A History of Zionism (10 page)

Moses Hess

Moses Hess, born in Bonn in 1812, was known in his lifetime chiefly for his activities as a Socialist. He was prominent in the theoretical exchanges between the Young Hegelians during the 1830s and 1840s, collaborated for a while with Marx and Engels, had to flee from Germany, and spent many years in political exile in France. He was one of the main representatives of what Marx contemptuously referred to as the ‘true Socialists’, castigated in the
Communist Manifesto
as those who merely translated French ideas into German: ‘speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, a Philistine, foul and enervating literature’.

Shorn of invective, the difference between Hess and Marx was the insistence of the founder of ‘scientific Socialism’ on the study of the laws of social development which were making for the emergence of a Socialist society. Hess on the other hand put the stress on Socialism as a moral necessity; for him the conscious will, the decision in favour of Socialism rather than the ‘objective forces of history’, was the decisive factor. As a theoretician and original thinker, Hess, abstract and unsystematic, was not in Marx’s class; latter-day historians relegated him to what seemed well-deserved obscurity. It took more than a century and the emergence of Communist movements totally unlike Marx’s expectations to reawaken interest in the ideas of Hess and other early apostles of Socialism outside the Marxist tradition.

Hess was forever bursting with childlike idealism; he thought with his heart rather than his head. Amateur fashion, he dabbled in many subjects with which he was clearly not equipped to deal. Yet on the Jewish question his analysis was, as subsequent events proved, more realistic and less abstract than Marx’s. Hess retired in 1852 from active politics and devoted himself to the study of natural sciences. Then in 1862, quite unexpectedly, he published a book which was to have been entitled
The Revival of Israel
but became known under the somewhat misleading title
Rome and Jerusalem, the last nationality question.
It opens with a moving personal confession:

After twenty years of estrangement I have returned to my people. Once again I am sharing in its festivals of joy and days of sorrow, in its hopes and memories. I am taking part in the spiritual and intellectual struggles of our day, both within the House of Israel and between our people and the gentile world. … A sentiment which I believed I had suppressed beyond recall is alive once again. It is the thought of my nationality, which is inseparably connected with my ancestral heritage, with the Holy Land and Eternal City, the birthplace of the belief in the divine unity of life and of the hope for the ultimate brotherhood of all men.
*

Hess was born into a family in which, unlike Marx’s, the Jewish religious tradition was still alive. When his parents moved to Cologne he was left in the home of his grandparents because Cologne was not thought to offer sufficient opportunities for a Jewish education. But like almost all his contemporaries, Hess turned his back on religion; the Mosaic religion (as he wrote in his diary) was dead, its historical role was finished and could no longer be revived. If a religion had to be chosen, Christianity was obviously better fitted for the present time.
*
Hess did not undergo conversion, but he was not opposed in principle to baptism. In his first book (
The Sacred History of Mankind
) he said that the people chosen by their God must disappear forever, that out of their death might spring a new, more precious life. Later on, in
Jugement dernier du vieux monde social
, published in 1851, he mentioned the two ‘horrible examples of unfortunate peoples’ who had been punished for still identifying themselves with their dead institutions - the Chinese, ‘a body without a soul, and the Jews, a soul without a body, wandering like a ghost through the centuries’.
*
True, under the impact of the Damascus affair in 1840, Hess had pondered the anomaly of Jewish existence; perhaps the Jews would remain strangers forever. He also wrote on one occasion that the Jew who denied his nationality was a contemptible creature. In 1840 Hess was painfully reminded (he wrote twenty years later) that he belonged to an unfortunate, maligned, despised and dispersed people, but one that the world had not succeeded in destroying: ‘I wanted to cry out in anguish in expression of my Jewish patriotism, but this emotion was immediately superseded by the greater pain which was evoked in me by the suffering of the proletariat of Europe.’ He thought there was no point in taking a lead in the struggle for the revival of the Jewish nation, if only because the Jews themselves were sure neither of themselves nor of their cause.

