Page 177 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

Bernhard Stade, although a scholar well disposed to the Jews,
reports: "The thought ofmeasuring actions according to their content
or the conviction from which they emerge is lacking . The actions
. .
are above all differently judged according to whether they were
committed in Canaan or not, whether they are restricted to Israelites
or to foreigners". 373
Here we have the beginnings of the later Talmud, which,
from this point of view, is nothing more than an extremely
complicated technical apparatus with whose help all questions are
to be solved. But since the mastery of this instrument demanded a
long time, the men, even among the Jews, who had, at every step of
life (whether it had to do with the synagogue or the toilet) a citation
from Moses or the Talmud at hand were not very numerous. These
experts in the law were also the most respected people who
dominated learning for themselves, and their names spread abroad
into all the countries inhabited by Jews.
So great was the esteem of knowledge in itself that even a
learned gentile was sometimes looked upon as a man. Although
Father Samuel forbade man (i.e. a Jew) to have community with the
374
gentile, and Rabbi Meir said: "Man must have daily three words
of blessings, that is, that God has not made me a gentile, a woman,
and a fool", still it was explained that it was possible to have relations
with a learned gentile.
But one must point to a fundamental difference between
knowledge and knowledge. For one could easily remark that even
the Indians had an accumulated knowledge which could be mastered
only through decades-long work, so they also had a mind similar to
the Jewish.
But then it is to be observed that the knowledge of the
Indians arose from the longing for the interconnectedness of the
universe and led to purified and symbolical knowledge, that in this
way this knowledge served only as a means to a goal going beyond
the same. The Jew has shown throughout his history a search for
knowledge in itself, avoided every metaphysical like an infectious
373
Geschichte des Volkes Israel, Vol.1, p. 5 10.
374
Bechorot, fol.26.
154