Censorship: Persecution and the Art of Writing

In February 1843 the first political article Marx ever wrote, on censorship, appeared in the Swiss magazine Anekdota.¹ Significantly, Freud’s first great work appearing at the century’s end, The Interpretation of Dreams, was also to deal with censorship: Freud discovered that, even in dream life, between the forbidden wish and the dreamwork falls the shadow of the censor. Freud correlated the role of the censor in dream life with the role played by the social censorship of manners in waking life: “The politeness which I practice every day is to a large extent dissimula-tion of this kind.”² This work of Marx, his political debut, deserves close reading. In it the young Marx notes with fury that the latest “Prussian Censorship Instruction” demands that he observe “prior restraint”—not on his political views but on his manners and style of writing; not on what he says, but how he says it.

The new Prussian censorship instructions were a liberalization of the original edict of 1819; it instructed the censors not to construe the prior edict too substantively: article II of the prior edict was never intended to impede “any serious and restrained pursuit of truth,” the instruction reads. Immediately, the word “restrained” triggers all of Marx’s rage. Instantly, all the antinomies of Jewish Emancipation are set clanging: Jews are to vote as citoyens, but they must also “pass” as bourgeois; Jews are invited to act in the political arena, but they must behave in the social arena; Jews may do or say anything they wish in the West, with only this proviso: they must do or say it in a seemly and restrained manner. Marx writes:

The pursuit of truth not to be impeded is qualified as being serious and restrained. Both modifications point to something out-side the content of the pursuit rather than to the matter to be investigated. They detract from the pursuit of truth and bring into

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play an unknown third factor [alongside “pursuit” and “truth”]. if an investigation must constantly attend to this third factor, an irritation supported by law, will such pursuit not lose sight of the truth? Isn’t the first duty of the person in search of truth that he proceed to it directly without glancing left or right? Don’t I forget the substance if I must never forget to state it in a prescribed form?³ [My emphasis]

The dream-censor imposes evasiveness on the id, Freud later says; the id must learn euphemism, obliquity, and circuitousness to “pass” the vigilance of the censor. In this way the id is refined, sublimated, civilized. Only as such may it qualify for admission to the consciousness of “civil society.” Marx is in the toils of his first collision with bourgeois society and its doctrine of expressive “prior restraint.” He continues:

Truth can be as little restrained as light, and in relation to what should it be restrained? In relation to itself? Verum index sui et falsi [Truth alone measures truth and falsehood—Spinozaj. Hence, in relation to falsehood?

If restraint shapes the character of inquiry it is a criterion for shying away from truth rather than from falsity. It is a drag on every step I take. [cf.: “The politeness which I practice every day is … dissimulation of this kind.”—Freud] With inquiry, restraint is the prescribed fear of finding the result, a means of keeping one from the truth.⁴ [Marx’s emphasis]

Heinrich Marx had criticized his son’s social behavior and had invoked the exigencies of bourgeois social form. The father had himself graduated in a generation from civil society to polite society. He feared his son might become a déclassé. Meanwhile, the son was exploring a frontier: he was discovering that, in practice, the line between civil and polite society, between morals and manners, between the “how” of a thing and the “what” of a thing, was a very difficult line to draw. He was de-pressed and infuriated by the fact that, however analytically distinct they might be, the roles of “good citizen” and “respectable bourgeois” interpenetrated each other. Bourgeois society even had prior tests—“re-straints”—on how the truth you were researching should “look” when you found it, its “bonne mine”: .

