Robert Eisler (27 April 1882 – 17 December 1949) was an Austrian Jewish polymath who wrote about the topics of mythology, comparative religion, the Gospels, monetary policy, art history, history of science, psychoanalysis, politics, astrology, history of currency, and value theory. He lectured at the Sorbonne and Oxford, served briefly on the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation in Paris after World War I, and spent fifteen months imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald, where he developed heart disease.Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence, R. Eisler to J. Skemp, 3 April 1946. He is best remembered today for advancing a new picture of the historical Jesus based on his interpretation of the Slavonic Josephus manuscript tradition, proposing a dual currency system to control inflation, and arguing for a prehistoric derivation of human violence in Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. His life and work intersected with those of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alois Riegl, Gilbert Murray, Karl Popper, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, G. R. S. Mead, Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, Gershom Scholem, Oskar Goldberg, Martin Buber, and Walter Benjamin.
Life Early life and education Eisler was born in Vienna on 27 April 1882. After gymnasium, Eisler attended the University of Vienna, where he received his first doctorate in economics. In 1902, he published Studien zur Werttheorie (Studies on Value Theory, 1902), a collection of five essays belonging to "The Second Austrian School of Value Theory", associated with his teachers Christian von Ehrenfels and Alexius Meinong. Around 1904 he traveled through the Mediterranean visiting museums and archaeological sites. When he returned to Austria in 1905, he took a second doctorate in Art History under Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff at the University of Vienna Institute of Art History. In 1908, Eisler converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry Rosalia "Lili" von Pausinger, an Austrian baroness and the daughter of the landscape painter Franz von Pausinger.
Attempted Art Theft in 1907 On 9 June 1907, during a trip to Italy, Eisler visited the library of the Archbishop’s Palace in Udine to photograph some codices. After Eisler had finished taking photographs and left, the librarian noticed that a fifteenth century codex called the Virginis et Passionis was missing and called the authorities to report the theft. The police picked up Eisler for questioning, and while he was being held at the station he grabbed a pen knife from a desk and stuck it into his throat, but the wound was superficial. Upon confessing to the theft, Eisler was confined to await trial and, as a foreigner, he was held without bail. In his jail cell one night, Eisler broke a bottle of disinfectant and tried to slash his left wrist with a shard of glass. This wound, too, was stitched up by a doctor, who also diagnosed Eisler with malaria. At his trial, in which Hugo von Hoffmannsthal testified as a character witness, Eisler confessed to having taken the codex and was ultimately allowed to pay his court costs and avoid jail time so that his family could take him to a sanitarium in nearby Gorizia.
Service in World War I From 1914 until 1917 Eisler served as an officer in Austria-Hungary’s 59th "Erzherzog Rainer" Infantry Regiment, and was awarded the silver medal and was made a knight of both the Order of Francis Joseph and the Iron Cross.
Connections to the Warburg Circle in Hamburg Eisler’s contacts with the "Hamburg School" of art history, which included Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, began in the early 1920s. During this period, Eisler also introduced Gershom Scholem to Warburg’s circle. On 3 December 1922, Eisler went to Hamburg to give a paper titled "Orphische und altchristliche Kultsymbolik" ("Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism") at the Bibliothek Warburg and received spontaneous applause at the end of his lecture. Warburg himself was taking a leave of absence, having suffered a nervous breakdown in 1918. It was Saxl, Warburg’s secretary who had read Orpheus the Fisher and invited Eisler. As they were setting the date, Eisler began to try Saxl’s patience with his frequent requests: before he had even arrived, Eisler wanted to set up two more lectures, one on ancient seafaring and another on the history of money, the latter being an area of his scholarship that he seemed convinced would be of special interest to Warburg, whose brothers were major figures in the world of finance. In 1925 Saxl published Eisler’s Orphisch-dionysische Mysterien-Gedanken in der christlichen Antike (Orphic-Dionysian Mystery Thought in Early Christianity) in the Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library Lectures). Writing from the Bellevue Clinic in Kreuzlingen, Warburg, who was much concerned with professionalism and distinguishing himself from the amateur scholars of his day, vehemently opposed Eisler’s invitation. He later complained about Eisler's excessive "chutzpah" and insisted that he did not want to attract "such people" and provide "a stage for immodest dilettantes." At the time, Warburg was suffering from severe depression and was subject to "terrible tantrums and phobias, obsessions and delusions which ultimately made him a danger to himself and his surroundings and lead to his confinement in a closed ward." In 1924, having recovered from his breakdown, Warburg sought Eisler’s help with his own work and corresponded with him on the topic of the Zoroastrian god Zurvan. When Warburg died in 1929, Eisler asked to write his obituary for a scholarly journal. And upon his own death, Eisler’s widow donated most of his papers to the Warburg Institute’s archive.
