In my forthcoming article 'Was Karl Marx a Satanist?'; I addressed a particular claim made by Sergius Riis' 1962 book 'Karl Marx: Master of Fraud'. The substance of this claim was that Riis had been to London in 1903 some fifty-nine years previously and had looked for anyone who had known Marx having heard about him for his teacher: one Mr. McFarlane. (1) Riis recounts that before meeting Demuth he had questioned others about Marx, but yet they didn't know of him.

This is hardly surprising given that Riis seems to have believed that Marx only ever lived in Dean Street when in London: (2) when in fact he had only spent his five years of extreme (but largely self-inflicted) poverty there between 1851 and 1856. (3) Thus, when Riis came to call over fifty years later expecting to find people who known Marx well (having assumed he must have died in 1883 in Dean Street having lived there for circa thirty years) that he did not find any to his manifest disappointment (4) is hardly surprising.

An elderly couple who claimed to have known the Marx family during their stay do seem to be genuine since their description of the Marx family as revolutionaries always leaving behind unpaid bills, debts while trying to borrow money from anyone who would lend it (5) does ring reasonably true.

However, when we learn that Riis claims to have met Helene Demuth in a fish and chip shop near Dean Street in 1903: we can only barely suppress a giggle. The reason why that is so is because Helene Demuth died in 1890: (6) so she was thirteen years dead and buried in 1903 when Riis claims to have met her.

We can just imagine the scene: it is a fish and chip shop in one of the less savoury areas of London and this young American man walks in questioning people about a man of whom some have heard in relation to discussions about socialism: Karl Marx. This old lady - whoever she actually was - saw an opportunity to make a bit of money and when the American youth asked her about Marx: she pretended to be Demuth.

It didn't take much since Riis knew next to nothing about Marx and with a little bit of knowledge (that Marx was born a jew and was a revolutionary) it was easy to invent some superficially plausible stories about the 'great man' that impressed the youth.

This accounts for why Riis' Demuth tells so implausible a tale, which I quote below:

'Another offering of a shilling, I queried the Demuth woman regarding Marx' religious inclinations. She said: “'e was a God-fearing man.”

I gathered that Marx had often gone on Saturdays to a Jewish temple in [the] Maidenhead section of London. Sometimes, when his ailment had bothered him too severely (using the exact words of the Demuth woman), “he prayed alone in his room, before a row of lit candles, tying a sort of tape measure around his forehead.”' (7)

Those who doubt my point about this only need look at the specific synagogue that Demuth claims Marx attended: in the 'Maidenhead section of London'. This is nonsensical and points to the woman who claimed to be Demuth having a slight bit of fun with Riis. After all Maidenhead isn't a 'section of London', but rather is a large town west of London.

Marx - who lived in London proper - would have had no cause to go to Maidenhead to attend a synagogue as there were several significant ones in London such as the West London Synagogue near Marble Arch, the Great Synagogue near Aldgate in Central London and Bevis Marks in the City of London itself.

There was simply no need for London to have gone to the significant routine expensive of travelling miles out of London to visit a synagogue.

What the woman who claimed to be Helene Demuth was likely doing to get this description was drawing on her experience with the considerable number of Ashkenazi jews who had migrated to London from the Russian Empire in the 1880s and who were often extremely religious. Using phylacteries (the 'tape measure') was something we have no record of Marx even knowing what to do with in ritual terms, but their use was extremely common in Ashkenazi Judaism as practiced in Eastern Europe. (8)

As such then it is not difficult to see that the lady calling herself Helene Demuth who Riis met was constructing her story out of whole cloth in order to either materially gain from doing so (it can hardly be suspected that Riis wasn't offering a little bit of a reward for information) or to have the joy of leading a young gullible American up the historical garden path.

Thus, Karl Marx was hardly going around visiting synagogues now was he?

References

(1) Sergius Riis, 1962, 'Karl Master: Master of Fraud', 1^st Edition, Robert Speller: New York, pp. 6-7

(2) Ibid, pp. 7-8

(3) David McLellan, 1975, 'Marx', 1^st Edition, Fontana: London, pp. 17-18

(4) Riis, Op. Cit., pp. 7-8

(5) Ibid.

(6) Hal Draper, 1986, 'The Marx-Engels Cyclopedia', Vol. III, 1^st Edition, Schocken: New York, p. 55

(7) Riis, Op. Cit., p. 11

(8) A good autobiographical account of the 'culture shock' between Ashkenazi Judaism and the experience of late nineteenth century city living can be found in: Fermin Rocker, 1998, 'The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood', 1^st Edition, Freedom Press: London