Furthermore, truth is universal. It does not belong to me, it belongs to all; it possesses me, I do not possess it. A style is my property, my spiritual individuality. “Le style, c’est -Thomme.” Indeed! The law permits me to write, only I am supposed to write in a style different from my own. I may show the profile of my mind, but first I must show the prescribed mien…. The prescribed mien is

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nothing but bonne mine a mauvais jeu….1 may be humorous, but the law orders that I write seriously. I may be forward, but the law orders my style to be restrained. Grey on grey is to be the only permissible color of freedom,… the official color…. The essence of mind is always truth itself, and what do you make its essence? Restraint. Only a good-for-nothing holds back, says Goethe, and you want to make the mind a good-for-nothing?⁵ [Marx’s emphasis— except on “first”]

Marx was being asked to “hold back,” to restrain himself. He was unwilling, or unable, it is clear, to do so. Marx, like Freud, with lingering Enlightenment optimism, believed he could interpose a neutral “free zone” between the unrestrained importunity of emancipating Jewry and the restraint system of the Gentile society in the West. Between the Jew and the Gentile superego Freud was to later interpose the “neutral” in-strumental ego of the psychoanalyst. Marx said something analogous earlier by insisting that true restraint does not lie “in the language of culture permitting no accent and no dialect. Rather,” he writes, turning to the language of universalist rationalism, “it speaks the accent of the substance of things and the dialectic of their nature. It is a matter of forgetting restraint and unrestraint [read: Gentile and Jew], and of crystallizing things. The general restraint of the mind is reason, that universal liberality which is related to every nature according to its essential character”⁶ (Marx’s emphasis).

But, this ritual bow in the direction of the Enlightenment over, Marx returns to the fray and to what really concerns him: the inherent tension in bourgeois society between truth itself and the problem of saying it “like it is.’ He perceives accurately that the civic society of bourgeois culture will yield on everything except procedures; it will concede all nouns, if it can retain control of the adverbs. Marx returns to the ques-tion of the Prussian censorship instruction, its censorship of appearance, rather than reality, of form rather than content, and tries to tear it to shreds. It instructs us, he says, in its mildness, in its assertion that the 1819 edict was not intended to impede any”serious and restrained pur-suit of truth." Ridiculous! says Marx. The ancient lure to the maskilm of Jewish Emancipation, the promise of freedom, is held out once more. But Marx this time will read the small print in the “brutal bargain” of Emancipation: “Be free citoyens,” it proclaims, “come in any stripe, pursue and speak any truth, only’—the bourgeois caveat reads—’”be serious and restrained." Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes: I fear Greeks bearing gifts, he writes, quoting Virgil.⁷ “For I treat the ridiculous seriously when I treat it as ridiculous,” runs the savage pilpulism of Marx, “and the most serious lack of intellectual restraint is to be re-strained about a lack of restraint.” Then he continues:

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Serious and restrained! What wavering and relative concepts!⁸ Where does seriousness end, and where does levity begin? Where does restraint leave off, and where does lack of restraint start? We are dependent upon the temperament of the censor. Prescribing a temperament for the censor would be just as wrong as prescribing a style for the writer. If you wish to be logical in your esthetic criticism, prohibit the pursuit of truth in a too serious and too restrained manner, for the greatest seriousness is the most ridiculous thing, and the greatest restraint is the bitterest irony.⁹ [Marx’s emphasis, of course]

Marx then goes for the jugular of the Prussian Censorship Instruc-tion: its implicit claim that, at the end of the road of social research, there sits patiently a value-free “truth” waiting to be formulated in the “official” prose of a value-neutral and “civil” civil servant. “All this,” Marx declares, "proceeds from a completely wrong and abstract view of truth. … Even if we disregard the subjective side,’ he continues,

namely that one and the same object appears differently in different individuals and expresses its various aspects in as many various intellects, shouldn’t the character of the object have some influence, even the slightest, on the inquiry? Not only the result but also the route belongs to truth. The pursuit of truth must itself be true; the true inquiry is the developed truth whose scattered parts are assembled in the result. And the nature of the inquiry is not to change according to the object? When the object is humorous, inquiry is supposed to appear serious? When the object is touchy, inquiry is to be restrained? Thus you injure the rights of the sub-ject. You grasp truth abstractly and make the mind an inquisitor who dryly records the proceedings.¹⁰ [My emphasis on sentence “Not only …”]

