No one says it, but every one knows that pantheism is an open secret in Germany. We have, in fact, outgrown deism. We are free and don’t want any thundering tyrant. We are of age and need no parental care. Nor are we the botches of any great mechanic. Deism is a religion for servants, for children, for the Genevese, for watchmakers … and every deist is, after all, a Jew.

—Heinrich Heine¹

With some notable exceptions, such as George Eliot, virtually everyone who put pen to paper in the nineteenth century, it seems, is vulnerable to the charge of antisemitism. It is not easy to draw any other conclusion from Leon Poliakov's rich compendium of opinions about Jews and Judaism from Voltaire to Wagner. Interest in Jews, it appears, almost invariably had an antisemitic slant.

Antisemitism has many strands, however, and the term may be too broad to be usefully applied. As there are degrees of racism—the residual prejudice that emerges in an occasional tasteless remark or traditional ethnic joke being of a different order from deliberately espoused, programmatic racism—so there are degrees of antisemitism. This is unlikely to have been any less the case at a time when Jews enjoyed full civil rights only in very few places and were known to many people chiefly through folk legends about their religious practices and popular accounts of their alleged part in the Crucifixion. It may even be that modern antisemitism—antisemitism as an ideology—developed only after the emancipation of the Jews in the course of the nineteenth century. Isolated, derogatory remarks about Jews should thus probably be viewed as the common currency of a time when Jews were in fact barely tolerated strangers and there was less incentive than now to curb inconsiderate language or to check the expression of unreflected prejudice.

There are probably good grounds, moreover, for distinguishing between anti-Judaism and antisemitism. The former, I would argue, is a philosophical and ideological position that might well be shared by emancipated Jews themselves and that often went hand in hand with enthusiasm for the culture of ancient Greece. Antisemitism, in contrast, is directed toward living Jews as a social and ethnic group and, in the nineteenth century, usually implied resistance to granting them equal civil rights with Gentiles and recognizing them as citizens. Both the young Hegel and Nietzsche, for instance, were anti-Judaic but arguably not antisemitic in the sense described. The young Hegel disliked Judaism as a religion, but supported Jewish emancipation. Nietzsche's contempt for the popular and demagogic antisemitism of his time is well known. Nevertheless, contempt for Judaism as a religion of servitude, resentment, mechanical obedience to precept, and hair-splitting, dry-as-dust rabbinical scholarship was not always distinct from distaste for certain alleged physical and moral characteristics of Jews.² Nor did support for Jewish emancipation imply respect for or even tolerance of Jewish religious beliefs and practices. Anti-Judaism easily spilled over into antisemitism. A fairly convincing case could even be made for the proposition that anti-Judaism was only the respectable mask of an unavowed antisemitism. It is all the more striking that despite the vehemence of his well-known criticism of excessive English and American “Hebraising,” Matthew Arnold turns out to be considerably more attached to the values of “Hebraism” and considerably less vulnerable to the appeal of antisemitism than most of the German writers from whom he borrowed not only his celebrated antithesis of Hellenism and Hebraism but also the twin ideals—which seem to have been always associated with the first term in that antithesis, never with the second—of the fully developed harmonious individual and of the state as the embodiment of culture.

Arnold's criticism of the “excess” of “Hebraism” in England and his advocacy of a stronger dose of “Hellenism” in the famous fourth chapter of Culture and Anarchy put us on the track of what appears to be a historical connection between philhellenism and anti-Judaism.³ Normally, the term “philhellenism” is used to describe the upsurge of support among liberal and educated Europeans, of whom Byron was the most illustrious, for the Greek independence movement against the Ottoman Empire in the third decade of the nineteenth century. I use it here in a broader sense to include not only the revival of interest in and enthusiasm for ancient Greece, which began in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century with Winckelmann and Wolf, and which no doubt laid the foundations of the political philhellenism of the nineteenth, but also the entire “neohumanist” movement in German literature, education, and politics. Growing out of the work of Winckelmann and Wolf, “neohumanism” took deeper root in Germany than in any other European country and resulted in the sweeping educational reforms enacted by the Prussian Department of Education under Wilhelm von Humboldt and his assistant Johann Wilhelm Süvern. Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, the Humboldts, and Hegel were all nourished at the neohumanist source and contributed to it. Its effects were felt in Germany into the early twentieth century, when there was a remarkable renewal of interest in Winckelmann in the famous George-Kreis, the circle of writers, artists, scholars, and philosophers that had formed around the poet Stefan George.

The basis of German philhellenism or neohumanism was the conviction that ancient Greece represented an ideal condition of freedom and harmony: free and harmonious development of all human capacities in each individual and free and harmonious development of the polis or community. Having fallen away from that original condition, modern man must strive to recover it by eliminating everything that stood between him and it, including the distortions of a misguided (predominantly Roman Catholic) baroque and rococo classicism that imitated the external forms of antiquity without penetrating to the original spirit that had animated them. This new Reformation would result, it was hoped, in the overcoming of all the destructive dualisms that characterize the life of modern man—matter and spirit, the ethical and the aesthetic, substance and form, reason and passion, the sacred and the profane—and the restoration of freedom, beauty, and harmony to the individual and the community.⁴ Winckelmann's cult of antique statuary, and in particular of the male nude, marked his rejection of the distinction between the inner and the outer, spirit and matter. In their plastic representations of the free, self-sufficient male body, the Greeks had symbolized for Winckelmann the unity and harmony of man and nature, the human and the divine. The symbol itself, being both the sign and the thing signified—in contrast to traditional neoclassical allegory, in which sign and signified are clearly distinguished—was an expression of the new ideal of unity as opposed to the old dualisms.⁵ Beauty was nothing other than that harmonious unity of inner and outer, spirit and form, the divine and the human, which the ancients alone had achieved. “The foundation of higher study,” Hegel declared in his rectorial address at the Nürnberg Gymnasium in 1809,

must be and remain Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second. The perfection and glory of those masterpieces must be the spiritual bath, the secular baptism that first and indelibly attunes and tinctures the soul in respect of taste and knowledge. For this initiation a general, perfunctory acquaintance with the ancients is not sufficient; we must take up our lodging with them so that we can breathe their air, absorb their ideas, their manners, one might even say their errors and prejudices, and become at home in this world—the fairest that ever has been. While the first paradise was that of human nature, this is the second, the higher paradise of the human spirit, the paradise where the human spirit emerges like a bride from her chamber, endowed with a fairer naturalness, with freedom, depth, and serenity … The human spirit manifests its profundity here no longer in confusion, gloom, or arrogance, but in perfect clarity. Its serenity is not like the play of children; it is rather a veil spread over the melancholy which is familiar with the cruelty of fate but is not thereby driven to lose its freedom and moderation … If we make ourselves at home in such an element, all the powers of the soul are stimulated, developed, and exercised.

(“On Classical Studies” 324-25)

In the reconstruction of man and the polis proposed by the neohumanists—partly, no doubt, as an alternative to the purely “material” political ideals of the French Revolution⁶—the study of Greek language and culture was to play a crucial role. For the old grammatical study of the ancient languages, which concentrated on “external” forms, the neohumanists wanted to substitute the study of language as a unity of form and creative spirit. “The works of the ancients,” Hegel explained, “contain the most noble food in the most noble form: golden apples in silver bowls. They are incomparably richer than all the works of any other nation and of any other time … These riches, however, are intimately connected with the language, and only through and in it, do we obtain them in all their special significance. Their content can be approximately given us by translations, but not their form, not their ethereal soul.” What the student was to appropriate was not the rules of Greek grammar or composition, but the creative genius of the Greek people which was held to be chiefly accessible through their language. “Imitation” of the Greeks, in art, in language, in ethics and politics would thus result not in the mechanical and slavish reproduction of the old, but in the production of new and original work in the spirit of the Greeks, that is to say, in that spirit of beauty and harmony that centuries of alienated culture had all but eradicated from the human consciousness. “It is necessary,” in Hegel's view, “that we appropriate the world of antiquity not only to possess it, but even more to digest and transform it” (“On Classical Studies” 326-27).

How Christianity, or even Enlightenment deism, or the Kantian philosophy which strongly influenced a number of the neohumanists could be made compatible with this fundamentally immanentist vision of man and the world was not always clear. To some, like Heine, it could not. In “Concerning The History of Philosophy and Theology in Germany” he denounced not only Christianity but deism as fundamentally hostile to beauty, joy, and man's inner harmony. But the irreconcilable enemy of Greek harmony and of the Greek sense of beauty was Jewish spiritualism and dualism. “The Jews looked on the body as something inferior, as a wretched cloak for the ruach hakodesh, the holy breath, the spirit, and only to the latter did they award their attention, their reverence, their worship.” No wonder “the Jews, the Swiss guard of deism,” had been “inexorable” in their hounding of the pantheist in their midst, Benedict Spinoza. As for the Christians, they “went much further” even than the Jews and “regarded [the body] as something objectionable, something bad, as evil itself.” Inevitably, in the art and literature influenced by Christianity, “there is no obvious harmony between form and idea as with the Greeks” (177, 174, 177, 163).

The young Hegel of “The Spirit of Christianity” found a way of accommodating Christianity by representing it as the reconciliation of Greek religion, the soul of which is beauty, and Kantian reason, the core of which is morality. Love, the moral principle of the Gospel, is the beauty of the heart, a spiritual beauty combining the Greek soul and Kant's moral reason. In this conception it was Judaism that became the “villain of the piece,” as Richard Kroner put it (9). “Abraham wanted not to love,” Hegel tells us, “wanted to be free by not loving” (“The Spirit of Christianity” 185). While Hegel recognizes that for culture to exist, man must be able to work on “nature” and “spirit” and must therefore transform them into his “object,” he distinguishes between a radical and destructive alienation—that of the Jews—and a mild and productive one, that of the Greeks.

The substance of Nature and Spirit must have confronted us, must have taken the shape of something alien to us, before it can become our object. Unhappy he whose immediate world of feelings has been alienated from him—for this means nothing less than the snapping of those bonds of faith, love, and trust which unite heart and head in a holy friendship. The alienation which is the condition of theoretical erudition does not require this moral pain, or the sufferings of the heart, but only the easier pain and strain of the imagination which is occupied with something not given in immediate experience, something foreign, something pertaining to recollection, to memory and the thinking mind.

(“On Classical Studies” (327-28)

The patriarch of Judaism appears in Hegel's early writings as having deliberately chosen the most extreme and inhuman form of alienation:

Abraham, born in Chaldea, had in youth already left a fatherland in his father's company. Now, in the plains of Mesopotamia, he tore himself free altogether from his family as well, in order to be a wholly self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself. He did this without having been injured or disowned, without the grief which after a wrong or an outrage signifies love's enduring need, when love, injured but not lost, goes in quest of a new fatherland in order to flourish and enjoy itself there. The first act which made Abraham the progenitor of the nation is a disseverance which snaps the bonds of communal life and love. The entirety of relationships in which he had hitherto lived with men and nature, these beautiful relationships of his youth (Joshua 24.2), he spurned.

