January 21: Moses Hess

Moses Hess, an early socialist and a pioneer of Zionism, was born on this date in 1812 in Bonn (then under French rule). He was the Paris correspondent for the Rhinelander Gazette from 1842 to 1843 and collaborated with young Karl Marx on several projects. He also met Friedrich Engels and convinced him that the logic of Hegelian philosophy and dialectic materialism led to communism. Soon, however, Marx and Engels would reject Hess’s own brand of socialism as utopian and mock him in The Communist Manifesto (1848). Hess, in turn, was reluctant to see all history as flowing from class struggle and looked instead to the struggle of “races,” or nationalities, as the prime factor. He expressed this in Rome and Jerusalem (1862), which called for a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. The book made little impact before his death in 1875, but Theodor Herzl was inspired by it to write The Jewish State and wrote, “since Spinoza Jewry had no bigger thinker than this forgotten Moses Hess.”

“The Messianic era is the present age, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and finally came into historical existence with the great French Revolution.” —Moses Hess