Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity

1. Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity

In Rome and Jerusalem (1862), Moses Hess imagined a new Jewry, one progressive and traditional, religious and socialist, nationalist and humanitarian. But such a utopian vision would not go unchallenged. Hess’s colleagues in Germany were the ¤rst to recognize the alarming tensions in his thought. Ludwig Philippson , the editor of the popular nineteenth-century German Jewish paper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, complained in an unsigned article that Hess, who himself did not observe Jewish laws or customs, could demand from every Jew strict observance to the commandments and commitment to a Judaism unchanged in its traditional form: “What do we have here, dear reader?” chided Philippson. “This is the newest form of hypocrisy in Judaism.”1 Humiliated, Hess insisted that Philippson had missed his point about religious reform, and such personal attacks on his character would do nothing to reinforce Jewish national identity. Hess’s passionate and often con®icted views invited attacks on his works, and even on his character. Philippson, with obvious disdain for Hess’s shallow display of piety, dismissed those con®icts as symptoms of a confused mind. But Philippson could not appreciate how those confusions addressed complex issues in modern Jewish identity. This was especially true in Hess’s image of Jewish sacri¤cial worship as the beloved but hideous “scar”: True love, the love that dominates spirit and mind, is in actuality blind. Blind because it does not desire, philosophically or aesthetically, the perfection of the beloved being, but rather loves it just as it is with all its excellences and faults. . . . The scar on the face of my beloved does not harm my love, but rather makes it even the more precious—who knows?—perhaps more precious than her beautiful eyes, which can be found in other beautiful women, while just this scar is characteristic of the individuality of my beloved.2 The face of Jewish tradition is scarred by ancient sacri¤cial worship, but loved all the more for its imperfections. Its appeal lies not in beauty but in individuality, not in perfection but in realism, not in reason but in passion. For Hess, modern Judaism , like the ancient sacri¤ces, must be unique, concrete, material, and meaningful. But it also must be connected to a past, however scarred. Hess’s Judaism is a passionate commitment touched with doubt (“who knows?”), and so his appeal to a scarred past reveals profound tensions in modern Jewish identity. Rather than dismiss those tensions, as many scholars of Hess have done, we should embrace them as insightful re®ections on identity. This book turns to Hess’s passionate struggle for an authentic modern Judaism in order to grasp better the dynamics of modern Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity 1 1 Jewish identity. The tensions in Hess’s works, I want to argue, reveal in new ways the inescapable con®icts facing modern Jewry. Contemporary scholars, following Philippson’s lead, have criticized Hess for his lack of philosophical sophistication (though unlike Philippson, they still admire his character and commitment). Edmund Silberner, Hess’s biographer, noticed the eccentric and erratic ordering of topics in Rome and Jerusalem. He responded by rewriting Hess’s claims in a more “systematic” form.3 Jonathan Frankel likened the “personal, fragmented, often emotional form” of Rome and Jerusalem to writing a confession.4 Hess’s work did not have the philosophical weight to be anything more. Even Isaiah Berlin, who ¤ercely defended Hess before his critics, complained that Hess’s style was “sentimental, rhetorical, and at times merely ®at; there are a good many digressions and references to issues now totally forgotten.”5 If, as I will argue in chapter 4, Berlin and Frankel poorly understood the rhetorical power of Hess’s narrative style, others often dismissed Hess’s religious thought entirely . In a book entitled Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism, Shlomo Avineri ignored Hess’s constructive proposals for modern Jewish religious identity, labeling Hess instead an “agnostic socialist” who did not want to get “bogged down in religious observance.”6 Hess was too passionate, unsystematic, con®icted, and secular to be taken seriously as a religious philosopher. Yet Hess’s readers all maintained , with Berlin, that Rome and Jerusalem was indeed “a masterpiece.”7 So despite the confusing, passionate, and outdated jargon, Rome and Jerusalem still had something to offer. The central claim in this book is that the confusions and tensions embedded throughout Rome and Jerusalem produce a meaningful testament and witness to the complexity of...