18. The Orphic Circle

Baphomet

During the 1820s, according to Robert Dreyfuss in Hostage to Khomeini, the British established the so-called Oxford Movement, a movement of high church members of the Church of England, organized by Oxford University, the Anglican Church, and Kings College of London University, in league with the Jesuits. With the movement’s umbrella being not a church but Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, the Oxford Movement created spies who passed themselves off as “missionaries,” and who were assigned with the mission of building affiliated branches of the Scottish Rite throughout the Empire. These missionaries would not attempt to convert Muslims away from Islam to other religions, such as to Christianity, for instance, but sought instead to bring Sufi practices in line with the cult practices of the Scottish Rite.[1] The chief sponsors of the project, further explains Dreyfuss, were the British royal family, Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 1881), Lord Shaftesbury, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 – 1873), who was closely acquainted with the famous occultist Éliphas Lévi (1810 – 1875), by whom he was purportedly initiated into the Frankfurt Judenloge, which would also become the prime influence behind the Occult Revival of nineteenth-century England.[2]

It was also in Coningsby that he confessed, through a character named Sidonia, modeled on his friend Lionel de Rothschild (1808 – 1879), eldest son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, that, “the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Of the influence of the secret societies, Disraeli also remarked, in Parliamentary debate:

 

lt is useless to deny… a great part of Europe—the whole of Italy and France, and a great portion of Germany, to say nothing of other countries—are covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads. And what are their objects? They do not attempt to conceal them. They do not want constitutional government. They do not want ameliorated institutions; they do not want provincial councils nor the recording of votes; they want… an end to ecclesiastical establishments…[3]

 

Benjamin Disraeli, the only British prime minister to have been of Jewish birth, was also Grand Master of Freemasonry, as well as knight of the Order of the Garter. Bulwer-Lytton was a friend of Benjamin Disraeli, and admired his father Isaac D’Israeli (1766 – 1848), himself a noted author. Like Moses Montefiore (1784 –1885), Isaac D’Israeli, was a member of the Bevis Marks synagogue. Montefiore was born in Livorno, Italy, a stronghold of the Sabbatean sect. Henriette (or Hannah), the sister of his wife Judith, married Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who headed the family’s banking business in Britain, for whom Montefiore’s firm acted as stockbrokers. Montefiore collaborated with Adolphe Crémieux (1796 – 1880), Grand Master of the Masonic Rite of Misraim and Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of France, who was responsible for managing the high degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite within the Grand Orient of France.[4]

According to Forty-Eighter Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795 – 1874), the time was then ripe for the carrying the Zionist ideals, as the sympathy of men like Adolphe Crémieux, Moses Montefiore, Edmond James de Rothschild, and Albert Cohn, rendered the Jews politically influential. Albert Cohn (1814 – 1877), a close friend of the Rothschilds, was employed by Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774 – 1856), considered one of the most accomplished orientalists of his time as one of his secretaries.[5] Die Geschichte der Assassinen (“The History of the Assassins”), published in Vienna in 1818, and written by Hammer-Purgstall, achieved great success in Europe and continued to be treated as the standard history of the Nizaris until the 1930.[6] The orientalists of the nineteenth century, led by Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758 – 1838), had already produced a number of scholarly studies of the Ismailis, resorting for the first time in Europe the historical works of Muslim authors, like Akhu Muhsin, and his account of the Assassins alleged seven stages of initiation, as well the account of Marco Polo. It was Sacy who finally resolved the various attempts at tracing the origins of the name of the Assassins, and confirmed that it derived from the use of Hashish, which Marco Polo reported was used for indoctrination purposes.[7] Edward Said, in Orientalism, described Sacy as “the teacher of nearly every major Orientalist in Europe, where his students dominated the field for about three-quarters of a century.”[8] Said added that several of Sacy’s students were “politically useful” as part of French presence in Egypt following Napoleon’s invasion.[9] These included Jean-François Champollion (1790 – 1832), known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs through the translation of the Rosetta stone.[10]

