FW:  Jan. 7, 2015

 

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 newspaper Völkischer 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.

 

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 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 called Letzte 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:

 

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 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 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 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 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.

 

 

 

 

 

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)

 

Soon there sprung up revolutionary nationalistic movements all over Europe such as Young Germany and Young Italy and Young Europe. The subversive anti-European aims of the revolutions of the 19th century are revealed in a message written by the Jew Piccolo-Tigre:

 

The most important thing is to isolate man from his family and to make him immoral ... When you have instilled aversion to family and religion in a number of minds then let fall some words exciting a desire to enter into the lodges. The vanity of the bourgeoisie to identify itself with Freemasonry has something so banal and universal that I am always delighted at human stupidity. I wonder that the entire world does not knock on the doors of the most eminent and requests to be one more laborer in the reconstruction of the temple of Solomon. (p.113)

 

After the Paris Commune of 1871, the revolutionary movements fostered by Masonry gradually transformed themselves into socialist and communist ones. Marx and his colleagues saw to it that the socialist movement would not be a purely workers' movement but one always led by Jewish intellectuals such as Trotsky, Kuhn and Leviné. At the same time, the core of the anti-European conspiracy was crystallised in such exclusively Jewish societies as the B'nai B'rith Order founded in New York in 1843 and the synagogues themselves. The chief rabbi of Frankfurt, Isidor, for instance, declared in 1868:

 

Already the peoples, led by the societies for the regeneration of progress and enlightenment (i.e. the Freemasons), begin to bow before Israel. May the whole of mankind, obedient to the philosophy of the Alliance Universelle Israélite, follow the Jew, who rules the intelligentsia of the progressive nations. Mankind turns its gaze to the capital of the renovated world; that is not London, nor Paris, nor Rome, but Jerusalem, which has risen from its ruins, which is at once the city of the past and of the future.

 

Zionism was the culmination of this Jewish ambition and it achieved its great victory in 1917 when Britain conquered Jerusalem from the Turks. As regards the relationship of the Jews to the Germans and the German Empire, Rosenberg is careful to highlight first of all the essential incompatibility of the Jewish mind, with its abhorrence of mystical religion and anything falling outside the realm of rational calculation, with the German, for "there is in Europe perhaps no nation that has explored and explained the inner mystery of man as the German?" (p.94). Rosenberg perceptively observes that the "depth of feeling and tenderness" that Schiller praised in Goethe indeed constitutes the very essence of the European soul. This is the reason why, whereas the Jews were able to live fairly comfortably with Frenchmen and Englishmen, they positively hated the Germans – as they did the Russians also, whose spiritual inclinations stood in stark opposition to the Jewish existence. It is not surprising then that, when the Jews realised that the British Empire served the Zionist internationalist dream more effectively than the German imperial one, they decided to back the English against the Germans in the first World War. Organised through the 'Alliance israélite universelle', the Jews embarked on a single-minded enterprise of destroying Germany. It is true that there were some anti-Zionist Jews in Germany who feared that the recognition of the Jews as a nation would mean that they could no longer hide as "state citizens" when accused of commercial or political treason in their adopted nations. But the solidarity among the Jews internationally was paramount and Fichte's early fears in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808) were fulfilled:

 

Does not the evident thought strike you that, if you give the Jews, who are, regardless of you, citizens of a state that is stronger and more powerful than all yours, also citizenship in your states, your other citizens will be fully under their feet? (p.135)

 

The horror of a total Jewish rule over European society was first realised in the Russian Revolution, when the Jewish Bolsheviks took over the reins of government from more moderate elements and established a Jewish Russian government. Rosenberg had in fact witnessed at first hand the Jewish control of the Soviet state when he travelled in 1917 and early 1918 from St. Petersburg to the Crimea. As he reveals:

 

In the name of fraternity and peace the Bolshevists lured to themselves unthinking hordes and set to work immediately with a raging hatred against everything "bourgeois" and soon with a systematic slaughter and civil war, if this one-sided massacre can be called that. The entire Russian intelligentsia, which had for decades striven for the Russian people and had gone to the gallows or were exiled for its welfare, were simply killed wherever they could be got hold of ... The workers and soldiers were pushed to such a degree that there was no return for them any more, they became the will-less creatures of the tenacious Jewish rule which had burned all bridges behind it. (p.143)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The problem with any Jewish rule of the world is the defective and dangerous quality of the Jewish mind itself. This is what Rosenberg explores in the last part of the present work.* He focuses at first on the Talmud as an exemplar of the Jewish intellect and points to the complete lack of any metaphysical or religious value in it. Rather, everything is cut and dried: "The world has been created out of nothing by the god of the Jews, the people who should rule the world and to whom every created thing belongs by right." Around this fundamental premise is woven a vast tissue of sophistical hair-splitting and moral casuistry that is sometimes incomprehensible and at other times obscene. The other basic defect of the Jewish mind, its technical tendency, is exemplified in the various manifestations of modernism itself. As Rosenberg points out:

