Perhaps the Reverend Dr Arnold, Head Master of Rugby School near Birmingham, would be a proper person. He is one of the most enlightened and liberal of our clergy....
John Stuart Mill, letter of 6 December 1831 (1)
ON APRIL 5, 1830, IN HIS MAIDEN SPEECH TO THE HOUSE of Commons, Thomas Macaulay spoke eloquently in favor of Robert Grant's bill for the Removal of Jewish Disabilities. Alluding to but not actually naming, Nathan Rothschild (who had financed the Allied armies ranged against Napoleon), Macaulay noted that "as things now stand, a Jew may be the richest man in England.... The influence of a Jew may be of the first consequences in a war which shakes Europe to the centre," and yet the Jews have no legal right to vote or to sit in Parliament. "Three hundred years ago they had no legal right to the teeth in their heads." (2)
If some members of the House thought it indecent of Macaulay to dredge up this nasty old business about King John extracting gold teeth from Jewish heads, certain opponents of Jewish Emancipation found it still much the best policy. According to J. A. Froude, his biographer, Thomas Carlyle, standing in front of Rothschild's great house at Hyde Park Corner, exclaimed: "I do not mean that I want King John back again, but if you ask me which mode of treating these people to have been nearest to the will of the Almighty about them--to build them palaces like that, or to take the pincers for them, I declare for the pincers." Carlyle even fancied himself in the role of a Victorian King John, with Baron Rothschild at his mercy: "Now, Sir, the State requires some of these millions you have heaped together with your financing work. 'You won't? Very well'--and the speaker gave a twist with his wrist--'Now will you?'--and then another twist till the millions were yielded." (3)
Although Macaulay was a liberal, he did not speak for all liberals, some of whom stood much closer to Carlyle on the Jewish question. One of these was Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby and intellectual leader of the liberal or Broad Church branch of the Church of England. Arnold set himself against conservatism as the most dangerously revolutionary of principles: "there is nothing so unnatural and so convulsive to society as the strain to keep things fixed, when all the world is by the very law of its creation in eternal progress." (4) When John Henry Newman, leader of the AngloCatholic (or "High") branch of the Church of England, declared that liberalism was "the enemy," and that by liberalism he meant "the Antidogmatic Principle," Arnold was among the principal culprits he had in mind, particularly "some free views of Arnold about the Old Testament." (5)
But Arnold's preference of improvement to preservation and of free views to dogma drew up short where the Jews were concerned. He might excoriate the High Church party for having, throughout English history, opposed improving measures of any kind; but he shared with his AngloCatholic adversaries the conviction that Christianity must be the law of the land. In 1834 (a year after the Jewish Emancipation Bill had been passed by the Commons but rejected by the Lords) Arnold insisted that he "must petition against the Jew Bill" because it is based on "that low Jacobinical notion of citizenship, that a man acquires a right to it by the accident of his being littered inter quatuor maria [on the nation's soil] or because he pays taxes." (6) That indelicate word "littered" suggests that Arnold's opposition to Jewish emancipation was not purely doctrinal, but had a strong admixture of compulsive nastiness (or worse).
Arnold took the view that the world is made up of Christians and non-Christians; with the former, unity was essential, with the latter, impossible or, where possible, deplorable. Parliament should be thanked for having achieved the great liberal desideratum of doing away with distinctions between Christian and Christian. But "I would pray that distinctions be kept up between Christian and non-Christian." Jews, Arnold argued, had no claim whatever to political rights because "the Jews are strangers in England, and have no more claim to legislate for it, than a lodger has to share with the landlord in the management of his house.... England is the land of Englishmen, not of Jews ... my German friends agree with me." (7)
The only way in which Jews could claim English citizenship was by becoming Christians. "They ... have no claim to become citizens but by conforming to our moral law, which is the Gospel." Arnold even speculated about deporting the Jews from England, "to a land where they might live by themselves independent" Indeed, he would even feel morally obligated to make a financial contribution to the costs of deportation. (8) If the Jews were to be accorded citizenship, Arnold feared, they might one day become magistrates or judges, an appalling prospect. Since Arnold's hostility to Jews was obsessive and irrational, not merely doctrinal, it could burst forth in the most unlikely places. In a letter of May 9, 1836, for example, Arnold appears to be discussing the relative importance of scientific and moral subjects in education, one of his favorite hobby-horses. "Rather than have [physical science] the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the star s were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament." So far, so good, especially since Arnold here sounds a note that will be played, with many embellishments and variations, by his son Matthew. But by the next sentence the eternal enemy has crossed and disturbed his field of vision. "Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy, and then we should see our way a little more clearly without falling into Judaism or Toryism, or Jacobinism or any other ism whatever." (9)
