Karl Marx
Page 2
PART I
Shaping
1
The Son
KARL MARX WAS BORN in the southwest German city of Trier in 1818, at the end of three decades of revolutionary upheaval and counterrevolutionary response that shaped the lives of his parents, strongly influenced his upbringing and education, and created political passions and political enemies that would remain with him throughout his life. Trier remains today, even as it was in Marx’s youth, a very old city, a Roman foundation, like many urban centers on Germany’s western fringes. It had reached its high point in the third century ad, when it glimmered briefly as the capital of the Roman Empire, but had been in almost continuous decline for the next 1,500 years. As late as the 1840s, the city seemed like the wraith of a past civilization, large vacant spaces within its walls—some employed for farming, some just empty and unused—eloquent testimony to a distant past overshadowing a modest present.1
The economic changes of the modern world seemed to have passed the city by. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Trier possessed no industry; the railroad only reached it in 1860. Commerce was equally unavailing; the peasants of the Eifel and Hunsrück highlands, to the north and south of Trier respectively, were badly impoverished and had few goods to bring to market. Perhaps more promising was the viticulture practiced in the valley of the Moselle River, where Trier is situated, but for most of this era Moselle Valley winegrowing was either faring poorly or its product was being sold directly by producers, bypassing the city and its merchants.
What remained for the city was another Roman legacy, its close ties to the Catholic Church. A center of Christianity since Roman times, with a resident bishop from the third century onward, Trier was a deeply and profoundly Catholic city, whose inhabitants had vehemently rejected the Reformation. Yet even there, the city’s eighteenth-century archbishops, who were also Electors, worldly princes of the Holy Roman Empire, moved their capital city to Koblenz, on the Rhine River, abandoning Trier to a declining university and its many monasteries. The city council’s 1788 complaint made all too clear the lack of economic prospects: “neither court nor nobility nor garrison and absolutely no manufacturing is present in Trier; the few persons of quality and the university, currently lying buried under its upheaval, are worth little; in current circumstances, there are simply no sources of earning a living on which we can count, so that we can foresee, with all certainty, that the unusually large number of poor burghers will be increased still more.”2
Social and political institutions in the city of Trier, in the Electorate to which it belonged, and in the Holy Roman Empire, the governing body loosely tying together the hundreds of small, medium-sized, and a few large states in central Europe, as was generally the case in continental Europe before the French Revolution of 1789, were organized in an arrangement that historians call “the society of orders.” In this sociopolitical world, rights and privileges, as well as obligations and restrictions, pertained not to individuals but to groups, whose membership came from status derived at birth, or from membership in a religious confession. Members of different groups possessed very different rights and privileges, generally set down in legally binding charters, such as the privileges of the Catholic burghers of the Catholic city of Trier to practice crafts and to deny Protestants residence there. The Catholic clergy and the many petty nobles residing in the vicinity in Trier had the privilege of collecting seigneurial dues from peasants whose land lay in their jurisdictions. Although the practices of the society of orders in Trier and its vicinity, as was true in Western Europe more generally, were not so fierce and harsh as they were in the eastern reaches of the Continent, they were far removed from contemporary, or even nineteenth-century conceptions of fairness and equity.
There was one particular group within this society of orders whose legal position was determined by its religious peculiarity, namely, the Jews. For Europeans of the eighteenth century, Jews formed a “nation,” whose members were spread all across Europe. This Jewish “nation” should not be confused with its modern namesake, in a world of nation-states, since pre-1789 European states were the patrimony of their rulers, not the product of nations. Rather, it was one of many groups within the society of orders, whose place was guaranteed by its own charters, although these tended to contain more obligations and restrictions than rights and privileges. Jews had to pay special taxes and dues to their lords for the privilege of residing within their territory, and were generally restricted in their choice of occupation to commercial and financial enterprises. There were often special restrictions on Jews’ place of residence, and their social relations with Christians. Today, we would say that the Jews were victims of discrimination; but in a society of orders, where different rights and privileges pertained to members of different groups, there was no ideal of equality from which complaints of discriminatory treatment could be derived.3
This was certainly the case in Trier, some of whose Jewish inhabitants paid their “protection money” and yearly “New Years Donation” to the Elector, while others paid these funds to the cathedral chapter, monastic communities, or local noblemen, who were their overlords. The Elector’s “Regulation of the Jews” carefully circumscribed occupational prospects, limited the rate of interest Jews could charge for loans, and regulated their financial transactions. It set down the yearly taxes the Jewish community had to pay, and made the Jews jointly responsible for the collection of these taxes—a typical procedure of a society of orders, based on groups rather than individuals. The Jewish population of the Trier Electorate was small, mostly residing in little towns and villages, eking out a meager living dealing in cattle. The Jewish community of Trier itself was even smaller, numbering on the order of one hundred people, just over 1 percent of the municipal population. Like the city itself, the Jewish community was marginal and undistinguished, not to be compared with the larger and more active Jewish settlements in such western German cities as Frankfurt, Worms, or Mainz. Trier’s Jewry did, however, include a handful of families who were somewhat more affluent and influential, wholesale merchants or professionals.4
