Moses Hess

Moses Hess (1812 to 1875) was a German-Jewish philosopher and writer who helped shape early socialist theory and, late in life, anticipated the Zionist movement. Born in Bonn under French rule and raised in a devout Jewish household, he turned in his youth to philosophy and radical politics. His first book, The Holy History of Mankind (1837), proposed a socialist society grounded in Jewish and Christian ethics and read through the philosophy of Spinoza. As a Young Hegelian in the 1840s he developed an ethical socialism and an early account of alienation, and he influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who later mocked his outlook as true socialism. Disillusioned by the failed revolutions of 1848 and by modern antisemitism, he argued in Rome and Jerusalem (1862) that the Jews were a nation whose revival required a socialist commonwealth in Palestine. He died in Paris in 1875.