Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx (1777–1838) and Henrietta Pressburg (1788–1863). He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine.[16] Marx was ancestrally Jewish as 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] His father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education and he became a lawyer and lived a relatively wealthy and middle-class existence, with his family owning a number of Moselle vineyards. Prior to his son's birth, and to escape the constraints of anti-semitic legislation, Herschel converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, the main Protestantdenomination in Germany and Prussia at the time, taking on the German forename of Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.[18] Marx was a third cousin once removed of German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, also born to a German Jewish family in the Rhineland, with whom he became a frequent correspondent in later life
Marx's birthplace, now Bruckenstrasse 10, in Trier which was purchased by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1928 and now houses a museum devoted to him[20]
