Monday, September 03, 2007
RABBI MOSES HESS - THE "RED RABBI"
Politics is not my forte, as I've said many times. I don't understand it, and I don't try to. Mostly it makes very limited sense to me. Having said that, I would like to turn to Israeli politics for a moment because of its potential to impact Catholicism.
The website to which I refer is that of writer Israel Shamir, which includes writings of like-minded authors. No doubt some of you readers can place Shamir into
a political group within the context of Israeli politics. I cannot. I take him at face value, believing that he is knowledgable and has something to say about the state of Israel, and that his viewpoint is worthy of consideration. At the website he says of himself that he is
a leading Russian Israeli writer, is a champion of the "One Man, One Vote, One State" solution seeking to unite Palestine & Israel in one democratic state. Shamir's work and that of his contributors speaks to the aspirations of both the Israelis and the Palestinians seeking an end to the bloodshed, true democracy and lasting peace.
Rabbi Moses Hess, a German, has been dubbed the "Red Rabbi". At the website of Shamir is an article titled "Zionism as Jewish National Socialism" by Lasse Wilhelmson. In this article Wilhelmson discusses Jewish apartheid, and claims Communist influence via Moses Hess, the so-called "Communist Rabbi." He writes:
Moses Hess - the Communist Rabbi
The fundamental ideology of Zionism however evolved much earlier with Moses Hess. He was one of Germany's earliest renowned Socialists. He was a Utopian, a Hegelian and a good friend of Karl Marx. Hess also wrote a contribution to The Communist Manifesto (1848) on the question of Religion as opium to the masses. He is considered by Zionists as the first Zionist. As he grew older he dissociated himself from Marx and "returned" to his People, that is to say Judaism. Marx shunned Hess' chauvinistic ideas. "Communist Rabbi Moses" as he was also called, wrote Zionism's Magnum Opus which Herzl later referred to as the book which says everything there is worth saying about Zionism. This book, "Rome and Jerusalem" was published by Hess in 1862. He was inspired, amongst others, by Spinoza. He defines the Jewish Nation by the following components:
# The Jewish race - superior and chosen
# Palestine - the homeland of the Jewish people
# The Jewish religion - the best guarantee for Jewish nationality.
At the website a quotation from the book by Shlomo Avineri titled THE MAKING OF MODERN ZIONISM: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (Basic Books, New York 1981). It reads as follows:
{p. 141} Many of the themes of this article, particularly that of money and the Jewish-Christian relationship, are taken directly from an article by Hess entitled 'On the Essence of Money'.2 Hess submitted this article for publication in the Deuch-Franzoche Jahrbucher, but the review collapsed before it could appear. Hess's influence here is important, as Marx's criticism of Bauer's second article contains his first tentative application to the field of economics of Feuerbach's idea of alienation. Hess had converted both Engels and Bakunin to communism, but his influence on Marx was a much slower process: in 1842-3, when Hess's proselytising was at its most active, Marx was no communist, and by the time Marx did become a communist, in Paris, Hess was only one among many new points of reference. Nevertheless, at this particular juncture, Marx seems to have leaned very heavily on Hess.
I find it a quite startling possibility that Communism was originally a Jewish concept!
