Moses Hess: The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings

Abstract

Moses Hess is a major figure in the development of both early communist and Zionist thought. The Holy History of Mankind appeared in 1837, and was the first book-length socialist tract to appear in Germany, representing an unusual synthesis of Judaism and Christianity that showed the considerable influence upon Hess of Spinoza, Herder and Hegel. In due course many of Hess's ideas would find their way into the work of Karl Marx, and into subsequent socialist thought. The distinguished political scientist Shlomo Avineri provides the first full English translation of this text, along with new renditions of Socialism and Communism, A Communist Credo; and The Consequences of a Future Revolution of the Proletariat. All of the usual reader-friendly series features are provided, including a chronology, concise introduction and notes for further reading, in a work of special relevance to students of politics, modern European history, and the history of Zionism.

The future of the stranger: Jewish exemplarity and the social imagination

“…Hess was an important actor in mid-nineteenth-century Hegelian circles. It is difficult to draw a clear line of argument or linear evolution of thought through Hess’ oeuvre, from Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit ( The Holy History of Mankind ) in 1837 to his now best-known Rom und Jerusalem: Die letzte Nationalitätenfrage (Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism) in 1862, which is widely considered to be a precursor to modern Zionism (Hess, 1918 [1862]; Hess, 2004 [1837]). Nevertheless, there are clear indications of a deep ongoing concern with questions of particularity versus universality and with the place of Judaism in both past and future.…”

“…In The Holy History of Mankind , the young Hess (2004 [1837]) attempted to lay the groundwork for an ambitious philosophy of history. His motivation was his experience of a dire need for a new historical vision with the potential to re-evaluate and redirect religion and religious differences into an inclusive history that would embrace both Judaism and Christianity in a common progressive development.…”

“…In this way, Hess inserted himself into the lines of transmission of the important debates over the character and identification of Jews and Jewishness that were part of the Enlightenment debates over Spinozism, pantheism, atheism, and heresy and that continued in and around the strife over the Jewishness of Jesus in the 1830s. As Shlomo Avineri also notes in his introduction to The Holy History of Mankind , Hess (2004 [1837]) was worried that an abstract universalism would prove to be false in its effects and that the debates over Jews and Judaism were an indication of the danger implied in the thought of many radical Hegelians (p. xxvii).…”

“…As a social form, the Jews are not disappearing, they are Judaizing Europe (Morris-Reich, 2008: 84). In Hess’ (2004 [1837]: 95) much less coherent and much less sophisticated thought, this was Spinozism and Hegelianism combined: laws of nature, laws of history and justice, are God’s laws, and the world is all one substance, in which everything is related, but at the same time these universals manifest themselves through exemplary cases and individualities:This nation has been summoned from the very beginning to conquer the world – not like Pagan Rome by its force of arms, but through the inner virtue of its spirit. The Jewish People itself wandered like a ghost through the world it had conquered, and its enemies did not succeed in vanquishing it, because its spirit is intangible.…”

Not in the Heavens: The Premodern Roots of Jewish Secularism

“…But his definition of the Jews as a political community, at least when they had a state, offered to modern Jews a bold alternative to the religious identity embraced by reformers in the nineteenth century. It is no surprise that Moses Hess, one of the forerunners of Zionism, was to sign his first philosophical work in 1837 as ‘a young Spinozist’ (a riposte to the ‘young Hegelians’ with whom he was associated) (Hess 2004). 22 When he came to write Rome and Jerusalem in 1862, Hess would repeatedly refer to Spinoza – often with wild inaccuracy and anachronism – in his argument for the Jews as a race and for the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty.…”