Diplomatic and Scholarly Work in Paris In 1925, with the recommendation of the classicist Gilbert Murray, Eisler took a diplomatic post in Paris as a deputy chief of the Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle (International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation) which had been created at the invitation of the French government to work with the League of Nations’ International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation. However, Eisler accepted the position and moved into a large rented apartment in Paris without first obtaining the permission of the Austrian government, who lodged a complaint with the League of Nations. While in Paris, Eisler received a visit from Scholem and Walter Benjamin. Scholem later described the encounter:"The visit we paid Eisler in the deserted rooms of his luxury apartment—the "official people" had already disassociated themselves from him—was a depressing experience for us. Eisler, however, cheerfully discussed his discoveries about the person and role of Jesus as the leader of a political revolt. We realized we were witnessing a sad turning point in the life of an unusual human being."While in Paris, Eisler gave lectures on the Slavonic Josephus manuscript, a version of Josephus's The Jewish War that Eisler argued was translated by a “Judaisizing heretic” from a lost Greek version of an unattested Aramaic original, and was therefore free from the Christian censorship coloring every other version of the text. In a letter to The Times of 17 April 1926, Eisler laid out the new narrative of Jesus’s ministry and death that the reconstructed manuscripts described:There is no doubt now that the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and the "cleansing" of the Temple were considered by Jews, as well as by Romans, as a revolutionary rising against the Roman government… Yet it is very important to see that even this hostile and prejudiced statement does not imply an accusation that Jesus started this rising against the Roman army of occupation, but admits that He was urged by His zelotic followers upon the path which led to the conscious self-sacrifice on the Cross.This argument became the basis for a two-volume work in German, ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ Οϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣΑΣ: Messianische Unabhängigkeitsbewegung vom Auftreten Johannes des Täufers bis zum Untergang Jakobs des Gerechtenn ach der neuerschlossenen Eroberung von Jerusalem des Flavius Josephus und den christlichen Quellen (Jesus, the King Who Did Not Reign: The Messianic Independence Movement from the Appearance of John the Baptist to the Downfall of Jacob the Righteous after the Newly Discovered "Conquest of Jerusalem" by Flavius Josephus and the Christian Sources, 1929-30). A year later he published a shorter English edition titled The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered 'Capture of Jerusalem' and Other Jewish and Christian Sources (1931).
Congressional and Parliamentary Testimony on Monetary Reform In the early 1930s, as the world was suffering the Great Depression, Eisler turned his attention back to economics, the subject in which he earned his first doctorate. With a plan to reverse inflation and stave off future financial crises, he wrote three books for popular audiences on how to reform the banking system: This Money Maze: A Way Out of the Economic World Crisis (1931), Stable Money (1932), and, with economist Alec Wilson, The Money Machine: A Simple Introduction to the Eisler Plan (1933). Eisler drew on an historical practice from the Italian Renaissance called "banco-money" to argue for a dual currency system that would create an effective negative interest rate by removing the zero lower bound. Eisler presented this system to the British Parliamentary Finance Committee Review in 1932 and the U.S. Congress’s Committee on Banking and Currency in 1934, where he argued that if Great Britain and the United States both adopted his plan, "they could completely revolutionize the world and achieve such prosperity and such wealth as cannot be dreamed of under present circumstances." Neither government implemented his plan.
Connections to Eranos In 1935 Eisler was invited to give a lecture on lecturing about the identity of the author of the Fourth Gospel at the Eranos conference, which marked the beginning of his connection to Carl Jung. Jung had already been reading Eisler and went on to cite his work on Orphic symbolism in his 1935 essay "Dream Symbols and the Individuation Process" and subsequently in a lecture series on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The 1935 edition of the Eranos Jahrbuch (Eranos Yearbook) published the paper he had presented in the form of an essay titled "Das Rätsel des Johannesevangeliums" ("The Riddle of the Gospel of John"). Eranos founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn reported to Jung that one of her cats had allowed Eisler to witness her birthing a litter, which had raised him in her estimation. Another Eranos attendee, Ernst Robert Curtius, called Eisler "a real aufklärer [enlightener]" and commented: "[Eisler] showed with uncanny clarity, where the cold dialectic of the white man’s intellect leads—to a petrifaction, a rigor mortis of the world as a concept. What remains is the inner malaise of Solomonic world-weariness."
Imprisonment in Dachau and Buchenwald