Page 112 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

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The Track of the Jew through the Ages

were at the command of the Jews in spite of all obstacles . . ; for a
.
scholar in Austerlitz or in German Miihlhausen it seems not to have
been less easy to have his letters sent to Spain than for one in Vienna,
Rome or Avignon". 180 A further proof of the well organised news
network of the Jews is given by the following incident:
On the African coast, there were always pockets of
countless Turkish pirates. Here the Jews nested by preference. They
were treated well by the Turks since they paid them a toll, bought
the stolen goods immediately and expedited them; mainly, however,
for their espionage service.
th
"They maintained", says a writer of that time ( 1 century)
"a widespread correspondence throughout Christendom so that the
Turks enjoyed through them a great gain in the trading of slaves.
At the same time they could be alerted in time regarding
what was being planned to be undertaken in Christendom. Thus it
happened that, in 1 662, the city ofHamburg equipped two warships
to protect their ships from pirates. The ships were not yet fully at
sea when slaves from Algeria wrote that the pirates knew all the
circumstances: how strong, how many people on the fleet, and what
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course the ship's course would take".
That the Jews were best oriented on foreign relations and
possessed good connections in all countries is also not an
achievement of our time but was already the case for centuries. So
it is also understandable that European princes often sought Jews
as political advisors: Charlemagne, for example, gave his envoys to
Persia (both of whom, strangely, died during the journey) a Jew as
escort in the correct calculation that the latter could best and most
quickly learn from the Jews there all that was worth knowing; the
Spanish kings were constantly surrounded by Jewish advisors, and
not less the princes of Fez and Tripoli, the Sultan and other rulers.
Thus these people, scattered through the world and yet
indissolubly connected, played a perceptible role in the politics of
nations already in the earliest times. They may unquestionably have
rendered services to many princes, but it is not less certain that they

IS. Bloch, Die Juden in Spanien, Leipzig, 1875, p. 86.
J. Schudt, Jiidische Merkwurdigkeiten, 1714, Vol.1, p. 88.

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