Moses Hess is an anomaly. A founding father of revolutionary socialism in Germany, he is best remembered today as the first “secular Zionist.” An enthusiast handicapped by an open mind, he took up many causes but found satisfaction in none. It was not by chance that already in the 1840's his socialist comrades had dubbed him “the Communist Rabbi.”

As a rebel, Hess gravitated from the first toward the Left-Hegelian circle in Berlin, the group which numbered among its members Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Marx and Engels. The Left Hegelians at first accepted the premises of the master, but only to draw diametrically opposed conclusions from them. Thus, they granted the view, held by Hegel in his later years, of the Idea (or Absolute) as incarnated in the world, and as working itself out in history. But they did not grant its corollary—that it was therefore the duty of rational men to seek out and recognize the element of sanctity in the existent; instead, they saw it as the obligation of the philosopher (as of the citizen) to seek out the irrational in society or the state—and then to criticize it mercilessly. If the Hegelian Idea was to be best served, the boundaries of freedom had to be extended, which meant, in practice, a relentless critical campaign against the forces of darkness which were embodied in the established church and its dogma, as well as in all other ideas or institutions that sought to restrict rational thought or action. From this position to political activism was but one short step, and from 1841 to 1847, Hess, like Marx and Engels, was engaged in building a bridge (and burning it behind him as he went) from Left Hegelianism to a political theory grounded in economics and a program of proletarian revolution. Moreover, at this stage of the transition period at least, Hess was a pioneer, for right from the start he had seen in Hegelianism not merely a vantage point for radical social criticism, but a force for total social change. Thus, in his first book, published in 1837, Hess already described the inevitable goal of the historical process as a society in which all men would be fully free and equal.

It was not until four years later, however, after the publication of his European Trierarchy, that Hess was finally accepted as one of their number by the Left Hegelian circle in Berlin. He now argued that German philosophy had to renounce its condition of splendid isolation, embrace the French revolutionary tradition, and recognize the industrial proletariat (which was already emerging so rapidly in Britain) as the driving force of the future. The world had to be transformed, not improved.

Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, published that same year, gave Hess an additional weapon in his attempt to draw socialist conclusions from German philosophic thought. Feuerbach saw in the entire structure of Hegelian metaphysics—no less than in all other theological or quasi-theological constructions—simply another product of the human imagination, a further example of man's alienation from his own spiritual and moral nature. Man had created God, Feuerbach argued, but now the time had come for him to recognize his own true nature, to fuse within himself the moral and the natural, the divine and the animal. The era of theology was over; the era of “anthropology” had arrived in its stead.

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For hess, Feuerbach's overturning of Hegelianism was a landmark in the continuing liberation of man—a process which could not stop with the creation of the autonomous individual, as Feuerbach seemed to suggest (and Stirner now proclaimed), but had to be extended to society as a whole. For man to find his true nature, it was not enough to abolish the concept of a transcendental Deity and seek God within himself; he also had to abolish all forms of social inequality. In a series of articles, Hess now argued that private wealth represented the labor power of the weak who had been forced to surrender what was really a part of themselves—the fruits of their work. In a capitalist society, in other words, man worshipped not only his alienated spirit in the form of God, but also his alienated labor in the form of money. Only a communist system could liberate him from God and Mammon, the two tyrants he had himself created. But before this goal could be reached, thought would have to become action and the philosophers would have to become politicians of the extreme Left.

From 1841 to 1845, Hess was accepted as an equal and even as a guide by Marx and Engels. It was Hess who encouraged Marx to join the editorial staff of the Rheinische Zeitung, the Left-Hegelian journal he had helped found in his home city of Cologne; there Marx gained his first intimate experience of day-to-day politics. It was Hess, too, who persuaded Engels that the logical culmination of German philosophy must be an uncompromising demand for the total abolition of private property. (“My conversion to Communism was definitely due to Hess.”) And it was Hess, again, who saw in the British proletariat a national prototype of what was to come into being everywhere, thereby giving Engels the incentive to undertake his crucial study of Manchester factory life, which was published in 1844 as The Condition of the Working Class in England.

