Moses Hess

A socialist militant close to Marx and Engels

Impressed by the new Italian unit reached at the time of the Risorgimento and, more generally, by the rise of the movement of the Nationalités which appears gradually at the time of the 19th century, in particular after the Printemps of the People of 1848, Moses Hess publishes in 1862 Rome and Jerusalem - the Last National question, which calls with the creation of a “Jewish State”.

Come from a family Middle-class E, Moses Hess married a woman of the Peuple, by measurement of distrust with respect to the middle-class values. That gave place to false Rumeur S according to which he had married a Prostituée. Hess accepted a Jewish education on behalf of his/her grandfather, and is registered with the Université of Bonn. However, it never obtained its diploma. In the place, it founded a socialist Journal and became the corresponding Parisian one about it. Following the failure of the Revolution of 1848 and with the Coup d'etat of December 2nd, 1851, he flees in Switzerland and Belgium, which he reiterates during the Guerre free-Prussian in 1870.

Conversion with the Jewish national question

Moses Hess was at the beginning in favor of Jewish integration in the socialist Mouvement Universel. It converts Engels with Communism and introduces Marx with the economic and social problems. Hess played a crucial role in the transformation materialist of the Dialectique hégélienne, still tried Idéalisme, by designing the man like the initiator of the history starting from his clean active Conscience. It is probably at the origin of Slogan S such as " the religion is the opium of the peuple" , etc

Nevertheless Moses Hess was gradually opposed to preeminence economic factors and Class struggle in the history, and came from there to see in the " Fight of the races " , or of nationalities, the independent factor of the last history (see the analysis of Michel Foucault about the " historico-political speech of the fight of the races" , which appears in France with Boulainvilliers). He lived in Germany of 1861 to 1863, where he took the measurement of the Antisémitisme incipient from what will become the Pan-German movement . He then took again his name Juif of " Moses" (that it had exchanged for the name of " Moritz") in order to protest against the Assimilationnisme, and then turned to the religion, in the form hétérodoxe of the Panthéisme Spinoziste, which it did not seem to conceive like contradictory towards its orthodoxy.

While contemplating the Italian and German movements of unification as well as the anti-semitism growing of the European company, it came to the idea from a Jewish State-nation. Moses Hess called some with the establishment of a " the Commonwealth " Jewish Socialist in Palestine like Jewish version of the movement of nationalities.

A late influence

Nevertheless, the work of Moses Hess was not particularly popular in the Jewish mediums, just as that of Leon Pinsker. It became important only retrospectively, and one considers in general the publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896 by Theodor Herzl, which dates from the Dreyfus business its " conversion" with the Zionism, like date founder of the Jewish national movement.

Hess died in 1875 in Paris, and was buried, in agreement with its wishes, in the Jewish cemetery of Cologne. In 1961, its corpse was exhumed and D-buried in the cemetery of Kinnereth, at the edge of the Lac of Tibériade, at the sides of other socialist Zionists such as Nachman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, or Berl Katznelson.

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