Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723-1939 by Jacob Katz

This is a FACSIMILE REPRINT of an exceedingly difficult book to find. 

1970 edition printed in 2025.

Please allow two weeks for the book to be delivered.

Note: This book is a reproduction of the historical text for academic, historical, or collector purposes.

Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723-1939 

This book is about the admission of Jews into the ranks of the Freemasons and how it reflected the larger scene of the Jewish struggle for emancipation. Katz explores the modern myth of Jews and Freemasons as bent upon world domination.

An Amazon review (https://us.amazon.com/Jews-Freemasons-Europe-1723-1939-Jacob/dp/0674474805):

The author of this book is eminent Israeli historian Jacob Katz (Hebrew University), a prolific scholar of Jewish history famous for - among other things - establishing the history curriculum used in Israel's High Schools. His works are too numerous to list here (>300). He won the Israel Prize in 1980 for his dedicated scholarship.

I preface my review with this information only to underscore the fact that we are not dealing with a work of conspiratorial history, but rather an investigation into a unique time period in the history of European freemasonry's relationship to Jews from a more or less semi-assimilationist background. I personally discovered this book while researching the heterodox Jewish sect known as "Sabbatianism" (spelled many different ways due to the nature of transliteration), particularly the Catholic crypto-Jewish sect of Jacob Frank. Chapter three of this book entitled "The Order of the Asiatic Brethren" deals with the connections between the Asiatic Brethren and the antinomian Sabbatian-Kabbalah of the Frankists. There are many intersections between these groups and many subsequent books have been written on this topic. Katz deserves credit for pioneering this study along with Gershom Scholem, who needs no introduction to English-speaking students of the history of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah.

This book is highly recommended, especially for its insights into the connections between the Asiatic Brethren and many wealthy European aristocrats, royals, financiers, merchants, and charlatans of mysticism peddling new varieties of occult "knowledge." Pawel Maciejko's *The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank And The Frankist Movement, 1755-1816* is a modern treatment of some of these themes, as is Christopher McIntosh's *The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment*. Both are up to date scholarly treatments using the latest discoveries in primary source material on these topics.