CONSPIRACY CLAIM #29

This is one of the oldest and most dangerous conspiracy theories in the world. It says that Jews secretly control Freemasonry, and use the lodges to start revolutions, wars and moral decay on the way to ruling the world. Historians call it the “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory”, and it rests almost entirely on a single document: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So let us look at that document first.

What are the Protocols?

The Protocols first appeared in 1903, serialised in Znamia, a newspaper in St Petersburg owned by Pavel Krushevan, a writer whose antisemitic articles had helped incite the Kishinev pogrom earlier that year. Krushevan presented the text as a genuine secret record, and he claimed, in the words of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “that the Protocols was minutes from a meeting of the “World Union of Freemasons and Elders of Zion.”” So the Masons were written into the story from the very first printing. The Museum calls the book “the most widespread antisemitic publication of modern times”.

Who exposed it as a forgery?

It did not take long. In 1920 the British journalist Lucien Wolf showed that ideas in the Protocols had been lifted from a German novel, Biarritz (1868), in which Jewish leaders meet in a Prague cemetery and the Devil turns up at the end. In August 1921 The Times of London went further. Its correspondent Philip Graves printed passages of the Protocols side by side with a French political satire, Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864), and showed that much of the “secret plan” had simply been copied from it. The Times called the Protocols a “clumsy forgery”. As the Holocaust Museum points out, “There is no mention of Jews in Dialogue in Hell.” The world plot was a plagiarised satire with the names changed.

The forgery has had a long and terrible life anyway: in the Museum’s words, “Despite the fact that it is a forgery, people seeking to spread conspiracy theories about Jews have used the Protocols for more than 120 years.” The Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels understood exactly what he was dealing with. He wrote in his diary: “I believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery.” And then: “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.” When the people using a document admit privately that it is fake, the document is not evidence of anything.

How did the Masons get dragged in?

Through another forgery. In 1797 the French priest Augustin Barruel blamed the French Revolution on a Masonic conspiracy (see Claim #34). He did not blame the Jews. But in 1806, as Danny Keren of the University of Haifa explains, “Barruel circulated a fabricated letter, probably sent to him by members of the state police opposed to Napoleon Bonaparte’s liberal policy toward the Jews, calling attention to the alleged part of the Jews in the conspiracy he had earlier attributed to the Masons.” One forged letter in 1806, one plagiarised forgery in 1903: that is the entire paper trail of the “Judeo-Masonic plot”.

Why Masons? Because Freemasonry was one of the few places in Europe where men of different religions met as equals. Its membership is “open to men of any race or religion” who believe in a Supreme Being and are of good repute, and the discussion of politics at its meetings is forbidden. A fraternity that welcomed Jews alongside Christians was an easy target for people who hated both tolerance and Jews.

What happened when believers took power?

We know, because it happened. Nazi Germany took the Judeo-Masonic theory as state doctrine. A Nazi poster declared that “Freemasonry is an international organization beholden to Jewry with the political goal of establishing Jewish domination through world-wide revolution.” Reinhard Heydrich counted “the Masons, along with the Jews and the political clergy, as the “most implacable enemies of the German race.”” On 17 August 1935 every remaining lodge in Germany was dissolved and its property confiscated, and wherever Germany set up an occupation regime, lodges were dissolved and looted. Occupied Paris (1940) and Brussels (1941) were treated to anti-Masonic exhibitions of stolen regalia. A “Jewish front organisation” is a strange description for a fraternity that the most antisemitic regime in history set out to destroy. We look at the Nazis and Freemasonry in Claim #13.

The theory has not gone away. The 1988 charter of Hamas, for example, claims that “With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.” Rotary and the Lions, those famous engines of world revolution, would no doubt be surprised. The idea that lodges are where world domination gets planned is answered in Claim #08.

Conclusion: Freemasonry is not a front for a Jewish world plot. The claim rests on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, exposed by The Times in 1921 as a forgery copied from a French satire that never mentions Jews, and on a letter forged in 1806 to add Jews to an older anti-Masonic theory. Freemasonry admits good men of any religion and forbids politics in its meetings; the regime that believed the theory most closed every lodge it could reach.