nspired by Mendelssohn or any
other Jew must remain for the present an open question. But the Jewish
connexions of certain other Illuminati cannot be disputed. The most
important of these was Mirabeau, who arrived in Berlin just after the
death of Mendelssohn and was welcomed by his disciples in the Jewish
salon of Henrietta Herz. It was these Jews, "ardent supporters of the
French Revolution"[601] at its outset, who prevailed on Mirabeau to
write his great apology for their race under the form of a panegyric of
Mendelssohn.

To sum up, I do not so far see in Illuminism a Jewish conspiracy to
destroy Christianity, but rather a movement finding its principal
dynamic force in the ancient spirit of revolt against the existing
social and moral order, aided and abetted perhaps by Jews who saw in it
a system that might be turned to their own advantage. Meanwhile,
Illuminism made use of every other movement that could serve its
purpose. As the contemporary de Luchet has expressed it:

The system of the Illumines is not to embrace the dogmas of a sect,
but to turn all errors to its advantage, to concentrate in itself
everything that men have invented in the way of duplicity and
imposture.

More than this, Illuminism was not only the assemblage of all errors, of
all ruses, of all subtleties of a theoretic kind, it was also an
assemblage of all practical methods for rousing men to action. For in
the words of von Hammer on the Assassins, that cannot be too often
repeated:

Opinions are powerless so long as they only confuse the brain
without arming the hand. Scepticism and free-thinking as long as
they occupied only the minds of the indolent and philosophical have
caused the ruin of no throne.... It is nothing to the ambitious man
what people believe, but it is everything to know how he may turn
them for the execution of his projects.

This was what Weishaupt so admirably understood; he knew how to take
from every association, past and present, the portions he required and
to weld them all into a working system of terrible efficiency--the
disintegrating doctrines of the Gnostics and Manicheans, of the modern
philosophers and Encyclopaedists, the methods of the Ismailis and the
Assassins, the discipline of the Jesuits and Templars, the organization
and secrecy of the Freemasons, the philosophy of Machiavelli, the
mystery of the Rosicrucians--he knew moreover, how to enlist the