Climate Change, Frankenstein’s Monster and the HEP HEP Riots of 1819 (Part 1 of 2)

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came, and went-and came, and brought no day.

Lord Byron “Darkness” 1816

In March of 1815, Napoleon escaped his Island exile on Elba off the Tuscany coast, where he had been imprisoned for eleven months. With a thousand loyal men he triumphantly entered Paris to cheering crowds. This political earthquake was to mark the 100 day campaign that would end in Napoleon’s defeat at the battle of Waterloo and the subsequent restoration of King Louis XVIII and the ostensible resurrection of the established European order of hierarchical privilege, lineage and rank. The forces of democracy, liberty, republicanism, nationalism, socialism, communism, trade guilds, student fraternities, and the burgeoning bourgeoisie, had been held in check and pushed back for now. The role of Jewish haute finance had been integral if not central to this rearguard action and defense, heralding a new transnational power that did not go unnoticed by contending political elements.  

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars together had seen Europe give witness to twenty- five years of unceasing warfare and the death of as many as 2 million people, leaving the European continent prostrated, destitute and economically gutted. Two weeks later on April 5th, on the other side of the world on the Island of Sumbawa in the lesser Sunda Islands, about 700 hundred miles East from present day Bali, Mount Tambora exploded with ten times the force of the 1883 Krakatoa volcano. The explosion, which was felt and heard 2,000 kilometers away in Batavia, modern day Jakarta, is thought to be the single most violent event of our geological age, which is known as the Holocene era to geologists. Ten billion tons of matter (equivalent to two million Little Boy Atomic Bombs) was ejected into the atmosphere and rose in a volcanic column that reached almost 45 kilometers above the Earth. Pyroclastic volcanic flows and tsunamis across the Indonesian archipelago killed upwards of 100,000 people in the immediate aftermath of the eruption. Within months, a reddish tinged sulphuric dust had encircled the planet. 

The fall of 1815 was short and the winter came early and quickly. After the long stretch of wars, the economic hardships, food shortages and the subsequent outbreak of rampant plagues and cholera, people everywhere waited expectantly in 1816 for spring and summer to arrive so crops could be planted in the post- war environment. But summer did not come and the crops did not get planted. 

In Villa Diodati, a rented mansion on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, Claire Clairmont and other notable literati huddled in the freezing cold, burnIng whatever they could find for heat and warmth and famously over the course of three frigid days amused themselves by writing horror stories. It was both  a challenge and a friendly contest as well a source   of amusement as the cold days wore on. During this period, Mary Shelley outlined her timeless masterpiece “Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus” and John William Polidori would write the Vampyre, based on a Fragment by Byron–what would become the first in the long line of ‘Vampire’ stories. These stories would give rise over due time to the genre of Gothic horror, an appropriate literary form for what was to follow in the 20th century.

The lives of these idealistic young artists were to be tragically truncated. Shelley, one of the great romantic writers of his generation, would be dead in 1822 at the age of 30 by drowning. Bryon, the incomparable genius, would be gone at the age of 36 in Missolonghi, Greece while fighting in the Greek War of Independence. Many of the other defining artists of the era had short lives. The brilliant poet John Keats would depart this earth at 26 years of age. Edgar Allan Poe, who reconnected his readers to the long lost supernatural and fantastical would expire at 40, Guy de Maupassant at 43 and Nikolai Gogol, the Russian romantic master of the grotesque, who is  said to  have hidden much of the next century’s greatest literary lights “under his apron” would die pre-maturely at 42 by way of self-starvation. The short lives of these great talents was an ominous omen and a forewarning of the world’s implacable danger, intolerance for non-conformity and fratricidal violence. In some real sense, the deaths of these extraordinary individuals, cut short so soon, took the ‘light out of the world’ as much as did the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora. It is a world that would get much darker as subsequent events unfolded. 

Byron and Shelley, who shivered under the moonless red skies, waiting for summer, are supreme examples of romanticism both in their works and lives. They represented the rejection of rationality, modernity, the enlightenment, and with equal vehemence the bourgeois and middle class goals of the new industrial age. They sought inspiration in a revisioned medievalism and a harkening back to emotion, and sentiment and nature, for the potent “Sturm and Drang” of the German variant of romanticism (Storm and Stress) so championed by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Frederick Schiller, Novalis and the entire Wagnerian Zarathustra re-arisen teutonic crowd. 

