Thanks to commentator Yosef I went back to the Rebbes family tree, to try to pin it down more.

After someone puts so much effort into trying to clear up this information, I thought it’s the least I can do to revisit it, and see if Yosef’s hard work might lead to more insights.

Short answer: it did.

Read on.

==

First, let’s go back to the story of Hananya ‘Bustenai’ ben Haninai, Exilarch of Pumbeditha (589-638 CE).

A version of his story is to be found in at least four different contemporary Jewish seforim, which you can see for yourself here:

https://tablet.otzar.org/pages/?&pagenum=16&book=100597
https://tablet.otzar.org/pages/?&pagenum=15&book=105839
https://tablet.otzar.org/pages/?&pagenum=20&book=8702
https://tablet.otzar.org/pages/?&pagenum=11&book=156243
https://tablet.otzar.org/pages/?&pagenum=64&book=172487

==

Long story short: he’s a descendant of King David, the Jewish leader of ‘Exilarch’, who after the Arab conquest Babylonia, is given a non-Jewish Persian princess as a slave, by the new Caliph.

At some point, Bustenai decides to marry her, and he has sons with her.

Then, there is a 300 year ‘machloket’ within the Jewish community about the Jewish status of these sons, as Bustenai’s two sons from his first, Jewish, wife claim that their father didn’t convert and free the Persian princess, before marrying her and siring children.

Sad to say, Jewish ‘rulers’ have often had middot in the toilet, and it wouldn’t be the first time that someone trampled all over halacha in secret.

The dispute goes to court – presided over by relatives of the Persian princess’s sons – and whaddya know?!

They find in favour of the Persian princess’s sons, and rule that she must have converted before Bustanai married her.

==

My 5 cents is that it’s highly unlikely this would have been so controversial if there was real evidence, like a bill of manumission, usually deposited with the local Beit Din, that a slave had been ‘freed’ prior to being converted.

Why Bustanai wouldn’t have been more careful to leave real evidence behind that he had freed and converted this Persian wife, is an interesting question.

==

Here is an academic snippet on the story, for those who like academia, discussing the account of Bustenai’s children in the Iggeret of Sherirah Gaon, written in the late 900s – i.e. about two centuries after all this happened.

It comes from an article called

THE POLITICAL ROLE OF SOLOMON, THE EXILARCH, C.715-759 CE (PART 1), by David H. Kelley (Foundations (2006) 2(1): 29-46).

Snippet from Kelley:

“Sherira (writing in the tenth century) indicated that Bustanai had two sons by a Jewish wife and three sons by a Persian wife, a royal princess who had been enslaved. The sons by the Jewish wife maintained that Bustanai had not freed and converted the Persian princess and that her children were, therefore, illegitimate. A court found that they should be considered legitimate.

Sherira says that some judges expressed doubts about the decision and he, himself, suggested that it was due to kinship between the judge and Bustanai’s part-Persian descendants.”

==

Bottom line: two of Bustanai’s sons are Jewish, three of the sons, maybe not, and of course, those three sons of the Persian princess ar the ones who go on to hold leading positions in the Jewish community.

Because why let a small matter like a non-Jewish, unconverted mother get in the way of being a leader of the Jewish community, especially when you can show you descend from King David!

Right?

==

Now, that handwritten family tree of the ‘Badd rebbes, that Yosef has worked so hard to clarify, seems to have Bustanai in some garbled form, like this:

#72
ר. רונא? חנא? הנא?
Hanna [?] Ben [son]… of Tzutzita Ana Safra [?] Zutra Sa’ada [?]ria Zutra Bistanai (Exilarch, c. 618-670 CE), his wife a righteous convert, daughter of the King of Persia.

==

Then it lists another 19 generations, between Hananya ‘Zutra Bistanai’ (who the Rebbe tree wrongly dates as living between 618-670 CE, when he was historically known to have lived thirty years’ earlier, between 589-638 CE) and generation 91,  ‘Sherira Gaon’ (906-1006 CE).

Remember, Sherira Gaon stated he categorically DID NOT descend from Bustenai’s family, and apparently made this distinction publically because of the whole mess around the non-conversion of Bustenai’s Persian’s wife.

This already shows us that this part of the ‘Rebbe Genealogy’ is not accurate.

==

If we assume that a generation is 20 years, then it would take 380 years, minimum, to get from #72 Hananya ‘Zutra Bistanai’ to Sherira Gaon, as the Rebbe Tree shows.

Except – less than 200 years separate these two figures.

This is more indisputable evidence that the Rebbe Tree is not accurate.

(And if you didn’t take the time to actually do all this nitpicking, you’d never know it.)

==

In the process of trying to figure this out more, and trying to see whether the Badd Rebbes conceivably descend from the unconverted Persian princess, I went to try and fill in more of the supposed family tree, HERE.

I know I’ve stated this a million times, but let’s state it again for clarity: I don’t use geni trees indiscriminately. I mine geni as a source of info – there is a ton of sourced genealogical info on the notes and discussions pages, that often helps to shed a lot of light on where the geni gatekeepers are deliberately muddying the waters.

==

From the discussions on the page of Hananya ben Bustenai, I understand that there are many,  many non-Jewish descendants of King David, including tons of monarchs and royals all over the world, most of whom claim descent via Bustenai’s suspected ‘non-Jewish’ sons.

I.e. these sons of his, and their descendants, enthusiastically married out all over the world, and apparently, especially with the royal houses of Europe.

Why?