Focusing on the Nizari Ismailis of Alamut, Hammer-Purgstall, also accepted Marco Polo’s narrative as well as all the criticism accumulated about the Ismailis by their Sunni and Shiah detractors. According to Hammer-Purgstall, in his Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum (“Mystery of Baphomet Revealed”), in volume 6 of Fundgruben des Orients, there was found among the antiquities of the Imperial Museum of Vienna some idols named Heads of Baphomet, which the Templars were said to have venerated. These had been seized during a Templar retreat, at a time when they were pursued by the law. The term “Baphomet,” the idol of the Templars, according to his interpretation, signifies the baptism of Metis, or of fire, and is, therefore, connected with the heresies of the Gnostic Ophites. Ultimately, Hammer-Purgstall regarded the Assassins as the exemplar of the secret societies of his own day, such as the French Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati, and, above all, the Italian Carbonari.[11] Hammer-Purgstall confessed the aim of his work:

 

In writing this history, we have set two things before us as our object, to have attained which is less our hope than our wish. In the first place, to present a lively picture of the pernicious influence of secret societies in governments, and of the dreadful prostitution of religion to the horrors of unbridled ambition.[12]

 

On the advice of Hammer-Purgstall, Cohn left Vienna in 1836, and began his lifelong connection with the Rothschilds.[13] In Frankfurt, he met with Salomon Mayer von Rothschild  (1774 – 1855), founder of the Austrian branch of the Rothschild family. Then moving to Paris, he perfected his skills in oriental languages ​​with Silvestre de Sacy.[14] Cohn taught successively three of the children of Salomon’s brother, James Mayer de Rothschild (1792 – 1868), founder of the French branch of the Rothschild family, including his son Edmond James de Rothschild (1845 – 1934).[15] James was married his niece Betty, the daughter of his brother Salomon. Together they patronized major personalities in the arts, including Rossini, Chopin, Honoré de Balzac, Delacroix, and Heinrich Heine. In 1839, after a year spent with his pupils in Palestine and in Austria, Cohn was placed by Baron Rothschild and his wife in charge of their extensive charities.[16] Cohn was President of the Rothschild-supported French Benevolent Society, a member of the Central Consistory of France, and President of the Society of the Promised Land. [17] The Central Consistory of France was an institution set up by Napoleon in 1808 to administer Jewish worship and congregations in France. He also directed the establishment of regional Israelite Consistories, subordinate to the Central Consistory, across France.[18]

 

Gore House

Gérard Galtier, the historian of Egyptian Freemasonry, suggests as a hypothesis that Bulwer-Lytton, who was never made a Freemason, was initiated into a branch of the Asiatic Brethren that was still operating in the Frankfurt region, probably during his visits to Germany between 1841 and 1843.[19] William Wynn Westcott, cofounder in 1888 of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, claimed in a lecture on the Rosicrucians that:

 

The late Lord Lytton, the author of “Zanoni” and “The [sic] Strange Story,” who was in 1871 Grand Patron of our Society, took very great interest in this form of Philosophy, although he never reached the highest degree of knowledge; for public reasons he once made a disavowal of his membership of the Rosicrucians, but he had been admitted as a Frater of the German Rosicrucian College at Frankfort on the Main; that College was closed after 1850.[20]

 

Joscelyn Godwin describes Bulwer-Lytton’s influential 1842 novel Zanoni as “an encyclopedia of ideas about the occult sciences.”[21] The author says: “…It so chanced that some years ago, in my younger days, whether of authorship or life, I felt the desire to make myself acquainted with the true origins and tenets of the singular sect known by the name of Rosicrucians.” The opening scene of Zanoni is set in the occult bookshop in Covent Garden, run by a Mr D—, who Bulwer-Lytton refers to as his “old friend,” a reference to John Denley (1764 – 1842), who operated a small shop in the district that specialized in the occult.[22] The book purports to be transcribed from a ciphered manuscript acquired from an old gentleman encountered there. It rejects Mesmer and Cagliostro as charlatans, but praises Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. The book pays special respect to the Platonists, Pythagoreans, and Apollonius of Tyana. Besides Glyndon, the narrator, the characters of Zanoni include two Chaldean initiates, apparently the only two left on earth of a high and ancient order, older and more illustrious order of which the Rosicrucians are a branch. Mejnour works at his plans with “cabala and numbers,” while Zanoni, a character much like the Comte Saint-Germain, is guillotined during the French Revolution. Zanoni’s fate would inspire Bulwer-Lytton’s friend Charles Dickens on how to end A Tale of Two Cities.[23]

