October 10, 1961
Moshe Hess, a 19th century Zionist, is reburied in the Kibbutz Kinneret cemetery beside other fathers of socialist Zionism. Hess, who was born in French-ruled Bonn in 1812, died in Paris in 1875 and was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Cologne. He was a friend to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and worked with them in the development of Communist theory before they had a falling-out by the late 1840s over differing views on socialism. Hess disagreed that class struggle was the basis of all history and saw the struggles of races and nationalities as important as well.
From 1861 to 1863 he lived in Germany. Noting the rise in anti-Semitism in Germany and across Europe, he returned to his Jewish roots. In his publication “Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question,” he wrote of the need for a Jewish national revival and argued for the establishment of a socialist Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. His book may have inspired Theodor Herzl’s “The Jewish State.”