Insofar as it can be rationally defined, what Arnold means by "Judaism" in such passages is the High Church Party of John Henry Newman and Edward B. Pusey. Of all the abusive epithets Arnold hurled at his Anglo-Catholic enemies--"the Oxford Malignants," "White Jacobins," Romanizers, the most spiteful and (in his view) damning was "formalist, Judaizing fanatics." (10) Arnold saw in "the Jews and Judaizers of the New Testament" the forerunners of the High Churchmen of Oxford. (11) When Arnold beheld the Oxford high churchmen contending for the apostolic succession or sacerdotal authority, his mind's eye was riveted upon "the zealots of circumcision and the ceremonies of the law." It was in the Jewish "enemies and revilers" of Jesus, "and in these alone," that the Oxford "conspirators" found their perfect prototype. But the Jews serve not merely as polemical counters with which Arnold can taint the Christian purity of the High Church critics of his friend Hampden. His venom against Judaism itself bursts forth mo re than once in his essay. "The poisonous plant of Judaism was cut down or withered away; but the root was left in the ground; and thus, when its season returned, it sprung up again, and is now growing rankly." (12) (So insistent was Arnold in designating the High Church Party as Jewish that there must have been more than a little rebelliousness or filial impiety in his son Matthew's later [indeed, after his father was dead] insistence that the puritan non-conformist dissenters, the polar opposites of the Oxford Party, were "Hebraizers.")
Arnold's unswerving conviction that, as he wrote in April 1837, "'Religion,' in the king's mouth, can mean only Christianity," was central to his idea of education and its establishments. When he found that he could not turn the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (an organization formed in 1827 whose executive committee included such militant secularists as James Mill) into a Christian organization, he abandoned it. Then, as a member of the first senate of the newly chartered London University, Arnold found himself up against "fierce" opposition to his insistence on examining all students in the New Testament. He had been a supporter of the new university in large part because (unlike Oxford and Cambridge) it was to be open to all Christians, including Dissenters, "which in common speech does not mean, I think, Dissenters from Christianity." But he soon found that "every single member of the Senate except myself was convinced of the necessity, according to the Charter, of giving the Jews Degrees." (13)
A university, in Arnold's view, can aid the cause of general education only if it has a Christian character. (14) This means, among other things, that all students must be examined in the New Testament, for Christianity is no mere branch of knowledge but its very basis. When he tried to imagine examining a Jewish student in a sacred history "of which he would not admit a single fact," or tried to imagine having to abstain "from calling our Lord by any other name than Jesus" (because for the Jews, of course, Jesus was not "the Christ"), he rebelled. Who would be served by ripping out the core of education? "Are we really for the sake of a few Jews... who may like to have a Degree in Arts... to destroy our only chance of our being even either useful or respected as an Institution of national education? ... It would be the first time that education in England was avowedly unchristianized for the sake of accommodating Jews...." (15) Finding himself the sole member of the London University senate opposed to givin g Jews degrees (and exempting them from New Testament examinations), Arnold resigned his position.
The objections to Arnold's position hardly need to be emphasized. His stress on the Christian character of English education and citizenship was inseparable from a racial idea of English character and an obvious distaste for Jewish people. It was clear (even to Arnold himself) that it was not only "a few Jews" (and "one or two Muslims") who would be excluded from his "nonsectarian" Christian university, but also a large and growing number of homegrown English unbelievers, especially those who had been touched by the criticism of the New Testament which tended to support "Jewish" views of Jesus as an observant Jew who neither was nor aspired to be a Messiah, especially in the sense Christians give to that term.
To English Jews Thomas Arnold must have seemed a Hesperidean dragon trying to preserve what Tennyson called, in a poem of 1832, "the treasure/Of the wisdom of the West" from barbarous intruders, a bigot denying them full rights of academic citizenship. Yet one must note, if only in passing, that Arnold's exclusiveness rested on a grasp, albeit a partial one, of a truth that Jews eager for "emancipation" and "enlightenment" tended to miss altogether: namely, that when you study western history and literature, you are studying not just revolutions and poems, but the mind of western Christianity.