(“The Spirit of Christianity” 185)

As a result, the world was forever disenchanted. The Jews never knew the harmonious “second paradise” of the Greeks. They lived in a world that they regarded as utterly alien to them, to which they had no ties, and for which they had no love. With no sense of the immanence of the divine, they had no feeling for beauty. “An image of God was just stone or wood to them; … they despise the image because it does not manage them, and they have no inkling of its deification in the enjoyment of beauty or in a lover's intuition” (“The Spirit of Christianity” 192). Judaism so understood might well seem to be in league with modern science or with the utilitarianism of the despised, practical, “philistine” English.

Hegel constantly contrasts the Greeks and the Jews, invariably to the disadvantage of the latter. In their representations of man's struggle with nature, the Greeks seek reconciliation, an end to dualism: “Deucalion and Pyrrha, … after the flood in their time, invited men once again to friendship with the world, to nature, made them forget their need and their hostility in joy and pleasure, made a peace of love, were the progenitors of more beautiful peoples, and made their age the mother of a newborn natural life which maintained its bloom of youth.” Noah, in contrast, sought mastery over nature at the price of submission to an all-powerful force alien to both himself and nature. Likewise Abraham, as we saw, left his fatherland but refused to become attached to any new land. “The groves which often gave him coolness and shade he soon left again; in them he had theophanies, appearances of his perfect Object on High, but he did not tarry in them with the love which would have made them worthy of the Divinity and participant in Him. He was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike … He entered into no ties … He steadily persisted in cutting himself off from others, and he made this conspicuous by a physical peculiarity imposed on himself and his posterity.” Cadmus and Danaus, in contrast, who also forsook their fatherland, “went in quest of a soil where they would be free and they sought it that they might love … In order to live in pure, beautiful unions, as was no longer given to them in their own land, [they] carried their gods forth with them … [and] by their gentle arts and manners won over the less civilized aborigines and intermingled with them to form a happy and gregarious people” (“The Spirit of Christianity” 182-86).

Since the Jews insist on maintaining their distance from nature and others and have removed their “perfect Object on High” far out of the world, the divine for them is never incarnate, it is never present in the world, even in the holiest of holies. For them, according to Hegel, the sacred and the profane are two unconnecting realms, whereas for the Greeks the one informs the other. “The concealment of God in the Holy of Holies had a significance quite different from the arcanum of the Eleusinian gods. From the pictures, feelings, inspiration, and devotion of Eleusis, from these revelations of god, no one was excluded; but they might not be spoken of, since words would have desecrated them. But of their objects and actions, of the laws of their service, the Israelites might well chatter (Deuteronomy 30.11), for in these there is nothing holy. The holy was always outside them, unseen and unfelt” (italics added). Even the holy days of the Jews in no way signified a transformation of the mundane; sacred time is another time. The day of rest is kept “in a complete vacuum, in an inactive unity of spirit” and “the time dedicated to God is an empty time” (“The Spirit of Christianity” 193). Finally, equality as envisaged by the Jews is the equality Montesquieu attributed to the subjects of a tyrant, not the equality of the free citizens of the ancient republics. “The Greeks were to be equal because all were free, self-subsistent; the Jews equal because all were incapable of self-subsistence” (“The Spirit of Christianity” 198). Hegel also subscribed, as one might expect, to what had already been a criticism of Jewish religious practice in antiquity and was to become a commonplace of all nineteenth-century discussion of the Jews: their dry, mechanical legalism, which contrasted unfavorably with both the life-giving charity of the Christians and the natural spontaneity and creativeness of the Greeks. “An essential of their religion was the performance of a countless mass of senseless and meaningless actions”; “the holiest of things, namely, the service of God and virtue, was ordered and compressed in dead formulas”; and lives were “spent in a monkish preoccupation with petty, mechanical, spiritless, and trivial usages” (“On Christianity” 69, 178).

Judaism, in short, with its deus absconditus, its radical alienation, its stark dualisms, and its rigid, inflexible obedience to the letter of the law, is identified with lifeless mechanism, repression, and death; youth, life, and the harmony of beauty belong, in contrast, to Christianity, but especially to the Greeks, with their feeling for the continuity of the divine, the human, and the natural and their emphasis on freedom rather than punctual fulfillment of commands. Judaism represents the dead world of allegory in contrast to the living world of symbol: “It is true only of objects, of things lifeless,” Hegel notes in a passage of “The Spirit of Christianity” concerning the Trinity, “that the whole is other than the parts; in the living thing, on the other hand, the part of the whole is one and the same as the whole. If particular objects, as substances, are linked together while each of them yet retains its character as an individual (as numerically one), then their common characteristic, their unity, is only a concept, not an essence, not something being. Living things, however, are essences, even if they are separate, and their unity is still a unity of essence. What is a contradiction in the realm of the dead is not one in the realm of life” (“The Spirit of Christianity” 261).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, according to the authors of an illuminating study of antisemitism in Nietzsche, the antithesis of “Hellenes and Jews” was part of the repertory of antisemitism among the educated classes in Germany. “Over against plastic art, the beauty of youth, eroticism, and creativity were set the prohibition of images, original sin, the mortification of the body; over against the noble and heroic life, elevated by dyonisiac extasy and the sense of the tragic, was set everything that could be disparaged as democratic, philistine, plebeian” (Hubert Cancik and Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier).

Like the young Hegel, a number of writers sought to distinguish between Judaism and Christianity, so as to save the latter from the condemnation of the former. Some, like Wagner and Lagarde in Germany or Emile Burnouf in France, imagined a Christianity completely cleansed of Judaism (Uriel Tal 223-89). This movement culminated in the heresy of the so-called Deutsche Christen in the 1930s. By the end of the nineteenth century, the criticism of monotheism and its repressive and “servile” moral code had become so vocal and pervasive that, to defend Christianity from it, even highly respected liberal theologians, such as Adolf von Harnack, argued for the independence of Christianity from a petrified and legalistic Judaism and advocated the removal of the Old Testament from the Bible.⁷

Another group, which included Feuerbach and Nietzsche, as well as the notoriously antisemitic Eugen Dühring, lumped Christianity with Judaism and rejected both. For Dühring, the struggle against Judaism was bound up with the struggle against monotheistic religion and hence also against the forces suppressing the free and natural impulse in life itself. “The religious systems,” he wrote in Wert des Lebens (1877), “are a chapter in the study of the diseases of the universal history of the spirit, for religion, including Christianity, is the quintessence of the ‘hatred of life’ … and the eradication of the natural instincts.” There was no point in combatting Judaism with Christianity. Christian antisemitism “ignores the basic truth that Christianity itself is semitic, a truth which should be the point of departure of all true anti-Hebraism.”⁸ That was also, basically, Nietzsche's view, according to Hubert and Hildegard Cancik. Nietzche's antisemitism, they claim, must be understood as antisemitism “raised to the second power, more subtle, less vulgar, deepened by historical and philosophical arguments and expressed in brilliant language.” Nietzsche's position was “that Christian antisemitism is a pure and simple stupidity, since Christianity itself is a heightened Judaism … Whoever would combat Judaism and its morality, cannot, in Nietzsche's view, be Christian” (42).⁹

Increasingly, the attacks on “Semitic” repression of the “natural instincts” and on the servile morality of Jews and Christians alike were made in the name of “Aryan” or “Nordic-Germanic” heroism and manliness. Dühring argued that “the Nordic idols and the Nordic God contain a natural kernel and no thousand-year-old distraction can remove it from the world … Here has reigned an imaginative spirit incomparably superior to the Jewish slave imagination” (quoted in Tal 266). But the underlying reference was ultimately to the ancient Greeks, with whom, since Winckelmann and Wolf, the Germans had felt a special affinity. To this affinity the early sociologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl bears unaffected testimony in his recollections of student life at a German Gymnasium around mid-century:

We regarded Greece as our second homeland; for it was the seat of all nobility of thought and feeling, the home of harmonious humanity. Yes, we even thought that ancient Greece belonged to Germany because, of all the modern peoples, the Germans had developed the deepest understanding of the Hellenic spirit, of Hellenic art, and of the harmonious Hellenic way of life. We thought this in the exuberance of a national pride, in virtue of which we proclaimed the German people the leading culture of the modern world and the Germans the modern Hellenes. We announced that Hellenic art and nature had been reborn more completely in German poetry and music than in the poetry and music of any other people of the contemporary world … Our enthusiasm for Greece was inseparable from our enthusiasm for our fatherland … We looked back to classical antiquity as to a lost paradise.¹⁰

In Nietzsche's Anti-Christ the link is between the Hyperborean creed of power, strength, and joy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the archaic, aristocratic Greece of the Dorians, rather than the popular and liberal Hellenism beloved of early philhellenes like Winckelmann.¹¹

The identification of Germans and Hellenes was thus an essential aspect of the struggle for the German soul against “Hebraism” in the nineteenth century. Feuerbach claimed that science and art originated only in polytheism, since “polytheism is the open, unresentful feeling for everything that is good, without differentiation; the feeling for the world, for the universe.” Whereas “the Greeks contemplated nature with the theoretical senses … heard heavenly music in the harmonious course of the stars … and saw pictures emerge in the shape of Venus Anadyomene from the foam of the ocean,” the Jews “only enjoyed nature through their palate. They only became men of God through the enjoyment of manna. Eating is the most solemn act … of the Jewish religion … In eating man declares nature to be a nullity in itself.”¹²

If Judaism and Christianity had “stupefied” the Germans and “blunted their senses,” “impaired the understanding and the spirit,” vigor and life would be restored to them through the aristocratic and tragic culture of ancient Greece. That was the essential message of Nietzsche and of his followers. The attack on Wilamowitz by Nietzsche and his sympathizers was an attack on a classical scholar who, it was alleged, was incapable of understanding the glorious, heroic, and tragic culture of Greece and who kept importing into his interpretation of it alien, “philistine” notions of virtue, sin, and repentance. “Sin is Wilamowitz's favorite word,” one critic declared in a review of Wilamowitz's translation of the Greek tragic writers. “He uses it to translate a whole range of Greek terms. It can be said a priori that this is a mistake in the case of the older classical tragedy. The idea of sin is so closely bound up for us with notions of punishment and the injunction to repent, that it ought to be kept well away from this tragic art. A contrite and submissive heart may have been pleasing to the Jewish-Christian god. The tragic sense is quite different. Repentance and penance would have seemed entirely out of place to the tragic hero. The hero is not a bourgeois in theatrical costume; and the heroic ethos … has nothing to do with our official morality” (Kurt Hildebrand 143; my translation).

