Nadene Goldfoot
During the Pre-Revolution days in Germany during the early 19th century, men and women of Jewish heritage agitated not only for their own emancipation, but for the emancipation of the oppressed all over the world. Jews had lost their homeland in the year 70 CE, so had been here and there at the whim of kings and queens who need their expertise in reading and math skills in trading, buying, selling; in how countries deal with each other. Most of the time, the Jews themselves were "allowed" to live in either little shtetls if lucky, or were locked in ghettos such as what Venice had provided.
His parents were Jewish, but like many Hellenistic Jews, they had abandoned Judaism before his birth and had him baptized as a Christian at the age of six. His father, Heinrich Marx, was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism prior to Karl's birth, in part in order to advance his career as a lawyer. A man of the Enlightenment, Heinrich was devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. Karl's mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was from Holland, and Jewish at the time of Karl's birth, although she converted upon the death of her parents. Karl was baptized when he was six years old.
His grandparents were Hirschel Mordecai Marx (1743-1804) and Eva Moses Llow (1753-1823) and Isaac Pressburg Heymans (174-1832) and Nanette Baront Cohen (1764-1833). Nanette's parents were were Salomon David Cohen (1732-1807) and Sarah Brandes. Salomon's father was Baront Cohen. Probably all were from Prussia or Germany.
Friedrich Engels (born Nov. 28, 1820, Barmen, Rhine province, Prussia [Germany]—died Aug. 5, 1895, London, Eng.) German socialist philosopher, His was a (Calvinist) Reformed upbringing and the faith he inherited was taken up with a zeal and exuberance he would later transfer to communism.
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's closest friend and collaborator. Engels's family was wealthy and owned large cotton-textile mills in Prussia and England.
Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron, on June 19, 1843 in the Pauluskirche, at Bad Kreuznach. Marx and Jenny had seven children, but due to poverty, only three survived to adulthood. Marx's major source of income was from the support of Friedrich Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. So, in truth, he was mooching off his friend, Friedrich. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Inheritances from one of Jenny's uncles and her mother who died in 1856 allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious lodgings at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town a new suburb on the then-outskirts of London.
Marx generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, although this did to some extent depend upon his spending on relatively bourgeois luxuries, which he felt were necessities for his wife and children given their social status and the mores of the time. This sounds an awful lot like many of us Americans who do the same thing.
He grew up with radical views so didn't get a certain teaching position because of that. He then turned to journalism editing the liberal Cologne Daily Rheinische Zeitung in 1842-1843. He then moved to Paris where had a friendship with Friedrich Engels. He was expelled from France because of his attacks on the Prussian government and went to Brussels where he renounced his Prussian citizenship and became "stateless."
He and Engles came up with The Communist manifesto, a classic work of Marxian socialism. All I can really see is his time spent on not working, but grumbling about not finding work, blaming the governments. His basic assumption of Marxism is that history is essentially the account of class struggles between the oppressing and the oppressed.
It seems that his parents were so Hellenized, that he didn't even see himself as Jewish nor did his care about his ancestors being Jewish. He had no expert knowledge of any Jewish problems because he studied none of them. His attitude toward the Jews was characterized by antipathy and contempt, and he described Judaism and the Jews in terms similar to those used by many anti-Semites of the day. From 1848 on, Marx envisaged the Jews chiefly as a financial reactionary group.
Moses Hess was born in Bonn, which was under French rule at the time. In his French-language birth certificate, his name is given as "Moïse"; (which is Moses) he was named after his maternal grandfather. His father was an ordained rabbi, but never practiced this profession. Hess received a Jewish religious education from his grandfather, and later studied philosophy at the University of Bonn, but never graduated. He's from a line of men who never finished what they started.
He married a poor Catholic seamstress, Sibylle Pesch, "in order to redress the injustice perpetrated by society". Legend has it that his wife Sibylle Pesch was a prostitute, whom he married either in order to rescue her from her way of life, or perhaps as an idealistic act. .Although they remained happily married until Hess' death, Sibylle may have had an affair with Friedrich Engels while he was smuggling her from Belgium to France to be reunited with her husband. Sibylle, however, claimed the relationship was non-consensual and accused Engels of rape. The incident may have precipitated Hess' split from the communist movement. This is how families become Hellenized. Mixed religions. The children will not be practicing Jews.
This is most interesting because of WWII and the culprit under Hitler was a Hess. Rudolf Walter Richard Hess was a German politician and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, .So there were Jewish Hess and the Gentile Hess out of Germany. Hess, the eldest of three children, was born on 26 April 1894 in al-Ibrahimiyya, a suburb of Alexandria, Egypt (then under British occupation, though formally a part of the Ottoman Empire), into a wealthy German family. Originally from Bohemia, the Hess family settled in Wunsiedel, Upper Franconia, in the 1760s.
Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia: Karl Marx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Hess
https://philarchive.org/archive/KOVMHM
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