Third Wheel

Moses Hess was clearly different from Alkalai and Kalisher.

Kalisher did actually study philosophy and science in Germany and used that knowledge to engage in debate with the enlightened and others.

But Hess himself was an assimilated Jew in Germany, a real man of philosophy and the sciences. 

He did study Judaism from his religious grandfather who raised him in fact.

Yet he was also a socialist and innovated the ideas of socialism next to Marx and Engles, but drew back away from their movement at an early stage...

It was then that Hess returned more to his Jewish identity, using his Hebrew name Moses in place of Moritz.

Not a Marxist

Hess’ Zionism was influenced by the philosophy of Hegel - discerning historical processes of progress, seeing the dialectic dynamic of this progressive process, seeing the ideas improve and sharpen and become more rational and ethical. 

Hess’ Zionism also brought the influence of Spinoza.

It followed a general theological perception of a divine power in this world in everything, within or as the rules of nature. So there was by that a mystical feel to it. Hess also followed the famous book of Spinoza, Political - Theological Treatise, which perceived the ancient Israelite legacy as a state of sorts. (Ben Gurion followed suit, continuing the ideas of Hess and Spinoza.)

Besides influence from Kalisher, whom he quotes, Moses Hess produced a Zionist vision that was nationalist and romantic, similar to other European thinkers, but particularly reflecting that of Giuseppe Mazzini the spiritual father of Italian nationalism - this is expressed by the name of his major work that he chose to name Rome and Jerusalem:

Until the French Revolution, the Jewish people were the only people in the world which had, simultaneously, a national as well as a humanitarian religion. It is through Judaism that the history of humanity became sacred... 

I mean by that, that process of unified organic development which has its origin in the love of the family and which will not be completed until the whole of humanity becomes one family, the members of which will be united by the holy spirit, the creative genius of history, as strongly as the organs of a body are united by the creative natural forces. 

As long as no other people possessed such a national, humanitarian cult, the Jews alone were the people of God. Since the French Revolution, the French, as well as the other peoples which followed them, have become our noble rivals and faithful allies.

Letter 9

But to me this goal of humanity is identical with the recognition of God, which Judaism proclaimed at the very beginning of its history, and to the spread and development of which it has always contributed, and which, since Spinoza, it has made accessible to all historical nations.

This knowledge of God, which in its first manifestations as the spirit of historical humanity, had not been fully conceived, but only perceived through unanalyzed sense impressions and intuitive experience, and which heretofore had appeared only as wisdom and light, must henceforth, on the basis of the already acquired wisdom and light, progress and become an exact science, which draws its knowledge not only from internal and external experience, but also examines it critically…

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... there began the regeneration of those nations which had acquired their national historical religion only through the influence of Judaism.

Letters 10

Missing Linkage

One can see the development of the messianic traditional Zionism to Jewish nationalism following the 1840 - 5,600 anticipation trend through the Spring of Nations in Europe, before the modern political movement of Zionism at the end of the 19th century - in the writings of thinkers like Judah Alkalai, Zvi Hersch Kalisher, and Moses Hess. 

One can not scientifically prove causative relationship between these thinkers to institutions of the Zionist movement, but it makes enough sense to estimate that the ideas of such thinkers collectively toiled the soil for Zionist action by the pioneers shortly thereafter. 

Zionist precursors communicated with the Rothschild family, with Moses Montefiori, Karl Netter, Adolph Cremieux, and the Alliance Kol Yisrael cHaverim, and with Reines, and with Herzl…

Rabbi Yitschak Yaakov Reines, the founder of the religious Zionist Mizrachi movement, wrote with Kalisher and recognized the Zionist Congress of Theodore Herzl and joined it, with his peers.

[He was a distinguished rabbi in Lithuania, his father was a disciple of the Gaon of Vilna who came to Israel as a messianist and escaped the earthquake disaster in 1837 by chance as he was traveling at the time, though his wife and children remained and died - he remarried and had a son.]

And then there was Theodore. Herzl read ‘Rome and Jerusalem’ of Moses Hess allegedly after writing the famous “Der Judenstaat” (The Jewish State) in 1896, and understood that his ideas were very similar reflecting those of Moses Hess!

And another fun fact - Alkalai was a rabbi in Serbia, and he had a pupil named Shimon Liev Herzl, who was also the gabay (manager of the synagogue), there in the Austro-Hungarian empire, dying in 1879 he presumably influenced heavily his grandson Theodore with Jewish identity and ideas regarding a Jewish state. 

One of Herzl’s ideas, in his book Der Judenstaat, which is heavily influenced seemingly by the ideas of Alkalai, you have for example a Messiah Son of Joseph figure, chosen by the council or alliance of Jews in Europe, who would mostly approach the ruling powers in Western and Central Europe, and through their auspices pave the way for Jewish settlement in Israel.

And just like that, we are talking about Herzl - and his connection to the precursors of Zionism, and his connections, not just intellectually with Moses Hess and with Alkalai.