In the Springtime (first five centuries of the Christian era) this landless Consensus spread geographically from Spain to Shantung. This was the Jewish Age of Chivalry and its "Gothic" blossoming-time of religious creative-force. The later Apocalyptic, the Mishnah, and also primitive Christianity (which was not cast off till after Trajan's and Hadrian's time) are creations of this nation. It is well known that in those days the Jews were peasants, artisans, and dwellers in little towns, and "big business" was in the hands of Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans — that is, members of the Classical world.
About 500[1] begins the Jewish Baroque, which Western observers are accustomed to regard, very one-sidedly, as part of the picture of Spain's age of glory. The Jewish Consensus, like the Persian, Islamic, and Byzantine, now advances to an urban and intellectual awareness, and thenceforward it is master of the forms of city-economics and city-science. Tarragona, Toledo, and Granada are predominantly Jewish cities. Jews constitute an essential element in Moorish high society. Their finished forms, their esprit, their knightliness, amazed the Gothic nobility of the Crusades, which tried to imitate them; but the diplomacy also, and the war-management and the administration of the Moorish cities would all have been unthinkable without the Jewish aristocracy, which was every whit as thoroughbred as the Islamic. As once in Arabia there had been a Jewish Minnesang, so now here there was a high literature of enlightened science. It was under the guidance of the Rabbi Isaac Hassan, and by the hand of Jewish and Islamic as well as Christian savants, that Alfonso X's new work on the planets was prepared (c. 1250);[2] in other words, it was an achievement of Magian and not of Faustian world-thought.[3] But Spain and Morocco after all contained but a very small fraction of the Jewish Consensus, and even this Consensus itself had not merely a worldly but also (and predominantly) a spiritual significance. In it, too, there occurred a Puritan movement, which rejected the Talmud and tried to get back to the pure Torah. The community of the Qaraites, preceded by many a forerunner, arose about 760 in northern Syria, the selfsame area which gave birth a century earlier to the Paulician iconoclasts and a century later to the Sufism of Islam — three Magian tendencies whose inner relationship is unmistakable. The Qaraites, like the Puritans of all other Cultures, were combated by both orthodoxy and enlightenment. Rabbinical counterblasts appeared from Cordova and Fez to southern Arabia and Persia. But in that period appeared also — an outcome of "Jewish Sufism," and suggestive in places of Swedenborg — the chef-d'œvre of rational mysticism, the Yesirah, germane in its Kabbalistic root-ideas to Byzantine image-symbolism and the contemporary magic of Greek "second-degree Christianity," and equally so to the folk-religion of Islam.
