s uncle. His mother was Dutch. Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, who was a Baron's daughter. He apparently mooched off and exploited his in-laws shamelessly. His poor wife Jenny, who was much neglected by her husband, seems to have been a champion Royalty Sniffer. At the time her husband was leading the First Communist International---The International Working Men's Association---she had cartes de visite printed up identifying herself as "Baroness von Westphalen"---a member of that class her husband had sworn to sweep into the dustbin of History. Surely the poor woman had very few pleasures living with such an unpleasant man---so perhaps we should not deny her a few foibles. Marx was surely the most disastrous of all the 19th Century European Intellectuals---his wacko theories have condemned hundreds of millions to economic privation and poverty and scores of millions to death. His favorite riposte according to Tom Sowell was, "I will annihilate you!"---and he certainly did that to millions of people. Marx's theories seem to have been pretty thoroughly discredited 113 years after his death. Only in Pyongyang, Havana, and parts of Tirane, Berkeley and Harvard Yard----does he get much respect. But it would be delicious were he to have had "Royal Blood"----particularly if he knew about it and took some pride in it. The thought of Karl Marx as a closet Royalty Sniffer is somehow deeply satisfying, as theatre----but I'm not holding my breath or betting any money on it, yet. Can you please tell us whether he was indeed of Royal Descent---and how the purple trail was constructed, if he did? -- D. Spencer Hines Fiel Pero Desdichado (Faithful But Unfortunate), Motto of the House of Marlborough as quoted by Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, The Last Lion, Visions of Glory (1874-1932), William Manchester (1983), p.810 Article 10090 of soc.genealogy.medieval: Path: news.kth.se!nntp.uio.no!newsfeeds.sol.net!newspump.sol.net!howland.erols.net!feed1.news.erols.com!news From: wrei@127.0.0.1 (William Addams Reitwiesner) Newsgroups: soc.genealogy.medieval Subject: Re: Medieval Ancestry of Karl Marx Date: Sun, 02 Feb 1997 02:51:30 GMT Organization: WARGS Lines: 86 Message-ID: <32f8eda1.5715989@news.erols.com> References: <3.0.1.16.19970124094031.39cf16ce@postoffice.worldnet.att.net> <5ce9dq$rvv$1@news.theriver.com> <32f04f6c.2674023@news.erols.com> <32F2B262.63C1@worldnet.att.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.96.125.240 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99g/16.339 Xref: news.kth.se soc.genealogy.medieval:10090 "D. Spencer Hines" wrote: >At 02:40 AM 1/28/97 +0000, William Addams Reitwiesner wrei@erols.com >wrote: > >>I haven't seen very many genealogies of Groucho Marx and the Marx >>brothers. On the other hand, if it's Karl Marx you're interested in, >>you can find him, and his medieval ancestry, in Neil Rosenstein, *The >>Unbroken Chain* [New York: CIS, 1990], vol. 1, p. 237. > > I've had zero luck finding Rosenstein's "The Unbroken Chain" to date. >Thomas Sowell, the distinguished Stanford economist, who just happens to >be an Afro-American, tells us some interesting things about Karl Marx's >roots in Sowell's, "Marxism---Philosophy and Economics," William Morrow >and Company, 1985. It seems that Marx was descended from a long line of >rabbis. The chief rabbi in Trier, where Marx was born, was Marx's uncle. >His mother was Dutch. > > Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, who was a Baron's daughter. If you got this from Sowell, then his understanding of the nobiliary structure of 18th and 19th century Europe is pretty poor. Jenny's father was in no way a Baron. His father (Jenny's grandfather) was made a hereditary knight in the Imperial nobility, with the additional prefix of "Edler von" on 23 May 1764, and was naturalized into the Danish nobility on 22 May 1781. Three of his sons (Jenny's father and two of his brothers) were recognized in the hereditary knighthood of the Kingdom of Westphalia on 5 Nov. 1812, and Jenny's father's nobility, and that of his six surviving children (including Jenny) was recognized in the Kingdom of Prussia on 11 Oct. 1834. The last male member of this family died in 1906. They were hereditary knights, and untitled nobility, but none of them were Barons. See *Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels*, Band 64 (Genealogisches Handbuch der Adeligen Haeuser B Band XII, 1977), pp. 489-491. > He >apparently mooched off and exploited his in-laws shamelessly. His poor >wife Jenny, who was much neglected by her husband, seems to have been a >champion Royalty Sniffer. At the time her husband was leading the First >Communist International---The International Working Men's >Association---she had cartes de visite printed up identifying herself as >"Baroness von Westphalen"---a member of that class her husband had sworn >to sweep into the dustbin of History. Surely the poor woman had very few >pleasures living with such an unpleasant man---so perhaps we should not >deny her a few foibles. > > Marx was surely the most disastrous of all the 19th Century European >Intellectuals---his wacko theories have condemned hundreds of millions >to economic privation and poverty and scores of millions to death. His >favorite riposte according to Tom Sowell was, "I will annihilate >you!"---and he certainly did that to millions of people. > > Marx's theories seem to have been pretty thoroughly discredited 113 >years after his death. Only in Pyongyang, Havana, and parts of Tirane, >Berkeley and Harvard Yard----does he get much respect. But it would be >delicious were he to have had "Royal Blood"----particularly if he knew >about it and took some pride in it. The thought of Karl Marx as a closet >Royalty Sniffer is somehow deeply satisfying, as theatre----but I'm not >holding my breath or betting any money on it, yet. > > Can you please tell us whether he was indeed of Royal Descent---and how >the purple trail was constructed, if he did? Ignoring the non-genealogical portions of the above rant, Karl Marx's ancestry, as far as has been traced, is exclusively Jewish. One of his ancestors, a 16th-century Rabbi, is said, according to Jewish legends, to have been King of Poland for one night. See Rosenstein, vol. 1, pp. 5-9, for the legends and an attempt to correlate them with the non-Jewish records, which make no reference to this alleged event. Other than that, Karl Marx appears to have no Royal ancestry. Jenny Marx, on the other hand, is a different story. In one of his "Notable Kin" columns in the *NEHGS Nexus* several years ago (I don't have the citation handy), Gary Boyd Roberts shows that Jenny's grandmother was from a Scottish gentry family, and that her (Jenny's) great-grandmother was a Campbell of Orchard, a cadet of the Campbells of Ardkinglass. Remember that it was a letter from the Duke of Argyll to the trustees of the British Museum, recommending his kinsman Karl Marx [sic, actually Marx was the husband of the Duke's kinswoman], which allowed Marx to study at the library there. Roberts' article is titled "A Marxist Royal Descent". William Addams Reitwiesner wrei@erols.com