Anticipating the possible consequences of the annexation of the Rhineland to Prussia, a Jewish delegation, headed by the leaders of the Jewish community in Frankfurt (then as now a center of banking), went to Vienna and petitioned Metternich not to revoke the rights of Jews who had enjoyed twenty years of civic equality under French rule, but to no avail. The matter was referred to the decision of the new authorities now established under the arrangements of the Congress of Vienna.
After some deliberations, the Prussian authorities in the Rhineland revoked Jewish emancipation and imposed on the Jews in the newly annexed territories the status of Jews in Prussia proper. The major principle, following the precepts of what it meant to be a Christian state, implied that Jews could not be in a situation of authority over Christians: they could not serve as lawyers, judges, civil servants, teachers in schools or universities. In other words, the Rhenish Jews were de-emancipated, thrown back to where they—or their parents—had been a generation ago.
Among the tremendous consequences of the post-1815 Restoration, the change in the status of Rhenish Jews was obviously a minor and marginal footnote, and is hardly noted or mentioned by historians, but it gave rise to a totally new situation, affecting a few thousand Jews who within one generation were both granted emancipation and then drastically denied it, something that had never happened until that time to any Jewish group. The fact that most of those affected were, almost by definition, educated professional middle-class people, for whom emancipation had opened the road to being full-fledged citizens in an open society and were now thrown back into almost a medieval status, had far-reaching consequences.
In the years between 1815 and 1848 one can discern a deep feeling of alienation and consequent political radicalization among members of the Jewish intelligentsia in the Rhineland and the emergence among them—much more than among the more quietistic Jewish communities in Prussia proper—of radical politics; some did convert under that pressure, but this did not make them more supportive of the system imposed on them; others, while distancing themselves from orthodox Judaism, did try to maintain their Jewish identity in one way or another. But it is among them that one finds the pioneers of radical democracy, revolutionary socialism, and a profound critique of bourgeois society and German nationalism. Many of them exiled themselves to Paris—which not only symbolized the legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in general, but must have also meant to them the homeland that once granted to their families and ancestors equality and citizenship. No region of Germany produced so many revolutionary radicals as the Rhineland.
Among these was the revolutionary thinker and poet Heinrich Heine (born in Düsseldorf in 1799); the communist and later forerunner of Zionism Moses Hess (born in Bonn in 1812); the writer and satirist Ludwig Börne (born in Frankfurt in 1786; his father, the banker Jakob Baruch, had headed the Jewish delegation that pleaded futilely with the Congress of Vienna not to revoke the emancipation of the Rhineland Jews).
And of course, Karl Marx, son of the Trier lawyer Heinrich (Heschel) Marx.
THE FATHER: TRIBULATIONS OF A JEWISH ADVOCATE
Mordechai Levi, Karl Marx’s paternal grandfather, was born in 1746 in Postolopty/Postelberg in Bohemia, and after being ordained as a rabbi moved to Trier, where he served as chief rabbi until his death in 1804. It was during his years in office that Trier was annexed to France and its Jewish population emancipated and granted equal civic rights.
This process was slowly also being reflected in the adoption of non-Jewish names, as well as what was known as “civil” surnames as required by French law. Thus we find Rabbi Mordechai Levi being referred to in official French documents first as “Marcus Levi” and then as “Marx Levi”; to this appellation his father’s name (Shmuel/Samuel) was occasionally added as a patronymic, so he is sometimes referred to as “Samuel Marx Levi.” In the December 1801 census under French administration he appears as “Marx Lewy, rabin” and in another document from 1803 as “Marx Levy, Rabin de la religion hébraique.” Yet on his gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of Trier his Hebrew epitaph reads “Rabbi Mordechai Halevi, son of Rabbi Shmuel from Pastelburg.”
This fluidity of names becomes even more evident when it comes to his son, Karl Marx’s father. He is first mentioned in an extant document in the 1801 census as “Heschel Lewy,” son of rabbi Marx Lewy. But with the progress of emancipation, his name changes subtly but significantly when he starts to study law. A matriculation document from the Imperial University of Coblenz in 1813 refers to him as “Henry Marx, fils de Marcus Samuel Levy,” thus definitely establishing “Marx” as his surname. It may be beside the point, but it is still intriguing to speculate that had it not been for the French insistence that Jews embrace “civil” surnames rather than variations on their patronymics, Karl Marx would have been born Karl Levi. Would a theory called “Levism,” or later “Levism-Leninism” have the same appeal and resonance as “Marxism”? The haunting question “what’s in a name” may echo here as well.
There is a further, though minor, shift in the father’s name with the advent of the Prussian annexation of the Rhineland: in November 1814 the new authorities issued a passport to the young lawyer, with the German version of his name—“Heinrich Marx.” He needed the passport to travel to Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where on 22nd November 1814 he married Henriette Presborg, the daughter of the local rabbi Isaac Presborg and a distant cousin on his mother’s side. The marriage certificate, issued under French civil law and written in French, following two decades of French rule, referred to the bridegroom with the Dutch version of his name, Hendrick. It would not come as a surprise that with both bride and bridegroom being children of rabbis, a Jewish wedding ceremony took place a week later. All of this occurred against the background of the tremendous political upheavals following the collapse of the Napoleonic empire and the drawing of new borders by the Congress of Vienna.
