|
Back in the 1970s when first I approached the historical subject
of freemasonry I went to the New York Public Library. That seemed
the first obvious place to go. There stood the old card catalogue
with its neat drawers filled with 3 by 5 cards that revealed
the call numbers of its vast collection. The cards devoted to
the subject “freemasonry” occupied a row more than
10 feet long and about 5 feet tall. Daunting, and as I quickly
realized, from a scholarly point of view, virtually worthless.
Let me explain.
At that time the unsuspecting researcher might turn to a standard
work in the field of European freemasonry: Revolution and
Freemasonry,
1680-1800, by Bernard Fay (1935). It was widely cited, and by
a prolific French historian who had first published on this European
theme in French. Indeed the book was on the reading list I used
as a graduate student when studying the eighteenth century. Nowhere
did anyone mention that Fay had gone on to become a Nazi collaborator
and that he subscribed to the myth of there having been a masonic
conspiracy behind the French Revolution, indeed at the heart
of modernity. But in that vast collection of index cards there
was no work that took issue specifically with Fay and the shortcomings
and distortions found in his approach. Or take the countless
histories of various lodges in just about every Western and some
non-Western countries, all easily accessed through those index
cards. Often the histories were factual and always they were
written by devoted brothers who cared deeply about their lodge
and its history. Admirable though they were - when they were
accurate - they contained little by the way of historical analysis,
nor did they ask, why might someone become a freemason, or in
the Anglo-American tradition, what did the exclusion of women
mean? Those realities - that of course men would want to be freemasons
and women not so - were taken as givens.
Days spent in the card catalogue of major libraries quickly
revealed that masonic history was cordoned off, work done by
and for the devout, or worse still by the fanatical, often from
the far-right. It was easy to conclude that it would be better
not to enquire about the meaning of freemasonry in the lives
of the thousands who populated the lodges in the first three
generations of their existence as social centers for Euro-American
men - and eventually women. They came from a wide variety of
professions and social classes; notably absent after the founding
of the Grand Lodge of London in 1717 were actual stonemasons.
But it is hard to dampen down the curiosity of any historian
especially when the topic is something like freemasonry. It was
new to its age, directly linked to British social experience,
and by the mid-eighteenth century immensely popular in the larger
European cities. How could the historian not be interested? But
how should she proceed with a topic that had become slightly
disreputable in the larger scholarly world. Incorrectly, freemasonry
had become associated with the mystical or the irrational, or
with the devoted or the fanatical. We must never forget that
particularly in Europe and Latin America the myth survived until
well after World War II: there had been a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy
that lay at the corrupt heart of modernity.
Let me fast forward. Today when I teach about the early scholarship
on freemasonry I draw on the blackboard, somewhat in jest, a
picture of what a card catalogue looks like. My students use
only computers to access library records and indeed to find web
sites that will help them with the topic of their term papers.
Put the word “freemasonry” into Google and we discover
over 3 million entries. Within the first ten stand sites devoted
to exposing the order as conspiratorial or as a Satanic religion.
In one sense not much progress has been made since the days of
the card catalogue. The problem remains: how do we distinguish
fact from fiction, how do we write about freemasonry within a
specific historical context whether that be late eighteenth-century
Boston or early nineteenth-century Mexico? The answer lies in
appropriating the standards of historical scholarship taught
routinely at the university level and bringing them to bear on
masonic history and its historical context.
The professionalization of masonic scholarship is now happening.
There has been an enormous change in the habits of masonic research
since the 1970s. First of all, it has become respectable, and
second and most important, standards of historical evidence and
scholarly rigor have been brought to its study. These changes
have occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, but they are more
visible in respectable academic settings in Europe. At universities
such as Sheffield, Leiden, Bordeaux, and Zaragoza in Spain, scholarly
centers for the study of freemasonry are active and supported
by both the university and private donors. The European Science
Foundation has just given a major grant to study the phenomenon
of freemasonry within national contexts.
In America younger scholars can now be found who are doing dissertations
or books on aspects of masonic history. Going to the electronic
site http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/results?set_num=1 we
discover that over fifty Ph.D. dissertations that deal with aspects
of masonic history have been produced during the past ten years
in American universities. Let me give but one example with which
I am familiar because its author, Jacob Dorman, read with me
in preparation for researching and writing “The Black Israelists
of Harlem and the professors of Oriental and African mystic science
in the 1920s,” UCLA 2004. This work in American black history
chronicles the search undertaken by black intellectuals alive
during the Harlem renaissance. They turned to freemasonry, as
well as various forms of religious experience, as they searched
for new truths and new identities that promised liberation.
There are other causes for optimism about the course of masonic
research worldwide. Increasingly attention is being paid to masonic
lodges in imperial settings as well as lodges founded in non-Western
countries by local people interested in the meaning of freemasonry
within their own cultural setting. New research is also underway
on women’s freemasonry. And finally, there are the “Moscow
archives”- to use the shorthand that those of us who work
with them use.
These archives contain thousands of hand-written (later typed)
documents from countries occupied by the Nazis. They fervently
believed in the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy and sought to prove
its existence and detail its evil intentions. To that end in
1940 the Nazis raided the Grand Lodges as well as local lodges
in the countries they occupied. All this documentation was shipped
back to Berlin where an institute was established to study the
stolen archives. Then came the Russian army. Most of the contents
of what had been in the institute was confiscated by the Russians
and shipped back to Moscow, probably intended as post-war bargaining
chips in negotiations to secure Russian treasures stolen by the
retreating German army. But somehow the process did not work
that way and masonic records from France, Belgium and The Netherlands
were locked away until the 1990s. The American historian, Patricia
Kennedy Grimsted (see her Trophies of War and Empire, Harvard
University Press, 2001), alerted the world to their existence.
After financial pressure was applied to the Putin government
now most of the archives have been returned, to Paris, Brussels,
and The Hague. This is an extraordinary set of manuscripts, equaling
thousands of documents, some from as early as the 1730s and never
seen since the 1930s. I have used them in two recent books and
doubtless dozens of other scholars will do the same.
The Moscow archives now further brighten the future of masonic
research into the European past and they suggest the necessity
of preserving archives, carefully and quickly. Someday all those
local histories of individual lodges will need to be rewritten.
Guidance will come from the older histories written by dedicated
brothers, but as we employ the working methods of good scholars
everywhere we will also need the original documents. If thousands
of hand-written texts can survive a world war, two confiscations,
not to mention the rigor of cold storage in Moscow winters, then
we can only hope and assume that all the lodges in this country
now in possession of historical documents will work very hard
to preserve them and to make them accessible to all reputable
brothers or scholars. The masonic past has a future only if we
give it one.
|
News Feed | 
Subscribe News by Email
