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So I want to clarify something, I've been treating the Freemason British Israelite Pyramidologists like they were not Zionists, but British Israelists did support the restoration of the Jews to Israel under the British Crown and were connected to Victorian Christian Zionism. So now I have to dig deeper into British Israelism because British Israelites believe the British People are the lost 10 tribes of Israel, so would they also be restored to Israel too? And would the Jews who were restored to Israel, would they remain Jews or become Christians? What were their ideas about the trinity? I am having a hard time finding info on British Israelite Zionism, but will continue. Even if all Freemason Pyramidologists were British Israelite Pyramidologists they could have still influenced Charles Taze Russell, just like other British Irsraelist Pyramidologists like Charles Smyth. I am not done investigating all avenues of Freemason Pyramidology, there are still Freemason Pyramidologists who could have been Zionist Noahide Pyramidologists and who could have influenced Russell or who may have even been influenced by him, which is something they would have done if they wanted to stay Noahide compliant as a true Masons.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3205158/
Victorian origins of William Osler's philosemitism?
Featherstone Osler, an Anglican missionary to the new world of British Canada, gave the name William to his new son. He held up the new baby to the marching Protestant crowd celebrating William of Orange and his Protestant victory over Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne on July 12, 1849. Catholics in Ireland to this day still see the Orange Order marches as provocative attempts to “show who is boss,” while Protestants see any attempt to deny them the right to walk through traditional routes as a move to restrict their freedom to celebrate their Protestant identity. The question raised many times is how William Osler, given his provincial, strictly parochial Protestant background, become so ecumenical, so liberal and universal in his broadminded vision and tolerance of other religions.
We know that Osler read and reread Religio Medici, written by his hero and spiritual mentor, Sir Thomas Browne, and the book was placed in his coffin. Despite prejudiced remarks against Catholics, Jews, Muslims, blacks, and women in this work, Osler seemed unaffected by this aspect of Browne. Osler had the highest regard for Browne's open-mindedness relative to his era, stating that Browne had “become denationalized so far as his human sympathies were concerned.”
Browne emphasized that he had “no prejudices in religion.” He subscribed himself “a loyal son of the Church of England” and commented:
Where the Scripture is silent the Church is my text; where that speaks it is but my comment. When there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my-religion from Rome or Geneva, but from the dictates of my own reason.
During his lifetime, Osler made similar remarks.
In his writings and actions, Sir William Osler betrayed no evidence of antisemitism—unusual for a man of his era. Among his friends and colleagues, this tolerant trait was unique. Osler's attitude could be contrasted with that of Harvey Cushing, his friend and biographer, who in his own memoirs referred to Osler's Jewish Historical Society speech against antisemitism as “Osler's charitable comments on the Semitic Invasion of Britain.”
Faith Wallis, PhD, viewed Osler's philosemitism as a function of the strong representation of Jews in his chosen profession. Wallis stated:
Medicine was the centre of Osler's world; that so many Jews shared his devotion raised them in his esteem. While Browne met few Jews and said things about them that in our secular age might seem unsympathetic, Osler met many Jews and said things about them that in a modern idiom seem enlightened. Yet Osler named Browne as his mentor in tolerance—perhaps rightly so, for they shared a common liberal religious outlook. No justice is done to either Browne or Osler by weighing their words on the present-day scale of political correctness. Both were men of wisdom, but both were men of their age. … By presuming moral superiority over the dead and discounting their experience, presentism becomes itself a kind of prejudice.
Presentism or not presentism, it is easily apparent in at least two of Osler's articles, “Letter from Berlin” and “Israel and Medicine,” that Osler had a marked distaste for antisemitism and strongly positive attitudes towards Jews. In both articles he spoke out vigorously against antisemitism. In 1884 Osler was on sabbatical in Germany. In a letter about this to the Canadian Medical and Surgical Journal, he discussed the antisemitism he saw in Germany.
The modern “hep, hep, hep” shrieked in Berlin for some years has by no means died out, and to judge from the tone of several of the papers devoted to the Jewish question there are not wanting some who would gladly revert to the plan adopted on the Nile some thousands of years ago for solving the Malthusian problem of Semitic increase. Doubtless there were then, as now, noisy agitators—prototypes of the Parson Stocker—who clamoured for the hard laws which ultimately prevailed, and for the taskmasters whose example so many Gentile generations have willingly followed, of demanding where they safely could, bricks without straw of their Israelitish brethren.
Presciently, Osler may have detected the coming catastrophe that would befall the Jews of Europe half a century later. Referring to German antisemitism, Osler said:
There is not a profession which would not suffer the serious loss of many of its most brilliant ornaments and in none more so than our own. I hope to be able to get the data with reference to the exact number of professors and docents of Hebrew extraction in the German Medical Faculties. The number is very great, and of those I know their positions have been won by hard and honorable work; but I fear that, as I hear has already been the case, the present agitation will help to make the attainment of university professorships additionally difficult. One cannot but notice here, in any assembly of doctors, the strong Semitic element, at the local societies and at the German Congress of Physicians it was particularly noticeable, and the same holds good in any collection of students. All honour to them!
