Moses Hess

Moses (Moshe) Hess (January or June 21, 1812 – April 6, 1875) was a French philosopher and socialist, and one of the founders of Labor Zionism.

Hess was born in Bonn, which was under French rule at the time. In his French-language birth certificate, his name is given as "Moises"; he was named after his maternal grandfather. Hess received a Jewish religious education from his grandfather, and later studied philosophy at the University of Bonn, but never graduated.

He was an early proponent of socialism, and a precursor to what would later be called Zionism. His works included Holy History of Mankind (1837), European Triarchy (1841) and Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question (1862). He married a Catholic working-class woman, Sibylle Pesch, in defiance of bourgeois values. In socialist literature the idea was propagated that she was a prostitute 'redeemed' by Hess, but that notion has been refuted by Hess' biographer Silberner.

As correspondent for the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper founded by liberal Rhenish businessmen, he lived in Paris. He was a friend and collaborator of Karl Marx (who also worked on the Rheinische Zeitung) and Friedrich Engels. Hess introduced Engels, the future famous communist, to the communism of the early 1840s.

But Marx and Engels would become well known for their fickle and pugnacious approach to fellow socialists who showed insufficient agreement with their own form of socialism. By the late 1840s, they had fallen out with Hess. They mocked him, first behind his back and later openly, and Engels had an affair with Hess's wife. The work of Hess was also criticized in part of The German Ideology by Marx and Engels.

Hess fled to Belgium and Switzerland temporarily following the suppression of the 1848 commune. He would also go abroad during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

Moses Hess

Communism

Hess became reluctant to base all history on economic causes and class struggle (as Marx and Engels did), and he came to see the struggle of races, or nationalities, as the prime factor of history.

After the failure of the revolutionary war in summer 1849 in Palatinate and Baden and the fall of Rastatt, the last refuge of the revolutionaries, the artillery commander Fritz Anneke (whose adjunct officer was Carl Schurz) and his wife Mathilde Franziska Anneke, who were old friends from Hess' Cologne days, close to Hess' friend Andreas Gottschalk and leading personalities of the Communist Club in Cologne, found temporary refuge in his home in Strasbourg before moving on to the United States.

According to George Litcheim, Hess, who differed from Marx on a number of issues, still testified in a letter to Alexander Herzen that what he and Herzen were writing about "resembles a neat sketch drawn on paper, whereas Marx's judgment upon these events [European upheavals] is as it were engraved with iron force in the rock of time" (Paraphrased by Litcheim, A Short History of Socialism, 1971 p. 80).

Proto-Zionism

From 1861 to 1863 he lived in Germany, where he became acquainted with the rising tide of German antisemitism. It was then that he reverted to his Jewish name Moses (after apparently going by Moritz Hess) in protest against Jewish assimilation. He published Rome and Jerusalem in 1862. Hess interprets history as a circle of race and national struggles. He contemplated the rise of Italian nationalism and the German reaction to it, and from this he arrived at the idea of Jewish national revival, and at his prescient understanding that the Germans would not be tolerant of the national aspirations of others and would be particularly intolerant of the Jews. His book calls for the establishment of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine, in line with the emerging national movements in Europe and as the only way to respond to antisemitism and assert Jewish identity in the modern world.

Hess's grave near Lake Kinneret, Israel.

Hess's Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question went unnoticed in his time, along with the rest of his writings. Most German Jews were bent on cultural assimilation and did not heed Hess's unfashionable warnings. His work did not stimulate any political activity or discussion. Hess's contribution, like Leon Pinsker's Autoemancipation, became important only in retrospect, as the Zionist movement began to crystallize and to generate an audience in the late nineteenth century. When Theodor Herzl first read Rome and Jerusalem he wrote about Hess that "since Spinoza Jewry had no bigger thinker than this forgotten Moses Hess" and that he would not have written Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) if he had known Rome and Jerusalem beforehand. Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky honored Hess in The Jewish Legion in the World War as one of those people that made the Balfour declaration possible, together with Herzl, Rothschild and Pinsker.

Hess died in Paris in 1875. As he requested, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Cologne. In 1961 he was re-interred in the Kinneret Cemetery in Israel along with other Socialist-Zionists such as Nachman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, and Berl Katznelson. The moshav Kfar Hess was named in his honour.

• "You may don a thousand masks, change your name and your religion and your mode of life, creep through the world incognito so that nobody notices that you are a Jew yet every insult to the Jewish name will wound you more than a man of honour who remains loyal to his family and defends his good name."
• "Even an act of conversion cannot relieve the Jew of the enormous pressure of German anti-Semitism. The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than they hate their race - they hate the peculiar faith of the Jews, less than their peculiar noses."
• "The race struggle is the primal one, and the class struggle secondary. The last dominating race is the German."
• "Yet it seems that a final race struggle is unavoidable"
• "The Messianic era is the present age, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and finally came into historical existence with the great French Revolution."
• "To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key. This "religion of the future" of which the eighteenth century philosophers, as well as their recent followers, dreamed [...] Each nation will have to create its own historical cult; each people must become like the Jewish people, a people of God."

(Quotes from Rome and Jerusalem by Moses Hess)

• "The Christian... imagines the better future of the human species... in the image of heavenly joy... We, on the other hand, will have this heaven on earth."

(Quote from A Communist Confession of Faith by Moses Hess)

• The Parasites' Paradise, 16th paragraph
• Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism

• Holy History of Mankind (1837)
• European Triarchy (1841)
• Socialism and Communism (1842)
• Die Philosophie der Tat (The Philosophy of Action, 1843)
• On the Monetary System, also translated as On the Essence of Money (Über das Geldwesen, 1845)
• Communist Confession of Faith (London, 1846)
• Consequences of a Revolution of the Proletariat (1847)
• Rome and Jerusalem Leipzig: Eduard Mengler (1862)
• Letters on the Mission of Israel (1864)
• High Finance and the Empire (1869)
• Les Collectivistes et les Communistes (1869)
• The Dynamic Theory of Matter (1877)
• Jüdische Schriften (anthology edited by Theodor Zlocisti; Berlin: Louis Lamm, 1905)

• The Holy History and Mankind and Other Writings. ed. Shlomo Avineri (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• The History of the Jews, Volume III, Graetz (1866 - 1867, into French)