The Greatness of Ahad Ha’am

In trying to explain Ahad Ha’am to others I have been struggling with my own inability to come to a clear understanding of his role in the history of the Jewish people and of the Zionist Movement. It was only with the help of a reading of Gabriel Piterberg’s highly partisan Anti-Zionist work, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel, that I was able to see Ahad Ha’am in his particularity. (Ahad Ha’am is never mentioned in the book.)

Piterberg is an Israeli-born historian who operates at the far left end of the Israeli political spectrum. The flaw in his work is his programmatic definition of the central values of Zionism as equivalent to Israeli politics and culture. “The foundational myth that underlies Israeli politics and culture to this day expresses itself in three ways: the ‘negation of exile’ (shelilat ha-galut), the ‘return to the land of Israel’ (ha-shiva le-Eretz Yisrael), and the ‘return to history’ (ha-shiva la-historia).’’ To this he adds the negation of the indigenous population.

Ahad Ha’am undermines much of this in his critiques of the Zionist venture in his time, and in his view of what would make that venture valid and worthy of success in its fulfillment. Piterberg ignores him completely. As he was so often in his life, Ahad Ha’am remains inconvenient.

We like our heroes to be heroic. Ahad Ha’am was an elitist who preferred to engage outside of the eye of the general public. He came to prominence in the salons and small meetings of those who were involved with the Hovevei Zion group. This group had formed over the previous decade around Lev Pinsker, the author of Auto-emancipation. That short work was a response to the reactionary period that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander in 1881. The Jewish assimilationist camp lost its faith that Jews could live their lives as normalized European citizens. Pinsker’s response was to insist that Jews needed to be masters of their own destiny and not rely on others, and that this would only be possible if they had their own place where they were empowered to create their own destiny.

The Hovevei Zion began to make efforts towards establishing a presence in the Land of Israel that presented an alternative to the existing Yishuv which was as moribund as any other social group there. Before the Hovevei Zion, the population there was largely made up by a small Sephardi presence and a population of elderly immigrants (more women than men) who had immigrated there to live pious lives until they could die and be buried in the Holy Land. They were concentrated in Jerusalem and had a minor presence in Safed.

The Hovevei Zion were mostly Jews of the Russian Empire. They were mostly poor and middle class. Some were still religious. Others had shed their religion for secularist ideologies. Their ability to bring financial support for the Holy Land enterprise was very limited. At that time the philanthropist Baron Rothschild supported agricultural settlements that, at his insistence, engaged in viticulture, rather than self-supporting agriculture.

Ahad Ha’am arrived on the scene in Odessa towards the end of Pinsker’s life and at a time when Pinsker was widely felt to have become too passive and disengaged from the struggle. Pinsker came from a secularist background which was far less common in his generation than for most among Russian Empire Jewry. Ahad Ha’am’s memoir/short story, “Kesavim balim,” (“A Tattered Manuscript,”) details the path that Ginsberg (and many others like him with religious upbringings) took in search of a path forward as Jews. This unusually revelatory piece (by Ahad Ha’am’s later standards) illuminates the appeal that he had within the Odessa circle. Both the secularized and the still religious saw themselves in his story.

His next major essay, “Lo zeh ha-derekh,” (“This is not the Way”) described a re-energized program for Hovevei Zion which brought him general prominence and the ability to organize the (initially) secret cadre within Hovevei Zion, Bene Moshe. This moment in the early 1890s was the golden time for Ahad Ha’am as a leader. The Bene Moshe grew and planned to do the serious work in Palestine that needed to be done to establish the renewed Jewish presence. Not long into this period, Ahad Ha’am made a trip to Haifa and Jerusalem. The way that a normal political leader would have written about a trip like this would be to praise as much as possible and use the opportunity to promote further efforts, but this was not the path that Ahad Ha’am took. His essay “Emet me-eretz yisrael” ("Truth from Palestine”) burst a bubble of enthusiasm about the Zionist enterprise.

