Moses Hess


Moses Hess was a German-Jewish philosopher, a writer on socialism, and in later life, a forerunner of the political movement that became known as Zionism. His intellectual journey included significant contributions to the early development of socialist theory, and he was a close collaborator and an important influence on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In his later life, Hess's focus shifted towards Jewish nationalism, culminating in his seminal 1862 work, Rome and Jerusalem.
Born in the French-occupied Rhineland, Hess was raised in a traditional Jewish home but broke away in his youth to pursue a path of philosophy and radical politics. His first book, The Holy History of Mankind, proposed a socialist society founded on a synthesis of Jewish and Christian ethics, mediated through the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. In the 1840s, he became a central figure among the Young Hegelians, where he developed a theory of "ethical socialism" and was one of the first thinkers in the German tradition to articulate a sophisticated theory of alienation rooted in social and economic conditions.
After the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, Hess grew disillusioned with the prospects of Jewish integration in Europe. Witnessing the rise of German nationalism and modern antisemitism, he concluded that the Jewish people were a distinct nation, not merely a religious community, and that their existential problems could only be solved through a national revival in their ancestral homeland. Rome and Jerusalem advocated for the establishment of a socialist commonwealth in Palestine, making him a foundational figure of Labor Zionism.
Hess died in Paris in 1875 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Deutz, Cologne. In 1961, his remains were transferred to Israel and reinterred in the Kinneret Cemetery. His work represents a unique synthesis of the national and social questions of the 19th century, and he remains a significant, though often overlooked, figure in the histories of both socialism and Zionism.

Early life and education

Moses Hess was born on 21 January 1812 in Bonn, which was then under French rule, into a family whose ancestors may have come from Poland. The Rhineland had been transformed by the French Revolution, which introduced legal equality, abolished feudal privileges, and fully emancipated the Jewish population. This new era of freedom was short-lived; after Napoleon's defeat in 1814, the region was granted to the Kingdom of Prussia, which rescinded the rights Jews had acquired under the French. This reversal created a profound sense of trauma and dislocation among Rhenish Jews, who, after tasting freedom, were pushed back into a state of civic inequality. While some, like Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx's father, converted to Christianity to regain their status, Hess's family reacted by becoming more fiercely attached to their traditional religion. This experience shaped a generation of radical Jewish thinkers from the region.
Hess came from a family with rabbinical ancestors on both sides. His father, a businessman, moved the family to the more commercially vibrant city of Cologne in 1816 to set up a sugar refinery, but left the five-year-old Moses in Bonn to be raised by his devoutly religious maternal grandfather. Cologne's Jewish community was small and lacked educational infrastructure, so Hess remained in Bonn to receive a traditional Jewish religious education in the Bible and Talmud under the guidance of his grandfather, whom Hess later recalled as an "extremely orthodox" and learned man. In a diary entry from 1836, however, Hess recalled his formal teachers with anguish, calling them "inhuman beings".
After his mother's death in 1826, Hess joined his father in Cologne and was expected to enter the family business. The move to a larger, more cosmopolitan city made him painfully aware of his limited, ghetto-based education. He rebelled against both his father's commercial world and the prospect of a rabbinic career, choosing instead to pursue a life of letters. He quarreled with his father and, in 1833, left home with a small sum of money, travelling to Holland and France, where he experienced poverty and first encountered socialist ideas. Lacking a formal secular education, he embarked on an intensive program of self-study, reading voraciously in German philosophy—including Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—and French thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was particularly impressed by Baruch Spinoza, whom he saw as a model for a modern version of the Hebraic prophetic tradition. The only other Jewish works he mentioned from this period were Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem and Spinoza's Tractatus.
This period of intellectual awakening led to the collapse of his traditional religious beliefs. He described in his diaries a painful transition from orthodox Judaism to a "moral world order" inspired by philosophy, an intimate crisis that he felt set him on a new spiritual and intellectual journey. After reconciling with his father, he was reluctantly permitted to attend the University of Bonn in 1835, where he attended some lectures, but it is uncertain whether he matriculated, and the experience appears to have left little impression on him.

Early socialist writings

''The Holy History of Mankind''

In 1837, Hess published his first book, Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit. Published anonymously by "a Young Spinozist", it was the first book of socialist theory to be written in Germany, predating Wilhelm Weitling's first work by a year. Completely disregarded at the time, the book was an ambitious and esoteric attempt to propose a socialist synthesis of Judaism and Christianity, mediated through the philosophy of Spinoza. It presented a messianic vision of social redemption based on the abolition of private property and inheritance, which Hess identified as the root of all social evils.
Hess divided human history into three periods, paralleling the Christian Trinity:
  1. The era of God the Father: A period of unconscious harmony and community of property, ending with the birth of Jesus.
  2. The era of God the Son: A period of disharmony, characterized by a dualism between spirit and matter, which reached its peak in the Middle Ages with the appearance of private property and inheritance.
  3. The era of the Holy Spirit: The modern age, initiated by Spinoza and advanced by the French Revolution, destined to culminate in a new, socialized humanity.
For Hess, Spinoza was the prophet of the modern age because his philosophy restored the Judaic unity of spirit and matter, which Christianity had severed. This new era would be characterized by a society based on community of property, which Hess saw as the only way to achieve true equality. He traced this ideal to the Mosaic legislation of the Jubilee year, where all land reverted to its original possessors. He argued that private property had led to social polarization, creating an "aristocracy of wealth" and a growing class of the impoverished. He predicted this "disharmony, inequality, egoism" would reach a climax, leading to a social revolution. While the book's language was often obscure, its core arguments contained an early sketch of theories of capital concentration and class struggle. At this stage, however, Hess described the contemporary Jewish people as a "spirit without a body," a disembodied idea whose historical mission had been fulfilled and who should now assimilate into the new universal humanity.
The book's conclusion was a dramatic call for a "New Jerusalem"—a socialist future inspired by the original Judaic vision of a society where the holy and the profane, religion and politics, were unified. Though he did not envision a revival of the Jewish people as a separate entity at this time, he argued that the social vision of Judaism, universalized by Spinoza, would serve as the inspiration for the socialist future of all mankind.

''The European Triarchy''

Hess's second book, Die Europäische Triarchie, published anonymously in 1841, was a more mature work that reached a wider audience and established his reputation among German radicals. The book called for a progressive alliance between the three major nations of Western Europe—Germany, France, and England—to lead humanity into a new future against "Russia, the reservoir of reaction". It laid the foundation for the synthesis of German philosophy, French politics, and English social and economic praxis that would later become a cornerstone of Marxism.
Influenced by the Polish philosopher August Cieszkowski, Hess argued that philosophy must move beyond interpreting the world to actively changing it. German philosophy, he claimed, had "led us to the total truth. Now we have to build bridges which would again lead us from heaven to earth." He saw the future European revolution as a synthesis of the unique contributions of the three leading nations: Germany would provide its philosophy, France its political activism, and England its practical experience with social and economic transformation.
Hess identified England as the country where the social revolution would most likely begin, due to its advanced industrialization and the acute social antagonisms between wealth and poverty. He argued that the social crisis was not political but structural, rooted in the economic system, and could not be solved by political reforms alone. The book also continued his engagement with Jewish history, arguing against Hegel's view of the Jews as a static, "Oriental" people without a historical development. Hess contended that the Jews were a central force in universal history, an "intermediary between West and East" whose messianic impulse for change was a permanent element of ferment in Western civilization. He also addressed the issue of Jewish emancipation, criticizing the expectation that Jews should shed their national identity and arguing that obstacles to intermarriage were proof of an incomplete and flawed liberation.