Rabbinic Age and closing with the activity of the earlier Gaonim, or
Persian Rabbis, the First Period would carry us to the eighth or the
ninth century. A well-marked Second Period is that of the Arabic-Spanish
writers, a period which would extend from the ninth to the fifteenth
century. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century forms a Third
Period with distinct characteristics. Finally, the career of Mendelssohn
marks the definite beginning of the Modern Period. Such a grouping of
the facts presents many advantages, but it somewhat obscures the varying
conditions prevalent at one and the same time in different countries
where the Jews were settled. Hence some writers have preferred to
arrange the material under the different _untries_. It is quite
possible to draw a map of the world's civilization by merely marking the
successive places in which Jewish literature has fixed its
head-quarters. But, on the other hand, such a method of classification
has the disadvantage that it leads to much overlapping. For long
intervals together, it is impossible to separate Italy from Spain,
France from Germany, Persia from Egypt, Constantinople from Amsterdam.
This has induced other writers to propose a third method and to trace
_Influences_, to indicate that, whereas Rabbinism may be termed the
native product of the Jewish genius, the scientific, poetical, and
philosophical tendencies of Jewish writers in the Middle Ages were due
to the interaction of external and internal forces. Further, in this
arrangement, the Ghetto period would have a place assigned to it as
such, for it would again mark the almost complete sway of purely Jewish
forces in Jewish literature. Adopting this classification, we should
have a wave of Jewish impulse, swollen by the accretion of foreign
waters, once more breaking on a Jewish strand, with its contents in
something like the same condition in which they left the original
spring. All these three methods are true, and this has impelled me to
refuse to follow any one of them to the exclusion of the other two. I