Although Karl Marx's Jewish ancestry is usually admitted by all bar the dimwittedest of Jews or philosemities, you typically have to endure an attempt to portray Marx as an antisemitie in the transparent agenda to distant the founder of communism from his Jewish brethren. However, Marx did indeed write many things which in today's hyper-politically correct society could land someone a prison sentence. This obvious Zionist blog is a good example, the blogger has done an impressive job of compiling phrases from Marx's mid-19th century works and personal correspondence, held them up to 21st century political correct standards, and supposedly exposed the "grotesque antisemitism of Karl Marx’s writing." 1
As I've previously posted on, biographers of Marx have attempt to hide his maternal ancestry due to the revealing fact that he was very closely related to the Rothschild banking dynasty. In this post I am going to post details of what I've learnt of the Marx family's conversions to Christianity.
Karl Marx's Father: Herschel ha-Levi Marx
The name Marx is merely a shorten form of Mordechai, as is the name Marcus. Karl Marx's father Herschel Ha-Levi Marx was born in 1782 in Saarlouis, although his family would move to Trier soon after his birth. His mother was the descendant of an unbroken chain of rabbis at least 800 years long, his father was a rabbi of Trier, the oldest city in Germany (but ruled by France between 1801 - 1815). Herschel would later take the name Heinrich.
Heinrich Marx was baptised into the the Protestant faith following his mother's death, when he was around 35 years of age (sometime between April 1816 and August 1817 by Pastor Mühlendorf, a district preacher). Heinrich decided to be baptised purely to save his career as a lawyer. An 1812 ruling which barred Jews from serving the state, was on May 4, 1816 extended to the Rhineland, which had been reattached to the Prussian crown in 1815. Herschel/Heinrich Marx certainly did not covert to Christianity out of conviction for any religious belief. In 1815 he had written to the Governor General of the Rhineland, respectfully asking that Prussian laws applying exclusively to Jews be annulled. In the letter, he spoke of Jews as his "fellow believers" and fully identified himself with the Jewish community.
Karl Marx's Mother: Henrietta Pressburg
Marx's mother was born in 1887 in Nymwegen, Holland, where her father Isaac Heijmans Pressburg was a rabbi. Her mother was Nanette Salomon Barent-Cohen, a cousin of Hannah Barent-Cohen, the wife of Nathan Mayer Rothschild (whose family was the wealthiest on Earth before Karl Marx was even 10 years of age). She married Herschel ha-Levi Marx on November 30, 1813, in traditional Jewish ceremony. Henrietta Pressburg was baptised on November 20, 1825, when she was 38 years old, and had already given birth to eight children.
Karl Marx's Yiddish
Letters which Henrietta Pressburg wrote to both her children and her own Dutch family, were written in ungrammatical German, without any punctuation at all, revealing that she had spoken Yiddish and not Dutch in her parent's home.2 If Karl Marx was raised by an uneducated woman whose primary language was Yiddish, it is virtually impossible that Karl Marx did not also speak Yiddish. Marx's youngest child Eleanor also spoke Yiddish 3, and at workers meetings in London's East End, would proudly proclaim: "I am a Jewess." 4
Was Karl Marx circumcised? Where exactly was he baptised?
Karl was the third of his parent's nine children, he was born in 1818 to a Jewish mother and a father who had reluctantly converted from Judaism to Christianity within the previous two years. Karl's father had already had two children before he converted to Christianity, the eldest was a boy named Moritz-David who died in either childbirth or in infancy (biographers' accounts differ). Austrian born American-Jewish historian Saul Kussiel Padover (1905 - 1981) wrote in his 1978 biography:"Karl Marx was thus born a Jew, and may even have been circumcised (although there is no record of it), since according to Jewish law, a child follows the religion of its mother." 5Karl was baptised with seven of his surviving siblings en masse on August 24, 1824, three months after Karl's sixth birthday. His mother granted permission for her children to be baptised, but she wasn't herself baptised until the following year, and only once her father, a rabbi, had died.
Biographers' assertions on where precisely the mass-baptism of the seven Marx children took place are contradicting. One says in the local Jesuit church in Trier (where Karl was Confirmed in 1834).6 Another states that the baptisms happened not in a church, but in a ceremony attended by a large number of friends, in the Marx family home 7, a home run by a Jewess.
Notes
1. From reading the blog — http://marxwords.blogspot.co.uk/ — I believe this particular blogger's main aim is undermining leftist sympathy for Palestinians by attempting to portray leftist critics of Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, as supporters of an ideology founded by a racist anstisemite (Karl Marx) and terrorists (Lenin et al). But he's made a good stab at it, and it's from there I learnt of the only criticism Marx made of his relatives the Rothschilds that I've heard. In an article published in the New York Tribune (4 January 1856), Marx stated:
The issue of a new Russian loan affords a practical illustration of the system of loan-mongering in Europe, to which, we have heretofore called the attention of our readers. ...
This loan is brought out under the auspices of the house of Stieglitz at St. Petersburg. Stieglitz is to Alexander what Rothschild is to Francis Joseph, what Fould is to Louis Napoleon. The late Czar Nicholas made Stieglitz a Russian Baron, as the late Kaiser Franz made old Rothschild an Austrian Baron, while Louis Napoleon has made a Cabinet Minister of Fould, with a free ticket to the Tuileries for the females of his family. Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.
