Page:Karl Marx The Man and His Work.pdf/23

Rh to all the Jews no other choice but to be baptized or to forego all official position and activity.

"The father of Marx, a prominent Jewish lawyer and notary at the county court, submitted to the unavoidable, and, with his family, adopted the Christian faith.

"Twenty years later, when the boy had grown to be a man, he gave the first reply to this act of violence in his pamphlet on the Hebrew Question. And his whole life was a reply and was the revenge."

"Marx's father," writes Marx's daughter, "was a man of great talent, and thoroughly imbued with the French ideas of the eighteenth century concerning religion, science and art; his mother was descended from Hungarian Jews who had settled in Holland in the seventeenth century. Among his earliest friends and companions were Jenny—later his wife—and Edgar von Westfalen. It was their father—a half Scot—who inspired Marx with his first love for the romantic school; and while his father read Voltaire and Racine to him, Westfalen read Homer and Shakespeare to him. And these remained his favorite authors."

It seems to me that the most desirable potentialities of the Jewish race lived in Marx. We find in him the untiring seeker for truth; the seeker who climbed lonely mountain peaks and strove to wrest from the fiery bush that which humanity has sought and striven for since the daybreak of culture: the knowledge of life. Furthermore, we meet here also the tenacious clinging to convictions, and the joy of faith and devotion to a cause: traits which are all predominant in the Jewish race. Then we find in him the flaming rage against injustice and slavery, and that strong developed brotherly feeling, which, according to a biblical legend, prompted Moses to clench his fist to strike the Egyptian who was maltreating a brother of his race. Nevertheless, all these characteristics do not possess anything typically Jewish or racial, because their uniqueness was not developed in sectarian seclusion, and