Moses Hess

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Moses Hess

Moses Hess (June 21, 1812 – April 6, 1875) was a German Jewish philosopher and one of the founders of socialism.

Born in Bonn, he later adopted the name "Moritz", but subsequently reverted to his original name "Moses", thus re-claiming his Jewish identity. He was an early apostle of socialism, and a precursor to what would later be called Zionism. His works included Rome and Jerusalem (1862), Holy History of Mankind (1837) and European Triarchy (1841). He married a working-class woman, in defiance of bourgeois values. According to some of his latter-day apologists, claims that she had been a prostitute were unfounded. But a substatiated research confirmed the opposite - that the lady was a dedicated professional prostitute.

Hess received a Jewish religious education from his grandfather, and later studied philosophy at the University of Bonn, but never graduated. As correspondent for a socialist newspaper that he helped to found, he lived in Paris, fleeing to Belgium and Switzerland temporarily following the suppression of the 1848 commune and again during the Franco-Prussian war. Hess originally advocated Jewish integration into the universalist socialist movement, and was a friend and collaborator of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Hess converted Engels to Communism, and introduced Marx to social and economic problems. He played an important role in transforming Hegelian dialectical idealism theory of history to the dialectical materialism of Marxism, by conceiving of man as the initiator of history through his active consciousness.

Hess was probably responsible for several "Marxian" slogans and ideas, including [need reference - more likely Heinrich Heine] religion as the "opiate of the people." Hess became reluctant to base all history on economic causes and class struggle, and he came to see the struggle of races, or nationalities, as the prime factor of past history. From 1861 to 1863 he lived in Germany, where he became acquainted with the rising tide of German Anti-Semitism. It was then that he reverted to his Jewish name Moses in protest against assimilationism. In this period he apparently returned to religion in the form of Spinoza's pantheism, which he somehow did not find incompatible with orthodoxy. He published Rome and Jerusalem in 1862. Hess 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 Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question went unnoticed in his time, along with the rest of this writings. Most German Jews were bent on 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.

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 Kinnereth Cemetery in Israel along with other Socialist-Zionists such as Nachman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, and Berl Katznelson.