In 1845, Hess and Engels launched a campaign to rally the workers of the Rhineland to their program. Though the enterprise did not get much further than a popular journal and a series of public rallies, and was apparently regarded as an entertaining curiosity by the respectable burghers of the area, it marked the first attempt of those Left Hegelians who now referred to themselves as “Communists” to organize the emergent industrial proletariat in Germany along political lines. While Engels and Hess were thus seeking action, Marx was laying the philosophical groundwork for his new-found communist faith—until his journey to Paris in 1843 Marx had been more radical democrat than socialist. In his new synthesis Marx now included both Hess's conception of private property as the “self-alienation” of man, and his view of the future communist society as an expression of man's true nature.

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But the year 1846 saw the end of the partnership, at least so far as Hess was concerned. Marx was finding his own feet and no longer needed guidance or, for that matter, competition—he was now at the point of beginning to assert his claim to the leadership both of European socialist thought and of the minuscule German “Communist” movement. He fell out with his former allies one by one: Karl Grün, Arnold Ruge, William Weitling, were the first to go; in 1847 he launched his attack on Proudhon, and a year later, in the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels jointly denounced Hess as the proponent of a viewpoint that “objectively strengthened” bourgeois society. There was a good deal of irony in this denunciation, not only because Marx and Engels had until a short time before held those very same views, but also because Hess, now under the intellectual sway of Marx, was in the process of eagerly adopting the latter's conception of the primacy of economics and the class struggle.

With the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, close cooperation between Marx and Hess ceased altogether. While Hess would always recognize in Marx a superior mind, he had for some time been shocked by his ruthlessness. (“By nature,” he once wrote to Marx, “you are too schismatic, while I perhaps am too conciliatory.”) As for Marx and Engels, they came increasingly to see Hess as a figure of contempt—to be despised, ridiculed, pitied, or viewed with suspicion, as the occasion demanded. In 1863, for example, Marx reacted typically to the news that Hess had joined Lassalle in his campaign to organize the German workers:

Lassalle is gathering together our departed party friends of twenty years ago in his dung factory from which he hopes to manure World History. . . . O Ikey, O Ikey, what do you think you are up to, hanging yourself with the help of Herwegh and Moses Hess.

Hess's influence upon the course of Marxism thus ends in 1848; his further appearances in Marx's biography were of secondary significance. Fourteen years later, in 1862, Hess published Rome and Jerusalem, his first public profession of faith as a “Zionist,” and his only remembered work. But though the book is generally regarded today, with Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation and Herzl's Jewish State, as one of the three major classics of early Zionist thinking—albeit the most idiosyncratic of them—it did not begin to exert a real influence until the turn of the century, some forty years after publication.1 By then, the term “Zionist,” which had not been in use in Hess's time, had come into currency and it was clear that Rome and Jerusalem had anticipated the basic ideas of the Zionist movement.

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The central tenet of the book is Hess's rejection of the belief that civil liberties alone could promise the Jews security. The emancipation of the Jews, he maintained, was not really deeply rooted in Western Europe and especially not in Germany, where hostility toward them, until now justified by religious arguments, was, in fact, a symptom of implacable racial hatred. “The Geman,” Hess wrote, “hates the Jewish religion less than the race; he objects less to the Jews' peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar noses.” The leaders of the Jewish enlightenment movement, and of Reform Judaism, he continued, were betraying their past when they asserted that Judaism was merely a religion and denied that the Jews had a national identity: “The Jew in exile who denies his nationality will never earn the respect of the nations among whom he dwells.” Accordingly, only a return to Palestine and the reestablishment of a Jewish state there would bring the Jewish people back to health: “With the Jews . . . all political and social progress must necessarily . . . be preceded by national independence.” As Hess envisioned the Jewish state, its population would come mainly from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and its capital would derive mainly from the West. But in addition to Jewish capital, Jewish labor, and Jewish talent, of which “there was no lack,” the support of a Great Power for the protection of the settlers was essential. For this support, which he had no doubt could be won, Hess turned to France: “It is to the interest of France to see that the road leading to India and China should be settled by a people which will be loyal to the cause of France to the end.” No wonder that Herzl, upon discovering Rome and Jerusalem for the first time in 1901, should have noted in his diary that “everything we have been trying to do has already been written by Hess.”

