Page 174 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

And the Jewish historian, M. Kayserling, rises to a eulogy
in calling the Talmud "the greatest work admired for thousands of
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years, and the likes of which is not to be found in any literature".
So think all Hebrews.
There has hardly been a more tolerant man, hardly one who
was so inclined to blur and deny the individual differences in the
character of peoples, than Tolstoy. With endless repetitions he
preached (that is, in his letters) the similarity of thought in China,
India, Judaea, Europe.
But after he left his airy castle built on the dogma of the
equality of men, and observed more closely the works of man, the
great man came however to other results. In the study of the New
Testament, he reports, he felt like a pearl-fisher who throws his net
for precious mussels but draws with them at the same time slime
and dirt from which he had to first release the former. "And so 1
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found next to a pure Christian spirit an alien dirty Jewish spirit".
Schiller felt great reverence for many figures of the Old
Testament, that is, for the personality of Moses, but he already
differentiates with a sure instinct (without a closer knowledge of
the actual contexts) between the "unworthiness and reprehensibility
of the nation" and the "merit of their law-givers". He calls the Jew
an "impure and base vessel" in which however something precious
was preserved which could later ripen "in brighter minds", an
"impure canal" through which the most noble of our possessions,
the truth, was conducted, which however broke once it had
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performed that which it had to".
Goethe said that the contrast between the present-day Jews
and their "forebears annoys us". Both the great men therefore have
a markedly contradictory attitude towards the Jewish past.
But this must be dispelled when, as we know today, the
great men of the Hebrew past were not at all the forebears of the

364
Sephardim, Leipzig, 1859, p.86.
365 Kurze Darlegung des Evangeliums [A Short Exposition of the Gospel, 1 881].
m
Die Sendung Moses. [Schiller's lecture on the origins of the Jewish religion was
delivered at the University of Jena in 1789 and published in Schiller's journal
Thalia in 1790.]
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