Alfred Rosenberg & The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages By Eustace Mullins ( Page 1 ) Alfred Rosenberg & The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages Eustace Mullins INTRODUCTION Alfred Rosenberg was born in 1893 in Reval* in the Russian Empire and studied architecture in the Riga Polytechnical Institute where he obtained his diploma in 1917. In his youth he read with avid interest the works of Kant and the German Idealists, as well as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. But it was his discovery of Indian philosophy that served as the deepest spiritual inspiration of his life. As he comments on the primacy of the contemplative life in Indian thought, "How far we are here from all greed for power and money, from all rapacity and intolerance, all pettiness and arrogance." (p.40)** [*Today Tallinn, capital of Estonia. **All references are to the present edition.] In 1918, Rosenberg emigrated to Germany, at first Berlin and then Munich, where he met Dietrich Eckart and contributed to his magazine Auf gut Deutsch. It was through Eckart that Rosenberg met Hitler. Rosenberg had already in January 1919 joined the NSDAP, that is, before Hitler, who joined only in October of that year. However, Rosenberg was not very close to Hitler as a political aide, and was more or less restricted to the editorial office of the newspaperVölkischer Beobachter (Nationalist Observer) to which he contributed several articles. The Völkischer Beobachter was the name given to the Münchener Beobachter when the latter was acquired by the Thule Society in August 1919. In December 1920, the paper was bought by the NSDAP and edited by Dietrich Eckart until his death in 1923, when Rosenberg assumed an editorial position. ( Page 2 ) Influenced both by his reading of anti-Semitic authors and by his first-hand experience of the involvement of the Jews in the Russian Revolution, Rosenberg turned his mind to the Jewish question already during the end of the first World War. In 1919, he composed the present classic study of the Jews.* In 1929, he instituted a 'Kampfbund fur deutsche Kultur' (Militant League for German Culture) which lasted until 1934. The members and supporters of this society included the publishers Hugo Bruckmann and Julius Lehmann and leaders of the Wagner Society such as Winifred Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain's widow, Eva, and Richard Wagner's friend, Baron Hans von Wolzogen. The society's main aim was to combat modernism in its manifold forms as Expressionist art, Bauhaus architecture and atonal music. In 1930, Rosenberg became a National Socialist member of parliament and published his cultural history Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, which he designed as a continuation of Chamberlain's Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899). In 1933, after Hitler's accession to power, Rosenberg was named leader of the foreign political department of the NSDAP but he did not exert much influence in this position. In 1934, he was placed in charge of the intellectual and philosophical education of the NSDAP. [*The first edition of Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten was published in 1920 in Munich by Boepple (Deutscher Volksverlag). I have used for my translation Rosenberg's slightly improved edition of 1937 which was published by the Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Publishers, Munich.] During the war, in July 1940, there was established the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (the Rosenberg Task Force) which was responsible for the collection of art materials that were considered as belonging rightly to Germany's European Reich. In 1941, after the invasion of the USSR, Rosenberg obtained a ministerial appointment, as Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, though he ran into regular conflicts with the brutal Gauleiter Erich Koch who was made Reichskommissar of the Ukraine.* At the end of the war, in May 1945, Rosenberg was captured by Allied troops and tried at Nuremberg. Unlike Albert Speer, he did not plead guilty and refused to distance himself from National Socialism itself – even though he had clearly been opposed to many of its leading ( Page 3 ) personalities, especially Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler, who had had greater influence on Hitler and consequently greater executive power in the Reich. Rosenberg was found guilty by the Nuremberg Tribunal and hanged on 16 October 1946. [*At the end of the war, Koch went into hiding and was not found by Allied forces until May 1949. He was judged and sentenced to death in 1959, though his sentence was commuted to life-imprisonment, perhaps because the Russians believed he might have information regarding art confiscated by the National Socialists from Tsarskoe Palace.] In his memoirs calledLetzte Aufzeichnungen (Final Notes), written during his imprisonment between 1945 and 1946, Rosenberg described the entire National Socialist movement as a response to the Jewish question: National Socialism was the European answer to a century-old question. It was the noblest of ideas to which a German could give all his strength. It made the German nation a gift of unity, it gave the German Reich a new content. It was a social philosophy and an ideal of blood-conditioned cultural cleanliness. National Socialism was misused, and in the end demoralised, by men to whom its creator had most fatefully given his confidence. The collapse of the Reich is historically linked with this. But the idea itself was action and life, and that cannot and will not be forgotten. As other great ideas knew heights and depths, so National Socialism too will be reborn someday in a new generation steeled by sorrow, and will create in a new form a new Reich for the Germans. Historically ripened, it will then have fused the power of belief with political caution. In its peasant soil it will grow from healthy roots into a strong tree that will bear sound fruit. National Socialism was the content of my active life. I served it faithfully, albeit with some blundering and human insufficiency. I shall remain true to it as long as I still live.