In fact, though, Hess was regarded as their own less by Herzl and his close lieutenants than by the adherents of the form of socialist Zionism associated with Nahman Syrkin, who in 1901 established the Moses Hess society or, as it was known, Hessiana. Syrkin saw in Hess something of the prophet; what he cherished most in Rome and Jerusalem was Hess's description of the return of the Jews to Palestine as a “messianic act,” a step toward the creation of a new world based upon moral foundations. In his own writings, Syrkin had demanded that the Jews build up Palestine along fully socialist lines and he found this same plea in Rome and Jerusalem. For Syrkin, as for Hess, the Return to Palestine was to be seen as the culminating act of a martyr race; after two thousand years the Jewish people was now being called upon to breathe new life into its biblical code of ethics and thus to play its part in the redemption of mankind. The colonization of Palestine was to be a reassertion of the national will. This voluntaristic philosophy was in strong contradiction to the Marxist determinism and class-war theory of Borhokov, the other leading ideologist of socialist Zionism in Russia. Yet by the 1920's it had become an integral part of the credo of Berl Katznelson and David Ben Gurion, the most influential leaders of the Yishuv in Palestine during that period.

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The fact that Hess has two claims to fame, the one as a partner in the philosophical transition from Hegel to Marx, the other as a precursor of Zionism, encourages one-sided portrayals of the man. For George Lukacs, writing as a good Leninist in 1926, Hess was a shadowy figure who passed fleetingly across the stage of history in the 1840's, only to disappear forever into the wings. Less understandable is the fact that John Weiss, in his otherwise excellent monograph, decided not even to mention Rome and Jerusalem. At the other extreme is the view implicit in Martin Buber's sensitive essay in which Hess is portrayed as a prodigal son, who, returning to his people after many years of error, renounced his earlier Marxist socialism with relief. And this view is carried to the point of caricature in Mary Schulman's recent biography.2

Within a brief compass, Mrs. Schulman has given a lively description both of Hess's unified vision—in which history, nature, and the universe are all part of one organic and purposeful development—and of his declaration of faith in Rome and Jerusalem. But her account of his relationship to the German socialist movement is superficial and her attempts to disassociate Hess from Marx lead her far off course. We are told, for instance, that “after the failure of the 1848 revolution, Hess severed himself from his fellow socialists and began to occupy himself with the wave of anti-Semitism that had followed in the wake of reaction.” Hess was, in fact, taken up with a new interest during the 1850's—an interest in the natural sciences—but there seems no reason whatever to believe that that interest had any connection with anti-Semitism. And in any case, it is clear that Hess never severed his links with German socialism. At his death in 1875, a number of German socialist leaders were on hand to pay him rich tribute, while the leaders of European Jewry, with the exception of Graetz, either ignored the event or else used it as an occasion to deal a parting blow to a man they deemed an irresponsible outcast.

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For Hess, socialism and nationalism were always integrally connected—the nation, or the proletariat within the nation, was the instrument, and socialism was the goal. In his unrivalled biography (published in Germany in 1921, and since translated into Hebrew but so far, unfortunately, not into English) Theodor Zlocisti recognized that these two strands in Hess's thought were tightly interwoven. So, too, did Sir Isaiah Berlin in his Lucien Wolf Memorial Lecture, which presents us with an integrated and fascinating picture of Hess as an unwavering exponent of a moralistic, non-determinist, nonviolent—hence anti-Marxist—philosophy. This view of Hess as self-sufficient, but meek, is also implicit in Sir Isaiah's comparison of his personality with that of Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin.

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It is true that there was much of the mystic in Hess, and yet, in reality, he lacked that single-mindedness which often accompanies mysticism. He was a man easily influenced and easily disheartened, a man of sudden enthusiasms, lonely, dependent on others for leadership. Always on the verge of poverty, he was constantly on the move, from Paris to Cologne, from Cologne to Brussels, from Brussels to Breslau or to Berlin. In 1846, he was thinking of joining a communal settlement in Texas; some years later, he was hoping to accompany Graetz on a journey to Palestine; in 1859 he wrote to Napoleon III, offering his aid in the coming war of Italian liberation against Austria. Nor was his domestic life any more stable. His family had never accepted his sudden marriage to Sybil Pritsch, a prostitute whom he had set out to reform, and on his extended visits to the family home in Cologne he left her behind in Paris. He knew France as well as he did Germany and, like, Heine, felt more at ease there; at the same time, he was as familiar with the world of traditional Judaism (which he had come to know well in the home of his grandfather, a rabbi by training, though not by profession) as with that of the radical Left—and he felt the pull of both. Not a strong character, he had no stomach for political in-fighting, so that, for instance, when Marx arrived in Cologne in 1848, Hess promptly departed for Paris. Yet while lacking both the stamina and the organizational gifts that go into the making of a politician, he was willing to enter into ideological debate, and on various occasions during the late 1860's, he took issue forcefully with Herzen (to whom he recommended Marx's refutation of Proudhon), with Geiger, and with Bakunin who replied to the argument with a wealth of anti-Semitic abuse. Yet for all his dislike of Marx's methods, Hess seldom attacked Marx publicly, and after Lassalle's death in 1864, he drifted back into the Marx-Engels milieu.

