I had a book a long time back, forgot the name, but it was one of
those "off the wall" books, trying to say Jesus literally married
and had children. There was ONE chapter that I kept, for it
possibly does have some truth in it. This chapter is concerning
the migration of SOME of the tribe of Benjamin into Europe. So
for you history buffs, here it is - Keith Hunt
THE EXILED TRIBE
Could there be something special about the Merovingian
bloodline - something more than an academic, technical
legitimacy? Could there really be something which, in some way,
might genuinely matter to people today? Could there be something
that might affect, perhaps even alter, existing social, political
or religious institutions? These questions continued to nag at
us. As yet, however, there appeared to be no answer to them.
Once again we sifted through the compilation of 'Prieure
documents', and especially the all-important Dossiers secrets. We
re-read passages which had meant nothing to us before. Now they
made sense, but they did not serve to explain the mystery, nor to
answer what had now become the critical questions. On the other
hand there were other passages whose relevance was still unclear
to us. These passages by no means resolved the enigma; but, if
nothing else, they set us thinking along certain lines - lines
which eventually proved to be of paramount significance.
As we had already discovered, the Merovingians themselves,
according to their own chroniclers, claimed descent from ancient
Troy. But according to certain of the 'Prieure documents' the
Merovingian pedigree was older than the siege of Troy. According
to certain of the 'Prieure documents' the Merovingian pedigree
could in fact be traced back to the Old Testament.
Among the genealogies in the Dossiers secrets, for example,
there were numerous footnotes and annotations. Many of these
referred specifically to one of the twelve tribes of ancient
Israel, the Tribe of Benjamin. One such reference cites, and
emphasises, three Biblical passages - Deuteronomy 33, Joshua 18
and Judges 20 and 21.
Deuteronomy 33 contains the blessing pronounced by Moses on
the patriarchs of each of the twelve tribes. Of Benjamin, Moses
says, 'The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by him; and
the Lord shall cover him all the day long, and he shall dwell
between his shoulders.' (33:12) In other words Benjamin and his
descendants were singled out for a very special and exalted
blessing. That much, at any rate, was clear. We were, of course,
puzzled by the promise of the Lord dwelling 'between Benjamin's
shoulders'. Should we associate it with the legendary Merovingian
birthmark - the red cross between the shoulders? The connection
seemed somewhat far-fetched. On the other hand, there were other
clearer similarities between Benjamin in the Old Testament and
the subject of our investigation. According to Robert Graves, for
example, the day sacred to Benjamin was December 23rd' -
Dagobert's feast day. Among the three clans which comprised the
Tribe of Benjamin, there was the clan of Abiram - which might in
same obscure way pertain to Hiram, builder of the Temple of
Solomon and central figure in Masonic tradition. Hiram's most
devoted disciple, moreover, was named Benomi; and Benoni,
interestingly enough, was the name originally conferred upon the
infant Benjamin by his mother Rachel, before she died.
The second Biblical reference in the Dossiers secrets, to
Joshua 18, is rather more clear. It deals with the arrival of
Moses's people in the Promised Land and the apportionment to each
of the twelve tribes of particular tracts of territory. According
to this apportionment, the territory of the Tribe of Benjamin
included what subsequently became the sacred city of Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, in other wards, even before it became the capital of
David and Salomon, was the allocated birthright of the Tribe of
Benjamin. According to Joshua 18:28, the birthright of the
Benjamites encompassed 'Zelah, Eleph and Jebusi, which is
Jerusalem. Gibealh and Kirjath; fourteen cities with villages.
This is the inheritance of the children of Benjamin according to
their families.'
Third Biblical passage cited by the Dossiers secrets a
fairly complex sequence of events. A Levite, traveling through
Benjamite territory, is assaulted, and his concubine ravished, by
worshippers of Belial - a variant of the Sumerian Mother Goddess,
known as Ishtar by the Babylonians and Astarte by the
Phoenicians.
Calling representatives of the twelve tribes to witness, the
Levite demands vengeance for the atrocity; and at a council, the
Benjamites are instructed to deliver the malefactors to justice.
