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Note to Readers

This article represents a turning point in my investigation of Neville Goddard’s teacher, Abdullah. For the first time, we can place a documented historical figure, Dr. Modeste Abda’llah Guillaume, in the right time, the right circles, and even the right building on West 72nd Street. 

Parts 1–3 of this series traced Harlem’s esoteric underground, Ethiopian mystics, and lost names which were necessary trails that led us here, even if they ultimately pointed elsewhere. Part 4 is not the end, but it is the first point where Abdullah can be shown in flesh and ink: with a name, a photograph, a paper trail, and a context.

A full collected volume, “The Abdullah Investigation: Who He Was, Who He Was Not” will follow, bringing together all articles, tables, documents, and appendices for scholars and readers who want the complete record. This is only a beginning of telling Abdullah’s story hopefully with evidence and context instead of myths.

I finally, maybe, found Abdullah. Or at least his outline. Not a convenient proof someone pulls from a Who’s Who, but the kind that becomes obvious in newsprint and census margins. The kind that keeps showing up at the same address.

For years, the hunt for Neville’s mentor has been like chasing a rumor: an “Ethiopian” rabbi who taught Kabbalah, a Black Jew who read Scripture and turned it into living instruction. The address Neville gave, 30 West 72nd Street, sat on my desk like a dare. It promised certainty but delivered a wild goose chase and false leads. Until the leads start lining up.

First, a word about “Ethiopia.” Neville never states it flat; he softens it with phrases like “so I am told” and “I was told he was born in Ethiopia.” Winifred Flood’s (another student of Abdullah) recount is even vaguer, “from Africa.” Joseph Murphy’s, “a black Jew from Israel”. In the 1920s–30s, Ethiopia in Black public life was also symbol as much as a place. The term was also used as shorthand for African origin and sovereignty, drawn from verses like Psalm 68:31 and dignified by the one African state that resisted colonial rule.

In church pulpits and fraternal halls, “Ethiopia” could mean “of Africa,” not “from Gondar.” If you take the word that way, the trail stops darting into cul-de-sacs and starts walking a straight line.

The line begins in Atlantic City.

In the Neville lecture, “I AM in You” (1968)

“My friend Abdullah once said to me that this elderly lady…he was an old, old gentleman and he was in Atlantic City…and someone told her that he could do something to a man in her neighborhood and destroy him. So she came and offered Ab $300. Ab said, “My dear, whoever advised you this way is silly. God is love, just love.”

In Atlantic City, seeing Lamperti and Leschetizky in print was shorthand for authentic European conservatory training without leaving town.

Between 1908 and 1923, newspapers on the shore print the same name again and again: Modeste Abdallah Guillaume, sometimes G. M. Abdallah, sometimes Dr. or Prof. Abda’llah. He runs a Bel Canto Conservatory at 1708 Arctic Avenue, advertising voice trials, recitals, and Lamperti pedigree. Later, he offers something stranger: circles, demonstrations, and classes promising the “science of Being,” the “mastery of control,” the “mystery books of Moses,” and the materialization of unseen things. He tells the public he can prove spirit phenomena; he invites Christian Scientists, New Thought followers, psychics, thinkers, students, scholars. He founds a church with an unmistakable name “The Church of the Religion of Love and Spiritualistic Phenomena, Inc.” and operates a School of the Great Mindlight from the same address as his studio. It’s an open secret what “mystery books of Moses” means in that milieu: not as we previously researched, Luria in Safed, but the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses grimoire stream of psalms, seals, divine names stitched to New Thought “law” and staged for demonstration. In other words, folk-Kabbalah plus mind-science, taught as Bible.

Exactly the register Neville later credits to his teacher.

The documents tighten around him. The 1920 census places Modeste and his wife Cora Contee Guillaume at 1708 Arctic, his occupation music professor, age 49, born Algiers, with a Moroccan lodger in the flat. The ads tell you his calendar as a bel canto music teacher (Lamperti and Paris trained) from 1905-1919 and then spiritual teacher from 1920-1923 with Sunday 8 P.M. lectures, Tuesday/Thursday instruction city columns that tell you who’s doing the paperwork with him: Bessie B. Payne and Elizabeth M. Maconochie, women who also surface in nearby Unity/Spiritualist filings. The net around him is exactly the one that later feeds students to Neville and Murphy: Unity readers, New Thought seekers, Spiritualist sitters, singers.