Arnold knew that anyone who studied English history and literature, even at a nonsectarian London University, must perforce submit to a whole world of assumptions that were alien and presumably offensive to him: namely, that the "Jewish God" is a fierce, tribal deity who was supplanted in the progressive movement of the world by the gentle and "universal" Christian one; that the Jews had rejected Jesus' more "spiritual" teaching because they were attached to the old Law and couldn't see that his message of love and forgiveness had made it obsolete; that although their Bible had foretold his birth, death, resurrection, etc., they rejected him as their Messiah because they found his claim to divinity blasphemous and condemned him to death; that what Jews call Torah is an "Old Testament" that had to be edited, interpreted, complemented, fulfilled, superseded, by the New Testament; and that Jewish collective existence since the inception of Christianity was a prolonged illustration of the spiritual blindness der ided in the Gospels. (16)
Even without the compulsory examination in New Testament that Arnold so much insisted on, the education Jews would receive at London University exacted a price for national citizenship in the form of a distortion and narrowing of Jewish self-definition. Paradoxically, Jews might have been better off, as Jews, had the exclusionist Arnold and not his more liberal and secular opponents won the struggle over university admissions.
Nearly a century later, Morris Joseph, addressing Jewish students at Cambridge, pointed to the snares that awaited Jewish undergraduates at the great English universities. These included not only what seemed (especially to those-an ever-growing multitude-ignorant of traditional Jewish learning, from the siddur to the Talmud) to be a wider learning and culture than that of their ancestors, but even the physical surroundings. Gothic architecture, as Pugin had argued in the 1830s, was essentially Christian architecture, even if the buildings were not (and many of them were) chapels. The Jewish student, said Joseph, "is set in an intensely Christian atmosphere, all the more potent because of the historic associations that go to the making of it; and the simple services of the plain brick structure that does duty for a synagogue present a glaring contrast to the impressive form and environment of the public worship of the University churches." (17)
The risks that university life entailed for Jews may be measured in part by the experience of those whom Dr. Arnold did not consider "dissenters from Christianity" and to whom churches and chapels, Gothic and otherwise, were not alien. Todd Endelman has pointed out that Nonconformists, that is, Protestants who did not belong to the Established Church, had experiences at universities during the Victorian period that were similar to that of the Jews. They often became Anglicans in order to overcome their sense of being outsiders and to embrace the culture (and career possibilities) of the dominant majority. Catholics, also outside the Established Church, would have faced similar dangers at the English universities, but their church, drawing upon its greater fund of worldly experience and political wisdom, showed no interest in having the universities opened to their young people. Indeed, a writer in the Catholic journal The Rambler wrote in 1851: "Thanks be to God, the Protestantism of England has shut out Cath olics from Oxford, and with few exceptions indeed, from Cambridge also." (18)
Matthew Arnold
In spite of all which in them and in their character is unattractive, nay, repellent,--in spite of their shortcomings even in righteousness itself and their insignificance in everything else,--this petty, unsuccessful, unamiable people, without politics, without science, without art, without charm, deserve their great place in the world's regard, and are likely to have it more, as the world goes on, rather than less. (19)
The question of how important and advantageous it is to belong to an established church, wedded to the state, and to be absorbed by its institutions was a central concern of Dr. Arnold's son, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold. "In my notions about the State," he wrote to his mother in February 1864, "I am quite papa's son, and his continuator." (20) Continuator perhaps he was, but with respect to the Jews, in a greatly nuanced and far more complicated and indeed attractive form.
In his introduction to Culture and Anarchy Arnold, by way of explaining his opposition to proposals by the religious Nonconformists and Liberal statesmen to disestablish the Church of Ireland (that is, the Church of England in Ireland), argues that the great figures of European civilization have all belonged to or been trained in Establishments. The seminal figures of the English Puritan tradition that wars against the Established Church were, Arnold insists, themselves trained within its pale; and he cites as examples Milton, Baxter, Wesley. He grants but two exceptions to his iron rule, two religious disciplines that "seem exempted, or comparatively exempted, from the operation of the law which appears to forbid the rearing, outside of national Churches, of men of the highest spiritual significance." These two are the Roman Catholic and the Jewish. But the contradiction is more apparent than real, for these "rest on Establishments, which, though not indeed national, are cosmopolitan." Catholics and Jews do not, therefore, lose in their intellectual culture what English Nonconformists do by being outside the Established Church; but the States of which they are citizens lose something because the conditions in which Jews and Catholics are reared make them, in a spiritual sense, less than full citizens. Unlike his father, Matthew Arnold never suggests denying the Jews English citizenship.
