Angelo Solomon Rappoport (1871–1950), known professionally as A. S. Rappoport, was a Russian Empire-born historian, writer, and translator who specialized in Jewish folklore, ancient myths, and historical narratives. Born in Baturyn in the Chernigov Governorate (now Ukraine), he settled in London and authored popular works such as Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel and History of Palestine, drawing on legends, religious texts, and historical accounts to make complex subjects accessible. As a Jewish scholar, Rappoport also translated literary works, including stories by Yiddish authors like I. L. Peretz, contributing to the dissemination of Eastern European Jewish culture in English. His writings emphasized mythological and cosmological motifs in Jewish tradition, blending historical analysis with folklore to explore themes of nature, human life, and ancient beliefs.
An excerpt from, "The Curse of the Romanovs: A Study of the Lives and Reigns of Two Tsars Paul I and Alexander I of Russia: 1754-1825" by Angelo S. Rappoport, Ballantyne Press, 1907, Pg. 6 - 16:
The irritability of the degenerate, of the mentally diseased, who is seized with fits of megalomania, which suffer no criticism and brook no contradiction, leads to systematic cruelty if it is not checked, and it is disastrous if, on the contrary, it is accompanied by the unlimited power of Tsar or Caesar. In ordinary men their wills, their whims and fancies, their manias, are checked and controlled by the will of others, by law and by society. There are prison cells, lunatic asylums, strait-jackets, for the ordinary mortal who grows diseased, loses his balance and strikes out in his wild strength, but there is but slight control for the idiot or madman on a throne, at any time and in any country. It did not and does not exist at all for the Caesars and for the Tsars. Who, indeed, has ever dared to doubt aloud the soundness of their minds? Who has dared to dam the current of their anger or check their mad outbursts which lash the smooth existence of their subjects into foam-crested waves and break and ruin everything before them ? There is no law, no power to oppose their will. On the contrary, they are supported by the abject adoration of their entourage, and woe unto him who shows the slightest inclination not to be submissive. Crowds of slaves surrounding the throne are constantly singing their praises, extolling their vices, flattering their vanities, treating the ruler not as a mortal but as a superior being, nay, as a God, standing beyond good and evil. But if this fancied God, or at least Superman, happens to have a diseased brain and a wild dash of degenerate blood in his veins, then this abject veneration, coupled with an unrestrained will, and the knowledge of omnipotence, finally unhinges his feeble mind. What wonder if every vestige of his judgment is destroyed and his moral feelings are corroded.
The omnipotence, however, upon the pinnacle of which the Caesars and the Tsars suddenly found themselves, was not the real — at least not the only — cause of the Caesarean insanity. It was simply the soil upon which their madness took root, bringing forth eccentric blossoms and fruits ; it was the means which allowed unlimited scope to their maniacal whims, and lent unto them vast dimensions. Placed as they were high above the ordinary mass of human beings, seeing on one side riches and power, and worshipping nations at their feet, and, on the other, the bottomless abyss into which the assassin's knife could at any moment throw them, a sense of giddiness seized them and they lost their mental equilibrium. But whenever fate has placed a real genius, a giant with a vast brain and a powerful mind, one of nature's aristocrats, upon the pinnacle of power, upon the Caesarean throne, the mixture of exultation and terror to which the degenerate and the parvenu so easily fall a prey, produced no disastrous effects upon them.
If unlimited power fosters and fostered the socalled Caesarean insanity, it was not the sole factor, for it affects and affected only those who have and had a predisposition to abnormality, degeneracy, and insanity. It requires, indeed, an aristocratic mind, a noble spirit, to preserve the mental balance of the autocratic ruler in the lofty atmosphere of a throne. Whenever a genius, nay, even a strongminded man, happened to don the purple, the strong wine of power failed to intoxicate him and he preserved his full vigour. Such was Napoleon, such were some of the Caesars, Hadrian, the two Antonines, even Augustus. The majority of Caesars and Tsars carried the germs of insanity in them before they found themselves absolute masters of the world or of vast empires. Their madness would have manifested itself in a more modest way, even had they remained private individuals. Caligula, Nero, or Paul I would not, under any circumstances, have remained normal, but as private individuals they would have lacked the opportunity to cause much harm. The Caesarean dignity fostered their manias, giving them full and unlimited scope. Napoleon suddenly found himself master of a mighty Empire ; he put his foot on the neck of Europe, but the blood of the Corsican, the son of strong-minded Laetitia Ramolini, was not corrupt, it was fresh and vigorous unlike that of his whilom enemy and later admirer, the mad son of Catherine Minerva, Paul L Augustus and Hadrian and the two Antonines stood just where Caligula and Nero had stood, but the thought of ruling the world, of commanding all its riches and all its pleasures, the knowledge that they could swallow up provinces, nay, the world itself, did not drive them mad. They were great and wise. They, too, could exclaim, with Charles V in " Hernani" : —
" Ye gods ! To stand alone
Upon the topmost summit of the world,
The head and front of all ; to be the stone
That binds the whole together ; to behold
The heads of kings submissive 'neath my feet ;
And, lower still, the houses of the great.
