The ‘Berner-Streeters’ formed the IWMC out of frustration with the religious and cultural segregation in their own communities. Secular, radical and unorthodox, they opposed ghettoisation and challenged the veneration of class and financial success that set rich against poor Jews. The IWMC ran evening adult education classes in Yiddish for working-class Jews to learn English and study politics, economics and literature. Many of their members were garment and textile workers, seamstresses and tailors sub-contracted by the high-end bespoke gentlemen’s and ladies’ outfitters in Bond Street and Savile Row – ‘the rag trade’: from the rags of the East End to the riches of the West.
At the end of 1889 IWMC requested Eleanor to teach evening classes and speak at public meetings. She started studying Yiddish and began to teach and make speeches in it – haltingly at first, gradually gaining fluency. She read as many of the new Yiddish papers as she could, including Fraye Velt (Free World) and various Polish, German and Italian immigrant journals.
Tussy discussed learning Yiddish with the Russian critic and translator Zinaida Afanasievna Vengerova, who was in London to study English.24 They shared an interest in philology, transition periods in language and folk dialects. Vengerova recalled Eleanor’s focus on examining the relationship between Yiddish dialects and European languages. Tussy talked about picking up languages in the same way rich, leisured women might talk about acquiring hats. ‘My latest linguistic acquisition is Yiddish,’ she said. ‘I deliver lectures in Yiddish and easily distort German grammar so that my audience should understand me better.’25
Vengerova was surprised that ‘the language of the Jewish ghetto’ still existed in ‘enlightened England’,26 but Tussy informed her that many of the impoverished immigrants from Eastern Europe who fled to England from the tsarist Russian pogroms of 1881 had no opportunity to learn English. Targets of anti-Semitism and general hostility, thousands converged around Whitechapel, Mile End Road and Stepney Green, consolidating into self-contained communities in order to survive. The situation of these new refugees was aggravated by the rivalry between the millionaire oligarchs of Anglo-Jewry who fought for patronage and influence over them.
Roughly, these divided between the proponents of an adaptive form of anglicised Judaism led by the United Synagogue, endorsed by the chief rabbi and sponsored by the banker Lord Rothschild, and, distinguishing itself from this reformist approach, the Federation of Synagogues,27 sponsored by bullion broker Samuel Montagu, which promoted adherence to a more strictly Talmudic approach familiar to those who had lately escaped brutal discrimination in Russia and Eastern Europe. However intense the schism over how the faith should be practised, religious leaders and patrons of both approaches were united in their opposition to apostasy.
Eleanor also gave personal reasons for learning Yiddish: ‘the Jewish language is akin to my blood . . . In our family it is thought that I am like my paternal grandmother, who was the daughter of a learned Rabbi.’28 Vengerova wrote:
One somehow felt from these words that Eleanor Marx set greater store on the heritage of the spiritual life of her forefathers, the Jewish Rabbis, than on the pure class arrogance of the aristocratic family to which her mother belonged.29
Vengerova’s class chauvinism extended to racist typology. She found Eleanor ‘rather plain though attractive’, presenting ‘intelligent, somewhat masculine features, with a big nose of the Jewish type’.30 Tussy would retort with one of her favourite jokes: that unfortunately she had only inherited her father’s nose and not his genius.31 But Vengerova’s comments illustrate that Tussy shared the common experience of anti-Semitism.
Many Jewish-based worker unions formed in the East End from the 1880s. Resistance from established capitalist Anglo-Jewry and religious leaders reinforced opposition to secular free thought at home within family, community and synagogue. At work, Jews found that some gentiles refused to labour alongside them, giving rise to the necessity to form their own unions. Jewish worker unions included the Hebrew Cabinet Makers’ Society; Stick and Cane Dressers’ Union; International Furriers’ Society; Tailor-Machinists’ Union; Tailors’ and Pressers’ Union; Amalgamated Lasters’ Society; United Capmakers’ Society; and International Journeyman Boot-Finishers’ Society.32 In December 1889, all of these were amalgamated into the Federation of East London Labour Unions.
