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Part I: The Young Man Marx
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Marx was descended from famous rabbis on both sides of his family going back to at least the fifteenth century. And records show that in Trier, the town where Marx was born in 1818, almost all the rabbis of the past had been his paternal kin. His father’s brother was a rabbi there and Karl became a boyhood friend of the rabbi’s son. Marx’s own father, Heschel, a lawyer, had converted to Christianity a few months before Karl was born—but only under extreme pressure. With the French defeat in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Trier was returned to Prussian control. At thirty-eight years of age, with a wife and child to support, Heschel Marx was faced with the decision under Prussian law either to renounce his ancestral religion or to give up his career as a lawyer. Heschel, supported by several leading Christian lawyers, appealed to Berlin for special dispensation. The appeal was denied, and Heschel was baptized a Lutheran sometime in 1817. But Henriette Marx, Karl’s mother, refused conversion until late in her life, after all eight of her children had long since been baptized as Christians. It was, you would think, a memory of humiliation that would have imprinted the young Marx with a bias against the church rather than against the synagogue, but that was not to be the case. Instead, Marx attended the local Protestant Volksschule in a town that was 90 percent Roman Catholic, and as a minority became an 15 P A R T I The Young Man Marx enthusiastic student of Evangelical theology from which he learned to think of “the Jew” as an abstract category representing greed and material preoccupation. It was a point of view that Marx was not to relinquish when, in his university days and studying philosophy, he renounced his Christian religion and proclaimed himself an atheist. His first interest at the University of Bonn had been in Romantic poetry. But by the time he transferred to the University of Berlin in 1837 he wrote in a letter to his father that his interest had turned from poetry to philosophy. Marx joined the Berlin Doctors Club1 and confessed to his father that he had passed from Kant and Fichte “into the clutches” of Hegel. Earlier, while in Bonn, he had met and fallen in love with Jenny von Westphalen, who returned the favor. They would marry and enjoy a close and lifelong relationship. Late in his life, Marx wrote to Jenny: “There are actually many females in the world, and some among them are beautiful. But where could I find again a face whose every feature, even every wrinkle, is a reminder of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life.”2 And this he wrote in spite of their years of exile and poverty. Having publicly associated himself with the cause of the Prussian working class, Marx effectively ended any possibility of academic employment. He became a journalist and by 1843, because of his public views on politics and Prussian state religion, found himself exiled from Germany to Paris where he met the man who would become his permanent friend and supporter, Friedrich Engels. The two discovered that they shared a passion for Feuerbach and his criticism not only of Christianity but of the philosophical idealism of Hegel. I have selected for this first section several writings from the young man Marx that reflect his warm personality and his early enthusiasm for social justice. Included also are writings that evidence a growing disenchantment with Christianity and religion in general in favor of critical philosophy and active advocacy for what Marx called “the impoverished, the socially and politically deprived masses.”3 If the first turn against religion was practical and moral, Marx developed a theoretical criticism under the influence of Feuerbach (see Parts II and IV). I have included here as well his essay “On the Jewish Question” which displays simultaneously and ironically an unfortunate stereotyping of Judaism as a religion even as it argues that the reformation of society must look beyond all religions. For Marx emancipatory practices require emancipation not from a particular religion but from religion in general. He came to this conclusion because the state religion that he saw and experienced had not simply abandoned the poor and working classes but had become an ideological weapon of the ruling class in Germany and in England. It was the only religion Marx would ever know. 16 Part I: The...