TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN 3rabbi in Trier and then moved to Westhofen in Alsace where he held the
rabbinate for twenty years. Aron Lwow's father, Moses Lwow, came from
Lemberg (the German name for Lwow) in Poland, and numbered among
his ancestors Meir Katzenellenbogen, head of the Talmudic High School
in Padua during the sixteenth century, and Abraham Ha-Levi Minz,
rabbi in Padua, whose father had left Germany in the middle of the
fifteenth century owing to persecutions there. In fact almost all the rabbis
of Trier from the sixteenth century onwards were ancestors of Marx.^5
Less is known of the ancestry of Karl's mother, Henrietta, but she
seems to have been no less steeped in the rabbinic tradition than her
husband. She was Dutch, the daughter of Isaac Pressburg, rabbi of Nijme-
gen. According to Eleanor (Karl's daughter), in her grandmother's family
'the sons had for centuries been rabbis'.^4 In a letter to the Dutch socialist
Polak, Eleanor wrote: 'It is strange that my father's semi-Dutch parentage
should be so little known. .. my grandmother's family name was Press-
burg and she belonged by descent to an old Hungarian Jewish family.
This family, driven by persecution to Holland, settled down in that
country and became known as I have said, by the name Pressburg - really
the town from which they came.'^5
Marx's father was remarkably unaffected by this centuries-old tradition
of strict Jewish orthodoxy. He had broken early with his family, from
whom he claimed to have received nothing 'apart from, to be fair, the
love of my mother',^6 and often mentioned to his son the great difficulties
he had gone through at the outset of his career. At the time of Marx's
birth he was counsellor-at-law to the High Court of Appeal in Trier; he
also practised in the Trier County Court, and was awarded the title of
Justizrat (very roughly the equivalent of a British Q.C.). For many years
he was President of the city lawyers' association and occupied a respected
position in civic society though he confined himself mostly to the com-
pany of his colleagues.
Although his beliefs seem to have been very little influenced by his
Jewish upbringing, Heinrich Marx's 'conversion' to Christianity was one
made solely in order to be able to continue his profession.^7 The Napo-
leonic laws had given Jews in the Rhineland a certain equality but had
attempted to impose strict controls over their commercial practices. On
the transference of the Rhineland to Prussia, Heinrich Marx addressed a
memorandum to the new Governor-General in which he respectfully
requested that the laws applying exclusively to Jews be annulled. He
spoke of his 'fellow believers' and fully identified himself with the Jewish
community. But the memorandum was without effect. The Jews got the
worst of both worlds: in 1818 a decree was issued keeping the Napoleonic
laws in force for an unlimited period; and two years earlier the Prussian