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Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews
Judaism, Spring, 2002 by Edward Alexander
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)
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