Osler had many friendships with Jewish colleagues. Jewish mothers sought his advice about their medical student sons. They felt comfortable with him. He had a special relationship with all his students, including those who were Jewish. Interviews with the children, grandchildren, and other relatives of Osler's Jewish medical students all without exception praise his heartfelt tolerance, which was related in Baltimore family gatherings as so unusual for a Gentile. Jews placed great trust in this Gentile, not only as a mentor, but as a good friend.
Osler seemed to be speaking about his own philosophy when he compared the competing influences of “Athens and Jerusalem.” Osler pointed out:
Modern civilization is the outcome of these two great movements of the mind of man, who today is ruled in heart and head by Israel and by Greece. From the one [Israel] he has learned responsibility to a Supreme Being, and the love of his neighbour, in which are embraced both the Law and the Prophets.
Osler grew to maturity in a land and an era when Jews were either not tolerated or openly persecuted. It was during this era that Osler worked with and trained several Jewish physicians. How much he socialized with them is unknown; however, what is documented is the great regard in which Osler held Jewish refugee pediatrician Dr. Abraham Jacobi, whom he hosted several times in his Franklin Street Baltimore home.
William Osler had a justly deserved reputation for humanitarianism, liberalism, and religious tolerance. What makes these qualities so remarkable is that he lived in a time when they were not representative of the Western world—in fact, when the entire milieu immediately around him was the opposite. How he came to hold this view while many of his colleagues and protégés were clearly bigots is one of the unknowns about Osler. In fact, Drs. David B. Hogan and A. Mark Clarfield argued that Sir William Osler was not merely immune to the endemic antisemitism of his age but was positively philosemitic.
SOURCES OF OSLERAPOS;S PHILOSEMITISM
While many articles discuss Osler's speeches, papers, and discussions with his peers, few discuss the intellectual ferment around him as he matured. An exploration of the literature and sociology of Osler's Victorian era may also be helpful in answering this question. As noted, historian Barbara Tuchman pointed out that in 19th-century England, and in Anglo-Saxon society in general, a strong sense of philo-Judaism coexisted with more prevalent antisemitic attitudes.
Disraeli and Arnold
Cultural kinship between Britons and Hebrews was postulated perhaps most famously during the middle of the 19th century by two great literary figures, Benjamin Disraeli and Matthew Arnold. In their works, Michael Ragussis argued, “the Hebraic is moved to the center of definitions of English national identity.”
To touch on these men's ideas only briefly here, in his trilogy of novels (Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred), Disraeli elaborated on a very clear cultural, and at times racial, bond between the Anglo-Saxons and the Hebrews. “Vast as the obligations of the whole human family are to the Hebrew race,” he wrote in Tancred, “there is no portion of the modern populations so much indebted to them as the British people.” The racial dynamic in Disraeli's three novels sought as its ultimate end the recognition of an interconnectedness between the Semite and the Briton.
Even more famously and clearly than Disraeli, Matthew Arnold formulated the idea that modern English national life was built upon a Hebraic foundation both in his Celtic Literature (1866) and, more directly, in the pages of Culture and Anarchy (1869). In these works, he offered an account of Hebraism and its relation to Hellenism, the two forces between which moved the modern nations. He thought that the Hebrew basis of much of the English moral and national character was undeniable. While he noted that the idea of a close racial connection between the two peoples was being increasingly eroded by the findings of the nascent science of ethnology, he still believed that affinity between peoples of different races showed an ultimate unity of man. No affinity of this kind was more prominent, he determined, “than that which linked the English nation, in its history and its moral rectitude, to that of the Hebrews.”
British-Israelism
The most explicit expression of British and Hebrew affinity was the set of beliefs known as British-Israelism. Those who held to British-Israel ideas believed that the British (including all the inhabitants of Great Britain and their colonial descendants) were the direct descendants of one or more of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. This meant that the “Anglo-Saxon peoples” were racially Hebrew and brothers by the flesh of the tribe of Judah and the Jews. British-Israelites, therefore, drew the closest connection between Englishmen and Jews, finding an affinity of race not in the prehistoric cradle of human beginnings (whether in Eden or in the Caucasus mountains) but in the relatively recent historic period from the 8th century bc.
Founded in the 1830s by John Wilson of Cheltenham, who was himself an accomplished student of Hebrew and a pioneer in phrenology at a time when phrenology was still taken seriously as a scientific field of study, British-Israelism relied most heavily on the prophetic passages of the Bible which British-Israelites interpreted as predicting great success and prosperity for the lost tribes in the latter days. Many British-Israel writers also seized eagerly upon findings in historical and archaeological research and the racial sciences to prove that the British were a Semitic people, racially allied to the Jews. Even outside British-Israel circles, a common theme in much imperial discourse was that Britain comprised a “new Israel” now in possession of Israel's mission to be a blessing and a light to all nations.