 

Today railways and poetry, aeroplanes and philosophy, warm-water heating and philosophy belong to culture; here a methodical differentiation is required. With the word 'culture' one should designate only the expressions of man that are the product (whether it be a felt or a thought one) of a world-conception. To this belong religion, philosophy, morality, art and science insofar as they are not purely technical. The rest is trade, economy and industry, which I would like to designate as the technique of life. Now it seems to me to be an important insight into the essence of the Jewish mind when I name it a predominantly technical mind. In all the fields that I have counted as belonging to the technique of life, it has, as we have seen, always been active with a tenacious energy and with great success. But even there, whence culture springs, it is only the external technical side of it in its different forms that it has left its mark on or possessed. (p.152)

 

[*These observations of Rosenberg's should render the contemporary discussions of Jewish IQ (see, for instance, G. Cochran, J. Hardy, H. Harpending, "Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence", Journal of Biosocial Science 38(5), 2006, pp. 659-693, and Richard Lynn, The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement, Washington Summit Publishers, 2011) rather worthless except as academic exercices.]

 

Similarly with the Jewish obsession with laws. As Rosenberg explains:

 

The more clearly and definitely the feeling for justice and injustice is rooted in a people, the less it requires a complicated juristic technique, and so much more spiritual culture will it possess. Thus it is a totally misleading judgement to see in the minute enumeration of the permitted and prohibited activities of daily life an expression derived from a higher ethos.

 

Quite on the contrary: it is a sign that the main focus of morality does not lie within man but this is determined merely externally, wherein reward and punishment for its observation are decisive. And here it is characteristic of the Jewish mind that the simple morality of good and evil has led to a tangle of laws and to a commenting on the same lasting hundreds of years. (p.153)

 

This is in contrast to the quintessential Indo-European mind:

 

... the knowledge of the Indians arose from the longing for the interconnectedness of the universe and led to purified and symbolical knowledge, that thus this knowledge served only as a means to a goal going beyond the same. The Jew has shown throughout his history a search for knowledge in itself, avoided every metaphysical like an infectious disease, and instinctively persecuted the few exceptions who flirted with philosophy. The knowledge of the Law was for the Jew a goal in itself. (p.154)

 

That is why, Rosenberg points out, Christ's teaching of a kingdom "within us" is essentially repugnant to the Jew.

 

All the myths that the Jews learnt from the Sumero-Akkadians and, later, the Persians, they turned into historical facts that justified their single political aim of ruling others. Thus

 

When the Jews heard of the immortality of the human soul for the first time from the Persians, when they heard of a messiah, a Saoshyant, who would deliver the world from the power of the evil principle to establish a heavenly kingdom into which would enter not only the holy but finally also, after severe punishment, all the countless penitent sinners, they understood of this principle of a world-liberating love only the idea of a world-ruling messiah. (p.155)

 

Those myths and symbols adopted by the Jews into the apparently mystical Kabbalistic work, the Zohar, have turned into "the driest magic".

 

The technical tendency of the Jewish mind is displayed equally in Moses Maimonides' Moreh Nebukim and in the works of Spinoza, who

 

... as a genuine Jewish technician ... accomplished the stunt of bringing these opposites [Descartes and Giordano Bruno] to a common denominator and to combine them in an ingenious 'system'. That he could do this shows that he understood neither. (p.160)

 

Similary in science:

 

It is now not hard to outline the sphere of the Jewish mind with total strictness. It has always mastered that field of science which is possessed only through the understanding. The lack of imagination and inner quest, which damned the Jew to sterility in religion and philosophy, emerges also in science. Not a single creative scientific idea sprang from a Jewish mind, nowhere has it pointed out new paths. (p.162)

 

The dangerous influence of the Jewish mind on modern technological society is summarised by Rosenberg thus:

 

If, thanks to the efforts of self-sacrificing men, science had been brought so far as to be on the track of the fundamental laws of the cosmos, now there emerged a factor that could not easily earlier: the technical processing of the collected knowledge that promotes immediate usefulness. Man began to become increasingly the slave of his creation, of the machine, the technique of life established itself more and more. And that meant the breach through which the Jew rushed into our culture! (p.163)

 

As for their contributions to the arts, Jews can only produce virtuosos who substitute quantity of performance for quality, composers like Mahler who seek technical special effects and impresarios like Reinhardt who produce all manner of entertainment circuses. Jewish art critics abjure form for technique and favour Artistic Bolshevism* and Futurism – and nevertheless dare to speak all the same time of the "soul" and "inexpressible inner experiences". In the literary field, Rosenberg points to the case of Heinrich Heine who, despite his veneer of European culture, was typically Jewish in his hatred of Christianity. Kant's attempt to show that faith is beyond reason was particularly annoying to the reason-bound mind of Heine. In fact, at the end of his life, Heine gave up all attempts to emulate European philosophy and said on his death-bed: "I do not need to return to Judaism since I have never abandoned it". Finally, the inveterate Jewish hatred of Christianity has appeared in a new political guise in the doctrine of Marx, who preached materialistic atheism to get rid of all religions and internationalism to get rid of all nations so that the world could be more easily ruled by the Jews.

