THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 602
the religious genius of the Jews, like the giant who touches native soil, draw new strength and be filled by the holy spirit of the prophets again.’ But the content of these
emotive expressions or missions, of this rather long­winded edification, remains socialism alone for Hess the revolutionary: he was one of the first to apply Judaism, as
he knew it from the works of the prophets, to the cause of the revolutionary proletariat. Socialism becomes for Hess ‘the victory of the Jewish mission in the spirit of
the prophets’; only to this end did this international socialist plan ‘an action centre in Palestine, in which the spirit of the Jewish race can rise again’. Admittedly with the
aid of France, though not of imperialistic France but that of the great Revolution, which Hess thought was still at work within it. ‘Once on its own soil again, once lifted
back on to the rails of world history again’, the Jewish nation was to astonish the House of Rothschild: ‘The social animal kingdom, which lives off the mutual
exploitation of human beings, is coming to an end.’ So much for the Zionist utopia of Moses Hess, dreamed and designed as a socialist one ab ovo, based on the
prophets.
But the western Jews were mostly bourgeois, there were not many workers among them. The Zionist dreams therefore only gained influence on these middle classes in
so far as they no longer had a socialist ring, but were moderate and liberal. Long after Hess, a generation later, Theodor Herzl appeared, the originator of the only
Zionist programme to become effective, maybe with Jeremiah, but without Isaiah. This for two reasons, one political and one ideological, both in keeping with the
situation of a Jewish bourgeoisie to which Zionism passed, very much without socialism. Politically, in the wake of the crises of the middle classes, the thin liberal prosemitism
of the surrounding world had swiftly been completely undermined again. Ideologically, liberal Judaism itself wanted to know very little about committed love,
about the revolutionary love which its prophets had preached and which would have cost more money than suited mere charity. Politically it promoted Herzl's success
that a so­called Anti­Semitic League had arisen, that trials for ritual murder advanced from Russia and Rumania to Hungary and Germany. Herzl saw in the Dreyfus trial
that even the classic bourgeois land of human rights no longer remained what it was, and he drew from this no conclusions about the citizens themselves, on whose side
he remained, but about their character as Gentiles. What was ideologically decisive for Herzl's influence on the Jewish bourgeoisie was in fact the bourgeois détente, the
liberal level of enlightenment which was given here to the dream of Zion. Above all, Herzl removed every