It was at Gore House that Bulwer-Lytton, his friend Benjamin Disraeli, the Fourth Earl Stanhope, John Varley, and many other influential personalities gathered to experiment in the occult practices. English watercolor painter and astrologer John Varley (1778 – 1842), a friend of William Blake, was mentored by Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope (1753 – 1816), the father of Lady Hester Stanhope and brother-in-law of William Pitt the Younger. A Freemason, Stanhope was friendly with Illuminatus Philippe Egalité, in turn a friend of Jacob Falk. In collaboration with Samuel Varley, he formed a Chemical and Philosophical Society that met at Hatton House, to which Josiah Wedgwood and other famous men belonged. Dilettanti Sir Joseph Banks was very active in founding this body, while Richard Payne Knight was a life subscriber, and that the annual subscriptions were collected by William Drummond of Logiealmond (1769 – 1828), an exponent of the solar theory of religions and a long-time friend of Sir William Hamilton.[24] In 1811, Drummond’s highly controversial The Oedipus Judaicus, a set of essays dealing with some episodes in the Hebrew scriptures which reference the Oedipus Aegyptiacus of Athanasius Kircher. Drummond’s interpretation is that these passages conceal an esoteric meaning concerning the sun, the zodiac, and the other heavenly bodies.

Stanhope’s daughter, Lady Hester Stanhope (1776 – 1839), developed an early interest in astrology and the occult.[25] In 1810, Stanhope left Portsmouth with her brother James Hamilton Stanhope, who accompanied her as far as Rhodes. Among her entourage were her physician and later biographer Charles Lewis Meryon (1783 – 1877) and her maids Elizabeth Williams and Ann Fry. In Rhodes, she met a friend of Lord Byron, Michael Bruce (1787 – 1861), an adventurer and later MP, who became her lover and travelling companion. From Athens, their party travelled on to Istanbul, and though interrupted by a shipwreck which took them to Rhodes, they landed in Cairo. Refusing the wear the veil, and instead choosing the garb of a Turkish male, she went to greet Mohammed Ali Pasha. From Cairo she continued her travels through many parts of the Middle East. Learning from fortune-tellers that her destiny was to become the bride of a new messiah, she made matrimonial overtures to the Wahhabi chieftain Ibn Saud (1748 – 1814).[26] When Meryon left for England, Lady Hester moved to a remote abandoned monastery at Joun, a village eight miles from Sidon. At first she was greeted by emir Bashir Shihab II (1767 – 1850), who ruled the Emirate of Mount Lebanon, but was welcomed by the Druze and became their de facto ruler as “Queen Hester.”[27] The Druze movement in Lebanon, another secret Batinyya-oriented movement with initiation rituals, was also considered by Freemasons, at least since 1761 and particularly during the nineteenth century, as the descendant of the first Masons and builders of the Solomon Temple, due to their use of secret signs and passwords.[28] In her Isis Unveiled, the famous Russian occultist H.P. Blavatsky, who would later herself also spent time among the Druze, reported that Lady Hester’s name “was for many years a power among the masonic fraternities of the East.”[29]

