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From: "D. Spencer Hines" <>
Subject: Re: Medieval Ancestry of Karl Marx
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 09:16:06 -1000


William Addams Reitwiesner wrote:

> >Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, who was a Baron's daughter. [DSH]
>
> 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.

Yes, Sowell does report that Jenny von Westphalen's Father was a Baron,
several times in his book. His sources are three biographies of Karl
Marx by Saul K. Padover, Robert Payne and David McClellan---all
secondary, of course, and now under suspicion. [It is amusing to note
how many people seem to think that when they have three sources, which
agree on a fact, they have somehow reached primordial ground truth. We
learned how false that could be, when working the Soviet Problem.]

There are several plausible explanations for Jenny's having printed up
the cartes de visite with "Baroness von Westphalen" on them. One----she
was plumping her pedigree, knowing it was not true. But could she easily
have gotten away with that----or did she care? She did give a dress
ball, complete with uniformed servants and hired musians---at age
50----according to Sowell, quoting Payne. [Her way of employing the
downtrodden I suppose.] Two----perhaps she had been mis-informed, by her
Father, and thought she was entitled to the rank of Baroness. What rank
would she have been entitled to on the cartes de visite---if any?
Three----you mention that her GrandFather was naturalized into the
Danish nobility on 22 May 1781. In what grade---did he perhaps get a
higher one in Copenhagen---and then use that rather than his Kingdom of
Westphalia rank? Would the "nobiliary police" have caught him out in
that ruse? You say, "they were hereditary knights, and untitled
nobility, but none of them were Barons." Was he entitled to describe
himself as a "Ritter" but not a "Feiherr"-----or neither? Plus
permutations, variations and additions to the above three options.
>

>... 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.

So, the 16th-Century Rabbi exercised his own personal *liberum veto* the
following day and declared himself inelligible further to serve as King
of Poland?

--

D. Spencer Hines---"Lenin's patience, never plentiful, was exhausted.
"Why," he demanded, "should we bother to reply to Kautsky? He would
reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to
that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautsky is a
traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything."
"The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive" **Yale University
Press**(1996)Newsweek,16 Sep 1996, p.100; [George Will]

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