Here we see the matrix of Marx’s essay, written in 1843 and pub-lished in 1844, on the “Jewish question.” “When the object is touchy,” he asks, disbelievingly, “inquiry is to be restrained?” Of course not, is the obvious answer. Such restraint is exactly the sort extorted by the “neutral” civil service bureaucrats of a bourgeois state thinking itself to be the “Universal Idea” of Hegel. It is with the current essay behind

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him that Marx will tackle—in his long-postponed essay on the Jewish Question—the two works in which Bruno Bauer wraps the “touchy” subject of the Jews in a hieratic prose of genteel academic restraint.

What then, for Marx, is the status of this new censorship instruc-tion? Is it political? Clearly not, in the old sense of “political,” anyway. The new norms go, not to the political content of the ideas expressed, but to the restraint of their manner of expression. Is the new censorship instruction, then, moral censorship, legislating morality? The old censor-ship edict, Marx notes, includes within the purpose of censorship “the suppression of ‘whatever offends morality and good conduct.’ The In-struction quotes this from Article Il. But … the [new] commentary … contains omissions in regard to morality. To offend morality and good conduct is now to injure ‘discipline, morals, and outward loyalty.’ One observes,” Marx continues, in his careful exegesis of the new instruc-tion, “that morality as morality, as the principle of a world with its own laws, has disappeared,” and thus the new censorship does not in-vade this inner realm (whose autonomy it does not recognize in any case). If the norms of the new censorship instruction do not bear on the old matter of political-moral behavior, what realm is it legislating for? What has taken its place? “Police-regulated honorability and conventional good manners have taken its place,”¹¹ replies Marx—that is, respecta-bility and public propriety (Marx’s emphasis). It is fanaticism, it is obsession that has been tabooed by bourgeois civil society. “The quali-ties of reasonableness, moderation, compromise, tolerance, sober choice —in short, the anti-apocalyptic style of life brought into the world by the middle class” is experienced by Marx as an “iron cage.”¹² A man obsessed, he attacks bourgeois civil society whose “great cultural triumph is,” as Podhoretz observes, “precisely that it brought obsession into disrepute”¹³ (my emphasis).

Since truth is decreed by the governmental censors, the reference to the search for truth—"inquiry’—is mere ritual. Marx asks:

Is truth to be understood in such a way that it is constituted by governmental order, and is inquiry a superfluous and obnoxious third element which cannot be entirely rejected for reasons of etiquette? … For inquiry is understood a priori as being opposed to truth and appears therefore with the suspicious official patina of seriousness and restraint a layman is supposed to display before a priest.¹⁴ [Marx’s emphasis]

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Marx then breaks into a metaphor that not only reveals the nature of the censorship instruction but betrays the hidden way he and his col-leagues among the Jewish exiles in the Diaspora had experienced all the “tolerance instructions” of the nineteenth-century social emancipa-tion: “You are to write freely, but every word is to be a curtsy before liberal censorship, which lets your serious and restrained words pass. By no means should you lose,” he concludes, “a consciousness of hu-mility”¹⁵ (my emphasis). The “serious and restrained” words of your liberal-Reform Jews will “pass,” but the mocking impudence of your schlemiels, like Heine, will not pass. The “serious and restrained” words of your revisionist Marxists will pass, but the savage vulgarity of your pariahs, like Marx himself, will not “pass” into respectable, bourgeois-Christian society. In theory, Marx could differentiate the cultural from the social, but in practice, not unlike his follower Mike Gold, he “was a hater of refinements of thought, partly because he could not distinguish them from refinements of manners, which he knew to be a petty-bourgeois lure”¹⁶¹⁷ (my emphasis), and partly because he would not so distinguish refined thoughts from gentle manners, and partly because he knew such thoughts to be indistinguishable from such manners, and hence a petty-bourgeois lure. To incorporate mental restraints and discriminations into the personality system went together with internal-izing the social-behavior constraints of the social system, making up one modernization-civilizational “package.” In the modernization process the finesses of one system become the nuances of the others; intellectual distinctions breed personal distinction (and vice versa); personality, so-cial, and cultural systems all—allowing for ascertainable “lags’”—play suavely into each other. As discrepancies in intersystem “profiles” are surmounted, a “drift to consistency” remorselessly sets in: the cunning of the modernization process is at work “refining substance into subjectivity.”¹⁸¹⁹