Then priests and men of war ; lowest of all.
Deep in the shadow that my greatness casts,
The world !
A mighty pyramid whose base is stretched
From pole to pole upon the nations' backs,
The world ! a sea. An ever-troubled flood, which all is moved
If aught be cast therein !
In its depths,
If one perchance should gaze adown the gloom,
Are countless Empires, noble vessels wrecked,
Tossed by the ebb and flow of that same tide
That knew them once, but know them now no more.
And of all this to be the lord ! To climb, At their election, to this pinnacle. Knowing one's-self a man as other men !
To see the abyss below !
What if my head Turned dizzy at the sight ! "
But their heads did not grow dizzy on the summit of the "restless pyramid." They trod upon the trembling world, they felt the pulsing of its eager life, but their strength did not fail them ; they looked down from their giddy height into the surging deep, but neither reeled nor tottered ; on the contrary, their ' spirits increased in strength, for they were of no common mould. Csesar, the real founder of the Caesarean dignity, was an unquestioned monarch, but his head was never turned. " No sudden wave of passion," said Antonius in his funeral oration, " made him cruel, no fortune or success spoiled him, no power changed him, and even the complete possession of the highest power in the State failed to influence him." ^ Caesar was one of the few mighty ones, " who, in great things as in little, never acted on whim or prejudice, but always, without exception, in accordance with his duty."
This is no place in which to investigate the causes that led to the degeneration of the Csesars or other reigning European families. Their neuropathic state has been attributed to consanguineous marriages, which are the prerogative of royalty, and which, in the end, produce depravity and mania in the descendants. A famous Russian specialist in insanity has attributed the development of the pathological element in, and the deterioration of, the members of royal and imperial houses, from the Caesars down to the Georges, to the detrimental influence exercised upon them by their consciousness of power and the exalted exclusiveness of their position. It is the retribution by which Nature punishes the crime which is committed by one class assuming power over another.^ Personally, I am rather inclined to consider the mental condition of reigning houses as the result of exhaustion. The heirs of genius are doomed to decay and deterioration. Intellectual development, in individuals as in races, leads to a neuropathic state, to weakness and to extinction. The descendants of great men cannot escape physical and mental decay. Nature, having perfected herself in a great man, has exhausted her force, and what follows is necessarily weak and miserable. Jealous fate makes the descendants pay heavily for the gifts she has heaped upon one of their ancestors. It is the curse of inheritance, the curse of ancestry that weighs on their shoulders. Now the members ot the reigning houses have been and are in most cases the descendants of a orreat man who has been the founder. It is due to this fact that their successors, who are, if not their sons and daughters, their very near kinsmen and descendants, must carry in them and propagate the germs of disease and degeneration. Although in Rome as well as in Russia, from Peter to Paul, the dynasty was not hereditary, the Csesar and Tsar designating his successor during his lifetime, this choice was limited to relatives or descendants. Thus, whilst in Augustus, the nephew of Csesar, who was a universal genius, the first signs of mental deterioration were noticeable, these rapidly increased in his successors, members of the Julian house. Antonia the younger, sister of Augustus, was the mother of Claudius.
Her son, Germanicus, was the father of Caligula, whose mother was Agrippina, grand-daughter of Augustus and daughter of the depraved Julia. Nero's mother was Agrippina the younger, a great-grand-daughter of Augustus. The father of Claudius, the great-grandfather of Nero, was Drusus, son of Augustus and Livia. Tiberius alone was not related to the Julian house, and, in fact, historians have endeavoured to prove that he has been misrepresented to posterity. Napoleon once warmly defended the character of this emperor. But, whatever the causes, it is admitted that the princes of the Julian-Claudian house, unlike the great Julius himself — soldier, statesman, legislator, historian and orator — were unfit to rule the world, and this statement is equally true of the Romanovs, whose history in many points resembles that of the Roman Caesars. Almost the same thoughts must occur to the student of history whether he read the annals of the Caesars or those of the Russian Tsars. The similarity of their fate is often striking. It could not be otherwise.