For Arnold, religious establishments are the existential realizations of the idea of integration in the main stream of human life, than which nothing is more important for a human being. Christianity, he believed, at its inception uprooted its various adherents from their foundations in Jewish and Greek culture, and would have lost itself in "a multitude of hole-and-corner churches like the churches of English Nonconformity" if Constantine had not established it as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. From that act of establishment (which for Victorians like J. S. Mill marked the decline of Christianity) flowed "the main stream of human life" in Europe; to have been cut off or to have separated oneself from that mainstream is to have been irreparably damaged. To illustrate his meaning, Arnold invokes the speculations of a French Protestant theologian named Albert Reville, who had very "advanced" views for his age.
M. Albert Reville, whose religious writings are always interesting, says that the conception which cultivated and philosophical Jews now entertain of Christianity and its Founder, is probably destined to become the conception which Christians themselves will entertain.... Now, even if this were true, it would still have been better for a man, during the last eighteen hundred years, to have been a Christian and a member of one of the great Christian communions, than to have been a Jew... because the being in contact with the main stream of human life is of more moment for a man's total spiritual growth, and for his bringing to perfection the gifts committed to him ... than any speculative opinion which he may hold or think he holds. (21)
For Arnold, 1800 years of Jewish existence, the collective life of millions of people bound by covenant to the living God and by history to one another, was nothing more than "speculative opinion." Although Arnold had (as would become evident from his religious books of the following decade) already discarded several of the central doctrines of Christianity, he still in 1869 adhered to a secularized and softened version of the Christian myth. According to this myth, because the Jews had rejected and killed Christ they in turn were rejected as God's chosen people, who in future would be drawn from the Gentiles. The Jews would be preserved, but in misery.
In one sense Arnold is so far removed from the old Christian myth that he does not even feel it necessary to spring to the defense of the Christian doctrine of Jesus' Messiahship. Yet his insistence that Jewish existence is mere "speculative opinion," and that Jewish life since the appearance of Jesus has been a diversionary ripple leading its adherents away from the "main stream" into dusty irrelevance, shows the tenacity of the myth. Judaism is no longer presented, as traditionally it was in Christian iconography, as blind to the truth, but now it is blind to the future course of civilization's development, "inveterate," as Arnold would say in a later work, "in its fated isolation." (22)
But there is another side to all this. Arnold had far more experience of Jews and Jewish ideas than his father did. His position as an inspector of schools frequently brought him to Jewish institutions such as the Jews' Free School in London, and he treated them with sympathy and respect. (23) He came to know several members of the Rothschild family, and was a particular friend of Lady Louisa de Rothschild. He claimed, in a letter of 23 December 1871, to have made enough progress in Hebrew to want to acquire a Hebrew Bible. (24) He read such ex-Jews as Benedict Spinoza and Heinrich Heine with a sharp eye out for their "Jewish" characteristics.
Arnold also met and read some of the work of Emanuel Deutsch, known to Arnold and other Victorians open to Jewish influences as "the Talmud man." (25) He wrote to Lady de Rothschild in 1867 that "the abundance of Christian doctrine and dispositions present in Judaism toward the time of the Christian era, and such phenomena as Hillel's ownership of the Golden Rule, for instance--I knew already, from the writings of the Strasburg school....But the long extracts from the Talmud itself were quite fresh to me, and gave me huge satisfaction." He even surmised that the English people, from constitution and training, were far more likely to be brought to "a more philosophical conception of religion" through Judaism than through Hellenism. (26) This is one of the rare occasions on which Arnold proposed that English Protestantism was in greater need of leavening by Hebraism than by Hellenism--but one must remember that his correspondent was a Jew, even if one whose intellectual culture was not much above the (modest) level of most English Jews of the upper class.