Nineteenth-century criticism of the repressive aspects of Christian and bourgeois culture sometimes claimed affinities with an earlier tradition of opposition to the authority of Church and State in the ancien regime. (In fact, that opposition was bourgeois as well as aristocratic.) Hence Nietzsche's admiration for certain writers of the age of French classicism—La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, and even Pascal. Hence also the link that the George-Kreis forged between itself and Winckelmann. The tone of serenity and confidence that marks the earlier writing is absent from the later, however, while the philosophical nihilism and the emphasis on the role of exceptional individuals and leaders are new. In an important review of Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik by Stefan George's favorite disciple, Max Kommerell (1928), Walter Benjamin demonstrated how the basic undertaking of Kommerell's book was to co-opt German classicism by reinterpreting it as “the first canonical case of a German uprising against the times, of a holy war of Germans against the age, such as George was later to call for.” German classicism was thus presented as a precursor of George's politico-poetical program. In this way, according to Benjamin (252-59), Kommerell hoped to conceal the Romantic roots of George's project.

Philhellenism, in sum, seems to have been one of the more ingenious and deceptive guises adopted by the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment, and it seems also to have been one of the more enduring: the intoxicating Romantic topos of the special link between Hellas and Germania, of German culture as the fulfillment of Greek culture, remained vigorously alive as late as the post-World War II writings of Heidegger.¹³ And one may legitimately consider in what measure the “postmodern” rejection of the transcendent nature of truth and the contemporary emphasis on the ludic as against the ethical are the outcome of an authentic coming to grips with the failures of the modernist project—and of rationalism in general—and in what measure they are yet another version of the same Romantic revolt that was once presented as the struggle of Judaism and Hellenism.

I would like now to turn back to Matthew Arnold. England had also known a Greek revival. As in Germany, it appears to have been closely connected with a desire to overcome the dualism of man and nature and to rehabilitate the body and the senses. Wordsworth swore he would rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Byron grieved over the death of the old gods:

Oh! where, Dodona! is thine aged grove,
Prophetic fount and oracle divine?

The Chorus in Shelley's Hellas laments the defeat of Apollo, Pan, and Jove by the “killing Truth” of Christianity:

The Powers of earth and air
Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem:
Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them;
Our hills and seas and streams,
Dispeopled of their dreams,
Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears,
Wailed for the golden years.

Leigh Hunt wrote to Hogg—in jest, it is true—that “if you go on so, there will be a hope that a voice will be heard along the water saying ‘The great God Pan is alive again’¹⁴—upon which the villagers will leave off starving, and singing profane hymns, and fall to dancing again.”¹⁴ Hunt's reference to Pan is noteworthy. More than the Olympian Gods, “Pan,” as Richard Jenkyns observes, “had become the god of the pantheists” (179). Even Ruskin, who warned against investing the Ancients' religious view of nature with modern sentiment, sometimes thought it could be revived. “With us,” he wrote, “… the idea of the Divinity is apt to get separated from the life of nature; and imagining our God … far above the earth, and not in the flowers or waters, we approach those visible things with a theory that they are dead; governed by physical laws, and so forth.” Ruskin longed to repeople with divine spirits the rivers and hills of an England already scarred by the industrial revolution. The scientific, utilitarian, exploitative relation to nature “fails.” In Jenkyns's words: “Christian beliefs in transcendence and monotheism seem inadequate” (184-85). Philhellenism was thus, at least in part, a rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and deism, Judeo-Christian monotheism, religious and philosophical dualism, and the mixture of prosaic utilitarianism and literalist Christian fundamentalism that Victorian Englishmen saw as the prevailing ideology of hard-nosed middle-class businessmen and industrialists.

Though an implicit opposition of Hellenism and Hebraism was thus already in the air in his own Victorian world, most scholars who have studied the matter are in agreement that Arnold took the basic idea of the fourth chapter of Culture and Anarchy from Heine. Heine was well aware, of course, of Hegel's comments on Judaism and subscribed to them in large measure:

As the prophet of the East called them [the Jews] the “People of the Book,” so the prophet of the West, in his Philosophy of History, characterizes them as the “People of the Spirit.” Already in their earliest beginnings—as we observe in the Pentateuch—they manifest a predilection for the abstract, and their whole religion is nothing but an act of dialectics, by means of which matter and spirit are sundered, and the absolute is acknowledged only in the unique form of Spirit. What a terribly isolated role they were forced to play among the nations of antiquity, which, devoting themselves to the most exuberant worship of nature, understood spirit rather as material phenomena, as image and symbol! What a striking antithesis they represented to multicolored Egypt, teaming with hieroglyphics; to Phoenicia, the great pleasure-temple of Astarte, or even to that beautiful sinner, lovely fragrant Babylonia—and, finally, to Greece, burgeoning home of art!

(“Ludwig Börne: A Memorial” 265)

Heine's poem “Die Götter Griechenlands” (“The Gods of Greece”), with which Arnold was almost certainly familiar, communicates the ambivalence of the German-Jewish poet's relation to both the Greeks and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The poet laments the passing of the ancient gods, now “verdrängt und verstorben” (“driven out and wasted away”) and reflects that even the gods are subject to the iron law of historical existence. “Auch die Götter regieren nicht ewig, Die jungen verdrängen die alten” (“Even the gods do not rule forever; the young drive out the old”; my translation, as are the other excerpts from this poem). As Zeus drove out the Titans, he has in turn been dethroned, his thunderbolts extinguished. The Virgin has displaced once haughty Juno: “Hat doch eine andre das Zepter gewonnen,” the poet tells the ancient goddess,

Und du bist nicht mehr die Himmelskönigin,
Und dein grosses Aug ist erstarrt,
Und deine Lilienarme sind kraftlos,
Und nimmermehr trifft deine Rache
Die gottbefrüchtete Jungfrau
Und den wundertätigen Gottessohn.
(Another has won the sceptre,
And you are no longer the queen of heaven,
And your great eye is glazed,
And your lily-white arms without strength,
And your vengeance will never reach
The divinely impregnated virgin
And the miracle working son of the god.)

For centuries now the inextinguishable laughter of the gods of Greece has been extinguished.

The lament is suddenly interrupted by the startling lines: “Ich habe euch niemals geliebt, ihr Götter! Denn widerwärtig sind mir die Griechen …” (“I have never loved you, you gods! For the Greeks are repugnant to me”). The fact is, the poet recalls, that the Greek gods had little compassion for human suffering and always sided with the victors. Man, however, can be more generous than they and may feel compassion for them—“Tote, nachtwandelnde Schatten” (“Dead, nocturnally wandering shades”)—in their abandonment. Especially, the poet cries, in yet another shift in position,

… wenn ich bedenke, wie feig und windig
Die Götter sind, die euch besiegten,
Die neuen, herrschenden, tristen Götter,
Die schadenfrohen im Schafspelz der Demut.
(… When I reflect how cowardly and insubstantial
Are the gods who conquered you,
The new, ruling, joyless gods,
Wearing the sheepskin of humility and exulting in
          suffering.)

At such moments of awareness, overcome with anger, the poet would gladly destroy the new temples, take up arms on behalf of the ancient gods and their “ambrosial law,” and sink down in prayer before their altars, his arms outstretched in supplication.

Many scholars believe that the immediate source of Arnold's Hellenism-Hebraism opposition is a critical passage in Heine's Memorial to Ludwig Börne, the left-wing German-Jewish writer and publicist.¹⁵ “In his comments on Goethe as in his judgments of other writers,” Heine writes,

Börne betrays the narrowness of mind of the Nazarene. I say “Nazarene,” in order to use neither the term “Jewish” nor the term “Christian,” although the two terms are synonymous for me and are used by me to designate not a faith but a natural disposition. “Jews” and “Christians” are for me closely related in opposition to “Hellenes,” by which I likewise do not mean a particular people, but a turn of mind and an outlook, both inborn and acquired. From that point of view, I could say that all men are either Jews or Hellenes, men motivated by asceticism, hostility to graven images, and a deep desire for the spiritual, or men whose essential being is delight in life, pride in the development of their capacities, and realism. In this sense, there have been Hellenes among those German pastors who come from families of pastors and among Jews born in Athens and perhaps descended from Theseus.

(“Ludwig Börne: Eine Denkschrift” 94-95; my translation)

Heine speculated whether the “harmonious fusion of the two elements” might not be “the task of all European civilization.” But while there were “rare instances” in which a reconciliation appears to have occurred (“Shakespeare is at once Jew and Greek”), in general “we are still very far removed from this goal. Goethe the Greek (and the whole poetic party along with him) has in recent times expressed his antipathy to Jerusalem in an almost passionate manner” (“Ludwig Börne: A Memorial” 270-71). Though Heine's position was complex, as can be seen from “The Gods of Greece,” and though in later years especially, bed-ridden and racked by pain, he described himself as “disillusioned with metaphysics” and “clinging fast to the Bible” (Geständnisse 138), he also always considered himself a “Hellene in secret” (“A Memorial” 264). There was no doubt whose side he was on in the account he gave of Börne's judgments of Goethe, which he read as a new skirmish in the “unresolved and perhaps never to be resolved duel between Jewish spiritualism and Hellenic glorification of life” (italics added). Börne is presented here, with almost Nietzschean vehemence, as “the little Nazarene full of hate for the great Greek, who was a Greek god into the bargain!” (Werke und Briefe 6:94). And while longing for the return of “Harmony,” Heine never questioned that it meant above all “making the world healthy again by curing it of the one-sided striving for spiritualization, the crazy error that makes soul as well as body sick!” In reawakening a feeling for Greek art in his countrymen and creating works of great solidity and concreteness to which they could cling, “as if to marble representations of the Gods,” Goethe—according to Heine—had done his bit to achieve this end (Werke und Briefe 6:120).

In Arnold's view of him, Heine was certainly on the side of Hellenism. “No man has extolled … the pagan extreme more rapturously” (Essays in Criticism 207). Yet one of the reasons for Arnold's enduring admiration for Heine may well have been that he found in Heine both the Hellenic and the Hebraic. “No account of Heine is complete which does not notice the Jewish element in him,” he wrote in the Heine essay.

His race he treated with the same freedom with which he treated everything else, but he derived a great force from it, and no one knew this better than he himself. He has excellently pointed out how in the sixteenth century there was a double renascence,—a Hellenic renascence and a Hebrew renascence,—and how both have been great powers ever since. He himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judaea; both these spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all poetry and all art,—the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sublimity. By his perfection of literary form, by his love of clearness, by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek; by his intensity, by his untamableness, by his “longing which cannot be uttered,” he is Hebrew.

