The Life of Ahad Ha’am
If you have ever been told that “You can’t be Jewish if you don’t live in Israel,” you have Ahad Ha’am to blame. Certainly, there are others who have a share in that misguided notion, and in his defense, Ahad Ha’am never said that and wouldn’t have. However, he did say, on any number of occasions and in so many ways, that you can’t be Jewish if you are not living in Hebrew. Even that he didn’t entirely mean. Rather, one can be Jewish without Hebrew. You can be a Jew, but as a Jew you will be a famished or sterile seed. According to his biographer and most prolific translator into English, Leon Simon, Ahad Ha’am was a cautious and shy person who too often compromised in face-to-face situations so as not to make things difficult for others - and at the same time he was a relentless stickler for the truth. He has left us with some frustrating and inconvenient questions.
Ahad Ha’am is the pen name for Asher Ginsburg. He was born into a Hasidic family in Skver, Ukraine, then part of the Pale of Settlement. The Skverer Hasidim are a more ascetic branch of Hasids than most and they value Torah study very highly. The Skverer dynasty (Twersky family) lead communities in New Square (Skver), Flatbush and Boro Park to this day. Ginsberg’s intense studiousness and seriousness can be seen as a reflection of that early influence.
When he was not yet ten, his father gained the lease on an estate in Gopitshitza, Ukraine. This was a rural location and young Asher was much more on his own. His father had an extensive library and, although he was a Hasid, had a collection of books that was much more broad in range. Asher was a very strong learner and acquired a strong backing in the kind of traditional text learning that would qualify one to be a Rabbi. This would have been a pleasing development for his father. However, Asher had developed a skeptical attitude towards the traditional faith. He taught himself Russian as a pre-teen and became interested in Western philosophy. His parents were distant and he had no friends his own age throughout his years in Gopitshitza. He was married off at 17 to a very religious partner, Rivke. They were loyal partners to each other, but had little in common in their interests. Asher had hoped to be able to escape Gopitshitza at the end of his teens. He wanted to attend a secular University and study philosophy. In the end, he was only able to escape from that orbit at thirty and as a married man with three children.
The choices for a religious Jew who no longer believed at the time were to become a Maskil, an emancipated and enlightenment Jew, or an assimilationist. Ginsberg was never able to make that kind of commitment. There was something in both of those positions that felt unnatural to him. He had come to his own beliefs in isolation and the socialization of these two groups may have been a frustration to him. His own term of self-description was Ohev Yisrael, lover of Israel.
This was in line with the Jewish organization that drew him into active participation in the Jewish world, the Hibbat Zion. This organization was founded by Leo Pinsker, the author of “Auto-Emancipation,” the subject of one of my previous articles. The members of this organization referred to themselves as Hoveve Zion, lovers of Zion. Pinsker, in response to the reaction of 1881 following the assassination of Czar Alexander and the pogroms that came with it, repudiated the assimilationist position. He held that Jews needed to base their sense of value on Jewish criteria and interests. From this came the idea that a Jewish homeland was needed as a place where this way of living could be accomplished with the least resistance.
Unlike previous figures with a Zionistic impulse, Hibbat Zion raised money and established Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine. Hibbat Zion’s momentum as an organization flagged with the death of Pinsker, although by that time, Ginsberg had emerged as a major figure under his pen name. Herzl introduced Zionism to Western Jewry in a way that Hibbat Zion had failed to do. However, over time, Ahad Ha’am’s ideas of Cultural Zionism as opposed to Political Zionism came to be an essential element of the Zionist Movement.
Ginsberg became Ahad Ha-am when he wrote a letter for publication in the periodical Ha-Melitz entitled “Lo Zeh Ha-Derekh (This is not the way).” He didn’t like the spotlight and the pen-name was a way of being a public figure and out of the spotlight at the same time. In this letter, he writes critically of the Hibbat Zion movement. He points out the discrepancy between the ideals of the movement and the reality of their accomplishments. In it, he lays out most of the ideas that would come to be known as Cultural Zionism.
It is important to clarify what is meant by Cultural Zionism. The term Cultural Zionism can be confused with Cultural Judaism, a term that is very popular nowadays. Cultural Judaism indicates a Jewish identity that sets aside observance of regular Jewish prayer, text study or Jewish law. Instead it focuses on Jewish foods, music, theater, politics, or other aspects of Jewish life that are secondary to traditional Jewish living.
Cultural Zionism is neither Cultural Judaism nor the opposite of it. Rather, it is an idea that came into focus in opposition to Political Zionism. Where Political Zionism was interested in doing the work to accomplish the practical goal of gaining permission from the Ottomans for a Jewish semi-governmental status in Palestine, Cultural Zionism was concerned with building up the resources to establish a cultural center in the Land of Israel. The goal was the revitalization of Jewish life through the creation of Jewish institutions, schools, a university, agricultural settlements, hospitals, newspapers and journals – all of the elements of a society that create the shared culture of a nation.
When Ginsberg moved to Odessa in 1886, he struggled to establish himself in business with limited success. In time his father lost the estate in Gopitshitza. Part of the antisemetic reaction in the 1880s were laws that outlawed the sort of rental arrangement that gave him the management of the estate. Asher was in Odessa because of its liberal attitudes and educated Jewish population. Like New Orleans, which is fed by a flow of non-conformists from upriver, Odessa drew the non-conformists Jews down from the Pale. This was not really his father’s way of being, but he did end up joining his son there. He tried to re-establish himself there, but the family business ultimately failed in 1896.
In Odessa, as part of his role in Hibbat Zion, Ginsberg established a sub-group called Bene Moshe. This was akin to a secret society at first. It was the elite corps of Hibbat Zion, a group meant to comprise only those who were dedicated to action more than words. Over time members of this small group had an outsized presence in the active leadership of the Zionist movement. However, the element of secrecy in the group was resented and ultimately had to be repudiated.
The rise of Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, the First Zionist Congress, and Political Zionism largely subsumed Hibbat Zion. Ahad Ha-am attended the First Zionist Congress, but rarely appeared at Zionist Congresses afterwards. The rest of his life would be filled with good work that left him feeling like a failure and struggles to provide for his family that left him feeling frustrated and intellectually stymied. Finally, bad health left him with only the ability to gather together his earlier work so that it wouldn’t be forgotten.
The issues that were closest to him were the importance and centrality of the Hebrew language to Jewish life and the creation of a Jewish cultural center. He was less interested in the political element of creating a nation. The Herzlian idea of the Jews “as a nation like all others,” was a pointless dead end to him. His interest was in building a people, not a land.
Next week I will talk about the latter part of Ahad Ha-am’s life, particularly his editorship of the journal Ha-Shiloah and his articles, “The Spiritual Revival,” and “Truth From Eretz Israel.”
