ABSTRACT
To English Jews, Thomas Arnold must have seemed a Hesperidean dragon trying to preserve what Tennyson called, in a poem of 1832, "the treasure/Of the wisdom of the West" from barbarous intruders, a bigot denying them full rights of academic citizenship. Matthew Arnold's ideas about the place of Jews in higher education also diverged sharply from his father's. Paul and Protestantism treats "the great mediaeval Jewish school of Biblical critics" with a respect rare among Victorian Christian writers, mainly because they provide support for Matthew Arnold's view that the Bible is a work of literature and not of (exploded) science. In the formidable work, Matthew Arnold tried to convince literate Englishmen that the main prerequisite for understanding the Bible was tact, a talent of literary critics rather than of "scientific" theologians. But for the most part Matthew Arnold's discussion is a defense lawyer's brief for the accused, indeed accursed, Jews.
