On this day: Karl Marx dies - The Jewish Chronicle

Perhaps the most famous thinker of all time, Karl Marx died in 1883 at the age of 64. The father of communism, the man whose theories of work, class struggle and alienation transformed the world in the 20th century and continue to appeal to many today, was buried in his adopted home of Highgate.

Born in 1818 in Trier, a town in what was then Prussia, he was descended from rabbis on both sides of the family. But Marx’s father, vineyard-owner Hirschel, found his religion left him subject to antisemitic discrimination, and he duly renounced his faith to become a Protestant.

For Marx, who spent his adult life variously in Brussels and Paris before settling in England, where he would spend days in the reading room of the British Museum, both faiths were as bad as each other.

He famously wrote in an 1843 work, the Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right¸that religion was “the opium of the people”, a tool of capitalist systems with which the powerful and the elite could subdue the workers.