(Essays in Criticism 179)

What Arnold seems to be pointing to in the combination of “Greek” and “Hebrew” elements he discerned in Heine is a coming together or reconciliation (admittedly an imperfect one, as his criticisms of Heine suggest) of classical beauty of form and Enlightenment wit with Romantic imagination. For Heine himself, however, as the passages just quoted indicate unequivocally, such a reconciliation could be expected—at very best—only in the distant future, at the far end of a long dialectical process. The relation of the two elements was one of “unresolved and perhaps never to be resolved” conflict. In addition, the meanings Arnold attributed to “Greek” and “Hebrew” or to “Hellenism” and “Hebraism” are not quite those that the terms “Greek” and “Nazarene” had for Heine.

The parallel between the title Arnold gave to the collection of articles known as Culture and Anarchy and the title he gave to the fourth of the articles in the collection, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” inevitably invites reflection on the possible relations among the four terms in the two titles. Is “Culture” connected with “Hellenism,” for instance, and “Hebraism” with “Anarchy”?

Culture and Anarchy was Arnold's response to the overwhelming sense, which he shared with earlier poets like Byron and Shelley as well as with contemporaries like Ruskin, of living in a withered and decaying world. When he took over the ideal of the harmonious, fully developed human person from Humboldt and the German neohumanists, it was in order to hold it up against what he felt was the pressing, ugly reality of mid-Victorian England: misshapen, parochial individuals removed from intercourse with nature and the experience of beauty, enslaved to specialized tasks—be it running a business or serving a machine—and fanatically committed to idiosyncratic and—in his eyes—arbitrary varieties of religion. But it was no longer simply the disenchantment of the world, the radical separation of the sacred from the profane, and the alienation of men from nature and from their own humanity that disturbed Arnold. It was an intense conviction that the center was already, visibly, not holding, that the world increasingly lacked, in his own words, not only unity but “a sound centre of authority” (Culture and Anarchy 119).

Unlike most of his liberal countrymen, who were traditionally far more concerned with individual freedoms than with “culture” or “totality” or “the State,” Arnold was haunted by the specter of order disintegrating into “anarchy.” In fact, there is probably an element of challenge or provocation in the very title of his volume. With their inveterate empiricism and pragmatism, Arnold's English contemporaries—on the critic's own admission—viewed “culture” with suspicion. Frederic Harrison, the distinguished legal scholar and champion of trade union legislation, derided “the cant about culture.”¹⁶ Perhaps the mockers of “culture” saw it as a foreign concept in tune with abstruse German philosophies and alien political regimes and having nothing to do with familiar British concerns such as moral and religious truth, the principles of political economy, or the Englishman's right to think as he likes, say what he likes, worship as he likes, and, above all, trade as he likes. Arnold can only have reinforced their suspicions by constantly praising Continental practices as superior to British ones and flaunting his Continental connections: with the German neohumanists in the first instance—Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller, and Schleiermacher (whom he had learned to admire in the house of his father, Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby and a strong Germanophile), but also with French writers such as Michelet, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, and Tocqueville. In the end, Arnold was questioning the idiosyncratic and—according to him—increasingly provincial path of the native tradition in politics and religion since the time of the Puritan revolution. Radical, consistent, English-style liberalism, he was arguing, can only lead to anarchy, the dissolution of all traditional social bonds and institutions.

Culture, in contrast, is the cement that holds society together and founds it. Neither the rational, natural-law principles of the Enlightenment—ideas of justice or equality—nor the pragmatic principles of the Utilitarians—ideas such as the greatest happiness of the greatest number—can provide a firm foundation for social life, according to Arnold. On the contrary, they are likely to tear it apart, by setting one group against another, one interpretation against another, one interest against another. Culture, in contrast, is not debatable: it is not based on principles that can be disputed. It is an accumulated, historically produced, and shared tradition which, despite its being a product of historical development, claims universal validity. In this respect it is fundamentally at odds with the narrow, one-sided concerns of particular moments and particular groups. Nothing could be further from the ephemerism and pseudo-culture of politics and the newspaper (a particular target of Arnold's, as it was also of his contemporary Jacob Burckhardt, who in far-off Basel was struggling with the same threat, as he perceived it, to the “old culture of Europe”). In addition, for Arnold—who in this respect is far closer to the German neohumanists than to the Romantics—culture is the result of a careful process of selection, enhancement, and preservation by an elite, a priesthood or clergy of humanity. For that reason, culture is not national. It is catholic and universal—“the best that has been thought and written” by all human beings in all times and all languages (though, with the single exception of the Bible, Arnold's culture is effectively restricted to the Greek, Latin, and other Western European languages and literatures). Arnold appears to have expected this “culture,” man-made and historically produced, to substitute for a no longer attainable Truth (whether religious or philosophical) as the foundation of individual conduct and social order. From this perspective, British science, British literature, and especially British politics and British religion (which far from being unifying were conceived as an arena of debate and clashing convictions and interests) had to appear narrow, provincial, divisive, even aberrant, and above all destructive of that “centre of authority” which was so important to the critic and which he believed was no longer provided by reason or even by faith.

Arnold's view of his own countrymen was strikingly similar to that of Michelet—notoriously no Anglophile. The English, according to Michelet, are the “aristocratic” people of world history: the people whose idea of liberty is anarchic, arrogant, exclusive, Byronic, and daemonic, and whose heroic struggle to win liberty was, and continues to be, marked by violence, parricide, revolt, and exploitation both of nature and of their weaker fellows. In Michelet's vision of history, the English—like the Jews—represent an essential and recurrent moment in the evolution of society, but one that is destined to be overcome by a less austere and exclusive, more harmonious and comprehensive form of sociability, a form of sociability which Michelet, drawing on Vico, considered “democratic.” For Michelet, as to a large extent for Arnold, that higher form of sociability was represented by France, which, since the Revolution, had harmonized better than any other society the competing claims of the part and the whole, the individual and the state. The argument of Culture and Anarchy was, in short, that British individualism—“the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion,” as Arnold put it disdainfully (CA 56 et passim)—would have to yield to a more comprehensive vision of society and that a greater role would have to be conceded to both the state and a national church if Britain was not to collapse in “anarchy.”

It is essential to Arnold's understanding of culture that in modern times it must inevitably be the product of formal education. The withered, sickly condition of society can be cured. Culture can be restored. But for a while at least, until it is so reintegrated into the life of society that it again becomes a second nature, culture, as something learned and acquired rather than organically connected with all aspects of life in the way it once was, will be second-best—not so much an ersatz of the real thing as a kind of forced hot-house seedling which might be expected to grow sturdier later in the open air. In this important respect, as already noted, Arnold is far closer to the German neohumanists than to the Romantics, for while the Romantics looked back nostalgically to organic folk-cultures or tried to preserve them, the neohumanists aimed to resurrect ancient culture through education by having students progressively internalize Greek culture along with the inner forms and energies of the Greek language. Arnold in fact refers explicitly to Goethe in one of several fine passages where he discusses the difference between “organic” culture and culture as he understands it in the modern world:

In the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent, and alive. And this state of things is the true basis for the creative power's exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this. Even when this does not actually exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of semblance of it in his own mind … This is by no means equivalent to the artist for the nationally diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or Shakespeare; but, besides that it may be a means of preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of great value. Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the long and widely combined critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe … There was no national glow of life and thought there as in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth. That was the poet's weakness. But there was a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans. That was his strength.

(“The Function of Criticism” 240)

Arnold implies that the aim of education is to bring about the eventual return of the “nationally diffused life and thought” which he associated with the glorious days of Pindar and Shakespeare. The realization of that goal could only be expected in a remote and rather ideal future, however. So while Arnold has “no doubt” that ages like those “are the true life of literature … the promised land, toward which criticism can only beckon,” he is no less certain of the melancholy reality that “that promised land … will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness (“The Function of Criticism” 267). On many occasions, in fact, the goal he presents is not so much the restoration of the “true life of literature” as the achievement of a more modest general culture, a middle-class aurea mediocritas. Over and over again, whether he is writing about the virtue of academies or about democracy, he argues for the superior merit of a more even distribution of culture, in the French manner, over an unruly combination of virtually “uncultured” masses and idiosyncratic geniuses, in the English manner. It even seems that it was such a general distribution of “culture” that he had in mind when he wrote about democracy, rather than any notions of political or economic rights or freedoms.¹⁷ His chief concern in the essay on “Democracy” was not how to achieve democracy (following Tocqueville, whom he quotes approvingly as “a philosophic observer, with no love for democracy, but rather with a terror of it,” he simply saw it as inevitable) but how to “prevent the English people from becoming, with the growth of democracy, Americanised”—in other words, how to ensure that democracy would not result in the overthrow or radical transformation of culture, as Arnold had defined it. It was necessary to find an accommodation of culture and democracy, just as it was necessary to find an accommodation of culture and religion, of “Hellenism” and “Hebraism” (“Democracy” 443-44, 452).

As Dover Wilson makes abundantly clear in the introduction to his edition, Culture and Anarchy was in fact a response to a particular political situation. It was not just the disenchantment of the world that had prompted Arnold to take up his pen: it was the enfranchisement of vast new sectors of the British population proposed in the Second Reform Bill of 1867; the violent agitation, provocative flouting of authority, and rioting (at Kidderminster, Hyde Park, and elsewhere) that accompanied the parliamentary debates; and the prospect of a spate of further radical legislation following passage of the bill. This was the time, Dover Wilson reminds us, of Carlyle's notorious essay “Shooting Niagara” with its call for a well-armed elite of “heroes” to defend culture against the advancing hordes. A concrete political situation is thus the context of Arnold's work at least as much as the more general problem of the “alienation” of the modern world. It is not hard to identify the ignorant armies clashing by night on the darkling plain of “Dover Beach.” Certainly they are the mindless forces of historical action in a world revealed as purposeless, but they are also the liberal and dissenting commercial class and the increasingly aggressive proletariat of mid-Victorian England.¹⁸

It was in the face of this disturbing situation, which to many seemed to mark a real crisis of culture and society, that Arnold proposed his solution: a re-emphasizing of “culture and totality,” as he put it,¹⁹ against the destructive forces of individual enterprise, the mechanistic spirit of positivist and materialist thought, the alienating, impoverishing effects of liberal economics and industrialism, the parochialism of dissent and protestant sectarianism, the ephemerism of politics and the culture of the newspaper, the narrowness, ignorance, and vulgarity of democracy in the English-speaking countries.²⁰