Karl Marx’s paternal ancestors came from this group, and Marx is usually described as being descended from a long line of Trier rabbis. As so often with instances of common knowledge about Marx’s life, this one is only half-true. Marx’s paternal ancestors did include Aaron Lwow, a seventeenth-century Trier rabbi, and his son, Joshua Heschel, rabbi in Trier from 1723 to 1734. This line ended with Joshua Heschel’s son Moses Lwow, Trier rabbi from 1764 to 1788. It was his daughter Chaje, also called Ewa, who was Karl Marx’s grandmother. Her husband, Mordechai or Marx Lewy, was not from Trier at all, but came from the little town of Postolprti in distant Bohemia, today’s Czech Republic. His antecedents show how the Jewish “nation” was spread out across state boundaries in old regime Europe. This feature of Jewish life also appears in Marx Lewy’s initial residence in Western Europe, in the city of Saarlouis, not far from Trier, an eastern outpost of the kingdom of France, seized in the wars of Louis XIV. Marx Lewy was the rabbi of the town’s Jewish community; in 1777, his son, Heschel (at different points in his life calling himself Henri or Heinrich), Karl Marx’s father, was born there.5
The Electorate of Trier, the Holy Roman Empire, the society of orders, and the place of Jews in this social hierarchy all came to a sudden, drastic, and violent end in the decade of the 1790s. The outbreak of war in 1792 between the revolutionary government of France and the Holy Roman Empire—actually, between France and virtually all the powers of Europe—put Trier on the front lines, as it had been in wars over the previous century and a half. On August 8, 1794, French armies, fighting on behalf of a revolutionary republic, stormed the Austrian positions on the heights overlooking the city, and, the following day, marched into Trier. The Austrian defenders had retreated and the Electors’ officials all fled, leaving the city fathers on their own. Dressed in festive regalia, they came out and ceremonially presented the keys of the city to the commanding
French general.6
Unlike the soldiers of the French kings, who had previously occupied Trier in order to seize territory and to gain strategic advantages in a wider war, the troops of the revolutionary French Republic were determined to combine military occupation with political and socioeconomic transformation, to bring their revolution, by force of arms, to the lands they conquered. It would be, as the jurist Michael Franz Müller remembered twenty-five years later:
a just about total upheaval in the constitution of the church and state, in the relationship between church and state, in the administration of justice, in commerce, manufacturing and crafts, in customs and the national mode of thought, in the arts and sciences in land cultivation and much besides.7
If anything, Müller understated the extent of upheaval during two decades of French rule in Trier. The occupiers abolished the Electorate of Trier, tore the city and its surrounding territory out of the Holy Roman Empire, and, in 1797, formally annexed it to the French Republic. Chartered privileges of the society of orders were replaced by a government in which all citizens were equal under the law, and in which the basis of sovereignty was no longer the hereditary property of a monarch but the will of the nation. Guilds were abolished and occupational freedom instituted; seigneurial dues came to an end. The property of monasteries and the nobility was confiscated and sold at auction—in Trier and vicinity, about 9,000 hectares (the use of metric measures was another revolutionary step), or 14 percent of useful agricultural land, including most of the very best vineyards.
Although initiated by the occupiers, these measures found a modest degree of support within Trier itself. Unlike larger cities in the Rhineland, such as Cologne, Mainz, and Koblenz, where the adherents of the new, revolutionary principles organized political clubs and tried to mobilize popular support, Trier’s sympathizers with the imported revolution were fewer in number and less well organized. Most of them were intellectuals and even former public officials, servants of the Archbishop/Elector, adherents of the reforming ideas of the Enlightenment. These included Johann Heinrich Wyttenbach, who had dropped out of the theological seminary in Trier when his teachers rejected the ideas of Kant, and had been a member of Trier’s reading club, in which Enlightened ideas were exchanged, until the Elector dissolved it as potentially subversive. Decades later, Wyttenbach would be an important influence on the young Karl Marx.8
The results of the efforts of the French occupiers and their local sympathizers to turn the burghers of Trier into citizens of a revolutionary republic were less than they had hoped. In spite of the publication of revolutionary newspapers, the organization of patriotic festivals, and the planting of trees of liberty, enthusiasm for the new state of affairs was conspicuously lacking. Living off the land, the French revolutionary army seized its supplies from the areas it had conquered. No sooner had the occupying troops liberated Trier from the tyranny of the old regime than they demanded the enormous sum of 1.5 million livres from the city’s inhabitants to support the war effort. When the municipality could not raise the sum, the French confiscated all the gold and silver they could find, even seizing people’s shoe buckles. Finally, the municipal government had to take out a loan to meet the rest of the imposition; almost thirty years later, in 1823, the city still owed the depressingly large sum of 56,000 Prussian talers on the loan.
