Page 184 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

J. Freudenthal also claims him rightly for Jewry, as also does Dr.
391
Spiegler. He characterises the philosopher as an "assimilated Jew"
and tries to argue that we have to thank the Jews for all knowledge.
Spinoza is therefore "the greatest of all philosophers", 392 "the
393
greatest hero of the philosophy ofthe modern age", Mendelssohn
"ennobled the German language and made philosophy popular
through his work, whereby it developed into hitherto unimagined
394
blossoms", he "formed through his elevated direction the German
395
nation into a philosophical", etc. If one examines this
Gallimathias 396 closer, one learns more from it than from many an
antisemitic work.
Exactly as in morality and religion does the Jewish mind
express itself also in science and art. The Jews pride themselves on
having, in all the ages of science, presented a great number of
outstanding men, especially in the field of medicine. Almost every
king, they say, had a Jewish doctor whom he could trust more than
his Christian colleagues.
Now, if it is incontestable that the natural influence that a
doctor exercises on a sick man was on the part of the Jews a strong
motivation towards this profession and opened a wide field to
speculation and was also in fullest measure exploited, we wish
nevertheless to suppose that medicine had for the Jews some other
interest. Then it would be necessary to expect that they must have
been the first to found scientific anatomy.
But that is far from the truth. The free impulse to research
that animated a Leonardo, which forced him, at the risk of his life,
to study the miraculous structure of the human body and to provide
an account of its functions, through drawings of phenomenal
accuracy that have not been surpassed even today, his magisterial
vision, the creative ideas of Descartes and Copernicus, all that finds

391
In his Geschichte der Philosophic des Judentums [1890]. [Julius Samuel
Spiegler (1838-?) was a Hungarian historian of philosophy.]
392
[Op.cit.], p.3 16.
m
[Ibid.], p.3 17.
194
[Ibid.], p.353.
395
[Ibid.], p.8.
396
[gibberish]
161