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Moses Hess is considered to be both a representative of
philosophical socialism and one of the precursors of socialist
Zionism. He was born in Bonn, Germany, and spent his childhood
with his grandfather from whom he absorbed Jewish culture.
When he was 14, Hess returned to live with his parents in
Cologne. His first book, The Sacred History of Mankind by
a young Spinozist, recaptures his first philosophical orientations.
He is primarily interested in social philosophy, and preaches
the union of the principal European powers -- France, Germany,
and England -- into a single, large European state. His
journalistic activities brought him first to Paris, and
then to Belgium where he frequented socialist circles. The
1848 revolution brought him back to Paris where he lived,
intermittently, until his death in 1875. His paternal inheritance
allowed him to lead an independent life.
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Hess's first works
emphasize the alienation of the individual in a society determined
by exploitation in which work is perceived to be an obligatory burden.
Only a better organization of social and economic relations, guaranteed
by improved education, could free mankind and ensure a full development.
Hess's socialism remained humanistic, and entered neither into dialectical-historical
considerations of the class war nor any scientific-economic considerations
of the relationship between production and consumption that characterize
Marxism. Moreover, in their Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels,
with whom he broke, scoffed at his ethical socialism .
Hess's position on the Jewish
question reversed itself completely. As a young Hegelian, he considered
that Jews had fulfilled their historical role and were now bound
to assimilate. Twenty years later, in 1862, he published Rome
and Jerusalem, which opens as follows:
The
Return to Judaism
After
twenty years of estrangement, I have returned to my people.
Once again I am sharing in its festivals of joy and days of
sorrow, in its hopes and memories. I am partaking of the spiritual
and intellectual struggles of our day, both within the House
of Israel and between our people and the gentile world. The
Jews have lived and labored among the nations for almost two
thousand years, but they nonetheless cannot become rooted organically
within them.
A sentiment which I believed I had surpressed beyond recall
is alive once again. It is the thought of my nationality, which
is inseparably connected with my ancestral heritage, with the
Holy Land, and the Eternal City, the birthplace of the belief
in the divine unit of life and of the hope for the ultimate
botherhood of all men. For years, this half-strangled emotion
has been stirring in my breast and has never left me but I had
not the strength to swerve from my own path, which seemed so
far from the road of Judaism, to a new one which I could envisage
only vaguely in the hazy distance.
M.Hess,
Rome and Jerusalem
Rome Jerusalem
Hess's return to Judaism was the capstone of his social and political
research. The war between Italy and Austria (1859) had taught
him the importance of the role of nationalities. Humanity could
only be liberated if the nation in which it finds its fulfillment
were liberated. The national struggle could be more effective
for mobilizing men than the class struggle. In this light, the
national regeneration of the Jewish people, which in turn required
a political regeneration in Palestine, seemed to him inevitable.
Religion, which remains the best means of preserving Jewish identity
in exile, no longer seemed to disturb Hess. Indeed, he suggested
that it should remain unchanged until political and social institutions
were created in Palestine to legislate the changes necessary for
the new society. Hess was the first to express many ideas such
as collective national acquisition and ownership of land which
were later adopted by the thinkers and activists of the Labor
Zionist movement.
The Franco-Prussian War caught Hess by surprise in France, and
he, along with other German nationals, was expelled. He once again
took refuge in Belgium where in 1871 he published a violent anti-German
pamphlet, A Fallen Nation: A Coalition of all Nations Against
Prussified Germany. Hess died in Paris in 1877 and his remains
were transferred to the Kinneret cemetery in 1961.
Nationalism and Humanism
I believe
that the national character of Judaism does not exclude universalism
and modern civilization; on the contrary, these values are the
logical effect of our national character. If I nonetheless emphasize
the national root of Judaism rather than its universalist blooms,
that is because in our time, people are all too prone to gather
and deck themselves out with the pretty flowers of the cultural
heritage rather than to cultivate them in the soil in which
they can grow. Judaism is the root of our entire contemporary
universalist view of life. There is nothing in the moral teaching
of Christianity, in the scholastic philosophy of Spinozism,
or even in modern philosophy, which does not stem from Judaism.
Until the French Revolution, the Jewish people was the only
people in the world whose religion was at once national and
universalist. It is through Judaism that the history of humanity
became a sacred history, by which I mean that history became
a unified, organic development which has its origin in the love
of family. This process will not be completed until the whole
of humanity becomes one family whose members will be united
by the holy spirit, the creative genius of history, as strongly
as the organs of a body are united by the equally holy creative
force of nature. (Hess assimilates God to the Holy Spirit at
work in history and in nature). As long as no other people possessed
such a religion combining national, universal, and historical
elements, the Jews alone were the people of God. Since the French
Revolution, the French as well as the others who have followed
their example, have become our most noble rivals and faithful
allies.
The
contemporary movements for national self-realization do not
only not exclude a concern for all humanity but to the contrary,
strongly assert it. These movements are a wholesome reaction
not against universalism but against the things that would encroach
upon it and cause its degeneration, against the leveling tendencies
of modern industry and civilization which are threatening to
deaden every primal, organic life force, by the mechanization
of life. As long as these tendencies were directed against the
moribund institutions of an antiquated past, their existence
was justified. Nor can there be any objection to universalist
tendencies insofar as they endeavor to establish closer relations
among the various nations of the world. But, unfortunately,
this universalism has gone too far: both in life and in science,
the typical and the creative are being denied, and, as a result,
modern life is being blighted by the vapor of idealism and science,
by the dust of atomism which are resting like mildew on red
corn and stifling germinating life in the bud. It is against
these encroachments on the most sacred principles of creative
life that the national tendencies of our time are reacting,
and it is only against these destructive forces that I appeal
to the primal power of Jewish nationalism.
M.Hess, Rome and Jerusalem
The Pedagogic Center
Director: Dr. Motti Friedman
Web site manager: Esther Carciente, esthers@jajz-ed.org.il
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