Moses Hess

Moses Hess was born in Bonn in 1812 and grew up in Cologne. He became one of the first German socialists; he helped win Friedrich Engels to communism and worked with Karl Marx in the 1840s, earning the nickname "the communist rabbi". The Damascus blood libel of 1840 had already shaken his faith in assimilation. In 1862, inspired by the Italian national revival, he published Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question.

In it he argued that the Jews were a nation, that antisemitism would not vanish with assimilation, and that Jews should rebuild a commonwealth in the Land of Israel founded on social justice. The book found few readers at the time, but Herzl later wrote that Hess had said it all before him. Hess died in Paris in 1875; in 1961 his remains were reburied in the Kinneret cemetery, and the moshav Kfar Hess bears his name.