Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews

(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.

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