Page 47 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

add the words from the fifth book ofMoses 23 :20: "You may practise
usury with the foreigner, but not with thy brother", that is the
economic motivation. The national feeling rings out in the narrative
ofthe Persian emperor who, quite similarly to the Europeans today,
went to the Jews and spread his arms in tolerance and said: "Come,
we all wish to become one people!" "It is true", answered Eabbai
Tanchum, "we circumcised could not be like you, so get yourselves
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circumcised and become like us".
This national separation and this morality with a double
foundation is an undeniable fact ofthe Jewish past and present both
in theory and practice. I do not wish to pile up so many quotations
here, let the words of one of the most authoritative and at the same
time extremely phi lo-Jewish scholars be mentioned: "It is a scheme
striking on account of its insolence when rabbis gathered together
seek to persuade the Christian public that the Jews are obliged to
the same moral conduct with regard to all men and brand Judaism
as a religion of love of mankind". 63 From this fact however there
result extremely important insights.
If the Christian, the European, may go astray, indeed if he
may sometimes fall deeper than the Jew, he possesses in his absolute
moral doctrine something that shows him, even in the deepest fall,
the path upwards. Against the commandment to robbery and betrayal
stands, written and unwritten, that to the European society. The
tendency of man to give himself up to his egoism receives from
morality a counter-weight. To the Jew, on the other hand, there comes
to his natural drive a great added power from his moral doctrine
which is combined, as it were, with a tenacious racial energy (more
details on that later).
If the Jew sees in the property of a non-Jew a thing that by
right belongs to him, if the goods of the heathens are similar to the
ruler-less desert, and if everybody who seizes them has acquired it
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honestly, if there is no adultery with a non-Jewess: "For the
62
Sanhedrin, fol.39a.
63
Bernhard Stade, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, Vol.1, p. 510. [Bernhard Stade
(1 848-1 906) was a Protestant theologian whose history of the Jewish people was
published in two volumes in 1887-1888.]
6A
Bava Batra, fol.54b.
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