Moses Hess - Quotes

Quotes

• "You may don a thousand masks, change your name and your religion and your mode of life, creep through the world incognito so that nobody notices that you are a Jew yet every insult to the Jewish name will wound you more than a man of honour who remains loyal to his family and defends his good name."

• "Even an act of conversion cannot relieve the Jew of the enormous pressure of German anti-Semitism. The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than they hate their race - they hate the peculiar faith of the Jews, less than their peculiar noses."

• "The race struggle is the primal one, and the class struggle secondary. The last dominating race is the German."

• "Yet it seems that a final race struggle is unavoidable"

• "The Messianic era is the present age, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and finally came into historical existence with the great French Revolution."

• "To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key. This "religion of the future" of which the eighteenth century philosophers, as well as their recent followers, dreamed Each nation will have to create its own historical cult; each people must become like the Jewish people, a people of God."

(Quotes from Rome and Jerusalem by Moses Hess)

• "The Christian... imagines the better future of the human species... in the image of heavenly joy... We, on the other hand, will have this heaven on earth."

(Quote from A Communist Confession of Faith by Moses Hess)

• On Karl Marx: "Here is a phenomenon who has made an enormous impression on me although I work in the same field. In short prepare to meet the greatest, perhaps the only genuine philosopher now living who will soon have the eyes of all Germany upon him wherever he may appear in public, whether in print or on the rostrum. Dr. Marx, as my idol is called, is still quite a young man (aged about 24 at most) and it is he who will give medieval religion and politics their coup de grace, he combines a biting wit with deeply serious philosophical thinking. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel combined into one person—and I say combined, not blended—and there you have Dr. Marx."