The promise and hope of the French Revolution and its vaunted  ideals of liberty, freedom, fraternity, knowledge, universal human brotherhood and possibility provided the premises for a broad cultural efflorescence in music, philosophy, politics and art. Rejecting materialism, modern industry and scientific rationality, and elevating the Middle Ages and its knightly qualities of heroism, loyalty and chivalry, the Romantic Age provided a powerful inspiration for the popular revolutionary movements of the 19th century. At the same time, European reactionary forces, sitting on the sidelines watching, would find many of its distinctive wellsprings of supra national mysticism, volkish unity, collective self-aggrandizement  and purpose in the symbols, dreams and fantasies of the Romantics. 

The tiny, ascendant, striving, studious, vigilant, hyper- alert and future- oriented remnants of European Jewry, who were barred from owning property, had assiduously and almost unnoticeably and invisibly to the world, amassed great loan-books and an immense wealth of credits and debits, mortgages, bonds and notes payable from behind their Ghetto walls. Fiercely ambitious, optimistic and hopeful, fully embracing the enlightenment and its promises of progress,  science and prosperity, Germany’s Jews sought to maintain the fragile emancipation that they had secured under Napoleon. They fought vociferously through their interrogators and agents to maintain these rights and privileges in the face of the defeat of Napoleon. These small close- knit Western and Central European Jewish communities, heavily involved in finance, trade and commerce, were protected, over the course of European history  by long- established, symbiotic and mutually dependent relationships with the ruling families and upper classes of the German Empire. The German Empire was an impossibly complicated legal patchwork and puzzle of feudal jurisdictions, consisting of Teutonic Kingdoms, Grand Duchies,  Free Cities, Royal fiefdoms, Bishoprics, as well as Imperial and baronial dynasties and myriad landed knighthoods sometimes constituting no more than a single castle. 

The Jews saw their opening in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat and the imminent restructuring of European Society during the 1815 Congress of Vienna. That the Jews continued to exist in any which way or form in the Germanic lands of Western Europe after the medieval expulsions from England, Spain, France, Portugal, Sicily and most of the principal Italian cities as well as many other jurisdictions and countries, was due almost entirely to the complexity of the political structures and the jurisdictional loopholes and baronial exceptions held by the local Germanic rulers. Without making themselves utterly indispensable as a source of loans, funds and taxation, the unprotected and defenseless Jewish communities would have never survived. 

The vast amount of ash and sulphur dioxide ejected by the 1815 eruption into the stratosphere is believed to have lowered global temperatures by as much as 1.5 to 3.0 degrees Celsius. The result of this temperature drop, although seemingly modest, was felt worldwide with devastating consequences for food and necessary sustenance. There were widespread crop failures in Europe and near famine conditions in Eastern Europe and Russia. The situation was compounded by the after-effects of the Napoleonic War, resulting in food inflation, along with the scarcity of specie as the Bank England sought to restore the pre-War Gold Standard. People everywhere fell into unsustainable debt and defaulted on loans and mortgages to Jewish money lenders violently exacerbating already heightened tensions.  England recorded its coldest summer on record and rivers across England flooded. The ground in May and June remained frozen in much of Western Europe and on the Eastern Seaboard of America. In New England, the ground remained frozen throughout May, and there are reports in June of snow squalls, and twelve inch icicles hanging from cabins. The Great Lakes across North America froze over and remained ice clogged all through the summer of 1816 and 1817. In Europe, near starvation-like conditions took hold in certain areas. Typhus and cholera epidemics erupted across the Continent, especially in Scotland, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Poland and in the Baltic countries. Sixty- five thousand people are thought to have died in Ireland from the failure of the potato crop. The Rhine flooded, disrupting the flow of the little grain that could be harvested. Hungary experienced brown coloured snow in August. Food riots broke out everywhere and were more violent than any of the riots that took place during the French Revolution or succeeding Napoleonic Wars. In India, the summer monsoon came late and violently, resulting in crop failures followed by extreme flooding, disease and epidemics on a scale not previously witnessed. China witnessed extreme climatic events and widespread starvation.

This list of climatic events suggests how vulnerable our entire planet and civilization is to changes in temperature and atmospheric variations. Any number of events could take place that would jeopardize or threaten human survival. Apart from volcanoes, massive earthquakes, extra-celestial events such as meteors, asteroids and comets could pulverize and sterilize the Earth in a great mass extinction as has happened on multiple occasions in the past. 

