Moshe Hess
Jerusalem Geography - Part 2

Rabbi Wein introduces Moshe Hess as a “typical, atypical Jew.” He was typical in that he was swept up in the 19th century secular “solutions” to anti-Semitism: assimilation and communism. But when he saw that neither were curing the problem, he became a proto-Zionist visionary who influenced no less than Theodore Herzl and, indirectly, the Lovers of Zion movement. G-d chooses surprising messengers at times, and Moshe Hess was surely one of them.

• his split with Marx and Engels
• Rome and Jerusalem, the 1862 book that predicted the Holocaust
• Dr. Leon Pinsker and Jewish auto-emancipation
• parallels to Herzl