Speaking the truth was a foundational principle for Ahad Ha’am. In fact, he often spoke his truth in code. An inside group would hear the same words that others heard and understand things that the others likely would not. He had built up his political influence on the idea that he would lead the rank and file towards useful actions to build up Jewish society in the Land of Israel. Instead, “Emet me-eretz yisrael,” began:

“After many years of thinking about and imagining the land of our fathers and the rebirth of our people there, I finally succeeded in seeing with my own eyes the object of my dreams, this land of wonders which captivates so many from all nations and lands. I spent three months there. I saw its ruins – the remnants of a past life, I studied its wretched conditions, but I paid special attention to the future. Everywhere I went there was one question that preoccupied me: to what extent is there hope regarding the future? Is the land ready for Jewry’s return, and is Jewry ready to return to the land? The question of the land’s suitability is not difficult to answer: It is enough to go about and travel a few days and see its mountains and valleys, its fields and vineyards that yield fruit despite the laziness of the Arabs...to see that now as in the past it can provide countless numbers of its children with life and sustenance as long as they diligently work the land. Despite this, it was not easy to answer whether Jewry itself is ready. Now I have left the land for which I yearned for so long with a broken heart and broken spirits … No longer are the land, its people, and all that happens there mere dreams for me, for now what I have seen is the concrete truth … of which I wish to reveal a bit – the ugliest bit.” (Translation by Stephen Zipperstein.)

What Ahad Ha’am found in his travels made him rethink the timetable for Jewish settlement. The existing settlements produced wine for export. Baron Rothschild was the primary customer for this wine as well as the financial supporter of the settlements. His control of their priorities had created a certain lassitude. It was easier to use Arab labor than to hire Jewish proletarians. As a result they created few new places for immigrants. The existing arable land was in Arab hands. Since there were a variety of groups competing to buy land for Jewish settlement, prices were being driven up dramatically. There was only one Zionist school, located in Jaffa, and there was an open conflict over whether its classes would be taught in Hebrew or some other language. Unlike the expectations of the Land, it was not a place where Jews were safe from anti-semitism and violence. There was a native population that resented their presence and were developing a growing self-awareness.

This list of challenges made Ahad Ha’am rethink the imminence of settlement. He knew that this would be too much of a discouragement to the Hovevei Zion members. Instead he proposed the idea that Palestine would be a place where a Jewish Cultural Center could be built up. Again, as with the Bene Moshe, this would be a cadre that would create the sense of purpose in Jewish life. The Land of Israel would be a validation of the suitability for this cultural renewal for the Jews throughout the diaspora. The initial response to this idea of a Cultural Center as a kind of consolation prize went over very poorly. It is unclear if Ahad Ha’am knew how much of a hit his credibility would take. He would take on a reputation  of excessive caution and delay. His early supporters didn’t repudiate him, but they were easy pickings for Theodor Herzl’s political Zionism that burst on the scene just four years later. One truth that hasn’t changed is that young people don’t want to wait.

This move by Ahad Ha'am moves away from the idea that the Jew can only be a fulfilled person in the Land of Israel. One is often told in Israel that one cannot fully be a Jew if one doesn’t live there. Diaspora experience is negated, that is, the idea that Jews could live meaningful lives in the diaspora is dismissed. Ahad Ha’am proposed that instead that Jews could live in the diaspora but that their lives could be made more meaningful there due to the cultural work that could be done in the Land of Israel. He was willing to wait a century to see the Jewish settlement in the Land mature into a political entity and ultimately a Jewish state. In the meantime, the Land of Israel would be the Jewish Futurist workshop, but it would be a workshop of the Jewish soul.

Herzlian Zionism and the early Zionist congresses were a cause of irritation and envy for Ahad Ha’am. Much of his criticism of them seemed like sour grapes, and that was not entirely untrue. Nevertheless, Ahad Ha’am’s analysis of that era of Zionism as culturally and morally empty was correct, and although he never actually became an official Zionist, his vision became a part of the ideology of the larger Zionism movement even as he himself remained an outsider. This was not for lack of his efforts to regain his political clout. However, since he was unable to move forward without thorough criticism of the decisions of himself and others, his power as a popular political figure never returned. His greatest political achievement, ironically, was his most Herzlian achievement. He served as Chaim Weizmann’s closest advisor as Weizmann was negotiating what ultimately became the Balfour Declaration.

