Page 178 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

disease, and instinctively persecuted the few exceptions who flirted
with philosophy. The knowledge of the Law was for the Jew a goal
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in itself.
This technical mind, which made out of moral feeling a
system of prohibitions and precepts, which has no equal in world
literature in its monstrous confusion and in its unspiritual shadow-
boxing, is necessarily anti-metaphysical, it could not have existed
otherwise.A mind directed to the external world must have an answer
to everything, it must have externally something that settles
everything, since it feels internally nothing that is deep and endless.
But even to this then necessarily narrow image ofthe world belonged
a formative power. And to that the Jewish mind has not contributed
much apart from the eternal tautology, God is god.
In foreign countries the Jew experienced for the first time
something of god as the creator of the universe, of the myths of this
creation, of the Fall through sin, of the principles of good and evil,
of the immortality of the soul.
Here, in its contact with foreign ideas, the Jewish mind
showed itself in its characteristic oddity. The images and myths
became in its hand anecdotes, the attempt to illustrate an inner
experience was interpreted as a material historical fact. The Fall of
man, the Sumero-Akkadian symbol for a spiritual event, became a
historical narration, the snake was actually nothing but a snake, the
apple really an apple, the whole thing an everyday event. When the
Jews heard of the immortality of the human soul for the first time
from the Persians, when they heard of a messiah, a Saoshyant, who
would deliver the world from the power of the evil principle to
establish a heavenly kingdom into which would enter not only the
holy but finally also, after severe punishment, all the countless
penitent sinners, they understood of this principle of a world-
liberating love only the idea of a world-ruling messiah.
The kingdom ofgod became a slave state in which the Jews
would rule as tyrants. The myth of the creation of the universe

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But where knowledge was not an end in itself it was seen as a means not to
understanding but to power and enrichment. It means, among other things: "As
soon as wisdom enters man, cunning too enters into him" (Sota, fol.21 b).

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