Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews

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.