Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Heinrich found his job difficult and frustrating. He was responsible for collecting the assessments on the Jewish population of the Saare Department, not only for the work of the consistory and the salary of his brother the rabbi but also for the debts that the old regime Jewry of the Electorate of Trier had accumulated to make their annual tribute payments to the Elector. Jews living in the rural areas, not very well off to start with, not particularly sympathetic to the consistory’s aspirations, and facing a threat to their livelihood from Napoleon’s infamous decree, refused to pay. At the same time, the central consistory in Paris delivered a constant stream of orders and requests for information and for funds, complaining about the inability of the Jews in the province to follow their orders. The central consistory was particularly hard on Heinrich, their officials asserting that he lacked the capability with the French language to carry out his task as Trier Consistory secretary.11

  Difficult as the Napoleonic administration and the differences among the Jewish population were for Heinrich and the members of the consistory, the attitudes of the Christian inhabitants of Trier and its vicinity were an even greater problem. As the consistory complained to the prefect in 1811, Christians were unwilling to accept Jews as equal: “to be named a Jew is all that is needed to be rejected everywhere.”12 The Jews’ identification with the new regime, which for all its problematic features promised an improvement in their condition, meant that opposition to Napoleonic rule would be focused on the Jews.

  The year 1809 had been a difficult one for the emperor. Many of his soldiers were bogged down fighting a guerrilla war in Spain, and the Austrians had once again gone to war with him. Caught short of troops, he was forced to increase the draft call sharply, a broadly unpopular move. While there were draft riots in rural areas, disturbances in Trier, where gendarmes and soldiers were stationed, never came to pass—until August 15, as the Jews were decorating their synagogue in celebration of Napoleon’s birthday. That day and evening, hostile crowds gathered in the streets, beating up the Jews and smashing the synagogue windows with stones. The police were nowhere to be seen, evidently content to let hostility to the regime be deflected onto the Jews.13

  Just how much these difficulties and evident hostility played a role in Heinrich Marx’s decision to leave Trier around 1811 is unclear. But it does seem likely that the frustrations of his position, and its low salary—about that of a primary schoolteacher, a notoriously badly paid occupation, even assuming he was paid regularly, which he probably was not—played a role in his move to the Westphalian city of Osnabrück, at the northern end of Napoleon’s empire. He worked there as a court translator, and had plans to obtain a position as a notary—an important position, then as today, in Roman Law countries, where notaries do much of the work of drawing up contracts and wills performed by attorneys in Common Law jurisdictions. But leaving Trier did not mean leaving hostility to the Jews behind. The municipality of Osnabrück refused to grant Heinrich permission to establish a permanent domicile, a necessity if he wished to be a notary.14 At the beginning of 1813 he moved again, returning to the Rhineland to study at the School of Law in Koblenz, which the French had set up to train practitioners in the new legal system they had created. If he followed the standard curriculum, in his ten months of studies he would have taken classes on Roman Law, an introduction to criminal and civil law, and a course on civil and criminal procedure. At the conclusion of his studies, he was granted a “certificate of capacity”—the lowest level of course completion offered at the school, taken only by a small number of its students, primarily older ones from a more modest background who could not afford a full three- or four-year course of study.15

  For Heinrich Marx, the French Revolution and its aftermath offered an opportunity to escape the narrowly circumscribed social and political position of Jews in the society of orders. He would no longer be a member of the Jewish nation but a French citizen of the Jewish religion, no longer a moneylender or middleman but a productive citizen, practicing a legal profession—one of the many barred to Jews before 1789. His path to that end was hard for him to follow: most of his fellow Jews rejected his redefinition of Jewishness; the Christian inhabitants of Trier and Osnabrück did not seem ready to welcome him into the ranks of free and equal citizens. His aspirations to study law—marked by almost certainly false claims to have studied at the School of Law in Koblenz before he was enrolled there, and to have studied law in Berlin before the University of Berlin was actually founded—were greater than his ability to do so.16

