DAVID DAICHES was a pioneering scholar and critic in the fields of modernist and Scottish literature, and a shrewd commentator on the culture of Scotland and of Scottish Jewry. He was a founding member of the University of Sussex, where he was Professor of English (1961-77) and Dean of the School of English Studies (1961-68).

He was also a leading spirit in the Institute of Advanced Studies in the University of Edinburgh, of which he was director, 1980-86. He had been a steady contributor in many ways to the revival of Scottish cultural confidence over the past 50 years.

David Daiches was born, it might be said, at two removes from Scotland, the country which became his passion. His father, the distinguished Rabbi Salis Daiches, was an immigrant from Lithuania. David was born in Sunderland in 1912. In 1919 the rabbi moved to Edinburgh to serve some 400 Jewish families there.

The result was summed up in the title of Daiches’s best-loved book, Two Worlds (1956). The Daiches boys went to George Watson’s College, bastion of genteel Edinburgh education — but they could not take part in sport on Saturday. At home and in the synagogue, rites and festivals evoked ancient Palestine and modern Eastern Europe. Two Worlds concludes with a muted crisis in Daiches’s loving relationship with his unworldly father — a man at ease in his Masonic lodge or addressing a Burns Supper, respected as Judaism’s chief representative in Scotland, but not ready for full assimilation.

His brother Lionel studied law with the rabbi’s approval, and became a famous advocate. David read English literature, first at Edinburgh University and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where his doctorate concerned English translations of the Hebrew Bible. But he had fallen in love with a fellow student at Edinburgh, Billie Mackay. Although she took the rare step of converting to Judaism to help to reconcile the rabbi to their marriage, this came after the couple had fled to the US to avoid embarrassment to Daiches’s father.

Daiches published three precocious books before moving in 1939 to Chicago University, where he wrote four more, one of which, The Novel and the Modern World (1939), swiftly achieved wide currency in academic circles. But the war stranded him in Chicago, and it was a relief when, in 1943, he got war work with British Information Services in New York. From there, after a year, he was transferred to the embassy in Washington.

In 1946 Daiches accepted a post at Cornell University, where one of his colleagues was Vladimir Nabokov. Besides his books, he had been publishing serious verse in Poetry, the Chicago magazine, and light verse in The New Yorker.

In 1951 he took up a fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, with an eye on a chair in Scotland. His position as the leading critic of Scottish literature was now clear. He had prised Burns away from his cult and written an important critical study, and had re-evaluated the very unfashionable Walter Scott. He had an instinctive sympathy for Stevenson, the exile, and his interest in philosophy equipped him especially well to reassess Scotland’s Enlightenment.

Most of all, he was the first major critic to circumjack the vast achievements of the radical and hyper-nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Marginalised and impoverished, MacDiarmid was delighted by his encomia, and the two men became friends, as the publication in 2001 of MacDiarmid’s New Selected Letters made clear.

At Jesus, Daiches took charge of the cellars, and he prided himself on his choice of bargain claret. A connoisseur also of stronger drink, his Scotch Whisky (1969) was accepted as a standard authority, and attractive consignments from grateful distillers ensured that his palate was well catered for.

By this time Daiches had largely rewritten Scottish literary history, as well as ranging across the tradition of English literature, of which he wrote a two-volume critical history in 1960. However, it was as a specialist in the modern period that he was recruited to the team of eight that edited The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962). He went on contributing to revised editions of this mighty compendium for a couple of decades, and as it became a standard textbook in countless US colleges it became a healthy source of income.

In 1961 Daiches became the first Professor of English at Sussex University — an institution presided over by a Scottish vice-chancellor and dedicated to the broad interdisciplinary ethos of the Scottish tradition. Some felt he too much favoured fellow Scots when recruiting colleagues, but the department he created was both strong and popular. His fifties were a very good time for him. many of his books were widely used, and he achieved fame as presenter of a TV series about literature.

His retirement from Sussex in 1977 was clouded by the death of his wife in that year. In 1978 he married Hazel Neville, who died in 1986. Latterly he had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

Despite much unhappiness in his last years, he retained the gift of buoyancy. He was host and mentor to foreign scholars visiting the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, which he directed from 1980 to 1986. He was a relaxed and charming lecturer, inside and outside academic institutions.

He had been briefly active, at Oxford, in Marxist circles, and remained on the Left. He emphatically supported home rule for Scotland, and sat prominently at the launch in 1989 of the cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention which did the groundwork for the Scottish Parliament ten years later. He was appointed CBE in 1991.

Having produced many books, of many kinds, he published just one collection of original poems, harvested from a long life: A Weekly Scotsman and Other Poems (1994).

He is survived by two sons and a daughter of his first marriage.

David Daiches, CBE, scholar, was born on September 2, 1912. He died on July 15, 2005, aged 92.