One might expect the Benjamites to comply readily. For some
reason, however, they do not, and undertake, by force of arms, to
protect the 'sons of Belial'. The result is a bitter and bloody
war between the Benjamites and the remaining eleven tribes. In
the course of hostilities a curse is pronounced by the latter on
any man who gives his daughter to a Benjamite. When the war is
over, however, and the Benjamites virtually exterminated, the
victorious Israelites repent of their malediction - which,
however, cannot be retracted:
"Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpeh, saying, There shall
not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife. And the
people came to the house of God, and abode there till even before
God, and lifted up their voices, and wept sore: And said, O Lord
God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there
should be today one tribe lacking in Israel?" (Judges 21:1-3)
A few verses later, the lament is repeated:
"And the children of Israel repented them for Benjamin their
brother, and said, There is one tribe cut off from Israel this
day. How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing we
have sworn by the Lord that we will not give them of our
daughters to wives?" [Judges 21:6-7)
And yet again:
"And the people repented them for Benjamin, because that the Lord
had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. Then the elders of the
congregation said, How shall we do for wives for them that
remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin? And they
said, There must be an inheritance for them that be escaped out
of Benjamin, that a tribe be not destroyed out of Israel. Howbeit
we may not give them wives of our daughters: for the children of
Israel have sworn, saying, Cursed be he that giveth a wife to
Benjamin." (Judges 21:15-18)
Confronted by the possible extinction of an entire tribe,
the elders quickly devise a solution. At Shiloh, in Bethel.
there is to be a festival shortly; and the women of Shiloh -
whose menfolk had remained neutral in the war - are to be
considered fair game. The surviving Benjamites are instructed to
go to Shiloh and wait in ambush in the vineyards. When the women
of the town congregate to dance in the forthcoming festival, the
Benjamites are to pounce upon them and take them to wife.
It is not at all clear why the Dossiers secrets insist on
calling attention to this passage. But whatever the reason, the
Benjamites, so far as Biblical history is concerned, are clearly
important. Despite the devastation of the war, they quickly
recover in prestige, if not in numbers. Indeed, they recover so
well that in 1 Samuel they furnish Israel with her first king,
Saul.
Whatever recovery the Benjamites may have made, however, the
Dossiers secrets imply that the war over the followers of Belial
was a crucial turning point. It would seem that in the wake of
this conflict many, if not most, Benjamites went into exile.
Thus, there is a portentous note in the Dossiers secrets. in
capital letters:
ONE DAY THE DESCENDANTS OF BENJAMIN LEFT THEIR COUNTRY: CERTAIN
REMAINED; TWO THOUSAND YEARS LATER GODFROI VI [DE BOUILLON]
BECAME KING OF JERUSALEM AND FOUNDED THE ORDRE BE SION.
At first there appeared to be no connection between these
apparent non sequiturs. When we assembled the diverse and
fragmentary references in the Dossiers secrets, however, a
coherent story began to emerge. According to this account most
Benjamites did go into exile. Their exile supposedly took them to
Greece, to the central Peloponnese - to Arcadia. In short, where
they supposedly became aligned with the Arcadian royal line.
Towards the advent of the Christian era, they are then said
to have migrated up the Danube and the Rhine, intermarrying with
certain Teutonic tribes and eventually engendering the Sicambrian
Franks - the immediate forebears of the Merovingians.
According to the 'Prieure documents', then, the Merovingians
were descended, via Arcadia, from the Tribe of Benjamin. In other
words the Merovingians, as well as their subsequent descendants -
the bloodlines of Planted and Lorraine, for example - were
ultimately of Semitic or Israelite origin. And if Jerusalem was
indeed the hereditary birthright of the Benjamites, Godfroi de
Bouillon, in marching on the Holy City, would in fact have been
reclaiming his ancient and rightful heritage. Again it is
significant that Godfroi, alone among the august Western princes
who embarked on the First Crusade disposed of all his property
before his departure - implying thereby that he did not intend to
return to Europe.
Needless to say, we had no way of ascertaining whether the
Merovingians were of Benjamite origin or not. The information in
the 'Prieure documents', such as it was, related to too remote,
too obscure a past, for which no confirmation, no records of any
sort could be obtained. But the assertions were neither
particularly unique nor particularly new. On the countrary they
had been around, in the form of vague rumours and nebulous
traditions, far a long time. To cite but one instance. Proust
draws upon them in his opus; and more recently, the novelist Jean
d'Ormesson suggests a Judaic origin for certain noble French
families. And in 1965 Roger Peyrefitte, who seems to like
scandalising his countrymen, did so with resounding eclat in a
novel affirming all French and most Europeen nobility to be
ultimately Judaic.