  In November 1813, he seemed close to having reached his goal, only to see it dissolve in the fortunes of great power warfare. In the ten months Heinrich Marx was peacefully studying law in Koblenz, Napoleon’s empire, which had provided the entire legal framework for the new possibilities Jews might have, was collapsing. The emperor’s hubristic decision to invade Russia in 1812 met its nemesis in the winter of 1812–13 when his invading Grande Armée was destroyed. Although he raised new armies in the spring and summer of 1813, at the famous Battle of the Nations in Leipzig that October the allied European powers completely defeated the emperor’s forces and forced them to retreat westward toward the French borders. Heinrich Marx was the very last student to complete a course of study at the School of Law in Koblenz; just six weeks later, Prussian troops reached and crossed the Rhine River, bringing Napoleon’s rule in western Germany to an end.17

  THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA of 1814–15 that reorganized Europe following Napoleon’s defeat granted Trier and most of Germany west of the Rhine to the Prussian kingdom. The initial decades of Prussian rule would prove extraordinarily unpopular in Trier. While the French may have been godless subversives, they were, at least, Catholic godless subversives. The Prussian ruling house and its leading officials and generals were Protestants, a religion most inhabitants of deeply Catholic Trier viewed with suspicion and hostility. The first three decades of Prussian rule were marked by large incidents and small, in which the officials of the Protestant kingdom insulted the sensibilities of their Catholic subjects.

  More profane reasons complemented spiritual ones in inciting hostility to Prussian domination. The Prussians actually increased taxes over their already high Napoleonic levels. Property taxes doubled, which led to especially bad feelings, since the property of large, noble landowners in the eastern provinces of the Prussian monarchy was exempt from taxation. An excise tax on food entering the city walls increased the cost of basic essentials. Following the initiation of the Prussian-sponsored all-German tariff union of 1834, the Zollverein, Moselle Valley wines faced strong competition from climatically more favorable viticultural regions in southern Germany, leading to a collapse in wine prices. The tax on wine, though, did not decline as prices did. While the defeat of Napoleon meant a long period of peace in Europe, the Prussians continued the French practice of military conscription, only their policy was actually rather more onerous since, unlike the French, they did not allow draftees to purchase a substitute to serve in their stead.

  Prussian rule in Trier was colonial in nature, the oppressive domination of an alien government, backed up by a heavily armed garrison, engaging in economic exploitation for the benefit of the inhabitants of Prussia’s eastern, core provinces. The reckoning with such a regime would come in the Revolution of 1848, when Trier’s inhabitants would smash the insignia of Prussian authority, drive off the tax collectors, assault government officials, openly and vociferously demand that Trier secede from Prussia, and engage in a series of brawls with soldiers from the garrison, ultimately escalating into a full-blown insurrection. It was only suppressed when the general commanding the fortress turned his artillery on the town and threatened to blow it up.18

  Understanding some of the problems they would face in incorporating the Rhineland into their kingdom, the Prussians proved surprisingly conciliatory about employing officials of the former Napoleonic regime. Johann Heinrich Wyttenbach, the sympathizer with the revolutionary republican government of the
1790s, had spent most of the Napoleonic era as principal of the Collège de Trèves, Trier’s secondary school, as the French called it. Following 1815, he became the director of the renamed secondary school: the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium. This policy of taking over into Prussian service former Napoleonic officials was particularly pronounced in the judiciary.19

  Such a policy offered Heinrich Marx his chance. In 1814, he moved back to Trier and set himself up as an attorney, quickly being admitted to practice before the court of appeals. The Prussians transferred the court of appeals from Trier to Cologne, but they created a midlevel court in its place, a Landgericht, and Heinrich Marx continued his practice with it. Like other graduates of the Koblenz School of Law, Marx strove to reconcile the Napoleonic judicial past with the present reality of Prussian rule, sending a memorandum to the Prussian authorities calling for the retention of the Napoleonic Code as the basis of the legal system in Prussia’s new Rhine Province. This was a hotly debated question for a number of decades; but in the end, the Napoleonic Code of Civil Law remained in force in Prussia’s Rhenish possessions until the introduction of the All-German Code of Civil Law in 1900.20

