Hess, Moses

(1812–75)

   Early German Zionist socialist. A student of philosophy at Bonn, Hess was caught up in the revolutionary socialist movement of the time, writing left-wing books and articles and helping to produce radical publications. After the suppression of the liberal uprising in 1848, he had to leave Germany. The rest of his life was spent mainly in Paris, with intervals in Belgium and Switzerland. Hess worked for some years with MARX and Engels. However, he never completely accepted the Marxist concept of dialectic materialism, but stressed the moral aspect of socialism as the road to ‘free labour’ and human self-development. Like other Jewish left-wing intellectuals, Hess regarded anti-Semitism as a relic of the reactionary past, that would disappear in a progressive socialist society. In his later years, he became disillusioned with that facile approach. In 1862 he published a short book, Rome and Jerusalem, putting forward a completely different solution. Its point of departure was that German anti-Semitism was based on race and nationhood, and would not be eliminated by Jewish assimilation or conversion. The Jews should accept that they too were a separate nation, and revive their independence in Palestine, where they would develop a just society on socialist lines. The book attracted little attention when it came out, and was attacked by the movement for Reform Judaism. Hess died in obscurity after the Franco-Prussian war. It was only in recent times that interest grew in him as an important pre-Herzl Zionist. HEVESY, George Charles de 1885– 1966. Hungarian chemist and Nobel laureate, 1943. Hevesy was born in Budapest and became a professor at Freiburg University in Germany until he was compelled by the Nazis to resign in 1934. He then worked in Copenhagen until 1943, when he escaped from the Nazi occupation to Sweden in a rowing boat. In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for developing the use of radioactive isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical and biological processes.