Aḥad Haʿam

Aḥad Haʿam (born Aug. 18, 1856, Skvira, near Kiev, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]—died Jan. 2, 1927, Tel Aviv, Palestine [now in Israel]) was a Zionist leader whose concepts of Hebrew culture had a definitive influence on the objectives of the early Jewish settlement in Palestine.

Reared in Russia in a rigidly Orthodox Jewish family, he mastered rabbinic literature but soon was attracted to the rationalist school of medieval Jewish philosophy and to the writings of the Haskala (“Enlightenment”), a liberal Jewish movement that attempted to integrate Judaism with modern Western thought.

At the age of 22, Aḥad Haʿam went to Odessa, the centre of the Jewish nationalist movement known as Hibbat Zion (“Love of Zion”). There he was influenced both by Jewish nationalism and by the materialistic philosophies of the Russian nihilist D.I. Pisarev and the English and French positivists. After joining the central committee of Hibbat Zion, he published his first essay, “Lo ze ha-derekh” (1889; “This Is Not the Way”), which emphasized the spiritual basis of Zionism.

In 1897, after two visits to Palestine, he founded the periodical Ha-Shiloaḥ, in which he severely criticized the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl, the foremost Jewish nationalist leader of the time. Aḥad Haʿam remained outside the Zionist organization, believing that a Jewish state would be the end result of a Jewish spiritual renaissance rather than the beginning. He called for a renaissance of Hebrew-language culture, and to that end he did urge the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine as the centre and model for Jewish life in the Diaspora (i.e., the settlements of Jews outside Palestine).

Aḥad Haʿam was an intimate adviser to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann during the time that Weizmann was playing a leading role in eliciting from the British government its Balfour Declaration of 1917, a document supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His last years were spent in Palestine, editing his Iggerot Aḥad Haʿam, 6 vol. (1923–25; “Letters of Aḥad Haʿam”). Further letters, principally from the last phase of his life, and his memoirs were published in Aḥad Haʿam: Pirqe zikhronot we-iggerot (1931; “Collected Memoirs and Letters”). His essays comprise four volumes (1895, 1903, 1904, and 1913).

While stressing the rational and moral character of Judaism, Aḥad Haʿam believed that the goal of re-creating Jewish nationhood could not be achieved by purely political means but rather required spiritual rebirth. The clarity and precision of his essays made him a major Hebrew-language stylist and an influential force in modern Hebrew literature.