Page 29 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

over the lost homeland were finally exhausted, all the people did
not actually return to Palestine but only the poor and the "holy",
who were forced to do so and constituted the smaller part of the
exiled. Those who remained behind pushed forward their trade and
banking enterprises ever farther to the east and they all remained
abroad.
Those who returned found before them a sparsely populated
country which waited for energetic cultivation. Now, even if the
Jews were forced by need to go there, it was not according to their
inclination, ofwhich the best proof is provided by the mass migration
that soon began to the above-mentioned countries.
The big lie which we are constantly fed consists in the
opinion that, through the dispersal and the restrictive laws, the Jew
had been excluded from all other activities except trade and therefore,
forced by necessity, had to move to money-lending. Quite the
contrary: the Jew emigrated because he hoped to find the best soil
for this service abroad. Thus it is not a coincidence that it was
precisely the big trading centres where the flourishing Jewish
colonies existed, for, if the Jew's heart had longed for work, he
would have moved to a country with fertile soil and not to stony
islands and narrow docklands. Examples of this fact of antiquity
can be derived from all ages and countries in large numbers.
In the Basque lands of Spain, for example, there were still
few cities. With the intention of stimulating trade and commerce in
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these provinces, Sancho the Wise (1 189) raised the old Gasteiz to
a city and passed an edict according to which any foreigner selling
his wares could live there free of all burdens. The result was that
immediately a number of Jews from all countries moved in in order
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not to miss the favourable opportunity. In Persia, when Abbas
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Sophir wanted to economically raise his country destroyed by war
he granted foreign merchants considerable privileges. Even here
19
[Now called Vitoria-Gasteiz.]
20
Kayserling, Die Juden in Navarra, p. 114. [Meyer Kayserling, Die Juden in
Navarra, den Baskenlaendern und auf den Balearen, Berlin, J. Springer, 1861.
Kayserling (1 829-1905) was a German rabbi and historian.]
21
[Shah Abbas 1 (1571-1629) was one of the greatest rulers of the Safavid dynasty
of Persia.]
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