Because in xtian-Europe, the monarchs wanted to claim they had a divine prerogative to rule over other people, and claiming descent from the biblical King David was a fantastic excuse to act like a tyrant, whilst still claiming to be a holy saint and beyond reproach.

==

Further down on the notes page, I see that original family tree that someone uploaded years ago into the notes, because the Geni gatekeepers kept distorting it on the site itself.

I am reproducing part of it here. Meet me at the bottom, for the discussion:

(65) Haninai (Hainai), Gaon of Sura (above)

(66A) Hillel, Gaon of Sura 694-712

(66B) Yakob, Gaon of Sura 712-730, the father of (67) Mari, Gaon of Sura 748-756/or 751-756, the father of (68) Hillel, Gaon of Sura 788-797/or 792-798 (below)

————————————————————————————————————-

issue of (68) Hillel, Gaon of Sura 788-797/or 792-798 (above) was:

(69A) Ivomai (821) (below)

(69B) Natroi, Gaon of Sura (d853)

(69C) Rivyai, the father of (70) Joseph (841)

————————————————————————————————————-

issue of (69A) Ivomai (above) was:

(70) Tzedek Ha-Kohen (d848) (below)

————————————————————————————————————-

issue of (70) Tzedek Ha-Kohen (above) was:

(71A) Nahshon, Gaon of Sura 874-882, the father of (72) [K]Hai, Gaon of Sura 889-896 (below)

(71B) Hophni, had issue (below)

(71C) Nehemiah

————————————————————————————————————-

descendants of (71B) Hophni (above) were:

(72) Rabba[n] [his son], the father of

(73) Mari [went to Spain 941], ancestor of the Mariite Line , which is also called the Meirite “B” Line, the father of

(74) Samuel, the father of

(75) Hophni (d963), = [name], daughter of Tzadok Kahana (above)

————————————————————————————————————-

issue of (75) Hophni (above) was:

(76A) Samuel Ha-Kohen (d1013)

(76B) Joseph Na-Nagid, the father of (77) Samuel, the father of (78) Joseph Ha-Nagid, killed 1062 in a pogrom

————————————————————————————————————-

issue of (76A) Samuel Ha-Kohen (above) was:

(77A) Israel (1017)

(77B) Joseph Ibn Nagrela [Al-Nagrila] Ha-Nagid (d1034), had issue

(77C) Asmouna, wife of [K]Hai, Gaon of Pumbedita (d1038) (above)

————————————————————————————————————-

issue of (77B) Joseph Ibn Nagrela Ha-Nagid (above) was:

(78) Samuel Ha-Nagid, vizier 1027 (d1056)

Eve [his cousin], daughter of [K]Hai, Gaon of Pumbedita,

————————————————————————————————————-

descendants of (78) Samuel Ha-Nagid (d1013) (above), by generation, were:

(79) Joseph Ha-Nagid [his son] (executed 1066)

[name here], daughter of Rabbi Nissim Ben Yaakov, the parents of

(80) Yechiel, the father of

(81) Avraham, the father of

(82) Azariah (Azarya), the father of

(83) Ezekiel (Yekhezkel), the father of

(84) Laemiel, the father of

(85) Azariah, the father of

(86) Elijah (Eliyah), the father of

(87) Joseph (Yosef), the father of

(88) Nachman, the father of

(89) Kalonymos Kalman, the father of

(90) Leibush, the father of

(91) Eleazar, the father of

(92) Yerakmiel, the father of

(93) Arye-Zeev (Arieh-Zeev), the father of

(94) Yaakov, the father of

(95) Belzalel Ha-Zaken, the father of

(96) Isaac, the father of

(97) Yehuda Lev Hazaken (d1439/40), the father of

(98) Betzalel, the father of

(99) Hayyim (d1565), the father of

(100) Bezalel Loew (Lowe), ancestor of the Lowe, Loew, Loeb, & Lieb families, &, the father of three sons, who were:

(1)/(101a) Yehuda Lieb, ancestor of the Schneerson Family

(2)/(101b) Sinai Loeb, ancestor of the Eskeles Family

(3)/(101c) Mendel Lieb, ancestor of the Mendel Family & Menachem Mendel, called “Tzemach Tzeddek”, adopted wife’s surname, “Schneerson”, the father of (a) Shmuel Schneerson, called “Maharash” (d1882) [the father of Sholom Dovber (d1920), the father of Yosef Yitzchak (d1950)] & (b) Boruch Schneur, father of Levi Yitzchak (d1944), father of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, claimant (d1994)(below)

————————————————————————————————————-

==

BEFORE WE CONTINUE WITH THIS LIST – notice this:

Generation # 70: Tzedek Ha-Kohen

This is a kohen – a priest. This is NOT a line of descent son-after-son from King David.

The sons are listed, tho, son-after-son, until 30 generations later we get to #100: BEZALEL LOEW (LOWE).

This is the father of the MAHARAL OF PRAGUE.

Again, a line of kohanim could NEVER be the Moshiach, even if they happen to also ‘descend’ from King David on their mother’s side. Kohanim can’t be the Moshiach. It’s impossible.

==

So now, get to that part I screenshotted in the previous post, HERE:

It shows that BEZALEL LOWE had three sons:

#101 a – YEHUDA LEIB, THE MAHARAL OF PRAGUE, ANCESTOR OF THE SCHNEERSONS

#101 b – SINAI LOEB, ancestor of the ESKELES family.

#101 c – MENDEL LEIB, ancestor of the TZEMACH TZEDDEK.

These all seem to be ‘kohanim’, paternally….

