distinct resemblance; both in the writings of the Illuminati and in Lessing's Dialogues we find the same vein of irony with regard to Freemasonry, the same design that it should be replaced by a more effectual system,the same denunciations of the existing social order and of bourgeois society, the same theory that "men should be self-governing," the same plan of obliterating all distinctions between nations, even the same simile of the bee-hive as applied to human life which, as I have shown elsewhere, was later on adopted by the anarchist Proudhon. It may, however, legitimately be urged that these ideas were those of the inner masonic circle to which both Lessing and Weishaupt belonged, and that, though placed in the mouth of Falk, they were in no sense Judaic.
But Lessing was also the friend and admirer of Moses Mendelssohn, who has been suggested as one of Weishaupt's inspirers. Now, at first sight nothing seems more improbable than that an orthodox Jew such as Mendelssohn should have accorded any sympathy to the anarchic scheme of Weishaupt. Nevertheless, certain of Weishaupt's doctrines are not incompatible with the principles of orthodox Judaism. Thus, for example, Weishaupt's theory--so strangely at variance with his denunciations of the family system--that as a result of Illuminism "the head of every family will be what Abraham was, the patriarch, the priest, and the unfettered lord of his family, and Reason will be the only code of Man," is essentially a Jewish conception.
It will be objected that the patriarchal system as conceived by orthodox