gue of Cromwell's friend the Cabalist, Manasseh ben Israel.[333]
To quote Jewish authority on this question, Mr. Lucien Wolf writes that
Templo "had a monomania for ... everything relating to the Temple of
Solomon and the Tabernacle of the Wilderness. He constructed gigantic
models of both these edifices."[334] These he exhibited in London,
which he visited in 1675 and earlier, and it seems not unreasonable to
conclude that this may have provided a fresh source of inspiration to
the Freemasons who framed the masonic ritual some forty years later. At
any rate, the masonic coat-of-arms still used by Grand Lodge of England
is undoubtedly of Jewish design.

"This coat," says Mr. Lucien Wolf, "is entirely composed of Jewish
symbols," and is "an attempt to display heraldically the various forms
of the Cherubim pictured to us in the second vision of Ezekiel--an Ox, a
Man, a Lion, and an Eagle--and thus belongs to the highest and most
mystical domain of Hebrew symbolism."[335]

In other words, this vision, known to the Jews as the "Mercaba,"[336]
belongs to the Cabala, where a particular interpretation is placed on
each figure so as to provide an esoteric meaning not perceptible to the
uninitiated.[337] The masonic coat-of-arms is thus entirely Cabalistic;
as is also the seal on the diplomas of Craft Masonry, where another
Cabalistic figure, that of a man and woman combined, is reproduced.[338]

Of the Jewish influence in Masonry after 1717 I shall speak later.

To sum up, then, the origins of the system we now know as Freemasonry
are not to be found in one source alone. The twelve alternative sources
enumerated in the _Masonic Cyclopaedia_ and quoted at the beginning of
this chapter may all have contributed to its formation. Thus Operative
Masonry may have descended from the Roman Collegia and through the
operative masons of the Middle Ages, whilst Speculative Masonry may have
derived from the patriarchs and the mysteries of the pagans. But the
source of inspiration which admits of no denial is the Jewish Cabala.
Whether this penetrated to our country through the Roman Collegia, the
_compagnonnages_, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, or through the Jews of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose activities behind the
scenes of Freemasonry we shall see later, is a matter of speculation.
The fact remains that when the ritual and constitutions of Masonry were
drawn up in 1717, although certain fragments of the ancient Egy