TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN^49ing poverty, was calculated to increase their collective self-awareness.
Although civil equality had been achieved under the Napoleonic laws, the
inauguration of the Holy Alliance and its policy of the 'Christian state'
inevitably involved an anti-semitism on the double count that the religious
Jews professed an alien faith and many claimed to be a separate people.
In much of the bitterest polemic - which Marx engaged in with, for
example, Ruge, Proudhon, Bakunin and Diihring - his Jewishness was
dragged into the debate. Whether Marx himself possessed anti-semitic
tendencies is a matter of much controversy: certainly a superficial reading
of his pamphlet On the Jewish Question would indicate as much;^11 and his
letters contain innumerable derogatory epithets concerning Jews;^12 but
this does not justify a charge of sustained anti-semitism. Some students
of Marx believe they have found the key to Marx's whole system of ideas
in his rabbinic ancestry; but although some of his ideas - and even life-
style - have echoes of the prophetic tradition, this tradition itself is more
or less part of the Western intellectual heritage; and it would be too
simplistic to reduce Marx's ideas to a secularised Judaism.^13
Typically Jewish attitudes were certainly not in keeping with the gen-
eral views of Marx's father. According to Eleanor, he was 'steeped in the
free French ideas of the eighteenth century on politics, religion, life and
art'.^14 He subscribed entirely to the views of the eighteenth-century
French rationalists, sharing their limitless faith in the power of reason to
explain and improve the world. In this belief these French intellectuals
tempered the dogmatic rationalism of the classical metaphysicians like
Leibnitz with the British empiricism of Locke and Hume. They believed
that they were capable of showing that men were by nature good and all
equally rational; the cause of human misery was simply ignorance, which
resulted partly from unfortunate material circumstances and partly from
a deliberate suppression or distortion of the truth by those in authority,
whether civil or religious, in whose obvious interest it was to perpetuate
the deceptions under which mankind laboured. One of the chief means
of destroying this state of affairs was education; another was change in
material conditions.
His surviving letters show that Heinrich Marx was indeed, in the
words of his grand-daughter Eleanor, 'a real Frenchman of the eighteenth
century who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart'.^15 His religion was
a shallow and moralising deism: Edgar von Westphalen, Karl Marx's
future brother-in-law, described Heinrich Marx as a 'Protestant a la Less-
ing'.^16 His outlook on life is well summed up in the advice he gave to
Karl: 'A good support for morality is a simple faith in God. You know
that I am the last person to be a fanatic. But sooner or later a man has
a real need of this faith, and there are moments in life when even the man