Page 98 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

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The Track of the Jew through the Ages

calm observation valid for all ages and especially for ours: "One
sees that, as the adage has it, on the stage of this world the same
drama is always played out, and only new characters enter one after
the other; already more than 800 years ago the Jewish wealth had
such a great power; it has that even today; that is why there are
hidden everywhere so many Jewish bosses, among the great and the
small; one respects them, speaks to them, often prefers them to
Christians and finds that one is listened to more readily and
160
willingly".
After several further agitations on account of the Jewish
question, the foreign rule in Lyons came to a terrible end at the
th
beginning ofthe 1 century. In 1 3 1 0, the Jews were violently robbed
of all their immobile properties by the aroused people and driven
out of the city. They fled into the suburbs, they found asylum in
Trevour, Chatillon and Dombes, but even there they continued their
old practices, so that already after a few decades the situation
developed similarly as in Lyons - and ended also similarly: in 1429
they were driven out of these places of asylum. 161
When, in the 1 1 * century, a wave of hysteria began to sweep
over Europe and the Crusades began out of a mixture of lust for
plunder and adventure, religious enthusiasm and hatred of heathens,
it is understandable that this movement could not remain without
an influence on the fate of the Jews. For, alongside wandering
preachers who represented the conquest of the Holy Land as a duty
of Christianity and heated religious fanaticism to a boiling point,
went many people who had nothing to lose in their homeland.
And now, where the bands that held the state together
comprehensively in times ofpeace were broken, we see the repressed
passions ofthe priests and debtors being manifested without restraint.
Before the departure, formal Jewish persecutions were preached
and followed, Jews driven from city to city, and house to house,
plundered and killed. If one reads the chapters of the Jew-hunts of
those days, no humane thinker will be able to do so without
m
Op.cit., Vol.IV, p.78.
161
Guillaume Paradin, Memoire de histoire de Lyon, Lj'on, 1573, Vol.11, p. 245.
[Guillaume Paradin was Dean of Beaujeu. His Memoires de I 'histoire de Lyon was
first published in 1550 as Memoires pour servir a I 'histoire de Lyon .]
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