The preface to the first volume of Capital ends with a motto about intellectual autonomy, or rather, about intellectual autonomy and the attitude toward reception that serves it best. Altering a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Karl Marx pledges to live by the words: “Go on your own way, and let the people talk.” He certainly managed to act in accord with the first clause, nowhere more so than in Capital itself. In this genre-transcending work, Marx aspires to the strictest conceptual rigor and documents his claims comprehensively, yet he also cracks wise, operates in a declamatory key, and gives free reign to his imaginative powers, telling readers, for example, what commodities would say if they could speak. As for letting the people talk, that proved to be a greater challenge. Capital was published in 1867; and the afterword that Marx produced for the second edition of his book in 1872 makes it clear that he studied as many responses to the first edition as he could find, not just the “systematic” ones, and that he was easily annoyed by slights and grateful for validations, even when it came from sources he disliked, such as the Saturday Review. Style, broadly speaking, figures prominently here. Marx brings up his “mode of presentation” more than a few times, famously asserting that it had to differ from the “mode of investigation” and faulting commentators for failing to see how he built off the latter when he developed the former. In a footnote, the last of thousands, some of which fill up multiple pages, he strikes back at “the mealy-mouthed scatterbrains of vulgar German political economy” who “have criticized the way my book is written and also the way its analysis is presented.” “Vulgar” in this context means tendentious and superficial, and Marx avows that he himself judges the “literary defects” of his magnum opus much more harshly than these lightweight naysayers, or in fact than anyone. He doesn’t say, however, which flaws he has in mind. Instead he adduces two favorable accounts of his style. One lauds it for injecting “charm” into “even the driest problems of political economy.” The other appreciates its “unusual liveliness.” Thus began a discussion that has played a small yet vibrant role in Marx studies ever since, a discussion in which the literary features of Capital have been prized, sometimes explicitly defended, and generally treated as non-incidental, non-ornamental aspects of the text. This line of commentary stretches from statements by Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels to Sianne Ngai’s and William Clare Roberts’s recent contributions, running through writings by Wilhelm Liebknecht, Edmund Wilson, Marshall Berman, Ludovica Silva, Robert Paul Wolff, and Jacques Derrida. It has addressed a variety of topics, including some of the mimetic techniques that Marx employs in Capital, such as his parodying of classical political economy and his freewheeling style of literary citation. What has been overlooked, to the best of my knowledge, is perhaps the most innovative of those techniques — Marx’s use of free indirect discourse. For while certain occurrences of free indirect discourse in Capital anticipate later developments in literary modernism, they are not especially conspicuous, in contrast to Marx’s much-quoted vampire and werewolf tropes and his reworkings of Faust (“a sensuous-supersensuous thing,” and so on). Tellingly, the original English translation, done by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (who was for fourteen years the companion and collaborator of Marx’s daughter Eleanor) in 1887, more or less dropped these stylistic distinctions, and the same goes for Ben Fowkes’s version in 1976, which generations of Anglophone readers have depended on for access to Marx’s text. What is Marx achieving when, rather than having a hypothetical capitalist speak directly, he engages in a kind of third-person imitation, reporting thoughts and utterances in a way that allows him to slide in and out of the hypothetical capitalist’s standpoint? How do we make sense of this investment of creative energy? We can of course bring different approaches to these questions. The one I want to pursue belongs to another conversation that has gone on at the margins of Marx studies but attracted participants of decidedly nonmarginal importance, for example, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Deutscher, and Isaiah Berlin. I am referring to the conversation about Marx as a Jewish writer. Born in 1818 to parents whose fathers were, respectively, a rabbi and a cantor, Marx was converted to Protestantism when he was a small child — this in predominantly Catholic Trier, a city where Jews accounted for less than one percent of the population. His own father Heinrich had taken the step of baptism in order to practice law, and young Karl and the rest of the family followed him in that a few years later. Not much is known about Marx’s experience of Judaism — or anti-Semitism — in restoration Prussia. How much did he interact with his uncle Samuel, Trier’s rabbi? Is there anything to the speculation that his mother Henrietta occasionally spoke Yiddish around her children? Marx’s biographers have had little to say about such matters. But the fact of his Jewish heritage has at times been seized upon by rivals and skeptics (Mikhail Bakunin, Eugen Düring) and put allies (Friedrich Engels, Franz Mehring) on the defensive. Because Marx penned a number of lines that rather furiously disparaged Jews and Judaism, most notably in his essay “On the Jewish Question” in 1844, the obscure situation has also made for accusations of Jewish self-hatred. On the other hand, the same fact has inspired many critics to frame Marx as being in some profound and productive way a Jewish writer. This framing has tended to rely on the power of suggestion — that is, to occur without much drilling down into the relevant sources. With a minimum of analysis, it is often said that Marx and his works stand in the prophetic tradition. Erich Fromm, for example, called Marx’s version of socialism “essentially prophetic Messianism in the language of the nineteenth century.” Or a critic such as George
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