Moses Hess

For my upcoming fellowship, we need to familiarize ourselves with a lot of different concepts about Israel and Judaism. I've decided to keep notes on my research here so I can reference it, and hopefully it will stick more in the writing. But also, maybe other people can learn from my cliff notes!

MOSES HESS (1812-1875)

Hess was a German Jew. His parents left him in Bonn when they moved to Cologne.  In The Zionist Idea, Arthur Hertzberg writes: "He therefore remained in charge of his grandfather, a rabbi by training though not by profession, who taught him enough Hebrew so that, when he returned to Jewish interests after thirty years of neglect, Hess was able to tap strong emotional and intellectual roots in the tradition." (117)

I immediately felt like I could relate to Hess, as someone who has come in and out of Judaism but always felt those emotional and intellectual roots.

Hess was really into philosophy and worked as a German newspaper correspondent in Paris. He was passionately socialist, but he didn't really see eye to eye with Marx because Marx was more into economic socialism and Hess was more into ethical socialism.

I really liked this note of Hertzberg's: "Evidently out of the desire to make personal atonement for the sins of man which drove poor women into the 'oldest profession,' he married a lady of the streets - and, somewhat surprisingly, lived happily ever after." (118). This made me feel even more affection for Hess.

I read excerpts of Hess's work, Rome and Jerusalem, (1862), in the same volume compiled by Hertzberg. It is basically a treatise about how necessary a Jewish national homeland is to the safety and success of the Jewish people, but also about his conviction that without nationalism, there's not much point to Judaism. He's pretty aggressive towards Jewish 'reformists' that he sees as denying their roots and trying to dissolve themselves into western culture, which he's certain will not end well for them. He particularly writes about how even conversion won't do much good for German Jews, as most Germans held racial antipathy towards Jews more than religious antipathy, and all of this was, of course, pretty chilling foreshadowing.  Here are some of the quotes I found most interesting:

"...the tendency of some Jews to deny their racial descent is equally fordoomed to failure. Jewish noses cannot be reformed, and the black, wavy hair of the Jews will not be changed into blond by conversion or straightened out by constant combing." (121)

"You may mask yourself a thousand times over; you may change your name, religion, and character; you may travel through the world incognito, so that people may not recognize the Jew in you; yet every insult to the Jewish name will strike you even more than the honest man who admits his Jewish loyalties and who fights for the honor of the Jewish name." (122)

"The Jewish religion has indeed been, as Heine thought - and with him all the 'enlightened' Jews - more of a misfortune than a religion for the last two thousand years. But our 'progressive' Jews are deluding themselves if they think they can escape this misfortune through enlightenment or conversion. Every Jew is, whether he wishes it or not, bound unbreakably to the entire nation. Only when the Jewish people will be freed from the burden which it has borne so heroically for thousands of years will the burden of Judaism be removed from the shoulders of these 'progressive' Jews, who will always form only a small and vanishing minority. It is the duty of all of us to carry 'the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven' until the end." (136)

But for all of his sad but mostly accurate claims about the vain attempts of Jews to assimilate into Europe, Hess had his own blind bias towards the French. He repeatedly wrote about how the French were our allies in civilization and progress, and how enlightened the French were.  "France, beloved friend, is the savior who will restore our people to is place in universal history." (133).

:/

It's sort of a lesson in identifying our own biases. What do we see through rose colored lenses?

Hess also asserted that it might have been better if the rabbis had never recorded the oral law because then Judaism would be more fluid and alive and progressive. Writing it down made it stagnant and formalized and halted its movement. I never really thought about this and it's a compelling argument.