 

[*Nowadays called Cultural Marxism.]

 

In the final analysis, the essential characteristic of the Jews is a sheer nationalistic version of the Schopenhauerian Will-to-live, the concept that Nietzsche reinterpreted as a Will-to-power.* Thus "the basis of [the Jew's] character is the unchecked instinct, his goal world-domination, his means cunning utilitarian sense and energy." Incapable of love and the creative instinct linked to it, he has devoted his entire existence to the acquisition of the means of world-rule – symbolised in Wagner's Ring operas by the gold of the Rhine.** In contrast to other world-conquerors, such as the Romans, or Napoleon, the Jews are marked by a total cultural sterility behind the religious fanaticism that compels them to represent themselves as "the chosen people". But, like the slave who wishes to play the lord, the Jew will only succeed in riding his master's horse to death.

 

[*Rosenberg detects the same characteristic also among their fellow-Semites, the Islamic Arabs. **Indeed both Alberich in Wagner's Ring and Klingsor in Parsifal are vivid portraits of the eternal Jew.]

 

 

 

 

A solution to the problem of Jewish intellectual influence on, and control of, European society can only be achieved by revoking the emancipation of the Jews:

 

The German mind, left to itself, would have soon established its own equipoise, but through the Jewish power in the press, theatre, trade and science it was made almost impossible for it. We ourselves were to blame; for we should not have emancipated the Jews but should have created insurmountable exceptional laws for the Jew as Goethe, Fichte, Herder had demanded in vain. One does not leave poison lying round unobserved, does not give it equal importance with antidotes, but preserves it carefully in black cabinets. That has finally happened – after 2000 years – in the National Socialist Reich! (p.165)

 

The alarming expansion of Jewish power can only be checked by the immediate cessation of tolerance, since

 

... every European must become aware that it is a matter of everything that our mind, our character has handed over to us as an inherited tradition to be fostered and administered and that here humanitarian tolerance in the face of aggressive hostility signifies plain suicide." (p.187)

 

One crucially important step in this direction was suggested already by Fichte in the 18th century:

 

They must have human rights, even if these do not belong to them as to us . . . but to give them civil rights I see no means of doing so, at least, other than cutting off one night all their heads and placing on them others in which there is not a single Jewish idea. In order to protect ourselves from them I see no other means than to conquer their extolled land for them and to send them all there. (p.188)

 

Following Fichte, Rosenberg suggests his own plan for the curtailment of Jewish power in Germany which would ensure that:

 

1. The Jews are recognised as a nation living in Germany. Religious faith or the lack of it play no role.

 

2. A Jew is one whose parents, father or mother, are Jews according to this nationality; a Jew is from henceforth one who has a Jewish spouse.

 

3 . Jews do not have the right to engage in German politics in words, writing or actions.

 

4. Jews do not have the right to occupy state offices and to serve in the army either as soldiers or as officers. Their work performance here comes into question.

 

5. Jews do not have the right to be leaders in state and communal cultural institutions (theatres, galleries, etc.) and to occupy professorial and teaching positions in German schools and universities.

 

6. Jews do not have the right to work in state or communal test-, control-, censorship-, etc. commissions; they also do not have the right to be represented in the directorships of state banks and communal credit institutions.

 

7. Foreign Jews do not have the right to settle permanently in Germany. Acceptance into the German state federation should be forbidden to them under all circumstances.

 

8. Zionism must be actively supported in order to transport a certain number of German Jews yearly to Palestine or generally over the borders. (p.189)

 

While these legal restrictions can only provide the conditions for the natural development of German culture, care must be taken to foster German culture at the same time. It will be necessary in this regard to cultivate a Christianity that is equally free of the noxious Jewish influence of the Old Testament: "The Christian spirit and the 'dirty Jewish' spirit must be separated; with a sharp cut the Bible is to be divided into Christian and Anti-Christian." Instead of considering the ancient Hebrews as the forebears of Christian Europeans, it would be much more appropriate and rewarding to study, and absorb, the spiritual achievements of the ancient Indo-Europeans, Indian, Persian, Greek and German.

 

Although Rosenberg's goals of European nationalism may today – after the military defeat of the National Socialists – seem insuperably difficult in the face of the growing American-Jewish globalisation of the world, one may derive a certain encouragement from the following remark made by Rosenberg regarding the campaign of the National Socialists to end the financial slavery of the international Jew: "If this could be achieved even only partially the axe would have been laid to the life-tree of the Jew." (p.189)

 

Alexander Jacob

http://eustacemullins.blogspot.com/2015/01/alfred-rosenberg.html