Arnold's critique of liberal optimism, like Heine's, is often effective and in the post-Thatcher and post-Reagan years, still surprisingly pertinent. He points with unerring perceptiveness to the weak spots of both economic liberalism—it has created publice egestas, privatim opulentia, he declares, quoting Sallust (CA 186-87)—and political liberalism: demagoguery and populism, libertarianism at home and oppression abroad—in Ireland, for instance (CA 80-81). The pathos of some of his descriptions of the lives of the poor reinforces the effectiveness of the critique of liberalism as a whole.²¹ As usual with Arnold, the argument is conducted on a high plane of generality and spiritual significance. The class conflicts of nineteenth-century England are represented in idealized, universalized form as conflicts between different universal values or tendencies of the human psyche. Thus the “populace” is not exactly the proletariat; it is an eternal aspect of humankind—its cruelty and animality—which happens to dominate among proletarians (CA 107). The terms “Barbarians,” “Philistines,” “Populace” transform a concrete historical struggle into a psychomachy, an allegory of the “eternal” conflict in human history between competing forces.²²

Culture and Anarchy turns essentially on the conflict between two opposing sets of values: the whole and the part, order and absolute individual freedom, the state and the individual. On one side: the total, harmonious, fully developed individual human being of the German neohumanists, the ideal of Goethe, Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt (CA 11, 126-27); the State—“organ of our collective best Self, of our national right reason” (97) viewed as standing above all particular interests and classes and embracing them all, as essentially classless (70); the Sacred (“the very framework and exterior order of the state,” we are told, is sacred, 204); “Humanity” as a kind of universal Church or Communion (192); eternal Truth;²³ universal and unchanging norms; a classically trained elite of disinterested servants of the state, concerned only for the common weal, such as Humboldt had hoped to create for Prussia; finally, the idea of a hierarchy or sacred order, which excludes nothing, but on the contrary includes everything in its proper place.²⁴ On the opposite side: against the aesthetic neohumanist ideal of the harmonious, fully rounded individual, the moral ideal of the individual passionately dedicated to a single overriding imperative, a single calling or task, the specialist, the religious fanatic, the dissenter, the protestant; against the State as the organ of our collective best Self, the idea of society as an arena of competition, debate, and struggle between rival classes and interests, out of which the best solution is supposed to emerge, but which Arnold tended to see as a “darkling plain … where ignorant armies clash by night”; against the view of the State as sacred, in some way still invested with the power and authority of the divine, a mechanical and profane conception of society as pure historical fact in a postlapsarian world from which God has withdrawn; against the ideal of “Humanity” as a Communion, a fragmented vision of individuals, generations, and peoples isolated from each other in both space and time; against the notion of eternal Truth, the relativism or pragmatism of adaptation to the demands of the particular time and occasion (CA 120); against eternal norms, the value of continuous research and experimentation (CA 124); against the ideal of a classical elite, the practice of “representational democracy,” in which “every one of our governors has all possible temptation, instead of setting up before the governed who elect him, and on whose favor he depends, a high standard of right reason, to accommodate himself as much as possible to their natural taste for the bathos” (CA 113-114); and finally, against hierarchy or sacred order, anarchical competition and distorted overdevelopment of particular individual traits and tendencies.

The opposition of “Hellenism” and “Hebraism” is part of this more comprehensive set of oppositions in Arnold's text, and in his work in general. As a result, its meaning, though not entirely unrelated to the meaning it had for Heine, is by no means the same as it was for Heine. “Hellenism” designates for Arnold not so much sensualism, worldliness, and love of life as the contemplative, playful, free consideration of all aspects of reality. It is an ideal of aesthetic comprehensiveness, closely related to theory and intellectual speculation (CA 132). “Hebraism,” in contrast, is closer to praxis. It is the term used to designate not so much otherworldliness and spirituality as the primacy of moral commitment, of the existential moment of choice or decision, which is always, by definition, exclusive and limiting or narrowing. It has to do with conduct and action. Arnold's “Hellenism” is related to “culture and totality,” his “Hebraism” to division and conflict.

Whereas the two terms, as we saw, are in an unending and unresolvable dialectical relation to each other for Heine, Arnold's thesis is that it is necessary, and possible, to find a golden mean that will accommodate both. His advocacy of “Hellenism” against “Hebraism,” he makes clear, is pragmatic and tactical, by no means principled. It is entirely a matter of adjustments and degrees, of balancing competing and equally justified claims rather than resolving a dialectical opposition by means of some Hegelian “Aufhebung.”²⁵

For the days of Israel are innumerable; and in its blame of Hebraising too, and in its praise of Hellenising, culture must not fail to keep its flexibility, and to give to its judgments that passing and provisional character which we have seen it impose on its preferences and rejections of machinery. Now, and for us, it is a time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too much, and have over-valued doing. But the habits and discipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal possession; and, as humanity is constituted, one must never assign to them the second rank to-day, without being prepared to restore them to the first rank to-morrow.

(CA 37)

Had Arnold been writing about Prussia, rather than England, in other words, he might have chosen a different emphasis.²⁶ After the debacle of 1870, he did in fact fault the French, whom he normally held up as models to his countrymen, for their lack of “Hebraism.” Reviewing Renan's La Réforme intellectuelle et morale in 1872, he took issue with Renan's view that France's defeat was the result of le manque de foi à la science. “No one feels more than we do the harm which the exaggeration of Hebraism has done in England; but [Renan's proposal to concentrate more on schooling] is Hellenism with a vengeance! … Moral conscience, self-control, seriousness, steadfastness, are not the whole of human life certainly, but … without them—and this is the very burden of the Hebrew prophets … —nations cannot stand. France does not enough see their importance” (Complete Prose Works 7:44-45). The implication of this argument is that “Hebraism,” if it can be curbed and brought into harmony with “culture,” will make Protestant England a more successful nation and a better model for others, in the end, than Catholic and Revolutionary France.

Though Arnold sometimes presents Hellenism and Hebraism, in the manner of Heine or Michelet, as the twin motors of history and civilization—by their “alternations,” he suggests, “the human spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule” (CA 139)—his most persistent tendency is to try to strike a balance between them. His deepest longing is to reconcile everything: the whole and the part, community and individual freedom, tradition and individual talent, pragmatism and principle, harmony and truth, culture and religion, culture and democracy, the dominance of the elite and the moral and physical well-being of the masses. It could be said that he is as “English” in this pursuit of compromise as the dissenters he attacked for their stubborn individualism. In a passage like the following, which is fairly typical, the provocative tensions of Hegel, Heine, and later Nietzsche are relaxed in what the last would almost certainly have characterized as an insipid optimism. It is only the baser forms of Hellenism and Hebraism that are irreconcilable, we are assured. At their noblest, the two are entirely compatible. In “beauty and charm” their opposition is smoothed away:

Hebraism strikes too exclusively upon one string in us; Hellenism does not address itself with serious energy enough to morals and righteousness. For our totality, for our general perfection, we need to unite the two; now the two are easily at variance. In their lower forms they are irreconcilably at variance; only when each of them is at its best, is their harmony possible. Hebraism at its best is beauty and charm: Hellenism at its best is also beauty and charm. As such they can unite; as anything short of this, each of them, they are at discord, and their separation must continue. The flower of Hellenism is a kind of amiable grace and artless winning good-nature … ; the flower of Christianity is grace and peace by the annulment of our ordinary self through the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ. Both are eminently humane, and for complete human perfection both are required; the second being the perfection of that side in us which is moral and acts, the first, of that side in us which is intelligent and perceives and knows.

(Complete Prose Works 6:125)

In some texts the two poles usually represented in Arnold's writing by Hebraism and Hellenism are situated entirely within the Greek world. In a speech to the students at Eton, for instance—where in the speaker's own words “the Greek and Latin classics continue to fill the chief place in [the students'] school-work”—a somewhat doubtful contrast developed by many German scholars between “manly” Aryan Dorians on the one hand, and “Asiatic Greeks of Ionia” on the other, is picked up and serves as the basis of an opposition between the “moral ideas of conduct and righteousness” strenuously cultivated by the “less gay and more solitary tribes in the mountains of Northern Greece,” and the “brilliancy and mobility,” the “gay lightness” characteristic of the “Ionians of Asia.” Conflict is resolved, however, and the right balance struck by the Athenians. The latter, though they were Ionians, “were Ionians transplanted to Hellas, and who had breathed, as a Hellenic nation, the air of Delphi, that bracing atmosphere of the ideas of moral order and of right. In this atmosphere the Athenians, Ionian as they were, imbibed influences of character and steadiness, which for a long while balanced their native vivacity and mobility, distinguished them profoundly from the Ionians of Asia, and gave them men like Aristides.” In this way, the Athenians—whose relation to the severe and alien Dorians strikingly resembles that of the English to the people of the Book—found the right middle ground between the extremes of the Ionians on the one hand and of the Dorians on the other. (The defects of the latter are described, incidentally, in the exact terms Arnold always used to describe the limitations of Hebraism: “stiffness, hardness, narrowness, prejudice, want of insight, want of amiability.”) The Athenians thus come to represent that synthesis of “Hellenism” and “Hebraism” that was Arnold's ideal. “With the idea of conduct, so little grasped by the Ionians of Asia, still deeply impressed on their soul, they freely and joyfully called forth also that pleasure in life, that love of clear thinking and of fearless discussion, that gay social temper, that ease and lightness, that gracious flexibility, which were in their nature.”²⁷

It might seem, in light of the argument developed here, that Hellenism has a definite edge over Hebraism in that it is capable of containing and subsuming Hebraism in the same way that the culture of the Athenians included the best of the Dorians as well as the best of the Ionians. Hellenism at its best, in other words, could be conceived to be identical with “culture” or “totality.” Arnold never gives any indication that Hebraism has the same capacity. At the same time, a totality that is defined as a well-balanced mixture, flexible enough to accommodate seemingly contradictory values, is not the same as the concept of a totality, the essential characteristic of which is that it cannot be understood simply as an aggregate of parts and which is held to be superior to any and all of its parts. What Arnold proposes, in the end, is a watered-down—if practical and manageable—version of both culture or totality and of religion or the moral imperative of choice. For in the same way that his version of an achieved “totality” seems more like a balance of competing elements than a resolution of differences, so too the one-sided and fanatical concern with righteousness, which is what “Hebraism” stands for, becomes acceptable by losing the intransigent transcendentalism that is its special force and that underlies its capacity to generate the most radical and uncompromising criticism of all worldly institutions.

