THE REMNANT OF JUDAH REVEALED IN GERMANY – (1)
WE begin with two quite well known verses from the book of Amos to set the scene, chapter 9:8-9:
Behold, the eyes of the Lord GOD are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth; saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the LORD. For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth.
This subject is unusual in our circles regarding the Kingdom message. I have entitled this message “The Remnant of Judah revealed in Germany”. I did a study a few weeks ago on the union of the two crowns, explaining how James VI of Scotland became James I of England. That, coupled, with my recent visit to Hanover, raised the subject that has always been of interest to me. However, it is a controversial subject in Kingdom circles. It is the question of a remnant of Judah being found in Germany.
Remember what the Scripture says; God said He would sift the House of Israel as grain is sifted in a sieve, yet He would not let those grains be lost. We know that the bulk of the grain was gathered into the appointed place, but we know that, as the exiled Israelites migrated across Europe, grains were left here and there and we should not be blind to that.
At the outset I will clarify something. I am not teaching you that all Germans are Judah, definitely not. Neither am I suggesting for one moment that Germany is an Israelite nation in the sense that Britain, Norway or Denmark or Holland would be classified. But I do hope to demonstrate to you that a sizeable number, now greatly reduced, of Judah came through Germany when the Tribes passed through that region on their way to the Isles North and West of Palestine.
We have always taught that to identify where the lost tribes of Israel were today, obtain a blank map of Europe and colour in all the areas that accepted the Reformation and the Protestant Faith, and you would have located the dominant Israelite parts of Europe.
If they were coloured in accurately you would have the British Isles, Holland, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland. However, there are three problematic areas, because there is a scattering of Israelites in Germany, as I will show, and at one time a sizeable number in France, certainly the Huguenot people who accepted the Reformed Faith. Therefore we may identify the remnant of Reuben as present in modern day France, also the Waldenses, who accepted reformation truth in Northern Italy. In fact they were pre-Reformation witnesses and were known as the Israel of the Alps. Belief in the concept of Israelites being found in Germany is not new. It is something we taught in our movement prior to World War I. In my library I have books that were written by a British Israel clergyman at that time, the Rev Douglas, which identified the remnant of Israel who had come through Germany.
But of course, when World Wars I and II broke out, we know what happened. Every time, truth is the first casualty of wartime, and it was not too long before the Germans became the Huns. In fact, such was the wave of anti-German feeling, that it reached a point in 1917 so that our own British Royal Family had to change their name to the House of Windsor. It is an historical fact that King George V went through a whole list of names before one of his advisors came up with the name Windsor. They dropped all reference to House of Hanover, House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and even the ancient German name of Guelph. All those names were dropped in favour of the House of Windsor. The Battenburgs, another branch of the Royal Family, changed their name to Mountbatten, an anglicised form of the name.
The teaching began to come to the fore that modern Germany was Assyria. That teaching did not just come to the fore in World War II, it completely took over in British Israel circles. All our preachers were preaching that Germany is Assyria. No less a preacher than our own A. J. Ferris wrote at least two books, “Germany’s Doom Foretold”, and “When Russia Bombs Germany” which outline this belief. The teaching that Germany is Assyria has been perpetuated to this day by the various branches, splits or splinters of what was the Armstrong World Wide Church of God.
In this study, we are going to look at a part of Germany, at Judah, and the Royal links. We are going to look at the heraldry, and, more importantly, the spiritual links, the westward migrations of Judah, and the poison that finally destroyed and ruined Germany.
Germany itself was never a unified nation until 1871. It was only then that William I of Prussia, had within the space of 5 years conquered Denmark, Austria and France. In the Royal suite in the Versailles Palace in Paris he proclaimed the first German Empire or German Reich. The Germans don’t call themselves Germans, they call themselves Deutsch, and the name German came about because the Romans named the people and the migrating tribes that were in central Europe in the days of the Roman Empire, “Germani”.
( “Germani” means genuine. This referred to the fact that they were genuine Celts, not members of the Asian tribes who were pushing them westward. VM)
There were centuries of turmoil. Tribes were passing through and migrating all the time. One tribe would start to move across central Europe and Germany, they had just begun to get settled and another tribe would get pushed by barbarians from the East. They were migrating and ebbing and flowing across what we call central Europe today. We know that the scattered Israelites (according to Revelation 7) “Were sealed by God for protection”. The migrating tribes made their way up the Danube Valley into Germany, into Holland, and into Scandinavia and ultimately into the British Isles. With those Israelites, accompanying them or sometimes even pursuing them, came other peoples from the Middle East. Not all Germans are the same; they only have a common bond in language; a Bavarian has very little in common with a Prussian, an Austrian has little in common with a Hanoverian, a Sudeten little in common with some of the others. They are a very different people, but they all speak a common language.