Arnold's attitude towards the prospect of bringing Jews into the educational system while respecting the integrity of their religious culture stands in sharp contrast to that of his father. He praised the French system of education, for example, because it accepted, without necessarily encouraging, religious division. The spirit of sect, Arnold observed, was noxious, but less noxious than the spirit of religious persecution. The French, with a population of 36 million, recognized three, and three only, religious divisions for educational purposes: "Protestantism, Roman Catholicism,...Judaism." The English system, despite its smaller population of 21 million, recognized no less than seven religious divisions--six Protestant, one Catholic, none Jewish. (27)
Matthew Arnold's ideas about the place of Jews in higher education also diverged sharply from his father's. Again, he praised France as "a model of reason and justice" because, unlike Prussia, which, "keeping in view the christlichen Grundcharakter of itself and its public schools," barred Jews from the office of public teacher. "In a country where the Jews are so many and so able, this exclusion makes itself felt." As for the universities in Prussia, Jews could hold professorships in medicine and mathematics, but not in history or philosophy. "France," he concluded "is in all these matters a model of reason and justice, and as much ahead of Germany as she is of England." He applauded the French for leaving religious instruction in their schools to clergymen and "ask[ing] no other instructor any questions about his religious persuasion." (28)
But the most striking example of Arnold's breaking away from the prejudices of his father (and indeed of his class) with respect to Jews and Judaism is to be found in his religious books of the seventies. St. Paul and Protestantism (1871) treats "the great mediaeval Jewish school of Biblical critics" with a respect rare among Victorian Christian writers, mainly because they provide support for Arnold's view that the Bible is a work of literature and not of (exploded) science. The medieval Jewish commentators enunciated "the admirable maxim," forgotten for centuries by virtually all Christian exegetes, that "The Law speaks with the tongue of the children of men,--a maxim which is the very foundation of all sane Biblical criticism." (29)
In Arnold's next book, Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards A Better Appreciation of the Bible, first published in 1873, "Jewish" concerns play a central role. In this formidable work, Arnold tried to convince literate Englishmen that the main prerequisite for understanding the Bible was tact, a talent of literary critics rather than of "scientific" theologians. His declared aim was to demonstrate only the effect of their religion upon the language of the Jews who were the authors and protagonists of the Hebrew Bible. But in pursuit of this aim he spread his net much wider and at least came close to allowing that Jews had (and have) a religious culture and inner world of their own.
He begins, to be sure, with a linguistic matter, namely, the Hebrew people's mode of naming God. The name they used, Arnold insists, was "The Eternal" and not Jehovah, "which gives us the notion of a mere mythological deity, or by a wrong translation, Lord, which gives us the notion of a magnified and non-natural man" (182). What they meant by this name, Arnold argues, was "the Eternal righteous, who loveth righteousness." Arnold thus makes the (Biblical)Jews into a foil for certain "Archbishops of York," who import into the Bible extraneous notions of moral philosophy when they expand "the Eternal" into "the Eternal cause. "No, the Jews "had dwelt upon the thought of conduct, and of right and wrong, until the not ourselves, which is in us and all around us, became to them... a power which makes for righteousness... and is therefore called The Eternal." (30)
Arnold's crucial encounter with Biblical Judaism comes in the fifth part of Chapter I. Here he argues that literary tact and a fair mind will show that all the standard objections to the Hebrew people of the Bible are shallow and mistaken. First, he rebuts those who ask why, if the Hebrews of the Bible really had the unique sense for righteousness that Arnold ascribes to them, "does it not equally distinguish the Jews now?" (196). Using the concessive rhetoric that was a hallmark of his argumentative prose, Arnold allows that "a change of circumstances may change a people's character"; but he then asks whether "the modern Jews lost more of what distinguished their ancestors, or even so much, as the modern Greeks of what distinguished theirs?" To those who claim that the Jews' God was not in fact the eternal power that makes for righteousness but merely their tribal God, Arnold replies with a question: "How, then, comes their literature to be full of such things as 'Shew me thy ways, 0 Eternal, and teach me t hy paths; let integrity and up rightness preserve me, for I put my trust in thee! if I incline unto wickedness with my heart, the Eternal will not hear me."' To Christian polemicists who say that the Jews' divine law was a merely traditional and external code, kept in superstitious dread of the almighty, Arnold retorts by citing yet more prooftexts: "'Teach me thy statutes, Teach me thy way, Show thou me the way that I shall walk in, Open mine eyes, Make me to understand wisdom secretly!'" (31) Why, if the Law already stood, stark and written before their eyes, would they repeatedly say such things?
True, Arnold does not (how could he and still remain a Christian?) entirely abandon the spirit of Christian triumphalism over the "old" law. Although genuine, the Jewish conception of righteousness was, he says, often "narrow" until the prophets brought into play the more profound elements of personal religion such as conscience. In fact, says Arnold, "Every time that the words contrition or humility drop from the lips of prophet or psalmist, Christianity appears." (32) This may remind us of Arnold's contemporary John Ruskin, an intensely Protestant figure, trying to explain his attraction to architectural ornaments on medieval Catholic buildings: he calls them budding Protestantism, trying to burst forth from the constricting formalism of Rome-thereby licentiously applying a religious label he likes to a style of art that he likes.