* [*See Memoirs of Alfred Rosenberg, tr. Eric Posselt, Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1949.] As for the Jewish question itself, he explained that: ( Page 4 ) The war against Jewry came about because an alien people on German soil arrogated the political and spiritual leadership of the country, and, believing itself triumphant, flaunted it brazenly. Today, however, the mere protest against such a phenomenon places anyone demanding a clean-cut differentiation between these opposing camps under so much suspicion that nobody dares raise the issue without being accused of preparing another Auschwitz. And yet, history does not stand still. The forces of life and blood exist and will be effective. The depth of Rosenberg's understanding of the dangers of a Jewish rule of European society is evident already in his first major work on the Jews, The Track of the Jew through the Ages. Focussing on the defects of the Jewish mind itself as the source of these dangers, Rosenberg outlines, in the first part of this work,* the formation of the Jewish mind from the earliest times to the present. In the second part, he surveys the history of Jewish involvement in European politics, especially in Portugal, France, Germany and Russia and also examines the contribution of the Masonic societies, from the 18th century onwards, to the revolutionary movements that brought about the fateful emancipation of the European Jews. In the last part, he analyses more carefully the special characteristics and limitations of the Jewish intellect and proposes his own solution to the Jewish question. [*I have in my edition divided the text into three parts to facilitate reading and comprehension.] Rosenberg begins by pointing out that the Jewish diaspora antedated the Babylonian Exile of the 6th century B.C. The Jews, who are essentially marked by financial talents and ambitions, had been tempted by commercial possibilities to disperse throughout the Mediterranean and North Africa long before they began to move eastwards after the Exile. What is significant about their earliest commercial ( Page 5 ) activities is that they were invariably marked by usury and deception, while in mediaeval Spain and Portugal they flourished on slave-trade as well. By lending money to princes for their military adventures as well as for their private luxuries, the Jews acquired a significant power at the courts that resulted in the acquisition of preferential rights and privileges. It was the rise of this ill-gained Jewish power that drove the local populations into the anti-Semitic agitations and persecutions that finally erupted in many European countries. Guilds of craftsmen that were, up until the 13th and 14th centuries, open to the Jews began to close their doors and the Jews were soon forced to live in ghettos for their own safety to avoid the periodic outbursts of anti-Semitic violence. Attempts on the part of governments to forbid usury and to force the Jews to take up manual labour came to nothing since the Jews always found ways of getting round these laws. Rosenberg reveals that the main reason why the Jew was so successful in his commercial undertakings was the fact that Jewish moral laws blatantly permitted dishonesty in transactions with non-Jews. This is indeed what forced the German philosopher Fichte to exclaim: "Let the Jews continue not to believe in Jesus Christ, let them not believe in any god at all, as long as they do not believe in two different moral laws and a god hostile to humanity". (p.25) Coupled with this moral ambivalence of the Jews is their intolerance of any religion apart from their own. This intolerance extended even to Jewish apostates like Uriel d'Acosta and Spinoza. Rosenberg perceptively notes the essential similarity between the intolerance of Talmudic Judaism and the dogmatic rigidity of the Marxist system which "gives an answer to all questions and excludes debates". As he puts it: This spirit which leads the troops of anarchy diplomatically and brutally at the same time, conscious of its goal, is the religious, economic, political and national spirit of fundamental intolerance that has developed from a racial foundation; it knows only universalism of religion (that is, the rule of the Jewish god), Communism (that is, slave states), world revolution (civil war in all forms) and the internationalism of all Jews (that is, their ( Page 6 ) world-rule). That is the spirit of unrestrained and unscrupulous rapacity: the black, red and golden International are the dreams of the Jewish "philosophers" from Ezra, Ezekiel and Nehemiah to Marx, Rothschild and Trotsky. This is in marked contrast to the tolerance of the ancient Indians and Germans. Indeed, it is to the tolerance of the Persian Achaemenid rulers that the Jews owe their present existence since it was Darius I who allowed the Jews to return to their homeland after their exile in Babylon. On the other hand, the Judaism that was crystallised in this period was itself marked by what the historian Eduard Meyer calls "the arrogant denigration whereby all other peoples in comparison to the people chosen by the world-ruling God became heathens destined to destruction". Thus Meyer concludes: The priestly codex is the basis of Judaism which exists unchanged from the introduction of the Law by Ezra and Nehemiah in 445 B.C. to the present day, with all the crimes and monstrosities, but also with the goal-oriented, ruthless energy that has been inherent in it from the beginning and that produced, along with Judaism, its complement, hatred of the Jews. (P.41) The ghetto which came to characterise the Jewish existence in later times was indeed originally formed by the desire of the Jews themselves for cultural separation from their host peoples. Later, when the resentment of the local population turned violent, the ghetto served also as a protection against injury. Gradually, ghettoisation and various limitations of property and immigration were seen to be necessary to protect the local population itself from the Jewish influence. As Rosenberg points out: The men of those times dealt on the basis of bitter experience and did not allow themselves to be led by obviously stupid