Moses
Hess was Jewish, Zionist, Communist and collaborated with Karl Marx. Also, he
was a Freemason. In short, if Moses Hess had not existed, the John Birch
Society and the Liberty Lobby would have to invent him! Sounds like a
commendation to me...
Hess' most important work is called "Rome and Jerusalem". Published in 1862, it's often regarded as a foundational text of Zionism. Despite his socialist convictions, Hess nevertheless believed that anti-Semitism was perennial in Europe, and that a Jewish state in Palestine was therefore necessary. At the time, this was considered a *very* strange idea. In 1948, the strange idea became reality. Hess was now seen as a pioneer of Labour Zionism, and in 1962 the Israeli labour union Histadrut actually had Hess' remains moved from Germany to Israel, where they were reburied at a kibbutz.
This book, however, doesn't contain "Rome and Jerusalem". Instead, we are treated to some earlier and lesser known texts by Hess. They are introduced by Shlomo Avineri, a world-leading expert on Hess and the author of the biography "Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism". The introduction is clearly necessary, since the main text translated for this volume, "The Holy History of Mankind", is down-right incomprehensible. Frankly, it sounds like drivel pure and simple. Even after reading Avineri's introduction, I still don't get it. It's unclear why Cambridge University Press didn't publish "Rome and Jerusalem" in this series instead!
"The Holy History of Mankind" was published anonymously in 1837, and had virtually no impact whatsoever. Hess called himself "a young disciple of Spinoza", perhaps a veiled reference to the Young Hegelians, but also to his Jewish background. The text was published in Germany. It's almost impossible to read and equally hard to understand. The work is liberally sprinkled with Bible quotations, the headlines have little to do with the actual text, and it's not until the last two chapters that the author starts making any kind of sense.
Apparently, Hess had developed his very own version of the Hegelian dialectic, with Moses and Judaism as the thesis, Christ and Christianity as the antithesis, and the pantheism of Spinoza as the synthesis. He interprets the Mosaic law as a piece of socialist legislation, emphasizing the jubilees in particular. However, Judaism was particularist and concentrated on the outer man. Christianity, by contrast, was universal in scope and emphasized the inner man. This eventually made Christianity a victim of the temporal powers. Spinoza's pantheism unites universalism, the outer man and the inner spirit in an undivided whole. This point towards a socialist commonwealth with common ownership of the means of production. Hess' is particularly obsessed with the right of inheritance, and attacks it relentlessly. However, he doesn't call for a violent revolution, preferring a more gradual approach.
Of the other texts in this volume, "Consequences of a revolution of the proletariat", published in 1847, sounds suspiciously similar to "The Communist Manifesto", published a year later by Marx and Engels. All three men were members of the Communist League. Hess' text contains a short program which is almost identical to the famous ten-point program of the Manifesto. Indeed, Hess cooperated with Marx and Engels later as well, and belonged to the broadly Marxist wing of the First International.
Still, there are three important differences between Hess and the founders of "scientific socialism". First, Hess was more gradualist or "reformist". Second, Hess often put forward his message in a quasi-religious form. A third text included in this collection, "A Communist Credo", shows this tendency. A credo is a confession of faith, and the rather short piece mimics the style of Luther's catechism, which would have been well known to the German readers. Also, Hess paints his socialist message as a kind of liberal Christianity. If read carefully, he is really suggesting that "heaven" is a metaphor for the socialist commonwealth, "hell" is a metaphor for capitalism and class society, and "our God" is humanity itself! This pseudo-religious approach is also evident in "The Holy History of Mankind", which begins with a tedious rendition of Biblical history, and culminates in the creation of The New Jerusalem (socialism).
The third difference between Hess and Marx-Engels is also the most important one: Hess was a nationalist. In "The Holy History", he still believes that the Jews will be emancipated in a future, socialist Europe. By the time he wrote "Rome and Jerusalem", he no longer believed this, warning that Germans won't accept the Jews even if they do assimilate, since the hatred is racial rather than religious: "You cannot reform the Jewish nose, nor can you turn through baptism the dark, curly Jewish hair into blond, nor will any comb ever straighten it".
Of the various strange ideas preached by Moses Hess, his Zionism proved to be the most enduring one. And even that took a world historical disaster to be fulfilled: the disaster of Nazism.
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