  There was just one problem with Heinrich Marx’s plans: his religion. Ironically, this problem emerged from measures the Prussian government had taken to improve the status of Jews under its rule. In 1812, the reforming Prussian chancellor Prince von Hardenberg had issued an Edict of Emancipation for the Jews of the Prussian kingdom, granting them freedom of residence and occupation, and the right to serve in the armed forces. The edict had reserved for future decision the question of whether Jews would be allowed to work as government officials. By the end of the decade of the 1810s, the Prussian government had decided that they would not, including attorneys in private practice such as Heinrich Marx in the category of government officials.21

  Marx hoped that an exception would be made in his case, and the Prussian commissioner in charge of reorganization of the judiciary in the Rhineland did recommend that Marx and the two other Jews working in legal occupations be allowed to continue; but the authorities refused to reconsider, part of an increasingly conservative turn in Prussian government policy. In these circumstances, Heinrich Marx took the decision to change his religion: at some time in the late 1810s or early 1820s, most probably toward the end of 1819, he converted to Protestantism.22

  Historians have sometimes made a lot of this decision, some suggesting that Karl Marx deeply despised his father as an unprincipled sellout because of it, and seeing this contempt for his father as integral to Marx’s future radicalism.23 Even if we ignore very convincing evidence of Karl’s filial devotion, this whole line of reasoning involves projecting twentieth-century identity politics back into a previous era. Conversion was a common option for central European Jews interested in engaging in public life during the first half of the nineteenth century. There were numerous examples on the left and center of the political spectrum, and even some on the right. Friedrich Julius Stahl, one of the most important figures among Prussia’s conservatives, both a political and a parliamentary leader, and a constitutional theorist, an important intellectual influence on Bismarck, was a converted Jew. In Trier itself, most of the members of the leading families of the eighteenth-century Jewish community had converted to Christianity by the 1830s.24

  In August and September 1819, the Hep Hep riots broke out in central Europe, in which mobs attacked Jews, their businesses and their homes. Particularly pronounced in the cities of Würzburg, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, although occurring elsewhere, anti-Semitic assaults centered on retail establishments that Jews had not been privileged to run before 1789, and on expelling Jews from public spaces previously reserved for Christians. In other words, the rioters intended to thrust Jews back into their subordinate condition of the society of orders. Although there were no disturbances in the vicinity of Trier and little in the Rhineland more generally, the riots were major news, discussed and portrayed in detail in the press, and there can be no doubt that Heinrich Marx would have known about them. For someone whose life over the previous decade had been one long effort to escape the limited circumstances of the society of orders, to enjoy new possibilities for his occupation and his citizenship, the prospect of being forced to return to old regime conditions must have been the final impetus in making his decision to become a Christian.25

  Heinrich Marx could have stuck with his Judaism and renounced practicing law, although that would have meant grave economic difficulties for himself and his newly started family. There was a younger contemporary who took such a step, the Hamburg jurist Gabriel Riesser, the leading advocate of Jewish emancipation in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century. After receiving his law degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1826, Riesser was barred from practicing law because of his religion. Instead, he published a periodical, Der Jude (The Jew), devoted to demanding equal rights for Jews in central Europe. Riesser, though, came from a much more affluent and better-connected family than Marx did, and could afford not to practice his profession. He also lived in the city-state of Hamburg, a relatively liberal polity, where his magazine could appear, not in the strictly governed, highly censored Prussian kingdom.26

  A more interesting question is why Heinrich Marx, in converting to Christianity, chose to become a Protestant rather than a Catholic. The other members of Trier’s onetime leading Jewish families who converted all chose Catholicism, as did Heinrich’s brother Cerf (or Hirsch).27 Going from Judaism to Protestantism in deeply Catholic Trier meant exchanging one form of minority existence for another.

