Proto-Zionism

Before Theodor Herzl, there were other thinkers who advocated for the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel. While their very disparate backgrounds brought them to this point of view, none of them so clearly anticipated the ideas that would animate Herzl as did Moses Hess. He can now be seen as the originator of the ideas embodied by the Labor Zionists as well as the general approach to Zionists like Ahad Ha’Am who felt that Jewish Nationhood required spiritual as well as territorial renewal. His work, “Rome and Jerusalem,” was largely ignored in its time outside of the Jewish community. Within the Jewish community, primarily in Germany, it caused enormous controversy before being largely forgotten.

Herzl only became aware of “Rome and Jerusalem” after publishing “The Jewish State.” He said of Hess' work that had he known of it, he might not have written his own book. Hess is a deeper thinker than Herzl. Herzl may not be a great writer, but he is a much easier read than Hess. I struggled through much of Hess’ prose. Hess was one of the Young Hegelians and he frequently falls into Hegelian styles of analysis. He is also stylistically GERMAN. His sentences are long and his paragraphs can go on for more than a page. He makes references to things that have either become obscure over time or were always obscure. Nevertheless, one comes to recognize even in some of his vaguer passages a hopefulness about human nature that defies his seemingly naively accurate assessments of the societal ills around him.

Hess was born in Bonn in 1812. His early years fell during the Napoleonic liberation of the Jews and the subsequent reversals. His father was a successful merchant who moved to Cologne when Hess was five to establish his sugar trading company. Hess was left with his grandparents who were pious traditional Jews. Isaiah Berlin makes the point that in the period of the reversals of Jewish emancipation, many German Jews converted out of Judaism due to their despair with the failure of assimilation as Jews. On the other hand, he observes that many of those who remained within the fold doubled down on their Jewishness. It could be that Hess’ grandfather, his great teacher of Judaism, could be seen as such a Jew, but perhaps he was just a pure product of an earlier time. Nevertheless, Hess always carried with him the memories of his grandfather as an exemplar of deeply felt, sincere and loving Jewish life.

Hess’ father wanted him to work in the family business. Hess demurred. He wanted to attend the University in Bonn, however he never seemed to have signed up to attend. His late teens and early twenties were a time of self-education, wandering and exploration. He arrived in Paris in 1832 and became ensconced in the world of the left-wing activists there. He was very impressed by one of the most radical of the forerunners of that scene, François-Noël Babeuf. Babeuf was an eighteenth-century French thinker who advocated for the end of private property. Although the term communist was not used in his time, he can be seen clearly as a forerunner of communism, anarchism and socialism.

In the early 1840s, Hess met Friedrich Engels and later Karl Marx and converted them to the communist idea. They were impressed by Hess’s first published work, “Holy History of Mankind,” published in 1837. Hess edited the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where Marx was also working, before having to flee Germany. Marx subsequently became the editor before he too had to flee.

“Holy History of Mankind” divides up the history of humanity into three periods of time overall (within a scheme of a larger number of sub-division). The first is the time of the Israelite nation before the destruction of the Second Temple. The second period is the era of Christianity and then the era of Emancipation. The final phase is the emergence of a more ideal world. The first era is a period of integration of spiritual and material. The second is dominated by spiritual concerns to an unhealthy degree followed by a shift to a domination of the Material over the spiritual to an unhealthy degree. The final era will see the triumph of a more ideal and balanced society where neither material or spiritual tendency rule over the other. Isaiah Berlin, who actually read the book, finds it to be not very well written or original, but does see in it the start of a thread in Hess’ thinking that would be significant in unexpected ways later on. Hess’ vision of a Socialist Europe is an earlier vision of what Marx and Engels would describe as "a spectre haunting Europe.”

Despite the close association of Hess with Marx and Engels, their relationship was not a pleasant one. Hess idolized Marx, but Marx and Engels viewed Hess as a sentimentalist and were dismissive towards him (even though they incorporated some of his work into “The Communist Manifesto,” and “The German Ideology.”) Marx had a pathological hatred of his Jewish origins and the Jewish people worthy of a thorough Freudian analysis. Hess’ positive view of the Hebrew prophets was off-putting to Marx. Hess and Marx/Engels were also separated by judgements about morality. As Isaiah Berlin wrote:

“Nothing was to be accepted merely because it had occurred - but solely because it was objectively good. Hegelian historicism had evidently not struck so deep in him after all; heretical as this was, he stoutly maintained that the only way to achieve social justice, the abolition of poverty and the equitable distribution of the ever more plentiful goods (which, owing to maldistribution, were breeding more misery than happiness) was by the conscious will of men convinced of the moral necessity of their action. One could, and one had a duty to, convince men by rational argument that if they turned their resources into productive and harmonious channels, they would be better off both materially and morally; this was Hess' 'True Socialism' - the Utopian sentimentalism for which Marx and Engels mocked him so bitterly.”

Although Hess thought highly of Marx, they differed on their belief in the primacy of class struggle as a central issue in radical thought. Hess believed that nationality and ethnicity played an additional or primary part in the way that the world worked. This disagreement is still active. Certainly, Marx and Engels underestimated the significance of Hess’ views.

Hess had been strongly affected by the Damascus Affair in 1840. This was a case of a blood libel following the disappearance of a Capuchin monk and his Islamic servant in Damascus. Members of the Christian community of Damascus alleged that Jews had killed the two in order to get non-Jewish blood to make Matzah. This led to both arrests of Jews and anti-Jewish rioting. The incident became a cause celebre in Europe. It was problematic because the local Pasha was in revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Only after his downfall was the Empire able to bring relief to the Jewish population. The libel and the agitation was a product of the Christian population, not the Muslims. At the time Hess recognized that “The Jewish Problem” was not as clearly subject to a solution within the blanket cure-all of left thinking. However, he could not see how to approach the matter and suppressed his concerns.

