Over the last few days I've been exchanging emails with one of the world's leading scholars on Karl Marx and Marxism. I can't reveal his name, but he is a professor of political science, and has written many books on Marxism over the last four decades, including several biographies on Marx and Engels. He is also a very nice guy.
I forwarded him the paper The Czechoslovak Ancestry of Karl Marx by Czechoslovakian born American biochemist and genealogist Mila Rechcigl, along with another source which also claimed Karl Marx's maternal grandmother was a member of the illustrious Barent-Cohen family, and that her cousin had married Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the richest man in the world.
I asked him whether there was any truth in this. He replied: "I find the suggestion that Marx's grandmother was a Barent-Cohen very convincing."
The Czechoslovak Ancestry of Karl Marx. By
Mila Rechcigal (pdf)