In fact the argument, although unprovable, is not altogether
implausible, nor are the exile and migration ascribed to the
Tribe of Benjamin in the 'Prieure documents'. The Tribe of
Benjamin look up arms on behalf of the followers of Belial - a
form of the Mother Goddess often associated with images of a bull
or calf. There is to believe that the Benjamites themselves
revered same deity. Indeed, it is possible that the worship of
the Calf in Exodus - the subject, significantly enough, of
Poussin's most famous paintings - may have been specifically
Benjamite ritual.
Following their war against the other eleven tribes of
Israel, Benjamites fleeing into exile would, of necessity, had to
flee westwards, towards the Phoenician . The Phoenicians
possessed ships capable of transporting large numbers of
refugees. And they would have been obvious allies for fugitive
Benjamites - for they, too, worshipped the Mother Goddess in the
form of Astarte, of Heaven.
If there was actually an exodus of Benjamites from
Palestine, one might hope to find some vestigial record of it. In
Greek myth one does. There is the legend of King Bolus's son, one
Danaus, who arrives in Greece, with his daughters, by ship. His
daughters are said to have introduced the cult of the Mother
Goddess, which became the established cult of the Arcadians.
According to Robert Graves, the Danaus myth records the arrival
in the Peloponnesus of 'colonists from Palestine'. Graves states
that King Bolus is in fact Baal, or Bel - or perhaps Belial from
the Old Testament. It is also worthy of note that one of the
clans of the Tribe of Benjamin was the clan of Bela.
In Arcadia the cult of the Mother Goddess not only prospered
but survived longer than in any other part of Greece. It became
associated with worship of Demeter, then of Diana or Artemis.
Known regionally as Arduina, Artemis became tutelary deity of the
Ardennes: and it was from the Ardennes that the Sicambrian Franks
first issued into what is now France. The totem of Artemis was
the she-bear - Kallisto, whose son was Arkas, the bear-child and
patron of Arcadia. And Kallisto transported to the heavens by
Artemis, became the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear.
There might thus be something more than coincidence in the
appellation 'Ursus', applied repeatedly to the Merovingian
bloodline.
In any case there is other evidence apart from mythology,
suggesting a Judaic migration to Arcadia. In classical times the
region known as Arcadia was ruled by the powerful, militaristic
stale of Sparta. The Spartans absorbed much of the older Arcadian
culture: and indeed the legendary Arcadian Lycaeus may in fact be
identified with Lycurgus, who codified Spartan Law. On reaching
manhood, the Spartans, like the Merovingians, ascribed a special,
magical significance to their hair - which, like the
Merovingians, they wore long. According to one authority, 'the
length of hair denoted their physical vigour and became a sacred
symbol.' What is more, both books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha
stress the link between Spartans and Jews. Maccabees 2 speaks of
certain Jews 'having embarked to go to the Lacedaemonians, in
hope of finding protection there because of their kinship.' And
Maccabees 1 states explicitly, 'It has been found in writing
concerning the Spartans and the Jews that they are brethren and
are of the family of Abraham."
We could thus acknowledge at least the possibility of a
Judaic migration to Arcadia - so that the 'Prieure documents', if
they could not be proved correct, could not be dismissed either.
As for Semitic influence on Frankish culture, there was
solid archaeological evidence. Phoenician or Semitic trade routes
traversed the whole of southern France, from Bordeaux to
Marseilles and Narbonne. They also extended up the Rhone. As
early as 700-800 B.C., there were Phoenician settlements not only
along the French coast but inland as well, at such sites as
Carcassonne and Toulouse. Among the artefacts found at these
sites were many of Semitic origin. This is hardly surprising. In
the ninth century B.C. the Phoenician kings of Tyre had
intermarried with the kings of Israel and Judah, thus
establishing a dynastic alliance that would have engendered a
close contact between their respective peoples.
The sack of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the destruction of the
Temple, prompted a massive exodus of Jews from the Holy Land.