What, two decades later, brought about the profound change in Hess’s thought and in his priorities? The position of the Jews in western society was certainly not critical; on the contrary, it had immensely improved during those years. Within their communities there were hardly any traces left of national spirit and enthusiasm. Two books published shortly before - Laharanne’s
La nouvelle question d’Orient
, and J. Salvador’s
Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, ou la question réligieuse au XIX
^e
siècle
(Paris, 1860) had dealt with the prospects of a Jewish national revival, but it is doubtful whether they exerted a powerful influence on him.
‡
In the course of his scientific studies he had become interested in the question of racial antagonism, to which he now attributed far greater importance than before. But in the last resort Hess’s reconversion to Judaism was emotional, and fairly sudden at that; only a few years before he was still expressing opinions very much in contrast to those put forward in
Rome and Jerusalem.

The most striking feature of that book is the startling, revolutionary and deeply pessimistic analysis of antisemitism. Almost all Hess’s contemporaries on the Left were firmly convinced that antisemitism reflected the dying convulsions of the old order, that it was reactionary, and politically of little consequence. Hess did not share their confidence. Writing well before modern racial antisemitism became a major political force, he had already realised its dangerous potential: the racial antagonism of the Germans towards the Jews was a deep, instinctive force, far more powerful than any rational argument. Reform and assimilation, eradicating the signs of their Jewishness and denying their race, would not save them:

But even an act of conversion cannot relieve the Jew of the enormous pressure of German antisemitism. The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than they hate their race - they hate the peculiar faith of the Jews less than their peculiar noses. Reform, conversion, education and emancipation - none of these opens the gates of society to the German Jew; hence his desire to deny his racial origin.

But noses could not be reshaped nor could black, wavy hair become blond and straightened by constant combing. There simply was no way out of the dilemma: the modern Jew could not hide behind geographical and philosophical abstractions; he could mask himself a thousand times over, change his name and religion and character, he would still be recognised as a Jew. The Jew might become a naturalised citizen, Hess argued, but he would never convince the gentile of his total separation from the gentile’s own nationality. For the nations of Europe had always regarded the existence of Jews in their midst as an anomaly:

We shall always remain strangers among the nations. They may even be moved by a sense of humanity and justice to emancipate us, but they will never respect us, so long as we make
ubi bene ibi patria
our guiding principle, indeed almost a religion, and place it above our own great national memories. Religious fanaticism may cease to cause hatred of the Jews in the more culturally advanced countries; but despite enlightenment and education, the Jew in exile who denies his nationality will never earn the respect of the nations among whom he dwells.
*

The racial issue, Hess thought, was particularly acute in Germany because many Germans were deeply prejudiced in this respect without even being aware of it; humanism had not yet become part and parcel of their national character to the extent it had in the public mind of the Roman peoples. For Jews, homelessness was the heart of the problem. Like other peoples they needed a normal national life: ‘Without soil a man sinks to the status of a parasite, feeding on others.’ Hess’s definition of Jews (‘a race, a brotherhood, a nation’) and Judaism was somewhat vague, but it is clear that he felt acutely that the liberal assumptions and definitions of the day were simply untrue. He maintained that if emancipation was not compatible with adherence to the Jewish nation, Jews ought to give up the former for the latter. They were not a religious group, but a separate nation, a special race, and the modern Jew who denied this was not only an apostate, a religious renegade, but a traitor to his people, his tribe, his race.

The main danger to Judaism did not come from the pious old Jew who would rather have his tongue cut out than misuse it by denying his nationality. It came from the religious reformers who with their newly invented ceremonies and empty eloquence had sucked the marrow out of Judaism and left only a shadowy skeleton of this most magnificent of all historical phenomena. This kind of reform had no basis in either the general situation in the modern world or the essential national character of Judaism, for which the reformers had not the slightest respect: they were at great pains to erase every echo and memory of it from their creed and worship. The reformers tried to make Judaism, which was both national and universal, into a second version of Christianity cut on a rationalist pattern, and this at a time ‘when the original was already mortally sick’. Hess ridiculed those reformers who claimed that the Jews, representing pure theism, had a mission in the diaspora to teach intolerant Christianity the principles of humanitarianism, to work for a new synthesis of morality and life, which had become divorced from each other in the Christian world. Such a mission could be achieved only by a nation which was politically organised, which could embody this unity of morality and life in its own social institutions. Hess also made some scathing observations about the Jewish obscurantists who buried their heads in the sand, denouncing all science and every aspect of modern secular life.

