ABSTRACT
In his essay "Democracy," the introduction to The Popular Education of France (1861), Matthew Arnold uses the terms Hebraism and Hellenism, signifying to him "character" and "culture," as a convenient way of arguing that society needs both. 1 Hardly original, Arnold's attempt to synthesize the Jewish and Greek cultures dates back historically to biblical times; and in the eighteenth century, interest was renewed by Winckelmann's popularization of Greek art, and in the nineteenth, by the Greek struggle for independence. 2 Arnold himself was influenced by Heinrich Heine, who asserted, among other things, that "All people are either Jews or Hellenes, people with drives that are ascetic, image-hating, and ravenous for spiritualization, or people of a nature that rejoices in life, is proud of display, and is realistic." 3 Although in the Christian world, the significations of the terms had evolved over time, to the Jews, in contrast, the Greeks consistently represented the rationalistic threat to the centrality of faith in their culture.
