Page 27 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

over Cyprus, Rhodes, Delos, Paros, Crete, Thessaloniki, Corinth,
13
Sparta and Attica.
In Italy it is Rome from which we possess the first certain
reports, from 139 B.C. Even here the Jews must have been settled a
long time before to be able to found such a big community as it was
already at that time. Jews also lived in great numbers in the cities of
North Africa, especially of Egypt. Here they moved chiefly to
Alexandria, and they soon formed a strong minority of the entire
population. Thanks to the tolerant government ofPtolemy Lagides, 14
settlement was granted to the Jews everywhere - and in this way
was the ring of Jewish settlements closed round the entire
Mediterranean Sea. The colonies stood in active communication
with one another, drew new settlers from Palestine, advanced
increasingly also into the market routes, so that Strabo 15 was right
when he maintained that, at the time of the birth of Christ, there was
no longer any place which was not settled - and ruled - by Jews.
These brief indications, which can be multiplied at will,
should demonstrate 1 . that the Jewish emigration from Palestine,
beginning already in ancient times, became an increasingly large
one, and 2. that this emigration was a voluntary one. No people had
asked, let alone forced, the Jews to settle in their midst; no, as if
possessed by a demonic drive, the Jews moved from one country to
another, and "after a few centuries", as the Jewish historian Herzfeld
reports, "and in general without any visible compulsion from outside,
the Jews were settled in all terrains from Media to Rome, from
Pontus to the Persian Gulf, from Macedonia to Ethiopia, and in this
enormous range of countries there was no significant commercial
16
city in which Jews were not represented".

,3
Herzfeld, Handelsgeschichte derJuden imAltertum, Braunschweig, 1879. [Levi
Herzfeld, Handelsgeschichte der Juden des Alterthums. Herzfeld ( 1 8 1 0- 1 884) was
a German rabbi and historian]
14
[Ptolemy 1 Soter ("the Saviour"), or Lagides (ca.367 B.C.- ca.283 B.C.) was a
Macedonian general under Alexander the Great who became ruler of Egypt (323
B.C.-283 B.C.) and founder of the Ptolemaic Dynasty.]
15
[Strabo (ca.64 B.C.-A.D.24) was a Greek geographer and historian most famous
for his 1 7-volume Geographical
,6
Op.cit., p.274.
4