Moses Hess at the Nexus of Marxism and Zionism
Radically as Marxism and Zionism would part ways in the twentieth century, it is interesting to observe that the two ideologies’ early histories are intertwined in the person of Moses Hess (1812-1875), a Jewish radical Hegelian thinker and contemporary of Marx whose 1862 Zionist manifesto, Rome and Jerusalem , predates Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State by more than three decades. Hess, like Marx, was born in Germany’s Rhineland to a merchant father who intended for his son to pursue a life of religious study. As Hess recorded in his diary, however, “the Talmud utterly repelled me” [1]. His adolescent intellectual awakening saw him drawn to French socialism and to the works of Baruch Spinoza and G.W.F. Hegel, whose thought would in different ways shape the course of Hess’s philosophical and political development. Under the influence of Hegel, Hess would in his early years stand out as a “dialectical Idealist” as opposed to a dialectical materialist, as his fellow left Hegelian Mar...