21
One of the questions that invariably presents itself is the extent to which Marx's
subsequent fate was affected by the circumstances of his being a Jew.
The fact is that in the history of the German intelligentsia, in the history of
German thought, four Jews played a monumental part. They were: Marx, Lassalle,
Heine and Borne. More names could be enumerated, but these were the most
notable. It must be stated that the fact that Marx as well as Heine were Jews had a
good deal to do with the direction of their political development. If the university
intelligentsia protested against the socio-political regime weighing upon Germany,
then the Jewish intelligentsia felt this yoke even more keenly; one must read Borne
to realise the rigours of the German censorship, one must read his articles in which
he lashed philistine Germany and the police spirit that hovered over the land, to feel
how a person, the least bit enlightened, could not help protesting against these
abominations. The conditions were then particularly onerous for the Jew. Borne
spent his entire youth in the Jewish district in Frankfort, under conditions very
similar to those under which the Jews lived in the dark middle ages. Not less
burdensome were these conditions to Heine.
Marx found himself in somewhat different circumstances. These, however, do
not warrant the disposition of some biographers to deny this Jewish influence almost
entirely.
Karl Marx was the son of Heinrich Marx, a lawyer, a highly educated, cultured
and freethinking man. We know of Marx's father that he was a great admirer of the
eighteenth-century literature of the French Enlightenment, and that altogether the
French spirit seems to have pervaded the home of the Marxes. Marx's father liked to
read, and interested his son in the writings of the English philosopher Locke, as well
as the French writers Diderot and Voltaire.
Locke, one of the ideologists of the second so-called glorious English
Revolution, was, in philosophy, the opponent of the principle of innate ideas. He
instituted an inquiry into the origin of knowledge. Experience, he maintained, is the
source of all we know; ideas are the result of experience; knowledge is wholly
empirical; there are no innate ideas. The French materialists adopted the same
position. They held that everything in the human mind reacted in one way or other
through the sensory organs. The degree to which the atmosphere about Marx was
permeated with the ideas of the French materialists can be judged from the following
illustration.
22
Marx's father, who had long since severed all connections with religion,
continued ostensibly to be bound up with Judaism. He adopted Christianity in 1824,
when his son was already six years old. Franz Mehring (1846-1919) in his biography
of Marx tried to prove that this conversion had been motivated by the elder Marx's
determination to gain the right to enter the more cultured Gentile society. This is
only partly true. The desire to avoid the new persecutions which fell upon the Jews
since 1815, when the Rhine province was returned to Germany, must have had its
influence. We should note that Marx himself, though spiritually not in the least
attached to Judaism, took a great interest in the Jewish question during his early
years. He retained some contact with the Jewish community at Treves. In endless
petitions the Jews had been importuning the government that one or another form of
oppression be removed. In one case we know that Marx's close relatives and the rest
of the Jewish community turned to him and asked him to write a petition for them.
This happened when he was twenty-four gears old.
All this indicates that Marx did not altogether shun his old kin, that he took
an interest in the Jewish question and also a part in the struggle for the emancipation
of the Jew.
This did not prevent him from drawing a sharp line of demarcation between
poor Jewry with which he felt a certain propinquity and the opulent representatives
of financial Jewry.
Treves, the city where Marx was born and where several of his ancestors were
rabbis, was in the Rhine province. This was one of the Prussian provinces where
industry and politics were in a high state of effervescence. Even now it is one of the
most industrialised regions in Germany. There are Solingen and Remscheid, two
cities famous for their steel products. There is the centre of the German textile
industry -- Barmen-Elberfeld. In Marx's home town, Treves, the leather and weaving
industries were developed. It was an old medieval city, which had played a big part in
the tenth century. It was a second Rome, for it was the See of the Catholic bishop. It
was also an industrial city, and during the French Revolution, it too was in the grip of
a strong revolutionary paroxysm. The manufacturing industry, however, was here
much less active than in the northern parts of the province, where the centres of the
metallurgical and cotton industries were located. It lies on the banks of the Moselle, a
tributary of the Rhine, in the centre of the wine manufacturing district, a place where
remnants of communal ownership of land were still to be found, where the peasantry
23
constituted a Glass of small landowners not yet imbued with the spirit of the tight-
fisted, financially aggressive peasant-usurer, where they made wine and knew how to
be happy. In this sense Treves preserved the traditions of the middle ages. From
several sources we gather that at this time Marx was interested in the condition of
the peasant. He would make excursions to the surrounding villages and thoroughly
familiarise himself with the life of the peasant. A few years later he exhibited this
knowledge of the details of peasant life and industry in his writings.
In high school Marx stood out as one of the most capable students, a fact of
which the teachers took cognisance. We have a casual document in which a teacher
made some very flattering comments on one of [Earl's compositions. Marx was given
an assignment to write a composition on "How Young Men Choose a Profession." He
viewed this subject from a unique aspect. He proceeded to prove that there could be
no free choice of a profession, that man was born into circumstances which
predetermined his choice, for they moulded his weltanschauung. Here one may
discern the germ of the Materialist Conception of History. After what was said of his
father, however, it is obvious that in the above we have evidence of the degree to
which Marx, influenced by his father, absorbed the basic ideas of the French
materialists. It was the form in which the thought was embodied that was markedly
original.
At the age of sixteen, Marx completed his high school course, and in 1835 he
entered the University of Bonn. By this time revolutionary disturbances had well-
nigh ceased. University life relapsed into its normal routine.
At the university, Marx plunged passionately into his studies. We are in
possession of a very curious document, a letter of the nineteen-year-old Marx to his
father.
The father appreciated and understood his son perfectly. It is sufficient to
read his reply to Marx to be convinced of the high degree of culture the man
possessed. Rarely do we find in the history of revolutionists a case where a son meets
with the full approval and understanding of his father, where a son turns to his father
as to a very intimate friend. In accord with the spirit of the times, Marx was in search
of a philosophy -- a teaching which would enable him to give a theoretical foundation
to the implacable hatred he felt for the then prevailing political and social system.
Marx became a follower of the Hegelian philosophy, in the form which it had
assumed with the Young Hegelians who had broken away most radically from old
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