It was the annexation of Trier to Prussia that confronted the young advocate with an unexpected dilemma. The new Prussian authorities decreed that Jewish civil servants and lawyers in the annexed Rhenish provinces could keep their positions—if they converted to Christianity. This would put their status on par with the situation in Prussia proper. To the Prussian authorities this must have seemed a reasonable and decent provision—no one was arbitrarily deprived of his livelihood, after all, and individuals were given a choice. To Heinrich, of course, it looked much different: he was the son of the previous local rabbi, and his brother was now the chief rabbi of Trier; he was also married to a rabbi’s daughter and had many relatives in town and in the region.
Heinrich repeatedly petitioned the Prussian authorities to allow him to maintain his position as a lawyer, which he had practiced for years, arguing that although he was born to a Jewish family, he was not then a member of the Jewish community; to assure the authorities that he was nonetheless not a dangerous revolutionary atheist, he declared himself a deist and a believer in Divine Providence. Advocate Heinrich Marx published a number of learned articles in legal journals and presented them to the Prussian ministry to prove his qualifications. A friendly Prussian district commissioner even recommended to Berlin to allow Heinrich Marx—“a loyal subject”—to be exempted, together with two other Jewish lawyers, from the general edict making it mandatory for advocates to be members of a Christian denomination.
This correspondence, some of it preserved in local and central Prussian archives, went back and forth for several years, as the Prussian administration slowly brought the Rhine provinces under the general, orderly Prussian system. But it was to no avail: after having exhausted all options, and needing to care for a growing family, Heinrich capitulated and decided to convert.
But the conversion was carried out in an unusual fashion, as it was obviously done most reluctantly and under protest. Trier, like most of the Rhineland, was mainly Catholic, but Heinrich decided to convert not to Roman Catholicism, but to Lutheran Protestantism. Since there was no Protestant chu
rch in Trier at the time, however, he sought out the Lutheran military chaplain and “Divisional Preacher” of the Prussian garrison just outside Trier, the Reverend Johann Heinrich Mühlenhof. Not exactly a typical act of assimilation or wish to join the majority population.
There is some uncertainty about the exact date of the conversion. Because it took place not in a regular parish church but in a military encampment, no document survived, although the name of the military chaplain who officiated has been preserved. The possible dates range from 1816 to 1819: in the first case, Karl, born in 1818, came into the world when his father was already a convert (albeit clearly a reluctant one); in the latter, and from internal evidence the more plausible date, both of Karl’s parents were still at least nominally Jewish when he was born.
Heinrich’s wife, Henriette, Karl’s mother, did not convert with her husband, since there was no external reason for her to do so, and apparently no need to cause unnecessary pain to her father. Only in 1825, after her father, the rabbi in the Netherlands, died, did Henriette convert. In her baptism certificate she is described as an “Israelitin,” presented to the pastor by “her husband, Advocate Heinrich Marx, who had already converted.” It was on this occasion that their children, including Karl, were also baptized.
Regardless of Heinrich’s exact date of conversion, there is no doubt that Henriette was not yet converted to Christianity when Karl was born, so according to the strict matrilineal principles of the Halacha, or Jewish law, Karl Marx was unquestionably born Jewish.
To this unusual family story a footnote should be added, providing further evidence of how complicated and paradoxical things could be. Heinrich’s brother, Samuel Marx, was ordained a rabbi and inherited his father’s role as chief rabbi of Trier, a position he held until his own death in 1827. The Jewish community of Trier needed a lawyer, and since Jews could not serve as advocates, it had to choose a Christian one. Rabbi Samuel Marx chose his (Christian) brother Heinrich Marx, who for decades represented the Trier Jewish community regularly before the authorities and in numerous court cases. The two brothers, who also lived close by each other, obviously remained in constant contact.
The most extraordinary thing about this family odyssey—a chapter in the challenges of modernization facing Jewish communities and individual Jews in the wake of the French Revolution and the Restoration—is that there is no clue of it in the enormous body of work, drafts, and correspondence of Karl Marx; there is no way of reconstructing how this history was lived, and remembered, in the Marx family. Recovering its details is possible only by sifting through archives in Trier and other state and church records.
The Jewish origins of Heinrich Marx’s family were of course known in a small town like Trier, but how much did Karl Marx know about his uncle, the officiating chief rabbi of Trier, or about both of his rabbinical grandfathers? Obviously some aspects of family history had to be shared. Did the two brothers, the rabbi and the Christian advocate of the Jewish community, who for years had close professional contacts, also meet socially—something almost unavoidable given their close proximity? We do not know, nor do we know how much Marx knew about the circumstances of his family’s conversion. But obviously he must have known something. One can only speculate about the silence, which may or may not speak for itself: if the circumstances of the conversion were a wound, it remained at least ostensibly unknown to outsiders.
