Return to the Promised Land.. Jacek Surzyn
assimilation, and marginalizing modern anti-Semitism, it will allow the Jewish community to build their own version of a secular nation, drawing examples from the great religious tradition with the main idea of Messianism and translating this example to the needs of the modern time as a necessary element of the historical process. Hess is convinced that enabling Jews to build their own country as full anticipation of a national entity will also give extra strength for the whole mankind and will become a great impulse for the further development of the Messianic idea. The Jewish state in Palestine will become the model of a new national and socially fair social order which according to the author will affect the whole humankind. This, among others, will be involved in the human organism as a whole achieving its full maturity.
Being aware of this great, noble goal and understanding the Messianic task for Jews, Hess also mentions several important, specific points which achievement will allow to build the Jewish state in Palestine. Those points are a kind of motivation to create a political program, which many postulates overlap with the later proposals of Zionists. Therefore, Hess proposes to start with large-scale actions in order to purchase land in Palestine and the Middle East. In his view, land is ←66 | 67→crucial for building the state and it must become the capital of the new community. Colonization should be combined with large-scale activities to prepare the purchased (bought out) territories and develop them properly to establish towns and villages. The postulate of buying out land may only be implemented officially as a result of an agreement with Turkey, which controls the areas Jews are interested in.
Building a state should begin with the proper preparation of the environment, and the Jewish ownership of land seems to be significant in this regard.98 While demanding political actions connected with purchasing particular territories for the future Jewish state, the author does not propose any specific solutions that can help achieve the key point. This problem will be discussed by the actual protagonists of the political Zionism in the future. Hess’ deliberations remain theoretical, and the next necessary condition for the establishment of the Jewish statehood that he mentions is the proper form of the community of Jewish colonists. Because of the specificity of the colonized areas, the projected community of the new state will mostly be agricultural, and according to Hess, this will mean that the larger part of the Jewish community will have to learn how to work in the field, which is not a common thing in the Diaspora. We need to remember that because they lived in the Diaspora among Christians, the majority of Ashkenazi Jews had never dealt with farming, because practically since the Middle Ages, there had been no place for Jews in the feudal society structure, so they could not own land (and thus, they could not establish feudal relationships). So, there is virtually no agricultural tradition in the Diaspora (although some Jews leased property, they were not users of land). The future state will have to be self-reliant; in addition, colonization also involves urbanization and preparing a difficult territory for cultivation. Hess is perfectly well aware of this, so he can see great importance in teaching the cultivation of the soil and developing the appropriate attitudes connected with it.99
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In another point of his plan, Hess stresses the need to defend the new state from external threats. For this, it is necessary to build relevant military force able to resist any invader. A strong army is a guarantee of security of the state itself and its citizens. Hess’ postulate has evidently been achieved in contemporary Israel, whose militarization exceeds the scope occurring in other democratic (and not only democratic) countries. Obviously, the author could not have predicted the scale of the current conflict between Israel and Arabs, but he did see the danger connected with the Islamic world surrounding the Jewish enclave.100
The last important factor is creating a relevant universal program of education to attract masses of Jewish youths to the idea of colonization and building their own national state. The postulate of universal education is important to develop patriotism and the sense of self-esteem, and to popularize the Messianic idea among Jews, since this is the only way to build a strong society and nation. Hess does not reject teaching based on religious tradition, because in his concept, the Jewish religion and faith play the fundamental role. The appropriate model of culture can only be developed by identifying the most important postulates in Judaism and changing them into universally applicable ideas. Thus, rabbinic Judaism no longer has the monopoly for religious teaching. Hess believes that teaching must become a state policy, so it needs to be secularized, although – and this must be strongly emphasized – for him, the secular character is not in opposition to faith. To the contrary, as we have already seen, Hess is convinced that his Messianic program is not anti-religious. It is the other way around, in the historic order, it expands to the whole humankind the postulate of Jewish covenant concluded between the chosen nation and God. According to Hess, the nation of Israel as the chosen nation is currently facing the task of leading mankind to the Messianic era, the purpose of history. The Jewish state with a properly formed ←68 | 69→educational process must prepare human resources for the implementation of that Messianic postulate. The boundary between religious and secular activity is completely blurred and according to the author, it is a natural process that does not cause any conflict or competition. Judaism well coexists with modern transformations in the socio-political life, and its dogmas are simply postulates to be implemented in the contemporary world. Hess considers it to be the role and task of the proper process of education, which should highlight all the philosophical postulates of universalism and humanism.101
Jews are to become the nation of culture, the people of spiritual regeneration and the source of humanity. He was not really interested in particular political steps to carry out the postulate of building the Jewish state. The outlined plan includes very good and lofty – actually even obvious – postulates, but what is striking is the lack of reasonable evaluation of the possibility to implement them. In this regard, Hess is a dreamer, whose vision seems to break the socio-political reality, which in a way corresponds to the assumptions of the socialist views he promoted and preached. National restoration is possible only through liberation, and this also refers to the Jewish nation. Theoretically, liberation assumes the existence of statehood. In Hess’ time, this seemed a necessary condition and the goal of all national movements. A national state is the quintessence of spiritual and social liberation and according to him, the state must be constructed in a new way, in accordance with the socialist model of equality and social justice. Hess is convinced that social life is formed within specific human types (races), which determine its structure. Still, each form of social life involves some conflict, which has had varied intensity throughout history. Historical advancement means gradual reduction of the conflict up to its complete elimination, which according to Hess will take place in the Messianic era, when the human organism as a whole achieves its full maturity.
Then, the main problem is the introduction of universal progress, i.e. enabling the nature of social life to develop properly. Each nation arising from a certain ←69 | 70→race suits that organic context of social life. For the Jewish national movement, the problem is not its religious origin and strong engagement in religion itself, which has been discussed many times as the basic problem of modern development of the Jewry: sticking to the old orthodox and backward religion, which blocks the proper social development. Modernity in this regard would mean Jews’ liberation from dogmatic chains. Hess’ proposal is completely different, because the problem of Jewish nationalism is not faith or religious restrictions. For him, the main problem of the Jewish Diaspora is how to find the key to arousing patriotic sentiment among Jewish masses so as to evoke in them positive dynamism and active will of changes. In this sense the author feels that there is a chance for releasing energy necessary to build their own state and nation. In this respect, Jews may and even must become leaders of the whole mankind in their mission.
Hess postulated the creation of the Jewish state, necessarily where it has its historical roots: in Palestine. In this point, he became a protagonist of the Zionist movement, yet without pointing to the political way of implementing the postulate involving the creation of the state. In his concept, we may see the origins of the later great dispute as part of the whole Zionist movement. Hess represents Zionism defined as spiritual/Messianic, which the later trend will oppose, the trend that will combine the postulate of Jews creating their own state and the belief about the hopelessness and the crisis of Jewish political and economic life, absent from Hess’s thought. This view will be represented