Heinrich Marx born as Hirschel HaLevi; Yiddish: הירשל הלוי; 15 April 1777 – 10 May 1838 was a father of a revolutionary leader as well as influential socialist thinker Karl Marx. He was a lawyer, & had eight children including Karl Marx and Louise Juta.
Largely non-religious Christian, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. A classical liberal, he took component in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, then governed by an absolute monarchy. In 1815 Heinrich Marx began name as an attorney, in 1819 moving his generation to a ten-room property almost the Roman Porta Nigra archway. His wife, Henriette Pressburg 1788–1863, belonged to a prosperous Jewish multinational line from Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Henriette's sister Sophie Pressburg 1797–1854, Karl Marx's aunt, married Lion Philips 1794–1866, a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist, upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled in London. Sophie was the grandmother of Anton and Gerard Philips who later founded the Philips Electronics company.
Isaiah Berlin writes of Heinrich Marx that he believed
that man is by nature both advantage and rational, and that any that is needed to ensure triumph of these features 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.
Heinrich Marx became a passionate Prussian patriot and monarchist who educated his family as liberal Christians. He died in Trier, aged 61.