Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction - Andreas Önnerfors 2017

Freemasonry and anti-Semitism
Perceptions, prejudices, and persecutions

However, the worst and most infamous conspiracy myth was yet to come. Occasioned by severe tensions in French society, where the particularly secularist ideology of ’laïcité’ was colliding with that of the Church, Catholic anti-masonic feeling increased both on an organizational level and in content. The Vatican attacked freemasonry in a string of condemnations, with increasingly graphic accusations, such as of Satanism, sodomy, and sexual excesses. The papal encyclical Humanum Genus (1884) divides the world into two camps: one influenced by the divine; the other, Satanic. This described freemasonry as a ’partisan of Evil’. Drawing upon these accusations, a French anti-clerical and atheist writer, Léo Taxil, invented a hoax: an account of Satanic freemasonry (venerating the diabolical figure of Baphomet, who he alleged was revered by the Templars); the intention was to mock both the brotherhood and Roman-Catholic opposition to it.

At around the same time, the Russian Tsarist secret service concocted the most toxic, anti-Semitic publication of modern times—the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which forecast a Judeo-masonic plot for world dominance. Barruel (mentioned earlier) had been contacted in 1806 by an Italian officer named Simonini, who encouraged him to publish an anti-Semitic sequel to his work. (The Italian novelist and intellectual historian Umberto Eco has outlined this feverish development in his novel The Prague Cemetery (2010), in a masterly mix of fact and fiction.) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion depicted freemasonry as a puppet of Judaism in a bid to achieve world dominance. All this demonstrated just how closely linked anti-masonic and anti-Semitic feelings were, and explains something of why the former was consequently suppressed by totalitarian fascist and socialist regimes alike (see Figure 8).

8. ’L’Oeuvre de la Franc Maçonnerie. Révolution. Anarchie’.

In 1919, the propagandist Friedrich Wichtl published Weltfreimaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik, blaming Jews and freemasons alike for the outbreak of World War I. Wichtl’s writings were immensely influential in setting the anti-Semitic agenda of the future National Socialist Party. Wichtl claimed that all major shifts in world politics since the French Revolution had been the result of a Judeo-masonic plot for world dominance. These ideas were picked up by a General Ludendorff, whose strategic miscalculations had ultimately contributed to the collapse of German warfare in World War I. He published Vernichtung der Freimaurerei durch Enthüllung ihrer Geheimnisse—the ’elimination of freemasonry through revelation of its secrets’—in 1927. Finally, Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi propagandist, repeatedly exploited anti-masonic and anti-Semitic conspiracy myths and thus laid the ideological foundation for the Holocaust.

The suppression of freemasonry under the Nazi regime and throughout the territories under Nazi occupation was based on these writings. In France, for instance, the main executive of this project of suppression, Bernard Faÿ, was also engaged in producing the first anti-masonic movie, Forces Occultes (1943; see Figure 1). The movie accused Jews and freemasons of having dragged the French Republic into war with Nazi Germany. Forces Occultes tells the story of a young member of parliament, Pierre Avenel, who is talked into joining a masonic lodge mainly for the purpose of career promotion. Major parts of the movie focus on details of his initiation ritual. In due course, Avenel is disillusioned with freemasonry, which he identifies as a tool of corruption and nepotism. As political tensions grow in French society and in French parliament, he realizes that the brotherhood constitutes a state within the State that is manipulating governmental decisions, encouraging warmongering, and essentially encouraging the destruction of law and order.