And then, in the Press of Atlantic City on October 8, 1923, the noise stops.

For over a decade he’s a weekly presence with baritone notices, conservatory announcements and then, church incorporations, séance bills and then nothing. No obituary. No farewell recital. Just silence. The silence isn’t empty though. The paper trail keeps on in the background. In the 1930 census Cora shows up at 1709 Disston Avenue, listed married (not widowed), living with her mother Ella Contee. In 1940 she calls herself widowed, which reads less like a dated death and more like a social convenience (she was very active in the A.M.E  Zion Church) after a long disappearance. And then, a stubborn fact I couldn’t shake: a tax lien notice in August 1966 naming “G. M. Abdallah a.k.a. Guillaume M. Abdallah” tied to 1709 Disston almost forty-three years after his last ad. Whatever else happened, his name stayed alive in Atlantic City property records for decades. 

On September 13, 1923, The New York Times reported that the Morgenthaus had moved to an apartment on Park Avenue and sold 30 West 72nd Street to William Henri Zay “who will remove his musical studio…to the former Morgenthau residence.”  Zay had paid the equivalent of $1.27 million today for the property.  The article recalled “it was the scene of many brilliant gatherings.”

A new stage, was probably already being built.

In September 1923, The New York Times reports that W. Henri Zay, a baritone and voice pedagogue, purchased 30 West 72nd Street from the Morgenthau family to relocate his studio. Zay isn’t a generic teacher. He’s a Lamperti-line baritone (through William Shakespeare (not the poet), student of Francesco Lamperti), a published author of Practical Psychology of the Voice and Life and a committed Anthroposophist, part of the small cluster of Steiner readers who, in New York, were mostly… singers. Under Zay, that townhouse becomes a hybrid space: conservatory by day, esoteric salon by night. Between 1925 and 1931 it effectively houses the Anthroposophical Society of New York—lectures, eurythmy, small-press work while the rooms get rented to Spiritualist congregations, astrology and healing classes, message services, and the occasional celebrity medium. Zay dies in 1927; his widow Eileen keeps the building afloat with lessons and sublets.

The address morphs into the Emmy Heiss Memorial Center, with Hall No. 1 (an auditorium) signed out to the First Spiritualist Church and Christian Spiritual Church, and weeknights given over to Psychic Development, Numerology, Methods of Healing, Occult Sciences. In the late 1920s, handbills list Robert Hector and, soon enough, the famous Arthur Ford among the featured mediums. It is hard to imagine a better landing pad for a baritone-mystic who has been teaching Moses-books Bible and mind-law down the shore.

Now let’s set Neville back into that building. In his lecture “Gift Bestowed By God” (1971) he says:

“I am standing in his place on 72nd Street, off Central Park West; that’s where he lived. He lived at 30 West 72nd Street. And here I am in his place, and he’s telling me that I am in Barbados! He didn’t explain what he meant.”

He places Abdullah on the first floor at 30 West 72nd, the very period he’s haunting the Upper West Side without steady work (and lecturing in Rosicrucian circles), the early 1930s when bread lines loop around blocks and Broadway goes dim. He says he studied with Abdullah day in, day out for years; that rabbis came to sit with him; that he knew Hebrew and taught Kabbalah as a psychology of Scripture, seeing patriarchs as states and letters as architecture.

Neville’s most vivid memory of Abdullah is from the opera house. He told the story of being taken to the Metropolitan Opera on Good Friday to hear Wagner’s Parsifal.