This Jew organization of loanmongers is as dangerous to the people as the aristocratic organization of landowners. It principally sprang up in Europe since Rothschild was made a Baron by Austria, enriched by the money earned by the Hessians in fighting the American Revolution.For more on Marx's antisemitism see here, for denials that Marx was antisemitic, and that his "A World Without Jews" is essentially a 1955 anti-Zionist Soviet propaganda piece, cobbled together from different Marx's writings and the title was not Marx's own, but chosen by the Soviets 70+ years after his death, here
2. McLellan, David. Marx Before Marxism. London: Penguin. 1972. p.48.
2. Gilman, Sander L. Karl Marx and the Secret Language of the Jews. Modern Judaism. Vol. 4, No. 3 October 1984. pp. 284-286. (an extract follows)
"Her maiden name was Pressburg, and she was the daughter of Isaac Pressburg, a rabbi in Nijmegen. But her name gives one further clue to her identity. Her father's family had come from Pressburg in Hungary to Holland and evidently maintained their Eastern European identity, at least their linguistic identity, even while living in Holland. Heinrich Marx's father, grandson and brother of rabbis in Trier, had an impeccable "German" tradition behind him. Indeed, his first language appears to have been German. His wife, coming out of a Yiddish-speaking home in Holland, never acquired a native command of German. And, as she corresponded with her family in broken German (Mauscheln), she also was not literate in either Yiddish or Dutch. Her letters reveal a Yiddish-tinged German,with sentence patterns which are clearly influenced by spoken Yiddish structures and a vocabulary that, while correct German, is extremely insecure in its choice of words. If one could extrapolate from her written German, her spoken language would have been German, but with a marked Yiddish accent, and perhaps, numerous Yiddishisms.
The specialized language of the Jew as a mirror of the Jews' nature seems to become an abstraction in Marx's later writings. And yet at the moment when Marx stands at one of the central markers in any human being's life, at the brink of his fiftieth birthday, the childhood association of the specific language of the Jew, the language of his mother, and the world of finance reappears. He writes to Engels on 30 April 1868: ". .. In a few days I will by fifty. When that Prussian lieutenant said to you: 'Twenty years in service and still a lieutenant,' I can say: 'A half a century on my back and still a pauper! How right my mother was: 'If Karell had made capital, instead of . . ." Now the association of the mother's spoken language, here reflected in the "Jewish" pronunciation of his name with the idea of "capital" links the abstract language of commodity back to the specific, Yiddish-accented language of the Jews as represented by his mother.
Within Marx's home, then, there would have been two models for the language of the Jew. His father, with his liberal support of the Prussian state, would have been associated with German. Marx's youthful enthusiasm for German letters may well be associated with his father's sense of the nature of the German language as an expression of German patriotism. On the other hand, Marx's mother seemed to have had little interest in such literary expression. Her reading would have been limited to tractates (books of the Talmud), and her world, as David McLellan formulated it, would have been "almost totally limited to her family and home, rather over-anxious and given to laments and humourless moralizing." Yiddish-accented German would have been associated with the world of the home, and the contrast between the two would have stressed the parochial implications of the language associated with the mother. This sense would have been highlighted by the contrast between the integrated world of his father's family and the image of his mother's family as intruders from the East. When one turns to Marx's discussions of his family, it is not surprising that his mother seems to vanish from his perception. The world associated with the mother had its presence on the streets of Trier. For while some of the Trier Jews may have been as well integrated into German society as was Heinrich Marx, a lawyer and a member of one of the German political clubs of his day, most of the Jews of Trier, according to the mayor of Trier in 1828, "belonged to the lower levels of society" and had been in Trier only for the past few decades. These Jews would have spoken Yiddish as their primary language and would have been a very visible presence in the world of the youthful convert Karl Marx. The tenfold increase of the number of Jews in Trier in the first two decades of the nineteenth century would have made the town even more aware of the differences between the assimilated or acculturated Jews of Trier and those "belonging to the lower classes." Thus a pattern is established: language, gender, class all contributed their qualities to the young Marx's image of the Jew. Yiddish-accented German, women, and the lower class merged with the image of the "peddler Jew," living off of his haggling in public places, to create the image of the Jew in Marx's early thought. The polar distinction between this image and the German-speaking, masculine, middle-class image of his father, earning his living from service, provides the model for the bad and the good Jew. And Marx categorizes the "good" Jew as that Jew who is not a Jew. The idea of conversion is inherent in the young Marx's understanding of the Jew. Conversion is the ability to remove oneself completely from any association with the "bad" Jew, no longer to possess the stigma of belonging to a group any definition of which would include the qualities ascribed to the "bad" Jew."3. Kerle, Dov-Ber. Politics of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Literature, and Society. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. 1998. p.125
4. McLellan, David. Marx Before Marxism. London: Penguin. 1972. p.44 and
5. Padover, Saul Kussiel Padover. Karl Marx, An Intimate Biography. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1978. p.30.
6. Ibid
7. McLellan, David. Marx Before Marxism. London: Penguin. 1972. p.48 and
Karl Marx was a funny guy. Preaching against Capitalism on the one hand and on the other he was fed by his capitalistic friend Friedrich Engels, an industrialist who supported him.
ReplyThe wealthy entrepreneur earned his money e. g. with commodity futures. That is he gambled at the stock market.
KM is really an obscure person. He called rich bankers "Jewish Niggers" and Slavs "people rubbish". But then again, he railed against religion and marriage.
A whimsical genius or a wicked two-faced person - this is really an interesting question. Maybe both, who knows ?