here is something behind
Freemasonry, something far older and far wider in its aims than the
Order now known by this name--the modern Freemasons are for the most
part only "playing at it." Thus, when Ernst complains that true
equality has not been attained in the lodges since Jews are not
admitted, Falk observes that he himself does not attend them, that true
Freemasonry does not exist in outward forms--"A lodge bears the same
relation to Freemasonry as a church to belief." In other words, the real
initiates do not appear upon the scene. Here then we see the role of the
"Concealed Superiors." What wonder that Lessing's dialogues were
considered too dangerous for publication!

Moreover, in Falk's conception of the ideal social order and his
indictment of what he calls "bourgeois society" we find the clue to
movements of immense importance. Has not the system of the ant-heap or
the beehive proved, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the model on which
modern Anarchists, from Proudhon onwards, have formed their schemes for
the reorganization of human life? Has not the idea of the "World
State," "The Universal Republic" become the war-cry of the
Internationalist Socialists, the Grand Orient Masons, the Theosophists,
and the world-revolutionaries of our own day?

Was Falk, then, a revolutionary? This again will be disputed. Falk may
have been a Cabalist, a Freemason, a high initiate, but what proof is
there that he had any connexion with the leaders of the French
Revolution? Let us turn again to the _Jewish Encyclopaedia_:

Falk ... is ... believed to have given the Duc d'Orleans, to ensure
his succession to the throne, a talisman consisting of a ring,
which Philippe Egalite before mounting the scaffold is said to have
sent to a Jewess, Juliet Goudchaux, who passed it on to his son,
subsequently Louis Philippe.

The Baron de Gleichen, who "knew Falc," refers to a talisman of
lapis-lazuli which the Due d'Orleans had received in England from "the
celebrated Falk Scheck, first Rabbi of the Jews," and says that a
certain occultist, Madame de la Croix, imagined she had destroyed it by
"the power of prayer." But the theory of its survival is further
confirmed by the information supplied from Jewish sources to Mr. Gordon
Hills, who states that Falk was "in touch with the French Court in the
person of 'Prince Emanuel,'[490] whom he describes as a servant of the
King of France," and adds that the talismanic