Background
Moses Hess was born in Bonn on June 21, 1812.
Moses Hess was born in Bonn on June 21, 1812.
He received an Orthodox upbringing at the home of his grandfather, since his parents had moved to Cologne, where his father established a sugar refinery. At the age of fourteen, when Hess’s mother died, his father brought him to Cologne to train him for a business career. The lad proved to be unsuitable for business, however, preferring to immerse himself in messianic visions and philosophical books, especially those of Spinoza and Hegel. He was self-taught, except for a few terms at the University of Bonn, from 1837 to 1839.
As a native of the Rhineland, he participated in the Battle of the Poets, begun in 1840 and fought over whether the Rhineland rightfully belonged to the Germans or the French. The battle of words was initiated on the German side by Nicholas Becker and on the French side by Alfred de Musset and Alphonse de Lamartine. Other poets joined in the fray, which culminated in Nikolaus Becker’s ultrapatriotic German hymn, Die Wacht am Rhein. Hess composed a melody to Becker’s poem and sent it to him. It was returned with the comment, “You are a Jew.”
Hess received similar rebuffs on other occasions in his wooing of Germany. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto ridiculed Hess’s humanitarian socialism, despite Hess’s help to Engels in editing a left-wing monthly. Eventually Hess realized that his nationality was indeed Jewish nationality rather than German, a conclusion he embodied in his Rome and Jerusalem (1862), a pioneering classic of Zionism.
In the 1840s and 1850s, however, his main contributions were to socialist theory. He collaborated and differed with Karl Marx and other radicals. In the columns of the first socialist daily, Rheinische Zeitung, which he help to found and edit, he gave expression to his political views. His Jewish origins were not overlooked, either by friends or opponents; he was even dubbed “the communist Rabbi Moses." Without abandoning his faith in socialism, his thinking gradually began to concentrate on the Jewish question.
Hess’s last years were concentrated on socialist activity, and he cooperated closely with Ferdinand Lassalle. He lived mostly in Paris and at his request was buried in a Jewish cemetery near Cologne. His remains were transferred with great honor to Israel, in 1961, and buried next to the Sea of Galilee.
At age twenty-five, Hess published his first book, The Sacred History of Mankind by a Young Disciple of Spinoza (1837). He clothed his philosophic views in Christian symbols, grouping his division of human history under the headings God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost. In his second book, The Europlan Triarchy (1841), he advocated the reconstruction of the social and political order into a European federation on a socialistic basis under the leadership of the three powerful states, Prussia, France, and England. In such a united Europe, Jews would be permitted to make their patriotic contribution. He pleaded for their right to marry Christians so as to facilitate the process of merging both groups in a higher synthesis. He himself practiced what he preached and married a Christian prostitute, which he saw as an attempt to redress social injustice.
In Rome and Jerusalem, he confessed that he had long been estranged from the Jewish people, but that he had come to realize that they could never be an organic part of other peoples, since Jews were a separate nationality, linked by unbreakable bonds to their ancestral heritage and to the Holy Land that first fashioned them. As a nation, Jews had once made important contributions to humanity. They could do so again if they were reconstituted as a nation on their ancient soil. There the vision of Jewish sages and prophets of transforming the individualistic, capitalistic system into a socialistic, messianic system could be realized by the founding of Jewish cooperative communities. Preparations for the resumption of a normal Jewish national existence had to be made by agitating for national alertness, by gathering financial resources for the moment when a favorable opportunity would present itself, and by establishing a network of Jewish settlements north of the projected Suez Canal and throughout the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. His book had no immediate repercussions, but forty years after it was written Theodor Herzl read it and noted in his diary, “What a noble exalted spirit. Everything that we tried is already in this book.”