When Hitler spoke of his Third Reich incorporating all Germans, he used racial terms, but those terms were totally incorrect. When he took over Austria, the only thing those people had in common with the other parts of Germany, Berlin or Hamburg or Frankfurt was that they all spoke German.
Language was the common bond rather than race or ethnicity. There certainly is a strong Assyrian element present in modern Germany. An ancient manuscript, called the Austrian Chronicle, suggests that, as early as 703 BC, Assyrians were present in Central Europe and they were pursuing fleeing Israelites along the Danube River valley.
The Romans claimed to have founded the ancient German city of Trier. But there is a German tradition much stronger than that, and there is a building in that city called the Red House. On that building is an inscription in Latin that states that Trier or Treves was founded at least 1300 years before ancient Rome and that it was founded by Trebada, a son of Semiramis, the consort of the wicked Nimrod. She was the woman responsible for the Babylonian mystery religion.
(We do not have the space to pursue this now but if you turn to Genesis 10:22, in the descendants of Shem you will find listed a man called Asshur. Asshur was the founder of the Assyrians, and the founder of ancient Nineveh the Assyrian capital). The Western Assyrians who lived in what was called in Bible days, Asia Minor, and we would call modern Turkey, were known in ancient history as Chatti or Hatti. If you look up the Encyclopaedia Britannica you will find that, among the earliest inhabitants of Germany were people called the Chatti or the Hatti which shows the Assyrian element. Further, the ancient Assyrian kings called themselves the Chattizars or the Kaisers of the Hatti, or the kings of the Hatti, and there are certain linguistic links between the Assyrian and old High German. So we are not saying that there is no Assyrian element. We can neither be dogmatic enough to say that Germany is all Assyria, or that Germany is all Israel, but that there are different and diverse elements present within the German population.
There are also elements of Gomer present. In Ezekiel 38 we read of Gomer and all his bands. Certainly there are elements of Gomer present in Germany, especially in those regions where in history the Teutonic Knights were moving eastward and seeking to conquer the lands eastward of Germany.
What of our teaching that there are German Israelites? Northern Germany, from modern Holland, right across in a block to the edge of modern Denmark, that whole area was the ‘racial seedbed’, out of which poured tens of thousands of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who moved into Britain as the Romans moved out, and who poured across the North Sea, entered the British Isles and pushed the original Ancient British, or Celtic population westward.
Were those people Assyrians who suddenly changed into Israelites on the boats crossing the North Sea? No! Northern Germany was like a vast pool of dispersed Israelite seed, and out of that area they poured across to Britain, because they were going to the Appointed Place of prophecy.
Even the names Jutes and Jutland are derived from Judah. It is not as simple as saying all Germany is Assyria, or all Germany is Gomer. What we now call Germany continued on through the history of the Middle Ages right up until the 18th and 19th centuries. If you looked at an historical map, it was a vast patchwork quilt of little principalities and electorates and dukedoms and petty city states, some of which were bound together in what was the Hanseatic League. Most of this territory lay within the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire, which was controlled and dominated by the German speaking Austrians of the House of Hapsburg.
But the Reformation revolutionised that, and drew a line through Germany, from the days of Martin Luther, until 1648, when the peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War. The area was absolutely devastated. The horrors we see in Iraq or Ethiopia today, of starvation and disease and death by famine, war and bloodshed are no worse than those seen in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War. Germany was torn apart by religious conflict and was the battleground for the armies of Europe, the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Swedes, everybody was involved in it for thirty years. They warred back and forth across Central Europe, across Germany. The area was devastated. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost in that conflict, and it depleted in size, strength and number the Judahite, Israelite Protestant Reformed element in some parts of the country.
It also began the process of propelling many Israelite people out of Germany in a westward track, which led them to North America.
We will leave Germany for the moment and look at Judah. Judah is the Royal Tribe; remember God said to Abraham, in Genesis 17, “Kings shall come out of you”. That was further augmented in Genesis 49. In the blessing of the tribes, we learn that Judah was to be the kingly tribe or the royal tribe, and we trace the blood-line of our own Royal Family right back through King David to Judah and to Abraham with our emblems of the Lion and other heraldic devices.
