Karl Marx: A Biography

PARIS^103

Just now [he wrote to Ruge in March 1843], the president of the

Israelites here has paid me a visit and asked me to help with a parlia-

mentary petition on behalf of the Jews; and I agreed. However

obnoxious I find the Israelite beliefs, Bauer's view seems to me neverthe-

less to be too abstract. The point is to punch as many holes as possible

in the Christian state and smuggle in rational views as far as we can.

That must at least be our aim - and the bitterness grows with each

rejected petition.^56

Marx's willingness to help the Jews of Cologne suggests that his article
was aimed much more at the vulgar capitalism popularly associated with
Jews than at Jewry as such - either as a religious body or (still less) as an
ethnic group. Indeed, the German word for Jewry - Judentum - has the
secondary sense of commerce and, to some extent, Marx played on this
double meaning. It is significant, moreover, that some of the main points
in the second section of Marx's article - including the attack on Judaism
as the embodiment of a money fetishism - were taken over almost verbatim
from an article by Hess - who was the very opposite of an anti-semite.
(Mess's article, entitled 'On the Essence of Money', had been submitted
for publication in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher but the journal col-
lapsed before it could appear).^57
The second of Marx's articles in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher
was written after his arrival in Paris: it revealed the immense impact made
on him by his discovery there of the class to whose emancipation he was
to devote the rest of his life. Paris, the cultural capital of Europe, had a
large population of German immigrant workers - almost 100,000. Some
had come to perfect the techniques of their various trades; some had
come simply because they could find no work in Germany. Marx was
immediately impressed:
When communist artisans form associations, education and propaganda
are their first aims. But the very act of associating creates a new need

• the need for society - and what appeared to be a means has become
  an end. The most striking results of this practical development are to
  be seen when French socialist workers meet together. Smoking, eating
  and drinking are no longer simply means of bringing people together.
  Company, association, entertainment which also has society as its aim,
  are sufficient for them; the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but
  a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their toil-
  worn bodies.^58

Marx attended the meetings of most of the French workers' associations,

but was naturally closer to the Germans - particularly to the League of

ilie Just, the most radical of the German secret societies and composed

of emigre artisans whose aim was to introduce a 'social republic' in