As long as the German Jews were living in Germany, and the Sephardic Jews in Spain, there was no urgent necessity to create a special vernacular literature for them: they spoke the language of their Christian fellow-citizens, shared with them the same conception of life, the same popular customs, except such as touched upon their religious convictions, and the works current among their Gentile neighbors were quite intelligible, and fully acceptable to them. The extent of common intellectual pleasures was much greater than one would be inclined to admit without examination. In Germany we have the testimony of the first Judeo-German or Yiddish works printed in the sixteenth century that even at that late time the Jews were deriving pleasure from the stories belonging to the cycle of King Arthur and similar romances. In 1602 a pious Jew, in order to offset these older stories, as he himself mentions in his introduction,[1] issued the 'Maasebuch,' which is a collection of Jewish folklore. It is equally impossible, however, to discover from early German songs preserved by the Jews that they in any way differed from those recited and sung by the Gentiles, and they have to be classed among the relics of German literature, which has actually been done by a scholar who subjected them to a close scrutiny.[2] On the other hand, the Jews who were active in German literature, like Süsskind, only accidentally betray their Jewish origin. Had they not chosen to make special mention of the fact in their own works, it would not be possible by any criterion to separate them from the host of authors of their own time.