Introduction

Summary

Moses Hess is today buried in the cemetery of the first Israeli kibbutz, overlooking the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee. Yet after he died in Paris in 1875 he was interred in the Jewish cemetery in Deutz, near Cologne, and the epitaph Vater der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Father of German Social-Democracy) was inscribed on his tombstone; more than eighty years later, his body was transferred to Israel, where he is considered one of the forerunners of Zionism. This is an unusual odyssey for a person who was born in the Judengasse in Bonn, became involved in the pre-1848 German radical movement, and spent most of his life as a socialist exile in France.

When Hess is today mentioned in historical studies, he is usually connected with Karl Marx, as both colleague and protagonist in the early communist movement; on the other hand, in Israel he is revered as one of the forerunners of Zionism, since in his Rome and Jerusalem (1862), he advocated the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. Yet his writings are little known, and have been hardly translated. At the time, however, he exerted considerable influence, and it was he who introduced Marx – six years his junior – to communist ideas; the latter referred to him, in a somewhat ambivalent comment, as ‘my communist rabbi’.

Hess' life story is emblematic of a whole generation of pre-1848 German radical thinkers and activists.