The favorable position of the Jews at the beginning of the Middle Ages is less familiar to the reading public, even to the Jewish reader, than the troublesome times which came later. As a matter of fact the Jews were, except for the lack of national unity and of the possession of an independent home, better situated materially four centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple than before the last dissolution of the Kingdom of Judah. The instinct for commerce which is latent in the “Semitic” race was awakened in the Diaspora and, after an interruption of more than a thousand years, we find, at the end of the classical times, international trade again almost exclusively in the hands of members of that race. The Sumero-Accadians or original Babylonians who were the earliest known international traders on land, and the Phoenicians, who first dared to trade over seas, were of Semitic origin. As foreign commerce is the highest form of activity in regard to the utilization of human productivity, so it is also the forerunner of mental activity and of the spread of an ennobling and instructive culture. The beginnings of both Egyptian and Greek civilization, according to the latest discoveries, point unmistakably to Mesopotamian or Phoenician origin, with a strong probability that the latter received it from the former in times which we usually describe as pre-historic, but about which we now possess considerable exact information. Culture followed the great route of the caravans to Syria and Egypt on one side, to Iran, India and as far as China in an opposite direction. And if we accept the wholly incorrect and un-scientific division of the white race into Aryans and Semites, then this original and most fertile of the cultures of humanity was undoubtedly Semitic. A more modern and more nearly correct division would place these ancient inhabitants of the plateau of Asia as a part of the great Mediterranean or brunette race, which includes, besides all the so-called Semites, a number of European nations which are classed as Aryans. Greece succeeded Phœnicia and was in turn succeeded by Rome in the hegemony of international trade as well as in that of general culture. Both commerce and culture declined when the ancient civilization was all but destroyed by the invasion of the blond barbarians of the northern forests, who were themselves destined to attain in a far-away future the highest form of civilization of which mankind has hitherto proven itself capable. (See _Zollschan_ “Das Rassenproblem,” Vienna, 1910, pp. 206 ff.)