Emanuel Marx

Emanuel Marx was born in 1927 in Munich

Emanuel Marx was born in Munich in 1927 to Yitzhak, an insurance clerk, and Rebecca, who ran a leather goods store. After his father was sent to Dachau on Kristallnacht in 1938, the parents sent Emanuel and his brother Shimon to relatives in Manchester in early 1939. The brothers joined their parents in Jerusalem in January 1940, where his father became a bookseller.

He attended the Ma'aleh religious high school in Jerusalem. In 1946 he served as a guard in the Beit She'an Valley, and from late 1947 he served in the Haganah and then the IDF until 1949.

He studied sociology, economics and Middle East history at the Hebrew University and earned a master's degree in 1958 with a thesis on the Bedouin. During his studies he worked as a librarian at the National Library and, from 1955 to 1959, as an assistant to the Adviser on Arab Affairs in the Prime Minister's Office.

In 1959 he went to the University of Manchester on a British Council scholarship and completed a doctorate in social anthropology in 1963, after field work among the Abu Gwe'id tribe in the Negev. His research argued that the Bedouin way of life he observed resulted from restrictions imposed by the Israeli military administration. He later became a professor at Tel Aviv University and an honorary member of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He died in 2022.