Page 99 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

shuddering and will have to be ashamed to find such pages in the
history of Europe. But when he rereads them, not in order to excuse
this frightfulness but to understand it, he will similarly see with a
shudder that, in all the centres of France, Germany and other
countries, parasites lived for centuries who conducted usury with
the workforce and money of the people hosting them. If a storm-
cloud discharged itself suddenly one stands in horror before the
sacrifices of the catastrophe, but one should not overlook the fact
that that represented a necessary consequence of an oppressed but
not yet lamed popular force.
But, even during the Crusades themselves, the Jews
remained, in spite of all the persecution, rich people. In Paris, the
citizens and peasants were strongly indebted to them and had to, on
account ofthe interest, work in hardest drudgery directly or indirectly
in the service of the Jews. The knights, in order to have money for
the Crusades, had pawned their goods many times to the Jews; indeed
a historian (Paul Emile) states that it was the need for money for
this purpose that occasioned the nobility's calling back Jews who
had been driven out.
In 1 146, the Abbot of Cluny describes the situation in the
following way in a letter to Louis VII, in which he protests against
the Jewish persecutions, and demands the following mandates: "what
punishment is more just for these heinous people (the Jews) than
that one deprive them ofthat which they have earned through deceit
and stolen? Not through commitment to agricultural work or another
honest occupation have they filled their barns with fruits, their coffers
with gold and silver. They hide what they have deceitfully taken
from the Christians and acquire at ridiculous prices the finest objects,
which they buy from thieves.
When a robber steals a holy object, he goes to a Jew and
sells the stolen object. An old but contemptible law encourages them
in this scandalous trade. According to it, a Jew, with whom one
finds stolen objects, is not obliged to return them, indeed not even
to denounce the thief.
Their crime therefore remains unpunished; and that which
makes the least thieving comrade of a Christian punishable makes

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