The man who converted Friedrich Engels to communism
Before Marx and Engels were household names, a self-taught Rhineland writer named Moses Hess had already published Germany's first book of socialist theory. He introduced both men to communist ideas, called Marx perhaps the only real philosopher alive, and later turned toward Jewish nationalism in Rome and Jerusalem.
Hess was born in Bonn on 21 January 1812, while the city was under French rule and Jews enjoyed full legal equality. When Prussia took the Rhineland after Napoleon's defeat, those rights were withdrawn. Some Jewish families, including that of Marx's father, converted to Christianity; the Hess family clung more tightly to tradition. His father moved to Cologne in 1816 to build a sugar refinery, leaving the boy with a strictly orthodox grandfather, and Hess later wrote bitterly of teachers who tried to beat the Talmud into him.
After a quarrel with his father in 1833 he drifted through Holland and France, poor, and taught himself Kant, Hegel, Rousseau and above all Spinoza. His first book, The Holy History of Mankind, appeared anonymously in 1837 under the name of a Young Spinozist. It split history into three eras mirroring the Trinity and blamed private property and inheritance for society's ills, sketching early ideas of capital concentration and class struggle a year ahead of Wilhelm Weitling. Almost nobody noticed it.
The European Triarchy of 1841 found a wider audience. It proposed that Germany supply philosophy, France political energy and England practical social change, a blend that later became central to Marxism, and it predicted revolution would start in industrial England. That year Hess helped organise the Rheinische Zeitung, where he met Marx, six years his junior. In late 1842 he won Engels over to communism, and Engels afterwards honoured him as the party's first communist. He worked with both on The German Ideology and joined their Communist League in 1847.
The failed revolutions of 1848 and rising antisemitism convinced him Jews were a nation, not only a faith. His 1862 book argued for a socialist commonwealth in Palestine, making him a founder of Labor Zionism. He died in Paris on 6 April 1875, and in 1961 his remains were reburied in Israel's Kinneret Cemetery.
Source: Moses Hess
