Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity

2. Conceptions of Self and Identity in Hess’s Early Works and Rome and Jerusalem

Hess delivered early copies of Rome and Jerusalem to his former publisher Otto Wigand and his good friend Berthold Auerbach. Hoping for critical assessments and honest praise, he instead received trenchant critique and contemptuous scorn. Both Wigand and Auerbach’s response found their way into the fourth letter in Rome and Jerusalem.1 Auerbach challenged Hess’s already insecure position within the nineteenth-century German Jewish community: “Who,” he asked, “has appointed you judge and ruler over us?”2 The biblical allusion was surely intended, for the modern Moses appeared to Auerbach much like the biblical Moses: Hess’s abrupt and mysterious return to Judaism was suspect. Hess had received a similar response from Phillipson, already noted in chapter 1. There, Phillipson accused Hess of hypocrisy. But Auerbach, a lifelong friend and defender of liberal Jewish observance, forced Hess to confront his ambiguous place within the Jewish tradition . He also brought to light an underlying theme in the very text he was criticizing : Hess’s own relationship to the biblical Moses. We shall see in chapter 5 how Hess linked Moses, as an outsider to Jewish history and tradition, to the modern enlightened (gebildete) Jews in Germany. Both failed to acknowledge their deep Jewish ancestry and the commitments associated with it. As “people of Egypt,” both the biblical Moses and the modern Jew were strangers to the Jewish tradition. Auerbach redirected Hess’s critique, suggesting that Hess himself was far closer to the biblical Moses than he would care to admit. As if to stress this very point, Auerbach quoted Exodus 2:14 in Hebrew so that Hess could not possibly miss its biblical resonance. It was thus both ironic and insightful that Auerbach, a German Reform Jew himself, had turned the tables on Hess. Not the Reform Jew, but the nationalist Hess had unjustly seized the mantle of Jewish leadership. Hess wanted European Jews to recognize their national history and to rebuild a Jewish homeland. Many reformers, Auerbach among them, were offended by Hess’s claim that Reform Jewry sat complacent in a foreign land, lost from its traditional moorings and fat in European high culture. Who could blame them, for Hess had done little to win their respect, even less their allegiance. To Auerbach, Moses in Egypt had reappeared in the form of a modern Moses Hess. Perhaps Auerbach was not unaware that Rome and Jerusalem was the only text that appeared with Hess’s ¤rst name Moses. In this light, Auerbach’s critique threatened not only Hess’s leadership but his integrity, not merely his stature but his authenticity, not just his vision but his Jewish identity. Hess’s “place” in the Jewish tradition is a central concern in the scholarly litConceptions of Self and Identity in Hess’s Early Works and Rome and Jerusalem 2 13 erature as well. But rarely, if at all, does a concern with “place” engage this deeper ambivalence about identity that Auerbach so astutely reveals. In this chapter, I will explore two texts that reveal, in productive ways, Hess’s own ambivalent relation to the Jewish tradition. In the tenth letter of Rome and Jerusalem, Hess considers the restraints and creative possibilities of a human life, claiming there that identity is indeterminate and contingent. Yet Hess’s defense of the Jewish tradition relies in part on racial imagery in both Rome and Jerusalem and in his later essays, suggesting that identity can be rooted (and thus secured) in a changeless, biological code that is “our ®esh and bones.” In the former account, Hess recognizes (and apparently endorses) indeterminate meanings and epistemological constraints for uncovering the sources of Jewish identity. But his racial language suggests that Jewish identity is only a linguistic cover for an inescapable attachment to a racial history. In the one, identity is problematic; in the other, identity is secure self-af¤rmation. Before turning to these texts and the two accounts of identity and self they sustain, I will explore how scholars have generally situated Rome and Jerusalem within Hess’s socialist and proto-Zionist thought. Although identity is an overriding concern in many of their debates, they still fail to consider how conceptions of identity inform Hess’s sociology, philosophical anthropology, and political ideology . I will argue that Rome and Jerusalem is unique among Hess’s works in its (unsuccessful) attempt to examine and unify two distinct visions of Jewish identity. Hess’s account of an integrative and coherent identity dominates his literary corpus from 1837 until...