KARL MARX

4 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Government had decided that the Rhineland too should be subject to the
laws that had been in force in Prussia since 1812. These laws, while
granting Jews rights equal to those of Christians, nevertheless made their
holding of positions in the service of the state dependent on a royal
dispensation. The President of the Provincial Supreme Court, von Sethe,
made an inspection tour of the Rhineland in April 1816 and interviewed
Heinrich Marx, who impressed him as 'someone of wide knowledge, very
industrious, articulate and thoroughly honest'. As a result he recommended
that Heinrich Marx and two other Jewish officials be retained in
their posts. But the Prussian Minister of Justice was against exceptions
and Heinrich Marx was forced to change his religion to avoid becoming,
as von Sethe put it, 'breadless'. He chose to become a Protestant - though
there were only about 200 Protestants in Trier - and was baptised some
time before August 1817. 8 (It was at this period that he changed his name
to Heinrich having been known hitherto as Heschel.)
Marx's mother, who remains a shadowy figure, seems to have been
more attached to Jewish beliefs than his father. When the children were
baptised in 1824 - the eldest son, Karl, being then of an age to start
school - her religion was entered as Jewish with the proviso that she
consented to the baptism of her children but wished to defer her own
baptism on account of her parents. Her father died in 1825 and she
was baptised the same year. Her few surviving letters are written in an
ungrammatical German without any punctuation. The fact that her letters
even to her Dutch relations were in German suggests that she spoke
Yiddish in her parents' home. Being very closely attached to her own
family, she always felt something of a stranger in Trier. The few indications
that survive portray her as a simple, uneducated, hardworking
woman, whose horizon was almost totally limited to her family and home,
rather over-anxious and given to laments and humourless moralising. It
is therefore quite possible that Henrietta Marx kept alive in the household
certain Jewish customs and attitudes.
It is impossible to estimate with any precision the influence on Marx
of this strong family tradition. 'The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a mountain on the mind of the living', 9 he wrote later.
Jewishness, above all at that time, was not something that it was easy to
slough off. Heine and Hess, both intimate friends of Marx - the one a
convert to Protestatism for cultural reasons, the other an avowed atheist
- both retained their Jewish self-awareness until the end of their lives.
Kven Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, though only half-Jewish, proclaimed
constantly and with a certain defiant pride at workers' meetings
in the East End of London: '1 am a Jewess.' 10 The position of Jews in
the Rhineland, where they were often scapegoats for the farmers' increas-