Moses Hess

Moses (Moshe) Hess (January or June 21, 1812 – April 6, 1875) was a Jewish French philosopher and socialist, and one of the founders of Labor Zionism.

Hess was born in Bonn, which was under French rule at the time. In his French-language birth certificate, his name is given as "Moises"; he was named after his maternal grandfather. Hess received a Jewish religious education from his grandfather, and later studied philosophy at the University of Bonn, but never graduated.

He was an early proponent of socialism, and a precursor to what would later be called Zionism. His works included Holy History of Mankind (1837), European Triarchy (1841) and Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question (1862). He married a Catholic working-class woman, Sibylle Pesch, in defiance of bourgeois values. In socialist literature the idea was propagated that she was a prostitute 'redeemed' by Hess, but that notion has been refuted by Hess' biographer Silberner.

As correspondent for the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper founded by liberal Rhenish businessmen, he lived in Paris. He was a friend and collaborator of Karl Marx (who also worked on the Rheinische Zeitung) and Friedrich Engels. Hess introduced Engels, the future famous communist, to the communism of the early 1840s.

But Marx and Engels would become well known for their fickle and pugnacious approach to fellow socialists who showed insufficient agreement with their own form of socialism. By the late 1840s, they had fallen out with Hess. They mocked him, first behind his back and later openly, and Engels had an affair with Hess's wife. The work of Hess was also criticized in part of The German Ideology by Marx and Engels.

Hess fled to Belgium and Switzerland temporarily following the suppression of the 1848 commune. He would also go abroad during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

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