Heinrich Marx

[2] An 1812 edict, unenforced by the French, asserted that Jews could not occupy legal positions or state offices, and Prussian enforcement of the law led to trouble for Heinrich Marx.

Isaiah Berlin writes of Heinrich Marx that he believed that man is by nature both good and rational, and that all that is needed to ensure triumph of these qualities is the removal of artificial obstacles from his path.

They were disappearing already, and disappearing fast, and the time was rapidly approaching when the last citadels of reaction, the Catholic Church and the feudal nobility, would melt away before the irresistible march of reason... Born a Jew, a citizen of inferior legal and social status, he had attained to equality with his more enlightened neighbours, had earned their respect as a human being, and had become assimilated into what appeared to him as their more rational and dignified mode of life.

Because of Marx's poor grades, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, where his legal studies became less significant than excursions into philosophy and history.

Your intercourse with the world is limited to your sordid room, where perhaps lie abandoned in the classical disorder the love letters of a Jenny [Karl’s fiancée] and the tear-stained counsels of your father.

[9]However, in spite of their disagreements, Karl always retained a strong affection for his father, his daughter Eleanor writing “he never tired of talking about him, and always carried an old daguerreotype photograph of him”.