“Every word is to be a curtsy,” wrote Marx. The ancient idea of “charity,” feudalized into “chivalry” in the Middle Ages, secularized into “courtesy” (and “curtsy”) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, undergoing a final metamorphosis in the nineteenth century into the “civility” of the emergent civil societies in the nation-states of the West. This ancient value-package was the “collective representation” hovering over the secularizing Christian West that rubbed emerging Jewry the wrong way. It caused in them what Eastern European Jewry called tsuris: trouble, aggravation. For Jews of the Emancipation, whether

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observant or inobservant, “the core concept that embodies and inte-grates the whole Jewish experience in the Diaspora,” writes Ben Halpern, “is the idea of Exile,… a ban of penance,… living in ex-piatory subjection to the Gentiles.”²⁰ With the dissolution, at the time of Emancipation, of the formal, sacral institutions embodying this sub-jection—namely, ghetto and shtetl—informal, de facto institutions of segregation appeared, “sponsored” by both Jew and Gentile. Separate-but-equal facilities were the rule for rank-and-file Jews. In the “neutral” spaces of the literary-social salons, Masonic lodges, and financial opera-tions—and among bourgeois converts to the Evangelical Church like Heinrich Marx and his family—there was “passing.” But questions of capacity, qualifications, “civil betterment,” and “passing readiness” were always only just out of sight. The bourgeois question, Had they arrived (socially)? was always more salient for both sides than the citizens’ question, Had they voted? The new historical situation of Jewish Emancipation “took the majority of Jews by surprise,” writes Jacob Katz, “and confronted the Jewish community with unprecedented tasks. The practice of the newly attained political rights required of them cultural and social adjustment”²¹ (my emphasis). In my terms: social interaction ritual—i.e. bourgeois-Christian rites—were prerequisite to the practice of civil rights and, ultimately, a condition of access to them. They were, at once, rites of passage and rites of “passing.” But if the Jew’s con-suming interest was in acculturation, the bourgeois Gentile observed him for the signs of assimilation (social). It was the Gentile superego that presided over the Committee on Admissions, that set all the qualifi-cations and passed on whether Jews “passed,” and held all the blackballs in its hand. The theological antipathy of the Middle Ages had yielded to the complaints of debtors and creditors of the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries; in the nineteenth century, with the emergence of the social category, social antipathy was mixed with economic antipathy and gradually displaced it among the middle classes. The question stood: are Jews to be admitted to bourgeois society?

Like someone importunate for admission to a select private club, one is never quite sure just what are the admission qualifications, or who are the members of the admission committee, or—strange as it seems—whether one really wants to belong in the first place: one does not need to be possessed of echt Jewish “self-hate”—the “normal” garden variety of social uneasiness will do just as well—to say with Groucho Marx: “Any club that’ll have me isn’t worth joining.” An earlier Marx complains to the Gentile Prussian censors: “You demand restraint and you proceed from the enormous unrestraint of making the civil servant a spy of the heart, an omniscient person, philosopher, theologian, the Delphic Apollo. On the one hand, you force us to acknowledge un-restraint, on the other, you forbid us unrestraint.”²² "Offensive utter-

