Ahad Ha’am’s Anti-Charismatic Leadership

I began my research on the early Zionist thinker, Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsburg) by reading the biography written by Leon Simon. As a young man Simon knew Ahad Ha’am during his years in London. That time was one of isolation for Ahad Ha’am. He kept mostly to himself. He felt ill at ease with English Jews. Simon was one of the few young English Jews who were drawn to him. He remained devoted to promoting Ahad Ha’am and his philosophy throughout his life, translating much of his work into English in three different collections of his essays and through the biography that he published in 1960.

Interest in Ahad Ha’am has been sustained long past his own time. The extraordinary changes that occurred within his lifetime and afterwards have rendered many of his perspectives historical artifacts, but much about his ideas about the ways that Jews should live their lives remain relevant. The degree to which Ahad Ha’am remains both relevant and forgotten is summed up in the copy of Simon’s biography that I checked out of the Central Library here in Downtown LA. I am a regular patron and have checked out old and new books from the Central Library. Not all are in pristine condition. Many in their Yiddish collection have seen better days. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying that the copy of "Ahad Ha-Am: Asher Ginsberg. A Biography,” by Leon Simon is the most beat up book I have ever encountered there. Its black cloth cover is roughly worn at the edges. The original spine must have been damaged or lost as it has been recovered with black cloth library tape and the time and call letters have been written in with white ink. The endpapers are detached from the text block of the book. There are some loose pages and it is water-damaged throughout. The text has been marked and underlined in pencil and pen in more than one color and the corners of many pages are either dog-eared or show the creases from where they were once dog-eared. This is the kind of book that would clearly warrant the purchase of a replacement copy, but there it remains, both well remembered and equally forgotten.

When I last wrote about Ahad Ha’am I was basing much of what I wrote on Simon’s biography. However, having read it I still felt that Asher Ginsberg, the life behind the pen-name Ahad Ha’am had eluded me. I was neither clear on what he had done or what he had believed. The excitement about him that had gotten the library copy of the biography read to oblivion evaded me. I went back to the library and took out a copy of “Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism,” by Steven Zipperstein. I had left it behind initially because my personal interactions with the author were disappointing. While one might equally categorize “Elusive Prophet,” as a biography, it is also a broader work of history. It benefits and extends from Zipperstein’s doctoral work that led to his first history, “The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881.” “Elusive Prophet” extends that history. Ahad Ha’am arrived in Odessa in 1884. While “Elusive Prophet” follows Ahad Ha’am through his years in Odessa and on to England and ultimately to his final years in Mandate Palestine, it is ultimately another book about the Jews of Odessa. While Ahad Ha’am is the focus, there is much to learn in it about Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Leon Pinsker, Chaim Nahman Bialik, Shimon Dubnow, the great Yiddish writer Mendele and many other important figures in the creation of modern Jewish nationalism, Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and Jewish philosophy and historiography.

Ahad Ha’am arrived in Odessa a young man with great uncertainty about his own value. He found a place in the circle around Pinsker as part of the crowd of thought leaders in the early Zionist organization Hovevei Zion, founded by Pinsker and an outgrowth of his philosophy as expressed in the polemical work, “Auto-Emancipation.” In order to understand how Ahad Ha’am went from a shy country boy to the central thinker and charismatic leader of the Hovevei Zion within a few years, it is necessary to understand who he was and who the group around him that raised him up were.

Those in Hovevei Zion were primarily Maskilim, that is, Jews who had grown up within the confines of traditional, often Hasidic, communities and in time rebelled against them. Their rebellion came in the form of the study of the sciences and of non-Jewish literature and philosophy. Much of their study came through works written on these subjects in Hebrew and through newspapers and magazines published in Hebrew. Pinsker himself was the son of a Maskil who went on to a university education. Many of the Maskilim were assimilationists. They believed that the Jews should learn the languages of those around them and try to fit in. This imagined path was closed off to the Jews of Eastern Europe, the realm of the Maskilim, by social pressure and law, as Pinsker discovered when he tried to get work in law, the field that he was educated in. It became crystal clear that assimilation was a bankrupt notion after the pogroms in 1881 following the assassination of Czar Alexander. It was this evolutionary moment in Jewish thinking that led Pinsker to write “Auto-Emancipation.”

While Pinsker was university educated and came from a comfortable background, most of the Maskilim were fairly poor and got by on tasks like journalism and teaching. They often lacked knowledge of Western European languages. Although they had broken with the traditional and Hasidic backgrounds that they had grown up with, their social education had a hold on them beyond the breaks they made with their original communities.

Ahad Ha’am grew up with parents who had strong ties to the three different Hasidic courts. Much of his education was with visiting Rabbis and on his own through the use of his father’s library in their relatively isolated country estate. When they travelled to meet their relatives or the Hasidic courts that they were related to, Ahad Ha’am was exposed to manners and mores of the leadership of the Hasidic movement. While he was strongly critical of it, once he was able to put some distance between it and himself, he was never able to separate himself from the social thinking and organization that he experienced within it.

A dynamic within the Hasidic community is that leadership can be derived from a public expression of modesty and public repudiation of the leadership role, which is at the same actually exercised through leadership of a closely held core group who work towards the goal of the “non-leader.” This arrangement is based on the charismatic leadership qualities of the “non-leader” which arise, at least in part, out of their supposed non-leadership.

Ahad Ha’am gained influence within the Hovevei Zion circle in Odessa because his manner was well understood by the Maskilim who made up that circle. When Pinsker died in 1891, Ahad Ha’am succeeded him as the leader of Hovevei Zion much in the way that the leadership in a Hasidic court would be passed. He exercised much greater control than he might have by organizing a secret society with the Hovevei Zion movement called the Bene Moshe. This was an elite corps that followed Ahad Ha’am’s leadership closely. They were, for as long as they were able to maintain it, a secret order with all of the lore and mishegas of the Masons of any other fraternal order. Ahad Ha’am became known widely through the publication of his essays in various Hebrew periodicals and later through his role as the editor of Ha-Shiloach. However, his publications which went out to the general Hebrew reading public were coded with meanings that were really only understood by those within the Bene Moshe group.

Ahad Ha’am turned the Hovevei Zion movement into a movement that reflected his values in opposition to the values of many of the older Hovevei Zion in two of his earliest essays, “This is not the Way,” and “Truth from the Land of Israel.” His Bene Moshe acolytes turned the organization after his arguments while Ahad Ha’am claimed that they acted independently. This dynamic raised his stock over time. His Hebrew prose was rife with vocabulary and turns of phrase that were strongly evocative of the traditional Jewish community and garnered him support within the religious community that he had moved decisively away from in his personal life. He was parsimonious in publishing his opinions and was averse to appearing at large events. All of this added to a certain mystique that kept the flaws in his character from rising to the surface early in his career.

The rise of Theodor Herzl and political Zionism ended the era of Ahad Ha’am’s greatest relevance. Ahad Ha’am struggled with and against his loss of relevance. Over the years from 1895 until his death, he tried to defend the value of his early ideas, principally among them the idea of the Land of Israel as a Spiritual Center for the Jewish people. Unlike Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker and Herzl himself, Ahad Ha’am’s life and career lasted long enough for many of his ideas to be tested by many different arguments and historical eras.