In his prospectus for Gesellschaftsspiegel: Organ zur Vertretung der besitzlosen Volks-
klassen und zur Beleuchtung der gesellschaftlichen Zustände der Gegenwart (Social mirror:
organ for representing the propertyless classes and for illuminating the social conditions of
the present), Hess announced that its focus would be to advocate for defenseless poor work-
ing people. See Edmund Silberner, Moses Hess, 214. On the Gesellschaftsspiegel, see also
Shlomo Na’aman, Emanzipation und Messianimus, 152 – 60.
Moses Hess, Moses Hess Briefwechsel, 111.
In Der gebildete Bürger Auerbach (following William Ellery Channing in Self-Culture)
discusses the greater availability and affordability of books as a promising means of dissemi-
nating Bildung to classes whose members had not formerly owned or read books. Auerbach
warns, however, against the danger of vapid and bad literature (Nichtiges und Schlechtes) that
also comes with the modern literary market. He remarks that, because many households buy
only one annual calendar, certain “men who are concerned about the well-being of their fel-
low men” have begun to devote attention to this branch of literature, and he recommends es-
pecially Honeck’s Volkskalender with the Buch für Winterabende (Der gebildete Bürger, 70 ).
In a letter of May 12 , 1839 , to Jakob Auerbach, his cousin and confidant, Auerbach
wrote that he “seems strange to himself when he, a stepson of the Fatherland” (komme sich
selbst komisch vor, wenn er, “ein Stiefsohn des Vaterlandes”) comes to Germany’s defense
against the criticism of the Francophile Alexander Weill (quoted in Bettelheim, BA, 132 ).
In a letter thanking Freiligrath for his poem, Auerbach wrote: “I also have to tell you that
it gives me special pleasure that I, a Jew, have succeeded in revealing something from the
innermost soul of the German people” (aus dem Innersten des deutschen Volksgeistes). More
darkly, he also acknowledged: “I know if I were to go out among the peasants with goodwill
in my heart and on my lips, the single word ‘Jew!’ would scare them away from me” (quoted
in ibid., 161 – 62 ).
On Hess’s relationship to Feuerbach, see Hou Cai, “Moses Heß und Ludwig Feuer-
bach,” and Junji Kanda, “Moses Heß und der gescheiterte Weg von Hegel zu Feuerbach.”
On the stability throughout his career of Hess’s interpretation of Spinoza as both the
basis for socialism and as the philosophical foundation of of Judaism, see Shlomo Avineri,
Moses Hess, 208 – 9.
Quoted in Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical
Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (hereafter DS), 192.
For an argument about Heine’s subversive use of Spinoza to unwrite Hegel’s grand
narrative of dialectical development (unto Hegel), and to give the Judaic tradition a more
central place in intellectual history than the marginal one Hegel had ascribed it, see Willi
Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, chapter 7.
Avineri, Moses Hess, 41 – 45.
Moses Hess, The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings (hereafter HHM), 93 ;
Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften 1837 – 1850 (hereafter PSS), 72.
Spinoza defines the knowledge of God as the mind’s highest virtue in Ethics, IV, p 28.
Hess alludes to the pursuit of knowledge as the primary reason for individuals to enter into
society in, for example, Hess, HHM, 64 ; PSS, 50.
