an international publishing conspiracy
Marx was baptized, raised Protestant, and knew nothing of Judaism his entire life. His father had gone to great pains to escape his Jewishness and provide a better life for himself and his son, even changing his name. As a result, Marx was inevitably brought up with a considerable amount of internalized antisemitism.
It is a view commonly held among amateur linguists, among whom I count myself, that Modern Hebrew is a constructed language “invented” by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. The official Tumblr of the Language Creation Society recently alluded to this, sparking a discussion on the LCS list which introduced a number of equally ridiculous claims, such as that Modern Hebrew was a “reconstructed language” in the same sense as Proto-Indo-European. I have edited my own remarks and am presenting them here, along with other things I subsequently learned.
Secular Jews like me live on the margins of Jewishness, without organized community, without institutions, without even recognition of our existence and legitimacy by most Jews and non-Jews outside of the reactionary bastion of the State of Israel.