As reported by Commonweal in January 1890,33 these unions congregated at a mass meeting of Jewish workers at the Great Assembly Hall to vote on inaugurating this Federation of East London Labour Unions. Jewish workers turned for support to existing British trade unions and the socialist movement – the Fabians, the SDF and the Socialist League. The Fabians and the SDF shunned them equally but for different reasons; the Socialist League welcomed alliance, but primarily through factions with shared anarchist tendencies.
By the following year, 1891, the anarchists, in militant mood, had taken over the Berner Street Club and pushed out its Jewish Marxist founders. The original Berner-Streeters, including Eleanor, recongregated around their new paper, Fraye Velt.
In October 1890 Eleanor accepted an invitation to speak at the Great Assembly Hall to this new federation of Jewish unions, with a clear assertion of her father’s ancestry:
Dear Comrade
I shall be very glad to speak at the meeting of November 1st, the more glad, that my father was a Jew.34
Eleanor was invited to speak to Jewish unions in Leeds and Bradford, which drew her attention to the latent cultural and religious nationalism within the Independent Labour Party. She saw the evidence of anti-Semitic attitudes within the ranks of the ILP and the TUC. Eleanor consistently identified herself as a Jew at public meetings. A story about a memorable incident at the Leeds Hall Institute is unsubstantiated, but indicative. Eleanor was invited to speak, but on arrival was prevented. She began to speak from where she was standing, shouting out, ‘I am a Jewess!’35 Many years later Eduard Bernstein described Eleanor as ‘nearly Zionistic’, but there’s no evidence to support this view. Certainly, the tenets of early socialist Zionism that promoted the interests of the collective above the individual spoke to Eleanor’s beliefs. But her internationalism and economic philosophy made all forms of ethnic nationalism wholly unacceptable in her world-view. Berstein’s questionable conflation of Tussy’s ardent cultural Jewishness with proto-Zionism reveals his own tendencies, not hers.36
Simultaneously, the Second International also revealed its refusal to deal with anti-Semitism. Despite the large membership of Jewish socialists in the Second International, the Brussels congress of the International in 1891 carelessly dismissed anti-Semitism, in the words of its official report, as originating ‘from the hatred of the Christian capitalist against the Jewish capitalist, cleverer than him’.37 This was an opinion Eleanor initially seemed to share. Writing about the Dreyfus affair in Justice in November 1897, she reductively attributed the motivation for the controversy to ‘a Christian jealousy of superior Jewish money making’.38 But as her experience developed, so did her thinking.
During the early 1890s Eleanor became aware of the anti-Semitism experienced by socialist Jews within the international labour movement. East End journalist, poet and radical leader Ben Vinchevsky, born Benzion Novochovits, had been exiled from Germany in 1879 under the Anti-Socialist Law. In 1884 he launched the first socialist journal in Yiddish published in London, Die Tsukunft – The Future.39 When Eleanor met him he was publishing Arbeter Fraint (Worker’s Friend) from Berner Street.
Eleanor and Vinchevsky travelled together on the train to Zurich for the International congress in 1893. Vinchevsky told Eleanor that many socialists were unaware of the existence of Jewish workers, ‘that is, a Jew engaged in manual labour, let alone organised Jewish workers’.40 The congress was inaugurated with a bright pageant that took over the streets of Zurich. As delegates lined up in the procession, Tussy saw Vinchevksy hanging back on the pavement, uncertain of where he should take a place in the ranks. ‘Eleanor ran up to me in great haste. She placed
me next to herself with Will Thorne on one side and Edward on the other. “We Jews must stick together,” she said.’41
One of about a dozen Jewish delegates at the congress, Vinchevsky soon encountered difficulty in getting himself tabled to speak. Repeatedly blocked at the daily speaker allocations, he presented his dilemma to Tussy. She told him to write down the names of his unions and their membership numbers, ‘and as translator I will somehow smuggle this into the Congress.’ When the congress session reconvened an hour later, she announced in German, French and English that real Jewish workers organised in eight unions had their representative present, and he should be allowed to speak.42 According to Vinchevsky’s account, this information was greeted by the congress with ‘tumultuous applause’, and ‘Eleanor’s face was radiant with pride.’43
The marginalisation of Jewish unions was confirmed two years later in 1895 when the TUC passed a resolution calling on the British government to control the immigration of ‘alien workers’. In response, ten Jewish unions called for thousands to attend a mass meeting at the Great Assembly Hall, to protest against the xenophobic anti-internationalism taking hold of the TUC executive at national level. Eleanor spoke, alongside other leaders, including Stepniak and Kropotkin:
Jews! The English anti-Semites have come to the point where the English workers’ organisation calls on the government to close England’s doors to the poor alien, that is, in the main, to the Jew. You must no longer keep silent.