Hester’s half-brother, a visitor as Gore House, was Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694 – 1773).[30] In 1836, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (1789 – 1849) had moved into Gore House, a grand Kensington residence that had belonged to William Wilberforce—friend of Zinzendorf’s follower John Wesley—on the site now occupied by the Albert Hall. Before that, she had married the First Earl Blessington (1782 – 1829) in 1818, and held court in the early 1820s in St. James’s Square. In 1821, Lady Blessington developed a friendship with Alfred d’Orsay (1801 – 1852), a friend of Lord Byron. The following year, she and her husband set out for a continental tour where they met with d’Orsay in Avignon, before settling at Genoa for four months in 1823, giving Lady Blessington material for her “Conversations with Lord Byron.” After that they settled for the most part in Naples, where she met the Irish writer Richard Robert Madden (1798 – 1886), who was to become her biographer. From 1824 to 1827, Madden was in the Levant as a journalist, and later published accounts of his travels. In 1839, he left Cuba for New York, where he provided important evidence for the defense of the former slaves who had taken over the slave ship Amistad.[31] The Blessingtons also spent time in Florence with their friend Walter Savage Landor (1775 – 1864), author of Imaginary Conversations, which she greatly admired. Landor also wrote an anonymous Moral Epistle dedicated to 3rd Earl Stanhope.[32]

It was at Gore House that d’Orsay met Benjamin Disraeli and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It was while staying there that Disraeli wrote Venetia, and that Hans Christian Andersen first met Bulwer-Lytton’s friend, Charles Dickens.[33] Soon after Lady Blessington started entertaining at Gore House, explained Michael Sadleir:

 

A craze for occultism seized on the company. Headed by Bulwer and Disraeli, they plunged into discussion and experiment. They listened entranced to Varley’s stories of his extravagant friend William Blake; they debated the pros and cons of witchcraft and spiritualism; they even tried their hands at crystal-gazing with the help of a famous crystal given to their hostess by Nazim Pasha.[34]

 

In 1835, Nazim Pasha, presumably a high Ottoman official, wrote to Lady Blessington in French, sending her a book on medicine and music composed by the Sultan.[35] The four-inch sphere of pure rock-crystal was consecrated to Michael, the Archangel of the Sun. One of the most frequent guests at Gore House was Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Bonaparte’s nephew, during his London exile in 1838–1840 and 1846–1848. Louis-Napoleon also visited Bulwer-Lytton at his retreat, Craven Cottage in Fulham. When Louis-Napoleon returned to France after the Revolution of 1848, his court became a similar focus of occultist activity.[36]

 

Order of the Swastika

The Earl of Stanhope, Bulwer-Lytton and his friend, an English astrologer, named Richard James Morrison (1895 – 1874), commonly known by his pseudonym Zadkiel, were members of a group known as the Orphic Circle. From the 1830s, the group conducted séances using young adolescents as mediums as well as the invocation of spirits into mirrors and crystals. One of these was the then thirteen-year old Emma Hardinge Britten (1823 – 1899), who E.J. Dingwall called “the most talented and successful propagandist for spiritualism the movement had ever known.”[37] Dingwall repots a “mystic marriage” in which Emma was lured into with a member of the aristocratic Hardings family, after which, in revenge, she assumed the surname of the man involved. Dingwall’s further research revealed evidence that while working as an adolescent medium Emma had been regularly sexually abused.[38] Godwin points to her mention in her Autobiography to a “vicious aristocracy.”[39] Britten describes the member of the Orphic Circles “ladies and gentlemen, mostly persons of noble rank”:

 

The persons I thus came into contact with were representatives of many other countries than Great Britain. They formed one of a number of secret societies, and all that I am privileged to relate of them is, that they were students of the two branches of Occultism hereafter to be described [Cabbalistic and Practical]; that they claimed an affiliation with societies derived from the ancient mysteries of Egypt, Greece, and Judaea; that their beliefs and practices had been concealed from the vulgar by cabalistic methods, and that though their real origin and the purpose of their association had at times been almost lost, it had revived, and been restored under many aspects. They claimed that alchemy, mediaeval Rosicrucianism, and modern Freemasonry were off-shoots of the original Cabala, and that during the past 150 years new associations had been formed, and the parties who had introduced me into their arcanum were a society in affiliation with many others then in existence in different countries.[40]

 