Where “flexibility” is the highest virtue, and undeviating obedience to divine law is seen as “stiffness, hardness, narrowness, prejudice, want of insight, want of amiability,” fundamental conflicts of principle are unlikely to arise. It is not in the least surprising that Arnold consistently rejects Judeo-Christian messianism and eschatology—“the turbid Jewish fancies about ‘the great consummation,’” as he liked to say²⁸—or that he responds impatiently to criticism of his own milder view of Christianity. “People talk scornfully of a ‘sublimated Christianity,’ as if the Christianity of Jesus Christ himself had been a materialistic fairy-tale like that of the Salvation Army or of Messrs Moody and Sankey” (Complete Prose Works 7:372). The intransigence of the old Jewish and Christian rejection of this world, the excessiveness of the longing for its total transformation, are alien to Arnold, and he does not see that there are only two alternatives: absolute alienation from the divine or absolute oneness with it, damnation or salvation. To the advocate of a proper balance between “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” the world does not present itself in those stark terms.

For the same reason, he has no sympathy with the literalism of orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians, for whom Holy Scripture has “a talismanic character,” as he says disparagingly. Paul “Judaises,” we are told, when he “uses the letter of Scripture in [an] arbitrary and Jewish way” to back up a point, for that use of the sacred text is “due to a defect in the critical habit of himself and his race.” Arnold cannot conceive a direct relation to the language of Scripture, only a relation mediated and eased by historical interpretation. “To get … at what Paul really thought and meant to say, it is necessary for us modern and Western people to translate him” (Complete Prose Works 6:22-23). In fact, it sometimes seems as though Arnold is prepared to carry interpretation beyond the point at which the religion of the nineteenth century can be considered the same as that of its early adherents. In one of his Last Essays he explains that “the partisans of religion” in England and America “do not know … how decisively the whole force of progressive and liberal opinion on the Continent has pronounced against the Christian religion.” Nor do they know “how surely the whole force of progressive and liberal opinion in this country tends to follow, so far as traditional religion is concerned, the opinion of the Continent. They dream of patching up things unmendable.” And once again, Arnold looks for a compromise. “One cannot blame the rejection … The religion of tradition, Catholic or Protestant, is unsound and untenable.” The only question that remains is whether “to claim for the Bible the direction, in any way, of modern life, is … as if Plato had sought to found his ideal republic on a text of Hesiod.” Does the irrelevancy of the Bible to the conduct of modern life follow necessarily from the view that traditional religion is obsolete? It is because Arnold would save the Bible not as Truth, but as an important element in Western culture, that he finds it “so all-important to insist on what I call the natural truth of Christianity.”²⁹

If Arnold's Hebraism balks at the “turbid fancies” of eschatology and at the “Judaising” reading of Scripture by fervent Jews and Christians alike, his Hellenism is brought up short before what he sees as the unresponsiveness of the Greek gods and of paganism in general to suffering: “The ideal, cheerful, sensuous, pagan life is not sick or sorry.”³⁰ That had been, in Heine's view too, the fatal flaw of the Greek gods and it had cost them their throne: “What a refreshing spring for all sufferers was the blood that flowed on Golgotha! … The white marble Greek gods were bespattered with this blood, and sickened with horror, and could never more recover … The first to die was Pan” (“Ludwig Börne: A Memorial” 269). But whereas Greek sensualism and Jewish spiritualism were engaged, for Heine, in an unrelenting “war between matter and spirit, which began with the world and would only end with the world” (as his Parisian friend Michelet put it in the opening paragraph of his Introduction to Universal History of 1831); whereas Nietzsche embraced joyfully the reality of tragedy, the acceptance of which he considered the core of Greek culture, and his colleague and close friend at the University of Basel, Franz Overbeck, denounced the attempt to reconcile Christianity and Culture as ruinous to both,³¹ Arnold still hoped that a sensible compromise might be realized: a bit of Judeo-Christian religion watered down to morality and charity and a bit of Greek culture reduced to the free play of form and ideas, but no excess of either.

Arnold's relation to the social class he was addressing in Culture and Anarchy is characteristic of his search for compromise and inclusiveness and his distaste for conflict. Heine and Nietzsche were radically critical of the culture of the middle class; Arnold, in contrast, hoped to correct and improve the English middle class, to which all his essays were addressed and to which he himself belonged. His goal was to get it to reform, to save itself from its own defects, to confront the consequences, for its own political power and prosperity, of dogmatic adherence to laissez-faire social, cultural, educational, and economic policies. His concern for the poor, his lifelong championship of public education, and his advocacy of state power were inspired less by visions of a democratic society than by expediency. His interest in democracy was in fact quite weak, and his compassion for the poor was more than equalled by his fear of an increasingly vocal and aggressive working class. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the model he often invited his own countrymen to borrow from—though characteristically he did not recommend that they adopt it as a whole—was the German culture and state that Nietzsche tirelessly denounced. One can speculate that if Nietzsche had known Arnold's work, he would most likely have judged that the English critic of English “philistinism” was as irremediably “philistine” as the dissenting free-trading businessmen who were the object of his reforming efforts or, for that matter, as irremediably philistine as English writers and thinkers were, in Nietzsche's view, in general.

Arnold's very lack of intellectual rigor and decisiveness—which makes his work so much less stimulating and provocative than Heine's or Nietzsche's—has probably a great deal to do with his tolerance on most subjects. Arnold's reasoning, his way of bringing competing claims to our attention, is not so much dialectical as rhetorical, and the solutions he comes up with are pragmatic rather than theoretical. His views of Judaism and Jews are no exception to this general rule. Arnold's totality, as we saw, is an empirical accommodation of competing values, not a unity resulting from their Aufhebung or sublation. Judaism, consequently, was not for him something that had to be overcome either by Christianity or by an ideal culture more comprehensive than Christianity. “The days of Israel are innumerable.” In practical terms, neither conversion nor assimilation of the Jews was necessary. Nor, on the other hand, was Mosaic Law or Sacred Scripture the first and last word of all faith and morality. They were subject to interpretation, in Arnold's view, in the light of other, equally valid demands and values.

Thomas Arnold had not been well disposed to Jews. In 1838 he had resigned from the senate of the newly founded University of London when he failed to convince his colleagues that Jews should not be admitted (Alexander 91). Matthew Arnold, in contrast, defended both Judaism and Jews. There are unflattering references in his work to Jews as “unattractive, nay, repellent, … a petty, unsuccessful, unamiable people, without politics, without science, without art, without charm.”³² (Arnold's descriptions of the ancient Dorians and of modern Puritans and Dissenters were strikingly similar, however, and hardly less negative). And occasionally he allows himself to be influenced by current racial theories concerning the superiority of “Aryans” to “Semites,” as in a notable passage of Culture and Anarchy concerning the controversy over legislation about marriage between a man and his deceased wife's sister:

Who, that is not manacled and hoodwinked by his Hebraism, can believe that, as to love and marriage, our reason and the necessities of our humanity have their true, sufficient, and divine law expressed in them by the voice of any Oriental and polygamous nation like the Hebrews? Who, I say, will believe … that where the feminine nature, the feminine ideal, and our relations to them, are brought into question, the delicate and apprehensive genius of the Indo-European race, the race which invented the Muses, and chivalry, and the Madonna, is to find its last word … in the institutions of a Semitic people, whose wisest king had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines?

(184)

In “Literature and Dogma,” however, Arnold makes a spirited defence of the ancient Jews against modern claims that they were “perpetually oppressive, grasping, slanderous, sensual,” worshippers of a “tribal God,” blind followers of “a positive traditionary code, … a mechanical rule which held them in awe,” incapable of conceiving evil in any but an external way, as “oppression, theft, or riotous excess,” and insensitive to the idea of “internal faults.” He insists on the “deeper personal religion” that “constantly breaks in,” on the importance in Judaism of following God's law out of love rather than blind obedience, on the crucial discovery of the idea of righteousness. To those who question the special moral insight of the ancient Hebrews by asking, “Why, if the Hebrews of the Bible had eminently the sense for righteousness, does it not equally distinguish the Jews now?” he responds by pointing out that a modern people that has endured centuries of persecution and oppression cannot be expected to have the grandeur of its ancestors. Modern Jews are not any further removed from the Jews of Biblical times than modern Greeks from the Greeks of the age of Aeschylus and Sophocles.³³

In practice, moreover, Arnold's support of modern Jews was solid. To the high-minded and serious Louisa Montefiore, Lady de Rothschild, to whom he became closely attached, and who was fervently interested in the traditions of her people, he owed not only the acquaintance of Disraeli but, in all probability, a deeper and more sympathetic understanding than he might otherwise have had of the Jews of his own time (Honan 316-18). As a result, he was instrumental in getting the Jews' Free School in Bell Lane, near Liverpool Street Station, included among the state-aided schools. Invited to propose the toast at a banquet in aid of the school in 1884, he recalled his early association with it: though he is no public orator, he says, “it is less difficult to speak among old friends—and, gentlemen, the Free School and I—as by your kind cheers you have shown me that you are aware—are old friends. I may almost adopt Grattan's famous words, and say that I sat by the Free School's cradle.” A few years earlier, in 1872, he had sent the headmaster of the School a copy of an introduction he wrote to the last 27 chapters of the Book of Isaiah, which was intended for use in schools, “as a sort of expression of gratitude,” as he wrote to Lady de Rothschild, “for the ideas your great Bell Lane schools have awakened in me” (Complete Prose Works 10:245-46 and 538n).

But it is in his almost instinctive resistance to anti-Judaic tendencies in continental scholarship that Arnold's own “Hebraism” is most visible. He is suspicious of the application of Hegelian philosophy to the interpretation of Scripture and notably cool to German attempts to demonstrate the anti-Petrine, universalist character of the Third and Fourth Gospels. In the eagerness of some scholars to prove that from very early on “the peaceable coexistence of a Jewish and a Gentile Christianity no longer satisfies the religious consciousness” and that “it will be satisfied with nothing less than a Catholic Church one and indivisible”—in other words that Christianity almost immediately sought to “transcend” its Jewish roots—he smells a rat. These scholars, he objects, are pursuing their Hegelian agenda with such zeal that they try to pass off as hard facts interpretations which are at best only possible. One theologian claims, for instance, “that by two crucified thieves, one converted, the other impenitent, the writer of the Third Gospel meant to contrast Jew and Gentile, the obstinate rejection of Christ by the former, the glad acceptance by the latter.” A possible reading, Arnold comments: “No doubt this may be called an ‘ingenious conjecture,’ but what are we to think of the critic who confidently builds upon it?” (Complete Prose Works 7:273-74). Though Arnold's sympathy with the Oxford movement is well documented and he himself repeatedly voiced his support for the idea of a national church—an idea consonant with his view of religion as part of culture and his belief that “our only real perfection is our totality” (Complete Prose Works 6:126)—the reference here to the peaceable co-existence of a Jewish and a Gentile Christianity is a reminder that his vision of totality did not require assimilation or the “resolution” of difference.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the authenticity of Arnold's “Hebraism” is his unequivocal recoil from the racist antisemitism of Emile Burnouf. In a time of increasing attacks on the religion of the Bible, Arnold wrote in “Literature and Dogma,”

even what the most modern criticism of all sometimes does to save it and to set it up again, can hardly be called very flattering to it. For whereas the Hebrew race imagined that to them were committed the oracles of God … there now comes M. Emile Burnouf … [who] will prove to us in a thick volume that the oracles of God were not committed to a Semitic race at all, but to the Aryan; that the true God is not Israel's God at all, but is “the idea of the absolute” which Israel could never properly master. This “sacred theory of the Aryans,” it seems, passed into Palestine from Persia and India, and got possession of the founder of Christianity and of his greatest apostles St. Paul and St. John … So that we Christians, who are Aryans, may have the satisfaction of thinking that “the religion of Christ has not come to us from the Semites,” and that “it is in the hymns of the Veda, and not in the Bible, that we are to look for the primordial source of our religion.” The theory of Christ is accordingly the theory of the Vedic Agni, or fire. The Incarnation represents the Vedic solemnity of the production of fire, symbol of force of every kind, or all movement, life, and thought. The Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit is the Vedic Trinity of Sun, Fire, and Wind; and God, finally, is “a cosmic unity.”

