Invidious Distinctions: Hebraism and Hellenism in Heinrich Heine and Matthew Arnold

The distinctions between Hebrews and Hellenes, the Bible and Homer, Athens and Jerusalem are malleable, generalized, and often invidious. These dichotomies, rooted in classical antiquity, have been deployed by modern figures from Voltaire in the eighteenth century to Leo Strauss in the twentieth. This essay engages in a close reading of two paragraphs that did much to forward the antinomy of Hebraic and Hellenic: the first, from Heinrich Heine's Ludwig Börne (1840); the second, from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869). In the case of Heine, I emphasize his flight from Jewishness, his situating of Jews between Protestants and Catholics, and his wrestling with the Bible as a literary classic. In the case of Arnold, I explore his promotion of Heine as the synthesis of Hebrew and Hellene, his growing appreciation of the Bible, and his increased interest in English Jewry. In both works we witness a distinct slide toward the philosemitic that contradicts the authors' avowed preference for the Hellenic. I conclude with a call for the deconstruction of a pernicious dichotomy.