Neville says in “Abdullah How We Got Together Q&A”

“You think Abdullah would ever let me go and buy the seats? No. Abdullah would go right straight down to the box office–and he was a negro, I tell you– and he’d go right down and say, “I want two in the center. I don’t want too far back. Not beyond the sixth row. Right in the center.” “Yes, sir.” Buy the two seats. For any show. The first opera I saw, Abdullah took me to it. It was Parsifal. Five hours, and I’d never seen one before. It seemed it would never come to an end. Of all the operas to be introduced to opera, through Parsifal. Good Friday it was, too… you go on Good Friday in New York, he said, when you go to Parsifal, and you sit there, and think “My Lord, is it ever going to come to an end?” And he is drinking it in, every little note, he understands every little point, and he’s so in love with it. And I’m sitting because I’m next to Ab, just waiting, hoping… but nothing happens… it goes on and on and on and it’s five hours later, and then… that’s it.”

What astonished Neville was not only the music but that Abdullah, a Black man in Depression-era New York, could walk to the box office and say, “I want two in the center, not beyond the sixth row,” and he was given them without hesitation.

As we soon shall see, this was no accident. Abdullah was himself a baritone, trained in the Lamperti school and billed as director of the Bel Canto Conservatory. He belonged to that world. And he was not alone. One of his Atlantic City students, Mrs. Reid, was praised as “a sweet singer” and noted as a former pupil of Marie Selika Williams, the celebrated Black soprano who sang at the White House in 1878. In other words, Abdullah’s teaching stood inside a wider Black operatic lineage that had already claimed space in America’s most exclusive venues. The mystery of the Parsifal tickets is revealed once we recognize Abdullah wasn’t an outsider crashing the opera.

The only heavy lift now is the identity. Who, precisely, is this “Abdullah”?

The Atlantic City Abdallah’s habits answer better than any title. He does not move like an ordination-track rabbi; he moves like a Spiritualist/New Thought Bible teacher who uses psalms, names, seals, and “Law” to heal, prosper, and demonstrate. His Atlantic City ads are a glossary for Neville’s later vocabulary, Moses as method, Law as consciousness, proof as pedagogy. His disappearance syncs to the purchase and rapid esotericization of 30 West 72nd. His Lamperti boast dovetails with Zay’s Lamperti line, binding two baritones across a single building. And the records never lift a contradiction as blunt as a death in 1935 the problem that kneecaps other candidates like Arnold Josiah Ford. Instead, they preserve the name in Atlantic City’s tax ledgers long after.

The evidence below will hopefully show that Abdullah didn’t miraculously appear on the Upper West Side. He stepped out of Atlantic City’s Northside, where the Black community built its own hotels, schools, and music halls beyond the Boardwalk’s racial lines. From 1708 Arctic Avenue, his Bel Canto Conservatory and 1709 Disston still in the family, he moved or taught at West 72nd Street, in a townhouse already braided with voice studios, Steiner circles, and Spiritualist churches. There, a Black Jewish baritone could teach Hebrew letters as states, take a hungry dancer to Parsifal, and say the line that detonated a life: “You are in Barbados.”

If you stand in that doorway and look backward, the pieces click. Born c. 1871, Algiers (see Appendix C). Immigration 1895. Naturalized 1902. Atlantic City 1905–1923: singer, teacher, test-giver, Moses-books man. Then the long Upper West Side chapter Neville remembered so well with the rudeness that was instruction, the whiskey and ice cream, the sermons on Acts for a vegetarian who had “quibbles,” the letters on Cabala tucked into an old Bible. It is not a tale of a missing rabbi. It is the story of a baritone who taught the Bible like breathwork, who carried a street-level Kabbalah from Arctic Avenue to Central Park West, and, for a handful of years in the hardest decade, made the text sing.

30 West 72nd Street

30 W 72nd wasn’t a random address in Neville’s lore; it was a purpose-built singers-and-esoteric campus. Zay (a Lamperti-line baritone and Anthroposophist) bought the Morgenthau townhouse in 1923 and turned it into a mixed-use hub: voice studios, an auditorium (“Hall No. 1”), eurythmy, and after his death Spiritualist congregations, Emmy Heiss Classes, and mediums and psychics.