In attempting some ultimate evaluation of Hess's career, one can say, I think, that he remained true throughout to the broad outlines of his earliest vision—of a monistic and purposeful historical development that would culminate in the ideal egalitarian society. If he was never too precise about how this vision was to be realized, it may have been because in his thinking about the immediate future, he was open to too many influences; his antennae were always receptive. Yet it was probably that very restlessness, and his acute sensitivity, combined with his constant shifts from one place and one culture to another, that enabled Hess to achieve his moments of political influence and of astonishing insight.

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It was he more than anyone else who had urged the Left Hegelians to leave their studies and to look for themselves at life in the Manchester factories. It was he who first showed Marx around Paris, with particular emphasis on its large working-class districts and revolutionary cafés. And he was among the first to recognize Marx's genius, writing as early as 1842: “Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel all fused in one person—and I mean fused, not lumped together, and you have Marx.” And in spite of their later quarrels he never went back on that judgment.

Again, in 1863, when Marx and Engels, for example, were reluctant to lend a hand, Hess participated enthusiastically (if briefly) in Lassalle's campaign to organize the German workers in the fight for full voting rights. At the same time, his imagination was fired by the first volumes of Graetz's monumental History of the Jews, and its assumption, so unlike that of the earlier products of Germany's “science of Judaism,” that the past of the Jewish people demanded a national future. He even undertook to translate and edit the first edition of Graetz's Sinai and Golgotha, which was published in France in 1867. “The work has been wonderfully improved by you,” Graetz wrote to him in acknowledgment. And in Rome and Jerusalem, Hess anticipated such diverse Jewish thinkers as Dubnow, Scholem, Buber, Peretz, and Berdichevski, seeing in Hasidism not a morass of medieval superstition, but a world that concealed within itself rich treasures of poetry and moral strength.

Though always acutely conscious of the importance not only of class, but also of national, divisions, he was not bound by preconception or dogma in his estimate of the European nations. He saw that the reappearance on the political stage of two of the great ancient peoples, first Greece, then Rome, could serve as a signal to the third, the Jews. He gradually came to fear German nationalism, until that fear almost overshadowed his life-long terror of Russian expansion, so that the wildly enthusiastic German patriot of the 1830's—he had loved to sing Becker's national hymn, “They shall not possess it, the free German Rhine!”—could write in 1859 that “the nearsighted fanaticism of Germanism will probably win out and have resort to the ‘German sword.’ And its eventual fate will be to fall into the pit which it is now digging for its neighbors who are supposedly thirsting for conquest.” This man who, in the mid-1840's, together with Marx, was condemning the Jews as a race of shopkeepers doomed to speedy disappearance, could proclaim in 1862 that “every Jew, even the converted, should cling to the cause and labor for the regeneration of Israel.”

1 A partial Hebrew translation appeared in the late 1880's, while the second German edition did not come out until 1899.

2 Moses Hess: Prophet of Zionism (Thomas Yoseloff, 1963).

Other works cited in this essay are: Georg Lukacs, Moses Hess und die Probleme der ideatistischen Dialektik (Leipzig, 1926); John Weiss, Moses Hess, Utopian Socialist, Wayne University Press, 1960; Martin Buger, “The First of the Last: on MOSES HESS,” from Israel and Palestine: The History of an Idea Farrar, Straus & Young, 1952; Theodor Zlocisti, Moses Hess, der Vorkàmpfer des Sozialismus und Zionismus 1812-1875 (Berlin, 1921); Isaiah Berlin, The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess (Cambridge, 1959).

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