The earth itself is subject to known cyclical fluctuations that will inevitably force us back into another Ice Age in twenty thousand or so years from now. These climatic cycles are known as Milankovitch cycles, after the brilliant Serbian geo-scientist, Milutin Milankovic. Milankovic worked out the three main cycles, pertaining to the Earth’s orbit which shifts from an elliptical geometry to a circle every 100,000 years; the earth’s axial tilt which varies by 2.4 degrees (from 21.1 to 24.5 degrees)  works on a 41,000 year cycle; and the Earth’s’ axial precession, which relates to the planet’s wobble (as in a spinning top) has a 23,000 year period. These cycles have different periodicities and overlap each other in unique ways.  

We are living in an interglacial warming period, with just a short 12,000 years separating us from the last Ice Age. The last Ice Age saw mile- thick ice sheets blanketing most of North America and Europe. Even short century long periods of cooling has caused massive human consequences and cultural reverses. The Younger Dryas, which occurred 12,000  years ago, as a consequence of the vast release of glacial melt-off pouring into the Atlantic Ocean from the breaking of an ice-dam on the Saint Lawrence River. This release of fresh water shut down the Atlantic Ocean underwater jet-stream, plunging the Northern Hemisphere into a mini-ice age, an event which killed off much of the larger mammals, and most of humankind and led to the desperate and life-preserving adaptations that likely prompted the agricultural revolution. It is also very clear, from much scientific research, that anthropogenic, (i.e. man-made) alterations to the environment might act as amplifiers or ‘forcers’ of natural climatic cycles, with unknown and potentially devastating consequences.

Israel and the Near East are especially subject  to climatic shifts. Zionism itself, as a political and moral framework that is transparent and unabashedly civilizational in its goals and ambitions, will need to address these dangers not only on behalf of the Jewish people but on behalf of the entire world. Our planet, as previously expressed in earlier posts, is a nest, an incubator and a conservatory of life; it must be preserved so that we might be able to emerge from it. The entire evolved biosphere, which is nothing but a vast set of solved puzzles and answers to complex biological questions, has to be preserved for the future of humankind and our collective and future destiny. The Jewish Nation and Hebrew Civilization as a whole, with Israel as its embodiment, has a special task and responsibility in this regard. It is a responsibility which will be met. 

What does all of this have to do, one might ask, with the HEP HEP riots of October 1819, other than a coincidental overlap in timing between the climatic patterns and the widespread looting, and despoiling of Jewish communities across Europe? The answer to this question is a great deal. In fact, the HEP HEP riots are one of least explained historical events in recent Jewish history. Even the peculiar rallying cry of the riots, HEP, HEP, an acronym,  apparently for the latin expression “Hierosolyma est Perdita” (Jerusalem is lost)  is bizarre and anachronistic. The cry harkens back to a Crusaders chant from the 11th century. Although some argue that this interpretation of the meaning of HEP HEP rests on a false etymology and have put forward other suggestions. What is clear, however, from letters, diaries, various personal contemporaneous reports and records, is that these riots absolutely frightened,  terrorized and deeply scared all of European Jewry. The riots which began on the 2nd of August 1819 in Wurzburg in southern Germany as a kind of debtors revolt, spread to almost all of Germany, including the cities of Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Cologne and cities and towns along the entire stretch of the Rhine. The riots then extended North to the old Hanseatic areas of Hamburg, Bremen and Lubeck. Violent riots then spread to the Baltic countries, Poland and into Southern Europe. It seemed at the height of the rioting that all of European Jewry would be consumed in a cauldron of violence and mayhem. The entire destruction and certainly the total looting of the Jewish communities across all of Western, Central and Eastern Europe was entirely possible, and looked inevitable.

Indeed, The riots altered the entire subsequent trajectory of 19th and 20th century European Jewish history.  These riots lead on one hand to increasing Jewish nationalism and self-identification, in another line, on the part of the rioters and instigators, to the elaboration of an entirely new vocabulary, and conceptual, and ideological anti-Jewish framework, “anti-semitism” if you will, and directly to the mass and wonton pogroms of Kristallnacht (night of broken glass).; The mass Kristallnacht pogrom was, however,  not stopped by the police and authorities, as were the HEP, HEP riots  but were rather fanned on and encouraged. Within the better part of a single night, thousands of Jewish businesses were vandalized and their windows broken.  At the same time, all of the synagogues in Germany were burned down and thousands of individuals were arrested, beaten, tortured and held for ransom.