(Complete Prose Works 6:239).

Arnold's reaction is incredulous astonishment at the audacity of these claims in a work that purports to offer La Science des Religions. “Such speculations almost take away the breath of a mere man of letters,” he comments with characteristic irony. He proceeds not to dispute Burnouf on scholarly grounds, but to challenge his entire understanding of religion. The un-metaphysical Englishman makes common cause with the allegedly un-metaphysical Hebrews to defend the religion of Israel:

Admitting that Israel shows no talent for metaphysics, we say that his religious greatness is just this, that he does not found religion on metaphysics, but on moral experience; … and that, ever since the apparition of Israel and the Bible, religion is no longer what, according to M. Burnouf, to our Aryan forefathers in the valley of the Oxus it was,—and what perhaps it really was to them,—metaphysical theory, but is what Israel has made it.

(Complete Prose Works 6:241).

Compared with the young Hegel's or with Nietzsche's philhellenism, Arnold's vision of a culture that can embrace both Homer and the Bible must inevitably appear timid, conservative, somewhat schoolmasterish. No doubt it is closer in spirit to British parliamentarism than to the ancient polis or to more recent attempts to establish unified national cultures. Like Parliament, Arnold's “culture” aims at accommodating more than one party rather than at unity, and like Parliament, its inclusiveness is selective. Still, it has its modest advantages. It was, after all, to Parliament that Disraeli was elected and through Parliament that he rose to become the first Jewish prime minister of a major Western European nation.³⁴ There appears likewise to be an inner compatibility between Arnold's inclusive, pluralistic vision of “culture” and the form taken by the emancipation of the Jews in Britain. Though legal disabilities and restrictions on Jews were less severe in Britain than in most continental countries before emancipation, full emancipation came later than it did in France, for instance. On the other hand, as the most recent historian of the emancipation in England has explained, “in Britain, civil rights were granted to Jews and other religious minorities unconditionally. They were not asked to make concessions at the expense of their religion, unlike the requirements made in France, Germany or Italy. Even though certain religious beliefs, such as prohibition of marriage with non-Jews, were incompatible with the expectations of modern citizenship, Jews were not told to reform such tenets. Similarly, Quakers were not forced to give up religious imperatives such as refusal to take oaths, to pay for or fight in wars, though these principles could clash with the modern notion of citizenship. During the process of emancipation, Britain legitimized religious pluralism by leaving the peculiarities of each sect untouched.”³⁵ This pragmatic and in the end conservative solution, by which the complete secularization of public life was avoided and the Church of England maintained as the established Church, has not been without its drawbacks, especially for British Jews,³⁶ but, like Arnold's “culture,” it seems to have allowed for more peaceful coexistence, in the short term anyway, than the more radical emancipation policies pursued in several continental states.

Notes

1. “Religion and Philosophy in Germany” (1834) 181, 223.

2. See Elisabeth de Fontenany 55 (where the claim is made that “anti-judaisme,” in the sense of a critique of Judaism as a religion, may go hand in hand with “philo-sémitisme,” in the sense of support for Jewish emancipation), and 104 (where the distinction between “Juifs philosophiques” and “Juifs sociologiques,” between “anti-judaisme” and “anti-sémitisme” is hedged round with the caveat that “ces deux perspectives, l’une plus métaphysique, l’autre plus sociologique, se recoupent toujours en même temps qu’elles divergent.” Fontenay evokes the example of Hegel, who “parlant péjorativement du judaisme, en vient insidieusement à mentionner le malheur hérité des Juifs actuels, lui qui d’ailleurs défend leur droit à l’émancipation.” The reference is no doubt to the passage in “The Spirit of Christianity” (written 1798-99, unpublished in Hegel's lifetime) where Hegel writes that “the subsequent circumstances of the Jewish people up to the mean, abject, wretched circumstances in which they still are today, have all of them been simply consequences and elaborations of their original fate” (On Christianity 199). Fontenay's attempt to spirit away Marx's antisemitism by presenting “Jews” in Marx as a “metonymy of bourgeois society” is criticized by Francis Kaplan (61-62), who also emphasizes the ease with which the “philosophical” critique of Judaism as a religion can shade off into plain antisemitism. When Marx asks rhetorically “Quel est le fonds profane du judaisme?” and answers “Le besoin pratique, l’utilité personnelle … l’abaissement effectif de la nature, le mépris de la théorie, de l’art, de l’histoire, de l’homme considéré comme son propre but,” at least part of that reply, according to Kaplan, can feed into the popular stereotype of the Jew as selfish, greedy, and indifferent to others (45).

3. For a brief general account of ancient Greek and Roman hostility to Judaism and Jews, see Carlos Lévy.

4. For a short overview of the essentials of neohumanism, see my article, “The ‘two cultures’ in nineteenth century Basle” (99-105).

5. See the invaluable study of Bengt Sørensen.

6. “We are fighting not for the human rights of the people but for the divine rights of mankind,” Heine was to write in the early thirties; “we do not want to be sansculottes, nor simple citizens, nor venal presidents; we want to found a democracy of gods, equal in majesty, in sanctity, and in bliss” (“Religion and Philosophy in Germany” 180).

7. Robert P. Ericksen; see also Tal 191-92, 200-201, 217-18. According to Jenkyns (72), Newman in England held a somewhat similar position at one point in his career: “Newman's perversely systematic mind had not only divided Hellenism sharply from Hebraism, but had separated Christianity no less sharply from both. Christ was neither Greek nor Jew …” Jenkyns also quotes a comment by George Eliot about her contemporaries: “They hardly know that Christ was a Jew.”

8. Both passages, the second from a text of 1882, are quoted by Tal (264-65). In the early decades of the twentieth century in France, the views of Charles Maurras, chief ideologist of the radical right-wing and antisemitic Action française, were similar, though Maurras's emphasis falls more on restraint and order (which he associated with classical antiquity) than on energy and life: “Admirateur de l’antiquité classique, Maurras ne se sent à l’aise que dans le paganisme. Il connaîit Lucrèce par coeur. Le polythéisme grec lui a toujours paru un chef d’oeuvre de mesure, d’ordre et d’harmonie puisqu’il assigne à chaque désir humain une divinité précise. Ainsi l’orientation du désir, dûment canalisée ne risque-t-elle pas de prendre le chemin de l’Infini. Dans le paysage méditerranéen, la lumière du soleil dessine nettement les contours et les ombres: à l’homme d’y prendre sa place, sans rêves ni chimères insensées, en acceptant de se soumettre à cet ordre préétabli. C’est la condition du bonheur. L’esprit biblique, les Evangiles de ‘quatre juifs obscurs,’ Jérusalem et la synagogue sont venus rompre ce bel équilibre. Le christianisme est aussi dangereux que le judaisme pour le maintien de la civilisation … L’aire de l’humanité civilisée ne déborde guère les rivages de la Méditerranée (encore faut-il préciser Méditerranée occidentale jusqu’à la Grece incluse, mais pas au-delà)” (Jacques Prévotat 250-52).

9. As the implications of late nineteenth-century anti-Judaism and antisemitism became unmistakably clear in the twentieth century, many Christians came to the defense of Judaism. Nicolas Berdyaev, for instance, emphasized the Judaic roots of Christianity, arguing that “in its human origins, [Christianity] is a religion of messianic and prophetic type, the spirit of which, as utterly foreign to Graeco-Roman spiritual culture as to Hindu culture, was introduced into world religious thought by the Jewish people. The ‘Aryan’ spirit is neither messianic nor prophetic …” (1-2). On the other hand, some Jewish thinkers have maintained that the dualism which the German philhellenes so detested is Christian, not Jewish. Rosenzweig claimed that the Jew is destined by his religion to remain in the Jewish world of his birth and is expected only to perfect his Judaism. The Christian, on the other hand, being by nature pagan, has to withdraw from the world to which he belongs, repeal his nature, and break with his original paganism, in order to carry out the precepts of his faith (see Berdyaev 23). Josué Jehonda claims that the Christians are rebellious, the Jews traditional. The Christians created the opposition between Jerusalem, the city of God's justice, and Athens and Rome, the political city. Thus “la vraie cause de tout anti-sémitisme est le dualisme chrétien.” Pagan antisemitism was in reality directed against the Christians. They were seen as subversives. The Jews, in contrast, were recognized as a national group. Thus in our own times, Nazi antisemitism “aimed to destroy, through the Jews, the entire Christian world” (Jehonda 108-110).