Morrison wrote an account of the Hindu Yugas, four world ages that make up a cycle of time, and the relation of their numbers to astrology, citing Sir William Drummond on the Book of Joshua. An article claims that the Indian gods are astrological, as is the Buddhist Wheel of the Law. It approves the theories of Francis Wilford, published in Sir William Jones’ Asiatic Researches, founded on a myth attributed to the Servarasa, of the dual creation of the human race by Shiva and his wife Mahadeva, divided into the Lingajas, or devotees of Shiva and his lingam, and the Yonijas, devotees of Parvati and her yoni.[41] Morrison adds that nearly all the deities of India and, in fact, of the Western world, resolve themselves into male or female sun gods, the twin sexes being due to the Sun’s passing through masculine and feminine signs of the zodiac.[42]

Bulwer-Lytton was named the “Grand Patron” of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), which was restricted to high-ranking Freemasons.[43] The Asiatic Brethren, or Fratres Lucis, were derived from the German Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross (Gold- und Rosenkreuz), from which much of the hierarchical structure was used in the SRIA.[44] In 1861, Kenneth Mackenzie (1833 – 1886), best known for his Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia, traveled to Paris to meet Éliphas Levi. During the early 1850s, MacKenzie worked for the weekly periodical The Press, and later commented he had written “side by side with [Benjamin] Disraeli for years and learned to love his cordial frankness of heart.”[45] In 1854, Mackenzie had met the American Rosicrucian Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825 – 1875) who, in Paris in 1861, was newly appointed Supreme Grand Master for the Western World of the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, founded on the basis of his teachings in sex-magic. In 1866, Mackenzie founded the SRIA, whose main leaders included Robert Wentworth Little (1840 – 1878), William Wynn Westcott (1848 – 1925), William Robert Woodman (1828 – 1891), and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854 – 1918).

According to Joscelyn Godwin, the Occult Revival began with the formation of a very small group within the SRIA, recognizable by their use of the swastika, which they identified with the red cross of the Rosicrucians. The group was probably started in 1844, by Morrison, along with Major Francis George Irwin (1823 – 1898), a veteran of the “Great Game” on the Indian North-West Frontier, and Kenneth Mackenzie. Many years later, in his Zadkiel’s Almanac, Morrison announced his intention to “resuscitate in England, and spread throughout Europe, India and America—The Most Ancient Order of the Suastica; or, The Brotherhood of the Mystic Cross.” The order, he claimed, was first founded in Tibet in 1027 BC. This order was related to the “Fratres Lucis,” the name of an order given to Francis George Irwin, when he was contacted by an entity that called itself “Count Cagliostro.” Other names of the order were “Brotherhood of the Cross of Light” and “Order of the [swastika symbol].” This “Cagliostro” told him that the Fratres Lucis was originally founded in Florence in 1498, and had included Ficino, Fludd, St. Germain, Pasquales, Swedenborg and Cagliostro himself, who derived from it the knowledge to found his Egyptian Rite Freemasonry.[46]

 

Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews

Correspondence in 1851 between Lord Stanley (1826 – 1893), whose father became British Prime Minister the following year, and Disraeli, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer alongside him, records Disraeli’s proto-Zionist views:

 

He then unfolded a plan of restoring the nation to Palestine—said the country was admirably suited for them—the financiers all over Europe might help—the Porte is weak—the Turks/holders of property could be bought out—this, he said, was the object of his life… Coningsby was merely a feeler—my views were not fully developed at that time—since then all I have written has been for one purpose. The man who should restore the Hebrew race to their country would be the Messiah—the real saviour of prophecy!” He did not add formally that he aspired to play this part, but it was evidently implied. He thought very highly of the capabilities of the country, and hinted that his chief object in acquiring power here would be to promote the return.[47]

 