Thus the city of Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius to
A.D. 79, included a Jewish community. Certain cities in southern
France - Arles, for example, Lunel and Narbonne - provided a
haven for Jewish refugees around the same time. And yet the
influx of Judaic peoples into Europe, and especially France,
predated the fall of Jerusalem in the first century. In fact it
had been in progress from before the Christian era. Between 108
and 98 B.C. a Jewish colony was established in Rome. Not long
after another such colony was founded far up the Rhine, at
Cologne. Certain Roman legions included contingents of Jewish
slaves, who accompanied their masters all over Europe. Many of
these slaves eventually won, purchased or, in some other fashion,
obtained their freedom and formed communities.
In consequence there are many specifically Semitic names
scattered about France. Some of them are situated squarely in the
Old Merovingian heartland. A few kilometres from Stenay, for
example, on the fringe of the Forest of Woevres where Dagobert
was assassinated, is a village called Baalon. Between Stenay and
Orval, there is a town called Avioth. And the mountain of Sion in
Lorraine - 'la colline inspiree' - was originally Mount Semita.
Again then, while we could not prove the claims in the
'Prieurd documents', we could not discount them either. Certainly
there was enough evidence to render them at least plausible. We
were compelled to acknowledge that the 'Prieure documents' might
be correct - that the Merovingians, and the various noble
families descended from them, might have stemmed from Semitic
sources.
But could this, we wondered, really be all there was to the
story? Could this really be the portentous secret which had
engendered so much fuss and intrigue, so much machination and
mystery, so much controversy and conflict through the centuries?
Merely another lost tribe legend? And even if it were not
legend but true, could it really explain the motivation of the
Prieure de Sion and the claim of the Merovingian dynasty? Could
it really explain the adherence of men like Leonardo and Newton
or the activities of the houses of Guise and Lorraine, the covert
endeavours of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, the elusive
secrets of *Scottish Rite* Freemasonry? Obviously not. Why should
descent from the Tribe of Benjamin constitute so explosive a
secret? And, perhaps most crucially, why should descent from the
Tribe of Benjamin matter today? How could it possibly clarify the
Prieurd de Sion's present-day activities and objectives?
If our inquiry involved vested interests that were
specifically Semitic or Judaic, moreover, why did it involve so
many components of a specifically, even fervently, Christian
character? The pact between Clovis and the Roman Church, for
example; the avowed Christianity of Godfroi de Bouillon and the
conquest of Jerusalem: the heretical, perhaps, but none the less
Christian thought of the Gathers and Knights Templar; pious
institutions like the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement; Freemasonry
that was 'Hermetic, aristocratic and Christian', and the
implication of so many Christian ecclesiastics, from highranking
princes of the Church to local village cures like Boudet and
Sauniere?
It might be that the Merovingians were ultimately of Judaic
origin, but if this were so it seemed to us essentially
incidental. Whatever the real secret underlying our
investigation, it appeared to be inextricably associated not with
Old Testament Judaism, but with Christianity. In short, the Tribe
of Benjamin - for the moment, at least - seemed to be a red
herring. However important it might be, there was something of
even greater importance involved. We were still overlooking
something.
................
Entered on this Website March 2008
NOTE:
The main point from all this particular history and many other
histories written and exposed by others, is that Europe and
Britain have a much more "Jewish"/Israel connection than many
today would dream about. For centuries this history has been
supressed and swept under the rug. To a large part it was the
Anglo-Saxons and their descendants of England that "wrote
history" their way. Only in the last 50 years have the English
history teachers come to admit the history preserved by the
Welsh, is in the main very true. When I was attending High School
in England back in the late 1950s, there was just about no
history taught to us before 500 A.D. when the now English came
into Britain. I remember a little being taught about Queen
Boadicea and her battles against the Romans, but that was about
it.
The Roman Catholic church, as they conquered and ruled Europe and
Britain, certainly did not want anyone to know of the great
civilization of that part of the world, which had deep roots in
Hebrew/Israel/Jewish. The RC church wanted history to show it was
THEY who brought Christianity and "civilization" to Europe and
Britain.
As you read the studies on this Website of true history, you will
come to see that NOTHING COULD BE FARTHER FROM THE TRUTH OF THE
MATTER, than what the Roman Catholic church wanted you to
believe. No wonder the period known as the DARK AGES, were indeed
DARK, if not BLACKNESS!
Keith Hunt
