Page 65 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

The ghetto

Through the facts discussed above one will get a closer
picture of the intellectual constitution with which the Jews moved
into Europe; from it were produced as a consequence all the events
of mutual interaction between the Jews and the other peoples. The
pronounced exclusiveness, both in physical and in intellectual
relations, to all other peoples thus led also to a phenomenon whose
character is still today misjudged: the ghetto.
The isolation of a foreign immigrant people in the midst of
the local people is a fact that appears everywhere and in explanation
of which one does not need to look for complicated reasons. All
Europeans have had their own quarter built in the colonies. All
trading posts of the Portuguese, Spanish, the Hansa, etc., held
themselves closely together. Quite similarly did the Jews also do;
and should what is valid in the case of other peoples suddenly be, in
the case ofthese, the result of one-sided repression? On the contrary,
precisely among them the exclusiveness had to be carried out more
logically on the basis of their intolerant racial character.
That it was really so we have sufficient reports from the
history of the Jewish migration; when the Jews, for example, as
mentioned above, moved in large numbers to Alexandria, they settled
not as a closed community but loudly raised a demand to own a part
of the city for themselves. Flavius Josephus explains this request
by the fact that the Jews in this way "could lead a pure life and not
mix with foreigners". Finally the Jews were so numerous that they
inhabited two out of five districts.
The relations in Rome were formed in precisely the same
way. When the Jews settled in this city, they followed, as everywhere,
their tendency towards trade and pitched their dwellings accordingly
where the best opportunities offered themselves for it. That was, in
Rome, the right bank of the Tiber, where the Phoenician and Greek
sailors were positioned and sold their wares. Every newly arrived
Jew likewise took up residence here as if drawn by a magnet, and
soon the Jewish quarter expanded greatly. When the right bank was
rather occupied, new immigrants, not to be at a disadvantage, moved

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