A lecture that deals with the first provable masonic lodges mainly in Beirut at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th Century. Given by Dorothe Sommer for the Centre for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism on 16 October 2008.

The triumph of nationalism destroyed the multi-ethnic Ottoman political and social order and replaced it by nation-states. Many explanations attributed the mass violence to a devious conspiracy between (crypto-) Jews, Freemasons, and Turks against Greeks and Armenians. Ugur Ungor argues that these pseudo-explanations are a product of two processes: one of competition between victim groups, and another of intellectual secularization. Lecture given 13 November 2008 for the Centre for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism.