Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question was written by Moshe Hess (1812-1875) in 1862. Hess was a German-Jewish philosopher and a friend and collaborator with Karl Marx until they had a falling out. Witnessing the rise of national movements across Europe, he argued for the Jewish people to return to the Land of Israel to establish a Jewish socialist commonwealth as a response to antisemitism. The book was the first Zionist writing that placed Jewish nationalism in the context of European nationalism.
According to Hess, the ancient Jewish nation had a sacred relationship with the Land of Israel and with the Hebrew language, and has a national identity that deserves to be realized in the same way that it had been for the Germans, French and Poles.
Hess concludes that the only solution to the Jewish question (antisemitism) is not assimilation but returning to the Land of Israel. The book went mostly unnoticed at the time, even though Hess reached the same conclusion as Theodor Herzl expressed more than 30 years later in his book The Jewish State. Herzl said that if he had read Hess’ book, he might not have written his own.
Today we would consider “leftism” and “nationalism” to be opposites, but Hess viewed them as consistent and interconnected. He is considered a pioneer of Labour Zionism and believed that a Jewish state could only be created by a Jewish working class making aliyah to Israel and working the land.
Buried in Cologne, Germany, he was reinterred in 1961 in the Kinneret Cemetery alongside other Socialist-Zionist luminaries such as Ber Borochov and Berl Katznelson.
His tombstone reads: The author of Rome and Jerusalem, a forefather of world socialism, and herald of the state of Israel.