But for the most part Arnold's discussion is a defense lawyer's brief for the accused, indeed accursed, Jews. He insists that they had a unique sense of the natural and necessary link between conduct and happiness, and will therefore always be the signal embodiment of this endowment of human nature. Arnold's ringing declaration is one of the most amazing things in the whole body of his voluminous writings: "as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest...." (33)
Perhaps Arnold is only referring to the Jews of the Bible here, but there are also hints that--whether rightly or wrongly--he was intrigued by the possibility that there was more than a thread of continuity between those jews of long ago and the politically debased jews whom his father wanted to harry out of the country. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his Table-Talk entry for August 14, 1833: "The two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term, are, I think, Isaiah--'Hear, O heavens, and give ear, 0 earth!'--and Levi of Holywell Street-'Old Clothes!'--both of them Jews, you'll observe." Coleridge's conclusion, rendered in a burst of Latin, was immane quantum discrepant (how dreadfully much they differ). Arnold, to his credit, could never be quite sure that it was; and he was more likely than Coleridge to know that Levi could read Isaiah in the original.
NOTES
(1.) Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill: 1812--1848, edited by F. E. Mineka (Toronto/London: University of Toronto Press, 1963), I, p. 92.
(2.) G. O. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), I, p. 148.
(3.) Montagu Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960), pp. 171--172.
(4.) Arthur Peorhyn Stanley, Life of Thomas Arnold, D. D. (London: J. Murray, 1904), p. 249.
(5.) J. H. Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Loogmans, 1864), Chapter one and the Note on Liberalism.
(6.) Stanley, I, p. 341.
(7.) Stanley, II, pp. 32-33.
(8.) Stanley, II, pp. 33, 35.
(9.) Stanley, II, p. 37.
(10.) "The Oxford Malignants and Dr. Hampden," in Victorian Literature: Prase, edited by G. B. Tenny on and D.J. Gray (New York: Macmillan, 1976), p. 17.
(11.) One reason why Arnold took up the defense of the appointment of Renn Dickson Hampden to the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford in 1836 was that Conservatives (including the High Church party) objected to Hampden's support for the abolition of religious tests for admission to Oxford. Two years later Arnold would insist on the religious test for Jews at London University. Needless to say, he failed to see any irony or contradiction in his position.
(12.) "Oxford Malignants," pp. 18-19.
(13.) Stanley, II, pp. 84, 94, 105.
(14.) It might be interesting to compare the liberal Arnold's views on this matter with those of his "conservative" adversary John Henry Newman, who in Idea of a University is at pains to point out that the liberal education imparted by a university produces not the Catholic or the Christian but the gentleman. (This is not to say that Newman was any more inclined than Arnold to countenance the presence of Jews in the university. London University, in fact, was for him the epitome of what a university should not be partly because it admitted Jews and Dissenters.)
(15.) Stanley, II, p. 93.
(16.) See on this subject Cynthia Ozick's "Still Another Autobiography of an Assimilated Jew," New York Times, 28 December 1978.
(17.) Todd Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 109.
(18.) Endelman, p. 112.
(19.) Literature and Dogma (1873), in Dissent and Dogma, edited by R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 199.
(20.) Letters of Matthew Arnold: 1848-1888, 2 vols. in 1, edited by G. W. E. Russell (London/New York: Macmillan, 1900), I, p. 263.
(21.) Culture and Anarchy, edited by J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), pp. 29-30.
(22.) Democratic Education, edited by R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 143.
(23.) See, e.g., his speech at a banquet for the school on May 21, 1884, printed in the Appendix to volume X of Super's edition of Arnold's prose works.
(24.) Letters of Matthew Arnold, II, p. 86.
(25.) Letters of Matthew Arnold, II, p. 59.
(26.) Letters of Matthew Arnold, I, p. 434.
(27.) Democratic Education, pp. 142-143.
(28.) Schools and Universities on the Continent, edited by R H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), p. 232.
(29.) St. Paul and Protestantism, in Dissent and Dogma, p.21.
(30.) Literature and Dogma, in Dissent and Dogma, p. 183.
(31.) Literature and Dogma, in Dissent and Dogma, pp. 196-197.
(32.) Literature and Dogma, in Dissent and Dogma, p. 197.
(33.) Literature and Dogma, in Dissent and Dogma, p. 199.
EDWARD ALEXANDER is Professor of English at the University of Washington and a contributing editor of this journal. His most recent book is Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (1998). His article, "False Witness: The Irving-Lipstadt Trial and the New Yorker," appeared in the Fall 2001 issue. The present essay is a chapter in his forthcoming book, Classical Liberation and the Jewish Tradition.