==

Let’s continue with the list from the Geni notes:

section 13.2: The Maharel’s House

(101) Yehuda Lieb, called “The Maharel of Prague” (above), a rabbi (d1609), who, by wife, Pearl Shmelkes, begot 3 sons & 6 daughters, of whom the sons were:

(102A) Shmuel Zvi, whose descendants end with Jacob Frank (d1791) and his daughter, an heiress, Eve, called “The Divine Lady” (d1826)

(102B) Betzalel Loewe, ancestor of “The Alter Rebbe”, ancestor of another modern family, the Schneersons

(102C) Zvi Mendel, or Mendel Lieb, among whose descendants was Israel of Rushin

---

==

So now, things are getting even more interesting.

#101 YEHUDA LEIB, THE MAHARAL OF PRAGUE has three sons:

#102 a SHMUEL ZVI – who leads us to the false messiah JACOB FRANK.

#102 b BETZALEL – who leads to the ALTER REBBE

#102 c ZVI MENDEL / MENDEL LIEB – who leads to ISRAEL of RUZHIN.

==

All three of these illustrious descendants were accused of being ‘false messiahs’ by their opponents…

And we see, what a very small pool of DNA our Jewish leadership actually comes from…

==

That list continues by detailing the ancestry of JACOB FRANK, like this:

section 13.3: senior-line

(102a) Shmuel Zvi, father of

(103) Yanai Loewe, father of

(104) Zalman Lieb, father of

(105) Yosef, father of

(106) Yehuda [Jude] Lieb “of Prossnitz”, claimant 1724 (d1730), father of

(107) Jacob Frank [Jacob Ben Judah], claimant (d1791), treated as a “king” by many of Europe’s royal courts, he was the father of

(108) Eve (daughter), considered the dynasty’s heiress & rightful queen; called “The Divine Lady” among other epithets, titles & styles; resided in a palace and presided over a lavish court; d 1816 without issue

---

==

JACOB FRANK was the son of another very famous Sabbatean ‘false messiah’ called YEHUDAH LEIB PROSSNITZ.

Prossnitz had a huge following, including the MEIR PANIM, Meir Eisenstadt, and Prossnitz was also the teacher of the young JONATHAN EIBSHITZ. The Meir Panim only turned against Prossnitz, and expelled him from Eisenstadt, in 1706 – the ‘deadline’ Prossnitz had given for the return of Shabtai Tzvi.

This is in line with the ‘story’ told about Jacob Frank’s family, that his father was a rabbi; that his father was a ‘Sabbatean’; and that his father was expelled at a certain point in time, leading to the ‘Frank’ family having to wander around.

(Read more about Prossnitz HERE, on the YIVO website.)

==

But bottom line:

The ‘Badd rebbes seems to literally be the cousins of Jacob Frank.

And apparently, so was ‘Israel of Ruzhin’, whose own lavish court, ‘wonder working’ and false messianic tendencies led to a huge machloket between his house, and the SANZER Rebbe, as discussed HERE.

==

So, little surprise then, that the ALTER REBBE’s mum was RIVKA SHOR, a close family member of ELISHA SHOR, leading Frankist who converted to xtianity with his children and became a ‘WOLOWSKY’.

The Badd family tree is one and the same as Jacob Frank’s, right down to that same amazing yichus, descending from the Maharal of Prague.

[Let me just add in here, that most of our leaders were close family of Jacob Frank. In the second installment of this article, I am going to start pulling together some very interesting stuff about the Baal Shem Tov hakadosh, including the story of his father – another area where the ‘Badd went back and re-wrote chassidic history. This stuff is very mixed-up, and the nuances are crucial to ‘unmixing’ it all.]

==

‘Badd probably faked their family tree for a lot of reasons.

Reason Number 1: If this is the correct family tree, above, they apparently descend son-after-son from a ‘TZEDEK COHEN’, and thus, the ‘Badd rebbes could NEVER have been Moshiach, no matter how good and pious they were.

Reason Number 2: Jacob Frank is literally their close cousin – and their whole tree is riddled with Sabbateans and Frankists, backwards and forwards.

Maybe, the Alter Rebbe may have tried to ‘buck the trend’, and to bring his family back to the good way, via the Baal Shem Tov.

However, it’s also possible that he was ‘parachuted’ into the chassidut movement at a late stage,  by the ruling oligarchy, to ensure they still got their mucky hands firmly stuck in the chassidut pie, where they could continue to ‘lead Jews’ – and subvert the community from within.

==

Last week, just as some of the ‘Bring them home NOW!!!’ signs finally started disappearing, a little, from the streets, they got replaced by a big new banner with that picture of Menachem Mendel #7, against the exact same shade of  ‘yellow’ backdrop, ordering us to ‘Greet Moshiach NOW!!!’

Cynic that I am, I can’t help but wonder if all this propaganda is being designed by the same people, and printed in the same place…

What I can tell you, is that Chabad has done more than anyone else to keep us stuck in a super-unhelpful, halachically-distorted discussion about ‘moshiach’ for the best part of 50 years, already.

(If not way, way more. But that’s a discussion for another time.)

Moshiach cannot be a dead person.

Moshiach cannot be a Kohen.

Moshiach cannot be Menachem Mendel.

==

Dead messiahs are not a Jewish idea.

But, they are for sure a xtian and a Sabbatean one.

==

I have got some very interesting info for part two of this study… stay tuned.

The last few days, I’ve been pretty sick.

Nothing serious, BH, just a lot of head fog, achey eyes, waking up at weird times, and now snot and a cough. Most of my family has been sick the last few weeks, with one thing and another.

