Another Moses who envisioned but did not make it to the Promised Land
Moses Hess and 19th century Zionist thought
Read the first in the series
One the fathers of Zionism was Moses Hess (1812 – 1875).
Moses Hess was a German journalist and socialist who influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels1 and who became an early proponent of Zionism. He read Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and tried to put ideas to work through a humane, sometimes anarchic socialism. He organized workers’ groups and argued his case in the radical Rheinische Zeitung, serving as its Paris correspondent from 1842 to 1843.
After Karl Marx joined the paper, Moses Hess helped shape Marx’s early thinking and they collaborated. Marx later rejected Hess’s approach and mocked it in The Communist Manifesto (1848). During the Revolution of 1848 in Germany, Hess fled the German lands. After years of moving through Europe, he settled in Paris in 1853.
In 1862 he published Rom und Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage—Rome and Jerusalem: The Last Nationality Question, also translated as “the last national question.” The book influenced Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (Aḥad Haʿam) and Theodor Herzl. Its central claim was direct: Jews would remain a homeless people, never fully accepted by others, until they had a country of their own. That claim became a core doctrine of Zionism. Hess’s socialism shaped his Zionism. He linked national renewal to social repair—land, labor, schools, and language—and Rome and Jerusalem gave that link a coherent form. For Hess the maintenance of Jewish nationality did not work within systems emphasizing German nationality and emancipation of the Jewish people within Germany. Effectively in his thinking either the Jewish peoples emancipated in Europe had to fully assimilate into the nationality where they were such as German or French, or they had to have their own fatherland - the Holy Land - so they could be respected as a separate people with a natural place even if they were currently abroad.
Aḥad Haʿam meaning “one of the people” was the pen name of Asher Ginsberg (1856–1927) who advanced the cultural argument for Jewish nationality. His cultural Zionism emphasized the revival of Hebrew, ethics, learning, and shared norms so that any future state in the Holy Land would host a living civilization rather than an empty form of nostalgia. Culture first, so that politics would have something worthy to exist for and to represent. It was Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) who developed the organizational depth of the movement. An Austro-Hungarian journalist and playwright, he convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and translated the claim of Jewish statehood into diplomacy, institutions, and funds. The idea did not begin with him, but he turned it into a program that could recruit people, raise money, and negotiate with governments. While Haʿam and Herzl are better known to general audiences, but the correct starting point is Moses Hess because he framed the question of Jewish nationality within the context of the existing debates over nationalism in Germany and elsewhere. Herzl then provided the machinery that made the project functional. Hess articulated the idea clearly, and Ha’am and Herzl gave it form.
We have to place this intellectual history within its European setting. Organized Zionism developed during Europe’s second great wave of colonization, the Scramble for Africa. In the 1870s, European powers controlled about ten percent of African territory; by 1914 they controlled roughly ninety percent. Great-power competition, nationalist ambition, profits, access to raw materials, and the search for markets drove this expansion.
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 set rules that legitimated and accelerated the scramble. Technology made conquest and control faster: quick-firing weapons, steamships and railways, telegraph cables, and improved medicine. This was the world in which Theodor Herzl sought charters and guarantees and in which the movement organized immigration, land purchase, and institutions. Zionists worked in the same diplomatic and intellectual climate as their European contemporaries. That is the fair context to place analysis of the issues. A common antisemitic move is to “other” Jews, to claim Jewish ideas and actions are alien or uniquely suspect. They were not. Early Zionists were products of European thinking. They read the same philosophers, spoke the same political language, and used the same tools.
Hess did not live to see the consequence of the ideas he helped to unleash. The village of Kfar Hess in Israel is named after him.
To understand the Zionist intellectuals is to place them inside nineteenth-century Europe, not outside it. Judge them and their movement by the standards used for other national movements of the era: claims, conduct, and consequences. Europeans were going abroad to establish states and protectorates, placing Zionist ideas in the same space as Liberia, Rhodesia, Sierra Leone and British South Africa. It was a return movement and a settler movement. This comparative frames allows one to offer fair critiques of Zionism within its actual world not a fictional one. And in the real world, early Zionists had to think about how to engage the last great Islamic empire: the Ottoman Caliphate.
He eventually left the communist movement because he was betrayed by Engels. Hess originally introduced Engels to the movement, making their estrangement and the treatment he and his family received an embarrassment to the Marxists.