Hopefully, you’ll find this post very interesting and ‘enlightening’, if that word can still be used in a positive sense.

Our Sages teach us very clearly:

In every generation, there is an individual who has potential to become the ‘Moshiach ben David’ (MBD) of that generation.

In every generation, there is a person who is the hezkat Moshiach.

But in order to become the actual MBD, that person then has to fulfill all the requirements incumbent upon the ‘Moshiach ben David’.

This post is going to be plenty long enough as it is, so I’m not going to bring all the details of those requirements here. If you’re interested in reading more about that aspect of this discussion, try THIS as a very basic primer.

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What we’re exploring more in this post is the idea that in every generation, there is a ‘hezkat Moshiach’ – who actually failed to ‘materialise’ in his job.

And this is something different from a ‘false messiah’, who is someone who was never, and could never, have been ‘MBD’ at any stage.

An example of a ‘false messiah’ is SHABTAI TZVI / SHACH – who was a Kohen, and so could never have been ‘MBD’ right from the beginning.

(We are also leaving alone the whole idea of ‘Moshiach ben Yosef’ in this post. It’s something the GRA and his students spoke a lot about, and again, it’s a whole discussion in and of itself[1].)

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In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at what actually spurred the organised aliya of the GRA’s disciples beginning in the early 1800s.

Those disciples are known as the PERUSHIM.

And as part of that process, we’re going to take a closer look at what these PERUSHIM themselves believed about the GRA, in terms of him being the ‘Moshiach’ of his generation.

We’re going to cover a lot of ground, including more fascinating information about how it was the GRA’s disciples who decided that the ‘Three Oaths’ no longer applied to barring mass-aliya to the Holy Land.

And how, when the messianic fervor leading up to 1840 – (the year 5600 in our counting, when the GRA and many others believed that the geula would start in earnest, as per their understanding of the Zohar) failed, how that then lead to such great disappointment amongst the PERUSHIM and others, there was a wave of conversions to xtianity, and also, general apostasy, that devolved down into secular z-nism.

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In this post, I’m not going to focus in on ‘Frankism’, or ‘Sabbateanism’.

There are for sure a lot of connections to be made, but first, we just need the bare bones of what actually happened clearly set out, and easy to follow.

Why?

Because the fall-out from what happened then is still affecting us greatly today, in so many ways.

And there is so much for us to learn from, as the ‘messianic fervor’ of our own days intensifies, about how the only way to get all through this is not with ‘predictions of the end’ or hanging on for ‘Moshiach to show up and save us’.

Rather, we need to move forward with simple emuna.

That everything is in God’s hands, except our own teshuva process.

It’s probably one of the most important posts I’m going to write.

And with that intro out the way, let’s begin.

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The story begins with a book written by historian Aryeh Morgenstern, called:

HASTENING REDEMPTION

It’s the precursor to the book he wrote a few years later that I’ve quoted a lot from already, called:

THE GAON OF VILNA AND HIS MESSIANIC VISION

That last book gave us all the information about how the GRA (whoever he actually is….) got to Amsterdam in 1778, as part of his aborted attempt to move to Eretz Yisrael.

HASTENING REDEMPTION explains much more of the back-story of the PERUSHIM, including what was really motivating them.

What you understand very fast from reading the book is that the GRA’s disciples behaved in exactly the same way as chassidim acted around their own particular ‘rebbe’.

The GRA was the ‘Rebbe’ of the Perushim from Shklov and Vilna.

K’pshuto.

And they firmly believed their ‘Rebbe’ was the Moshiach of his generation.

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Before I tell you their story, let’s quote something from Morgenstern’s preface:

“I want to note “The Disciples of the Ga’on of Vilna, Sabbateanism and the Jewish Essence”, a revolutionary study by Prof. Judah Liebes….

According to Prof. Liebes’s discoveries, R. Menachem Mendel of Shklov, the Ga’on of Vilna’s disciple, regarded Shabbetai Tzvi as the false ‘messiah’ who had stumbled and fallen down among the qelippot (the ‘husks’, kabbalistic imagery for the forces of evil.)

The Ga’on himself, meanwhile, was the true messiah, known as the ‘reviving serpent’ (nahash in Hebrew, the numerical value of whose letters equals that of mashiah, messiah), who had come to repair Shabbetai Zevi by revealing the secrets of the Torah, and later in the process, through the settlement of the Land of Israel by his disciples.”

(Bold emphasis mine).

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Let that sink in.

It’s spiritual dynamite.

It shows clearly that whoever the real GRA and the real ‘Alter Rebbe’ of Chabad actually were, in terms of their Sabbatean family connections and leanings, the real argument boiled down to this:

Who was the true ‘moshiach’ of their generation – the GRA, or the Alter Rebbe?

(The answer was apparently always ‘neither’…. Maybe, we’ll get to that another time.)

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OK, so now, what was happening around the time the GRA was being acclaimed as the ‘true moshiach’ by his disciples, the Perushim?

The Freemasons[2], including the Austrian Freemason Joseph II (brother of Marie Antoinette) had sponsored Napoleon to overturn the world, and uproot ‘organised religion’, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789.

The European nations’ ongoing war against the Ottoman Turks was also entering a new phase, where the Ottomans were becoming a weak empire, and were starting to lose ground rapidly, both figuratively and in actuality[3].

Satanic secret societies were flourishing all over the place, and had royals, nobles and ‘philosophers’ as their patrons.

Where the ‘Bad Baal Shem’ of London, SAMUEL FALK was promoting satanic ‘mysticism’, the BAAL SHEM TOV, on the side of good, was trying to channel all this awakened ‘mysticism’ back in the direction of serving God, and upholding the Torah and its commandments.

Lastly, the externally pious ‘Sabbateanism’ of Shabtai Tzvi / SHACH and Jonathan Eibshitz had now morphed into the nihilistic, openly satanic and externally ‘xtian’ movement under JACOB FRANK (with some help from WOLF EIBSHITZ, Jonathan Eibshitz’s youngest son.)

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Long story short, the whole world was in uproar, the whole world appeared to be ‘at war’, and just like today, the observant Jews believed all this heralded ‘the birth bangs of the Moshiach’.

As we started to explore more HERE, the Frankist-Reforming-maskilim and the Freemasons were intertwined already by this point.

And messianic fervour was also reaching boiling point by the ‘xtians’ too, most notably the Protestants. This is a quote from page 11:

“In Protestant England as well, Napoleon’s expedition to the Land of Israel gave rise to theological deliberations over Israel’s return to its land.

These assessments commingled religious expectations with political considerations. The power that helped the Jews return to their land and establish their national state there would gain a grateful and loyal ally in the East, reaping abundant political and economic benefits.”

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Remember this, from the Economic Hitman a few years ago, explaining how ‘the Jews’ were being used right from the start to provide a ‘European bulwark’ in the Middle East, so the non-Jewish satanic masons could move in and exploit the region’s natural resources to the max?

That was always the plan.

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So, the Freemasons, with some help from their ‘Frankist’ acolytes, leveraged ‘messianic yearnings’ on both sides of the Jewish-xtian equation to start making that happen.

And as the 1800s progressed, the world was gripped by one revolution, one ‘war’, one uprising after another.

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Meanwhile, ZVI HIRSH LEHREN, the main funder of the GRA’s Perushim in Amsterdam, was also willing to dig deep into his pockets to fund their settlement in Eretz Yisrael – because he also believed that ‘the Moshiach’ was about to show up, and geula was imminent.

Snippet from page 12:

“Zevi Hirsch Lehren possessed…a powerful messianic faith….

On June 24th June 1831 he writes: ‘The earthquake that has now come upon the world in several countries, and the manner in which the fear of government has declined and descended to the dust – who can be sure that this does not entail preparation for the coming of King Messiah [!?]

For God, may He be blessed, thereby shows the worldly kings that He alone appoints kings and kingship is properly His. And the shoot of David will sprout and his glory will be raised up, and the kingdom will be restored to Jerusalem.”

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LEHREN, for all his other faults and his descent from a bunch of Sabbatean bankers, really believed this.

To the point that he was willing to spend so much of his fortune on supporting the Perushim’s attempts to settle the Holy Land.

Morgenstern explains that ZVI HIRSH LEHREN was a big follower of the GRA, and that according to the GRA and his followers, the moshiach was going to show up in 1840.

(Who they believed that ‘MBD’ to actually be is a matter of speculation.

There is precedent from our own days, and certainly from the Sabbateans who preceded the GRA’s students, that the Perushim may have believed the GRA was going to be ‘reincarnated’ as part of techiat hametim in 1840, as the ‘MBD’.)

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OK, so now on the other side of the story, let’s take a look at the main leaders of the Perushim in Israel at this stage, YISRAEL OF SHKLOV, and MENACHEM MENDEL OF SHKLOV.

Before we do that, a word on the ‘Three Oaths’.

Morgenstern explains that once the Tzar Nicolai I instituted the notorious ‘Cantonist Decrees[4]’ beginning 1804 (although they had been in the pipe for 25 years, before then), the GRA’s disciples believed this level of oppression of the Jews abrogated the ‘Three Oaths’, that had prevented mass, organised immigration to Eretz Yisrael up until this point.

He brings a latter from ISRAEL of SHLOV sent in 1830, to the Ten Tribes, where some of this idealogy is set out.

The idea that it was now OK for the Jews to try to ‘force the end’, by taking concrete actions to resettle Eretz Yisrael, was a radical departure from the traditional approach – and it’s something that at this time characterised only the Perushim, the followers of the GRA.

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In the meantime, what actually happened to the Perushim after they moved to Israel?

There were three ‘waves’ of organised aliya, mostly from Shklov and Vilna, beginning in 1809.

Because the Ashkenazi Sabbateans under Yehudah Chassid[5] had run up massive unpaid debts in Jerusalem, around the building of the now ruined ‘Churva Synagogue’ and compound. The Perushim decided to settle in Tsfat, and not Jerusalem.

The first couple of years, things are going great guns for the Perushim, and the plan to resettle Israel, buy land, start the process of geula with an ‘awakening from below’ seems to be working.

They are being funded via some joint arrangement involving ZVI HIRSCH LEHREN of Amsterdam, and the ‘NOBLES of VILNA’ charidee organisation that also went by the name KOLLEL RASSEINI (that was under the control of SHNEUR ZALMAN, the ALTER REBBE[6].)

Then in 1813 – disaster strikes.

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This snippet is from page 67:

“During 1813-1814, an epidemic raged in parts of Syria and spread to the Galilee; it claimed the lives of many new immigrants affiliated with the kolel of the Perushim. Among the victims were many members of Israel of Shklov’s family.”

That included his wife, his parents, four of his children and his son-in-law.

Of the 511 members of the Perushim who had made aliya between 1809-1813, only a few dozens – or around a fifth – remained.

The Perushim themselves understood this as a clear sign that God wasn’t happy about something, but then a big dispute opened up between YISRAEL of SHKLOV and MENACHEM MENDEL of SHKLOV, about why they’d been struck such a harsh blow.

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MENACHEM MENDEL of SHKLOV argued that it’s because the Perushim had settled in Tsfat, instead of settling in Jerusalem, and rebuilding the Sabbatean synagogue, the CHURVA, and it’s courtyard.

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It seems none of the Perushim were linking what had happened back to trying to ‘force the end’ with their aliya, at least not at this stage.

Why not?

Because they were relying on the fact that none other than the GRA himself had ordered his disciples to make aliya en masse to Israel, as part of his ‘will’.

Here’s another snippet from page 81:

“Some years ago, there came to light a manuscript by Aryeh Ne’eman, who immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1813 and served for many years as a trustee of the kolel of the Perushim in Jerusalem.

The manuscript mentions two previously unknown facts related to the aliyah of the Vilna Gaon’s disciples:

That the initiative began in 1800, only two years after the Ga’on’s death, and that the individual who initiated the project was none other than his eminent disciple, Hayyim of Volozhin[7], hitherto only known only for his moral, organisational and economic support for this aliyah.”

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To make a very long story short, the Perushim fractured into distinct groups at this point, one coalesced around YISRAEL of SHKLOV in TSFAT, while the other group banded together around MENACHEM MENDEL of SHKLOV, and his plan to rebuild the Sabbatean’s CHURVA compound.

The groups started fighting each other over who should get more money, and control, from ZVI HIRSH LEHREN, and the ‘Nobles of Vilna’ (aka KOLLEL RASSEINI).

And things got so bad, they even started slandering each other to the local Muslim rulers.

There is nothing new under the sun.

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In the meantime, MENACHEM MENDEL of SHKLOV and the people associated with him manage to get Ottoman permission to:

a) cancel all the old debts associated with YEHUDAH CHASSID’s group in Jerusalem

b) Rebuild the CHURVA.

They took this as yet another sign that the time for the redemption had arrived.

But it seems that God didn’t agree with them.

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On January 6th, 1837, the group around MENACHEM MENDEL of SHKLOV dedicated part of the CHURVA they’d just rebuilt, which was the study hall called ‘MENACHEM ZIYYON’.

At exactly the same time, the devastating earthquake of 1837 hit Tsfat, killing thousands more people.

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The Jerusalem Perushim claim that Tsfat is destroyed because YISRAEL of SHKLOV was against the rebuilding of the CHURVA.

Meanwhile, YISRAEL of SHKLOV and his backer ZVI HIRSCH LEHREN claim that he was miraculously saved from the Tsfat earthquake precisely because he was down in Jerusalem completing the purchase of another courtyard from the Arabs, to serve as an alternative Ashkenazi synagogue to the Churva.

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Point is, in 1837, the Perushim were so convinced that the Moshiach was imminent, and that the geula had begun, they’d even starting changing the prayer liturgy in some worryingly familiar ways.

This is from page 131:

“On the premise that the redemption has in fact begun auspiciously, [the Perushim] changed the order of prayer and deleted, from the Lekhah Dodi hymn….the verse calling on Zion to rise from its dust.

They likewise abandoned the recitation of dirges as part of tiqqun hazot, all on the premise that the shekhinah had already risen from the dust of exile.

Reacting to this, Lehren says, ‘Regarding their omission of [the verse from Lekhah Dodi] and the dirges in tiqqun hazot, I would ask who introduced this innovation.

‘If it not a great man, one well-known not to have been misled by the error of Shabbetai Zevi… Then I would be suspicious that the practice had arisen from people misled by Shabbatai Zevi, for Hemdat Yamim [a book likely written by a Sabbatean) also says not to recite [these passages].’”

(Emphasis mine.)

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Remember, ZVI HIRSCH LEHREN is writing about the ‘cream of the crop’ of the GRA’s students in Israel.

But as I hope you are starting to realise, ‘false’ or even just ‘failed’ potential messiahs always start off as tremendous scholars with tremendous followings.

Just that can devolve very quickly into very bad things.

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The whole time the Perushim were in Israel, they were in close contact with xtian missionaries, many of whom were actually born Jews who had ‘converted’.[8]

We’re not going to digress into a whole discussion of the Frankists here, but it’s important to remember that the leading Sabbatean families had many members who followed Frank into ‘xtianity’, and who believed his teaching that all Jews had to ‘raise the sparks’ out of xtianity by converting to that faith.

(Externally…. Internally, it was a totally different story.)

Not every single ‘converted Jew’ at this time was a Frankist, or came from a Sabbatean-Frankist family.

But a lot of them, particularly the more privileged and wealthy ones, were.

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So, the Perushim and also the chassidim in Eretz Yisrael have tight links with many of these missionaries and accept both financial and political help from them.

This is in stark contrast with the Sephardim in the Holy Land, many of whom were also secret Sabbateans, or from Sabbatean families – but drew the line very firmly with interacting with xtian missionaries in any way.

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This sets the scene for what happens next to the GRA’s Perushim, after 1840 comes and goes – and no Moshiach shows up.

Snippet from page 165:

“And now we come to resolve and explain the words of the holy Zohar… Regarding what is written there explicitly with respect to the year 5600 was not realised….

For [the Messiah] was supposed to come in the six hundredth year of the sixth millenium… And, if so – why does our Messiah delay….?

And some people have become heretical on account of this, having seen that six has come, that is, the year 5600, and he [the Messiah] has not come, they said he will never come.”

– Aviezer of Ticktin, writing in Sha’arei Zedeq.

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There is nothing new under the sun.

When we put all our hopes on ‘dates’ and ‘end time calculations’, instead of focussing on working on strengthening our own emuna, and improving our own bad middot, this is the despairing, heretical, ‘anti-emuna’ trap a person can so easily fall into.

And as it happened in 1840 – so it’s happening again, right now, in our days.

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The xtians were here on the scene for a few reasons, not least that getting the Jews back to the Holy Land is also part of the ‘Anglican’ xtian tradition for how redemption unfolds.

With the next bit of their story that Yoshki then ‘comes back’, and rules the world for a thousand years, God forbid a million, billion, trillion times over.

But the point is, the ‘xtian plan’ is:

1. Get the Jews back to Eretz Yisrael.
2. Get the Jews converted to xtianity.

And yes, that exact same plan is still operating in Eretz Yisrael today, in our times, but that’s also a topic for another post.

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Why do the Perushim accept so much help, money and influence from the xtian missionaries here?

The prosaic reason is they were so broke and poor, they felt they really had no choice.

But of course, they also had a ‘philosophical’ reason for why it was OK to co-operate with xtian missionaries.

This is a snippet from page 167:

“[For the leadership of the Perushim in Jerusalem], the involvement of Christian missionaries in efforts on behalf of the Jewish community represented the fulfillment of the prophetic promise that gentiles would help promote the return to Zion: ‘And strangers will build your walls.’”[9]

And the people who were dealing with the missionaries in Eretz Yisrael were the creme de la creme of the Perushim.

Snippet from page 168:

“During the 1820s, most of the dealings with the missionaries were conducted by Menachem Mendel of Shklov and Solomon Zalman Shapira; the meetings took place in the rabbis’ own homes.”

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Again, to cut a very long story short, when 1840 (5600) came and went with no obvious ‘Moshiach’ appearing (or ‘re-appearing’….)

Many of the Jews in Israel lost their faith.

There was a spate of conversions to xtianity – including what Morgenstern calles ‘three of the Sages of the Jerusalem Perushim.’

These three were:

“Eliezer Luria (a second cousin of David Luria – a leading Lithuanian rabbi – and a third cousin of Shemariah Luria, the son-in-law of Hillel of Shklov);

Benjamin Goldberg; and

Abraham Nisan Walfin (the brother of David Walfin, a trustee of the kolel of the Perushim, and son-in-lalw of Menachem Mendel of Shklov.)”

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In the end, Walfin backed out of converting at the last minute, after three years of deeply considering it.

Morgenstern doesn’t mention other individuals, but from my own research I turned up a bunch more surprising xtian converts in Eretz Yisrael, including:

SHABTAI BINYAMIN ROHALD – the great-grandson of MENACHEM MENDEL of SHKLOV, via his son, NATAN NATA of SHKLOV, who also became a missionary for the xtians in Eretz Yisrael.

Snippet from the archived version of the Christian Witness to Israel website, HERE:

Christian Witness to Israel (CWI) has been involved in the work of the Gospel in Israel since 1847, when it commenced a school in Jaffa under the leadership of “Mr. Manning”. Manning resigned and returned to England in 1858. In 1921, Rev. Sabot B. Rohold appeared on the scene. Rohold, son of Rabbi Naphtha Rohold had been born in Jerusalem (1876). The details of his conversion are unknown.

A Mr. Joseph, associated with the Plymouth Brethren, had been working in the land and somehow came into contact with the young Sabot, resulting in God’s goodness in the young man’s conversion. Rohold graduated from the University of Glasgow and from the Free Church College in Edinburgh.

Between the years 1897 to 1906, he served as the Superintendent of the Boner Memorial Mission to the Jews in Glasgow. In 1908 he accepted a call to the Toronto congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Canada, where helped found the first Hebrew Christian Synagogue. He also participated in the founding of the Hebrew-Christian Alliance of America.

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In 1919 Sabot returned to Palestine with Mr. Joseph, who was then quite ill and increasingly concerned about the future of the work he had founded in Haifa. He proposed to give the building he owned on the slopes of Mount Carmel to Rohold but the latter thought it wiser for Joseph to deed the property to the British Jews Society, as CWI was then known.

Two years later, Rohold offered his services to the BUS for work in Palestine and the Free Church of Scotland invited BUS to become its agent for missionary work among the Jews. Thus, an ongoing relation was established between CWI and the Free Church, which relation continues to the present day.

In the course of that time, the work has taken on different forms.

At first, there was no Jewish Christian presence to speak of in the land. The number of Jewish settlers was small and the medical, social and economic needs of the Jewish settlers most pressing.

CWI responded with a medical and colportage outreach, publishing material in Hebrew and actively promoting the welfare of the small but growing Jewish population in. Among projects undertaken was a small workshop where Jewish settlers were taught to work wood and leather.

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I highly recommend you go HERE and read the whole thing.

You’ll learn that the HaGefen publishing house is xtian-owned – and that the Israel army is literally crawling with home-grown xtian missionaries….

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To return 200 years ago – it was a plague of conversions – all subsequently hushed-up by the leaders of the Perushim.

So, some of the Perushim and their descendants converted to xtianity.

Other descendants of these Perushim become the leading maskilim and proto-z-ists in Israel, including:

JOSEPH RIVLIN and YOEL MOSES SALOMON.

(There are many, many more that could be added to this list.)

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And then, the third group ‘retreated’ from any idea of being able to ‘force the end’ and rebuild the land with human activitism.

This snippet is from page 187:

“The Messiah’s failure to arrive at the expected time reignited the old disputes over the mechanics of redemption.

One emergent group within the kolel began to retreat from the accepted notion of hastening the redemption through construction and other action.”

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Let me quote one more very interesting snippet from page 188, written by none other than MOSES TEITELBAUM[10], of what became Satmar chassidut, responding to the terrible earthquake of 1837 that killed so many in Tsfat:

“And it seems clear to me from the troubles that have over the holy city year after year – including its being despoiled and its women being defiled and so too, Torah scrolls in the sanctuary [1834], and this year, because of our many sins, thousands being killed in the earthquake – that the will of the Lord, may He be blessed, is that we not go to the Land of Israel on our own initiative; rather, we should wait for our righteous Messiah to lead us to our Land.”

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I could carry on bringing snippets from Morgenstern’s very interesting book for another ten years, but that will do for now.

In this post, we learned together that none other than the ‘VILNA GAON’ sparked a messianic movement that brought many hundreds of his disciples to Eretz Yisrael, as part of an organised attempt to ‘settle the land’ and force the end times – ahead of 1840 (5600).

These disciples believed the GRA was Moshiach.

They followed his ‘will’ dictating that all his disciples should ascend to Eretz Yisrael, to prepare the land for the coming (or reappearance?) of the Moshiach in 5600 (1840).

And when that back-fired spectacularly, after one disaster after another occurred here in the Holy Land, and 5600 came and went with nothing except the Damascus Blood Libel to show for itself, his followers split into three distinct groups:

1. Xtian converts and apostates who despaired of the Moshiach ever coming.
2. ‘Proto-z-ists’, who kept going with the idea of ‘settling the land’ with human activism, but increasingly divorced it from it’s religious and spiritual component and association with geula and the coming of Moshiach.
3. Hardcore ‘anti-activists’ who became the nub of the Ashkenazi extremists who began to terrorise the Old Yishuv’s attempts to modernise, or get out from under the yoke of the chalukah payments by developing some sort of economy in Eretz Yisrael.

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Of course, all this got covered up in a million different ways.

And instead of joining the dots together, so we can figure out how the GRA was at the very least another ‘failed candidate for messiah’, his followers closed ranks, and started up the same sort of ‘cover up’ we saw happening around SHABTAI TZVI / SHACH, and later on JACOB ESKELES FRANK, and his bunch of followers who also had wonderful yichus.

There is a lot to learn from all this.

Not least, that the mitnagdim also had a ‘rebbe’, also acted like hassidim’, and also believed very much in mystical concepts, Kabbalah and calculating ‘the end times’ of the coming of the Moshiach.

But in the end – it came down to teshuva, not hints of the ‘end of times’ from the Zohar, or other places.

Exactly as the BAAL SHEM TOV had said, back in 1760, shortly before he died.

I wrote about that last year, and I’ll repost that next.

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There is nothing new under the sun.

You want moshiach NOW?!?!?!?!?

Then instead of obsessing over ‘end times’, work on your own lack of emuna and your own bad middot.

That’s the only thing geula depends on – and the only thing that’s really holding it up.

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] Take a look at the Gemara, Sukkot 52a.

[2] There were so many satanic secret societies at this time, with so many different names, but broadly the same goal of ‘uprooting religion’ and ushering in practices that ‘freed’ people from serving God, and obeying His commandments, particularly, in terms of human morality. I am referring to all of these secret societies as ‘Freemasons’, even though that’s not the real names actually used at the time.

[3] Large parts of Poland – especially Podolia, where the Sabbateans were still in full force – were actually under Turkish rule, 250 years ago.

[4] The Cantonist Decrees saw 10 year old Jewish boys torn from their homes and forced to serve 25 years in the Tzar’s army before being allowed to return. The point of the Decrees was to forcibly ‘assimilate’ the Jews. Very few of the Cantonists could hang on to their yiddishkeit in the face of all the beatings, torture and ‘punishments’ they were given for refusing to eat treif food, to give just one example.

[5] The Sabbatean aliya to Israel in 1700 was undertaken in preparation for the ‘reappearance’ of Shabtai Tzvi, at this point. It was funded, at least in part, by SAMSON WERTHEIMER.

[6] How all this is meant to fit together, we are still in the process of figuring it out. It could be, we’ll eventually discover that ‘CHABAD’ actually consisted of the GRA’s Perushim, and not the bubbe meises version of history we’ve all been taught.

[7] Even after five years of doing this research, I still can’t tell you who ‘HAYYIM OF VOLOZHIN’ really was.

It could be he is one and the same as ‘CHAIM BRODIE’, son of BENJAMIN BRODIE (RIVLIN….) and Rivka Shoshana FRANK, daughter of false messiah JACOB FRANK.

And / or, he could be a son of NATAN NETA NOTKIN, the big shtadlan of Shklov.

[8] In particular, the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews was very active in Eretz Yisrael in 1820. One of it’s key missionaries here was a converted Jew named Joseph Wolff. Another converted Jew named Michael Solomon Alexander was parachuted into Jerusalem as it’s first ‘bishop’. Both come from families of ‘big rabbis’ in Europe with ‘big yichus’.

[9] Isaiah 60:10.

[10] Written in June, 1837.