Early British political support for an increased Jewish presence in the region of Palestine, based upon geopolitical considerations, began in the early 1840s and was led by Lord Palmerston, following the occupation of Syria and Palestine by separatist Ottoman governor Mohammed Ali of Egypt.[48] While the French exercised an influence in the region as protector of the Catholic communities, Russians of the Eastern Orthodox, Britain without a sphere of influence. These political aspirations were supported by evangelical Christian sympathy for the “restoration of the Jews” to Palestine among elements of the mid-nineteenth-century British political elite, most notably Lord Shaftesbury (1801 – 1885), who married Lady Emily Caroline Catherine Frances Cowper, who was likely to have been the natural daughter of Lord Palmerston. Shaftesbury was the grandson of the Earl of Shaftesbury (1671 – 1713), who was highly esteemed by Moses Mendelssohn,[49] and Yirmiyahu Yovel, author of The Other Within: The Marranos, listed him as an example of “marranesque” philosophy.[50]

Shaftesbury, was one of the first leading Christian Zionists, and an early proponent of the Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land, providing the first proposal by a major politician to resettle Jews in Palestine. Lord Shaftesbury sought to turn his vision of a restored and converted Israel, including Jewish resettlement in Palestine and the creation of an Anglican church on Mt. Zion, into official government policy. Shaftesbury became president of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, founded in 1809 by influential Clapham Sect such as William Wilberforce and Charles Simeon (1759 – 1836), who desired to promote Christianity among the Jews.[51] In 1783, when Wilberforce and his companions travelled to France and visited Paris, they met prominent Freemasons like Benjamin Franklin, General Lafayette as well as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.[52] Madame de Staël became converted to Wilberforce’s cause, and lent considerable support to Abolition when she returned to Paris.[53] Wilberforce headed the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade for twenty years until the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Most early nineteenth-century British Restorationists, like Simeon, were Postmillennial in eschatology, an interpretation of chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation which sees Christ’s second coming as occurring after the Millennium.[54]

As president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Montefiore’s correspondence in 1841–42 with Charles Henry Churchill (1807 – 1869), who as British consul in Damascus responsible for Ottoman Syria under Lord Palmerston, proposed the first political plan for Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel in the region of Ottoman Palestine. The correspondence came in the wake of the Damascus Affair of 1840, which drew widespread international attention when thirteen notable members of the Jewish community of Damascus were arrested and accused of murdering Father Thomas, a Christian monk and his Muslim servant for the purpose of using their blood to bake matzo, an antisemitic accusation also known as the blood libel. Backed by Palmerston and Churchill, Montefiore and Crémieux led a delegation to the ruler of Syria, Mohammed Ali Pasha, and eventually secured the release of the captives. They also persuaded the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to issue an edict forbidding any further circulation of blood libel accusations.[55]

The Damascus Affair provided a motive for more concrete British intervention on behalf of the Jews in Turkey. Under the influence of Shaftesbury, Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, called on the Ottoman Empire to facilitate the settlement of Jews from all Europe and Africa in Palestine in addition to allowing Jews living in the Turkish empire “to transmit to the Porte, through British authorities, any complaints which they might have to prefer against the Turkish authorities.” The Sultan made the grant in February 1841, and equality of treatment to Jewish subjects was guaranteed in April. The British government wanted to prop up the ailing Ottomans, and admitting Jews to Palestine with “the wealth they would bring with them would increase the resources of the Sultan’s dominions.”[56]

 

Alliance Israélite Universelle

Beginning with the first voyage undertaken at the request of the Central Consistory, Albert Cohn visited Jerusalem no less than five times between 1854 and 1869. Working with Moses Montefiore, Sir Anthony de Rothschild (1810 – 1876), Rabbi Ludwig Philippson (1811 – 1889)—a member of the Haskalah—and others, Cohn obtained a recognition of the rights of Jews in Turkey. Anthony was the son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, and was married to Moses Montefiore’s sister Louisa. Cohn visited Palestine several times, and with the financial assistance of the Rothschilds, established a hospital and schools.[57] In Istanbul, on his return journey from Jerusalem in 1854, Cohn was granted a private audience by Sultan Abdul Majid I (1823 – 1861), and received a promise that no improvements should be introduced in the legal conditions of the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire which would not also be applied to the Jews.[58] Cohn’s first stop on his return to Europe was Vienna, where he gained an interview with the Franz Joseph I of Austria (1830 – 1916) and his senior ministers, leading to the Kaiser’s consent to protect the institutions Cohn established in the East, thus granting them official approval from the Austrian Empire.[59]