The event that revived his interest in “The Jewish Problem” was the reunification of Italy under secularist principles. While Hess loathed the nationalism of Bismarck and Germany, he saw something appealing in Italian nationalism. Italian unification and the national renewal that it promised was a model that allowed him to imagine the re-establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in the historical Land of Israel.

Herzl and Hess agreed that the Jews in their own homeland will be able to truer to their nature than they were able to be in Europe. Herzl recognized the failure of assimilation to ameliorate European anti-semitism. His scheme to remove the Jews from Europe, or at least the majority of them, was what he saw as the solution. He rationalized the anti-semitic conduct of Europe as one of resentment over the competition that Jews brought to the workers, professionals and merchants of the European nations. Hess believed that the resentment came from the inherent defensiveness of the European nations to the inroads of the Jews as people of no nation. For him, the re-establishment of the national character of the Jewish people was the solution. Every Jew didn’t need to live in the Land of Israel for this to be accomplished. The Jews just needed to be seen by the world as a Nation unto themselves and to conduct themselves accordingly.

Hess did not believe that one nation was better than another. To the degree that nations actually believed and functioned as if that belief was warranted, their nationalism could be seen as positive or not. But his usual idealism led him to believe that this was the best way to overcome animus between individuals as well as nations. Difference was a positive factor in the world. Again, Isaiah Berlin:

“Hess goes on to say that the great French historian Augustin Thierry at the beginning of the nineteenth century rightly maintained that history is dominated by the struggles not only of classes, but also of races and nationalities. 'Semites' and 'Teutons' are not mere linguistic categories, although they carry no titles to superiority in themselves. Each race has different and incommensurable gifts, and they can all contribute to the enrichment of mankind. ... nothing was worse than flying under false colours. In a moving passage, early in the book, he says that Moses was not buried in the Holy Land, whereas the bones of Joseph were carried there, because, according to the rabbis: when Moses presented himself before his future father-in-law, Jethro the priest of Midian, to sue for his daughter's hand, he did not reveal his true origin: he allowed it to be assumed that he was an Egyptian; whereas Joseph revealed himself to his brethren, and never disavowed anyone or anything. One moment of weakness deprived Moses of his right to burial in the land of the ancestors whom he had by his silence denied; so that, according to the Scriptures, no man knows the place of his grave.”

In this, we see that Hess has laid his socialism and Judaism over each other and resolved the two together, at least for himself. Resolved, but not exactly synthesized.

What made “Rome and Jerusalem” so controversial in the German-Jewish world was Hess’ fierce condemnation of both the assimilationist camp and Reform Judaism. His appraisal of the end of those paths was that of an apocalyptic disaster. He was no more sanguine about the Orthodox camp. Although his admiration for traditional Judaism is strongly felt, and he singles out Hasidism as a positive force, he views the rigidity of Orthodox observance as an obstacle to the revival of Judaism as a national way of life.

In one of the twelve letters that the book is composed of, Hess imagines that both the Temple and the Sanhedrin would be revived as part of the new Jewish commonwealth. He repudiates only animal sacrifice, and only because the Jewish people have become more sophisticated since Temple times. He imagines that the revived Sanhedrin could uproot some of the law that Orthodox Jewry held so tightly to. He imagines in the Jewish Future a dissolution of the separations of denominational Judaism. He doesn’t lay out a program of what might comprise this future spiritual life, but he imagines that it will be something different from the Judaisms that he knew in his time. In this, he precedes thinkers like Benay Lappe.

Hess and Herzl are close in their prognostication of who would settle this new commonwealth. Herzl sees the project beginning with the most dispossessed. These Jews with nothing to lose would build up the new society, and in doing so, make the project appealing to those more difficult to convince. In the end, Herzl believed that this progress would ultimately draw even those at the highest economic strata. Hess believed that the project would appeal most to the Jews of Eastern Europe who were the most oppressed — in other words, those with the least investment in false notions of the improvement of Jewish status in Europe. Beyond that he makes no speculations.

While Herzl is always the starry-eyed optimist in his boosterish approach, Hess is more cautious. Morality is as important to him in the building of a Jewish nationality as in anything else. Thus, he attached his socialism to the new Jewish nationality. Again, Isaiah Berlin:

“But he was a socialist, and when he spoke of the Jewish state in Palestine, he declared that the soil of that country must be acquired by the Jews acting as a single national whole in order to prevent private exploitation. Similarly he regarded full legal protection of labour among the future colonists as a sine qua non, and declared that the organization of industry, agriculture and trade must follow Mosaic - which for him was synonymous with socialistic - principles. He wanted to see in the new Jewish state workers' cooperatives of the type organised by Lassalle in Germany, state-aided until such time as the proletarians formed a majority of the inhabitants of Palestine, when the state would automatically, peacefully, and without revolution, become a socialist commonwealth.”

At this time, when the State of Israel is an accomplished matter, it is important to remember the visions of those who imagined it into existence. Reality is always more complex than we expect to be as we plan, but that does not forgive us when we fail to reach for the highest standards of human conduct. The words of the early Zionist and the forerunners of Zionism are what Martin Luther King referred to, in the American context, as “the uncashed check.” We need to present that check until it is paid.

Sources

Berlin, Isaiah. “The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess. The Lucien Wolf Memorial Lecture delivered in London, December 1957.”
Hess, Moses. “Rome and Jerusalem.”
Laqueur, Walter. “A History of Zionism.” 
Jewish Encyclopedia entry on Moses Hess.