An even more unpopular group of measures taken by the new revolutionary regime stemmed from its anti-clericalism. Rejecting a Catholic Church that had been closely tied to the society of orders the revolutionaries were determined to destroy, they created their own Deist religion appropriate to a republic of equal citizens, disestablished the Catholic Church, sold its properties, prohibited its public religious functions, and turned Trier’s many monasteries into hospitals, barracks, jails, or ammunition storehouses. The city’s cathedral housed the barrels of wine the French army confiscated from the monks. Trier’s deeply Catholic inhabitants boycotted the patriotic festivals of the republic and its new religion, and continued to engage in the prohibited processions of their strongly held faith.
Napoleon Bonaparte, who ended the revolutionary regime in France, took measures aimed at reconciling the inhabitants of Trier and of western Germany more generally with French rule. Following on Napoleon’s victories in the field, French armies and their requisitions moved deep into central and Southern Europe, meaning that the burghers of Trier would no longer have to meet their demands. The city received administrative functions in the Napoleonic imperium as the seat of the prefect, the chief administrative office of the Department of the Saare, and a court of appeals—such government offices providing potential income and jobs the Trier city council had decried as lacking at the end of the 1780s. When Napoleon, having declared himself emperor, toured the eastern marches of his realm in 1804, he received a tumultuous welcome almost everywhere and certainly in Trier itself. Perhaps the most important feature of consolidating his rule, Napoleon reconciled with the Catholic Church, signing a Concordat with the Pope in 1801. The agreement did not restore the privileged position of the Church as it existed in the old regime; most church lands remained seized; indeed, the emperor, needing funds for his wars, hastened their auction. But Trier was once again the home of a bishop—one who actually resided in the city, unlike his predecessor. In 1810, Trier’s Catholics publicly demonstrated their faith by celebrating the return of their most precious sacred relic, hustled out of the city before the appearance of the revolutionary armies in the 1790s—the Holy Shroud, the seamless garment of the crucified Christ, described in the Gospel of St. John—with a public exhibition and a enormous pilgrimage drawing tens of thousands of the faithful. The relic has remained in its case in Trier Cathedral ever since. Its public exhibition and pilgrimage have been repeated on a number of occasions, most recently in 1996.9
The upheavals of two decades of revolutionary and Napoleonic rule would create an exceptionally turbulent period for Trier’s Jewish minority, one in which the tantalizing possibility of a fundamentally different position for the Jews in state and society was promised, subjected to public observation and critical scrutiny, but never quite realized. The promise of the revolution to the Jews was the abolition of the society of orders and its replacement with a regime of free and equal citizens, one in which religious affiliation was not politically relevant. As the first prefect of the Department of the Saare, Joseph Bexon d’Ormechville, put it at the end of 1801, “all distinctions between citizens on account of the religion they profess” were “absolutely contrary to the principles of the government.”10 In theory—although the practice, especially as interpreted by state officials at the local level, did not always turn out quite so positively—the old regime restriction on Jews’ occupations, on their residence, on their relations with Christians, and the special taxes Jews had to pay, were to disappear.
The redefinition of political belonging that accompanied the new, revolutionary concept of citizenship went along with a new, revolutionary understanding of the nation, as a body of free and equal citizens, as the source of sovereignty. There was no room in such a concept for the old regime Jewish nation, a separate corporate body of the society of orders. Exactly what the end of this old regime nation would mean for Jews was not always clear and remained in dispute for much of the nineteenth century. For the Jews of Trier, it was the emperor Napoleon who offered the first answer to this question. Jews in his realm would have to conform to cultural norms of the society in which they lived: abandon their laws of ritual purity when they served in the armed forces, take family names rather than referring to themselves by their patronymic, organize their religious practice in a system of consistories based on the Protestants of his realm. Most controversially, in 1808, Napoleon issued his “infamous decree,” which required Jewish businessmen to obtain a “certificate of morality,” with the authorities testifying to the legitimacy of their business practices, particularly that they lent money in honest and above-board fashion, in order to engage in commerce. This d
ecree strongly encouraged Jews to bring up their children to work in more “useful” and “productive” occupations than lending money or acting as middlemen.
The emperor’s conditions for joining the French nation were difficult and controversial, leading to a split in Jewish ranks. Jews living in the countryside rejected the idea, clinging to their long-established religious practices and way of life. In Trier itself, by contrast, particularly among the Jewish community’s leading families, Napoleon’s demands found a more favorable hearing. Trier’s rabbi, Samuel Marx—son of Marx Lewy, the family choosing to take Marx as a surname, which is why Karl Marx’s paternal ancestors were not named Marx—was a delegate to the Sanhedrin, the 1806 gathering of Jewish notables from across Napoleon’s empire that created the new system of Jewish consistories. Under Samuel Marx’s leadership, the Trier Consistory called on the Jews of the Saare Department to be loyal citizens of the nation, to serve their emperor in the armed forces, to avoid usury and questionable business practices, and to bring their sons up to learn a craft. An important ally of Samuel in this task was his younger brother Heinrich, who was the Consistory’s secretary.