10. Kulturgeschichtliche Charakterköpfe (1891), quoted in Fritz Blättner 161-62.

11. The point is made forcefully by Hubert Cancik, “Philhellenism and Anti-Semitism in Germany (II)” 7-10. The rehabilitation of the Dorians began toward the close of the eighteenth century with the Greek Revival in architecture, for which Winckelmann himself had prepared the ground. In England, the second volume of Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1787) revealed a Greek architecture unlike anything men had imagined, and the vogue of the “Greek style” to which it gave rise prompted established architects like Sir William Chambers to attack the “gouty columns” and “disproportionate architraves” of the Doric. The editor of the third volume, Willey Reveley, leaped to the defense of the style that possessed, he claimed, “a masculine boldness,” “an awful dignity and grandeur” (see Jenkyns 12). But it was in Germany that the Doric and then the Dorians enjoyed the greatest vogue. Goethe recorded his disorientation and awe before the ruins of Paestum in a well-known passage of the Italian Journey: “In the distance appeared some huge quadrilateral masses, and when we finally reached them, we were at first uncertain whether we were driving through rocks or ruins. Then we recognized what they were, the remains of temples … Kniep quickly choose a favourable spot from which to draw this very unpicturesque landscape … At first sight [the temples] excited nothing but stupefaction. I found myself in a world which was completely strange to me. In their evolution from austerity to charm, the centuries have simultaneously shaped and even created a different man. Our eyes and, through them, our whole sensibility have become so conditioned to a more slender style of architecture that these crowded masses of stumpy conical columns appear offensive and even terrifying …” (209-10). In the work of Carl Otfried Müller (Die Dorier, 1824) and in that of his student, Ernst Curtius, the author of a much translated and widely read History of Greece (1857-61), it was the invading Northern Hellenes or Dorians (the name Dorian is said to be derived from Dorus, one of the sons of Hellen), who, thrusting south toward the Peloponnese, were the active, “manly” power that fecundated the somnolent, “feminine” Pelasgians, and forged the greatness of ancient Greece. “From the Hellenes sprang entirely new currents of life,” according to Curtius. “The Pelasgian times lie in the background—a vast period of monotony: impulse and motion are first communicated by Hellen and his sons; and with their arrival history commences. Accordingly we must interpret them to signify tribes which, endowed with special gifts, and animated by special powers of action, issue forth from the mass of a great people, and extend themselves in it as warriors” (41). Müller's and Curtius's view of the Dorians was taken over in Britain, where there was a strong temptation to associate the Dorian “highlanders” with the Scots (see Jenkyns 167).

12. Wesen des Christentums, ch. 12, quoted in Poliakov 415.

13. See the striking article by Nicholas Rand.

14. All four passages quoted in Jenkyns 177-78. The Shelley passage is cited more fully here than in Jenkyns.

15. The essay on Heine (read as a lecture in 1863) in The Function of Criticism and the poem “Heine's Grave” (probably completed by 1863 but not published until 1867) are eloquent testimony to Arnold's long-standing admiration for Heine. The exact relationship of Arnold's contrast of Hellenism and Hebraism to Heine's writings is, however, a matter of some scholarly dispute. Lionel Trilling, R. H. Super (the editor of Arnold's Complete Prose Works), and most other English-speaking scholars (but not, apparently, David J. DeLaura in his now-classic study) hold that Arnold derived the Hellenism-Hebraism opposition from Heine's memorial essay on Börne. But it has been questioned whether Arnold had read that essay, and some of Trilling's assertions in particular have been effectively invalidated. More pertinently, it has been argued that Arnold altered the meaning that the opposition of Jews and Hellenes had for Heine, while retaining Heine's idea that history is marked by the struggle and alternance of forces represented by the two terms Hebraism and Hellenism. See Ilse-Maria Tesdorpf, especially 43-36, 138-69.

16. Quoted by Arnold himself in Culture and Anarchy 39 (hereafter CA). See also 72.

17. “Democracy is a force in which the concert of a great number of men makes up for the weakness of each man taken by himself; democracy accepts a relative rise in their condition, obtainable by this concert for a great number, as something desirable in itself, because though this is undoubtedly far below grandeur, it is yet a good deal above insignificance” (italics added), in “Democracy” 448.

18. See Dover Wilson's Introduction to CA, xxii-xxxiv.

19. CA 19. See also 21: “Culture … and what we call totality …”

20. See CA 48-49; also 17-18, 19, 22 on North America. America, “that chosen home of newspapers and politics,” is “without general intelligence,” according to Renan, and Arnold believes “it likely from the circumstances of the case, that this is so; and that, in the things of the mind, and in culture and totality, America, instead of surpassing us all, falls short” (19). To Arnold, only the first generation of Puritans—Milton, Baxter, Wesley—had had any greatness, chiefly because they still enjoyed the legacy of the catholic culture that they rejected (“were trained within the pale of the Establishment”). Since then, they had all been mediocrities (13).

21. See, for instance, CA 189-98.

22. Michelet, whom Arnold admired, tended to do the same thing in his histories, most blatantly in his powerfully schematic Introduction à l’histoire universelle of 1831.

23. One thinks of Burckhardt's expression: “Unzeitung.”

24. Thus “culture” admits the necessity of “fortune making and industrialism,” “culture does not set itself against games and sports” (CA 61).

25. Jenkyns underlines the deliberately non-dialectical nature of Arnold's thought on the subject of Hellenism and Hebraism. “It was characteristic of the age, or of its more enquiring members, to feel that between faith in Christianity and the love of Greece there must be a tension. Arnold was being consciously heterodox when he argued that Hellenism and Hebraism could be painlessly combined” (70). The contrast between the dialectical character of Heine's opposition of Greeks and Nazarenes and the undialectical character of Arnold's opposition of Hellenism and Hebraism is one of the chief themes of Ilse-Maria Tesdorpf's Die Auseinandersetzung Matthew Arnolds mit Heinrich Heine. Tesdorpf argues convincingly that while Arnold's Hellenism and Hebraism is not the same as Heine's Greeks and Nazarenes, his philosophy of history is borrowed from Heine. As a result there is a significant degree of inconsistency in Arnold's ideas (see especially 168).

26. See Park Honan 331 on Arnold's reservations about Prussia.

27. “A Speech at Eton,” in Complete Prose Works 9:28-29. Arnold develops the idea of a tension within Greek culture similar to that between Hebraism and Hellenism in other texts also, notably “God and the Bible,” in Complete Prose Works 7:208-11, and “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment,” in Essays in Criticism 212.

28. “Literature and Dogma,” in Complete Prose Works 6:260. See also 225, 259-60 on “the turbid Jewish fancies …,” 281-82, 302-303 on “the turbid phantasmagory” that filled the thoughts of the Jews at the coming of Jesus Christ; and “God and the Bible,” in Complete Prose Works 7:370-71, where we are told that the influence of Christ gradually transformed “the turbid elements among which it was thrown.”

29. Complete Prose Works 8:151-52. My conclusions coincide with those reached by Edward Alexander several decades ago in his excellent study of Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill 52: “Arnold did his best … to maintain an equilibrium between the two adversaries [Hellenism and Hebraism] … But he could not help letting the cat out of the bag. Hellenism, after all, represented all of Arnold's hopes for the perfection of mankind, and Hebraism his scepticism about the capacity of men for perfection and his consciousness of their inherent weakness. Whereas Hellenism is a positive ideal, investing human life ‘with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy, [Hebraism] has always been severely pre-occupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in Zion.’ Hebraism and Hellenism are committed, ultimately, to opposite conceptions of human nature. For the ideal of culture as a harmonious human perfection which Arnold espoused throughout Culture and Anarchy was the ideal of Hellenism; and just as culture, in Arnold's theory, ultimately encompasses religion, so is Hellenism ultimately to encompass Hebraism.”

30. “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment” (first delivered as a lecture at Oxford, 1864) in Essays in Criticism 201. See also 205: “It is natural that man should take pleasure in his senses. But it is natural, also, that he should take refuge in his heart and imagination from his misery. And when one thinks what human life is for the vast majority of mankind, how little of a feast for their senses it can possibly be, one understands the charm for them of a refuge offered in the heart and imagination.”

31. On Overbeck, see Walter Nigg; see also my “Anti-Theologie und Anti-Philologie.”

32. “Literature and Dogma,” in Complete Prose Works 6:199.

33. CA 196-99. See also “Equality,” in Complete Prose Works 8:286-87: “the power of conduct … was so felt and fixed by Israel that we can never with justice refuse to permit Israel, in spite of all his shortcomings, to stand for it.” Admiration for the Jews as a people is found even in the English translation of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's notoriously antisemitic Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. The author of the introduction to this translation, Lord Redesdale, finds Chamberlain's testimony to the “nobility” of the Sephardic Jews the more convincing as “Chamberlain is a strong anti-Semite,” but he challenges Chamberlain on the latter's disparagement of the Ashkenazim or German Jews: “Chamberlain is unjust … They are born financiers and the acquisition of money has been their characteristic talent. But of the treasure which they have laid up they have given freely. The charities of the great cities of Europe would be in a sad plight were the support of the Jews to be withdrawn; indeed many noble foundations owe their existence to them. Politically too they have rendered great services …” (xxxv-xxxvi). Redesdale later notes his “appreciation of the stubborn singleness of purpose and dogged consistency which have made the Jew what he is. The ancient Jew was not a soldier … He was no sailor like his cousins the Phoenicians … He was no artist … neither was he a farmer nor a merchant. What was it then that gave him his wonderful self-confidence, his toughness of character, which could overcome every difficulty, and triumph over the hatred of the other races? It was his belief in the sacred books of the law, the Thora … The influence of the books of the Old Testament has been far-reaching indeed, but nowhere has it exercised more power than in the stablishing of the character of the Jew. If it means so much to the Christian, what must it not mean to him? It is his religion, the history of his race, and his individual pedigree all in one. Nay! it is more than all that: it is the attesting document of his convenant with God” (xxxix).

34. It is true, of course, that Disraeli, though he flaunted his Jewish roots, had been baptised, and could therefore take the oath that was offensive to Jews and that prevented them, even when they had been duly elected, from taking their seats in Parliament until the final passing of the Jews' Act Amendment Bill in 1859. This fact hardly diminishes the extraordinary character, in the European context of the mid-nineteenth century, of Disraeli's role in British politics and public life.

35. Abraham Gilam ii. Gilam points out that, in contrast to Germany and France, “Jewish communal autonomy and separateness remained untouched in Britain. The Board of Deputies retained control over marriages, education, welfare and other domestic concerns. In 1836 it was given statutory recognition by Parliament as the marriage registrar for the Jewish community and in 1852, the chief rabbi and head of the Portuguese congregation were entrusted with the responsibility of supervising educational grants allocated from parliamentary endowments … British politicians constantly refused to intervene in internal Jewish disputes even when asked to do so by Jewish dissidents … England was the only European country where Jews continued to retain an autonomous management of their domestic affairs during a process of emancipation.” (151) Gilam contrasts this with the Napoleonic interrogation of the Sanhedrin to determine whether the Jewish creed was sufficiently universalistic and whether Jews were ready to alter it when ever it seemed anti-social. (152) The British road to Jewish emancipation was in fact a compromise between liberal and conservative interests: “English statesmen wanted to establish freedom of conscience in the country while retaining the privileged position of the Anglican Church. In order to retain Church establishment, British legislation had to recognize the uniqueness of other creeds. They did not wish to separate church and state, disestablish Anglicanism or secularize public life. They did not confine religion to the sphere of individual privacy. If England wanted to retain an inequality before the law in favor of Anglicans, it had no right asking other minorities to make concessions in return for their own civil rights” (ii; see also 152).

36. For a sense of what these might be, from the point of view of the Jewish community in Britain itself, see Howard Cooper and Paul Morrison.

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