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Moses ( Moritz) Hess (21 January 1812 – 6 April 1875) was a German-Jewish philosopher, early socialist and Zionist thinker. His theories led to disagreements with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He is considered a pioneer of Labor Zionism.
Hess was an early proponent of socialism, and a precursor to what would later be called Zionism. As a correspondent for the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper founded by liberal Rhenish businessmen, he lived in Paris. He was a friend and important collaborator of Karl Marx, who was the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, following his advice, and befriended also with Friedrich Engels. Hess initially introduced Engels to communism, through his theoretical approach.
Marx, Engels and Hess took refuge in Brussels, Belgium, in 1845, and used to live in the same street. By the end of the decade, Marx and Engels had fallen out with Hess. The work of Hess was also criticized in part of The German Ideology by Marx and Engels. (1976). 9780828500081, International Publishers. ISBN 9780828500081
Hess fled to Switzerland temporarily following the suppression of the 1848 commune. He would also go abroad during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. During the 1850s Hess immersed himself into studying the natural sciences and gaining, in an autodidactic fashion, a scientific foundation for his thoughts.
Hess died in Paris in 1875. A non-religious ceremony was held in which he was eulogized by representatives of French radical democrats, German socialists, and the German workers in Paris. As he requested, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Cologne. In 1961, he was re-interred in the Kvutzat Kinneret Cemetery in Israel along with other Labor Zionism such as Nachman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, and Berl Katznelson.
Moshav Kfar Hess in Israel was named in his honour.Hareuveni, Imanuel (2010). Eretz Israel Lexicon (in Hebrew). Matach. p. 498.
According to George Lichtheim, Hess, who differed from Marx on a number of issues, still testified in a letter to Alexander Herzen that what he and Herzen were writing about "resembles a neat sketch drawn on paper, whereas Marx's judgment upon these events European is as it were engraved with iron force in the rock of time" (Paraphrased by George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism, 1971 p. 80).
From 1861 to 1863, he lived in Germany, where he became acquainted with the rising tide of German antisemitism. It was then that he reverted to his Jewish name Moses (after going by Moritz Hess) in protest against Jewish assimilation. He published in 1862. Hess interprets history as a circle of race and national struggles. He contemplated the rise of Italian nationalism and the German reaction to it, and from this he arrived at the idea of Jewish national revival, and at his prescient understanding that the Germans would not be tolerant of the national aspirations of others and would be particularly intolerant of the Jews. His book calls for the establishment of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine, in line with the emerging national movements in Europe and as the only way to respond to antisemitism and assert Jewish identity in the modern world.
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