Born into a Trier rabbinical family
Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 at Brückengasse 664 in Trier — in what is now the Karl-Marx-Haus. His ancestors on his father's side had been the rabbis of Trier since 1723; his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx had held this office. His mother Henriette Pressburg came from Nijmegen and was likewise a rabbi's daughter; on both sides Marx's forebears had been rabbis for generations.
Heinrich Marx and the conversion
His father Heinrich Marx — originally Marx Levi, with the old Jewish family name Mardochai — was a lawyer. After the Prussian annexation of the Rhineland in 1815 and the gradual repeal of Napoleonic emancipation, he could no longer practise his profession as a Jew. In 1817 he converted to the Prussian state church, the Protestant church. Only thus was he permitted to continue to work as a lawyer.
Karl Marx himself was baptised as a Protestant together with his siblings in 1824; his mother was baptised in 1825. The family was thus formally no longer Jewish — yet Jewish origins continued to shape the family's self-understanding and intellectual climate.
Significance for the history of the Jews on the Moselle
Karl Marx stands for the ambivalent experience of Jewish families in the Trier region after the Congress of Vienna: Napoleonic equality had been revoked; in order to retain a bourgeois profession, conversion was required. Heinrich Marx's step was not an isolated case — it was typical of a generation of Rhenish Jewish citizens who had to choose between economic existence and religious identity.
Karl Marx himself treated the question of his relation to Judaism in his writings (in particular Zur Judenfrage, 1844) ambivalently — and, in the view of many Jewish readers, inappropriately or hurtfully. Today's scholarship discusses these texts in a differentiated way; they are the subject of controversial debate.
Marx and the Prüm family
Karl Marx was born in 1818, the son of a Trier lawyer. Jodocus Prüm was born in Wehlen in 1807, the son of a winegrower. Both knew the social hardship of the Moselle winegrowers in the middle of the nineteenth century. Their responses differed: Jodocus with social projects and foundations, Marx with fundamental critique. What united them was compassion — both drew from what they had seen on the same river, on the same slate slopes.