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ances and defamatory judgments on individuals are not suitable for print," Marx quotes from the instruction. “Not suitable for print!” he exclaims. “Instead of this gentle phrasing we should have liked to re-ceive objective definitions for what is considered offensive and defama-tory.”²³ Marx quotes the hope of the instruction that political literature and the daily press will “gain a more dignified tone” through the good offices of its censors’ vigilance and attacks the “romanticism of the spirit, … the romantic indefiniteness [and] sensitive inwardness” (Marx’s emphasis) of such ambiguous norms of “preventive prudence.”²⁴²⁵

The last matter Marx turns his attention to is the clause of the censorship instruction urging the appointment of censors “who can over-look with self-confidence and tact minor objections” in a piece of po-litical writing “which are not justified in view of the purport and direc-tion of the entire article.” Marx fairly explodes: “The content as a criterion for censorship already disappeared, as we have observed; now the form disappears too…. All objective norms have been abandoned; the personal relationship is left; and the censor’s tact may be called a guarantee. What [norm] can the censor violate, then?” Marx asks (his emphasis). “Tact. But tactlessness is no crime.”²⁶ (Of the Nazi “final solution,” Trevor-Roper writes that “it was a dirty business, everyone agreed,… [but] it was bad form—-contrary to the German, ‘inborn gift of tactfulness’—to discuss the details.”²⁷)

Marx, himself fabled for a tactlessness verging on the heroic, has, in this, his first public article, worked his way to the structural ele-ments of the problem of nineteenth-century Jewish Emancipation: on the one side we have the petitioning emigrant from (ultimately) the back country²⁸ of the shtetl seeking to “pass” into the West, into its political and social systems by means of education and interpersonal skills, into its streets and public places, into its professions (as, in this case, Marx inaugurating his career as a political journalist), and -everywhere urged to show “restraint” in his pursuits (of career, of money, of—in this case —“truth”); on the other side we have the “immigration” officials staffing the “customhouses,” the censors, the Gentile Western superego, “in-structed” to use “tact” in what it will allow to “pass.” Tact, the dictionary tells us, is “delicate perception of the right thing to say or do without offending.”²⁹ To Marx, such a directive, couched in terms of “restraint” and “tact,” is the ultimate in arbitrariness, “based on haughty conceit of a police state…. The censor … is prosecutor, lawyer, and judge in one person.”³⁰ A curious “police state,” nevertheless, it legislated not criminal laws (“But tactlessness is no crime”), nor civil laws, nor morals, but manners. Marx had been emancipated into the modern, bourgeois-liberal era of “civil society.” Not having undergone in his upbringing

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the blessings of a properly installed Protestant Ethic, he would encounter and experience the informal sumptuary legislation of a Protestant Eti-quette as a heteronomous tyranny.

Later, in another battle over censorship, Marx replies to an attack on his critique, in the Rheinische Zeitung, of the debates in the Rhenish Diet on freedom of the press. The K6lnische Zeitung in turn attacked the Left Hegelians for their assaults on Christianity and reproved the censors for the “blameworthy forbearance” they had shown in allowing the newer philosophical school—and I quote from Marx’s reply—“to make the most unseemly attacks upon Christianity in public papers and other printed writings not intended exclusively for scientific circles.”³¹³² Marx makes short work of the assumption of this “liberal leading article” that science is on the side of Christianity and that the religious faith of the ordinary reader should not be exposed to the doubts aroused by public religious controversy. In fact, he writes, “the truly believing heart of the ‘great masses’ is probably more exposed to the corrosion of doubt than the refined worldly culture of the ‘few’”³³ (my emphasis). This cryptic remark—one more example of the onslaught of pariah Jewry against refinement as such—means that while the “crude” religious beliefs of the masses (in miracles, etc.) are in open collision with scientific findings, thus creating real crises of faith, the “refined” liberal Protestantism of the “elite” enables it to escape such a real clash and hence to escape the anxiety of real doubt. But the liberalism of the Cologne paper is in the end, according to Marx, less concerned with whether the investigations of Christianity in the public papers be scientific or unscientific than it is with another requirement; in Marx’s words: “Even if it is attacked by unscientific investigations in all the papers of the monarchy it must be discreet and quiet.” Marx once more brings the matter of seemliness to center stage: it is decorum, and concern for appearances, and fear of scandal, and deference to “good taste” that prevent philosophical and religious ideas from enter-ing the so-called “unsuitable terrain” of newspapers. Attention must be paid, Marx insists, to “the cry of life of ideas which have burst open the orderly, hieroglyphic husk of the system to become citizens of the world.”³⁴