The Rome of the Emperors and the St. Petersburg of the Tsars in the eighteenth century offer pictures differing only in their framework. Here as there we see the same crowned criminals, clowns and madmen, ruling supreme ; the purple hiding their bloodstained hands. The gratification of their own personal wishes constitutes in their minds the welfare of the State, and patriotism takes the shape of the veneration of Caesar and Tsar. In St. Petersburg, as once in Imperial Rome, everything is the property, not of the State, but of the ruler. On all sides hundreds of thousands are starving, whilst the few revel in fabulous luxuries. Hunger and epidemics decimate the subjects, whilst the ruler is richly remunerating the courtier whose imagination hits upon a new and hitherto unheard-of luxury or pleasure ; the starving masses cast eager, hungry glances upon a piece of bread, whilst vast sums are wasted to satisfy the gluttony of the ruler. The complete absence of a prosperous middle-class, the bone and sinew of cities and of empires, is equally noticeable in Caesarean Rome as in Imperial St. Petersburg, both mainly consisting of two classes, wealthy nobles and patricians, moujiks and slaves.
Hundreds of thousands, nay millions of miserably wretched beings are suffering from famine, are exposed to insalubrious climates and a baneful atmosphere, whilst a few beati revel in luxury and debauchery. Excessive love of pomp and extravagance in feasts and revelries, in dress and presents, were characteristic of the Caesars as of the Tsars. Snow in summer, roses in winter for Caligula and Nero, pdUs de Perigord by special messenger from Paris for Elizabeth Petrovna, and if the Romanovs could boast neither the artistic refinement nor the rich imagination which characterised the revelries of the princes and princesses of the JulianClaudian house, they nevertheless displayed an equal love for pleasure and debauchery. Fortunes were spent on entertainments during the reigns of Elizabeth and Catherine of which Roman Empresses would perhaps not have been ashamed. The Roman nobles indulged in luxurious and voluptuous recreations and escaped to Baise and the other fashionable watering-places of Campania, whilst the plebs were slowly festering in the unhealthy quarters of the Esquiline and the Quirinal. Fever and leprosy are good enough for the plebs. Worse off than the slaves was the nominally free civis Romanus, As long as he was healthy and robust Caesar cared for him, it is true. He gave him panem et circenses, bread and games. But Caesar did not protect him against sickness and fever, he opened no hospitals — for what did Caesar care for dying wretches? Why should he save the lives of proletarians whom it cost him vast sums to feed?^ Caesar had no need of them. What a contrast between the Roman rich, whose magnificent dwellings on the heights of the Carinae dominated the Forum Romanum, and the crowd teeming in the dirty hovels, in the narrow streets of the Suburra or in the suburbs beyond the Pomcerium. But is the contrast less between Russian nobles, who have their grandes et petites entries to the Winter Palace and the Hermitage, and the Russian plebs? Still the Roman slave, the client from the Aventine, was happier than his Russian counterpart of centuries later. For, after all, Caesar was afraid of the plebs, of the so-called Populus Romanus, who nominally constituted, though in connection with the Senate, the official government of Rome. The Populus Romanus was not only able to pass laws ; it could prevent the passage of laws and it could revolt, for it was a surging, dangerous crowd, animated by a turbulent spirit. It was in Caesar's interest, therefore, to flatter this crowd so as to gain its favour. Caesar fed and amused this rabble ; he gave it bread and games, all that the rabble required, and as his own safety greatly depended upon the temper of the mob, Csesar was most punctual in the distribution of his bounties and the supply was most regular. But no Tsar will feed the hungry moujiks ; he is so sure of their meekness of character. They will not riot, and, even if they make a feeble attempt at it, cannon-shots soon silence them. No five measures of grain for you, my poor moujiks, from the hand of the Tsar ; no largesses on special occasions, no bread and no games, no congiariunt and no sportulce for you, O plebs of the Neva, of the Volga and of the Kama, as once for those of the Tiber. Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine will waste large sums on pleasure, Catherine will lavish twenty million of roubles on her favourites, Paul will make princely gifts on the occasion of his coronation ; he will give thousands of presents to his friends, to his servants, to his mistresses and to their relatives, but you alone, great silent mass, will be ignored. You will be ignored, because no one is afraid of you, because you have shown to your rulers that you lack the spirit of the ancient Roman mob, that you are silent and submissive, that you will not rebel, will not threaten the Russian Caesar, not only when you are refused bread, but even when your humble petitions are greeted with cannon-shot and salvos.
In the rooms of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg the visitor may admire one of the finest collections of pictures in the world, whilst high on the ruins of the Villa of Zeus on the island of Capreae, where Tiberius passed the last years of his life, stands the chapel of Santa Maria del Soccorso ; but if stones could speak what a tale they could whisper into the ears of the visitors, tales of hideous cruelties, of lust and obscenity. What scenes the walls of the palaces of the Russian Tsars and of the Roman Caesars must have witnessed ; the walls of the Hermitage and of the Kremlin, the ruined walls of the palaces on the Palatine and of the Caprean villas, what strange sounds they must have heard. They witnessed all the passions dwelling in the human breast let loose, lust and cruelty, and vice and folly ; they heard the sighs of agony of the assassinated, and the tumultuous uproar of bacchanalian revel.