Neville later remembered the house as Morgenthau-owned, rented to Abdullah by Henry Morgenthau Jr. himself. This is incorrect. The record shows: Henry Morgenthau Sr. built the house; in 1923 it was sold to baritone Henri W. Zay, whose widow kept it after his sudden death. By the time Neville met Abdullah there in the early 1930s, the building was functioning as a mixed-use spiritualist and Anthroposophical center. The error is telling: Neville misremembered the Morgenthau detail but he was right about the address 30 West 72nd Street.

Abdullah Q&A

“I didn’t have a job, I had no money, and I was living in a basement on 75th Street and he (Abdullah) lived on 72nd Street, in a very lovely home that was owned by Morgenthau, whose son (Henry Morgenthau Jr) was then the treasury (sic) of our country, a cabinet member (US Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt), but his father owned this house, but he didn’t live there, and he rented the first floor to my friend Abdullah.”

About the story of singers and 30 W. 72nd, it is important to remember that Anthroposophy in America during the 1920s wasn’t the formal international organization it would later become. The entire membership amounted to a couple handfuls of people, concentrated mainly in New York, where two small groups carried the work: the St. Mark’s Group and Zay’s Emerson Group. Both were overwhelmingly musicians and singers. Figures like Herbert Wilber Greene (himself a baritone and devoted Steiner follower), Ethel Parks Brownrigg, and W. Henri Zay anchored the New York activity, holding meetings at Carnegie Hall studios. In this embryonic period, Anthroposophy was a network of singers and teachers who found in Steiner’s ideas a bridge between vocal training, spiritual science, and esoteric practice.

Table 1 — Chronology of 30 West 72nd (people & groups)

Property and tenancy details derived from NYT real-estate notices, Anthroposophical Society bulletins, and city directories

Timeline of Abdallah Guillaume (Atlantic City – New York)

ABDULLAH THE BARITONE

Bel Canto

The Two Baritones and The Lamperti Line (Francesco – G. B. Lamperti – Abdallah – William Shakespeare – Zay)

In the world of bel canto, lineage was everything. William Shakespeare (the English pedagogue, not the poet) studied in Milan with Francesco Lamperti between 1871 and 1874, carrying the father’s method back to London. There, in the 1890s, a young American baritone from Ohio, W. Henri Zay, became his student and later his assistant, before striking out on his own and teaching in London for two decades. Meanwhile, Francesco’s son, Giovanni Battista Lamperti, was active in Dresden and Berlin, still drawing students who sought a direct link to the Lamperti name. Among them, according to his own ads, was Modeste Abdallah Guillaume, who proudly billed himself as a “pupil of the great singing teacher, G. B. Lamperti.” By 1910–11 Abdallah was touring as a baritone and running his own studio in Atlantic City, while Zay returned to New York in 1916, publishing Practical Psychology of the Voice and Life and eventually purchasing 30 West 72nd Street in 1923. The result is two baritones from parallel Lamperti lines, one through Francesco, the other through Giovanni Battista operating in New York at the very hinge where our story turns.

ABDULLAH THE SPIRITUALIST

Between 1914 and 1923 in Atlantic City, Modeste Abdallah Guillaume lived a double public life that made perfect sense in its time. He was a baritone and bel canto teacher, running the Bel Canto Conservatory at 1708 Arctic Avenue and billing himself as a “famous singer, teacher and actor.” Later, he turned to metaphysics, advertising the Church of the Religion of Love and Spiritualistic Phenomena, Inc. and the Church of Abdallah, inviting “Christ Scientists, psychics and followers of New Thought.” His ads promised lessons in “the mystery books of Moses,” “the materialization of things invisible,” and “psychic control.” That phrase “mystery books of Moses” is telling: in New Thought and Spiritualist circles of the 1910s–30s it almost always referred to the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, popular occult grimoires filled with Kabbalah-tinged seals, psalms, and magical correspondences, widely used in Black Spiritualist churches and storefront temples. So when later admirers remembered Abdullah as the man who “knew the Bible and its symbolism,” it matches exactly what he was offering in Atlantic City: a metaphysical, esoteric reading of Scripture, Moses, numbers, correspondences which are the very interpretations Neville Goddard would later carry forward.