One more time Marx will turn his attention to censorship and the special meaning it had for him (and shortly thereafter his paper, the Rheinische Zeitung, is suppressed and Marx goes into exile in Paris). On the day he becomes editor-in-chief, he replies to charges by an Augsburg paper that, as he writes, "makes the faux pas of finding the

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Rheinische Zeitung to be a Prussian communist…. The reader may de-cide," Marx rejoins, “whether this ill-mannered fancy of the Augsburger is fair … after we have presented the alleged corpus delicti”³⁵ (my emphasis). He counters their charge that his paper has presented “dirty linen with approval” by asking whether his paper should maintain that communism³⁶ is not an important current issue because it “wears dirty linen and does not smell of rose water.” Marx recalls that the Augsburg paper itself, in the person of its Paris correspondent, has been seeking to assimilate certain socialist-communist ideas to monarchy itself and, in the process, of course, laundering communism. This correspondent is “a convert who treats history as a baker treats botany.” The real offense then, of Marx, is thus understandable: the Augsburg paper “will never forgive us for revealing communism to the public in its unwashed nakedness. Now you understand the dogged irony,” Marx tells his readers, “with which we are told that we recommend communism, which had the happy elegance of being discussed in the Augsburg paper”³⁷ (Marx’s emphasis). To “seek to appropriate socialist-communist ideas”³⁸ into bourgeois liberalism, Marx holds, much more into monarchy, is to refine away all their coarse power, to endow them with “the happy elegance” of bourgeois chit-chat in the family newspaper. Communism is “dirty linen,” Marx declares, which must indeed be laundered if it is to “pass” in respectable journalistic circles. .

We know already, in outline anyway, what will happen when Marx puts his hand to writing “On the Jewish Question”: we know that he will “wash dirty linen in public” and that, in so doing, he will violate not only the Gentile commandment of public decorum—opening himself to the charge of vulgarity—but he will also violate “a powerful though unwritten commandment of Jewish life: ‘Thou shalt not reveal ingroup secrets to the Goyim’”³⁹⁴⁰—opening himself to the charge of anti-Semi-tism. In one stroke, he will have become a double pariah: unfit by reason of vulgarity for the polite society of Gentiles—vulgar anti-Semi-tism, after all, was not salonsfahig—and persona non grata with the Jew-ish community because he had told “truth in a hostile environment.”⁴¹⁴²

In October and November 1842 he published his analysis of the cruel wood-theft laws passed by the Rhenish Diet (sitting in Diisseldorf) against peasants who gathered fallen branches in the forest to use as fuel. Then, in early 1843, he began a series of articles on the economic distress

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of the Moselle vintagers. Later, he was to recall these two articles as his first “embarrassed” effort to deal in detail with “material interests.”⁴³ Finally, on March 18, the following announcement appeared in his paper: “The undersigned declares that as from today he has resigned from editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung due to present censorship conditions.” 88 The paper shuts down on April 1, and on June 19, 1843, Marx marries Baroness Jenny von Westphalen in the Protestant church at Kreuznach. After a honeymoon trip to Rheinpfatz, Switzerland, the couple return to the home of his mother-in-law at Kreuznach. There Marx works on “On the Jewish Question” and the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.” As he writes, he is preparing his departure from Prussia. Why will he leave? Because, he writes Ruge that summer, he is allowed only to use “pins instead of a sword” in his fight for liberty: “I am tired of this hypocrisy and stupidity, of the boorishness of officials, I am tired of having to bow and scrape and invent safe and harmless phrases”⁴⁴ (my emphasis).

