Mt Carmel - Teutonic Knights. Protestant Reformation Creation of Israel

 Płońsk Poland

Home of the Catholic "Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel" , founded during the Christian Crusades 1100 - 1400. 

Original coat of Arms

 

 

 

Mount Carmel Palestine
The Order was founded at the site ,that it claimed had been the location of Elijah's cave, 1,700 ft (520 m) above sea level at the northwestern end of the mountain range. Adjacent to the "fountain of Elisha". A Carmelite monastery was founded at the site shortly after the Order itself was created, and was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of "Star of the Sea".

Elijah's cave  "where a biblical"  challenge took place by Elijah to determine which "deity " out of 450 available, truly controlled the Kingdom of Canaan and  Judah,  In reference to  authenticity.  Tutmos III 15th century BC. lists a holy headland among his Canaanite territories. 
  
The Carmelite Order are the earliest known hermits that lived in caves on Mount Carmel, in Palestine. During the time of the Crusades. Possible even the same cave system that Dorothy Garrod in 1935, excavated finding one of the oldest 120,000 yr Female Neanderthal known simply as Tabun 1. 

Her discoveries although largely forgotten now, shed light on 1 million years of human evolution in the Levant region. And a cave system comprising of chimney like structures, being used to herd wild animal into, such that they fell inside the cave and were slaughtered by the inhabitants. Her finds were somehow overshadowed by a later male Hungarian archaeologist, Arthur Jelinek’s 1967-1972 finds of 1,900 1.5 million yrs old Acheulean flint's and hand axes.

The Carmelite Order grew to be one of the major Catholic religious orders worldwide, although the monastery at Carmel has had a less successful history. During the Crusades the monastery often changed hands, frequently being converted into a mosque; under Islamic control the location came to be known as "El-Maharrakah", meaning "place of burning", in reference to the account of Elijah's challenge to the priests of Hadad.


The King Of Poland Siemowit IV regularly mortgaged his non German speaking domains To the Teutonic Knights including  Wizna (during 1382-1401), Płońsk (during 1384-1399) and Zawkrze (during 1384-1399 and again 1407-1411). 

Under the control by the Teutonic Knights of Jerusalem  Formed 1143 by Pope Celestine II who ordered the Knights Hospitaller to take over management of a German hospital in Jerusalem.
It was transformed into a military order in 1198 and the head of the order became known as the Grand Master (magister hospitalis). It received papal orders for crusades to take and hold Jerusalem for Christianity and defend the Holy Land against the Muslim Saracens.  

 

"Before the Protestant Reformation, the Order was divided into seven langues or tongues. The langues were divided into great priories, some of which were further divided into priories or bailiwicks  (ballei), and these were in turn divided into commendaries."

The largest of the langues by far was the "German" one, which included not only all of the Holy Roman Empire but also the non-German-speaking (Slavic and Hungarian) territories east of Germany. It was divided into five great-priories, the largest of which were Austria-Bohemia and Germany, in turn divided into major priories or bailiwicks;  one of the largest such became independent after the Protestant Reformation was the Order of Saint John (Bailiwick of Brandenburg). founded in Jerusalem in the year AD 1099.
 
During the Protestant Reformation, large parts of the German Langue of the then-undivided Order of Saint John followed the leadership of the Bailiwick of Brandenburg and accepted Lutheran theology while continuing to recognize the headship of the grand master of the Order, who, with the majority of the knights, remained Roman Catholic. The higher officials of the Order, now headquartered on the Mediterranean island of Malta after the successive losses of Jerusalem, Acre, and Rhodes to Moslem Arabs and Turks, evinced a desire to maintain a relationship with the Protestant knights despite the theological and ecclesiological differences between the two groups.

Sephardic  Jews first appeared in the region of Holstein, which belonged formerly to Denmark. In a letter dated Nov. 25, 1622, King Christian IV. (1588-1648) invited the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam to settle in Glückstadt, where, among other privileges, the free exercise of their religion would be granted them. " Jan. 19, 1657, "the Portuguese professing the Hebrew religion" were permitted  travel everywhere within the kingdom, and to trade and traffic within the limit of the law."

Different from the Portuguese Sephardic Jewish congregations invited to Denmark by Frederick III  formed in the capital, Copenhagen, but other congregations were soon founded in some of the provincial cities; for example, in the Laaland town Nakskov (1667). In Ribe, Jutland, there were Jews as early as 1680, although the first synagogue in Jutland, that of Fredericia, was not built until 1719 (rebuilt in 1814). The privilege of 1657 was specially ratified in an open letter of Dec. 14, 1670.  

Following this  Radical Lutherans known in Denmark, Switzerland, Hungary, Germany and Britain as " Mosaics" followers of moses later to be known as the "Ashkenazi's" or German Jews who had converted to Judaism from Lutheran protestantism, were leaving Germany and forming new colonies in Britain, South Africa, Canada, and Palestine.

What followed next was the Thirty Years War. Initially a war between Protestant and Catholic states in the fragmenting Holy Roman Empire, it gradually developed into a more general conflict involving most of the League of Evangelical Union, becoming less about religion and more a continuation of the France–Habsburg rivalry for European political pre-eminence.

 The Teutonic Bailiwick was effectively placed under the protection of the Prince Electors of Brandenburg, later Kings of Prussia, members of the House of Hohenzollern. Under this protection, the Johanniterorden, as the Order came to be known, came to be headquartered at Sonnenburg Castle in the Neumark of Brandenburg, east of the Oder River, though the Herrenmeister "Master of the Knights" resided in the Ordenspalais in Berlin from its completion in 1738. 

In 1811 and 1812, in his position of protector of the Order, King Frederick William III of Prussia transferred the powers of the "Master of the Knights" and the Chapter (the governing council of the Order) to the Prussian Crown, effectively dissolving the Bailiwick and confiscating its possessions.

Eds Note: 
( most modern writers, tend to insert "Israel" in to any mention of  history, when writing about the Levant. This is wrong on many levels.

Any name is a reference to ancient times, relevant, especially when referencing ancient writings.  Scholars of repute know that Historically  from c.1150 BCE onwards the region of the Levant home to the Peleset Peoples, Philistines who fought with Egypt during Ramesses III's reign.  
The Assyrians called the same region "Palashtu/Palastu" or "Pilistu", beginning with Adad-nirari III in the Nimrud Slab in c.800 BCE through to an Esarhaddon treaty more than a century later.   In  c.340 BCE, Aristotle wrote, "there is a lake in Palestine", understood by scholars to be a reference to the Dead Sea."

 " The first clear use of the term Palestine to refer to the entire area between Phoenicia and Egypt was in 5th century BC, Ancient Greece, when Herodotus wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê ". 

It was never known as Israel, That country or state was invented in the 19th century by German Danish and european Lutheran Protestants who had converted to Judaism.
 
Whom The Founding father of Israel David Ben Gurion.
Born David Grün; 16 October 1886, in Płońsk Poland,
Home of the Catholic "Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel".

After WWII

David Ben Gurion obtained Despite the protests, an agreement signed in September 1952, with the West Germany government "reparation for slave labour and property stolen by the Nazi's ". They paid Israel a sum of 3 billion marks over the next fourteen years; 450 million marks were paid to the World Jewish Congress. The payments were made to the State of Israel as the heir to those victims who had no surviving family.

In 2009, Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz announced that he will demand a further €450 million to €1 billion in reparations from Germany on behalf of some 30,000 Israeli forced labor survivors. As of 2013 no agreement has been reached.