So you don’t have to squint. Here is the lowdown.

Abdallah’s Ads: Claims, Teachings, Audience (verbatim pulls)

Powers & Abilities (what he says he can do)

• “I can prove the existence of spirit beings.”
• “I can teach anyone with a normal mind to behold the materializations of what to most of us are unseen things.”
• “I am the medium of a most wonderful teacher who speaks and voices wisdom through this my servant body.”
• “I can by this force heal, help harmonize.”
• “[He] will demonstrate the phenomena of spirit” (illegible word fragments in that line, but ‘demonstrate… phenomena of spirit’ is clear)
• “Every phase of spiritualistic phenomena is made plain.”
• “The wonderful psychic… Spiritualistic science.”
• “The wonderful medium, teacher and professor… will lecture on psychic control; the master science, solar lights and astral bodies.”
• “Those wishing to understand the mystery books of Moses and the materialization of things invisible should apply for advice and schooling.”

Teachings & Topics (what he says he teaches)

• “The science of Being and law of unfoldment together with the mastery of control.”
• “Teacher of the mastery of control.”
• “The Illuminated Way: sun thoughts, sun doctrine, sun perfection; … a great spiritualistic new thought…”
• “The Great Sun Spirit: Revealing the Illuminated Way and Kingdom of the Light.”
• “The Psychic Soul and Solar Spirit” (lecture title)
• “Psychic control; the master science, solar lights and astral bodies.”
• “Higher psychology (classes forming); School of the Great Mindlight; Spiritualistic fundamentals and the psychological development of the soul’s expression.”
• “What you would know about self made plain.”
• “Private lessons in healing and the development of prosperity.”
• “If you would develop psychic power, spiritual sight and the God-life, see G. M. Abdallah… Thoughts given from 8–9 P.M. (Tues & Thurs).”
• “Devoted to spiritualistic new thought as taught by the divine mystic G. M. Abda’llah Ibn Ghaleym Ibn Allah.”
• “Those wishing to understand the mystery books of Moses … apply for advice and schooling.”

Audience & Invitations (who he says it’s for)

• “Christ Scientists and followers of New Thought, psychics and the general public are cordially welcomed.”
• “Christian Scientists, Thinkers, Psychics and the general public are cordially welcomed.”
• “Christ Scientists, thinkers, reformers, psychics, students, scholars; the general public and all who are in need of consolation or a healing thought are cordially welcome.”
• “Those desiring helpfulness, health, prosperity and progress call to see G. M. Abda’llah… Consultations daily.”
• “We present none but best psychics.”

Self-Descriptors – Titles (how he brands himself)

• “Dr. G. M. Abda’llah – Psychologist, philosopher and teacher.”
• “The Great Teacher” – “The wonderful psychic…”
• “The wonderful medium, teacher and professor…”
• “High Priest and Test Giver, teaching the occult art of the Orient.”
• “Oriental mystic” – “Saharawi Mystic.”
• “G. M. Abda’llah Ibn Ghaleym (Ghalym) Ibn Allah” – “Abda’llah Ben [illegible].”

Venues

• Weekly public lectures: “Sunday Evening — 8 o’clock” (multiple venues).
• Weeknight instruction: “Thoughts given 8–9 P.M., Tuesdays & Thursdays”; “Public meeting Tuesday eve.”
• Private work: “Private lessons in healing and the development of prosperity”; “Consultations daily.”
• Circles/classes: “Join the Tuesday evening circle for the advancement of thought”; “Classes in the higher psychology are now being formed.”
• Claims/demo nights: “Come Sunday night… a beautiful lecture, beautiful singing and a blessing to all.”
• Halls/addresses: 1708 Arctic Ave (home base, consultations, “School of the Great Mindlight”); Currie Bldg. (3 S. South Carolina Ave., top floor); Eastern Star Hall (3 S. South Carolina Ave.); phone 1009-M.

