Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Moses Hess { 269

money. To satisfy its egotistical needs, it not only attends its Holy Mass [heilige

Messe (my addition)], but above all attends to the profane Mass (the Mercenary

Mass) [Krämermesse (my addition)] held in the market place. And if this world

knows how to revere the Church and God as its Sunday meal, so must it also

take into account the stock-market and the cult of wealth (money making) as

its daily bread.”^91 The extent to which Hess continued in this period to under-

stand his socialism as rooted in Judaism can only be a matter of speculation. He

certainly kept up no meaningful ties to the Jewish community, and in 1842 he

even looked favorably on the prospect of the disappearnce of the “national” and

all “separatistic” character among the Jews through intermarriage with Chris-

tians.^92 Nonetheless, even in his socialist writings he saw socialism as destined

to overcome the limitations of secularized Christian culture and institutions,

and he continued to see Spinoza as the figure who showed the way to this mes-

sianic, post-Christian future.

The most profound continuity between Hess’s Spinozan communism of the

1840 s and his Spinozan Jewish nationalism of twenty years later lies precisely in

his critique of the religion, philosophy, politics, and competitive commerce of

the autonomous individual.^93 Indeed the most characteristic quality and chief

virtue that Hess sees in the Jewish nation are the extra-individual ties that bind

its members. Hess’s Jews hold the key to ushering in humanity’s final redemp-

tion (“the Sabbath of History”) because they embody human existence other-

wise than as discrete individuals.^94 Hess projected onto the Jewish nation his

Spinoza-inspired ideal of a monistic human totality that united spiritual ener-

gies and a natural substrate and that constituted the individuals it comprised

and exceeded: “We are on the eve of the Sabbath of History and should prepare

for our last mission through a thorough understanding of our historical reli-

gion.” As a prolegomena to such a historical understanding, Hess adds:

We cannot understand a single word of the Holy Scriptures, so long as we do

not possess the point of view of the genius of the Jewish nation which pro-

duced these writings. Nothing is more foreign to the spirit of Judaism than

the idea of the salvation of the individual which, according to the modern

conception, is the cornerstone of religion. Judaism has never drawn any line

of separation between the individual and the family, the family and the nation,

the nation and humanity as a whole, humanity and the cosmos, nor between

creation and the Creator. Judaism has no other dogma but the teaching of

the Unity.^95

It goes without saying that Hess presents an idiosyncratic version of the Jewish

tradition (nothing in the spirit of Judaism distinguishes between creation and