The expressive norms of verbal propriety embodied in the Prussian Censorship Instruction were experienced by Marx as a form of persecu-tion—persecution by propriety. To have continued to write would have been “to bow and scrape and invent safe and harmless phrases,” that is, to practice the bourgeois form of what Leo Strauss has called “writing between the lines.”⁴⁵ This technique of esoteric writing, in which a hidden truth is deliberately concealed like a stowaway among the plau-sible baggage of exoteric opinion shipped to the “vulgar,” was repugnant to Marx. Besides, the form of censorship emerging in the liberal era addressed itself more to the manner of statement than to its content. In a man constitutionally incapable of understatement, such censorship was intolerable. He refused this form of moral Marranoism as his “ticket of admission” to the cultural system of bourgeois-Christian Prussia.

“How rare the fortunate times,” Marx had concluded his article on the Prussian Censorship Instruction, quoting Tacitus, “in which you can think what you wish and say what you think.” The months at Kreuznach with the Westphalens following his honeymoon with Jenny were to be one of those fortunate times. Taken up with working on his 150-page Critique and his reply to Bauer on the “Jewish Question,” these months in 1843—prior to the Paris manuscripts of 1844—are the decisive months in Marx’s intellectual development. His practical experience for the first time flows directly into a theoretical critique. Just as “his own struggles with the censors … provided Marx with at least part of the experience which underlies his long and bitter attack on the bu-reaucracy in the Critique,”⁴⁶ so his observations of newly emancipated Jewry entering civil society—the biirgerliche Gesellschaft—gave him the empirical grip which underlies his long and bitter attack on Hegel’s presumed “reconciliation” of bourgeois and citoyen in the modern state

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in the latter’s Philosophy of Right. Intending to revise his Critique, Marx wrote an introduction to it and published it in the same issue of the Yearbook in which he published “On the Jewish Question.”

The “original motivation-nexus” (to use a phrase of Leo Strauss) of Marx’s call for the abolition of private property lies in this early struggle with public propriety. “Cultural education spread,” Horkheimer and Adorno write, “with bourgeois property.”⁴⁷ Bourgeois propriety spread in the wake of bourgeois property. Bourgeois Bildung, in the large sense of the restraints of the Protestant expressive esthetic, with its sense of “mine” and “thine,” with its spheres and privacies, the whole envelope of precious space enclosing each differentiated bourgeois in-dividual like a sacred mandala, ticketing him against intrusion—all of this Marx experienced as emasculating, domesticating, taming. France, at least, he had learned, allowed one to say the unsayable. He would take his heterodoxy there. There, in self-imposed exile from Germany, he would address himself to the “Jewish question,” the ancient Juden-frage. Decisions made in coming to terms with the “Jewish question” could then be used in settling his accounts with the bourgeois-Christian West. In October 1843 he left with Jenny for Paris.

“On the Jewish Question” was published in Paris, in February 1844, in the only issue ever to appear of the Deutsch-franzdsische Jahrbiicher that was edited by Marx and his friend Arnold Ruge.⁴⁸ In that issue Parisians read the opinions that were to become an abomination to Marx’s fellow Jews, a delight to anti-Semites, and a source of contin-uing embarrassment to members of the revolutionary Marxist movement, both Jew and Gentile:

Let us consider the actual, secular Jew—not the sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.

Let us look for the secret of the Jew not in his religion but rather for the secret of the religion in the actual Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.

What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining. What is his worldly god? Money.

Very well! Emancipation from bargaining and money, and thus from practical and real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our era….

Christianity arose out of Judaism. It has again dissolved itself into Judaism.

From the outset the Christian was the theorizing Jew. Hence, the Jew is the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has again become a Jew.

