But an entirely new situation was created when, from about the year 1000, the Western portion of the Consensus found itself suddenly in the field of the young Western Culture. The Jews, like the Parsees, the Byzantines, and the Moslems, had become by then civilized and cosmopolitan, whereas the German-Roman world lived in the townless land, and the settlements that had just come (or were coming) into existence around monasteries and market-places were still many generations short of possessing souls of their own. While the Jews were already almost fellaheen, the Western peoples were still almost primitives. The Jew could not comprehend the Gothic inwardness, the castle, the Cathedral; nor the Christian the Jew's superior, almost cynical, intelligence and his finished expertness in "money-thinking." There was mutual hate and contempt, due not to race-distinction, but to difference of phase. Into all the hamlets and country towns the Jewish Consensus built its essentially megalopolitan — proletarian — ghettos. The Judengasse is a thousand years in advance of the Gothic town. Just so, in Jesus's days, the Roman towns stood in the midst of the villages on the Lake of Genesareth.
But these young nations were, besides, bound up with the soil and the idea of a fatherland, and the landless "Consensus," which was cemented, not by deliberate organization, but by a wholly unconscious, wholly metaphysical impulse — an expression of the Magian world-feeling in its simplest and directest form — appeared to them as something uncanny and incomprehensible. It was in this period that the legend of the Wandering Jew arose. It meant a good deal for a Scottish monk to visit a Lombard monastery, and nostalgia soon took him home again, but when a rabbi of Mainz — in 1000 the seat of the most important Talmudic seminary of the West — or of Salerno betook himself to Cairo or Merv or Basra, he was at home in every ghetto. In this tacit cohesion lay the very idea of the Magian nation[1] — although the contemporary West was unaware of the fact, it was for the Jews, as for the Greeks of the period and the Parsees and Islam, State and Church and people all in one. This State had its own jurisprudence and (what Christians never perceived) its own public life,[2] and despised the surrounding world of the host-peoples as a sort of outland; and it was a veritable treason-trial that expelled Spinoza and Uriel Acosta — an event of which these host-peoples could not possibly grasp the under meaning. And in 1799 the leading thinker among the Eastern Hasidim, Senior Salman, was handed over by the rabbinical opposition to the Petersburg Government as though to a foreign state.
Jewry of the West-European group had entirely lost the relation to the open land which had still existed in the Moorish period of Spain. There were no more peasants. The smallest ghetto was a fragment, however miserable, of