Though rejected, often derisively, the theory was not ignored. One prominent Victorian anthropologist, A. L. Lewis, thought it important enough to take the thesis apart on at least two occasions in the 1870s before prominent bodies of his colleagues, the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Anthropological Society of London. At least two antisemitic French authors suggested that if the British-Israel thesis proved true it would explain the visceral and almost instinctive antagonism which the French people felt for both the Jews and the British!
There was also a loose connection between Victorian Christian Zionism and British-Israelism. Most British-Israelites believed in the ultimate restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land under the protection of Britain. It was during this time that Isaac Lyon Goldsmid was made baronet, the first Jew to receive a hereditary title. The first Jewish Lord Mayor of London, Sir David Salomons, was elected in 1855, followed by the 1858 emancipation of the Jews. On July 26, 1858, Lionel de Rothschild was finally allowed to sit in the British House of Commons when the law restricting the oath of office to Christians was changed; Benjamin Disraeli, a baptized Christian of Jewish parentage, was already a member of Parliament. In 1868, Disraeli became prime minister, having earlier been chancellor of the exchequer. In 1884, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild, became the first Jewish member of the British House of Lords.
George Eliot
Another Victorian also felt a bond to Jews—and Jewish nationalism. George Eliot's novels were well known to Osler. Although there is no record of Osler meeting with her, Osler had Oxford friends who had dined with her. He considered her novel Middlemarch, describing a physician who did not rise to his potential, a manual of lessons for what doctors should not do.
George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda, was also her most controversial. What earned Eliot such admiration from Jews was her treatment of Daniel, which broke the longstanding tradition of English literary antisemitism that stretched from Shylock to Fagin. Few had a problem, upon its publication in 1876, with its portrayal of yearning and repression in the English upper class. But as Eliot's lover, George Henry Lewes, had predicted, “The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody.” Deronda was the first of Eliot's novels to be set in her own period, the late 19th century, and in it she took on what was a highly unusual contemporary theme: the position of Jews in British and European society and their likely prospects. The eponymous hero is an idealistic young aristocrat who comes to the rescue of a young Jewish woman and in his attempts to help her find her family is drawn steadily deeper into the Jewish community and the ferment of early Zionist politics.
Despite the strong current of British-Israelism passing through British literary and upper classes, Jews were still unpopular, not least in the lower classes, even during the premiership of the Jewish-born Benjamin Disraeli. Eliot was keen to show what she considered a view of Jews from the upper classes (who superciliously referred to Mirah, the Jewish heroine, as a “little Jewess”). The British middle classes (Mrs. Meyrick) instantly presumed that Mirah might have “evil thoughts.” The working class (the man in the pub) asked, “[If] they're clever enough to beat half the world—why haven't they done it?”
Eliot was an upper-class woman who had been converted to the cause of Jewish national rebirth, which was the British-Israelism passion. It was two decades before Theodor Herzl would give a name Zionism and an organization to that cause. The word “Zionism” nowhere appears in Daniel Deronda. Yet in his manifesto, The Jewish State, Herzl credited Eliot with inspiring his mission. In fact, Eliezer ben Yehuda, the restorer of Hebrew as a modern spoken language, was prompted to move to Palestine after reading Daniel Deronda in a Russian translation. By the time the Jewish state was established, Israel's three largest cities, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa, had streets named after George Eliot.
The Balfour Declaration
This Victorian stream of British-Israelism became a strong current with the November 2, 1917, Balfour Declaration, a formal statement of policy from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community. The letter reflected the position of the cabinet, as a sign of “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations”: “His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”
The Balfour Declaration received support for “sentimental” reasons related to British-Israelism beginning in the 19th century with the Eliot novel and with a number of leading figures in Britain who had become interested in the idea of restoring the Jews to Palestine. In other words, the policy was backed because of the traditional support of many Britons for Jewish restoration, a support echoed by several US presidents as well. Very probably, there were pragmatic reasons as well, including those of Lloyd George and Balfour, who intended the declaration as an intention to create a Jewish state or British-protected Jewish entity in all or part of Palestine, one that could also be used to give Britain a claim on Palestine to use against France. The British used the promise of a Jewish national home to extract from the League of Nations a large territory for their mandate, creating a new territorial entity for itself called “Palestine,” that had no status except in Christian holy books before 1917. The League of Nations mandate for Palestine incorporated the provisions of the Balfour Declaration. It now was an explicit commitment, not just a promise.
William Osler, who I believe had a strong streak of 19th-century Victorian British-Israelism, would have approved.
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