We can blame the seasons, or maybe, the chemtrails.

Either way, there has been a lot of contributing factors on the emotional and spiritual levels, too.

==

I mean the war ended…

Apparently. That horrible, terrible war that the Rav was the only person asking his followers to pray it should never even begin… That war is now over. Apparently.

And everything we were talking about here even before it began, that the whole ‘war’ in Gaza, and whatever ‘war’ they have planned for the Golan Heights – it all boils down to putting puppet regimes in place, so the Evils can extract the natural resources in the area with the least resistance, and maximum profit.

==

But in the meantime, the whole of Israel has some severe, compounded PTSD from ‘the war’, that came right on the heels of ‘the lockdowns’, and it’s probably contributing to an overall malaise that so many of us are experiencing right now, where we just feel so tired, so much of the time.

Keeping things general, there’s also the ongoing implosion of the world of lies, where even the most died-in-the-wool MAGA fanatic is starting to realise their savior is actually a pedo, and one of the worst creatures in the ‘swamp’ he was apparently going to drain, all those years ago.

Here in Israel, the Likud fanatics, the ‘right wing’ fanatics’, the ‘IDF-solves-all-our-problems-and-we-don’t-need-God’ fanatics – the wheels are also coming off their buses, too. In a big way.

Where I used to be the only conspiracy theorist in the village, a while back, these days I am being told ‘conspiracy theories’ by just about everyone I know.

(Some of which are totally ridiculous, btw. Just being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ doesn’t make you right about everything, perhaps it just moves you a step closer to the truth. If you’re lucky.)

==

As the world of lies implodes, people are scrabbling around looking for their scapegoat, and of course, the Evils have made sure that the Joooos are in prominent positions all over the place, so it’s super-convenient to have them take the fall.

I haven’t written about current affairs here for a while, on purpose.

But here’s my take on what’s going on, for what it’s worth:

There is a turf war being fought, by the Evil ‘mafiosos’ who run our world from behind the scenes. Let’s call them ‘freemasons’, but understand that label is way too limiting to really be accurate.

But, there is one group of ‘masons’ who are atheistic-Napoleonic-French-satanic – and there were many secular Jews that got caught up with this group 200 years ago, as a way to achieve liberty, equality and fraternity, in a world that was otherwise barred to Jews.

This group is running a lot of stuff in the world, and involves a French-American-Spanish nexus.

==

Then, there is a second group of ‘masons’ who started off evangelical-xtian-z-ist-British, at the turn of the 19th century.

Over a few decades, they started the practise of ‘talking in tongues’, and quickly devolved into satanism as a result, but still with the ‘facade’ of being believing xtians.

This group links Germany, Britain, Holland and the ‘evangelical lobby’ of the US.

They were quickly joined by Jews from Frankist families, who were following the Frankist doctrine of ‘turning xtian’, at least externally, in order to ‘raise the sparks from Edom’. If you check into the evangelicals, you’ll find many of their preachers from 200 years ago were Jewish apostates – and some, like Joseph Wolff, were actually direct descendants of Jacob Frank.

This is the group that created the State of Israel, as a uniquely xtian-z-ist project, with the explicit aim of ‘restoring’ the Jews to Eretz Yisrael in order to fulfill biblical prophecy.

The next stage was the mass conversion of the Jews – which is why, BTW, the State of Israel has been secretly supporting and even funding missionary operations all over the country, for years.

And then whoever doesn’t convert – they get killed when ‘Armageddon’ / Gog and Magog kicks off.

==

On top of all this, there are also economic factors involved, and ‘geo-politics’, about who gets to control the natural resources here, and also, crucially, the waterways around Eretz Yisrael and the ‘land bridge’ that Eretz Yisrael is, connecting the different continents of earth together.

It’s truly the centre of the world, and if our maps were accurate, we’d understand its strategic importance even more than we do.

==

So to get back to my take on what is really going on here:

There are two main groups of ‘masons’ fighting it out to control the world.

One is French-Spanish-American secular-satanist-atheist. The other is German-British-Dutch-Evangelical-z-ist.

If you ask me where the Vatican fits in, the honest answer is I don’t know.

You’d have to go very far into Jesuit history, including the history of so many catholic rulers of Europe having ‘Jesuit confessors’, to really even have an informed guess.

But the point is, the Evils are evil, and just like regular mafias, there are always turf wars between the godfathers.

==

How does this fit with all the antisemitism, the war, media influencers blaming the Jooos for everything including Jeffrey Epstein?

The ‘blaming the Joos’ is mostly being done by the French-Spanish-American-Catholic secular-satanist-atheists.

BUT – and here’s the kicker – as the State of Israel was set up as a puppet state, right from the beginning, by the British-German-Dutch-Evangelical ‘xtians, you can be sure that much of what the Joos are being blamed for – or to be more accurate, much of what ‘the State of Israel’ is being blamed for – has a factual basis.

==

You and me all know, that our ‘State’ is not being run by good people; that it’s full of traitors; that it takes its ‘orders’ from people outside our borders, and that it totally and utterly hates Torah Judaism and Torah-observant, God-fearing Jews.

This of course fits perfectly, with the ‘evangelical blueprint’ for the State, mentioned above.

Torah Judaism, with its emphasis on the Gemara, was always the perfect antidote for xtian missionising, and the missionaries have been trying to get the Jews to throw away their Gemara, or burn it, for centuries, already.

The State has been acting as their de-judaising ‘proxy’ since it was created.

==

What threw the spanner in the works, was the baal teshuva movement.

