THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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attainable, with a capitalist­democratic background; firmly rooted in the soil, the only thing it did not yet have, it did not tilt at any windmills. If it thus recommended itself
to the specific idealism of the Jewish businessman, and lawyer too, then as far as the national element is concerned this utopia cut very sharply through assimilation,
much more sharply than Moses Hess; pride, not a sense of mission was the substance of Jewish national consciousness according to Herzl. The diaspora with its
thousands of distortions and forms of pariahdom was to be reversed, but so was Moses Mendelssohn or assimilation, as a false red dawn, in which the diaspora had
not been cleared but affirmed. Instead the second and true red dawn now seemed to be breaking with Zionism or anti­Mendelssohn: ‘a homeland for the Jewish nation
in Palestine protected under public law’. In spite of the fact that at least the immigrants keen on investment and most certainly the fleshpots of Egypt presuppose and
profit by a strong assimilation. The Hasidim would not have founded a Tel Aviv, the study of the Talmud would not have deposited an Einstein manuscript in the
University of Jerusalem, and there would not be any professors of the cabbala there, but cabbalists. Jewish fascism in particular, as a consequence of the adopted
contemporary capitalist­democratic state, would be totally unknown without such an adoption. Herzl's utopia is in nuce itself more of an assimilation than the apparently
much more assimilated utopia of the romantic Zionist Moses Hess. The latter was much more closely connected with the old Messianism, a believer in the social Zion,
who fought in the labour movement up to the moment he died, and who believed he was activating the spirit of the prophets precisely in his connection with the
international labour movement. As Hess, unlike Herzl, tried to show, there is clearly a Zionism for which the family grave is less important than resurrection. If not that
of the Jewish national consciousness of the bourgeoisie, then that of a very old, frequently submerged faith. If this faith, because it is still a utopia, also sought an ‘action
centre in Palestine’, then this centre was clearly conceived as radiating outwards, as an appeal to the world and not as a miniature state. The element of social mission
and prophetic legacy which is still at work in Judaism and which makes it uniquely important was proclaimed by Moses Hess far from Palestine, and made current by
Marx even in total alienation from Palestine. For them, Zion was everywhere where the ‘social animal kingdom’ is destroyed and the diaspora comes to an end: that of
all the exploited.
When the dream had been turned into a bourgeois one by Herzl, it