Cohn was one of the most active members of the Masonic-style Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in 1960 by Crémieux and five French Jews, which had for its aim, “The promotion everywhere of the emancipation and moral progress of the Jewish people.”[60] Crémieux and the German Jewish financier Baron de Hirsch (1831 – 1896) contributed funds in support of the establishment by the Alliance Israélite Universelle of a free school by Charles Netter (1826 – 1882) in Jerusalem in 1868, followed by Mikveh Israel near Jaffa in 1870, after he was granted a tract of land from the Ottoman Emperor.[61] Netter, a founding member of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, was the first headmaster, and introduced new methods of agricultural training, with Baron Edmond James de Rothschild contributing to the upkeep of the school. The school owed its founding to the activism of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, who went to London, and the United States in 1849. In 1850, he was called to the Tifereth Israel congregation in Cleveland, Ohio, where he advanced the interest of Reform Judaism. Kalischer was offered the rabbinate of Mikveh Israel, but his doctors forced him to decline the offer.[62]

Netter was also involved in the founding of the first Masonic lodge in the Holy Land, with Robert Morris, an American Mason, Past Grand Master of Kentucky, along with a few Masons then living in Jaffa and Jerusalem, reinforced with the presence of some visiting British naval officers with Masonic credentials. Morris convinced his friend William Mercer, the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Canada in the Province of Ontario, to grant a charter, which was issued on February 17, 1873, as the Royal Solomon Mother Lodge N° 293. Netter was among the signers of the petition. The charter was formally consecrated on May 7, in a Masonic ceremony conducted in tunnels beneath the ancient Temple of Jerusalem supposedly built by the Templars, and known as Solomon’s Quarries.[63] The list of those taking part included Americans, Britons, the Prussian consul, and the Ottoman Governor of Jaffa. Morris called the group the “Reclamation Lodge of Jerusalem.” Referring to the Templars, Morris noted that the ceremony was being held in Jerusalem for the first time “since the departure of the Crusading hosts more than seven hundred years ago.”[64]

 


[1] Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini (New Benjamin Franklin House, June 1981), p. 113–114.

[2] “L’Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Croix.” Splendor Solis, IV (2006), p. 6.

[3] Cited in Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini, p. 118.

[4] Ellic Howe. “Fringe Masonry in England 1870-85.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (September 14, 1972). Retrieved from https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/aqc/fringe/fringe.html; Cyrus Adler, Joseph Jacobs. “Freemasonry.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/6335-freemasonry

[5] Isodore Singer. “Cohn, Albert.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4514-cohn-albert

[6] Daftary. A short history of the Ismailis, p. 16.

[7] Browne. Literary History of Persia, Volume 2, pp 205–06.

[8] Edward W. Said. Orientalism (Penguin Books, 2019).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ridley. The Assassins.

[12] Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. The History of the Assassins: Derived From Oriental Sources (Benares, 1926), pp 218–19; cited in Ridley. The Assassins.

[13] Singer. “Cohn, Albert.”

[14] “Les Juifs.” La Patrie (November 2, 1887), p. 3. Retrieved from https://www.retronews.fr/journal/la-patrie-1841-1937/2-novembre-1887/2935/4584131/3

[15] Singer. “Cohn, Albert.”

[16] Ibid.

[17] Nahum Sokolow. History of Zionism, 1600-1918, V. 1 (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1919), p. 182.

[18] David Feuerwerker. L’Emancipation Des Juifs En France. De L'Ancien Régime A La Fin Du Second Empire (Albin Michel: Paris, 1976).

[19] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 123.

[20] W. Wynn Westcott. The Rosicrucians, Past and Present, at Home and Abroad (Mokelumne Hill, CA: Health Research, 1966), p. 45; cited in Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 126.