Especially, after the success of the Six Day War, when biblical prophecies started happening in an undeniable fashion, and the failure of the Yom Kippur War. Back in ‘73, no-one in Israel guessed that the State had been ‘ordered’ by Kissinger to let that war happen.

Yeah, just ‘taken totally by surprise’….

Whatever. From our vantage point of 2025, and understanding what happened on the Gaza border two years ago, we are not quite as naive as the previous generation was.

But still, even they understood that the secular government and the army had let them down totally – and when the soldiers returned in ‘73, there was a huge wave of teshuva.

That totally threw the blueprint off.

==

Both sets of masons are ‘anti’ the Joos, but coming from very different places.

The Evangelicals hope to destroy the Joos spiritually, and then set off Armageddon, Gog and Magog as the precursor to the ‘second coming’. This is called ‘philo-semitism’, or being a ‘friend of Israel’. Meanwhile, the atheist-satanists just want to destroy the Jews, full stop, and also the so-called ‘Old Testament’ and any notion that the Jews are God’s ‘chosen people’. This is called ‘anti-semitism’.

==

Anyway, point is: all this is extremely tiring and destabilising, on the emotional level.

When the ‘real world’ reported in our propaganda press seems way more farcical and ridiculous and dangerous than anything you’d get in a sci-fi novel, that also causes a lot of anxiety in the people trying to navigate it.

For me personally, I’ve been trying to maneuver through all this by keeping my focus very tightly on my own dalet amot.

It’s been a useful exercise, but I’m starting to wonder if I don’t need to take a slightly more broader view again. We’ll see.

==

I know this is a more ‘rambling’ post than usual.

I just felt like sharing some of my thoughts with you, dear reader, to see if perhaps they also resonate with yours.

We’re all shell-shocked, traumatised, confused, tired.

It’s been a heck of a few years, with Covid lockdowns seguing seamlessly into this brutal pre-planned ‘war’.

That also explains, why so many of us have so many ‘rough edges’ at the moment, and often so little patience, optimism and energy left.

But it can’t continue like this forever.

At least, that’s what I hope.

After I posted up the article on the ‘Golem of Chelm’, I remembered I’d written a bunch of stuff connecting to the Chacham Tzvi, back in 2021.

First, you can read the Golem of Chelm by clicking the link – it’s recent comments from the Rav.

The following was extracted from a huge post that came down with the first version of this site, called:

Karaites, Copernicus and Yom Tov Lippman Heller

==

Here’s some relevant snippets from that monster post, and then meet me below, for some updated thoughts on how all this ties together.

Firstly, about the Magen David symbol.

• Sabbatians were the first people to popularise the Star of David symbol, and it appeared on the graves of yucky people who were into kabbalistic black magic, like the Bad Baal Shem of London.
• The Freemasons also used that symbol.
• A red Star of David in a circle was the ‘seal’ of another secret society called the Martinists:

“Martinism is a form of Christian mysticism and esoteric Christianity concerned with the fall of the first man, his state of material privation from his divine source, and the process of his return, called ‘Reintegration’ or illumination. As a mystical tradition, it was first transmitted through a masonic high-degree system established around 1740 in France by Martinez de Pasqually, and later propagated in different forms by his two students Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz.”

==

In Jeremy Brown’s book, he identifies the first time the ‘Star of David’ showed up in the Jewish community.

It was on the tombstone of one David Gans, buried in the cemetery of Prague, who wrote a treatise called Magen David:

“Magen David was the name of a textbook on science and astronomy that Gans wrote, the very first Hebrew book to mention Copernicus by name.”

(Page 43, in ‘New Heavens and a New Earth’.)

====

Here’s a bit more background about Gans, from Wikipedia:

David was born in Lippstadt, in what is now North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. His father, Shlomo, was a moneylender. He studied rabbinical literature in Bonn and Frankfurt am Main, then in Kraków under Moses Isserles. Later he attended the lectures of the Maharal of Prague and of his brother, Rabbi Sinai. They introduced philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy into the circle of their studies, and from them Gans received the impulse to devote himself to these branches of science.

==

The anti-Torah idea of ‘Heliocentrism’ in the Jewish community is closely connected to the Maharal of Prague, and his circle.

==

So much of what was really going on in Prague around this time has been totally and deliberately obscured from view. According to Allen E Goldenthal – that Karaite historian who also has a very warped view of ‘history’ – there was something of a turf war going on between the Karaite Jews in Prague, the Maharal of Prague, and the xtian community.

In his re-telling of history, the Golem was actually unleashed to terrorise the wider community for less than holy motives, and King Rudolph II called in the Karaites to try and help him solve the problem, and to contain the ‘kabbalists’ who were causing it. Do I believe this whole story? I think I don’t. Do I believe there were a lot of unsavory machinations going on, in a million different ways, in the Prague Jewish community? Sadly, yes.

==

Now, we start getting into the ancestry of the Chacham Tzvi:

I have been trying to track down the real story of the Chacham Tzvi for a very long time.

It was clear to me that so much of the ‘official narrative’ is hooey, but again I just haven’t been able to find an alternative version that I can stand up. Now, more information is appearing.

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There are two famous ‘stories’ about a man who was apparently seen killed during the Chmielniki uprisings in 1648, so the rabbis permitted his wife to remarry. Trouble was, the man wasn’t killed, and came back home a year later.

In one version of that story – the one attributed to Yaakov Emden, apparently the Chacham Tzvi’s son – this ‘resurrected’ man is called the Shaar Ephraim, and is meant to be the father or grandfather of the Chacham Tzvi. In turn, the Shaar Ephraim is meant to have descended from the wonder-working ‘Rabbi Elijah Baal Shem of Chelm’.