Christianity overcame real Judaism only in appearance. It was too refined,⁴⁹ too spiritual, to eliminate the crudeness of prac-tical need except by elevating it into the blue.

Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, and Judaism is ’the vulgar⁵⁰ practical application of Christianity.⁵¹ [Marx’s em-phasis]

Even though in 1843 the bourgeois taboo against revealing in public —even presuming such a revelation were true—the ignominious group behavior of minorities (including one’s own) was much less strong than it was to become subsequently, nevertheless, Marx’s essay, as we have noted, embarrassed his friends, pleased anti-Semites, and enraged Jews. Yet for all its shock value, Marx’s “book review” of Bauer’s two works on the “Jewish question” merely reargued in mid-nineteenth-century form a question that had been publicly argued in the previous century: “Are the Jews congenitally unsociable and rude, or are they this way as a result of having been segregated into ghettoes?”—“such was the form of the question,” notes the Franco-Jewish historian Léon Poliakov, “over which argument raged in the Eighteenth Century, on the eve of the Emancipation.”⁵²

Was Marx an anti-Semite (i.e., a Jew-hater)? Was he a self-hating Jew? Was what Ben Halpern calls “the vulgarity of Marx’s references to Jews”⁵³ and Edmund Silberner Marx’s “anti-semitic vulgarism”⁵⁴ truly anti-Semitism? or vulgarity? or both? If both, was it vulgar anti-Semitism as opposed to polite anti-Semitism? Was Marx vulgar? Were the Jews Marx referred to vulgar? Suppose they were—then are Marx’s vulgar references to them and their vulgarity anti-Semitism? or vulgarity? or both? Suppose on the contrary, that the Jews Marx referred to as vulgar were not vulgar but that, believing them to be vulgar, he made vulgar references to them and their presumed vulgarity? Was he in that case an anti-Semite? or vulgar? or both? These questions carry us to the core of Marx and Marxism and place in our hands the key to his savage assault on the bourgeois-Christian taboos of “respectable” nine-teenth-century European civilization, an assault renewed in its savagery, if not in its thrust, by another intellectual of the Jewish Diaspora at the end of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud.

In that very fourth decade in which Marx published “On the Jewish Question” a teenage Ferdinand Lassalle was also struggling with the “Jewish question” as framed in the public discussion of “Jewish Eman— cipation.” Lassalle had a strong interest in Reform Judaism, and his desire was strong to make the Jews a respected people.⁵⁵ He wanted to be their Maccabean vindicator.⁵⁶ At nineteen he writes to his mother

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that Jewish “misfortune, however, as it appears here, namely as broken-ness and inconsistency of the human spirit, is the esthetically ugly.”⁵⁷ The choice Lassalle was to make, between left-wing revolution and Reform Judaism’s liberalism, was governed by his answer to a prior question: was the sorry social “look” of Jewry in the West the outcome of long confinement and persecution by the surrounding Gentile culture, or was it the product of largely indigenous forces working within the Jewish subculture? Lassalle thus struggled to make up his mind about his own identity: was he, in the West, to be a pariah or a parvenu? All his life he wavered in his answer. Marx never did. While Marx’s decision to be an outlaw took final intellectual form only in the years 1843-45— the years of his marriage to the aristocratic Gentile Jenny von West-phalen, his critique of Hegel, and his manifesto on the “Jewish question” (the years which were “the most decisive in his life,” Isaiah Berlin writes⁵⁸)—this decision itself has earlier roots. As with Hobbes, as Leo Strauss notes—or with any great thinker, for that matter—the later formulations of Marx tend “to disguise the original motivation-nexus,” the fundamental attitude that lies at the core of his doctrine.⁵⁹ Marx’s father, long before Karl read Hegel, had presented his son with the essentials, on a behavioral level, of what Karl Léwith calls “das Problem der biirgerlichen Gesellschaft”: the problem of bourgeois society.⁶⁰