Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews

Judaism, Spring, 2002 by Edward Alexander

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?