Tussy’s personal friendships also influenced her. Olive Schreiner, Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy were all Jewish, and writers. Tussy had known Israel since Dogberry days, and they had co-written A Doll’s House Repaired. Their mutual friend, Clementina Black, introduced Eleanor to Amy in the mid-1880s; in turn, Eleanor introduced Amy to Olive.
Amy was born in London in 1861. Her father, Lewis, was a stockbroker and believed in educating women. Amy shone intellectually and became one of the first women, and one of the first Jews, to attend Cambridge University, where she published her first volume of poetry, Xantippe and Other Verse. Jews had only been admitted for the first time to Cambridge in 1872, a mere seven years before Amy took her place at Newnham. She left college early to pursue her literary career but not before becoming the first Jewish woman to pass the Higher Local Examination in 1881. She wrote regularly for the Jewish Chronicle and other magazines, and was part of the group of Bloomsbury women intellectuals who congregated in and around the British Museum.
In 1888, Macmillan published Amy’s new novel Reuben Sachs. Eleanor was commissioned by Amy to translate the book into German. The German edition appeared in 1889 and shortly afterwards Amy, aged twenty-eight, committed suicide. Tussy said that Amy was always frail, very often depressed and inclined to hopeless melancholy, ‘an infallible symptom of nervous exhaustion’.44 The novel, Tussy said, had used the last of Amy’s reserves and left her ‘a disembodied spirit’.45
Levy wasn’t a socialist but she was a trenchant critic of social and religious life, materialist obsessions with status and class and what she saw as the moral turpitude and patriarchal constraints of her own well-heeled Anglo-Jewish background. These are the themes of Reuben Sachs, a novel that fascinated Eleanor as much as Madame Bovary. The Reuben Sachses satirised by Amy Levy were of the aspirant materialist type prodded by Marx in his controversial essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, written in 1843.
Tussy’s writing shows that she empathised with Emma Bovary’s plight, but did not identify with her. Conversely, she identified strongly with Amy Levy’s portrait of the complexity of being a British Jewish woman in Reuben Sachs. Emma Bovary fascinated her because she was Tussy’s petit bourgeois, resolutely gentile antithesis; on the other hand Judith Quixano, the anti-heroine of Reuben Sachs, was a figure much closer to home: a woman whose struggles Tussy shared across class differences. Because Gustave Flaubert is better remembered in the literary canon than Amy Levy, so too is Eleanor’s translation of Madame Bovary. Yet Reuben Sachs is a novel, and Judith Quixano a character, much closer to Eleanor’s life.
Marx said, ‘Tussy is me.’ Flaubert said, ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ But Eleanor never made these identifications. She did, however, state that, like Judith Quixano, ‘I am a Jewess,’ a statement she made in response to the Dreyfus affair.
When Emile Zola published his well-known indictment of the miscarriage of justice experienced by Dreyfus, Eleanor wrote to Nathalie Liebknecht expressing her disgust at the silence of the French left in supporting Dreyfus. Witness the fact that ‘the one clear, honest note has been struck not by one of our party, but by Zola! . . . What does it matter if Dreyfus is “sympathique” or not? The only question is: was he even according to accepted standards fairly tried?’46 She suspected French socialists of being motivated by anti-Semitism. This is a significant development from her previous position of blaming anti-Semitism on Christian capitalists. Disregarding political differences, she wrote again for Justice, according ‘honour to whom honour is due – even if we do not find these persons “sympathetic”. And so all honour to Clemenceau, and above all to Zola.’47
What would Marx make of all this? Eleanor remarked that in later life her father hardly ever spoke about religion, ‘neither for nor against’.48 Marx never denied his Jewish origins – he just didn’t regard them as of particular interest. He was famously critical of the tyranny of all religions but he was sympathetic to the spiritual impulse.49 As he put it in his essay ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1844): ‘Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’ Religion was not Eleanor’s chosen opiate. She preferred to stick to her chain-smoking. Resolute secularist and atheist, for Eleanor the human spirit embodied and encompassed in earthbound form all that she took to be the essence of life. People were answerable and accountable to each other, not an absent, unseen arbiter – including her own dead father.