slogans and effusive lack of criticism as our present-day "civilised" public in Europe allows itself to be without resistance. Only immigration laws can save us too from the present-day Jewish rule or we must decide to become more efficient and ( Page 7 ) unscrupulous than the Jew. (The National Socialist state has, of course, for the first time done that). One of the most characteristic and significant signs of the hostility of the Jews towards the Europeans is their hatred of Christianity. Rosenberg gives samples of this hatred from the Talmud as well as from the work called Toledot Yeshu which purports to give an account of the life of Jesus. Indeed it is not surprising that the Church increasingly proscribed Jewish works: Let us imagine the situation: in Christian states there live a foreign people who bitterly revile the founder of the state religion in their books, who all week in the synagogue utter the curse of their god on the Christians and in other ways too make no secret of their hatred. Even a less self-conscious Church than the Roman would have had to take up mass measures to put an end to this situation. It is interesting that the burnings of Jewish books that began in the 13th century were in fact initiated by Jews themselves who opposed the "heretical" writings of Moses Maimonides. Similarly, the burnings of the Talmud that followed were instigated primarily by converted Jews, who showed the same intolerance in their new-found Catholicism as in their previous Judaism. Rosenberg goes so far as to ascribe the anti-scientific persecutions of the Roman Catholic Church against thinkers like Galilei and Bruno as being due to its adoption of a Jewish intolerance within its own ecclesiastical system. Indeed, during the Inquisition, the most feared persecutors, including Torquemada, were converted Jews: "The symbolism of the Catholic faith they naturally left aside but the joy in religious persecutions found in the converted Jews its most typical representatives." The second part of the work considers the history of the Jews in Europe and studies the cases especially of the Jews in Portugal, France, Germany and Russia. In so doing, it also notes the importance of the involvement of the Jews in the developing Masonic movement in Europe. Rosenberg begins by noting the similarity of the experiences in different European states where Jews were admitted. At first they are accepted by their host ( Page 8 ) nations with little reserve, then they begin their inborn exploitative usurious business to hold princes and populace under their control and finally they suffer anti-Semitic persecutions or expulsions. In Portugal, the Jewish history begins already in the 11th century and the Jews are seen to profit greatly from the growing slave-trade and to lend these profits to the local population at ever higher interest until popular revolts finally break out in the 16th century. In France, the presence of the Jews in the land can be detected from as early as the 6th century but it was especially under Charlemagne and the Carolingians that they achieved a high status in France as commercial agents. As in most countries, their worldly ambitions knew no bounds and, in the 9th century, Bishop Agobert of Lyons undertook a long and arduous official campaign against their commercial cunning and arrogant mistreatment of Christian slaves. But he found that the Jews had protection in high places and his efforts bore little fruit. It was not until the beginning of the 14th century that popular agitations succeeded in driving them out of Lyons. In central France, the economic situation after the Crusades was extremely favourable to the usurious activity of the Jews and they exploited it to the utmost – until they were driven out in the late 14th century. ( Page 9 ) Only in Pamiers at the foot of the Pyrenees was the Jewish conduct more tolerable since the rabbis enforced strict rules of moderation among their people. As a result, there was hardly any persecution of the Jews in this region. During the French Revolution, however, the Jews worked fervently for their emancipation through such agents as Herz Cerfbeer in Alsace and Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin. And the barriers that separated their usurious existence from that of the Gentiles gradually began to be removed. Although the Jews formed from earliest times an international network that aided Jews in different countries through mutual contacts, the rise of Masonry in the early 18th century helped them operate more effectively and clandestinely through the various lodges of Europe. At first the Jews were not accepted in the Masonic lodges on account of the prevailing aversion to them. But, gradually, movements like the Martinist in the 18th century began to accept Jews in large numbers and lodges that were primarily Jewish too began to be established. The anti-royalist and anti-clerical aims of the Masons are clear in the part played by them in the French Revolution. Rosenberg points particularly to the role of the Jew Cagliostro in initiating the calamity. Later, when the Revolutionary Army decided to expand its ideas in other parts of Europe through military expeditions, it was aided by the fact that there were Masons among the German generals as well who allowed the French to conquer German territory with little difficulty. Rosenberg explains the conquests of Napoleon too as being due largely to Masonic support, a support that was withdrawn when he decided to use Masonry for his purposes rather than let it use him for theirs. In the 19th century the development of Jewish lodges proceeded steadily until Masonry became identical with Jewish ideas of revolution. As Gotthold Salomon of the Frankfurt "Rising Dawn" lodge aptly remarked: Why is there also no trace in the entire Masonic ritual of Church Christianity? Why do the Masons not talk of the birth of Christ but, like the Jews, of the creation of the world? Why is there no Christian symbol in Freemasonry? Why the circle, the square and the scales? Why not the cross and other instruments of torture? Why not, instead of Wisdom, Strength and Beauty, the Christian trio: Faith, Charity, Hope? (P.110) ( Page 10 )