Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question

The book was the first Zionist writing to put the question of Jewish nationalism in the context of European nationalism.

Hess blended secular as well as religious philosophy, Hegelian dialectics, Spinoza's pantheism and Marxism.[1]

It was written against the background of German Jewish assimilationism, German antisemitism and German antipathy to nationalism arising in other countries. Hess used terminology of the day, such as the term "race", but he was an egalitarian who believed in the principles of the French Revolution, and wanted to apply the progressive concepts of his day to the Jewish people.[1]

Written in the form of twelve letters addressed to a woman in her grief at the loss of a relative. In his work, Hess put forward the following ideas:[2]

1. The Jews will always remain strangers among the European peoples, who may emancipate them for reasons of humanity and justice, but will never respect them so long as the Jews place their own great national memories in the background and hold to the principle, "Ubi bene, ibi patria." (Latin language: "where [it is] well, there [is] the fatherland")
2. The Jewish type is indestructible, and Jewish national feeling can not be uprooted, although the German Jews, for the sake of a wider and more general emancipation, persuade themselves and others to the contrary.
3. If the emancipation of the Jews is irreconcilable with Jewish nationality, the Jews must sacrifice emancipation to nationality. Hess considers that the only solution of the Jewish question lies in the returning to Palestine.

At the time the book was met with a cold reception, and only in retrospect it became one of the basic works of Zionism, as it prefigured ideas laid out in Der Judenstaat by Theodor Herzl by some 35 years.

• Rome and Jerusalem text in Wikisource
• Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess; Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York, 1984).