Moses Hess: The Red Rabbi

HAIFA, Israel — “The liberation of the eternal city on the banks of the Tiber marked the beginning of the liberation of the eternal city on the slopes of Moria, with the resurrection of Italy begins the resurrection of Judaea,” Moses Hess, a secular Jewish philosopher, wrote in 1862 in the preface to “Rome and Jerusalem.”

The famous Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, friend and foe of Karl Marx, called Hess “the Communist Rabbi Moses.” When Herzl first read Rome and Jerusalem, he wrote: “Since Spinoza, Jewry has had no greater thinker than this forgotten Moses Hess.” Herzl noted that he would not have written The Jewish State if he had known Rome and Jerusalem earlier.

Moses Hess was born in Bonn on June 21, 1812. He received a Jewish religious upbringing from his grandfather. In 1830 he entered the University of Bonn, where he studied philosophy and came under the influence of radical ideas. Hess’s fascination with socialism led to a break with his conservative father. During the revolution of 1848 he took part in an armed uprising. After the revolution’s defeat, Hess was sentenced to death. He fled to Switzerland. The Prussian government demanded his extradition. In 1853 he moved to Paris, where he lived as a Prussian citizen until his death – April 6, 1875 – except for a period of expulsion during the Franco-Prussian War. He was the Paris correspondent for several socialist newspapers in the United States and Germany.

Initially, Hess was an advocate of Jewish integration in the international socialist movement. He was a friend and associate of Marx and Engels. In a letter to German Jewish writer Berthold Auerbach in 1841, he reported his discovery of Marx: “Dr. Marx is the name of my idol, still a very young man, at most about 24 years old. He will deal the final blow to medieval religion and philosophy.” Although Hess was attacked by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto for “abstract idealism” and called by them “dreamer” and “utopian socialist,” he was the first to recognize Marx’s greatness, having experienced his strong influence from 1846 to 1851, without, however, becoming a Marxist. He did not believe in class struggle because he believed that class interests did not exist in their pure form, that they were “polluted” by national interests. Hess could not be a Marxist, for he was anti-materialist: “The biblical tradition, revived by the sound of your footsteps, will again sanctify our Western society and vanish without trace the cancer of modern materialism.”

For Herzl, the 1894 Dreyfus affair was a turning point for Zionism, for Jabotinsky – the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, for Hess, the blood libel in Damascus in 1840.

Hess describes this turn as follows: “Twenty years ago, when the absurd libel [accusing the Jews of ritual murder] reached us Europeans from Damascus, and the rudeness and credulity of the Asian and European mobs, who today, as two thousand years ago, willingly believe any slander as long as it is directed against the Jews, made all Jewish hearts shrink with bitter and natural resentment, then, at the height of my enthusiasm for socialism, I was for the first time rather unceremoniously reminded that I belonged to a poor, slandered, abandoned by all the world, scattered in all countries, but not deadened people; then, though I was already far from being Jewish, I wished to pour out my feelings of Jewish patriotism in a cry of pain.” Socialism could not distract him from the anti-Jewish winds in his homeland. But what was the strength of Judaism was, according to Hess, its weakness: “Jewry is a spirit without a body.” Jews, according to Hess, needed a state body.

Hess wrote: “The German Jew, experiencing at every turn the hatred of antisemites, is always inclined to etched out everything Jewish in himself and even to renounce his race. […] Neither reform, nor baptism, nor education, nor emancipation open the way to public life for German Jews to the end. […] Despite enlightenment and emancipation, a Jew in exile who renounces his nationality does not gain the respect of the peoples among whom he is successfully naturalized as a citizen, for he is not exempt from the duty of solidarity with his people […] despite the renunciation of his national cult, despite all attempts at Germanization, they [the Jews] claim in vain to political and social equality.” According to Hess, emancipation only creates additional tensions between Jewry and the surrounding, nationally constructed society, which does not see it as an integral part of its national culture.

At the same time that Marx and Engels were creating the First Socialist International, a Judophobic International was being formed. In 1871, Hess was a member of the First International in the camp of Marx’s supporters. The famous Russian anarchist Bakunin attacked Hess as a member of Marx’s camp, which he branded a “synagogue.” Bakunin called Hess “a Jewish pygmy in Marx’s entourage” and claimed that “the whole Jewish world, which is one gang of exploiters, leeches and parasites, which only gorges itself at others’ expense, without regard to state borders, […] is today at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other.”

Bakunin was international in his antisemitism: he was not satisfied with Jews of all countries, from Russia to Germany.

In the work of the First International, Hess recognized a socialist antisemitism dating back to one of his idols, the French socialist utopian Charles Fourier, who considered Jews “parasites, merchants, usurers,” and whose emancipation he called “the most shameful vice of society.” In 1847, Prudon, a theorist of anarchism and Bakunin’s French predecessor, outlined a program for the destruction of the Jews: “This race poisons everything with its ubiquitous invasion, without joining any people. We must demand their expulsion from France. […] We must close the synagogues: […] lead to the final elimination of this cult. […] The Jews are enemies of the human race. We must send them back to Asia or destroy them. […] By fire or assimilation or expulsion the Jews must disappear. […] What medieval peoples instinctively hated, I hate consciously and irrevocably.”

In “Rome and Jerusalem,” Hess defined the Jewish nation as the chosen and preserved self without change, Palestine as the homeland of the Jewish people, and the Jewish religion as the best guarantee of Jewish nationality. The basis of his essay was the perception of Jewry as a nation. Hess predicted the establishment of a Jewish state 80-85 years before it was founded. He called for the establishment of Jewish socialism as the only answer to antisemitism: “I wished to pour out my feelings of Jewish patriotism in a cry of pain, which, however, was soon again muffled in my breast by the greater pain awakened by the position of the European proletariat.” According to Hess, the national Jewish republic to be established in the historical homeland of the Jewish people should be based on a socialist basis, on public ownership of land and means of production, and production itself would be organized on cooperative and collective principles.

Hess was the first to determine that the time had come for the Jews to return to their homeland. At his request, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Cologne, where a monument was erected with the inscription “Father of German Social Democracy.” This inscription became the official proof of the “guilt” of Jews for their participation in the revolutionary movement in Germany. The combination of “Jew” and “first socialist” looked to German nationalist circles as a challenge to the Jews to the German people. His figure still supplies antisemites with material about Jewish dominance in the socialist revolutionary movement and about the Jews’ guilt in the birth of communism.

Sentenced to death by the Prussian authorities for his armed involvement in the failed revolution of 1848, Hess proved successful in another way: he became the first prophet of Zionism and a pioneer of Jewish socialism. In 1961 his remains were transported to the Kibbutz Kineret cemetery, where he was buried with socialist Zionists Nachman Syrkin, Ber Borokhov, and Berl Katznelson.

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