  The answer to this question brings us to the heart of Heinrich Marx’s views on the world that helped shape the outlook of his son. As might be expected from someone who had accepted the principles of the French Revolution in their Napoleonic form, Heinrich was a strong adherent of the Enlightenment. Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, reported after her father’s death that Heinrich had read Voltaire aloud to the young Karl Marx. We can take this secondhand reminiscence as we wish, but we also find Heinrich writing to Karl when he was at the university, praising the Deist beliefs of Leibnitz, Locke, and Newton—a veritable Enlightenment trinity. After Heinrich Marx died, a notary meticulously inventoried his private library. The list contained mostly law books, but also a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man.28

  In early nineteenth-century Germany, Protestantism would have been the religion of choice for a supporter of rationalist, Enlightened ideas. By no means all Protestant theologians, to say nothing of ordinary pastors or laypeople, supported the Enlightenment, and by the early nineteenth century there was a strong countertendency in the making: “the Awakening” (contemporaries also described it using the older term “Pietism”), a central European version of born-again Christianity. Still, particularly among the Protestant intellectual middle class, the wish to reconcile the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment with the tenets of revealed religion was very widespread. There certainly were Enlightened Catholics, such as Trier’s first bishop under Prussian rule, Joseph von Hommer, but opponents of Enlightenment rationalism were gathering strength and influence in the Catholic Church. Heinrich Marx witnessed firsthand one of their first public demonstrations, the pilgrimage to the Holy Shroud of Trier in 1810. Its repetition in 1844 would spur an angry and massive reaction among Germany’s rationalist and Enlightened intellectuals.29

  This connection between Protestantism and Enlightenment was already evident in Heinrich Marx’s thinking some years before his conversion. In 1815, he wrote a memorandum to the new Prussian authorities in the Rhineland, calling on them to abolish Napoleon’s infamous decree against the Jews. In the course of that essay he noted that “the mild spirit of Christianity could often be darkened by fanaticism, and the pure morality of the Gospels polluted by ignorant priests.”30 Both the sentiments and, particularly, the language in which they were expressed—“fanaticism,” “pure morality of the Gospels,” “ignorant priests”—reinterpre
ted Protestant criticisms of Catholicism in Enlightened terms, pointing toward a liberal and Enlightened Protestantism, not entirely separate from Deism, that would become Heinrich Marx’s Christianity of choice.

  Trier’s Protestants were ready to welcome the new convert. The Protestant Prussian officials, many of them thinking along Enlightened lines, ruling a disaffected Catholic Rhineland, needed all the allies they could get, and took them in the form of Enlightened Catholics, such as Trier’s bishop, or the attorney with a Napoleonic past willing to renounce his formal allegiance to Judaism. Continuing in this vein would require that the connections between Enlightened and rationalist ways of thinking, the Protestant Church, and the Prussian state be preserved. Even in Heinrich Marx’s lifetime, this connection would prove increasingly strained; in the life and times of his son, it would collapse completely.

  A NECESSARY PRECONDITION TO setting himself up as a practicing attorney was another step Heinrich Marx took in 1814: he got married. His bride, Henriette Presburg, eleven years his junior, was from Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, member of a Jewish family which, as the name shows, was originally from Hungary (the city of Pressburg, today’s Slovak capital of Bratislava), who had settled in the Netherlands during the eighteenth century and had been quite successful in their mercantile ventures. Henriette’s younger sister, Sophie, married the businessman Lion Philips, who handled his sister-in-law’s finances after her husband’s death, and became a friend and confidant of the adult Karl Marx. Sophie and Lion’s grandsons were the founders of the electrical equipment and electronics multinational that bears the family name.31