2 The Occult Power Behind Freemasonry
It follows that if there is no “Secret Government of the Jewish Nation,” such a Government cannot well be “the occult power which works behind Freemasonry.”8 The Morning Post, however, is very careful to hedge on this, as on many other points. Its alternative theory is that Freemasonry is Judaical because it is descended from the Templars, who received their Jewish traditions from the Assassins.9 The only foundation for the suggestion that the Assassins could act as intermediaries between the Jews and the Templars is, on the one hand, that they were Ishmaelites, and consequently “first cousins” to the Jews, and, on the other, a much disputed hypothesis of Von Hammer, that certain Templars were initiated into the mysteries of the Assassins.10 The truth is that the Assassins were not Ishmaelites, except in the figurative sense that all Mohammedans claim to be descended from Ishmael, and even if they were, they had no contact with Jews, and their tenets bear no trace of Jewish influence. Consequently, whatever else the Templars may have learnt from them, they certainly did not learn Judaism. The nearest approach to a tradition of Hebrew influence on Templarism is found in a very dubious legend of Swedish Masonry which alleges that certain Templars of Jerusalem received the secrets of the Essenes from seven Syrian Christians whom they rescued from the Saracens.11 But if this story were true, the secrets thus taught would assuredly have been more Christian than Jewish. To anyone, however, who knows anything of mediæval history, and the relations of Moslems and Jews at this period, the whole of this conjecture is the crudest buffoonery. No section of the Crusaders dealt with the Jews except by way of massacre. Moreover, had there been the slightest ground for believing that the Templars had Judaised it would have been seized upon as the most damning of all crimes alleged against them when the Order was suppressed. But throughout the comprehensive indictment, which ranges from the Gnostic heresy to gross licentiousness, there is no hint of the deadly sin of Judaism.