Page 105 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

all the years. When the descendants ofAbraham were expelled from
France, the Count of Foix, under whose protection the community
ofPamiers stood, directed a request to the king to make an exception
of his Jews.
Fhis wish however was not granted and those forced into
innocent behaviour here had to share the fate of their crooked blood-
brothers from the other provinces.
This would be in very short strokes the entire history of the
Jews until the harbingers of the French Revolution. I have left out
in the last remarks the religious differences in order to be able to
point out the central theme of social conflicts passing through them
more clearly. In fact, apart from usury, other factors were at work in
bringing about the fate of the Jews, as every great movement is
indeed constituted of many forces.
The priests fervently fulminated in their councils against
the unbelievers, often made attempts through sermons and even in
less gentle ways to allow them to enter the heart of the Church; they
had the Talmud, where they could get hold of them, burnt, forgave
the Jews their insult of the Church, the sacrifice of a Christian child
on Good Friday, etc.
The Jews for their part sharpened their laws of separation
and cursed Christ and the Christians all week long in their
synagogues. Unfortunately the Inquisition demanded victims even
in France, since it caused a religious madness, but, on the other
hand, the public sentiment rose against it more powerfully here than
in Spain and Portugal (here however it must be remarked that the
heresy courts in Spain were not seldom criminal courts and disguised
cases of actually social-national conflicts).
The stronger and more conscious the national feeling in
France now became, the more it set itself in conscious opposition to
the racial arrogance of the Jews and caused an aversion that had
been only vaguely felt earlier to emerge more clearly into the
foreground.
And so both these forces can be shown to have helped to
bring about a sharpening of the relations between Jews and
Christians. But the situation became catastrophic for both sides

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