THE CHURCHES & THE UNITY WOMEN

These clippings show the women who incorporated Abdullah’s church, Bessie B. Payne and Elizabeth M. Maconochie who also surface in a parallel filing for the Unity Spiritualists’ Church (34 N. Kentucky Ave). That overlap matters. “Unity” here points straight into the New Thought/Unity ecosystem (Fillmores, metaphysical Bible interpretation), and you’ve already got Winifred Flood’s later testimony: she took the Unity courses, then studied with Neville, and then with “the great mystic Abdullah, from Africa.” In other words, Atlantic City’s Black metaphysical scene was braiding together Unity-style metaphysical Christianity, Spiritualist practice (mediums, message services), and New Thought psychology. Abdullah sat right at that braided junction: voice teacher and metaphysical Bible teacher and Spiritualist test-giver. Nothing points to formal rabbinics; everything points to Kabbalah-flavored, New Thought Bible precisely the vocabulary Neville picks up (inner meaning, numbers, correspondences, “Moses as state of consciousness,” etc.). For our research (Abdullah’s disappearance from Atlantic City on Oct 8, 1923), it’s important to note Bessie B. Payne died in 1933 and Elizabeth M. Maconochie 1929.

The Bridge – 30 West 72nd Street

UPDATE: Part 4.5 – Houdini to Yogananda: Following Neville Goddard’s Abdullah from Atlantic City to NYC

On October 8, 1923, Abdullah’s advertisements in the Atlantic City Press fall silent. At the same moment, the New York Times reports that baritone and Lamperti-line pedagogue W. Henri Zay has purchased 30 West 72nd Street for his studio. Zay, an ardent Anthroposophist, soon turned the townhouse into the New York headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society, a place where singers and vocal teachers gathered for lectures, journals, and eurythmy. After Zay’s sudden death in 1927, his widow kept the house afloat with voice lessons while its halls hosted Spiritualist events and esoteric classes. So when Neville later recalled that Abdullah lived at 30 West 72nd and took him to Parsifal on Good Friday, the scene does not read as myth. Abdullah had simply shifted from Atlantic City into a building already designed as a singers-and-mystics hub.

The fragments of his life cohere once viewed through this hinge. A North African baritone who ran a Bel Canto studio and founded a metaphysical church at 1708 Arctic Avenue, publicly inviting Christian Scientists, psychics, and New Thought seekers to study the “mystery books of Moses.” Women like Bessie Payne and Elizabeth Maconochie linked him to Unity circles, while Winifred Flood, a voice teacher herself, later traced the same line: Unity – Neville – Abdullah. His disappearance from Atlantic City in 1923 coincides with Zay’s purchase of 30 West 72nd, and the Anthroposophical tenancy explains why a baritone-mystic steeped in Bible symbolism would be teaching there when Neville arrived. He did not need Cambridge credentials to “know the Bible.” He was a New Thought–Unity–Spiritualist symbolist, speaking the same language of resonance and scripture as Zay and the anthroposophical singers around him. The clippings show it; the address clinches it. This is the through-line that finally brings the story home.

The Psychic Teacher in Three Voices: Flood, Murphy, and Neville

The figure of Abdullah reaches us refracted through the memories of three students: Joseph Murphy, Winifred Flood, and Neville Goddard. Each described him differently, but when their accounts are read against Abdullah’s surviving Atlantic City advertisements, the outlines of a single teacher emerge.

Joseph Murphy, who arrived in New York in 1922, remembered Abdullah above all as a psychic. In his most repeated story, Abdullah startled him by declaring that his family had six children, not five. Only later did Murphy confirm with his mother that an infant brother had indeed died in childbirth. For Murphy, this was proof of clairvoyance. Murphy’s line about Abdullah giving Hebrew courses at Cambridge appears apocryphal; no record supports it.

