Marx: A Biography (Illustrated Edition)

Author: (British) David McLellan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: His name and his work will continue to exist for centuries. — Engels Marx's mother was slender, and her attachment to Jewish faith seemed to be stronger than that of Marx's father. When the children were baptized in 1824, the eldest son Karl had reached school age, and she registered her religious affiliation as a Jew with an additional condition: she agreed to have the children baptized, but due to the reasons of her parents, she hoped to postpone her own baptism. Her father died in 1825, and she was baptized the same year. The few letters she left behind are written in ungrammatical German without any punctuation. Even her letters to relatives in the Netherlands were written in this German, which indicates that she spoke Yiddish at home with her parents. Because she was very attached to her family on her father's side, she always felt a bit like an outsider in Trier. The limited existing materials show her to be a simple, uneducated, hardworking woman whose activities were almost entirely confined to her own family, overworked, and experienced sorrow and tedious moral teachings. As a result, Helene Marx, it is highly likely that she maintained Jewish customs at home. This strong family tradition had an immeasurable influence on Marx. "All the traditions of the dead ancestors, like a nightmare, haunt the minds of the living," he later wrote. Jewish traditions, especially in that era, were not easily shaken off. Marx's two close friends, Heine and Hess, one converted to Protestantism due to cultural reasons, and the other openly declared himself an atheist; but until the end of their lives, they maintained a Jewish self-awareness. Even Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, who was only half Jewish, proudly declared in a provocative manner at a workers' meeting in East London: "I am a Jew." Jews in the Rhine region were often blamed for the increased poverty of the local peasants, and this status enhanced their collective self-awareness. Therefore, although civil equality was achieved under Napoleon's laws, the establishment of the Holy Alliance and its "Christian state" policy inevitably involved anti-Semitism with double weight, and religious Jews openly acknowledged a non-Christian faith, with many demanding to be an independent people. In many of the fierce and arduous debates Marx participated in, such as those with Ruge,, Bakunin, and Dühring, his Jewish identity was inevitably involved. Whether Marx himself had anti-Semitic tendencies has been a subject of much debate: undoubtedly, a superficial reading of his pamphlet "On the Jewish Question" seems to suggest this tendency; his countless letters contain derogatory terms for Jews; but this does not prove that he was always anti-Semitic. Some Marx scholars believe they have found the key to understanding the entire system of Marx's thought in his rabbinical lineage; but it should be noted that while some of his ideas, even his lifestyle, echo the prophetic tradition, this tradition itself is, to some extent, part of Western traditional thought; reducing Marx's thought to secularized Judaism seems too simplistic. It is clear that the ideas of orthodox Jews did not completely align with those of Marx's father. According to Eleanor's recollection, he "was deeply immersed in the free thoughts of 18th-century France about politics, religion, life, and art," completely agreeing with the views of the 18th-century French rationalists, completely believing in the power of reason, and believing that reason could explain the world and drive its progress. In this belief, French thinkers reconciled the British empiricism of Locke and Hume with the dogmatic rationalism of German classical philosophers such as Leibniz. They believed they could explain that human beings are fundamentally good and equally rational; that human suffering is entirely due to ignorance, partly stemming from miserable material conditions, and partly from the deliberate suppression or distortion of truth by those in power (whether on a secular or religious level), who maintained this deception for obvious interests, making humans toil in this deception: they believed that one main way to eliminate this situation was through education; another way was to change material living conditions.