17 Adar 5608 – February 21 1848
Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto. The political ferment created by the Manifesto, particularly in Russia, catapulted many thousands of oppressed Jews into political activism, but Marx was far away from it all, working quietly away in the reading room of London’s British Museum. A family man who gave each of his three daughters the middle name Jenny, after his wife, and the descendant of a line of illustrious Jewish scholars, including the commentator Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi), Marx targeted religion but might have been shocked by the way Communism all but destroyed the family as a social unit.