Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 245

As he would in his more famous Rome and Jerusalem ( 1862 ), Hess here in-

scribes Spinoza as a profoundly Jewish thinker who ushers in the modern age

by showing the way beyond the conceptual and political limitations of Christian

dualism.

Heine played a key role in Auerbach’s first publication as the specter of Jew-

ish irony and egoism. Heine likewise played an important role in Hess’s early

development, but for Hess he was a source of philosophical inspiration. Hess

admired Heine’s Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland

(On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany) and, in a letter to Heine

accompanying a copy of his Holy History, wrote, in a characteristically histri-

onic idiom: “Without you I would not have become what I am—without you I

could not have continued my spiritual life.”^10

Heine saw Spinoza as an avatar of the modern age and also ventured a com-

parison between the saintly Spinoza and Christ.^11 Hess took both of these

points further and proposed an idiosyncratic tripartition of “the holy history

of mankind” in which Adam inaugurates the first era (“the history of revelation

of God, the father”), Christ the second (“the history of revelation of God, the

son”), and Spinoza the third and ultimate (“the history of revelation of God,

the Holy Spirit”). Hess sees Christianity’s great achievement in its universal-

ism: Christian universalism will leave its mark on the holy state to come, which

will no longer be the possession of one people but of all humanity, no longer a

particular state but a universal empire. Yet, as Shlomo Avineri has underscored,

the denouement of Hess’s Holy History reinscribes the unity between German

thought and French politics, which it sees history working toward, emphati-

cally within a Jewish frame of reference.^12 Hess repeatedly refers to the ancient

Jewish state, however universalized through Christianity, as the model for the

new society he prophesies. For Hess the contribution of Christian universal-

ism was marred by Christianity’s dualism, which disrupted the unity of religion

and politics that had defined the ancient Jewish commonwealth. In its dualism,

Christianity rights the wrongs of the world only in an abstract, highly spiritual-

ized way, not in reality. The new age Hess envisions would overcome Christian

abstraction and reestablish concrete ethical politics. Spinoza thus inaugurates a

sort of secular Jewish supersession of the Christian era:

In the second revelation [that is, Christ’s] the old Law was lost; the third

will introduce a new one. The time approaches in which the unity, which

has been destroyed in the Whole, will be restored, when the state will be-

come holy once more.... The old Law was crucified together with Christ

only insofar as it had been external, existing in time and space; but its divine