ABSTRACT
Although Karl Marx wrote many thousands of words (nearly all vituperative, and many salacious) about Jews, he seems to have mentioned his own Jewish origins only once. In a letter to Lion Philips, a Dutch uncle who founded the Philips Electronics dynasty and was a major source of (capitalist) income to young Marx, he remarks that Benjamin Disraeli is their Stammgenosse, that is, of the same stock. 1 Why, one wonders, should the fierce Promethean rebel against established society and Western imperialism claim kinship with the quintessential insider—the traditionalist (and imperialist) Tory politician Disraeli? Although he was willing to grant that Young England, the political movement and parliamentary faction headed by Disraeli, occasionally struck the bourgeoisie “in the very heart’s core” by its witty and incisive criticisms, Marx nevertheless dismissed it as a fantastical sentimentalism, with a “total incapacity to comprehend the march of history.” 2
