Sacred Brotherhood: Freemasonry and Civic-National Sociability

Abstract

This chapter explores how members of Masonic lodges in Israel extend the logic of friendship to a broader organizational and civic context. The study follows the intersections of interpersonal, public, and collective intimacy in members’ ritual activities and everyday life. Lodge members take on the roles of citizen, bureaucrat, priest, and president concurrently, partly collapsing the distinctions between personal and collective ties, between the familiar and the revered. Their understanding of fraternity carries over to questions of citizenship and patriotism and straddles particularist and universalist interpretations of national solidarity, a tension best captured in the model of civic-nationalism.