The Divine Order in Judaism as Mirrored in Freemasonry: A Kabbalistic Explication from 1841

The lecture will address a highly detailed and complex lithograph with the title, Origin of the Rites and Worship of the Hebrews, which was designed and executed in Paris, in 1841, by a Hungarian rabbi, David Rosenberg. The iconographic programme of the elaborate print, also conceived by the rabbi, is based on the Kabbalistic understanding of the divine order manifested in Judaism. The mystical harmony between the system of the universe and the Jewish religion, customs, and history is visualized through the numerology of Kabbalah, and represented through a grandiose edifice with intricate details. The tableau was accompanied by a seventy-page explication by the author.

Rabbi Rosenberg became a Freemason in Paris, in the 1830s, and made a remarkably fast Masonic career in an aristocratic lodge. Besides accomplishing other manifestly Masonic tables and diagrams, the present tableau was also given a Masonic reading by the author himself – in a separate publication. There, the symbolic numbers permeating Judaism and thus central to the iconographic programme of the tableau were associated with the Masonic rites, symbols, themes, words, tokens, grips, office-bearers, ceremonies, the hierarchy of the degrees, and the physical arrangement of the lodge and its furnishing. Thereby the rabbi wished to prove that Freemasonry originated with the Hebrews.