Philhellenism and antisemitism: Matthew Arnold and his German models

Comparative Literature, Winter 1994 by Gossman, Lionel

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 very deist is, after all, a Jew. --Heinrich Heine(1)

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 Suvern. Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, 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.