two thousand years because of their misguided beliefs. Had they only stayed to the facts, I think they would have found that most educated people would have understood what occurred in the framework of the time and circumstances. I'm not naive and saying that the early Church would not have pursued its policy of deicide if they hadn’t written the inaccurate story of Jesus into the Talmud but I don’t believe the persecutions would have been conducted as vehemently as they were. What you have in the Gospels is the story of Caiaphas sending Jesus to Antipas, and then to Pilate. Pilate pronounced sentence and Roman soldiers performed the execution. You actually have evidence of the Jewish authorities abdicating their responsibility and handing it over to these other powers. Therefore the role of the Jewish authorities is minimalized.
When you read about the confrontation between the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew, and the Nasi, Yakov Kahana in Shadows of Trinity, you are seeing the two worlds of Karaism and Judaism clash. The former regarding the Talmud as the work of foolish men and the latter that deemed themselves worthy of interpreting Gods words, convinced that there were hidden meanings, detailed instructions, and numerous restrictions behind every word. But as the above story has pointed out, words can be very dangerous when they used improperly. Less would have definitely been better!

Incredible Journey:
Since the first book of the Kahana series has been published (Blood Royale) the question has been frequently asked, where do these ideas come from. The answer to that question is dealt with numerous times in conversations with John Pearce that narrate most of the stories. The tales themselves were passed down, inherited, encoded and for lack of a better word, 'infused.'
For those that have seen the family tree unrolled, it is an impressive sight. Two meters in height and almost five meters fully laid flat in length, it contains close to 50,000 names. With that many names, there's going to be alot of history to write about.
But the problem with history as we're taught it today is that it's viewed under a glass dome as if it's complete, finished; nothing more to learn about it. Sadly, that is far from the truth and most teachers can't comprehend that history is a living, breathing entity that we've only scratched the surface of. For every story of a Tacitus, Herodotus from ancient times or a Gibbons to give it a more modern spin, there are squirrled away somewhere a hundred or so other documents on the same subject, providing a vantage point from a completely different perspective. You have to remember, anything of a differing opinion was publicly burnt well into the eighteenth century. Thousands upon thousands of books, manuscripts and letters with differing opinions. But no matter how hard you try to eradicate those other truths, as the Nag Hamadi findings, the Dead Sea Scolls, the hidden manuscripts of Nostradamus, etc., have shown us, somewhere, someplace, are the original manuscripts just waiting to be discovered.
In that sense we are all on this voyage of discovery. How far that voyage will take us is yet to be determined. And the consequences of those future discoveries will be both amazing and world-defining.
As a young boy, my third great grandfather found a set of books that had been hidden away by his own father and a few generations that preceded him. They were a collection of books considered heretical, and a letter of introduction to the Hapsburg Royal family that was passed down from Emperor Rudolf II of the sixteenth century. A letter which he used to gain entry to the academic world by attending the University of Leipzig and then later to become of service to the Emperor Franz Josef, the decendant of that same Hapsburg family. As for the heretical books he had discovered, they were also from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Passed down by his ancestor of the time to remind him that in spite of living in a Jewish world under the influence of the Rabbis, he in turn was a Karaite and that he must never forget that. The revelation turned him into an outlaw, with an arrest warrant issued by his own hometown should he ever return. He made a decision of conscience, a decision of truth, and as he went forward in his life, becoming a professor at the University of Vienna, I doubt very much he regretted his decision.
Now oddly, I still come across the same prejudices of erroneous Rabbinical teaching that Karaites aren't Jews, Karaites don't exist, or that Karaites were the cause of all the social ills and problems that affected mainstream Jewish society. It's my turn to pick up the guantlet where my third great grandfather left off. To expose the histories that have been buried, to rewrite what currently exists in order to nullify the misconceptions. SHADOWS OF TRINITY is the first to have a major public release to do so. And as they celebrate the events of the 400th anniversary of the Maharal's death in Prague this year, let them answer the questions raised in the book regarding this highly esteemed individual. "If you create a monster to kill, does that not make you a monster in turn?" Once you've read the book, you'll have to answer that question for yourself.