Winifred Flood, a teacher of voice and speech, placed Abdullah in a different frame. She traced her own path through Unity courses into Neville’s circle, and finally into Abdullah’s small classes, which she remembered as Bible lessons delivered with unusual force. Flood described him as the “great mystic Abdullah, from Africa. For her, Abdullah’s teaching was a continuation of the Unity metaphysical Bible school tradition, but deepened into something stranger, more esoteric. Her testimony helps fix his audience as New Thought seekers, Unity readers, and students of Bible symbolism which is the same public his Atlantic City ads explicitly invited. (See update May 28, 2026 Neville Goddard Hotel Lobby Ambush: Winifred MacCardell Flood’s 80-Year-Old Sex Bragging & “Just Trash” “Revelation” Book)

Neville Goddard, who studied with Abdullah between 1929 and 1936, cast him as a Kabbalist of consciousness. He remembered him as a man who “knew more of Christianity than all the priests of the world. ” a man who taught him that every Hebrew letter was a personification of an eternal state. Neville even preserved fragments of his teacher’s letters, including a definition of Cabala In Neville’s telling, Abdullah was the one who turned scripture into a living psychological code.

When these recollections are set beside the Atlantic City newspaper record, the vocabulary snaps into focus. In ads, Abdullah billed himself as “High Priest and Test Giver” and promised psychic demonstrations, instruction in the “mystery books of Moses,” the “law of unfoldment,” and the “Illuminated Way.” He invited Christian Scientists, New Thought seekers, and psychics who are precisely the audiences that Murphy, Flood, and Neville represent. The most over-told story that Abdullah demonstrated psychic powers became his calling card, the gateway into a program of metaphysical Bible teaching and the “law of consciousness” that Neville would later make famous.

Appendix A: The Kabbalah of Abdullah is Not Lurianic, but Folk and “Moses Books”

My previous writing aligned Abdullah with Lurianic Kabbalah, (which is super helpful to Neville studies) because Neville’s language “the simple little letters of Hebrew,” “all characters of scripture are personifications of eternal states” mirrors the ideas associated with mystics like Isaac Luria. But the documentary evidence of Abdullah’s ads points to “understand the mystery books of Moses” and “behold the materializations of unseen things” which sit squarely in the current of “folk Kabbalah”, psalm magic, and Moses grimoires that flooded New Thought and Black Spiritualist circles in the early 20th century.

The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses (can be read here)

• Origin: 19th-century German grimoire, compiled by Johann Scheible (1840s), falsely attributed to Moses.
• Content: Magical seals, angelic names, psalm formulas, exorcisms, healing charms.
• Circulation: Mass-marketed in the U.S. by publishers like L. W. de Laurence (Chicago), absorbed into hoodoo shops, Pennsylvania Dutch pow-wow, and Spiritualist bookstores.
• Relevance to Abdullah: His Atlantic City ads (1910s–20s) promising insight into the “mystery books of Moses” are unmistakable references to this genre. He wasn’t offering Etz Chaim of Hayyim Vital; he was offering exactly what his audience recognized as the Sixth and Seventh Books as an esoteric manual.

Psalm Magic

• Root Text: Sefer Shimmush Tehillim (c. 10th–13th c.), assigning psalms to magical purposes (e.g., Psalm 91 for demons, Psalm 20 for success).
• Practice: Recitation, inscription, amulets, healing, protection.
• Transmission: Entered Christian Arabic, Coptic, and even Muslim contexts (as Dallāl al-mazāmīr). In America, psalms became common in conjure, hoodoo, and New Thought healing services.
• Relevance to Abdullah: His ads promise “materialization of unseen things” and “healing thoughts”: classic psalm-magic framing. Murphy’s anecdote of Abdullah revealing his “forgotten brother” fits the psychic-proof + biblical text model of this culture.

Folk / Practical Kabbalah

• Definition: Applied Kabbalah with divine names, amulets, permutations, magical uses as opposed to the speculative sefirotic cosmology of Luria.
• Status: Marginalized by rabbinic authorities, but widespread in folk practice. Often blurred with Christian occultism and New Thought.
• Relevance to Abdullah: Neville’s letters from Ab, in which he “takes the word Cabala and breaks it down in Hebrew,” is letter-magic pedagogy, not a Safed cosmology. This is practical/folk Kabbalah dressed in psychological allegory.

