Page 40 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

son to the synagogue, if a Jew could be allowed under a penalty of
only ten florins to stick his tongue out at an image of Mary, if in
1327 in Regensburg a priest fled from two Jews who wished to
murder him.
And when the Jewish community avoided punishing the
miscreants, the Christian court satisfied itself with prohibiting
intercourse with them. According to a chronicler of Strassburg,
people who had insulted a Jew had to expect a harsher punishment
than those who had hurt an ordinary citizen.
The Jews were even already from the earliest times the
money-lenders to the city council and the government; the people
must already have been driven to despair before they revolted
violently against their power. It is an event that recurs constantly:
the rule of the Jews coincides always with the downfall of the
German nation, their enfeeblement with its rise.
After the second crusade and at the time of the Black Death
(in the middle of the 14 th century), the misery of Germany reached
two of its high points. The German inclining to law and order was
then no longer able to resist giving expression to the earlier
suppressed wrath and to free himself of his exploiters.
What is narrated of "poisoning of wells", etc., on the part
ofJews with the intention of exposing the "reasons" thereby is empty
twaddle, spread either by people who are incapable of differentiating
between the husk and the core or by Jews who wish to represent the
Germans as idiotic fanatics (as, for instance, Graetz).
The Gennans had sensed bitterly in themselves that they
had an enemy of their people and an unscrupulous exploiter in the
country. That they were aware even during the Black Death what it
was about is to be seen from a chronicle of Erfurt which states as its
cause "the immeasurable money that barons and knights, citizens
and peasants owed to the Jews".
But the outbursts of despair did not help at all. For, a few
years later, the situation was once again the same, the interest rate
worse than before. If the country suffered from war, in the final
analysis the Jew had the gains. For, exactly as today, "all
commissioners were Jews and all Jews commissioners; the Jews

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