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Remember in the Rav’s shiur on the Golem of Chelm, he first brought that strange story of R’ Heshel of Krakow’s niece, who was apparently ‘arguing’ with two witnesses that her husband hadn’t been beheaded, as the last of a 100 Jews publically killed in line by the Cossacks?

That part of the shiur was actually directed connected to the part about the Golem of Chelm, and Elijah Baal Shem of Chelm.

Let’s continue with the snippets from that old post from 2021:

The Shaar Ephraim is meant to be the grandson of Ephraim Fishel, who CO-INC-ID-ENT-ALLY is the brother of that royal tax collector who became a xtian,  Moshe Stefan Fiszel Powditzky.

There is also a second version of the story about the ‘man who faked his own death’. In that second version,  the man who is ‘resurrected’ is identified as the father of the Chacham Tzvi himself, and is called Yaakov Koppel Heller Wallerstein FRANKEL.

You remember who else was a Frankel, don’t you?

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JACOB LOB BENJAMIN FRANKEL = JACOB FRANK, THE FALSE  MESSIAH.

He had some truly fantastic yichus, on both sides of his fantastic family tree.

And yes, he still came from a notable, leading, Sabbatean family – who the rabbis helped ‘hide like the night’, to quote Yaakov Emden, because honestly, look at this yichus!

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Ad kan, from the first post from the old blog.

BTW, since I posted this up four years ago, all these family trees have gone ‘private’, or have been disappeared. Not only that, this series of posts from 2021 marked the time when Google started de-listing my site, and the censorship that’s apparently all in my head kicked in, well and truly.

That’s a big part of how I knew I was over the target with this Frankist stuff, because if it was baloney – why go to all that trouble to censor it so much?

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Now, we’re going to re-visit another old blog post, called:

Mystics, and Mad Martin, the Belarussian ‘Dracula’

Here is where the ‘Baddd start to join up with R Eliyahu the Baal Shem of Chelm. Back in 2021, I’d started reading through the Rebbe Rayatz’s ‘memoirs, and the following is pertinent for our discussion here:

From page 25, part of a discussion about an organised underground group of ‘kabbalist mystics’ who are spreading out across Eastern Europe, to help people ‘reach a higher spiritual levell:

“And don’t imagine…that each of these mystics is merely following his own particular plan. I can tell you positively that every one of them has had his ‘mission’ assigned to him and has been told in which area is his ‘sphere of influence’. Taken collectively, they all form part or a large, comprehensive whole, with its inspiration emanating from their chief. “This particular society of people,” continued Wolf, in a way that showed he knew all there was to know about it, and even as if he were also one of them, “is quite an old one.

It was first established by the tzaddik, the gaon, Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem of Wurms, Germany. Thus the movement is about one hundred and ten years old. “Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem established this society upon the request of a certain Kabbalist, whose identity is unknown to this day. We are told that this Kabbalist requested that chosen gaonim and tzaddikim, who would be prepared to dedicate their whole lives to this sacred work, should be sent out among the poor, simple, uneducated and unawakened Jews, and make them aware of their Creator, and of the spiritual values in life.

“It was about the year 5381 (1621) or 5383 (1623) that this society was established by Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem, and ever since, thousands and thousands of ordinary Jews have been brought back to the service of G-d!”

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Some historical context, to help you connect the dots for yourself:

Rabbi Israel ben Sarah, the Baal Shem Tov (BESHT) was only born in 1698. This ‘particular society of people’, apparently started up by ‘Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem’ was operating for 75 years before the BESHT was even alive. Even more interestingly, the standard dates given for ‘Shabtai Tzvi’ say he was born in 1626 – three years before this ‘particular society of people’ apparently started to operate across Jewish Eastern Europe.

So, who exactly were this ‘particular society of people’, and where did their teachings really come from?

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Next, I tried to pin down who ‘Eliyahu Baal Shem of Wurms’ actually is, in real life.

In various places, he’s described as the ‘grandfather’ or sometimes the ‘great-grandfather’ of none other than the Chacham Tzvi.

If you go to Wikipedia, HERE, you’ll find an entry for one ‘Eliezer Loans’, who could be the ‘real persona’ of Eliyahu Baal Shem of Chelm. Here’s a snippet: (Note: ‘Virmyze’ is another spelling of ‘Wurms’)

Elijah ben Moses Ashkenazi Loans also known as Elijah Ba’al Shem of Virmyze (1555 – July 1636) was a German rabbi and Kabbalist. He was born in Frankfurt-am-Main. He belonged to the family of Rashi, on his mother’s side was the grandson of Johanan Luria, and on his father’s of Josel of Rosheim.

After having studied in his native city under the direction of Jacob Ginzburg and Akiba Frankfort, Loans went to Cracow, where he attended the lectures of Menahem Mendel. While there he prepared for publication the “Darke Mosheh” of Moses Isserles.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century Loans was called to the rabbinate of Fulda, which he left in 1612, occupying successively the rabbinates of Hanau, Friedberg (1620), and Worms (1630), in which last-named city he remained until his death. Loans was a diligent student of Kabbalah, and for this reason was surnamed “Ba’al Shem.” He was also accomplished in music and calligraphy, and various legends circulated regarding his personality… Loans also edited the “‘Ammude Shelomoh” of Solomon Luria on the “Semag” (Basel, 1599), and the “Sha’are Dura” of Isaac ben Meïr of Dueren, to which he wrote a preface.