Why the Confusion

• Neville later framed everything as “psychological states,” making it easy for readers to retroject him into Lurianic categories.
• The word “Kabbalah” in early 20th-century New Thought circles often meant any esoteric Bible interpretation, including the Moses books.
• Scholars like Margaret Ruth Broome and Israel Regardie labeled Abdullah “rabbi” or “teacher of Qabalah,” reinforcing the association with Jewish mysticism broadly.
• But the ads show the idiom: “mystery of the books of Moses,” “materialization,” “psychic law”: folk Kabbalah, Moses grimoires, psalm magic.

What Abdullah taught Neville, Murphy, and Flood was not the cosmic Lurianic system of Safed but the applied, popularized Kabbalah of Moses books and psalm-magic, reframed through New Thought psychology. His genius was in translating that folk-esoteric vocabulary into a symbolic Bible that Neville could later universalize.

Note: Practical Kabbalah vs. “Voodoo” Misunderstandings

It is important to stress that the practices Abdullah advertised, instruction in the “mystery books of Moses,” psalm recitations for healing, the use of divine names and symbolic numbers do not represent an importation of African-diasporic religion or “voodoo.” They belong to a long, contested, stream within Jewish mysticism often called practical or folk Kabbalah. As Gershom Scholem, Moshe Idel, and later scholars have shown, the use of Psalms and divine names for healing, protection, or visionary experience was attested in Jewish sources as early as late antiquity (e.g. Shimmush Tehillim), elaborated in medieval Kabbalistic manuals, and persisted into early modern Europe. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses  though a nineteenth-century German grimoire, drew on these older traditions and re-packaged them for a transatlantic print culture where Jewish, Christian, and African American readers alike turned to “Moses-books” as sources of esoteric authority. When Abdullah spoke of the “mystery books of Moses” and taught symbolic exegesis of scripture, he was tapping into this recognizable lineage: a hybrid of biblical mysticism and practical Kabbalah that had circulated for centuries. In this sense, what he offered was not “foreign” to Judaism, nor reducible to folk sorcery; it was a modern American iteration of a well-documented mystical current, adapted to the New Thought/Spiritualist audiences of the 1910s–30s.

Appendix B: Known Addresses of G. M. Abda’llah

A few doors along, Amunath Israel (1714 Arctic) had housed a Hebrew International School before erecting its synagogue (1908), underscoring how Black Northside and immigrant Jewish institutions overlapped on the same corridor.

Known Addresses of G. M. Abda’llah Guillaume

So his core Atlantic City hub was 1708 Arctic Avenue (studio), while 1709 Disston Avenue (Cora’s family home) remained tied to him administratively (taxes, wife’s residence).

Appendix C: The Crémieux Decree and Algerian Jews

On 24 October 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, the French government under Adolphe Crémieux issued the Crémieux Decree, a law that collectively granted French citizenship to nearly 35,000 Jews living in Algeria.

This decree made Algeria’s Jews full legal citizens of France, while their Muslim neighbors remained classified as “French subjects” without full political rights. The result was a radical realignment: Algerian Jews could now study, travel, and settle in France as if they were Paris-born. They gained access to French schools, universities, and conservatories, including the Conservatoire de Paris, which became a natural destination for ambitious North African musicians.

For our story, if Modeste Abdallah Guillaume was born in Algiers around 1871 as the U.S. census suggests, he would have come of age after the Crémieux Decree. That means he was legally French, free to cross the Mediterranean, and eligible to enter the Paris Conservatoire.

His claim of Conservatoire training, Lamperti lineage, European and the artistic respectability he was given is possible and historically grounded. Algerian Jews in this period often navigated dual identities: deeply rooted in the Maghreb while moving fluidly in French cultural institutions. This dual identity helps explain how “Guillaume” could later reinvent himself in America as both a professor of bel canto and a North African mystic.

Sources

Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (Rutgers University Press, 2010) excellent on the impact of the Crémieux Decree.
Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Cornell, 2006) background on French citizenship in Algeria.
Journal Officiel de la République Française, 24 October 1870 (the decree text itself).

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Sunday Gazette (1891 – 1930)

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All census images here.