 A further important ramification of the riots were the permanent cleavages that the riots would create in German Jewry. 

A catastrophic calamity for European Jewry was just nearly averted in the post- Napoleonic period. An obvious and clear precursor of the Holocaust.  Not only was this a near catastrophe in motion, it was only by a sheer miracle that the conflagration could be brought under control and put out before it burned up the entirety of Jewish existence in Europe, as we would see with Kristalnacht a short 117 years later. 

Part of the reason for the pogroms self-limiting destruction, accepting and understanding that the riots reached near continent- wide proportions, is that the general ‘propaganda’ media by which it could spread was still lacking. A large proportion of the European population was still illiterate. One would hardly think that illiteracy could be propitious and protective, but it was. People that don’t read can’t enjoy novels, and literary entertainment, but they are also far less prone to having their heads brainwashed and infected by dangerous and pernicious political ideas.  Newspapers, the great medium of political dissemination (and nationalistic hatred), were still in their infancy in 1819. In Germany, less than 5% of the male proportion of the population read newspapers and this 5% were the middle and upper-middle classes. The newspapers of that era were also largely devoted to matters of diplomacy, politics, business and trade and they were heavily State censored. 

A number of crucial technological developments were necessary before newspapers could sway and mobilize nations. These include the first high-speed steam-driven printing presses first developed in the 1830s, and most importantly the economic wood-pulp paper making process, an invention of the 1840s; this was a process that used wood pulp rather than utilizing rags which were much more expensive. The transformational introduction of the electronic telegraphic news services were also a child of the 1840s. The golden age of the newspaper really just begins in the 1840s and runs to at least the 1940s when radio and the beginnings of television start to take hold. We see the growth of tabloids and yellow journalism promoting nationalism and war start to take flight in the 1890s, a baleful political phenomenon that would be very much present during the anti-Jewish Dreyfus trial–the other big European spasm of xenophobia that would point to the concentration and death camps of 1940s. 

Why have the HEP HEP riots been so entirely ignored and not integrated into a general view of modern Jewish history? There appear to be many reasons for this lapse and historical absence. One of the reasons is that there was no vocabulary and language, so to speak, within which to attack, demonize and slander the Jews in any kind of modern way to reflect the rapidly changing state of affairs. The Jews seemingly at the bottom of the social ladder, were now, post Napoleonic Wars, at the top and reigning supreme. It looked to many that the coming epoch would be a Jewish one, and indeed it very much turned out that way.  

The ideology, racial theory, and language of anti-semitism had not yet been invented in 1819. The sudden shift in the internal relationship of Jews to the European polity;  a seeming Jewish ascendancy of an alien ethnicity, rising literally from the cracks and interstices of the German political quilt; the spectacle of Jews emerging from their dark, high-walled, forlorn ghettoes, suddenly now  wealthy, if not in full control of the new monied and specie directed post-Napoleonic world, had not yet penetrated the general European consciousness. It would take European nationalists, intellectuals and anti-semites three generations to generate a semi-coherent anti-semitic playbook and repertoire and a rich and requisite language adequate and up to the task to encompass  the festering rage, unquenchable envy and visceral hatred that so desired the communal destruction and extermination of all Jewry and her civilization. 

In fact, the very expression “anti-semitism”  had not yet been coined by Wilhelm Marr in his 1879 pamphlet “ The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism”.  Marr argued that Jewry and Germanism were locked in a fatal death struggle for supremacy and control of Europe’s destiny. Marr would found “League of  Anti-semites” later that year. The League was the very first organization dedicated to removing Jews from Germany. The term anti-semite initially had little traction and was not understood, in that the term “semite” is something of a misnomer, referring to a philological or linguistic concept, i.e. the semitic language group, rather than to an ethnic or racial category. Very few Jews at that time understood that antisemitism had anything to do with them or that it was a new form of hatred and expression directed at them specifically. 

*Dedicated to the memory of siblings Noa Chiell, 27 years of age and her brother Gideon, 24 years of age. They were murdered on October 7th while attending the Supernova Music Festival. They were in a car along with Shalev Gal (23) and Tamar Goldenberg (23 years). The car was hit with an RPG and all four died. Noa was an organizer of Tel Aviv based raves and parties. The brother and sister had a shared tattoo which read “Nothing is Impossible”, an inscription that was taken from their grandfather’s tombstone. May their memory be a blessing and may they not be forgotten. 

(Part 2 of 2 to Follow)