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If you go to Wikipedia HERE, you’ll find an alternative profile for ‘Elijah Ba’al Shem of Chełm‘:

Elijah Ba’al Shem (1550 – 1583) was a Polish rabbi and kabbalist who served as chief rabbi of Chełm. One of the most eminent Talmudists of his generation, he is recorded as the first person known by the epithet “Ba’al Shem” having been considered a great saint and believed to have used miraculous powers to create a golem.

Elijah was born to his father Aaron Judah in 1550. About 1565 he entered the yeshiva of Rabbi Solomon Luria of Lublin, and, after receiving his rabbinical ordination, became rabbi of Chełm, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. In 1564, he gathered with other prominent rabbis, including his teacher, to co-sign the halachic rulings which allowed an agunah to remarry.

His great-granddaughter married Rabbi Ephraim ha-Kohen (1616–1678), author of “Sha’ar Efrayim” and grandfather of Rabbi Tzvi Ashkenazi.

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There’s a few things to notice.

Firstly, ‘Elijah Ba’al Shem of Chelm’ appears to have died pretty young and is recorded as having no gravestone, despite having apparently risen from the dead during his funeral to make a church sink into the ground. That’s pretty weird, as we Jews venerate our saints, and visit their tombs.

So, it’s at least possible that these two ‘Elijah Baal Shems’ are really one and the same person.

The second thing is the connection between these two Elijahs, and Rabbi Solomon Luria of Lublin, (the MAHARSHAL) who apparently lived between 1510-1573. At least one of these Elijahs married the MAHARSHAL’s daughter, while another version has the MAHARSHAL marrying Elijah of Chelm’s daughter – which would be quite a feat, considering that even if the Baal Shem of Chelm got married at 13 and immediately had children, his oldest child would only be 10 years old when the MAHARSHAL died.

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According to the Freidiriker Rebbe (page 34), ‘Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem’s father was:

“A certain Spanish Jew named Yosef Jospa“, who arrived in Cracow aged 50 years old, either in 5261 (1501) or 5265 (1505), and then married 30 years later, apparently aged 80 (!)

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Meanwhile, the other ‘Elijah Baal Shem’ candidate,  Elijah Loans, has a grandpa called Josel (Yosef) of Rosheim (1476 – 1554), who according to Wiki,

“Was considered as the most important advocate of the Jews in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.”

This Yosel / Yosef styled himself ‘commander-in-chief’ of Germany Jewry, and is a very interesting character.

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Ad kan, from 2021.

Of course, still so much to unpick, even four years later.

But let’s see if we can shine a bit more light on this subject, beginning with the basic premise that:

All of the Shabbatean rabbis and prophets had at least one, if not more, ‘alter egos’.

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Here’s the next point we can sum up:

So many of the disparate groups of Jews leading our community, on all sides of the divide,  belong to the same small set of families. Many of these families trace back – via multiple ancestors – to the Maharal of Prague and the Maharam of Padua, and beyond. Way, way beyond.

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Let’s give one example:

Binyamin Netanyahu, whose family surname was originally ‘Milikovsky’, is a descendant of the Vilna Gaon.

See here for more information:

Nathan Milikowsky Netanyahu was born to Zvi in Krevo (Vilna area) in 1875, a descendant of the Gaon from Vilna. He studied at the Volozhin Yeshiva for 8 years and then became an orator preaching about Zionism. He migrated (with his children who were born in Warsaw) to Palestine in 1920 and served as headmaster of various Hebrew high schools in several towns before settling in Jerusalem as an official of the World Zionist Organization. On his arrival in Palestine, Milikovsky changed the family name to Netanyahu (“Lord has given”).

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(Two more examples: Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin were both direct descendants of CHAIM of VOLOZHIN, said to be the GRA’s leading disciple… It’s always the same people, on all sides of the arguments.)

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BTW, on that original post from 4 years ago, Daisy left a comment that included this information:

My Tzaddik cousin Pinchas (Tibor) Rosenbaum ZT”L was a descendant of the Maharal of Prague – according to his children!

Go look that guy up, if you can be bothered. There’s a lot of very interesting stuff going on with him, that exactly fits with what we’re talking about here.

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So, let’s get back to the ‘Baddd dimension to all this, and then we’ll stop there for today.

The Alter Rebbe was supposed to be the 7th generation from the Maharal of Prague.

The Baddd is very into their yichus, and they will stress over and over and over again, the fabulous yichus of the Rebbes…. except, it’s so very hard to pin down that information in anything approaching ‘the real world’. Kinda strange, for an organisation who devotes so much energy into claiming their leaders were ‘moshiach’, and so have to descend, son-after-son, from King David himself.

The link to the Maharal of Prague, who is meant to have descended from King David (good luck, standing that up…) is the whole basis for the claim that the ‘Baddd Rebbe(s) had the necessary yichus to be the Moshiach.

So, you’d really think all this stuff would be set out super-clearly, so even dunces and conspiracy theorists like yours truly could follow the yichus… wouldnt’ you?

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Here’s some screenshots from another old blog post, back when I wasn’t ‘blocked’ from doing stuff on Geni:

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I’d love to give you the link to that Geni discussion from four years ago, which also showed how the Loews descended from Cohanim from Baghdad, and also showed how JACOB FRANK is part of the Eskeles family tree…. but I can’t.

For some reason, I can’t find the post with that information, and I can’t find the discussion on geni, either.

