Ahad Ha-am

Aḥad Ha-Am is the originator of "cultural" Zionism, a response to both "political" and "practical" Zionism as well as Orthodoxy and assimilationism. He maintained that the large-scale settlement of Palestine and the dream of a Jewish homeland there were premature. Instead he proposed a cultural renaissance of the Jewish people through the agency of the Hebrew language and Hebrew literature, with the Land of Israel becoming a spiritual center strengthening Jewish life throughout the Diaspora. In "The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem," he wrote that while Zionism sought "a remedy for poverty and complete tranquility and national glory" in the Jewish State, Ḥibbat Zion sought only "a secure refuge for Judaism and a cultural bond to unite our nation." Thus, in his view, Zionism began its work with political propaganda, Ḥibbat Zion with national culture. This culture was to have as its focal point "the ideal of our nation's unity, its renascence, and its free development through the expression of universal human values in the terms of its own distinctive spirit." For Aḥad Ha-Am the problem was not the preservation of individual Jews but of Judaism itself, and the way to achieve this was to seek a meeting point between religious tradition (for all his ambivalent feelings toward it) and the humanism of Haskalah.

Though Aḥad Ha-Am's thought had many adherents, influencing figures as diverse as Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik and the young Chaim Weizmann, his views did not prevail in the rush of events that saw Zionism become a mass movement. As a stylist of Hebrew prose his influence was paramount.

AḤAI (or AḤA) OF SHABḤA (680-752). Talmudic scholar of the gaonic era. Born and educated in Babylonia, Aḥai migrated to Erets Israel (c.750) when he failed to be elected Gaon of Pumbedita, having been passed over in favor of one of his students. In Erets Israel he composed the She'iltot, the first halakhic work to be written after the close of the Talmud. It consists of 182 halakhic and aggadic discourses in Aramaic on the weekly readings from the Torah. Each she''ilta has a fixed arrangement and is divided into five sections, the first of which opens with a few halakhot on the theme to be discussed. Section two, after a prefatory formula, introduces two quite simple halakhic questions with arguments pro and con. The third section, preceded once again by a fixed rubric, consists of halakhic and aggadic quotations on the theme of the she''ilta; these derive from the Babylonian Talmud. Section four provides answers to the two questions previously raised. The last section (now missing in most of the she'iltot) consists of a homiletical discourse. The author drew exclusively on Babylonian sources, for which reason it has been suggested that his intention was to spread knowledge of the Babylonian Talmud among readers in Erets Israel. The only gaon to cite this work was the last, Hai Gaon, further evidence that it was unknown in Babylonia for centuries. Not the least important aspect of the She'iltot is the fact that it contains numerous passages and versions of talmudic texts that differ from those in standard editions. In many instances, the former texts provide better readings than the latter.

1856 - 1927

Early Zionist author; pen name of Asher Ginzberg.

Born in Skvire in the Ukraine, Ahad Ha-Am (in Hebrew, One of the People) was moved to a rural estate in 1868, rented by his wealthy father, a follower of the mystical Hasidic movement. There he was educated in Jewish topics by private tutors, while teaching himself Russian, German, French, and English. Ginzberg broke with traditional Judaism and, in 1886, settled in Odessa, a center of progressive Jewish life. There he quickly rose to prominence in the emerging Zionist movement, then spearheaded by the Odessa-based Hovevei Zion. He worked as an editor of several periodicals and founded Ha-Shiloah, a pioneering Hebrew-language journal. In 1908, he moved to London, where became a close adviser to Chaim Weizmann during the negotiations leading to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Ginzberg settled in Palestine in 1922; he died there at the age of seventy.

For several decades after 1889, when he first published his major article "Lo zeh ha-derekh" (This is not the way), Ahad Ha-Am became prominent in Hebrew letters. His ironic spare prose set new standards for the Hebrew essay. His stand on Jewish nationalism was based on two interlinked themes - the perils of Jewish assimilation and the role of Palestine as a spiritual center. He saw not mounting antisemitism but the threat of assimilation as the spur for Zionism. He saw the return of Jews to their homeland accompanied by a return to their original language and by a rebirth of political institutions - which had been supplanted by adherence to theology and ritual after the Roman conquest of Palestine in the first century C.E. In his view, before the Haskalah (enlightenment) movement of the late eighteenth century, Jewry had been sustained by commitment to community, to collective life - but modernism and citizenship or the prospect of citizenship in European states was isolating Jews from their natural community and from each other. He championed the Russian-based Hovevei Zion (Hibbat Zion) movement as the natural heir to the Jewish people's legacy of exile and the focal point of Jewish identity in a world where both the refusal to assimilate outside influences and an unchecked eagerness to do so could result in the disappearance of Jewry. Herzlian Zionism, which came to dominate Jewish nationalist circles following the First Zionist Congress in 1897, was, he contended, shortsighted in its stress on diplomacy and politics - and its indifference to the colonizing efforts of the Hovevei Zion.

As an alternative both to philanthropic and to diplomatic Zionism, Ahad Ha-Am promoted his concept of "spiritual center" - since, in the past, Jewry had owed its collective existence to an ability to concentrate its spiritual resources on the rebuilding of its future. Martin Buber, Mordecai Kaplan, Judah Magnes, and Zionist socialists read his work and respected his views, in part, while at the same time others criticized his politics as elitist, apolitical, and impractical.

He was the first Zionist to see the darker side to the Arab-Jewish relationship in Palestine, insisting that there were threats to the Jewish national enterprise. As early as 1891, in his essay "Emet me-eretz yisrael" (The truth from the land of Israel), he argued that the brutal recent treatment of Arabs by some Jews was a tragic reaction to a history of Jewish subjugation in the Diaspora. The weight he gave to the issue of Arab retaliation to Jewish settlement activity placed it, however tenuously, on the Zionist
agenda. In the last years of his life he argued that Palestine would face its greatest test in how it treated the "strangers" in its midst.

Ahad Ha-Am's reputation declined after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. His caution appeared misguided, his pessimism idiosyncratic rather than prescient. After the election of Menachem Begin in 1977, however, he was put to use by some intellectuals on Israel's liberal-left who were frustrated by the ability of the right-wing Revision-ist Zionists to win not only control of the government but to usurp classical Jewish nationalism as well.

Bibliography

Hertzberg, Arthur. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959.

Luz, Ehud. Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist Movement (1882 - 1904). Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988.

Simon, Leon. Ahad Ha-am, Asher Ginzberg: A Biography. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960.

Zipperstein, Steven J. Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

— STEVEN ZIPPERSTEIN