Could a bridge be built between the nihilism of the Reform rabbis and the conservativism of the orthodox who had forgotten nothing? Hess thought the answer was the return to the land, a Jewish state in Palestine. The hope of a political rebirth of the Jewish people should be kept alive, until political conditions in the orient were ripe for the founding of Jewish colonies. He had no doubt that conditions were rapidly improving with the digging of the Suez Canal and the building of a railroad to connect Europe and Asia. France, he believed, would undoubtedly help them to establish their colonies, which might one day extend from Suez to Jerusalem and from the banks of the Jordan to the shores of the Mediterranean. At this stage Hess drew heavily on Laharanne’s analysis of the Eastern Question: what European power would oppose a plan for the Jews, united in a congress, to buy back their ancient fatherland? Who would object if they flung a handful of gold to decrepit old Turkey and said: ‘Give us back our old home and use this money to consolidate the other parts of your tottering old empire.’
*

Hess had definite ideas about the character of the future Jewish state. He did not doubt that the majority of Jews in the civilised west would remain where they lived. The nobler natures among them would again interest themselves in the Jewish people, of whom they knew little, but, having achieved the breakthrough to western culture and society they would not lightly give up their newly won civic position; such a sacrifice of a recently acquired prize was contrary to human nature. But Hess did not doubt that many thousands of east European Jews would emigrate. In this context he mentioned Hassidism, of which he knew enough to realise that it was one of the few living forces in contemporary Judaism; few western Jews had so much as heard of Hassidism at the time. Hess argued that in the last resort, given modern means of communication, it did not really matter how many of the Jewish race would dwell within the borders of a Jewish state and how many outside. The state was needed both as a spiritual centre, and, as Hess said in a later essay, as a base for political action. In this state the existence of a Jewish identity would have neither to be demonstrated nor to be hidden.

The state was to be basically Socialist in character. Hess envisaged the establishment of voluntary cooperative societies (associations on the pattern developed by Louis Blanc) which would operate with the help of state credits on the basis of ‘Mosaic, i.e. Socialist principles’. The land would be owned not by individuals but wholly or largely by the nation. For Hess, a Jewish state was not an end in itself but a means towards the just social order to which all peoples aspired.

Rome and Jerusalem
suffers from grave weaknesses. Its very form, twelve letters and ten notes written to a fictional lady, was neither a happy nor an effective medium for a work which its author hoped would bring about a radical revolution in Judaism. It is difficult to imagine the authors of the
Communist Manifesto
presenting their ideas in this fashion. The style, as Isaiah Berlin has noted, is by turns sentimental and rhetorical and at times merely flat; there are far too many digressions and irrelevancies. The substance of the book, too, is open to serious criticism. The analysis of antisemitism and of the drawbacks of assimilation is far more convincing than the rest of the argument. The idea that Turkey could be induced to part with Palestine for a handful of gold betrays, to put it kindly, a lack of realism on the part of one who had been preoccupied for several decades with political issues. Hess’s reliance on French help for the venture was, as some of his friends in Paris told him, clearly over-optimistic. Weakest of all are the sections dealing with the Jewish religion; Hess felt that so long as a Jewish state did not exist, this was the great preservative and nothing ought to be done to undermine or dilute the Jewish religion, of which in
Rome and Jerusalem
he spoke with the greatest admiration; hence his fierce attacks on the ‘nihilism’ of Reform Judaism. Old customs should not be abolished, he argued, nor holidays cut down. Judaism was just and equitable, the true source of all the noble aspirations of mankind.