21
‘Oh! for a Balzac to paint it!’
At the end of 1892 Louise Kautsky introduced Engels and Eleanor to a young Viennese doctor she’d met whilst on holiday in Austria during the summer, who had just arrived in London. Dr Ludwig Freyberger was a fresh-faced, twenty-seven-year-old physician who had graduated with distinction from the University of Vienna, specialising in anatomical dissection, physiology and pathology.
Tussy paid scant heed to Louise’s chatter about the marvellous ministrations of her new doctor. Whilst Louise flirted with Freyberger, she and Edward were marshalling a mass demonstration by unemployed workers that assembled on New Year’s Day in Trafalgar Square and marched to St Paul’s Cathedral. Recommending Freyberger’s skills, Louise encouraged Engels to consult him. The only doctor the General trusted was his old friend Edward Gumpert, but he became gravely ill and died in April 1893, leaving the glum Engels to brood on the loss of two of his greatest friends within a year. The once-Jollymeier, Karl Schorlemmer, had died of lung cancer in Manchester the previous June, a sad event Eleanor described as ‘a very great blow’ to the General,1 who spent much time at Jollymeier’s bedside, though he was no longer recognised by him.
Whilst Freyberger’s popularity grew at Regent’s Park Road, Tussy and Edward moved to quieter lodgings at 7 Gray’s Inn Square. This move coincided with three simultaneous anniversaries: the tenth anniversary of her father’s death, the fourth birthday of the gas workers’ union, and Laura and Paul’s silver wedding anniversary, which they spent, as promised, in London. Engels, Tussy knew, was working intensively on completing the third volume of Capital as a suitable commemoration to Marx.
Several months later Tussy noticed properly that Freyberger had become the General’s indispensable personal physician and ubiquitous presence at Regent’s Park Road. She wasn’t much impressed; something about him drew her spitfire. ‘I can’t see how anyone can st
and Freyberger,’2 Tussy grumped to her sister. Engels, conversely, brimmed with enthusiasm for Freyberger’s modern medical knowledge and the ‘splendid scientific career’3 that doubtless lay before the young man, willingly writing the references that enabled his relocation to London.
Gumpert had been one of Engels’s executors, so he had to redraw his will. On 29 July Frederick Lessner and Ludwig Freyberger witnessed this new testament. Engels appointed the barrister Samuel Moore, journalist Eduard Bernstein and Louise Kautsky as his executors. He left generous bequests to Pumps and the election funds of the German Social Democratic Party. All the books in his possession or control, including those originally belonging to Marx, were bequeathed to the German SPD, along with Engels’s copyrights. His correspondence and manuscripts went to Bebel and Bernstein. All ‘manuscripts of a literary nature in the handwriting of my deceased friend Karl Marx and all family letters written by or addressed to him shall be given by my executors to Eleanor.’4 His house, furniture and effects, except where otherwise specified, were to go to Louise Kautsky, with a quarter of his residue estate. The remaining three-quarters were divided equally between Eleanor, Laura and Longuet’s children.
Eleanor was not named as an executor or informed by Engels of provisions that determined the destiny of her father’s literary estate. The General may have been trying to shield Tussy from the anxiety of being exposed to the pressures he was under from the leaders of the German SPD to bequeath the entire Marxian Nachlass to the party. Practically speaking, Marx’s will left all his papers to Tussy, to be kept in trust by Engels until his decease. Under English law, Eleanor had rightful inheritance of her father’s manuscripts and letters.
Eleanor Marx Page 41