We know that Judah had two Sons by Tamar, Zarah and Pharez. The story of how the hand of Zarah came out first and was bound with the scarlet cord should be familiar to you. That Red Hand of Zarah/Judah is the Red Hand of Ulster. The Zarah/Judah people did not remain in Palestine but that section of them migrated; there are new books coming out of America soon and they trace the Westward track of those Zarah/.Judah people right round the Mediterranean, via Sardinia, into Spain. They named the river Ebro in honour of Heber. They named the city of Zaragosa (Saragossa) for their father Zarah. They came from Spain into Ireland and they called this land Hibernia. We know that they later went over into Scotland. We know that Robert the Bruce, in the Scottish Declaration of Independence, claimed that the Scottish people were of Judah.
We can say fairly confidently that the people of the North of Ireland and Scotland are predominantly Zarah/ Judah, and we have a mixture of Dan as well. We know that it was to Ulster that Jeremiah brought the Princess, daughter of Zedekiah, fleeing the burning ruins of Jerusalem by way of Tahpanes in Egypt. They came on a Milesian vessel to Carrickfergus thence to Tara, and there the Princess was joined in marriage with Eochaidh the Heremon, or High King. Our Royal Family descends from that line.
But what about the Pharez/Judahites who stayed behind in Palestine from which the Davidic line had come? The Bible says that they went into deportation first with ten-tribed Israel. Only a remnant ever went to Babylon. If you read II Kings 18:13 it says:
“Now in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah (that was the Royal King of the Davidic line in Judah, in Jerusalem) did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the fenced cities of Judah, and took them”.
What actually happened was that having taken ten-tribed Israel, and deported them to Halah and Habor by the rivers of Gozan, the cities of the Medes, the Assyrians deported the inhabitants of 46 fenced cities of Judah. (200,000 Judahites). That Bible account is borne out by the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser in the British Museum, in the Assyrian Galleries. You will find the Assyrian evidence corroborates that along with our forefathers of ten-tribed Israel, went 200,000 Judahites as well.
Those people migrated across the Crimea. They came through the land of Arsareth (modern Rumania) up the Danube Valley through Germany, through Scandinavia, to Britain. It wasn’t just ten-tribed Israel, but also the descendants of 200,000 Judahites. Therefore a remnant of Judah was, and still is, present in Germany today, those who did not move on to the West. Not every Saxon, not every Jute, left Germany to come to the Isles.
Maybe that is revolutionary in some Kingdom circles, but do not forget that God spoke through Amos and He says, “I’ll sift them but not one grain will go missing”. They will all be located sooner or later.
Let us now look at the Royal links:
“Kings shall come out of thee,” – Judah was to be the kingly tribe. When I went to visit Brunswick (or Braunschweig as the Germans call it) I saw a number of historical buildings and statues connected with a king, a German monarch called Henry the Lion, who was the Duke of Saxony. His family name was Guelph, and he ruled around 1139 AD. He took as his wife Princess Matilda of England, the daughter of King Henry II. She ultimately was known in history as the Empress Maud.
The line of descent from Henry the Lion and Empress Maud brings you to Ernst Augustus of Hanover, the father of our King George I. Not only did George I have a blood claim to the throne of David, through his Stuart line of descent, he could go right back into the Norman line of descent, and trace the blood line back to the Plantagenet kings and to the Norman kings.
King James I and VI came from Scotland to claim the crown of England. He had a daughter, Elizabeth, Princess Royal of Britain. She married a young German Prince, Frederick the Elector Palatine. He was chosen by the Protestants to become king of Bohemia. Bohemia was a part of what we would call Czechoslovakia today. He no sooner was crowned than the Roman church, and the Holy Roman Empire, made sure that a Protestant Prince should not sit on that throne too long. In 1618 there began one of the most vicious wars of religion in European history, the Thirty Years’ War between the Protestant and Catholic factions in Europe. The first round went to the Roman Catholics, who completely routed the young king. He was defeated in 1618 at the battle of the White Mountain. He fled to his homeland again, taking with him his bride, who became known in history as the Winter Queen. She spent her later years in exile in Holland. That was the start of the Thirty Years’ War.