While still in Odessa, Ahad Ha’am had a close circle of figures who later proved central in the development of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Zionism, Jewish scholarship and philosophy. This small tight group would summer together. Among that group was Shimon Dubnow, now know as one of the greatest Jewish historians, but also known as the father of Jewish territorialism. Territorialism and the Bund are often seen as the opponents of the Zionists, and in Poland that certainly was the case. And yet, Ahad Ha’am and Dubnow were close friends both in their Odessa years and for the rest of Ahad Ha’am’s life.

Dubnow’s territorialist belief was not a narrow vision where there would be one territorial center. He imagined that  there could at least be three centers. Poland would be where the Jewish masses and rising proletariat would be centered, but it would be beneficial if there were also Jewish centers in the Land of Israel and in the United States. Israel would provide a cultural or religious role and the American center would provide the financial support that the other two centers required. This mapped onto Ahad Ha’am’s idea of Palestine as a Jewish cultural center. Rather than negate the diaspora, this vision integrated the Palestinian settlement with the diaspora. This vision explains in part the rise of American Hebraism in the early part of the 20th century. Yes, Hebrew would be the Jewish language, but it would be a Jewish language rather than what it has become, the Israelian language.

Ahad Ha’am eventually left Odessa behind. He was working for the Wissotzky Tea Company and as the Odessa Jewish community declined, he took a job running their London office. He never warmed to Anglo-Jewry. He had a small number of friends there and felt very much outside of the major events in Jewish life. It was not until after the end of the First World War that he was able to immigrate to the new city of Tel Aviv. Although he had long complained about London, he found Tel Aviv wanting and while there longed to return to London. He was alive long enough to see the growth of the kind of cultural institutions that he had imagined as part of the Cultural Center in Palestine, particularly the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the growth of a system of schools that taught their classes entirely in Hebrew. He had been a fanatic for the elevation of the Hebrew language and it must have been very satisfying to live among a society of Hebrew speakers and hear a Hebrew that had broken free from the Yeshiva world and the Maskilic world. Still, the society that he found himself in was far from his ideal.

In 1925 a ten year old Arab boy was killed by two Jews in what was revenge for attacks on Jews. That this could become tolerated in the new Jewish Cultural center was an immense disappointment to him. A Jewish state would be worthless without Jewish values. As he wrote:

"For without these principles – Almighty God! What are we, and what will be our life in this land that, for its sake, we have made endless sacrifices necessary for its rebuilding! Is it only to add another small nation of new ‘Levantines’ in a corner of the Orient that will compete with the other Levantines already here in all their debased practices – in a lust for blood, for revenge, for rivalry, etc. - will this constitute their way of life?

If this is the Messiah, may he come, but may I not live to see him!" (Also Zipperstein translation).

For Ahad Ha’am, there was no return to history without Jewish values. Jewish history was, to him, the history of the Jewish people trying to live their Jewish values in resistance to the values of other nations or the lack thereof. There was no greater dead-ending to Jewish history than a Jewish state that abandoned those values.

We can see that Ahad Ha’am, the great Zionist leader, did not support the three foundational ideas of the Zionist enterprise as named by Piterberg. Either Ahad Ha’am was not a Zionist or the pillars of Zionism according to Piterberg are not unassailable. For all of the early or proto-Zionists, Zionism was an answer to the fundamental question,”How can the Jewish people build a future for themselves?” We no longer live in their times and we are not formed by the same historical moment that formed them, and yet we face the same question that they did. We can’t copy our answer off of their papers, but there is a lot that we can learn from the ways they struggled over the answers that they came to. Ahad Ha’am’s greatness is not in either his originality or in his successes. It lies in his struggle to overcome his flaws and to share what was best in himself despite those flaws.

Reading: 
Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-’am
Piterberg, Gabriel The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel
Simon, Leon. Ahad Ha’am Asher Ginsburg: A Biography
Zippestein, Steve J. Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism