Kabbalah and Cabals

[Craig Clark]

David Casseres asks:

> Something to think about regarding "why they are there":  Kabbalah is one
> of the most fully developed mystical traditions, and it is Jewish; what
> would that mean to spiritualist Nazis?  What would the Qlippoth,
> specifically, mean to Nazis?  I know that antisemitic tradition uses
> Kabbalah to accuse Jews of sorcery and of conspiracy (our word "cabal,"
> of course).  And I assume the likes of Himmler learned a good deal about
> Kabbalah, but I have no idea what they made of it.

A few years ago I came across some South African anti-Semitic 
literature which made a great deal of the fact that today's "Jewish" 
people are not the descendants of the "Jewish" people of Biblical 
times. Apparently there is some truth in this, because of the rapid spread 
of Judaism through the Roman Empire at around the time of the birth 
of Jesus: many of the Jews of Europe murdered by the Nazis were 
descended from people born in central Europe who had been converted to
Judaism, rather than people born in the Middle East who had settled 
in Central Europe after the Diaspora. There was also a British-born 
crackpot from the turn of the century (the name eludes me but I can 
probably track it down) who argued that the "People of Israel" referred 
to in the Old Testament were actually blonde-and-blue-eyed 
Anglo-Saxons, and that the *real* setting for the New Testament 
narratives was Britain. As I recall, his theories were widely 
embraced within Nazism. It is therefore possible that Kabbalism was 
embraced by many Nazis who saw it as a fundamentally Aryan mystical 
system which had been appropriated by Jews.

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"