In 1862, Moses Hess, a German Jewish socialist who had been a close associate of Marx and Engels, published a book called “Rome and Jerusalem.” Little read at the time, it is recognized today as the first statement of modern political Zionism, the first book to argue that “the pious Jew is above all a Jewish patriot.” When Hess wrote, the prospect of restoring the Jews to political existence in Palestine seemed infinitely remote. Yet he took encouragement from the Risorgimento, which in those years was creating a national state out of the fractured principalities of Italy. “On the ruins of Christian Rome there rises the regenerated Italian people,” he observed; why couldn’t the ruins of Jerusalem provide the foundation for a regenerated Jewish people?

By adopting the title of Hess’s famous tract for his fascinating, extremely rich new history, “Rome and Jerusalem” (Alfred A. Knopf, 624 pp., $35), Martin Goodman exposes the great historical irony behind Hess’s comparison. The reason Jerusalem had to emulate Rome, Hess wrote, was that “though the Jews have lived among the nations for almost two thousand years, they cannot, after all, become a mere part of the organic whole.” Yet Rome itself was the reason why Jews were a Diaspora people, without a nation of their own. In the first century of the common era, Judea was a province of the Roman Empire, yet it still enjoyed considerable autonomy, practicing its own religion under its own leaders. The Temple at Jerusalem — built by Solomon, destroyed by the Babylonians, rebuilt under the Persians, and only recently remodeled in magnificent style by Herod the Great — was both its cultic and its political heart.