The reason for their silence is because Karl’s lineage from his grandfathers on backward is a long line of Orthodox rabbis.
At some point his parents converted to the Lutheran denomination of Christianity. Think of Karl like the crazy uncle no one speaks of or associates with in way except that this uncle ended up killing a bunch of his own family.
From the Wiki on him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 at 664 Brückergasse in Trier, a town in the Kingdom of Prussia’s Province of the Lower Rhine.[16] Ancestrally Ashkenazi Jewish, his maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier’s rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx.[17] Karl’s father, Herschel Marx, was the first in the line to receive a secular education; becoming relatively wealthy and middle-class, his family owned a number of Moselle vineyards. To escape the constraints of anti-semitic legislation, he converted from Judaism to the Protestant Christian denomination of Lutheranism prior to his son’s birth, taking on the German forename of Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.[18]
It would be easy enough to dismiss Marx as a self-hating Jew. The real complication, I think, is that ethnic Jews were sufficiently over-represented in Communist ranks that it is dangerous for an academic’s career to explore the links between Communism, Jewishness and anti-semitism, especially after Hitler conflated Bolshevism and Jews for his own purposes.
yes, Lutheran, the dominant religion where Marx’s family lived in Germany. But religion was not a significant part of Marx’s life, other than in his philosophical analyses. The big deal with Marx was his materialism, that is: analyzing everything in terms of wealth (which he saw as leading to power). This caused him to be classified as an atheist generally. He discounted religion as (famously) the opiate of the masses, that is... something in which the not-wealthy found solace (and as something foisted on the people by those with wealth and power) ... and which, by calming them with myth (including the promise of a better future in the “imagined” nigh and nigh), kept them from critical analysis of their present (down-trodden, very real) condition.. and especially, from doing anything about it (revolution).
This very limited view of religion does not reflect Lutheranism, Christianity, or Judaism. Obviously. It reflects Marx’s philosophy, though, and is totally consistent with his position that previous philosophers described the world whereas “the point is to change it.” Marx hoped to change society to one in which everybody had enough means so that their basic nature would then willingly share the wealth. But, Marx realized that this change would only arise through “force,” with a temporary “dictatorship of the the proletariat” confiscating the wealth of the few for “redistribution” to the masses. Marx was, underneath all this, also a bit of a utopian idealist, however, in that he allowed that the change could possibly be brought about by infiltrating and using the democratic systems in those countries having same (although direct force was more clearly necessary in non-democratic societies). Either way, Marx’s dream encompassed a (later) time when almost all government would become “unnecessary” ... after the dictatorship of the proletariat had done its job. But, Marx never quite specified (to my knowledge, anyway) how he expected this dictatorship to yield its enormous power when that time (hopefully) came.
Alas. We are now experiencing precisely such “hope and change” or “transformation” as Obama “shares the wealth” — meaning, of course, yours and mine, and most certainly not HIS (for he continues to amass riches all over America at his $38.600 a plate chicken fundraiser dinners — which only proves that there are many “useful idiots” with all “too much wealth,” in Marxian terms at least).
Or something like that.