That young couple had a daughter called Sophia and she married Ernst Augustus, the Prince or Elector of Hanover. William of Orange drove the Stuarts from Britain’s throne and he and his wife Mary the daughter of James II, died childless. They were succeeded by Mary’s sister Anne who had numerous children, but none of them lived to maturity So Britain was faced with a choice, would the Catholic Stuarts come back and resume the throne, or could anybody find a Protestant with a claim to the throne? The daughter and the grandson of the Winter Queen, Sophia and her son George, The Elector of Hanover, were the Protestant heirs.
Thus came about the Bill of Rights and the Revolution Settlement, that was to secure the Protestant succession and it was to pass from Anne to the House of Hanover unless the Stuarts returned to the Reformed Faith.
I don’t know where you would find the Bill of Rights if you were looking for it in Britain, but it didn’t take too long see it in Germany. On a Saturday morning I was taken to a big museum in the centre of Hanover and there amongst many other objects of interest to us as Kingdom believers, under a glass covering, was the Bill of Rights exactly as it was delivered from Britain to Hanover. It was to advise the Hanoverians that the Crown was theirs if they upheld the Reformed Faith. It is hard to believe that all those people could be Assyrians. We know, of course, that they were not. We know that they were the remnant of Judah revealed in Germany.
Sophia died a few months before Anne, and her son George assumed the Throne as George I. He was known as “German George” because he couldn’t speak a word of English, he never bothered to learn. He reigned from 1714 to 1727. He continued to speak German, continued to make trips to Hanover every so often. His only claim to that throne was that, in fact, he was the only Protestant in the line of descent.
So Britain had a Hanoverian Monarchy. George I was succeeded in turn by his son George II, the last English king to lead his armies into battle. He fought all these battles on the Continent of Europe in the 1740’s. George II’s Queen, was a German, Caroline of Ansbach. A grandson who succeeded George II as George III, had a German Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg Strelitz.
During the time of the American Revolutionary War or War of Independence, not only did King George’s Red Coats, his British soldiers, fight the rebelling Americans, but his Hanoveriari and Hessian soldiers, his German soldiers, went over to America and fought. Furthermore, in the Napoleonic Wars, the Hanoverian and Hessian German soldiers of the British Monarch fought with Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. There is a big column like Nelson’s column, which survived the bombing of Hanover, and is the War Memorial column commemorating all the Germans who died fighting for the British Crown at the Battle of Waterloo, against the French.
George IV formerly the Prince Regent, came to the Throne of Britain. He also had a Queen, Caroline of Brunswick. He visited Hanover and there in the museum is the Golden Coach that he used on his visit, like the one our Queen uses to the State Opening of Parliament.
When George IV died, he was succeeded by his brother, William IV, known as the “sailor king”; he had a German bride, Adelaide of Saxe Meiningen. The big city of Adelaide in Australia was named in her honour. When William IV died, he was succeeded by Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria’s father, who had pre-deceased her, was William IV’s brother, Edward, Duke of Kent and he was married to Louisa Victoria of Saxe Coburg, another German. The only reason Queen Victoria did not rule Hanover as well was because they had a law that a woman could not succeed to the crown. So her uncle, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland assumed the kingdom or took the title of King of Hanover. But right up to Queen Victoria, Hanover and Britain were united. That had been from 1714 to 1837, unified through a monarchy with the same King ruling both places. Queen Victoria had as her husband and Prince Consort, Albert, a German of Saxe Coburg and Gotha.
Are we expected to believe that all those kings of German descent and all of their queen consorts and Prince Albert were Assyrians? It is not so.
The blood-line wasn’t marred; they were all of Royal Judah. The Royal line clearly demonstrates to us the remnant of Judah revealed in Germany. Queen Victoria’s own large family intermarried into European and German royalty so that she became known as The Grandmother of Europe. Her daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal of England, became the mother of the German Kaiser. Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Alexandra of Hesse, married the ruler of Russia and was the last Tsarina, slain by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Queen Marie of Rumania, Queen Maud of Norway all were granddaughters of Queen Victoria.
The Greek Royal Family is not really Greek at all; they were from Denmark, the first King of Greece, George I, being a brother of Queen Alexandra, wife of our Edward VII. Prince Philip, the husband of our own Queen is of German/Danish extraction. The beloved Queen Mary of King George the V was Princess Mary of Teck, the granddaughter of George III. She died in 1953. She had lived here for all her life, and still spoke with a German accent because her father was a minor German Prince. All these Royal personages reveal to us the remnant of Judah found in Germany.
