The Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy: The Path from the Cemetery of Prague to Arab Anti-Zionist Propaganda.

Freemasonry was established and lively in the Middle East from the first half of the 19° century, with the active participation of the local political and cultural intelligentsia, and including Muslims as well as many ethnic and religious minorities (Christians, Jews, Greeks, Italians, French and British). Nevertheless, the strengthening of the Zionist presence in Palestine and, most of all, the establishment of the Israeli State in 1948, undermined the status of Freemasonry in Arab societies until it was banished. The Arab-Israeli conflict fostered the spreading of a new Arab fiction that was anti Zionist in its aim, but anti-Masonic in its expression and anti-Judaic in substance. Resuming the anti-Judaic discourse of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the anti-Masonic literary tradition of Catholic-Jesuit roots (Barruel’s Memoirs), this Arab fiction elaborated a special strand of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory, enriched with specific invented accounts, detailing secret assemblies said to have taken place in Jerusalem since the 37 AD, in Prague’s cemetery, in London or in contemporary Brazil. This specific fictional production was very common in the 1980’s with about twenty works mainly printed in Beirut, Damascus and Cairo and is still active.