BEGINNINGS: FROM LAW STUDENT TO PHILOSOPHICAL RADICAL
Karl Marx’s childhood and early youth seem uneventful and appear to have followed the pattern of what could be expected of the son of a relatively comfortable middle-class family. The spacious family home—now the site of the Karl-Marx Haus in central Trier—shows the solid social standing of his father’s position as a lawyer. At the age of twelve Karl entered the local classical Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium, named after the reigning Prussian monarch. After graduating, he enrolled in the law faculty of the neighboring University of Bonn in October 1836, but after one year, the following October, he transferred to the law faculty at Berlin University.
This involved not only a move from provincial Bonn to the Prussian capital: it also opened the young student to what was then the most exciting and forward-looking intellectual and political ambience in Germany. Berlin University, founded in 1809 as part of the far-reaching reforms the Prussian state undertook after its crushing defeat at the hands of Napoleon’s army in the Battle of Jena in 1806, was the first modern university established in Germany. It was also the first university in Europe—except the modern institutions of higher learning founded in France after the revolution—that was free from the ecclesiastical legacy of all the older European universities.
Under the guidance of the philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, modern teaching methods, especially in the natural sciences, were introduced; independent research was encouraged; in the humanities, such luminaries as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, and G. W. F. Hegel—who all had problems fitting into the antiquated system of the traditional universities—were offered prestigious chairs. This drew to the new university some of the brightest students from all over the German lands.
The innovative atmosphere of a university situated in a modern metropolis, and not in sleepy though charming medieval towns like Göttingen, Heidelberg, Tübingen, or—for that matter—Bonn, encouraged among students, exposed to modern ideas of philosophy or law, a fervent intellectual climate leading to nonconformity and political activity. The philosophy and law taught at the university were basically conservative—but modernizing, in the spirit of the defensive reform policies introduced into the Prussian state system by leaders like vom Stein and Hardenberg: peasant vassalage was abolished, as were medieval craft guilds and corporations; cities received modern charters, education was mostly freed from church supervision, and many of the residential restrictions on the Jewish population were lifted. The modern classical gymnasium and the modern research university had their origins in these Prussian reforms, which tried to counter the waves raised by the French Revolution by substituting for the medieval feudal order a modernizing bureaucracy whose conservative aims were coupled with a careful rationalist liberalizing practice.
The young Karl Marx had already been exposed to these currents in Trier, through his father’s friendship with the top Prussian official in the city, Ludwig von Westphalen. Coming from a gentry family with traditions of public service in various German principalities, von Westphalen had initially served in the French-dominated modernizing administrations of the Rhineland during the Napoleonic period. After 1815, he was accepted into the Prussian civil service and appointed to Trier, where the mainly Catholic population, exposed to French Enlightenment ideas during French rule, presented the Prussian, Protestant administration—including von Westphalen—with a delicate task. It would not be surprising that he found a kindred soul in his neighbor, the lawyer Heinrich Marx, from a Jewish background and a graduate of French legal training; eventually the relationship spread also to the younger members of both families.
In von Westphalen, the young Marx found not only a spiritual mentor, but also his future fiancée and wife, Jenny von Westphalen, four years his senior. The two developed a deep relationship that took a few years—and a heated correspondence—to blossom into marriage. For Marx, the Westphalen connection was also a window into a wider world, and even Jenny’s anglicized name suggested broader horizons: her mother, Jean Wishart, was of Scottish origin and a distant relation of the duke of Argyll. In an ironic future twist, which none of the persons involved were aware of at the time, Jenny’s brother (and Karl Marx’s future brother-in-law) Ferdinand von Westphalen was to become a Prussian conservative civil servant and served as Prussia’s minister of interior during 1850–58, when Marx was a revolutionary exile in London. On the other hand, Jenny’s other brother, Edgar, would move in revolutionary circles and was to become close to the League of Communists.
Marx’s enrollment in
the law faculty was a clear indication that he was initially destined to follow in his father’s steps. Yet in Berlin he got involved with a group of students and young lecturers who, under the influence of Hegel’s philosophy, developed a critical approach to politics, society, and religion. They were known as the Doktoren-Klub, which became the breeding ground for what eventually developed into the group of radical “Young Hegelians”: among them were Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Arnold Ruge, and others who later became Marx’s colleagues—and eventual adversaries.
From the correspondence between Karl Marx in Berlin and his father back in Trier it becomes clear that the father has discerned the growing interests of his son in critical philosophy and radical ideas; he occasionally voiced concerns that Karl might be sidetracked from his future career as a lawyer. The father expressed his concerns in a muted and tactful way, and for some time the son avoided responding to these strictures. Eventually he gently told his father that he was troubled by the gap between the “ought” and the “is,” which German philosophy inherited from Kant. Being exposed to Hegel’s philosophy, he found the answers in actual reality itself, “since the Gods which have until now dwelt above the earth … have now moved to its center.” And in an aphorism he wrote down in a scrapbook he kept at the time he similarly declared, a bit grandly, “Kant and Fichte reach for eternal heights/ Look there for a distant land/ But I just try to comprehend/ That which I found on the street.” The turning away from German idealist philosophy, with its avoidance of dealing with historical reality, is already clearly discernible.
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