Moses Hess and Aron Liberman were the first “Jewish socialists”, the first to argue that Jews should form an independent unit in the fight for international socialism. In 1862, Hess–successively mentor, comrade, party opponent, and finally part-time ally of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels–published the case for the establishment of a Jewish socialist state in Palestine. He thus anticipated by almost forty years the next major statement of socialist Zionism, that presented in 1898 by Syrkin, who saw himself as in some sense his heir. Liberman presented his theories of Jewish socialism in Lavrov's revolutionary journal Vpered! during the years 1875–6. If Hess was the first drawn to the maximalist pole of Jewish socialism, then Liberman was the first to explore its minimalist counterpart. Jewish socialists, he contended, should not put forward any national demands and yet they should organize the Jewish workers as an autonomous unit within the movement, be it the Russian party or be it the Socialist International.

However, what makes a study of Hess and Liberman important here is not that they were first in the field, nor even that they had a marginal influence on later developments, but that their own lives are of intrinsic interest to the historian of Jewish socialism. In their biographies can first be seen the type of inner tension that was to constitute a basic characteristic of Jewish socialism.