Karl Marx
Founder of historical materialism; Capital and the Manifesto
Two corrections needed almost everywhere. The rabbi of Trier from 1723 was his paternal grandfather, not his maternal one: his mother's father, Isaac Pressburg, was a rabbi at Nijmegen in the Netherlands. And Marx did not "convert to Christianity": he was baptised as a child, on 26 August 1824, aged six. His father Heinrich had converted before Karl was born—about 1817—to keep his right to practise law when Prussia began applying the emancipation edict of 1812 restrictively in the Rhineland. His mother Henriette was baptised only in November 1825, after her own father's death.
And the uncomfortable thing has to be said. The only thing Marx wrote about Jews is On the Jewish Question (1843–44), where the word "Jewry" stands as a name for hucksterism; his private letters contain worse. He was neither bar mitzvah nor a practitioner of anything, and he stands on the Jewish side here not for any attitude to his people but because his line is rabbinic two generations deep and the baptism was the price of a licence to practise law.
Sources
Documents of the period
- K. Marx, On the Jewish Question (1843–44) — his only text about Jews — and it is hostile
Scholarship
- Wikipedia, “Karl Marx”; the Trier registers — the baptism of 26 August 1824; the paternal grandfather's rabbinate
Basis: documents and evidence.