Page 186 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

himselfwith only one science suffers from abdominal illnesses, but
one, on the other hand, who devotes himself to many becomes
nervous. Even that was known by the old rabbis. For it says: "The
majority of scholars die of abdominal illnesses. When the scholar
gets excited (becomes nervous) it is his enlightenment (intelligence)
that excites him. Ben Soma and Ben Asai occupied themselves with
legal doctrine as well as with philosophical science and both became
nervous"
Another avid Talmudist, Med. Dr. Kornfeld, has shown
"strictly scientifically" that "circumcision alters the human organism
in such a way that only the circumcised person is capable of
undertaking studies". Such things are taught, printed and believed
by two-thirds of a people which would like to delude the present
world about its indispensability! If these are the results of "genius"
of the Jewish scholarly mind, one cannot resist smiling at such
naively displayed triteness.
When the awakening European mind promoted free thought
and research from North Italy to England, from Spain to Poland,
and when creative men taught to question Nature with ground-
breaking ideas, there was still no field of activity there for the Jew.
And when world-navigators bravely fared to distant lands, when
world-discoverers invented astonishing apparatuses to study the
starry heavens and unravel the laws the cosmos, the Jew was
occupied, as in Solomon's time, with horse-trading, usury, and at
best logical hair-splitting, from England to Austria. Never could
one detect in him the mental disposition that researches far and
deep, which Balzac later so finely characterised when he called it a
power that forces a German scholar to run hundreds of miles in
order to directly confront a truth that challenges him.

The 19 th century

But the essence of scholarly research changes in the 19 th
century. If, thanks to the efforts of self-sacrificing men, science had
been brought so far as to be on the track of the fundamental laws of
the cosmos, now there emerged a factor that could not easily earlier:

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