[21] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 126.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Leonard G. Heldreth. The Blood is the Life (Popular Press, 1999). p. 161.

[24] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 39.

[25] Ibid., p. 138.

[26] Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope & Charles Lewis Meryon. Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope; forming the completion of her memoirs (London: Henry Colburn, 1846).

[27] “Hester Stanhope.” Women in Exploration. Retrieved from https://womeninexploration.org/timeline/hester-stanhope/

[28] Zarcone. “Occultism in an Islamic Context,” p. 160.

[29] Cited in Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 281.

[30] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 138.

[31] Andrew Boyd. “The Life and Times of R. R. Madden.” Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society, 20: 2 (2005): 133–154.

[32] Algernon Charles Swinburne. “Landor, Walter Savage.” In Hugh Chisholm (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 16, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 161.

[33] Elias Bredsdorff & Charles Dickens. Hans Andersen and Charles Dickens: A Friendship and Its Dissolution (W. Heffer, 1956).

[34] Michael Sadleir. Blessington-D’Orsay: A Masquerade (London: Constable, 1933), p. 261; cited in Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 180.

[35] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 180.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., p. 200.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Emma Hardinge Britten. Autobiography of Emma Hardinge Britten (Stansted Mountfitchet : SNU Publications, 1996), p. 7; cited in Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 200.

[40] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 211.

[41] Ibid., p. 16.

[42] Ibid., p. 213.

[43] Ibid., p. 218.

[44] Ibid., p. 121.

[45] Howe. “Fringe Masonry in England 1870-85.”

[46] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 220.

[47] Benjamin Disraeli, John Alexander Wilson Gunn & Melvin George Wiebe. Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1852–1856 (University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 535.

[48] Leonard Stein. The Balfour Declaration (Simon & Schuster, 1961).

[49] Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger. “Berlin Salons: Late Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Century.” Jewish Women’s Archive. Retrieved from https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/berlin-salons-late-eighteenth-to-early-twentieth-century

[50] Thomas Fowler & John Malcolm Mitchell. “Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of.” In Hugh Chisholm (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 24, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911), pp. 763–765.

[51] Kelvin Crombie. For the Love of Zion (Hodder & Stoughton Religious, 1991).

[52] William Hague. William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London: HarperPress, 2007), pp. 53–55.

[53] John Pollock. Wilberforce (David C Cook, 2013).

[54] Donald Lewis. The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury And Evangelical Support For A Jewish Homeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 380.

[55] Isaac Baer Levinsohn. Éfés dammîm: a series of conversations at Jerusalem between a patriarch of the Greek Church and a chief rabbi of the Jews, concerning the malicious charge against the Jews of using Christian blood (Longman, 1841). p. 14.

[56] Barbara W. Tuchman. Bible and Sword (London: PAPERMAC, 1984).

[57] Henry Samuel Morais. Eminent Israelites of the Nineteenth Century: A Series of Biographical Sketches (E. Stern & Company, 1879), p. 36.

[58] Singer. “Cohn, Albert.”

[59] Yochai Ben-Ghedalia. “The Habsburgs and the Jewish Philanthropy in Jerusalem during the Crimean War (1853-6).” Department of Jewish History The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 2009), p. 18.

[60] Benjamin Peixotto. “Principality, now Kingdom, of Roumania.” Menorah, I: 1 (July 1886). p. 212.

[61]  “Landmarks in the history of Mikveh Israel.” Mikveh Israel Website. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20091101110931/http://www.mikveisrael.org.il/P301/

[62] Aryeh Newman. “ZVI HIRSCH KALISCHER — FATHER OF THE THIRD RETURN TO ZION.” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, 5: 1 (1962), p. 85–86.

[63] Ben-Dov. In the Shadow of the Temple, p. 347

[64] Leon Zeldis. “Jewish and Arab Masons in the Holy Land: Where Ideas can Fashion Reality.” First Regular Meeting of Quatuor Coronati Lodge 112 Regular Grand Lodge of Italy (Rome, March 20, 2004). Retrieved from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/zeldis12.html

Divide & Conquer