1. Robert Eisler 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.
Robert Eisler 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.
Robert Eisler 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.
In 1908, Robert 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.
On 9 June 1907, during a trip to Italy, Robert Eisler visited the library of the Archbishop's Palace in Udine to photograph some codices.
The police picked up Robert 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.
At his trial, in which Hugo von Hoffmannsthal testified as a character witness, Robert 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.
From 1914 until 1917 Robert 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.
On 3 December 1922, Robert Eisler went to Hamburg to give a paper titled "Orphische und altchristliche Kultsymbolik" at the Bibliothek Warburg and received spontaneous applause at the end of his lecture.
When Warburg died in 1929, Robert Eisler asked to write his obituary for a scholarly journal.
In 1925, with the recommendation of the classicist Gilbert Murray, Robert Eisler took a diplomatic post in Paris as a deputy chief of the Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle which had been created at the invitation of the French government to work with the League of Nations' International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation.
However, Robert 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.
Robert Eisler cheerfully discussed his discoveries about the person and role of Jesus as the leader of a political revolt.
Robert 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.
In 1935 Robert 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 Robert 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.
Lili Robert Eisler stayed behind in Unterach am Attersee, trying to get her husband released.
Robert Eisler was eventually transferred to Buchenwald on 22 September 1938.
At Buchenwald, prisoners worked from first light until dark and in 1938 and 1939, when Robert Eisler was there, they were often made to work after dinner until one in the morning under floodlights.
Robert Eisler's body was badly damaged by his fifteen months in the camps, probably compounded by earlier war injuries and the long-term effects of malaria.
In 1942 Robert Eisler proposed to the BBC a broadcast reading of his reconstruction of Ecclesiastes for Ash Wednesday.
In September 1941, Esther Simpson, secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, wrote a one-paragraph note to Robert Eisler asking about his current employment so that she could update the Society's records.
Robert Eisler died on 18 December 1949, reportedly with the essay he was finishing, "The Passion of the Flax," at his bedside.