Page 66 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

to the left bank of the Tiber and soon there arose a second settlement
there. The Jewish quarter in Rome was ready even before a coercive
mass regulation was introduced. Numerous floodings, to which
precisely this part ofthe city was most exposed, the epidemics which
these resulted in, all that was not able, through the centuries, to
compel the Jews to leave the best trading places in the city. The few
exceptions are not worth consideration at all. When one was later
forced to build a build a wall around the Jewish quarter in Rome
one sealed therewith a condition that had been formed already for a
long time, which Jewish historians indeed admit.
Thus Vogelstein-Rieger, for example, say: "Already since
the 14 th century the Jewish quarter assumed the dimensions of the
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later ghetto". In later times the wall that was built often served as
a protection of the Jews against popular uprisings, which was
acknowledged even by the Jews". 102 And the historian Heman
summarises the necessity of the ghetto, which arose from the
circumstances of that time, in the following manner: "As a result of
the exclusion of everything non-Jewish, the Jewish mind became
used in all relations to allowing itself only so far as would aid its
own benefit.
But the consequences did not fail to materialise: the peoples
soon felt that there was no real interest among the Jews for them
and their institutions. They got the impression that the Jews only
wanted to exploit them. The antipathy of the peoples against the
Jews has its basis in the attitude that the Jew himself has had to all
non-Jews".
"That the Jews were forced in later times to remain in their
ghettos happened as much for their protection against the hatred of
the population as for the protection of the other inhabitants from
their greed. We see here also, once again, that what the Jews decry
as the shameful oppression ofthe Christians is the mere consequence
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of their self-chosen particularism".
101
Geschichte der Juden in Rom, Vol.1, p. 301.
102
Vogelstein-Rieger, op.cit., Vol.11, p.237.
103
Die historische Weltstellung der Juden, Leipzig, 1882, pp. 13, 18. [Carl Friedrich
Heman was a missionary Protestant who wrote several books on the Jews and the
Jewish question.]
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