KARL MARX ALS MENSCH PART I

(The title is indicative of my look at Marx as a person, but it is also an allusion to his Jewish roots.

I used to belong to the rare breed of interested students of Marx and Marxism in Russia, who actually read Marx’s works in their “original” Russian translations, rather than relied on summaries and compilations, as did most of my fellow students at Moscow University, and at other colleges, in preparations for the courses in History of the CPSU, Political Economy, and Scientific Communism, all compulsory subjects, requiring not so much reading the sources, as using their names extremely frequently during the exams, and quoting them, also generously, but always “second-hand,” that is, from textbooks and encyclopaedias, rather than from the real thing. I guess, the situation with Marx is even worse in the West, where his works may have been read by a tiny bunch of professionals, while the rest of the frequent users of his name, talk of the popular conception of “Marxism,” when they say “Marx,” without ever realizing that these two are by no means the same thing, and while Marx was a real man, and could be studied as such from the sum of his writings and from the historical records, the word “Marxism” is a chimera, meaning different things to different people, but never doing any justice to the man whose name it has appropriated.

In the course of writing my Marx-related entries throughout this project, I intend to correct such erroneous impressions to the best of my ability. This entry alone, however, will be demonstrably insufficient for such an undertaking, which obviously requires an aggregate effect of everything that I have said about Karl Marx in this section and everywhere else.)

One may like him or abhor him, but Karl Marx is one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of all time and, as such, he merits, and gets from me, a special measure of attention across a wide spectrum of thematic matter. Even in the course of this section alone, he will be visited more than once, becoming the main focus of a very important Marx contra Bauer miniseries, later on.

(The purpose of this particular entry is to look at him as a Jew, and in the specific context of res Judaica. If, for some reason, it may become superfluous, or mergeable with some other entry, I am ready at that time to reconsider its separate presence here, but another factor contributing to my decision to place it here, in the Jewish philosophy subsection, is my reluctance to create an empty space between Moses Mendelssohn and Franz Rosenzweig, having a visceral aversion to such a glaring omission.)

First things first, and now a little of the biographical background. As in many such instances, the question arises whether a Jewish convert to Christianity can be legitimately considered a Jew. I think that the right answer has already been given, exemplified by the life of Moshe ben Maimon: historically, conversions of such nature have mostly been either matters of convenience, -- often motivated by a far broader assortment of career opportunities than without it, -- or by the elementary instinct of survival. Anyway, the former of these two reasons must have been the motive of Marx’s father Heinrich, a German-Jewish lawyer, known for his love for Voltaire and Kant, and an ardent political activist in behalf of a Prussian Constitution. He decided to accept the baptism soon after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire, and his son Karl was baptized as well, at the age of six. (Considering that they thus became members of the Evangelical Established Church in Germany, Karl’s age must have been extremely young.)

His mother Henrietta Pressburg was also Jewish. She came from Holland, and never learned German well enough.

Having received his education outside the Yeshiva system first at the high school in Trier, then at Bonn, and soon thereafter at the University of Berlin, where he studied law and philosophy, Karl Marx was from early on known for his tortured Christian feelings and for a martyr complex: the desire to suffer for the benefit of humanity. As for his view of his Jewish roots, I suspect that he had a mixed bag of emotions on that account and basically lived his life with a big chip on his shoulder. But he never lost an intense interest in the Jewish Question, as evidenced by his incendiary polemic against his former University mentor Bruno Bauer (see the Marx contra Bauer entries later in this section). That particular polemic happened on the eve of his renunciation of his Prussian citizenship, leading him and his Gentile wife Jenny von Westphalen on a path of poverty and extreme misery as if in fulfillment of his martyr complex, or Jesus complex, as some have called it.

His material problems were eventually solved when his Gentile friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, who had vowed to support Karl to the best of his personal means, received a full partnership in his family business, and thus gained his own financial independence. Marx’s rich Jewish contacts, however, had no intention to match such generosity, which was apparently a very old story, etched in his subconsciousness, and, perhaps, instrumental in his fierce anti-capitalist revolt against his "bloodsucking" former brethren. (His reputation as an anti-Semite was eventually spread around the Jewish circles, and would become a part of his historical legacy. But I would never go so far as to call him a self-hating Jew, as he has been called as well. (This is a twentieth-century term designed to describe “anti-Semitic Jews.”) He may well have had an identity crisis of sorts within him, but he must have resolved it by rising to the heights of a super-identity, and becoming larger than life, not only in the eyes of the posterity, but also in his own eyes.)

His “Christian” devotion was also gone, in his student years, resulting in what is recognized as his atheism (epitomized in his famous “religion is the opium of the masses” dictum), but which may have been only a revolt against all organized religion.

Ironically, with Marxism becoming an almost household word, little is yet known, or rather, allowed to be known, about Karl Marx’s person, and even less is understood.

…To be continued in Part II.