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But never mind: this discussion will do instead:

https://www.geni.com/people/Hananya-ben-Haninai-haKohen-al-Nahr-Paqod-Dayan-of-the-Gate-Gaon-of-Sura/6000000001263102021

It’s a whole big can of worms.

Bottom line, the ‘Maharal of Prague’ is said to descend from this line. But here’s the thing about this line:

2) All the above (including Natronai from Pumpedisa) are descended from Adda, the daughter of Bustenai, who married Bustenai’s first cousin Chaninai ben Hunai hakohen. Thus, the family is a direct patrilineal descent from aharon hakohen, and direct patrilineal descent WITH ONE DAUGHTER IN THE LINE from King David.

Bottom line, the Maharal wasn’t ‘son after son’ from King David, the line is actually one of Kohanim (those same ‘bent’ kohanim that gave us the Tzadukim, and so much tzarot for 2,000 years already) – and the Chabad Rebbes COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MOSHIACH.

Proven from their own yichus.

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A lot to take in, I know.

My mum keeps telling me to write a book about all this. Maybe, one day.

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PS: Here’s the Rebbe’s yichus list, handwritten and illegible, from the ‘Baddd itself:

I got to it from THIS discussion on the Maharal’s genealogy on geni, where the genealogy hits a dead end pretty fast.

Here’s the relevant comments:

I looked through the drawings a bit, and there is a problem: there is a reference there through Rabbi Hai Gaon (hopefully I spelled his name correctly in English), the problem: the researchers are not at all sure he had children, so the lists should be treated with skepticism.

And this is a comment from the ‘Baddd’s own site:

The Rebbe is BEN ACHAR BEN from Dovid Hamelech. Not through the Alter Rebbe. Rather through Reb Sholom Shachne the father of the Tzemach Tzedek.

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HERE is the Tzemach Tzedek’s family tree, on geni.

The paternal line traces back to one ‘PINCHAS CHAJES‘ born 1485, connected to Prague – and then stops.

There is no ‘descent from King David’ in sight for the Tzemach Tzedek…

Quite an important issue to be getting wrong, given the claims made for his illustrious descendant. Don’t you think?

My friend just sent me this short Runkle video.

I watched it, and I found her nuances helpful:

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Takeaway points, for me, is that the labels are much less important than the experience itself.

Most of us are are interacting with very troubled family members, one way or another, these days.

The ‘stress’ of the world is bringing out the PTSD symptoms more and more, there’s just no hiding the bad middot any more.

But the real issue I think comes down to taking responsibility for our own bad middot, and how they impact others.

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The last few weeks have been quite a rollercoaster for me, trying to digest all the new insights about  my family dynamics, and how they impacted me then – but more importantly, and really the main point, how they have still been impacting me today.

Because honestly, the past is the past, and it doesn’t really matter so much, as long as the ‘danger’ from then, the horrible behaviours from then, are not still continuing on today, in 2025.

But what I realised a few weeks’ ago is that the same ‘bullying’ from then has been following me around ever since, with a certain member of my extended family.

And I also realised, that this person is NEVER going to admit what’s going on, try to change, try to fix things, start over – that’s really the ‘ground zero’ of being a true narc, and not just a troubled person.

Because in some way or another, we are all troubled in some way, these days.

But only narcs totally and absolutely refuse to acknowledge their share in whatever mess has been made, and try to destroy you for even mentioning something is not working properly.

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What I’ve realised, though, is that if we’re genuine about everything coming from God, including the bullying narcs, then we also have to look for the real solutions to these difficulties inside ourselves.

To give one huge example, I have realised that it’s my own weak boundaries that are causing me the issues I now have with people trying to take more than I can give.

And the only way to fix that, is for me myself to take responsibility for me myself, and to ask God to give me stronger, healthy boundaries, so I don’t get sucked in to other people’s dramas and problems inappropriately.

As part of this process, I just read Anna Runkle’s book Re-regulated, which is very helpful, and I also got the second book Connect-ability – which my husband grabbed first, so now I have to have a little patience, as he reads way slower than I do.

But bottom line: I can’t change anyone else.

I have to just hold God’s hand and work on myself.

It’s easy to say, and not at all easy to do, consistently.

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My last thought for now has to do with the real you is the you at home.

Our communities are full of ‘tzaddikim’ and ‘tzaddekot’ who apparently just do chesed 24/7 for everyone else, and especially, on social media.

The reality is how their kids experience them.

What I’ve noticed is that so  many of these ‘tzaddikim’ and ‘tzaddekot’ have kids who are really miserable, feel disconnected from their parents, and often, have massive issues of feeling unseen and neglected – compounded by the ‘guilt’ of daring to criticise all these big tzaddikim parents of theirs, who put everyone else first.

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The real you is the you at home.

Try this: send some ‘Crappy Childhood Fairy’ videos to your kids, and invite them to compare and contrast with their experience of you as a parent (if they are already grown up enough to be out the house and able to give you a real answer.)

The people who want to keep thinking they are perfect, and who have no real interest in working on their bad middot – those people would probably rather gouge out an eye with a fork, than send a video from the Crappy Childhood Fairy to their own kids – or siblings.

Me?

I sent the link to my girls and husband the first time I realised she was helpful, and I encouraged them to see if anything ‘speaks’ to them.

I am happy to keep working on the stuff I messed up, and I’m not pretending there isn’t a ton of it.

And really – that’s what counts.

That’s the bottom line.

Not to be ‘pretend perfect’, but to continue to show up and take responsibility for being ‘real flawed’.

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BH, I hope this becomes the new trend in the Jewish community.

Heaven help us, otherwise.